Linux for "cloud computing": Request for Input

[Bill McGonigle]

On 03/05/2010 02:03 PM, Brian St. Pierre wrote:
> Virtualization?

Yes, and to drive home that point, this is what's being chosen 
empirically by the extant service providers.  Amazon's EC2 is Xen on 
RHEL.  I seem to recall that Rackspace also went this route.

And if you don't like Xen on RHEL/CentOS you can switch to KVM on RHEL. 
  Or (heaven forbid) VMWare Server on RHEL or VMWare ESX which was 
partially based on RHEL.  Even Xen started life with a big code import 
from Linux.

And if you go the Xen route and decide you really don't like Linux you 
can run Xen on OpenSolaris.  Open Source is good - you can choose Linux 
first and still have good escape routes.

>> >  Any blatant negatives for Linux as a platform?

ZFS is only on *Solaris and FreeBSD (albeit an old one).  Linux doesn't 
yet have a stable, consistent COW filesystem.  Certainly a combination 
of the two is a great win.

If you assume ZFS for storage virtualization, Linux has the advantage of 
being able to (p)NFS mount the data, so you can do file-level 
snapshotting and data de-duplication.  You could also run Windows-based 
clouds with a ZFS backend, but you'd have to use an iSCSI backend which 
loses the nice snapshotting capabilities and drives everything back to 
the block device level of granularity because Windows doesn't play 
nicely with everybody else.

-Bill

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