Q 8 Blog Reviews » vendor

Cloud Religion: Do’s, Do Not’s, and a Glimpse of Nirvana

cgseo — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:45:00 +0000

As the cloud is getting more players and interfaces, best and worst practices are emerging. As the market grows and more companies try to plug in, the cloud may benefit from guiding principles. Similar to new technology movements in the past, a natural process is underway to define "what is good", which, for some in the industry, equates to "what is open". Like religion itself, open can be defined in ways that are uplifting, or on the other side of the coin, restricting. Also, we learn again, nothing is free. Sponsor Cloud APIs Must Walk on Water If you've been part of a software development project, you know that sometimes it's hard to get the team to all agree on best practices for interface design, database optimization, or even what technology to use. In this analysis, we take a look at some of the movements in cloud computing that start to lay a framework of good as it relates to this technology. In this context, API designers for cloud applications need to think ahead and avoid common pitfalls. For several reasons, more than ever before. First, because many people will be accessing your one piece of code. Second, is that in this world of open APIs, it's easy to compare your code against another. We notice that data management practices are at the core, and details matter when provisioning in platforms. At the same time that groups are forming to align practices and forms of virtualization and cloud standards, a voice whispers that perhaps this is a free-market problem. People who benefit at solving it, will; others will ignore it or compete directly. We enjoyed this post from Joyent on where standards matter in a practical sense. In essence, the question raised: If a vendor makes it easy and bakes in the ability to "just do it", do you know or care about the standards? This seems to mirror an iPhone development paradigm, which is to expect work from the vendor SDK or libraries. The SDK wraps standards implementations, which is done in the way best understood by that vendor. Do Unto Others as You Would Have Done To You We know the cloud is big - perhaps it will inevitably be bigger than the Internet itself as it usurps our conception of location, space and time. Where power forms, rules, groups, and organizations do as well. In information technology there is always tension between open standards and defacto standards. The former are crafted through agreements, the latter through leadership and market dominance. We asked in a prior series " Will a single company become the dominant provider in the cloud? " Today we look at the more practical side of "who is winning now" - who is setting the rules and who is in the trenches. Quite a number of the responses to our earlier posts emphasized that "the cloud should be free", meaning that it should have governing principles to avoid one vendor from owning the landscape. Here are a few groups that have emerged to provide some context in how this may come together, both philosophically and practically. In both, the devil is in the details. A good summary of some of the current combining of forces is by the Open Grid Forum . (In our opinion, grids have given way to clouds as the dominant concept in this technology makeover). A resource directory of initiatives is located at the Cloud Standards Wiki , which in itself was formed by a handful of organizations and movements working to align around setting rules and patterns for cloud computing. The Open Cloud Consortium is organized around developing practices around sharing resources and has recently focused on a developing a test bed. The DMTF is working at the core definition of virtualization. It recently focused on the 1.1 version of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification that focuses on packaging virtualization instances and creating a portable mechanic distribution by defining envelope