I just read a post on Cloud Computing Journal that suggests that RackSpace will be rolling out Drizzle later this year on their Cloud, and are probably going to replace MySQL in the process. Drizzle is a cloud-directed, Linux-leaning, stripped-down, hitherto for unsupported, GPL 2 MySQL 6.0 fork that Rackspace is betting will infinitely scale, or at least scale better than MySQL. But what will that mean for the websites hosted on the RackSpace Cloud?

There is a lot of hype as well as valid discussion about the benefits of Cloud Computing. And while we hope that the faith we put in this elastic environment to scale and provide the flexibility we need to ensure our web applications are always running and performing at optimal levels for all our visitors, there will be times when things don’t go as planned.

I read the post (link in main blog post) with interest, hoping that it would shed further light on the relative merits of private vs public clouds. Unfortunately, the main argument outlined was actually one of business process engineering, and the writer claimed that adopting the Private Cloud would highlight your inefficiencies and help you streamline your processes while the Public Cloud could not do this …

About 3 years ago, I posted an article about the different types of hosting available at the time. While most of what was written still holds true today, the emergence of Cloud Computing (Cloud Hosting) adds a new layer of complexity and options. In this revision of the 2006 post I will add a summary of each of the types of hosting – including Cloud – to clarify the terms and help provide a clearer picture of the marketplace.

It’s been an interesting few months. After trying out a number of multi-computer synchronisation tools (like SugarSync, DropBox, etc) and settling on the Live Mesh beta, it’s time to rethink the approach because there still appear to be basic bugs with even Live Mesh that lead to uncertainty in the consistency of the synchronised files.