Google officials claim that, with Chromebooks, you don't have to take care of backups and software updates. I doubt that this is an advantage.

Last week, I outlined why I believe that Chromebooks are no match for Windows netbooks when it comes to accessibility and the ability of their applications. Today, I will address two topics that Google explicitly names as two advantages of Chromebooks—that is, the fact that you need not worry about backups or updates.

4. Backups

That you don’t need to take care of backups if you store all your data in the cloud is a claim often put forward. Of course, this is supposed to also be one of the alleged advantages of Chromebooks. From my point of view, it is one of the major disadvantages.

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This second part of the Chromebooks series discusses the "anytime and anywhere" argument and compares the power of web apps with Windows applications.

In the last post in this series about Google’s Chromebooks, I outlined why I believe that “this new kind of computer” won’t improve security in your organization. Today, I want to address two topics that also play an important role in the current discussion about Chromebooks: accessibility and ability.

2. Accessibility

Google touts the anytime and anywhere accessibility of web apps as one of the major advantages of Chromebooks. Honestly, this is simply wrong. Watching the keynote was a nice case in point of the limited accessibility of web apps. I was trying to watch the video in Boracay in the Philippines (by the way, one of the world’s best beaches). Even though Internet speed in the Philippines is definitely above average compared to other locations in Asia, I wasn’t able to watch the video continuously even though I used the lowest available resolution.

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In this series, I will outline my views about the disadvantages of Google's Chromebook, a netbook running Chrome OS. Part 1 discusses security.

A few days ago, Google announced Chromebooks, “a new kind of computer,” as the Google Chrome blog was titled. I watched the Day 2 video of the keynote speech for the Google I/O developer conference, and I read several comments on the web. I often found myself shaking my head. This five-part series covers eight of the causes that made my head shake: security, accessibility and ability, updates and backup, usability and cloudability.

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I am not only a Microsoft fanboy, but also an Amazon fanboy. Okay, it is out now. I didn’t consult my therapist about this, but there is no doubt that those two companies have something essential in common which attracts me.

What is it? When people discuss which operating system is the best, they often focus on technical features or ideological arguments. Honestly, those kinds of arguments don’t interest me much. What counts for me the most is the whole ecosystem in which an operating system is embedded. Creating and maintaining a huge ecosystem is Microsoft’s real achievement.

And this strategy is exactly what made Amazon big. Amazon doesn’t have an online store. Amazon is a retail ecosystem. And Amazon doesn’t just have a nice e-book reader. Amazon is an e-book ecosystem. You can guess by now where I buy most of the virtual and physical things I need. Obviously, it is only natural to also buy my cloud server at Amazon.

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In my last article I outlined why I believe that EC2 lacks elasticity under certain circumstances. Of course, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud wouldn’t have this name if this new kind of computation wouldn’t provide additional elasticity for some usage scenarios.

Last time I complained that I can’t add more memory to my 32-bit instance. However, this problem does not exist with 64-bit instance type because you can just bundle the instance (create an image) and launch this new AMI (Amazon image) with another instance type that has more memory. This can be done without downtime which wouldn’t be possible with on-premises server where you have to add more RAM.

If you need a new full-blown server, then you can indeed get more computation power within a few minutes and you don’t have to wait for weeks until the new server you ordered at your server vendor arrives. This is the main reason the name “EC2″ (Elastic Compute Cloud) is justified. Even if all your servers are virtualized you can’t get this kind of elasticity with on-premises computing.

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In my last post, I complained about the relatively high costs of Amazon EC2. I am sure you are curious to learn how I could then be so lavish to run 4sysops in the cloud. But first let me share a few words with you about the other usual suspect when it comes to arguing for cloud computing and that is reliability.

Reliability

Before I moved 4sysops to the cloud, it was running on a dedicated server and throughout the three years I had not one hardware related incident. Okay, this is just one server. I have some experience with the server hardware from well-known vendors and those experiences are not really positive. However, I have my doubts that cloud technology can significantly improve uptimes at the moment. This technology is relatively new and complex. There are only a few cloud providers and much has yet to be learned about reliable management of these huge systems.

In this one year with Amazon, there was at least one incident with my virtual server. You might have read in the news that Amazon had some problems with its storage system a few months ago. It appears that 4sysops was affected. I am not 100% certain about this due to the fact that Amazon didn’t contact me, but I think it was no coincidence that the storage where my database volume resided suddenly disappeared.

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About one year ago, I moved 4sysops from a dedicated server in Berlin to Amazon’s cloud somewhere on the East Coast of the US. At that time, I bought a reserved instance (see below) that was valid for one year. Thus, now I had to decide whether I should stay with Amazon EC2 or move ahead.

To come straight to the point, I bought another reserved instance; this time, the one that extends for three years. I suppose this makes it clear that I feel quite comfortable in the cloud. However, the cloud also has its downsides. So let me first outline the things that made me doubt whether EC2 is a good place for 4sysops.

First of all, I considered the costs. Cloud providers never grow weary of repeating the mantra of cost savings in the cloud. I already blogged a while back about my disbelief in the cost savings argument. As far as 4sysops is concerned, that means a simple web server with CMS and a database. There are certainly cheaper offers available.

