Although I haven’t really talked about it here, I joined a new startup a couple of months ago called Stackdriver where we’re working on building a hosted solution to make infrastructure monitoring and management suck less for users of the public cloud. After a having to duct tape the various pieces together a couple of times now, it’s super clear that the need is there so it’s exciting to be working on solving it. More on the side of being at a very early startup to come in the future.
Today I had planned to do some work around some of our provisioning and deployment code and Amazon had another EBS outage making the AWS API pretty unavailable for much of the afternoon. So after doing some other things, I took a look at what fails along with EBS to help us remember what fails along with EBS and thought it was interesting enough to share.
There is a reason why building an independent API (or APIless environment) makes a lot of sense. E.g., my employer’s OpenShift can run in one instance on Amazon (http://rhcloud.com/), but you can also have it installed elsewhere. Just saying.
But that puts you in the Platform as a Service corner as opposed to building on top of just the raw infrastructure building blocks.
Also, running across cloud providers and thus involving the “public” Internet for communication between them has some challenges all its own in how you architect and build your application/product on top of those providers.
Yes, it is PaaS, but you can get way way down to the low-level stuff … https://openshift.redhat.com/community/developers/do-it-yourself