Cloud Application Architectures

Appendix B. GoGrid

Randy Bias

There is more than one way to build a cloud infrastructure. Amazon Web Services (AWS) represents the “service infrastructure” approach, offering customers a number of customized, nonstandard, but highly scalable services to rebuild an infrastructure in a totally virtual environment. GoGrid represents more of an industry-standard approach that offers a very familiar data center-like environment, but in the cloud.

For many customers, the GoGrid approach is easier and more comfortable because it reuses traditional idioms and technology, such as VLANs (virtual LANs), network blocks, hardware appliances (load balancer and firewall), and file storage (SAN or NAS, storage area networks and network attached storage, respectively). This approach represents what we call a cloudcenter: a data center in the clouds.