4sysops EC2 costs

The reserved instance for three years costs $700 USD (net) and the monthly “elastic” costs amount to about $58. The reserved instance allows me to run a medium high-CPU instance for $0.06 per hour instead of the regular price of $0.17. Thus the elastic instance costs amount to about $43 per month. Aside from the instance costs, I have storage costs at $3 per month, and a monthly bandwidth charge of $12.

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I somehow forgot my poll about cloud computing which I started last year. I wanted to know how many Windows admins are already involved in cloud computing and how interested 4sysops readers are in this new technology. The result is quite interesting:

At time of this writing, 17% are already using cloud technology, 11% are planning to introduce cloud computing in their organization, and 24% have no such plans. The most interesting result here is that 48% of those who took part in this poll didn’t choose any of these three options. Does this mean that almost half of participants simply don’t know if their company will introduce cloud computing?

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Some days ago Steve Ballmer talked about Microsoft’s commitment to cloud computing. I suppose, many people were quite surprised that Ballmer claims that 70% of Microsoft’s 40,000 employees are already working in one way or another on Microsoft’s cloud. Of course, he didn’t mean that the majority of Microsoft’s workforce is engaged with Azure. Obviously, Ballmer must have a very broad concept of cloud computing.

(Note to subscribers: There is video embedded)

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Vanessa Alvarez addresses a popular topic in her latest article: “Why Cloud Computing Won’t Kill IT Jobs“. I discussed the same issue more than a year ago. Even though cloud computing has made some significant advances since then, I haven’t heard of IT pros losing their jobs because computers disappeared on-premises. I absolutely agree with Vanessa Alvarez’s title; however, I don’t think, she provides the right arguments in her article.

I think, she is correct when she says that many IT pros are afraid of losing their jobs because of cloud computing. The worldwide economic crisis certainly cost quite a few IT jobs, which made many worry about the future. Thus, I decided to post another article about this issue because I strongly believe that these worries are unjustified.

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Amazon has added an interesting new feature to EC2 that allows you to boot from Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes. If you are not familiar with EC2, please read my review of the Amazon AWS Management console first.

I have criticized EC2′s complicated OS image creation process (AMI bundling) before. Thus far, it was only possible to store images on Amazon’s storage service S3. S3 and EC2 don’t really harmonize well, and that is probably the reason why Amazon needed to introduce EBS in the first place. Until now, you could only attach EBS volumes to instances (virtual machines), but could not use an EBS volume as boot device. I suppose, many EC2 customers were asking for this feature, and now it is here. It simplifies many things, but it also has some downsides compared to using S3 as AMI (Amazon Machine Image) storage. Note that the original method is still available. Amazon calls the corresponding images instance-store, or S3 AMIs, as opposed to the new EBS AMIs.

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Submitted by Neill Turner – Blog: EC2Dream

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EC2Dream

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You might have noticed that I’ve blogged more often about cloud computing lately, especially about Amazon’s AWS. This is not just because I have moved 4sysops to EC2. It is more the other way around. I have moved 4sysops to the cloud because I want to get more experience with cloud computing. I must admit that I got somehow hooked on EC2 since I played with it the AWS Management Console a while back.

On the other hand, it is possible that I have been taken by just another hype. According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle cloud computing is now at the top of the hype curve. It is interesting to note that it shares this position with eBook readers which is the other topic that fascinates me for quite a while. (Just ordered the new Kindle International.) So you see I am prone to fall for all kinds of new technologies which are sometimes just hypes.

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Have you ever run out of storage and desperately needed a place to temporarily store large amounts of data? If so, then you should have a look at the Amazon S3 storage service. Of course, the service is not free, but prices are moderate. If you only need the space to overcome a temporary storage shortage, then the storage costs won’t really hurt your organization. The advantage over those free online storage services is that the amount of data you can store at S3 is more or less unlimited.

There are different ways to use S3; today, I will just discuss the possibility of copying files from your servers or desktop to Amazon’s online storage service. Amazon offers a simple web-based S3 file manager, but this is only something to use if you are on the run and want to access your S3 storage from an Internet cafe or so (if you dare). There are quite a few free Windows tools that allow you to upload and download files to S3. For this article, I tried three free S3 explorers: Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer(S3Fox) 0.4.7, S3 Browser 1.9.7 and Cloudberry S3 Explorer 1.6.3.

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I hope some of you followed my recommendation and played a little with Amazon’s cloud management tool, AWS Management Console. It is really fun! Another option to manage EC2 is the free Firefox plugin Elasticfox. I wouldn’t recommend starting with the tool if you haven’t previously used EC2. The AWS Management Console is the better tool for beginners. However, Elasticfox is not really difficult to use. It just lacks the AWS Management Console’s Launch Wizard which makes it easier for EC2 newbies to find an AMI (OS image) to play with.

However, Elasticfox is an interesting alternative once you understood how EC2 works. Its biggest advantage over Amazon’s tool is that it is snappier. Working with Elasticfox feels like using a desktop tool, whereas the AWS Management Console is a typical web app and often a bit sluggish although it is based on Ajax. Elasticfox is probably also the better tool if you have to manage many instances because it uses the screen space more efficiently. The spreadsheet-like interface allows you view all relevant information quickly.

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