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3Tera clarification
I fired up my first instance of a Xen-based
virtual Linux box on Amazon's just-announced grid, the Elastic Compute
Cloud (EC2). Then I logged in as root and copied over a little Python-based
search service that I run on my own server at home, along with the
several XML data files that it searches. I fired up Python, pointed a
browser at the domain name that EC2 had assigned to my virtual server,
and...it just worked.
...
As the service's name suggests,
though, if you need an elastic capability that can nimbly grow or
shrink, EC2's the only game in town.
But not for long. Earlier this week, I met with the folks
at 3Tera to discuss their AppLogic grid system. It's a kissing
cousin to EC2, but with a more sophisticated approach to configuring
and managing bundles of Linux applications along with other so-called
virtual appliances that encapsulate firewalls and
load balancers. The AppLogic management console is a slick AJAX application
that you use to wire up collections of these virtual appliances and
clone them for reuse. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
As Andrew
Binstock pointed out in an email to me this morning:
3Tera sells infrastructure to hosting providers like Amazon. They do not do hosting at all, nor have any plans to.
That's correct. I did not mean to suggest a similarity between 3Tera's
business model for AppLogic and Amazon's for EC2, only a similarity in
their use of virtualized Linux. But I can see that the
column as written may imply the former, in which case: oops.
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