and collection parameters around the virtual machine and its services. The organization, which contains members of IBM, Microsoft, Dell, VMware, XENSource, Sun, and NEC, has submitted 1.1 for consideration as an ANSI and ISO standard. The efforts by the federal government in its data.gov initiative shows that there's a market that's starting to see the value of raw government data formats . Soon, we would expect this to be powered by a mesh of computer resources that allow all sorts of jobs - integrated jobs - to work with these data sets. It would comprising an active government cloud. Do Not Covet Thy Neighbors Network Resource When looking for things to avoid, we found a lot of philosophical questions around data ownership, logging and portability. These discussions are alive and well and seem to be being absorbed into vendor solutions and consortiums like the ones mentioned earlier. For a more practical view, we turned to a friend of ReadWriteWeb, Thorsten von Eicken , and have summarized his thoughts from a recent post, " Top Cloud API Sins . Bold items are our (loose) mapping to biblical terms. Do not covet your neighbors resources. : Listing of resources without the details, e.g., a list-servers call that doesn't return all the details for each server. This makes it very expensive to poll for server state changes ... Do not make cast idols : Not returning a resource id on creation. Some APIs don't give you a server i.d. when you request a server ... Labor six days, rest on the seventh : Providing a task queue. Several APIs I've seen have a task queue that is supposed to provide updates on tasks that are in progress E.g., you launch a server and you get a handle onto a task descriptor. For us that's just overhead ... Though shall not bear false witness : Not returning deleted resources in a "list resource" call. In particular, terminated servers must be returned in a list servers call for a certain duration, probably at least for an hour. Ouch! ... Shall not covet his neighbor (or force me to repaginate) : Pagination that goes page-wise instead of using a marker, e.g. where you get page one or the first 100 resources and then issue a query for "page 2″ or "from 100 on". Explain to me how a client can get a consistent resource listing when resources can be added and removed concurrently ... Randy Bias added to Torsten's post: Treat others as you want to be treated Your UI MUST use your API so you understand how to be a consumer of your own API ... We plan on keeping up with this list and seeing how it intersects with implementations and standards that evolve. Please let us know your thoughts below. Nirvana: Smells Like Services Orientation Torsten goes on to describe a picture of the future. "Now here's what I'd really like to see. This is what we're working on for internal purposes and it's not easy, which is an event based interface instead of a request-reply based interface... " This sounds like a vision where we all win. Smart services in the cloud, rather than resources alone. This starts to get us closer and closer to an object-orientated network. Maybe that's what the cloud will be for platforms, infrastructure and software. The industry has been quick to identify the layers. But perhaps the point is piecing them together in a smart transactional framework. A way to engineer highly reliable systems around these architecture challenges may sound familiar to those who monitor existing data centers today. Torsten continues, "We run a good number of machines that do nothing but chew up 100% cpu polling EC2 to detect changes. Fortunately cpu cycles are cheap ". This is practical intervention between vision and get it done. We find it refreshing to hear this type of dialog in the industry and see a fresh opportunity for defining efficient patterns for this next generation of the cloud infrastructure. Perhaps a new concept is forming: "Divine Computing". Where do you sit in the "just do it" spectrum? Photo credit: tsarkasim , Amsterdam Esogna Discuss

