I'm very curious what you guys think the differences in the definitions of VPS and Cloud type servers actually are.

Thanks,
-Chris

VPS - I get a percentage of one box.

Cloud - I get resources, scalable as needed, across a cluster of boxes.

Same as what vonskippy said

Hi,

Last weekend I was reading some threads at wht about this same topic and this post has a good explanation:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost. ... ostcount=5

To clarify, I'm asking about one VPS vs one Cloud server (linux box). IaaS, not PaaS.

-Chris

Now I'm confused.

Can a single box be a "cloud"

Well, then, you're defining "cloud" as a VPS.

"Cloud" is a meaningless feel-good term, like "green" or "next-generation" or "healthy." Without some additional context, "cloud" seems to mean "something you can't kick."

Things that are green: hybrid cars, energy-efficient UPSes, recyclable coffee cups, R-134a, cloth diapers, frogs, staycations, new buildings

Things that are cloud: Linode, Gmail, Dropbox, the Amazon family of brands, FedEx Office, fog, Google App Engine, high-availability shared hosting

See, it's a meaningless term on its own. You cannot ask the difference between VPS and Cloud, as it makes as much sense as asking the difference between Toyota Prius and green. Best you can do is come up with reasons why VPS might not be cloud.

Some might say VPS is not cloud because it is typically unmanaged: you have to actually do something to make your application run. To this I say that Google Docs is not cloud because you have to set up formulas and all that to make a spreadsheet balance your checkbook.

Some might say VPS is not cloud because it does not automatically scale. Indeed, this is very closely related to the unmanaged nature of the service. It cannot automatically scale unless you make it automatically scale, which is entirely possible to do.

There are probably other reasons and whatnot, but I think I'm procrastinating by writing this post, so I shall stoke the fire and be off.

VPS: It's in a fixed location and offers an agreed share of physical resources (memory, CPU, disk, network).

Cloud: It's in an undetermined location (chosen by provider when it's instantiated, may move during use, might not even be on one physical machine) and offers and agreed amount of resources (memory, cores, compute units, disk, network).

_________________
/ Peter

I agree with the confusion. To me, VPS is a long term* contract for consistant hosting (that happens to be in a virtualized environment, as opposed to shared or dedicated hosting) and Linode is a great example of this. Cloud would connotate a consumable service where you pay for what you use in terms of time and resources (so if I have a million photos of cows that I would like indexed, I spin up a few cloud servers, and after they are done with the computations I shut them down). Amazon's EC2 would be a good example of that.

Of course, you could use one service for the other - I could treat Linode as a cloud in this sense by turning on a whole bunch of nodes, and then shutting them down in a day after the jobs are completed. Or I could leave my EC2 instances running forever to serve my website. I think it's pretty clear though that each service is tailored particularly to each use-case, so Linode would be considered a VPS while EC2 is cloudy.

On a side note, there is another usage of cloud that occurs when people say "the X is in the cloud". This usage has to do with doing work locally on your machine but having the storage and hard computation occuring server side ("My email is in the cloud", "I store all my cow photos in the cloud").

* long term being relative

In my not so humble opinion...

A cloud is a collection of resources that may not necessarily be co-located. "Applications" which run within the cloud are not necessarily bound to specific hardware and can migrate between them (dynamic migration during run-time is an advanced cloud feature and not a hard requirement of a cloud). New application instances can be created and existing instances destroyed quickly. Billing is typically pro-rated at a relatively granular level and based on some usage metric.

A VPS is an operating system instance. This instance may be created as an application in a cloud, or it may be tied to resources on designated hardware; it's not relevant.

I'm guessing the original question is leading to whether Linode is a cloud provider or not. In my mind, no; the OS instance ("application") is tied to specific hardware. It can me migrated but this is slow and relatively painful (block copying of images between machines). Resources are managed and allocated on a per host basis and not dynamically allocated across the infrastructure. To make Linode become closer to a cloud operation would require something like the disk storage being SAN or NAS based and for the instance to be brought up on any host in the datacenter (probably at boot time) - hence the centralised storage requirement. This "instanced tied to dedicated hardware" is, in my mine, what makes Linode a more traditional server farm based outfit rather than a cloud based outfit.

But this is just one man's opinion

_________________
Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

The Cloud is marketdroid speek for what is essentially a scaleable VPS.

If you started randomly migrating our linodes from host to host without telling us about it, then I think that would make Linode a cloud provider.

And it would suck if you did that

In my opinion, Cloud refers to a form of infrastructure, whereas VPS may refer to individual instances (water droplets?) that typically make up the infrastructure. But neither directly implies the other.

VPS's do not necessarily make up a Cloud; they can be arranged to form a traditional, non-Cloud infrastructure. The V in VPS stands for virtualization. If the OS is not running directly on the physical machine, then it's a VPS. It doesn't matter what you do with the virtualized instance, it's still a VPS.

Likewise, Clouds do not necessary consist of VPS's. One could imagine Clouds made up of non-virtualized physical machines. That might reduce flexibility, but it's still a Cloud in the sense that individual machines don't really matter much. Google uses millions of machines, not all of which may be virtualized. EC2 is obviously made up of highly flexible VPS's, but something like S3 could be running on non-virtualized machines for all I know. Nonetheless, both are Cloud services.

a cloud service gives free ram upgrades from 512 to 1024 megs a month after their 7th birthday.

clouds are pretty