AWS Live Migration? Some Say it’s Coming
The ongoing debate about the requirement to have live migration of instances in a cloud environment is rearing its head again. It’s seemingly split between the traditional enterprise side of management, and the more scale-out, application style method which is often referred to in the “pets versus cattle” comparison.
Why Live Migration Matters
Despite the massive uptick in application deployment that is built around the scale-out model which can withstand partial node outages, the traditional enterprise model still has a strong incumbency in many data centers.
While the advantages of cloud methodologies are clear, many organizations are beginning what will prove to be an often slow migration towards N-Tier applications build for resiliency. As such, the need for high availability is always coming up.
When we talk about high availability in this sense, it is generally backed by something called live migration. This is the ability to move an active virtual workload from one host to another with no outage, or sub-second outage to the running application environment.
A great article was posted up at Gigaom on the idea that Amazon Web Services is going to develop a live migration offering. The idea stems from the fact that Google has the capability, and will inevitably create a need for Amazon to match the feature set.
It’s difficult to tell of the cloud giant will bend to the will of the popularly growing GCE platform, or if in fact it is customer demand that is already in place driving the change. Either way, if the move does come, we can definitely see that it could raise some eyebrows of CIOs to make the cloud a potential home for many more workloads.
Making the Case for Both Sides
We really should recognize there are are clear use-cases for both sides of the argument on this. Some workloads are entirely appropriate for public clouds such as AWS. At the same time, the lack of HA features means that certain applications may not land in the cloud.
This will be very interesting to see whether Amazon does take the bait as set by Google. One thing for sure is that the thought of a rapid move to the cloud for companies would be heavily assisted if live migration was available.
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