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Hyperic CloudStatus Now Monitors Google App Engine

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We’ve covered Hyperic before, most recently when they added monitoring for Citrix XenServer environments to their Hyperic HQ service. The company just announced that their CloudStatus service now also supports Google App Engine, after launching with advanced monitoring for Amazon EC2 services. Support for additional cloud providers is planned for the coming months.

Update: check out the excellent analysis on GigaOM as well.

The addition of App Engine monitoring is designed to provide customers with the ability to obtain up-to-the-second perspectives on performance and network connectivity from both inside and outside the App Engine platform. The initial release will allow for continuous monitoring of the health and performance of major App Engine infrastructure, including the DataStore, Memcache, and global network connectivity. CloudStatus uses App Engine-specific management plug-ins to collect measurements that provide administrators and developers with unprecedented insight into the health of the App Engine platform.

As part of this development, Hyperic is also announcing the availability of the first cloud-specific management plug-in for its flagship product, Hyperic HQ. The new plug-in extends the full monitoring and management capabilities of Hyperic HQ to App Engine users, enabling them to examine the performance of their own custom applications running in the cloud. This plug-in is free for download on HyperForge.

Hyperic

ELASTRA Adds Support for Eucalyptus Platform

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ELASTRA, which recently raised $12 million from Amazon and other investors, today announced Elastra Cloud Server support for the Eucalyptus platform.

ELASTRA’s products are designed for portability across compute clouds and currently provide support for the Amazon EC2 and S3 compute and storage environments. Because Eucalyptus exposes its virtual machines through an EC2-compatible API, ELASTRA’s portability to Eucalyptus was a straightforward addition to its platform offering.

Eucaplyptus (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems) is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon’s EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies.

Elastra

Workspace Service Morphs Into Nimbus 2.0

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Grid is dead, and reinventing itself as Cloud. All kidding aside, the idea of providing a virtual machine instance as a service in the Grid rather than just CPU time with the appropriate environment and libraries to be used by different users isn’t new; it actually makes a lot of sense to provide e.g. a working virtual machine instance for a complex scientific application, which is a lot easier than having to document the correct setup for fellow researchers to implement.

The Workspace Service project part of Globus.org has just announced it’s rebranding and releasing the 2.0 version of what will now be known as Nimbus.

One of the core services of the Virtual Workspace project was orchestrating the deployment of VMs on remote resources as well as the release versioning. Today, Nimbus is a set of tools that together provide a “infrastructure-as-a-service” (IaaS) cloud computing solution targeted specifically towards scientific applications. Many non-scientific use cases are supported as well.

Nimbus allows a client to lease remote resources by deploying virtual machines (VMs) on those resources and configuring them to represent an environment desired by the user.

It was formerly known as the “Virtual Workspace Service” (VWS) but the “workspace service” is technically just one the components in the software collection.

Just as Eucalyptus, it is capable of managing clients that are compatible with the Amazon EC2 service.

Open Source Virtualization management platforms like Nimbus , Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and openQRM are catching on. This probably isn’t the last one we’ll learn about. The question is which one will survive eventually.

Virtualization.com Contest: Guess What’s on Werner Vogels’ Mind and Win A Book

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Aside from interviewing Werner Vogels at the GigaOM Structure 08 conference, we asked him to dedicate an O’Reilly book on the Amazon Web Services, which we will give away in the contest we’re introducing today. First, watch the video below.


Win O’Reilly’s Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS and SimpleDB

Second, follow these simple rules for our summer contest: up until the 15th of August, you can guess what Vogels has written in this book and provide your answer in the comments below. You don’t necessarily have to get it right, but the funniest, most original, most in-depth or closest comment on this post will be picked out by our editors on the 15th of August 2008. The lucky winner will get a free copy of O’Reilly’s Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB (Programming), with the hand-signed note from Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels inside!

If you are really creative, we throw in a second freeby, for the funniest fake job title. Get inspired by “Werner Vogels, System Admin at a Small Bookshop (aka CTO Amazon)”

Make your educated guess or just be funny and don’t forget to include your e-mail address (not shown) so we can contact you afterwards and get your book delivered.

Amazon Loves CloudStatus, And We’ve Got The Proof on Video

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At the O’Reilly Velocity conference we attended last month, Hyperic was there to hype the launch of Cloudstatus, which aspires to become the monitoring tool for cloud providers similar to what Netcraft is for’classic’ hosting providers. Get the lowdown on Hyperic and CloudStatus in this video (two parts) from Jon Travis (Principal Engineer) and Xavier Soltero (co-founder and CEO).

