MacBook Air Contest: What is the Best Route on the Road to the Cloud?

What is the best way to embark upon cloud computing? What do you do first? We’re doing a year-long contest on ReadWriteCloud, asking people for their comments about their views about cloud computing. Each month, we’ll give out a MacBook Air to the person who we think provides the best comment on that month’s topic.

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There is still time for you to give your comment for this month’s contest. Here’s the topic:

A first step towards creating a virtualized infrastructure often comes at a point when the customer starts experiencing performance issues. Servers start failing as application loads increase. When these issues start occurring, what are the first steps to take into consideration? How should a virtualized infrastructure be deployed? How are these pre-production environments developed? What are the most effective ways to deploy a simplified, reliable and optimized virtualization solution?

What do you think? Leave a comment on our post for your chance to win a MacBook Air.

Here’s a comment from Joe Masters Emison that provides a good example for the kinds of responses we are looking for:

We have not moved everything to the cloud. By using the “do one thing well, and then expand” strategy, we discovered certain aspects of running remote virtualized hardware that would have a noticeable negative impact on our operations. The two downsides to the cloud that have so far kept us from moving everything are the network latency and huge data transfer times. We were aware that both of these could be issues, but by taking our migration one step at a time (and starting with those pieces that would not be affected by latency or huge data transfer times), we were able to determine how significant those issues would be for us. Additionally, another downside to the cloud–relatively slow I/O–ended up being a non-issue for us.

At this point, we have every automated component of our data-processing pipeline on the cloud, but have kept the server that serves our local user interfaces and applications. So, in a sense, we have essentially returned to a client-server setup, where the clients (and servers that handle client interfaces) run locally for latency reasons, and the servers that handle heavy-lifting and need dynamic resources run on the cloud.

What do you think? What is your thinking about how to get started with cloud computing?

Comment today: http://rww.to/hCO7s9

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