Hi Surajit,

On Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:48:59 +0530, surajit ray
<mr.surajit.ray at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Andreas,
> 
> Just curious ... does Jiffy box provide an SDK for interacting with instance
> like
> http://aws.amazon.com/sdkforjava/

It provides a REST API, so you can interact with the JB cloud via curl
calls.

> I find most other solutions compared to AWS very half baked. The amount
> of functionality offered by AWS is truly very broad and it would make sense
> to develop expertise in this domain.

As far as I understand it, AWS features a lot of automatic performance
monitoring, and also scaling, of instances deployed.
This is not feasible with JB (yet), which is a more "traditional"
service. Most companies won't have the resources to develop and maintain
a service as sophisticated as AWS, obviously. 

Basically, you get dedicated hardware at JB, but with the flexibility
of easy switching and upgrading machines. Moreover, JB does no resource
sharing among machines, as in many low-end vServers. As stated, I am not
dogmatic about the type of deployment we are going to choose. Moreover,
I have not done systematic testing of JB vs a traditional deployment on
real hardware. However, Xen (which is what JB uses) or KVM hardware
abstraction is quite mature and used a lot in production services.

> I think unless there are very good reasons to overlook Amazon, it would
> serve the collective project better if we could develop around their
> flexible infrastructure rather than just making simple "virtual servers",
> which is essentially just abstracting the fixed hardware cost into a fixed
> web based service cost.

Well, any decision must be based on systematic testing, and on price,
too. Perhaps you could set up an OpenAM instance on Amazon, so we could
do comparisons.
We should come up with an updated guide for setup, soon.

Regards
Andreas