So I figured I would write this article as a response to some questions and feedback I received from my earlier post “CloudFiles curl example” which outline’s some example usage to interact with the CloudFiles public API as well as some example code. Ryan over at http://www.ryanuber.com/ brought up some interesting questions that I left out in my original post based off of the assumption that the reading audience was already familiar with CloudFiles. Here are two very important and relevant questions that he asked: “What kind of output do you get?” “What kinds of...

So here is an example python script that you can use to build new CloudServers and then deploy software on them. This particular example is pretty basic and only installs either a LAMP stack or just a simple installation of MySQL. Don’t let the limitations of this particular script fool you into thinking that is all libcloud or python can do because that is not the case. You can do something pretty basic like this one, extend the script to utilize threading which will allow you to deploy multiple instances at a time, or simply have more complex software installations. Before you run the script...

This article is a follow up to my original called “Coding for the Cloud” which focused on a broad range of topics and provided a high level overview of how to use the cloud by scaling your application in a linear fashion rather than relying on heavy duty hardware to power your servers. This article is going to focus on figuring out if your application is a good fit for the cloud or if it should remain on a dedicated hardware solution such as Co-location, Managed Dedicated Servers, or Unmanaged Dedicated Server. So.. Is your application a good fit for the cloud? Here are a few questions you...

Overview: These day’s everyone is talking about the scalability of the cloud, and its abundance of uses, however few of them are talking about how to properly utilize the technology. Cloud Infrastructures are designed to be able to scale in a linear fashion rather than a “vertical” like that of dedicated hardware. When scaling with dedicated hardware the first step is to build up what you have. Typically people start off with a smaller server which is cheaper and add ram / disk as needed. Once the hardware can no longer be upgraded, they then start to expand linear. The cloud also...