cloud computing

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.

Get A 10% Discount For Structure 08, And Start Putting Cloud Computing To Work

June 4, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

In about 3 weeks, one of the world’s most popular tech blogs, GigaOm, is hosting what is likely to become one of the must-attend events in the storage, hosting, cloud computing and virtualization industry for this year.

The conference is dubbed Structure 08, and features a slew of kick-ass speakers like Werner Vogels (VP & CTO Amazon), James Crowe (President and CEO Level 3), Mendel Rosemblum (Co-founder VMware), Albert Esser (VP, Data Center Infrastructure, Dell), Greg Papadopulous (CTO, Sun Microsystems and many others.

The event takes place on June 25 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco.

Tickets are selling out quickly, so sign up fast! As one of Structure 08’s media partners, we can offer our readers a 10 % discount on the registration fee. Simply click the event logo above and the discount will automatically calculated.

We’ll attend the event ourselves, so expect lots of reports and video interviews!

If you’ll be there too, don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to hook up.

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!

Microsoft Heading Forward With Container-Based Data Centers

April 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Not entirely related to virtualization as such, but hugely relevant as far we’re concerned: Microsoft is getting serious about embracing containers as the key to building scalable, energy-efficient cloud computing platforms. The company’s bold move is an affirmation of the potential for containers to address the most pressing power, cooling and capacity utilization challenges facing data center operators. Microsoft’s new Chicago facility is part of the company’s fleet of next-generation data centers being built to support its Live suite of “software plus services” online applications.

DataCenterKnowledge quotes Microsoft Director of Data Center Services Michael Manos:

“The entire first floor of Chicago is going to be containers. This represents our first container data center. The containers are going to be dropped off and plugged into network cabling and power.” The second floor of the immense facility will be a traditional raised-floor data center, Manos said. “It’s a bold step forward. We’re trying to address scale with the cloud level services. We were trying to figure the best way to bring capacity online quickly.”

Manos added that the facility will accommodate between 150 and 220 shipping containers, which will be shipped and dropped off by trucks. That approach led Microsoft to consult with parking lot operators to address the design logistics of enabling large trucks to navigate within the facility.

In 2006, Sun Microsystems introduced Project Blackbox (now the Sun MD S20), the first effort at a “data center in a box” incorporating a high-density computing environment into a 20-foot shipping container. The containers can travel on trains, ships or trucks.

We were thinking about adding a joke about containers containing containers (you know, the software ones), but it’s getting late and we’ve had quite a busy, interesting day already.

Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie On Cloud & Utility Computing

March 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Interesting interview up on GigaOM today, featuring Microsoft‘s Chief Software Architect and industry luminary Ray Ozzie talking about MS’s strategy, the economics of cloud computing and the relevance of desktop and infrastructure challenges.

The most interesting bits:

OM: The costs of computing, hardware and bandwidth are dropping quickly. Do you believe that the cost will come down fast enough to make cloud computing actually a profitable business?

RAY OZZIE: Well, it’s unlikely that we would get into it if we didn’t think it was going to be a profitable business. So we’ll just manage it to be profitable. It’s going to have different margins than classic software, or the ad (-supported) business. But, we have every reason to believe that it will be a profitable business. It’s an inevitable business. The higher levels in the app stack require that this infrastructure exists, and the margins are probably going to be higher in the stack than they are down at the bottom.

…

OM: When do you think utility computing can be a profitable business; are we’re looking at like maybe two years, four years out before it actually starts to become a profitable entity?

RAY OZZIE: (Let’s) take (one company) who is in the market today: Amazon. They chose a price point. There are either customers at that price point or not. They may have priced themselves at expected costs as opposed to actual today costs, but it doesn’t really matter. They could have brought it out at twice the existing price and there still would have been a customer base, and they’d be making money at birth.

I think all of these utility-computing services, as they’re born will either be breaking even or profitable. At the scale that we’re talking about, nobody can afford, (even Microsoft) can’t afford to do it at a loss. We could subsidize it, I suppose. Google could subsidize it by profits in other parts of their business, we could subsidize it, but I don’t think there’s any reason that any of us in this world would bring out that infrastructure like this without charging for what we’re paying, and then trying to make some profit over it. The cost base is so high in terms of building these data centers you do want to kind of make it up.

Read the rest of the (edited) interview here.

Former Microsoft Executive Paul Maritz Joins EMC To Head Cloud Computing Initiatives

February 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters 3 Comments

Microsoft’s cloud computing team will not be happy to learn about this: Paul Maritz, former senior executive at Microsoft, is to become president of EMC‘s cloud computing initiative, which competes directly with the Redmond-based software giant.

Maritz is rejoining the corporate world after seven years of dabbling in startups and philanthropy, now that his company Pi Corporation, a Seattle-based information management provider, has been acquired by EMC. The 100-person company will continue to operate as a standalone entity, similar to the way EMC lets VMWare run independently.

When the deal is finalized, Maritz will become president and general manager of EMC’s new Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division reporting to CEO Joe Tucci.The release reads:

“He will continue to directly oversee development and operations for Pi, along with other key elements of EMC’s cloud computing strategy, which include the EMC Fortress SaaS infrastructure, the Mozy online backup service and other upcoming EMC cloud infrastructure systems and software offerings under development.”

EMC wouldn’t say how much it paid in the all-cash deal, but said it should be done within the first quarter of 2008 and will “be dilutive by $.01 per diluted share in 2008.”

[Source: The Seattle Times]