Poolparty.rb is a very promising ec2 management tool. But it’s down right now. (see below) Based on the documentation, poolparty is self-hosting, which is not an advertisement for relying on ec2 as the primary tool to host a site. As reserve capacity it makes sense, but when it’s the only server, it seems expensive and not necessarily reliable. We use ec2 instances for a number of tasks, mostly for data processing, but the unreliability of using a cloud in this way is related to the immaturity of the toolset to manage the cloud. While the instances are an incredible time savings over provisioning and maintaining the physical hardware, I’m finding that I underestimate the time needed to build and manage the tools to manage the cloud. As tools like poolparty improve, i’m sure this will go down, but it’s significant at this point.
Note: downforeveryoneorjustme.com says it’s not even a site on the internet. This is probably related to the way DNS is managed for the site, which is exactly my point. Odds are the instances are running just fine.
Ah I appreciate the comments for the thoughts into cloud computing, but poolpartyrb was down in December *not because of a hosting issue*, but the authors were moving the site from one company to another. PoolParty is under active development and has been since February with production-ready sites.
Had PoolParty been hosted on a vps or other infrastructure at the time, the site would have been down anyway. Your comment on the infancy of cloud computing as a hosting platform, although well conceived is misguided. Also, the PoolParty framework is aimed at reducing the cost, provisioning and management pains regardless of usecase for the framework.
However, you should check out PoolParty, Heroku, EngineYard, Amazon, SliceHost, Rackspace, etc. etc. for other cloud providers whose entire businesses are modeled after the cloud as a hosting environment.
Thanks for the feedback. I understand what you’re saying about the downtime and it’s good to know it wasn’t related to the technology in use. I’ve used heroku (love it) and use anywhere from 1 to 25 ec2 instances all the time. I love cloud computing, but it’s in the early stages… i’ll give poolparty another look.