91d437f0fb56cfb5b64de81b60bd6738

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.

gedit-editor > apps > totem > buffer-size | network-buffer-threshold

Change buffer-size = 10 & network-buffer-threshold = 10

Stack: SeaMonkey 1.1.15 in Ubuntu 9.04

Symptom: Socks Proxy is set, but doesn’t work

Open SeaMoney > about:config in URL bar > type

network.proxy.type

then set the value = 2

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.

---

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://berkeleyclouds.blogspot.com/…

One of the obstacles we identified in our paper was API-based vendor lock-in: If you’ve written your application to run on a particular cloud, and especially if you have automated management and provisioning tools, moving to a different provider, with different APIs, can be a significant expense. Mark Shuttleworth recently announced on the Ubuntu Developers mailing list that the next release of Ubuntu, Karmic Koala, “aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the API’s of Amazon EC2, and making it easy for anybody to set up their own cloud using entirely open tools.” Specifically they will be including support for Eucalyptus, the University of California, Santa Barbara project that allows operators to provide an EC2 compatible API to their own cluster. While there are a number of other efforts to create a standard this is definitely a step towards the adoption of the EC2 API as a de facto standard. To the best of our knowledge, this makes EC2’s API the first one with a second implementation — an open source implementation, to boot.

Source: http://highscalability.com/eucalyptus-ready-be-your-private-cloud

Rich Wolski, professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, gave a spirited talk on Eucalyptus to a large group of very interested cloudsters at the Eucalyptus Cloud Meetup. If Rich could teach computer science at every school the state of the computer science industry would be stratospheric. Rich is dynamic, smart, passionate, and visionary. It’s that vision that prompted him to create Eucalyptus in the first place. Rich and his group are experts in grid and distributed computing, having a long and glorious history in that space. When he saw cloud computing on the rise he decided the best way to explore it was to implement what everyone accepted as a real cloud, Amazon’s API. In a remarkably short time they implement Eucalyptus and have been improving it and tracking Amazon’s changes ever since.

The question I had going into the meetup was: should Eucalyptus be used to make an organization’s private cloud? The short answer is no.

The project is of high quality, the people are of the highest quality, but in the end Eucalyptus is a research project from a university. As an academic project Eucalyptus is subject to changes in funding and the research interests of the team. When funding sources dry up so does the project. If the team finds another research area more interesting, or if they get tired of chasing a continuous stream of new Amazon features, or no new grad students sign on, which will happen in a few years, then the project goes dark.

Fears over continuity have at least two solutions: community support and commercial support. Eucalyptus could become community supported open source project. This is unlikely to happen though as it conflicts with the research intent of Eucalyptus. The Eucalyptus team plans to control the core for research purposes and encourage external development of add-on service like SQS. Eucalyptus won’t go commercial as University projects must stay clear from commercial pretensions. Amazon is “no comment” on Eucalyptus so it’s not clear what they would think of commercial development should it occur.

Taken together these concerns imply Eucalyptus is not a good base for an enterprise quality private cloud. Which they readily admit. It’s not enterprise ready Rich repeats. It’s not that the quality isn’t there. It is and will be. And some will certainly base their private cloud on Eucalyptus, but when making a decision of this type you have to be sure your cloud infrastructure will be around for the long haul. With Eucalyptus that is not necessarily the case. Eucalyptus is still a good choice for it’s original research purpose, or as cheap staging platform for Amazon, or as base for temporary clouds, but as your rock solid private cloud infrastructure of the future Eucalyptus isn’t the answer.

The long answer is a little more nuanced and interesting.

The primary purpose for Eucalyptus is research. It was never meant to be our little untethered private Amazon cloud. But if it works, why not?

Eucalyptus is Not a Full Implementation of the Amazon Stack

Eucalyptus implements most of EC2 and a little of S3. They hope to get community support for the rest. That of course makes Eucalyptus far less interesting as a development platform. But if your use for Eucalyptus is as an instant provisioning framework you are still in the game. Their emulation of EC2 is so good RightScale was able to operate on top of Eucalyptus. Impressive.

But even in the EC2 arena I have to wonder for how long they’ll track Amazon development. If you are a researcher implementing every new Amazon feature is going to get mighty old after a while. It will be time to move on and if you are dependent on Eucalyptus you are in trouble. Sure, you can move to Amazon but what about that $1 million data center buildout?

Developing software not tied to the Amazon service stack then Eucalyptus would work great.

As an Amazon developer I would want my code to work without too much trouble in both environments. Certainly you can mock the different services for testing or create a service layer to hide different implementations, but that’s not ideal and makes Eucalyptus as an Amazon proxy less attractive.

One of the uses for Eucalyptus is to make Amazon cheaper and easier by testing code locally without out having to deploy into Amazon all the time. Given the size of images the bandwidth and storage costs add up after a while, so this could make Eucalyptus a valuable part of the development process.

Eucalyptus is Not as Scalable as Amazon

No kidding. Amazon has an army of sysadmins, network engineers, and programmers to make their system work at such ginormous scales. Eucalyptus was built on smarts, grit and pizza. It will never scale as well as Amazon, but Eucalyptus is scalable to 256 nodes right now. Which is not bad.

Rich thinks with some work they already know about it could scale to 5000 nodes. Not exactly Amazon scale, but good enough for many data center dreams.

One big limit Eucalyptus has is the self-imposed requirement to work well in any environment. It’s just a tarball you can install on top of any network. They rightly felt this was necessary for adoption. Saying to potential customers that you need to setup a special network before you can test this software tends to slow down adoption. By making Eucalyptus work as an overlay they soothed a lot of early adopter pain.

But by giving up control of the machines, the OS, the disk, and the network they limited how scalable they can be. There’s more to scalability than just software. Amazon has total control and that gives them power. Eucalyptus plans to make more invasive and more scalable options available in the future.

Lacks Some Private Cloud Features

Organizations interested in a private cloud are often interested in:

• Listening #Last.fm via #Mobbler on my #Nokia #E71 #Symbian smartphone through Wifi in office. It’s playing #Pirates of #Caribbean . 01:17:47
• #AMI by Provider – #IBM > http://tinyurl.com/dgv97m > #Amazon_Machine_Image 03:56:40
• Creating Applications with #Amazon #EC2 and #S3 > http://tinyurl.com/5ffa9z 04:51:38
• #Redhat ties #virtualization future to #KVM > http://tinyurl.com/bcbnds 04:56:53
• @elsua Sent an email to you. Don’t know you changed your account. Greetings from #Beijing in reply to elsua 05:50:19
• RT @mashable How to Track 500 Business Blogs in 10 minutes a Day > http://tinyurl.com/6s9vsc 19:51:17
• RT How to Boost Your Social Media Productivity – A Guide for Busy People > http://tinyurl.com/bwfrsh 19:54:42
• #Yahoo briefcase #storage service to be closed > http://tinyurl.com/c22783 22:31:56