See part 1 of the movie here on Vimeo, but scroll down for the best part!

As we are living in the ice age of cloud computing, glitches (like the recent outage of Amazon S3) are to be expected and it must be said that Amazon managed to fix its ecosystem relatively fast and openly reported on the underlying problem .

An interesting question is posted by Reuven Cohen on his blog about the use of federated network protocols within cloud services and the gossip protocol that caused Amazon’s WS downtime on June 24.

“…We have been big fans of use of XMPP for federated communications within our Enomalism cloud platform for multi cloud communications (Wide Area Cloud). XMPP is interesting because it natively solves a number of federation problems within a tried and tested framework. One of the biggest benefits to the use of a gossip protocol lies in the the robust spread of information and the exponential nature of it’s sharing of information within a large number of machines…”

At Virtualization.com, we intend to report on cloud initiatives too, since all these Platform-as-a-Service providers (Google App Engine being the exception to this rule) are enabled by virtualization technology. We expect to see several more competitive statistical analysis tools for various cloud service providers to emerge in the near future. With Amazon Web Services (AWS) blazing the cloud trail, Hyperic picked them to start reporting on via CloudStatus. But Google App Engine and (Sales)force.com seem target platforms to follow. So Amazon’s trouble with being first, is they are first in line to be publicely reported on too. This also means the PR and sales people at Cloudstatus have a busy time issuing press releases and contacting impacted prospects whenever Amazon experiences a glitch or failure.

Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm ventilated the common fear that:

“… Amazon or another cloud provider could shut the service down, either by offering their own status service or by stopping the Hyperic agent. Given the rush to provide dashboards, application-testing products and other services on top of established computing services, I’m eager to see how startups keep their footing in the clouds.”

Being curious and knowing Amazon only speaks through CEO Jeff Bezos or CTO Werner Vogels, we walked up to the latter and were happy to learn Amazon actually loves CloudStatus. He took a step back right afterwards, but why not just watch the video to see his response to the CloudStatus launch?


Amazon AWS Loves CloudStatus.com, Here’s The Proof (Hyperic Video 2/2) from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

On a sidenote: Hyperic’s newly launched CloudStatus detected the outage at 8:45am PDT, a full 20 minutes before Amazon posted that they were aware of the issue, at 9:05 PDT on http://status.aws.amazon.com/. CloudStatus saw several server errors coming from the majority of their S3 and SQS monitoring agents, in addition to other problems with EC2 (lots of EC2 zombies being created) that may have been related.

Like hurricane warning systems, while Hyperic CloudStatus could not have prevented the S3 outage, it was able to provide enough of a “storm” warning for users to take action. The company will be adding additional cloud services to CloudStatus in the coming months, next up is Google App Engine.

Hyperic

DSA Research Group Releases OpenNebula (ONE) 1.0

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Recently, the dsa-research group announced that a Technology Preview (TP2) of the OpenNEbula (ONE) Virtual Infrastructure Engine had been made available. Now, a stable release (v1.0) of OpenNebula (ONE) is available for download, again under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0.

OpenNebula enables the dynamic allocation of virtual machines on a pool of physical resources, so extending the benefits of existing virtualization platforms from a single physical resource to a pool of resources, decoupling the server not only from the physical infrastructure but also from its physical location.

The last version supports Xen and KVM virtualization platforms to provide the following features and capabilities:

  • Centralized management, a single access point to manage a pool of VMs and physical resources.
  • Efficient resource management, including support to build any capacity provision policy and for advance reservation of capacity through the Haizea lease manager
  • Powerful API and CLI interfaces for monitoring and controlling VMs and physical resources
  • Easy 3rd party software integration to provide a complete solution for the deployment of flexible and efficient virtual infrastructures
  • Fault tolerant design, state is kept in a SQLite database.
  • Open and flexible architecture to add new infrastructure metrics and parameters or even to support new Hypervisors.
  • Support to access Amazon EC2 resources to supplement local resources with cloud resources to satisfy peak or fluctuating demands.
  • Ease of installation and administration on UNIX clusters
  • Open source software released under Apache license v2.0
  • As engine for the dynamic management of VMs, OpenNebula is being enhanced in the context of the RESERVOIR project (EU grant agreement 215605) to address the requirements of several business use cases.

More information is available here.