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I placed a lot of effort on Cloud Computing engagement and had tours around the country. Piling my mileage

First off of everthing, I demo my compiz 3D desktop enabled Ubuntu 9.04 to show off how we live in a pure open source environment without having to touch any of Microsoft.

Get back to our topic. Last week, I visited one of largest mobile device / equipment manufacturer to discuss how a Cloud Computing could transform customer’s IT. We spent an hour to talk about Return of Investment (ROI). To list what are supposed in consideration of an ROI

• Hardware
• Image Instance – build, migration, administration
• Software – non-free operating system and hypervisor. If Xen, or KVM being used on LAMP, the cost is close to zero. And all software to build a Cloud environment with licensing and maintenance.
• Labor – build and operate a Cloud environment
• Provisioning Process – time taken to complete provision

Input the above consideration comes out in 3 charts as the following (the data is under a certain assumption and might vary in different environment) :

• Comparison of without- cloud and with- cloud

• Categorized

• Cost in Transformation

The information reflects a scope of ROI to be analyzed and doesn’t have to mean this is a mandatory.

I discussed the subject with one of colleagues who is a Cloud Computing architect. I’m logging what my comment here

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To continue our previous talk is a huge discussion. I’d recommend you could start to get involved in http://twitter.com and follow

http://twitter.com/mashable
http://twitter.com/j3ffyang -> me
http://twitter.com/OpenIBM -> I own this too as of being admin for IBM Open Source Global community

When you hit any of above, you can see the bytes come from http://aws.amazon.com actually, which is an IaaS with no doubt. Twitter is a kind of social collaboration network -> an application running over Amazon Web Services (AWS). Twitter doesn’t own any hardware resources. Whenever Twitter needs computing capability, it goes to AWS and AWS fulfills its request… on demand. Even though Twitter sometimes out of service due to its overload.

@ IaaS, AWS not only gives power of hardware (CPU, memory, disk and network…), but also provides plugin / API to connect Twitter with Hadoop… and Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Simple Database (SDB).

You shouldn’t be surprised @ Twitter’s power to gather thousand of thousand developers around it, if keeping our eyes open. (Some reasons of the motivation of social collaboration in term of Web2.0). See these:

http://tweetwheel.com
http://ftags.com
http://tweetvalue.com/
http://www.tweetizen.com/
http://twittersnooze.com/
http://mrtweet.net/home/j3ffyang
http://tweettrail.com/search/hadoop
…
…

This list is almost endless. They’re all independent of twitter.com. The above are all SaaS, plugable into Twitter.com where provides API -> http://apiwiki.twitter.com/ and http://twitter.com/downloads – @ PaaS

This is an ecosystem.

Recently one of my friends I met from LinkedIn sent me several questions, about Cloud Computing, which looks like a Request for Proposal (RFP). I post my very personal response here for a mindshare.

About Cloud, Cluster/ Load Balancing, Data Center and Open Source, I could talk day and night without stop. I’m giving my personal but confident thoughts upon my friend’s email in brief.

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Cloud Computing is a big topic. People have their own definitions depending on their view and objective.

- Open Source / Operating System / Framework
I’m Unix/ Linux guy. Other than Unix, Linux is the only operating system in Cloud management and Cloud resource pool, in terms of efficiency, green security, cost, and manageability. No Windows, No Mac… Certainly Windows could be one of computing services in resource pool as a kind of computing resource, that Infrastructure_as_a_Service (IaaS) provides and delivers.

Microsoft .Net framework doesn’t make much sense to Cloud @ IaaS, as Cloud is Open. That’s a defacto rule in Cloud. Windows isn’t “royal free” either, nor brings satisfied ROI in fact.

Most/ major components in Cloud are supposed to be operating system independent, like Java, Xen, Apache, MySQL, Linux/ Unix, JDBC, Mozilla/ Firefox, Eclipse, Tomcat… etc. As long as a software depends on a specific OS as a pre- requisite, it doesn’t fit in Cloud.

- Cloud Architecture
Several open source projects to recommend
http://www.opennebula.org > this is being used @ http://nebula.nasa.gov/
http://open.eucalyptus.com > this is a very AWS EC2- like open source cloud which I personally installed several time for Proof_of_Concept (PoC).

April 23rd, 2009, Ubuntu released 9.04 Server edition, which includes OpenNebula and Eucalyptus open source projects and supports Cloud environment >
http://doc.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/serverguide/C/opennebula.html
http://doc.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/serverguide/C/eucalyptus.html

5 cost- efficient flexible open source resources for Cloud

http://ostatic.com/blog/5-cost-efficient-flexible-open-source-resources-for-cloud…

Cloud hosting & storage toolbox

http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/cloud-hosting-storage-toolbox-options-tools/

- Virtualization and Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)
Virtualization is a key player in Cloud, but not all in Cloud. Virtualization technology is a carrier of computing resource dynamically managed and delivery in Cloud. In my opinion, its importance has been exaggerated in market. The keys of Virtualization are (1) standard (2) simple (3) easy to manage. You can’t deploy and manage multiple virtualization technologies within one Cloud environment.

Hyper-V doesn’t comply with the rule I mentioned earlier – Cloud is open. VMWare solution is expensive, isn’t it? Xen / XenSource is open source / free and recommended. Xen has been widely adopted in Cloud service provider in Internet. Xen is also compatible with monitoring system to be discussed below.

I’ve a blog describing the comparison between XenSource and VMWare > http://tr.im/mFFa

- Monitor
The ability of monitor determines how precisely and automatically Cloud detects from Cloud, and how fine- grained (granular) computing resource could be deployed to customer.

