Cloud Webhosting makes me wet...

[guest2013-1]

Okay so that's a bit of an overshare, but I've been reading up on cloud servers and "true hybrid" technology where you can, on one website instance, run both PHP and ASP.NET applications while each is being processed in it's native server (php -> Linux Apache Server and ASP.NET on Windows)

Which to me is awesome. That including the scalability and everything that goes with it... just really really cool.

However, the starting package at rackspace for example is $100 a month. Which is okay if you have several clients.... but I don't... which doesn't justify that price. I maybe need a 10th of what they offer as the starting price anyway.... but that's the minimum.

So I thought okay, I'll go with the $14 per month cloud server option, the server option is linux only unfortunately, but allows multiple servers being created and many more sites etc...

Now I'm thinking "I want to setup my own cloud server and see how it works and what I need to do"

Unfortunately I can't find any real info on what I can download (OS or server app wise) to install a "cloud server" on my development machine so I can start virtualizing ****.

Any of you guys ever worked with this before? Server wise, not coding wise. As you know I'm kind of an all rounder when it comes to web dev (I do server admin as well, not advanced **** but yea, I know a thing or two) and this really toggles that "interesting need to know" button of mine...

 

[Other Pineapple Smurf]

Check out Ubuntu9.10 Eucalyptus - not had time to look into it but hear they are going into what you want. Will also be perfect for our office as we use Amazon EC2 and looking a deploying more infrastructure in virtualized enviroments.

 

[Conradl]

Check out C3 from Citrix, link below. Its an integrated suite of products that provides a complete cloud delivery solution: platform, applications, monitoring/delivery and orchestration.

Platform

At the core of any cloud solution is the platform, used to virtualise servers. C3 uses Citrix XenServer, which is a 100% free and fully functional commercial version of the open source Xen (the same technology that Amazon EC2 uses).

This is the technology that allows you to rapidly provision OS services (Linux Server, XP desktop etc). If a customer is running a new campaign and needs 3 additional web servers, then you would use this to provision those three machines from templates.

You could download this and run it for free in either a test or production environment.


Applications

The platform allows you to create virtual instances of an OS, the application delivery component allows you to deliver apps into those virtual instances. For example: If you required 100 XP desktops, 50 clerks with MS Office and 50 call centre agents with only IE, then you could roll out the same golden desktop, and plug the required apps into that desktop. XenDesktop and XenApp do this.

In the above scenario, the new campaign, you decide that you need the call centre guys (only IE) to also have office for the duration of the campaign. You then simply plug Office into the golden image, and they have office. After the campaign you unplug it, and its gone....

Delivery/monitoring

Because a cloud infrastructure is network based you need to optimise and monitor your network infrastructure. Compression, load balancing and service offload occur here, typically on hardware appliances (Netscaler and branch repeater).


Orchestration

Brings everything together. Basically automates and coordinates all the above services to reduce the managment overhead (Citrix Workflow Studio)

Of course this is just one vendor implementation; the exact model may differ from vendor to vendor - but the concept remains similar.

http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=1681633