As for 3d-animation — yeah, there’s certainly possibilities there. It’s not hard to imagine a cloud-based animation program that renders all the frames of an animation in the time it takes your own machine to compute just one frame.

The power of Eucalyptus and its use of libvirt is the fact that it abstracts Amazon’s API’s so that other services can be established..including kvm based clouds. You may not be able to use the exact same kernel images tuned for xen versus kvm for performance reasons..but you should be able to build comparable operating images that use the appropriately tuned kernel somewhat at the API level that Eucalyptus exposes…making it possible to move workloads across cloud services regardless if they are using xen or kvm.

-jef

@Jef:
“The Eucalyptus project version, version 1.5, that ships with Jaunty supports kvm.”

I did miss that and that is a very interesting point. Surely a machine image tuned to work on KVM can not be guaranteed to perform the same when deployed on a Xen platform. From past experience, certain compile options were required to get the best performance from a Xen guest.

@Walt:
The commodity that the ISPs charge for is bandwidth. Bandwidth is expensive and can be the single biggest expense of an ISP. Especially if you have a business model where the bandwidth usage of heavy internet users is subsidised by the light users. The increase in use of Video-On-Demand type high bandwidth applications by all users across the board is a big factor here.

The Eucalyptus project version, version 1.5, that ships with Jaunty supports kvm.

I can understand how you missed that as the Eucalyptus project has yet to release the final 1.5 version and in fact just released a release candidate a couple of weeks ago. Canonical received preferential access to the Eucalyptus project codebase well ahead of when the Eucalyptus project was prepared to make the 1.5 version public. In fact jaunty package building process leaked unofficial tarballs of the source code for several weeks even though the project lead at Eucalyptus desired to keep the code private until the upstream 1.5 release date.

It took about a week after I made a request for source code access for the project to open up its source code repository for the 1.5 branch to the public. A guess Canonical thinks its okay to leak pre-release materials against the stated interests of the upstream project to keep the code private. That’s interesting. It’s also interesting that they would seek preferential access to what is essentially a publicly funded work instead of requesting the code be made available to the public as part of the upstream project.

-jef

The ability to move servers into the cloud is highly significant. As businesses require more bang for their technology buck – the more that can be moved off premise the better.

Along with EC2 I’d like to see how an IT infrastructure can move office functions into the cloud (google apps/zoho, saas).

How much $$$ can be saved in licensing, hardware, software and support moving that way?

Joe Panettieri
Editorial Director, WorksWithU