Cloud Hosting Review

Cloud has become on of the most used buzzwords in the technology world.

In 2008 when the Cloud computing technologies started picking up the Oracle CEO Larry Elisson said that the interesting thing about cloud computing is that people redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do.

"I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements", said Ellison and added that "The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion".

He was very much right as 10 years later the term "Cloud" is so generic and so broadly used that most people actually have no idea what does it mean. One of the most misleading meanings for "The Cloud" is Internet. At the same time terms "Cloud" or "Cloud Computing" has nothing to do with the term Internet."

What is Cloud Computing really about?

The terms comes to describe a networking model of computing system, one in which the computation and processing operations are performed in a separate cluster of virtualized computers instances, physically isolated from those where the data is hosted. In other words "Cloud" mean computing infrastructure, which unlike the compute clusters is created with any virtualization technique. So each and every Cloud Computing system is an infrastructure which has:

1. A group of connected physical servers which don't store data.
They work as a group and run virtualization technology - for example like VMware ESXi or Kernel based Virtual Machine. The "Cloud" term comes to describe the virtualized servers, each of them used to deliver processing power.

2. A data storage appliances connected into a network.
The data storage servers are connected and work together in a Storage Area Network.

Both sub-systems described above are connected into one Cloud Computing infrastructure which is usually used to deliver Cloud Server Hosting services. Those are usually separate virtual server instances, which host data on certain virtual disks, which reside on top of the storage area network.

What makes the Virtual Server a Cloud Server?

The first and foremost it obviously needs to be hosted in Cloud Computing system which uses the architecture model described above. The server can be called Cloud if has any of the following functionality:

• High Availability: This is a feature which allow the server instance to restore operations in case of a downtime of the underlying physical host or in case of a OS failure.

• Failover functionality: This is a functionality which allows the server instance and the service it runs to continue without an interruption in case of a failure of the underlying physical host or of the Cloud Server OS itself.

• Storage Fault-Tolerance: A protection of the appliances part of the storage area network (SAN) and the whole SAN itself against failure and downtime.

Those are the things to ask any provider who claims to offers a Cloud Hosting services. If they have them, they are a Cloud provider, if they don't have them, they simply use any virtualization to create virtual servers, which they misleadingly sell as 'Cloud'.