Pica8 - Open Source Cloud Switch

Mon Oct 18 15:50:42 UTC 2010

George:

Nice answer. Do you think cloud services is based on an oversubscription model?
Where they hope those who purchase servers don't actually max them out memory/CPU wise?

Do you also believer that cloud services should never have any downtime? To me, cloud services is synonymous with redundancy....

> Subject: RE: Pica8 - Open Source Cloud Switch
> Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2010 08:17:09 -0700
> From: gbonser at seven.com
> To: brandon.kim at brandontek.com
> CC: nanog at nanog.org
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Brandon Kim 
> > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 7:58 AM
> > 
> > Cc: nanog at nanog.org
> > Subject: RE: Pica8 - Open Source Cloud Switch
> > 
> > 
> > Has our industry ever really fundamentally defined what is "cloud
> > computing"?????
> > 
> > Even though "MPLS" is sort of a buzzword too, we can define it, how it
> > works, it's protocol and such...
> > 
> > But cloud computing?
> 
> My take on "cloud computing" is simply the provisioning servers or
> virtual servers (say, VMWare or KVM) on the fly as needed.  So you would
> have a "pool" of servers.  When load for one application rises, more
> servers for that application are taken from the pool and added to the
> mix as needed.
> 
> When load drops, that instances are removed from the rotation handling
> that application and returned to the pool of free (virtual) servers.
> 
> Providers of network gear have been working on applications that monitor
> the gear in the application delivery path (e.g. metrics on load
> balancers) and automatically deploy instances as needed to handle that
> application. This would be more of interest to providers of "bursty"
> applications where they might have high load sometimes but a relatively
> low "base" load.  It could also be of interest to people who serve
> customers in different time zones, such as the US and Europe where the
> US application can be turned down at night and an application serving
> Europe loaded up during their business day.
> 
> It could also be of interest for someone who is expecting a temporary
> "surge" of activity.  It leads, though, to a completely different kind
> of attack called the "denial of sustainability" attack where a
> cloud-based provider is hit with a flood of "legitimate" transactions
> causing the "cloud" management to kick in more servers to handle the
> additional load.  If that cloud is rented, a content provider could be
> hit with a huge bill.
> 