Amazon Web Services

Red Hat Launches Virtual Storage Appliance For Amazon Web Services

February 7, 2012 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Red Hat today announced the availability of the Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that is built on the former Gluster technology that the company acquired in October 2011.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance enables organizations to extend their datacenter storage to the cloud. With the appliance, users have the ability to aggregate both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, creating a highly available virtualized storage pool that offers enhanced scalability and performance in the cloud.

This news comes on the heels of Red Hat’s announcement of its Storage Software Appliance in December 2011.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS features both synchronous and asynchronous file replication, assuring data availability across AWS Availability Zones. Synchronous replication provides users with redundancy and protection within a single datacenter or multiple datacenters and availability zones in a region, while asynchronous geo-replication offers data availability across all AWS Regions.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance is POSIX-compliant, meaning that no application modifications are required for data access in the cloud.

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

July 29, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 2 Comments

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

Hyperic Launches CloudStatus, Cloud Management Software Deluxe

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters 3 Comments

In an impressive effort to make the cloud more transparent, open source cloud management software vendor Hyperic has launched CloudStatus.com, a web service (in beta) that lets a user peek in on the various compute clouds to see how things are running.

CloudStatus measures service availability, latency and throughput for cloud-based infrastructure and application services. The initial release provides metrics for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (which runs on the Xen hypervisor), Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service and Flexible Payment Service. Hyperic does so by sending a software agent to make requests against various cloud services, which obviously leads to a few questions about the viability of the service.

As Stacey Higginbotham puts it on GigaOm:

“It’s a decent idea, but my worry is 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.”

The Hyperic team also blogged about the release featuring a promotion video which we’re happy to share with you.

Build Your Own Cloud!

June 6, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 2 Comments

Given enough hardware, you can now build your own Amazon Elastic Cloud or similar platform. And all in Open Source.

A group of developers from the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara has recently released a tool that can make your personal Cloud dreams come true!

EUCALYPTUS – 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 has been developed in the MAYHEM Lab within the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, primarily as a tool for cloud-computing research. It is distributed as open source with a FreeBSD-style license that does not restrict its usage much. Eucalyptus 1.0 targets Linux systems that use Xen (versions 3.*) for virtualization.

Eucalyptus is based on the Rocks cluster management platform. In the future, the EUCALYPTUS team will offer a source release along with other methods of deployment.

Being API compliant with Amazon EC2 means you can reuse the tools you already wrote for Amazon and effectively build your own while not having to change your applications. EUCALYPTUS also opens the door for other organizations with spare CPU cycles to offer Virtual Machines instances at a competitive price.

Eucalyptus 1.0 was just released last month and the ISO iso available for download.

Google And Microsoft Set To Battle In The Clouds: App Engine vs. Red Dog

April 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Lots has been written already about Google’s new initiative called App Engine, a preview-release developer platform for Python applications, and now Microsoft seems to be throwing itself in the ring – where Amazon and Salesforce are also to be found – in order to get at least a piece of the cloud computing buzz momentum. LiveSide spotted a job posting with clear mentions of the Microsoft Utility Computing Platform, code-named Red Dog, and it sounds very much like a platform for building a Google App Engine type service.

LiveSide’s take:

“The posting itself is a little dense, written to appeal to seasoned developers looking for new challenges. But to paraphrase a bit, here’s what the (CIS) team is building with Red Dog:

an “efficient, virtualized” environment
a “fully automated service management system” (like the Google App Engine, you won’t have to worry about managing the system)
on “highly scalable” storage services (you only use the storage you need)
the service will “scale to millions of machines” across Microsoft’s data centers (geo-located, easy to maintain data centers, remember?)
“will lead the marketplace as the best platform for rapid development, deployment, and maintenance of internet services and applications”
SDK and tools will be included for external and internal customers
V1 for external customers in the coming year

Meanwhile, Gartner analysts Daryl Plummer and Thomas Bittman reportedly stated at the Gartner Emerging Technologies conference in Las Vegas that it will be another year – 2009 – before companies will start using cloud computing services extensively. “In the meantime, folks will have to define and sort out a lot of mumbo jumbo about the cloud.”

Interesting times!