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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?

skaffman
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Drunken Programmer
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    What do you mean by "a cloud"? A cloud computing service? Cloud storage? – Sasha Chedygov Jun 01 '09 at 05:13
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    Correct me if I am wrong but is'nt Cloud Computing supposed to encompass both Service and Storage? The way I think of a cloud is a limitless(ofcourse I don't live in the real world) resource where I deploy my site and then don't have to worry about storage, cpu etc. And I am billed for my usage of the resources. – Drunken Programmer Jun 01 '09 at 17:24

6 Answers6

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These are a few open source cloud servers:

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

brianegge
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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?

Steve Severance
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Recently VMWare announced Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry is both a commercial product and open source project. cloudfoundry.com is the websiter of the commercial service. The open-source project is homed at cloudfoundry.org, source code is on github.

So far what I have seen, suggests that the cloud software, and consequently the service, being developed by cloudfoundry is more of a PaaS offering than IaaS. This might appear surprising given the fact that VMWare's core strength is virtualization.

For your requirement you can probably build the whole cloud solution by combining cloud foundry's OSS with other open source IaaS software like Eucalyptus to make your own complete stack.

Tahir Akhtar
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Rackspace's solution set is running on OpenStack.

BozoJoe
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"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?

Drew Dormann
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    There is a huge difference between cloud computing and distributed computing. Please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing – Drunken Programmer Jun 01 '09 at 17:26
  • Cloud means remote. If I host your documents on a server at my house, it's cloud computing. Usually as a service provider, I should offer performance and redundancy and so on. But even without, it is still cloud computing. It's meaning less buzzword. – Philippe Carriere Aug 26 '09 at 17:01
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    So the condensation on my overclocked, water-cooled CPU doesn't count then eh? – crowne Sep 26 '10 at 12:56