With infrastructure services like Amazon EC2, Rackspace, and VMware making it easy to take advantage of the flexibility, portability, and reduced costs of cloud computing, it seems obvious to jump on the cloud bandwagon for new IT projects.
But, developers are generally left on their own to deal with the pain of deploying their apps to the cloud: configuring application servers, libraries, disk partitions, networking, clustering, service connections, and virtual private networks. After they get their app installed they also need to install management agents that run on top of the application layer.
If you really want to take advantage of the cloud and optimize return on investment, you'll want the on-boarding process to be easy and fast and you won't install that agent. Agent-based solutions are inherently inflexible. Deploying agent-based solutions in a cloud-based environment, which is, by definition, highly flexible, is often like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. In agent-based solutions, hard-coded agents are installed on every machine to monitor the application. If a change to the application configuration occurs--such as the IT department adds a node or upgrades a component--the agents must be updated as well.
Each agent and management server must be configured separately with management and monitoring solutions generally not portable. When every change to an environment requires installation of multiple agents on each server and configuration of multiple management servers, it becomes a tall order to move an application from a traditional infrastructure to the cloud, or from one cloud infrastructure to another: private to public, public to hybrid, or hybrid to private.
How do you get around this so you can actually capitalize on the benefits of cloud computing? Go virtual. Move application management, including easy on-boarding, from above the application stack into the underlying virtual layer, along with the rest of the cloud infrastructure.
I was recently briefed by webappVM CEO Isaac Roth on how the company is pioneering this new approach. He said the virtual path allows you to actually realize all of the flexibility, portability, and reduced costs that come with the promise of cloud computing.
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A huge amount of digital ink has been spilled trying to define "the cloud" and "cloud computing" and now Amazon Web Services has once again upped the ante with its latest Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) services.
The VPC, outlined here by fellow CNET blogger James Urquhart, provides a way for companies to create a logically separated set of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and a secure VPN connection to their own networks. Effectively, it takes a chunk of Amazon's services and makes it private. Still on the Internet and still on shared hardware, but private.
The VPC use case is for enterprises to use cloud services outside their firewall, connected in a secure manner. This is very compelling to IT shops that need more resources but have to date been concerned about security. And while this approach can certainly be called a "private cloud," I believe the more likely private use case is that of an "enterprise cloud" that is behind the firewall and adheres to compute cloud principles (elasticity, seamless scaling, etc.).
Where the computational resources live seems to be the crux of the private vs. public cloud discussion, and now that Amazon has defined private clouds as part of an Internet-hosted infrastructure I expect we'll see more references to "enterprise clouds" as the software matures.
The enterprise cloud is really just an actualized version of the "compute cloud" concept that we've seen for the last 10 years (and I've written about repeatedly) with a deployment model that mirrors Internet-based cloud services.
A "compute cloud" is a different animal, according to the developers of Eucalyptus, an open-source, EC2-compatible infrastructure-as-a-service. Typically based on virtual machines, "cloud computing allows users to dynamically provision processing time and storage space from a ubiquitous 'cloud' of computational resources."
Incidentally, Amazon's new offering not only resets the semantics of how we talk about cloud computing but also puts serious pressure on other cloud providers to offer feature parity. Few other providers offer the full breadth of AWS services and those that do are constantly playing catch-up.
Another aspect of the new offering is the impact it has on a variety of start-ups that have attempted to do similar things, or to augment AWS in ways that Amazon hasn't yet tried. As with so many other platforms, the risk of building on top of something you don't own (i.e. EC2) is significant. And while AWS continues to be very innovative, start-ups are going to have to be very agile to outfox Amazon.
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IBM and Amazon.com announced that they are now providing pay-as-you-go access to development and production versions of IBM Information Management database servers, IBM Lotus content management, and IBM WebSphere portal and middleware products.
This is interesting as it shows that IBM understands that people want to consume software in the cloud, but it's not clear that anyone is currently interested. But the fact is, if they don't build it, then no one will come.
The full list of currently available IBM software available on EC2.
- IBM DB2
- IBM Informix Dynamic Server
- IBM Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition
- IBM WebSphere Portal Server
As a tech bellwether, it's also important for IBM to set the method by which it offers its cloud-based software so that other can follow suit. Pricing and deployment options have varied a bit between large software vendors which leads to customer confusion.