See the article here:
Cloud Religion: Do's, Do Not's, and a Glimpse of Nirvana

Network as a Service: Open Source Enables Efficient Cloud Hosting

cgseo — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:30:00 +0000

To keep up with the growth of cloud computing and virtualization, networks keep evolving. But unlike Twitter's Trending Topics, IT budgets don't scale up. In fact one of the major initiatives in many IT shops is creatively reduce their own expense. To get to a scalable cloud infrastructure where costs are contained, it sounds like the network industry is going to see a time where a "Linux" arrives on the scene. An open source alternative to building networks may disrupt the networking landscape and give network admins an open source network operating system. Sponsor Virtualization: It's in the Network Too Distributing workload across machines, storage, and environments has required networks to be smarter than ever. Now, the network needs to be intelligent enough to not only route traffic both a bridge and a toll-gate, but to also provision and de-provision all aspects of the environment at a moments notice. Providers like Rackspace are in the business of using the network to optimize the performance of the entire data center. To be effective in keeping up with dynamic system provisioning, technical teams need access to all tiers of the computing environment to reduce operations overhead. In their innovation for efficiency, hosting providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace start to create new patterns - including ones in the core of the network - to get their job done. Network operating systems that are open, like Extreme XOS enable large scale hosting providers to look deeper into networking gear and start to tune it themselves. And enterprises may follow this trend. Servers Don't Sleep at Night, but Applications and Admins Do For a long time, networks have been used to detect the peers and devices. Many of us use the nearly ubiquitous DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), which is the the thing that automatically assigns IP addresses to a PC when plugging into the network. In an analogy, there is a need for a "super DHCP" is needed that can keep up with the highly virtualized cloud infrastructure per virtual instance. To do this, engineers look deeper to find efficiencies in how the network talks to the hardware and software for the virtual machines. A good example of benefit for this is where a resource has peak loads during the day. Due to natural usage, the applications compute power is not utilized during the night. Using monitoring and provisioning tools, the network can de-provision the extra hardware and offer it to another service. This "freeing up" allocation saves power and money. This is a simple example of where virtual data center solutions are being innovated in the industry to figure out how to further timeshare the computing resources. The network has the ability to help manage the scale down to the moment is enabled by it's reach to everything over IP (Internet Protocol). The Open Network Wins, Developers Rule Extreme Networks is betting IT leaders that have become very familiar with Linux and open source Hypervisors like XEN want to tweak the network. For the data center manager that wants to go into the core network engines innovate, there comes a need for APIs, SDKS, and open access libraries. Extreme's openness is in the form of web services, many offered that are offered as XML or CLI scripting that allow integrate tools into the core of the network via XML, and configure edge ports for security and VOIP access as dynamic provisioning. The company offers a code workbench of its own to download widgets to plug into the network. Designed for the open source developer, it shares the familiar pattern that presides in open source community for application frameworks and operating systems code sharing. Shown in the diagram, Extreme's network offers real-time provisioning of code widgets in the network. Play Nice: the Networks Worse Enemy May be Success Will the network evolve to see an open source player that drives change in pricing and value? In the rush to enable new efficiencies we wonder if this is an Apple A-HA moment in the making. The question seems to be can the giants in the space balance the fine line of better end-to-end experience of managing the environment and whether vendors do it best. If we follow the Apple example of industry success, and end-to-end play for the network may be in the cards. Last month, Juniper announced it has created a new business group and commitment to an Junos ecosystem. Juniper has made a big move towards open source innovation in it's recent re-branding and at least to one analyst, John Furrier from Silicon Angle, seems to be suggesting that Juniper Judo'sing Cisco, like Google did with Open and Microsoft . That probably doesn't feel the least bit nice to the market leader, especially when Cisco is priming it's engines for changing the Internet forever. Cisco Open IOS in 2007 a model towards compartmentalizing and opening IOS, as part of it's overall movement into a more software based organization.With the complex series of network enhancements and feature sets, it will be interesting to see how Cisco views "open" vs. "customizable" and where the control lives for network management and up-time. When visiting the Cisco IOS website today, we see the standard license and no clear mention of open source licensing. Cisco strikes the balance between open and controlled in it's a approach to defining what an open network is and where networks will be encapsulated as services. We wonder if Cisco deliver the capabilities to pull more traffic into it's end-to-end range, while open networking APIs rise as part of the network service stack. With this market, it's likely both. At very least, open networking has a role in determining the fate of the network and where territories are being defined. The Cloud is a Network of Services The cloud is defining a world where service orientation rules - both the software and physical layers. And, it is breaking the rules of workload distribution, where network topologies are changing. The requirements of connecting the layer 2 and layer 3 networks, as well as IT leaders that are building solutions for mass scaling (enterprises or service providers) are evolving and being driven by an ability to be efficient at the workload level. Extreme Networks Technical Brief, Dynamic Network Virtualization Overview , explains the value of plug and play network components in today's topology. "By leveraging Extreme Networks® ExtremeXOS®, a modular, edge-to-core operating system, and our extensibility frame-work including Universal Port Scripting and an XML interface, Extreme Networks is able to tightly integrate the switching network with the virtualization environment to create a virtualization-aware network fabric that automates the network-level virtualization required in next generation data center and cloud computing environments. This unique functionality enables Extreme Networks to provide seamless support of virtualization capabilities across the various hypervisor platforms, including Citrix ZEN, Microsoft and VMware. The highly integrated solution allows the Extreme Networks solutions to trigger responses to virtualization moves as they happen in the network by virtue of a tightly integrated XML-based network management framework." Extreme, and now Juniper, are moving in the direction of offering IT administrators control points in networks and protocols to optimize it opens the market. It looks promising to give administrators vendor leverage in buying services without vendor lock, or waiting for feature releases from the vendor. And, it mirrors the open-source movement in bringing communities together to solve problems and build compatible services. Open APIs may define the cloud's network of the future for large hosting providers. We wonder if for the enterprise. Photo credit: opensourceway Discuss

