Cloud Management

Unless your head has been stuck in a cloud you have probably heard of cloud computing. This technology holds great promise for the world of hosting and management. It is nothing short of a revolution in how hosting and applications are handled. A revolution, like so many Internet ideas, that may or may not occur depending on how it takes off. Still, a host of large companies are betting billions on cloud computing as the wave of the future - so it has an excellent prenatal plan.

How Does It Work?

Basically, a data center dumps all it's hardware - processors, memory, hard disks etc - into a big bucket, then "slices" off as much power as you need to do a particular job. Your "slice" of the cloud is called an instance but in truth it looks exactly like a remotely managed server. Instead of paying monthly hardware fees you pay small fees for the duration of everything you use. For example you might pay 8 or 12 centers per hour for the time the "instance" is running. Stop the instance and you stop paying the fee.


Sounds Great, Why Do I Need You?

As great as cloud computing is it comes with some distinct disadvantages. There is no real "support" for cloud instances. They are challenging to set up and get right, they pose security concerns. They are a very immature technology - even polished companies like Amazon are finding it difficult to create user friendly tools that are also secure and full featured. That's where we can help. We can navigate the dizzying array of options for you and come up with a plan that fits your needs.

For example, we recently rehosted a 3 server system in the cloud and placed them all on "standby" as a contigency plan. These standby instances are ready to spool up and do their job. ANT scripts (a technology for automating certain tasks) run periodically and "start" these instances, update the code and database on them, and stop them - keeping them ready and waiting. CF Webtools devised and executed this plan for our customer and we maintain and monitor these scripts.