whiteontech.com – The Blog

On June 4 I had the good sense to attend a panel on the topic The State of Startups Using Cloud Computing. The event was staged at the Vilna Shul (http://www.vilnashul.org) on Beacon Hill and is part of a series of downtown networking events that the shul hosts.

The panelists were (left to right):
Prakash Khot, CTO, Dimdim Inc., http://www.dimdim.com
Aaron White, CTO at DK Pictures, Inc., http://www.doink.com
Mark Pascarella, CEO, Gotuit Media Corp., http://www.gotuit.com

Joe Berkovitz, President, NoteFlight LLC, http://www.noteflight.com

Philip Jacob, Founder & CTO, StyleFeeder, Inc., http://www.stylefeeder.com

Brian Whitman, Founder & CTO, The Echo Nest Corp., http://www.echonest.com
Moderators:  Branko Gerovac and David Carver

The panelists were first asked to speak about their different motivations for using cloud computing. Gotuit, for instance, went to the cloud out of fear when a client suddenly threw a massive-load event at them, where the anticipated number of concurrent users was at least one million and upper limit unknown. Another company began using cloud computing because their CEO wanted to be able to say, “We use cloud.” Other companies had the more standard reason of not wanting the expense of buying their own physical server structure.

There was agreement among the panelists that the cloud offers incredible advantages for testing: it’s easy and quick to set up a duplicate instance of your server, load the newest builds of your apps, and then let testers (including clients) go at it. You can also let different virtual machines stress test each other.

Another area of advantage is that cloud computing allows complete mobility for your development team. You can unplug your laptops, move office cross country, and plug back in, and all your data is right where it always was. This is also great for geographically distributed teams of developers.

Panelists did highlight several caveats for using cloud computing, among them:

• Using SMTP through the cloud can cause problems when clients see traffic coming from an Amazon server instead of your company’s own—they may react by blocking it.
• Latency issues.
• S3 has had failures and you have to be prepared to recover.
• Getting data up and down is slow: for large volumes of data it’s easier to FedEx a disc. But moving data within the network (we’re talking Amazon here) is very fast.
• Lack of support.

Complaints included:

• A lack of transparency regarding Amazon’s operations statistics, i.e. downtime, error rates.
• An all-day fail on S3 about six months ago was highly visible on Twitter but was not apparent on S3 itself!

Bottom line: if you require the elasticity, use the cloud. If you have consistent volumes and consistent I/O, you’re better off with a regular server.

The panelists were united in their praise for a company called RightScale (http://www.rightscale.com) that is providing cloud management services as an add-on to the actual cloud service providers. RightScale is agnostic as regards cloud providers. And it sounds like they are doing their intended job very, very well, so this is a company that bears watching.

A few of the companies participating in the panel have already moved off of the cloud to some extent, either because their cloud usage had already served its purpose during their initial start-up phase and was no longer needed (or no longer economical), or because they had found cloud computing to be inappropriate for their needs (this was true for the high bandwidth of Dimdim’s web conferencing, for instance).

In all, it was a very interesting panel and useful to hear some true-life stories of startup companies and their experiences so far with cloud computing. These companies have lived through the growing pains of cloud computing as it moves into the mainstream and lurches towards maturity as a technology option.

Kudos to the organizers, compliments to the Milk Street Café for the sandwiches and cookies, and I hope to see many more events in this vein.

All photos by Tracy White.