Cloud may complicate SOA load balancing act

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Shine your own light in the cloud

Lori is correct to suggest that the cloud can obscure what you see. Cloud offerings tend to be basic, covering CPU, bandwidth and storage, and are very much of a 'one-shape-fits-all' nature. This is a consequence of building the offering on multi-tenanted infrastructure - it is very hard to differentiate individual instances.

Enterprises and other organizations running complex, finely-tuned applications are accustomed to much more control and visibility, and their applications depend on many auxiliary functions such as firewalling, security, load balancing and traffic management. Although standard cloud packages may not provide these, all is not lost.

Some forward-thinking providers (such as Joyent) offer dedicated infrastructure components (e.g. their Zeus Accelerator), giving their customers exclusive access to their own load balancer on a cloud-friendly pay-by-use model. Other users have found it straightforward to deploy software in the cloud as an alternative to the hardware appliances they have in their own datacenter.

So, don't give up at the first hurdle if you are concerned that the cloud provider won't give you the control you need for your applications. Understand the limitations of the service you receive and the gap between that and what you require for your application. There are software tools (both OSS and commercial) that you can deploy in your chosen cloud to bridge this gap.

If you have poor visibility of your application in the cloud, you can shine a light in there to see what is going on and regain the control you require.

Posted by: Owen Garrett   Posted on: 09/09/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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