Comments on: Grid Computing: Amazon EC2, Mosso, GoGrid

By: Charles Feduke

Charles Feduke — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:16:31 +0000

Glad you found this info useful. We had to move off of GoGrid because we were trying to host a production software on a beta platform (one night all our Linux images mounted as RO and we use file system caching which means we delivered out of date content for a couple days). I do think they offer the best bang for your buck though.

By: Jonathan Marcus

Jonathan Marcus — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:07:36 +0000

Thanks for the very helpful analysis. I am trying to choose a cloud hosting provider: while I'm finding that while nobody has gotten it perfect yet, I agree that GoGrid is doing an excellent job.

To me, the lack of persistent storage with EC2 is an absolute deal-breaker. (Yes, I know you can use their Elastic Block Store to handle this, but that means that all of your hard disk operations occur over the network, and that's freaking slow).

Mosso is a nice idea (being able to run PHP and ASP side-by-side is really cool) but if you have custom applications that need to be running constantly (as I do), the lack of root access is, again, a deal-breaker.

I've just started GoGrid, and I hope that I can get everything working. The GUI is nice, and I was able to get everything up and running quite quickly. My biggest gripes are 1) the inability to change machine settings after creation (once you've made a 1GB server, you can't up it to 2GB), and 2) the inability to clone machine instances, which will make it more difficult to scale up. Nonetheless, it looks like the best overall service, with the most upside.

By: cfeduke

cfeduke — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 02:46:46 +0000

Sure thing, I’m just getting this blog setup so I haven’t even gotten to contact info! I was locked out of the building this morning so figured then was as good a time as any to start writing stuff.

By: Michael Sheehan

Michael Sheehan — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:13:46 +0000

One more thing cfeduke, since you don’t have a means to contact you directly, could you drop me an email?

Thanks,
Michael

By: Steven

Steven — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:59:23 +0000

Finally, I was waiting for someone who has used Mosso to post something on the internet in comparison to Gogrid and EC2. You are the first as far as I know. Thanks for this – very useful.

By: Michael Sheehan

Michael Sheehan — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:34:26 +0000

Thanks cfeduke for the very well thought out analysis of the 3 services. I think that users looking for a Grid or Cloud Computing solution will find a lot of good information here.

I wanted to add a couple of points regarding GoGrid (but your details here are right on!):

- Load Balancing – you can add more than one free LB should your topology require it. In essence, you could set up a full load balanced staging environment AND a LB production environment within the same GoGrid instance.

- Snapshots – you are correct, this feature is well on its way and should be available soon.

- API – we did recently release the GoGrid API (http://www.gogrid.com/how-it-works/gogrid-API.php) should you want to control your GoGrid instances programmatically.

- Communication – we also have the blog (http://blog.gogrid.com), the wiki for documentation (http://wiki.gogrid.com) and user forums (http://forums.gogrid.com). We also just released a GoGrid Support chat embedded within the GoGrid portal for those people who need instant help when deploying and managing their servers.

- Server Images – we have 32 and 64 bit images available and other images being rolled out.

That all being said, your analysis is spot on!

Thanks,
Michael
Technology Evangelist for GoGrid