[IPOL discuss] why not in "the cloud"?

[Nicolas Limare]

Today, someone asked me why IPOL is not hosted "in the cloud", ie on
flexible computing resources provided by a cloud hosting provider,
like Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud[1].

1. one part of IPOL is in the cloud

IPOL already rents three machine to Gandi[2], french computing resources
provider with a cloud infrastructure. These three machines provide
http://www.ipol.im/ (the web frontend), http://tools.ipol.im/
(the tools server, including wiki, web stats, mailing-list) and one
mackup copy and archive. When IPOL scales up, we can "resize" these
three machines to have more CPU, more RAM, more disk.

I chose Gandi because it is local (better for network connexion and
customer service), inexpensive (starts at 12€/month) and I already
used their services before.

2. one part of IPOL can not be in the cloud

So, what is remaining? The demo server is a big machine we bought and
host in Cachan. We can not find it "in the cloud" because such systems
only provide smaller, inexpensive hardware. The cloud concept is that
we add more machines in parallel when we need more ressources, but the
demo system is not distributable (yet) over multiple machines, and
parallel algorithm will use many *local* CPUs, not CPUs distributed
over a cluster.

The most powerful Amazon EC2 instances[3] have two quad-core CPUs, and
cost $4290/year[4]. For 18000€ we had our demo server with four
octo-core CPUs, and I think it will be our main machine for ~3 years.

We also have a backup and archive server in Cachan, because multiple
backups in different locations are good and as a journal it is our
responsibility to ensure no data will be lost.

3. one part of IPOL could be moved to the cloud, maybe

The demo archive is typically the kind of service we could move to
the cloud. Lots of data to store, few visits, simple system,
quasi-static, scalable. To do that, the demo code has to be changes
top split demo and archive.

[1]http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
[2]http://www.gandi.net/hosting/
[3]http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
[4]http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

-- 
Nicolas LIMARE - CMLA - ENS Cachan    http://www.cmla.ens-cachan.fr/~limare/
IPOL - image processing on line                          http://www.ipol.im/
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