20 Real-Life Challenges of Cloud Computing

Nikita Ivanov of GridGain offers some excellent insight into the nuts and bolts of getting the cloud to work. Definitely worth a read. To summarize:

• Most likely you do NOT need cloud computing
• The best way to think about cloud computing is “Data Center with API”
• You will spend weeks and months fine tuning your cloud based application
• You are about to deal with 100s and 1000s of remote nodes
• You cannot rely on the fact that environment will be homogeneous
• Debugging problem on a cloud scale requires deep understanding of distributed computing
• IP multicast will likely not work or work with significant networking limitations.
• Traffic inside is very cheap or free – but traffic outside is expensive and can “get you” very quickly
• If you have to use cloud all the time, the economics change and it may be cheaper to traditionally rent in a data center
• Up time and per-computer reliability is low – comprehensive failover support on grid middleware is a must
• Static IPs are not guaranteed
• Almost always plan on having multiple clouds
• External clouds may present data sharing problems
• Carefully think through dev/qa/prod layout and how this is all organized
• Clunky (re)deployment of your application onto the cloud can stop your development process
• Connections are often one-directional so comprehensive communication capabilities supporting one-directional connectivity and disjoint clouds in grid middleware is a must
• Cloud are implemented based on hardware virtualization – make sure your grid middleware can dynamically provision such images on demand
• Stick with open source stack
• Linear scalability can only be achieved in a control test environment. Real world applications will exhibit non-linear scalability.
• [His] Personal recommendation: use Amazon EC2/S3 services