See original here:
Network as a Service: Open Source Enables Efficient Cloud Hosting

Cloud ‘Recovery’ or Just The Same Old Thing?

cgseo — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:00:00 +0000

Cloud computing means many things, but almost all definitions include some key value propositions: scalable on-demand resources, a metered pay-per-use model, access over the Internet, and infrastructure management and optimization that is better than most data centers. At a more conceptual level, cloud computing abstracts away all the undifferentiated IT tasks. Most businesses don't add any value to their customers or create any competitive advantage for themselves when they buy, build, configure, and manage servers and storage. This is doubly true for disaster recovery equipment and data centers. Sponsor Conversely, poor performance in these tasks can cost value and competitive advantage. There is no benefit in doing these tasks well, but there is cost to doing them badly. This is like the opposite of a financial call option - lots of downside risk, but no upside. For companies planning their first disaster recovery data center, with the associated selection, build, and maintenance tasks for servers, storage, and networking, cloud computing seems like an obvious fit. They can trade the capital expense that buys them no new value, for a no-commitment operating expense that probably buys better operating practices than they could achieve themselves. Solutions are beginning to grow up around this idea of cloud recovery. The name is a little optimistic because most offerings today are traditional backup solutions, with little or no ability to actually recover in the cloud. Although a lot of vendors in the backup industry are making cloud announcements, they are mostly just letting users store backups in the cloud. In order to really deserve the cloud recovery title a solution should have the following features. The ability to recover workloads in the cloud : The cloud can offer more than just a place to dump your backup files. It can provide the computing systems to run your recovered systems, and after a production system fails, the ability to quickly restart a complete replacement with data, applications, and complete configuration in the cloud. Effectively unlimited scalability with little or no up-front provisioning : A few vendors can offer rapid, off-site recovery, but they don't really qualify for the cloud title unless they provide lots of stand-by capacity with no up-front reservations or configuration. While this seems like a lot to ask, this is the promise of cloud computing. Pay-per-use billing model : A defining characteristic of cloud computing is that we only pay for the things we use. Use a little this week and pay a little; if we use a lot next week then we pay more, but only for that specific week. Infrastructure that is more secure and more reliable than the one you would build yourself : When we decide to outsource any part of our operation, we worry about the security and reliability of our vendor. The best cloud providers have not only large scale equipment, but also large scale expertise. This means that they can be much better at security and reliability than any of their customers, and their data center is better than one we might build for ourselves. Complete protection and automated recovery : Non-expert users should be able to recover everything they need by default - the current crop of solutions is shockingly bad at this. This is the cherry on top because it makes everything so easy. No one wants to go through a "run book" full of recovery procedures and bring in experts for each system to assist with getting recovered systems back online. Depending on the type of disaster, experts may be scarce, and the run book is probably out of date. Why not make the run book part of the automated system? Instead, simply push a button that says "recover now", wait for the files to copy, and then log in to the perfectly configured system, running right in the cloud. In summary, the trouble with traditional backup solutions is that they are really focused on dumping the data onto tape or disk (and now onto cloud storage), and maybe restoring it back onto the original hardware. If you must recover to different hardware or a different virtualization platform, they don't generally do much to help with the inevitable incompatibilities. And for equipment failures, you really have to have some hardware standing by. So while cloud computing means many things, it is fair to say that any cloud recovery customer who doesn't get all five of these features will be disappointed. Photo credit: Suresh Discuss

See more here:
Cloud 'Recovery' or Just The Same Old Thing?