On Fri, 2011-04-22 at 01:38 +0000, Ariel Gold wrote:
> Private Cloud? Commodity hosting provider? 
> 
> So you're saying Amazon and Linode are public clouds, and recommending
> he setup a private cloud for less than $100/mo? That means he's paying
> and managing his own hardware and setting up an automated
> virtualization system? And the $100/month would be for colocation and
> bandwidth?

Why, yes, yes I am :-)

You can set up a private cloud with two machines and a few hours of work
by installing UEC on them.  

  http://www.ubuntu.com/business/server/cloud

I'm sure other vendors have similar solutions, but that's the one I know
(I work for Canonical).  It's really pretty easy to do.

I think that as we enter the "cloud era" business will be measured on
their success of managing the balance between private and public clouds.
Public clouds provide scalability but private clouds provide more
predictability.  And I think that predictability is key for development
and QA.  Of course, I'm one guy on a mailing list :-)

So back to your numbers, a couple of decent servers for $1K each with a
2-3 year lifetime is less than $100/mo.  Of course YMMV.

		--Ted