Existing IBM customers can use the licenses they've already bought while still taking advantage of the elastic nature of (Amazon Web Services) to handle spikes and peaks. These licenses retain their value and can be used to handle steady state processing needs, with more licenses available (on an hourly basis) in the cloud for peak times.This clean and innovative new model should clear up some of the uncertainty which can cause potential users to think twice before jumping in to cloud computing. A new IBM PVU (processor value unit) table will map between PVUs and the full set of available EC2 instance types. See our new IBM partner page for details.
Most people assume that running applications in the cloud, and specifically on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, is automatically less expensive then running in your own data center.
The short answer is that the EC2 may not actually be the cheapest route, but it can provide faster time to market and additional revenue, even if it actually costs more to run.
I read a post on Geva Perry's Thinking Out Cloud blog Sunday that got me thinking about cloud economics, and if there is a missing link in the costs associated with cloud services and specifically what happens if you run everything you own on EC2 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 356 days a year.
... Read moreLast week Oracle and Amazon Web Services held a webinar to outline how Oracle works on Amazon's EC2, including database backups to the Cloud.
Running Oracle on EC2 is not too thrilling, though it's likely welcome for many organizations. Oracle database licensing fees are similar to on-premises pricing with no immediate way to leverage an on-demand usage model. Basically, if you want/need to run Oracle in the Cloud you can. But you aren't looking at a huge cost advantage.
More interesting is the ability to run backups to the Cloud and take advantage of Amazon's S3 low-cost storage. Backup and disaster recovery are a notorious enterprise burden and anything that alleviates risk and system administration is a welcome relief.
One could argue that backup is the killer app for the Cloud. The Cloud offers a higher degree of reliability and accessibility than tapes with faster time to recovery. It removes some of the human intervention required for a recovery and overall makes it easier for companies to back things up on a regular basis.
When I read today that Europeana, a digital library of Europe's cultural heritage "crashed just hours after it went online and will be out of operation for several weeks" I was pretty shocked.
How a website could crash and be offline for weeks in this age of flexible-scale Cloud offerings and caching technology is a bit mind-boggling--especially considering that a properly architected website should be easily portable to larger hardware or a scaled-out system.
There are a great many ways to deal with traffic bursts, from using Amazon S3 for storage, or EC2 for more machines, to Akamai for edge-caching to Memcached to alleviate database load.
Just by offloading the images from the repository, I bet Europeana would have fared just fine. If searching the database brought the site down then those guys are in for some very tough times.
It's one thing to be a victim of your own success (as the site says they are) and quite another to be hamstrung by not following best practices.
As applications and infrastructure move into the Cloud the need for management becomes more important all the time. This set of Cloud Tools for deploying and testing Java EE applications comes as a Maven plugin to make your life even easier.
Components:
Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that are configured to run Tomcat and work with EC2Deploy
EC2Deploy - the core framework. See this blog entry for an overview
A Maven plugin that uses EC2Deploy to deploy a web application to EC2
Via Cote
Cloud computing keeps getting more interesting every day. With the open source release of a framework called Scalr you can now have a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon's EC2.
Scalr allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI's for load balancers (pound or nginx), app servers (apache, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of.
Scalr was developed by Intridea, who describe it thusly:
Scalr utilizes EC2 to provide a multi-tiered hosting environment with pre-built images for load balancers, database servers, and application servers. Designed with flexibility in mind, users can further customize each type of machine to use as nodes in their server farm or customize a generic base image for any number of purposes. The application monitors and maintains the server farm by reconfiguring the entire cluster when machines fail or when new machines are inserted. Additionally Scalr can be setup to replace failed machines and scale up and down based on user configured thresholds. The application provides a simple web-based interface for configuring and monitoring your server farms.
Via TechCrunch
Amazon is introducing what is definitely the "must-have" utility for it's EC2 cloud computing offering to become a reality. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service now has an application programming interface (API) that lets developers choose where its application physically runs.
As Martin LaMonica writes on News.blog:
This Availability Zones feature is important because people can now add redundancy to their application. Choosing multiple zones, people can have server instances with separate power, cooling, network access, and physical servers
This is an important move by Amazon and I would expect it to be echoed by others. Simply obscuring where your data lives (distributed or not) as Google does, doesn't provide the level of comfort that enterprises need.There must be a built-in mechanism for high-availability and redundancy when you data is floating in the universe.
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