EC2

Measuring the Growth of Cloud Computing

As cloud computing has grown in recognition, and the marketplace has started to attract serious cash, some people are beginning to put some serious effort in to tracking and measuring actual cloud usage. Here’s a small collection of links that show, with some veracity, the state of cloud computing today.

Guy Rosen has the rough cut of usage for public clouds, which finds that among IaaS providers, Amazon EC2 leads the pack, followed by Rackspace, Joyent and GoGrid.

But there are caveats to Rosen’s data. Rosen is only counting websites running in the cloud. The raw data comes from Quantcast, which Rosen has analyzed according to IP location to generate comparisons.

It’s worth questioning how useful Rosen’s analysis is. Classically, Web servers are a primary use case for cloud computing, but increasingly, data processing stacks, test and dev and similar applications are pitched as potential uses for the public cloud. With Amazon continually making hay over its use by the enterprise, this analysis may be accurate, but it is certainly limited.

Another stab at quantifying the cloud comes from those beloved propeller-headed comp sci types, which they dub “Cloud Cartography.” In the course of analyzing multi-tenancy security vulnerabilities, researchers at the University of California, San Diego and MIT came up with a bone-simple way to coarsely measure actual servers on Amazon’s EC2 cloud. (Hint: it involved a credit card, nmap, wget and Amazon’s DNS servers.) According to their cursory research, the number of responding server instances on EC2 currently stands at 14,054.

Cloud Cartography promises to be a very entertaining arms race between cloud providers and the curious, and will doubtless be emulated by others for different sites. I’ll try to keep this space updated as new metrics come around. In the meantime, vendor-neutral suggestions about ways to gauge the state of cloud computing are welcome. Let’s make this a haven for learning what’s really going on.

EUCALYPTUS sprouts business shoots

In what is surely a contender for the most-complicated backronym of the ages, the Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems, first developed at Middleware and Applications Yielding Heterogenous Environments for Metacomputing, UC- Santa Barbara (MAYHEM in case you weren’t seeing the silly nomenclature trend) has jumped the public lagoon for the open waters of commerce:

Eucalyptus Systems, formed out of the team that developed EUCALYPTUS has gone commercial to sell help with their open-source software to cloud-minded types.

EUCALYPTUS (fingers…getting…so… tired) is a set of open-source software tools that allow users to interact with and deploy AWS-type clouds. You can use the software to administer your EC2 images or create your own private data cloud along the same model. Pretty neat, and free, but what happens when AWS decides to re-tool their APIs? Questions soon to be answered.

read the press release here.

watch this page for updates.