I recommend Ganglia and Nagios that are popular in Cloud, data center, server farm/ cluster, and widely adopted in many enterprises.

developerWorks > http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/l-ganglia-nagios-1/index.html
Nagios homepage > http://www.nagios.org/

- Request Driven Deployment / Provisioning
Deployment driven by request means the end user decides how much computing resource s/he needs from Cloud. Such as you specify number of CPU, # of gigabyte of memory and size of disk (priced @ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2 ) from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Very simple. We may learn a lot from AWS architecture > http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture

Provisioning means that a specific software, like JVM or middleware software, or database, to be installed and configured in an deployed / existing virtual system on demand.

The scenario: eg. in AWS, you’re given a Linux operating system with 2 CPUs and 4G memory. But you can do nothing in a blank OS. You might need an Oracle database 11 or a middleware like JBoss or perhaps WebSphere. Then provisioning function will install and configure on the deployed virtual machine unattended.

For now, in that case @ AWS, you have to install by your own or you can select one available image from AWS image pool, with pre-loaded software you need, in which if someone else made one and published previously. Amazon doesn’t have provisioning service so far. That results that AWS has to manage thousand images in its image repository so that implies it is a challenge.

- SLA / Service Policy / Automation
An example of Service Policy: when an instance is running 80% disk utilization, a pre- defined service policy triggers a configured action – to add another 100G disk into such instance.

This is done by Service Policy, not by system operator and administrator. We can see how this differentiate from mainframe’s virtualization since 60′s.

In another word, Service Policy = Automation!

This kind of policy could be very specific in many and many scenarios. It does require customization effort to fit requirement. I do have some experience/ skill of elastic JVM/ JavaEE computing resource as being engaged with a banking customer now, @ Platform as a Service (PaaS) project.

- Load balancing (not F5)
Load balancing is a must in large enterprise and busy traffic internet. F5 is popular. But F5 throws URL (a request from web) as a token to go into web server cluster. In fact, URLs are not equal. F5 doesn’t know how much resource behind one URL might need from JVM in middleware. So F5 can round- robin requests / URLs, but not granularly down to CPU utilization level.

Cloud Computing @ each layers – IaaS, PaaS & SaaS – needs monitoring to know how much resource remains, how much needed, how much to deliver, how much to remove after use.

- Security/ Authentication / LDAP
Security is a big concern in Cloud, as well as alert and audit, in term of authentication, authority, data integrity, encryption/ decryption, etc.

LDAP (OpenLDAP) could be used @ Cloud portal where end user applies computing resource in resource pool, while Cloud operator manages in management portal. As long as a computing resource is deployed, end user is received an authority to access the delivered resource and doesn’t need LDAP authentication.

- Languages
Java is preferred as global languange
C is used in Eucalyptus Cloud Management
Ruby on Rail used to display @ Portal & UI
XML in data transaction, Python, etc.

- Approach
Have to have Proof_of_Concept – to build a small system to prove all works prior to production

Source: http://www.galorath.com/wp/…cloud-computing.php

Definitions:

Software as a Service: Software provides an application on-demand. There is no implied language, development methodology, or tool specifically attributed to SaaS. Some development methods may be more appropriate (such as Java and C#) since SaaS applications often provide the user interface a browser .

Service Oriented Architecture: (SOA) provides methods for systems development and integration where systems group functionality around business processes and package these as interoperable services. A SOA infrastructure allows different applications to exchange data with one another as they participate in business processes. Some organizations offer software as a service running on the organization’s private infrastructure as well.

Cloud Computing: Cloud computing is Internet (cloud) based use of computer technology where dynamically scalable resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure (the Infrastructure as a Service cloud) that supports them…virtualized. Some call this “IT Infrastructure as a Service. ” Some venders refer to the “private cloud,” which is essentially virtualized local servers. Gotta love the buzzwords.

SaaS applications may use the cloud but they are not the cloud.
SOA architectures may or may not be delivered via SaaS but they are not generically SaaS.

Cloud applications may or may not be delivered as SaaS

Amazon 2 days ago announced to support Eclipse @ EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Amazon names this service as Amazon Java Toolkit for Eclipse. See this >

http://aws.amazon.com/eclipse/

This enriches Amazon’s Platform as a Service (PaaS). The obvious implication behind reads:

• Include Java API within Amazon’s PaaS
• Provide elastic computing resource for Java application via Java API / IDE on IaaS
• Ease the access of Java @ API / plugin on Tool-as-a-Service (TaaS)
• Widen support to Tomcat container

More info:
Pricing > http://aws.amazon.com/eclipse/#2 , which is Free!
Installation > http://aws.amazon.com/eclipse/#4

1. The end- user community @ twitter / bluetwit is HUGE. Go to http://twitter.com/mashable (who has more than 210,000+ followers. Imagine the impact from mashable.com on web. Unbelievable! In our community, how many followers do we have? Through email? Wiki?), follow several threads there, you could see how the info/ data flows over Internet smoothly and healthily.
2. The interaction/ collaboration @ twitter-like platform is tremendous rapid. The information/ data is tweeted by twitter people in second among Common Interest group, with passion and motivation to distribute and share such info/ data.
3. The shared data with tags is stored there always. How often does people search in email? People search in intranet and/ or on web. Tagged information/ data piled to grow to be a great repository available on intranet and/ or web for searching @ any time. Never been deleted. It’s always available there.

What we could start is to register and broadcast like http://twitter.com/developerWorks on Internet and Intranet!

1. Standardized offerings
2. Service catalog ordering
3. Flexible pricing
4. Advanced virtualization
5. Rapid provisioning
6. Metering and billing
7. Elastic scaling