Cloud Computing: What does it take to setup a Cloud

Question

What does it take to setup a cloud. I have some friends in the middle east who want to setup clouds similar to Google and Amazon and are wondering if there is any open technology that they can use to setup a cloud hosting service. Any ideas?

Answer 1

"Cloud" is an often misunderstood term.

Any computer doing any work on the internet qualifies as cloud. It's simply a metaphor for computer work done "somewhere else".

Perhaps you meant distributed computing?

Answer 2

A few open source cloud servers:

• http://www.eucalyptus.com/
• http://www.enomaly.com/
• http://eyeos.org/ (semi-"cloud")

Answer 3

You should check out Eucalyptus. The goal of Eucalyptus is to allow you to setup your own private cloud, similar to Amazon's EC2.

Answer 4

Software is important and there is nothing available publicly that replicates what you might find in Google, Microsoft or Amazon. Microsoft has written the most about their infrastructure. AutoPilot and Cost of Clouds being two interesting papers. A real segment of the cost will be in data center design and construction. The number of computers needed is non trivial. To be clear I don't think that a single cluster of 5000 machines is a cloud. Many clusters of 5000 machines is a cloud. Also clouds should be resilient to data center failure so there should probably be at least two data centers.

Other than geo-location is there any reason they want to have their own and not use either EC2 or Azure?

Answer 5

A very good article about Cloud computing, .net and microsoft technologies is at:

http://jai-on-asp.blogspot.com/2010/05/cloud-computing-and-net.html