Case Study on Scaling PaaS infrastructure

In his blog post, Scaling WSO2 Stratos, Srinath Perera explains the scaling architecture of the WSO2 Stratos Platform as a Service (PaaS) infrastructure. It is explained as a series of solutions where every solution adds a new concept to solve a specific problem found in the earlier solution.

Overall, WSO2 Stratos uses a combination of intelligent Load balancing and lazy loading to scale up the architecture. More details about Stratos can be found from the paper WSO2 Stratos: An Industrial Stack to Support Cloud Computing.  

Problem

Click to read more ...

Snooze - Open-source, Scalable, Autonomic, and Energy-efficient VM Management for Private Clouds

Snooze is an open-source, scalable, autonomic, and energy-efficient virtual machine (VM) management framework for private clouds. Similarly to other VM management frameworks such as Nimbus, OpenNebula, Eucalyptus, and OpenStack it allows to build compute infrastructures from virtualized resources. Particularly, once installed and configured users can submit and control the life-cycle of a large number of VMs. However, contrary to existing frameworks for scalability and fault tolerance, Snooze employs a self-organizing and healing (based on Apache ZooKeper) hierarchical architecture. Moreover, it performs distributed VM management and is designed to be energy efficient. Therefore, it implements features to monitor and estimate VM resource (CPU, memory, network Rx, network Tx) demands, detect and resolve overload/underload situations, perform dynamic VM consolidation through live migration, and finally power management to save energy. Last but not least, it integrates a generic scheduler which allows to implement any VM placement algorithms. The system can be either used to manage production data centers or as an experimental testbed for advanced (i.e. requiring live migration support) VM placement algorithms.

Click to read more ...

Performance in the Cloud: Business Jitter is Bad

One of the benefits of web applications is that they are generally transported via TCP, which is a connection-oriented protocol designed to assure delivery. TCP has a variety of native mechanisms through which delivery issues can be addressed – from window sizes to selective acks to idle time specification to ramp up parameters. All these technical knobs and buttons serve as a way for operators and administrators to tweak the protocol, often at run time, to ensure the exchange of requests and responses upon which web applications rely. This is unlike UDP, which is more of a “fire and forget” protocol in which the server doesn’t really care if you receive the data or not.

Click to read more ...

In Memory Data Grid Technologies

In Memory Data Grid Technologies - what is it, who are the leaders, why would I want one, what the business benefits and how do you use one?

What is an In Memory Data Grid?

It is not an in-memory relational database, a NOSQL database or a relational database.  It is a different breed of software datastore.

In summary an IMDG is an ‘off the shelf’ software product that exhibits the following characteristics:

The data model is distributed across many servers in a single location or across multiple locations.  This distribution is known as a data fabric.  This distributed model is known as a ‘shared nothing’ architecture.

Click to read more ...

Five Misconceptions on Cloud Portability

The term "cloud portability" is often considered a synonym for "Cloud API portability," which implies a series of misconceptions.

If we break away from dogma, we can find that what we really looking for in cloud portability is Application portability between clouds which can be a vastly simpler requirement, as we can achieve application portability without settling on a common Cloud API.

In this post i'll be covering five common misconceptions people have WRT to cloud portability.

1. Cloud portability = Cloud API portability. API portability is easy; cloud API portability is not.
2. The main incentive for Cloud Portability is - Avoiding Vendor lock-in.Cloud portability is more about business agility than it is about vendor lock-in.
3. Cloud portability isn’t for startups. Every startup that is expecting rapid growth should re-examine their deployments and plan for cloud portability rather than wait to be forced to make the switch when you are least prepared to do so.
4. Cloud portability = Compromising on the least common denominator.Application portability doesn't require compromise on the least common denominator as most of the interaction with the cloud API happens outside of our application code anyway, to handle things like provisioning, setup, installation, scaling, monitoring, etc.
5. The effort for achieving cloud portability far exceed the value. The effort to achieve cloud portability is far less than it used to be, in most cases, making it a greater and more valuable priority (with less investment) than it used to be.

Click to ready more..

Scaling Social Ecommerce Architecture Case study

A recent study showed that over 92 percent of executives from leading retailers are focusing their marketing efforts on Facebook and subsequent applications. Furthermore, over 71 percent of users have confirmed they are more likely to make a purchase after “liking” a brand they find online. (source)

Sears Architect Tomer Gabel provides an insightful overview on how they built a Social Ecommerce solution for Sears.com that can handle complex relationship quires in real time. Tomer goes through:

• the architectural considerations behind their solution
• why they chose memory over disk
• how they partitioned the data to gain scalability
• why they chose to execute code with the data using GigaSpaces Map/Reduce execution framework
• how they integrated with Facebook
• why they chose GigaSpaces over Coherence and Terracotta for in-memory caching and scale

In this post I tried to summarize the main takeaway from the interview.

You can also watch the full interview (highly recomended).

Read the full story here

Creating Scalable Digital Libraries

Like many other media content providers, libraries and museums are increasingly moving their content onto the Web.  While the move itself is no easy process (with digitization, web development, and training costs), being able to successfully deliver content to a wide audience is an ongoing concern, particularly for large libraries.

Much of the concern is financial, as most libraries do not have the internal budget or outside investors that for-profit businesses enjoy.  Even large university libraries will face serious budget constraints that even other university departments, such as science and technology would not face.

Creating a scalable infrastructure and also distributing a large digital collection that can handle multiple requests, requires planning that many librarians have not even imagined.  They must stop thinking in terms of "one-item-per-customer" and start thinking in terms of numerous users accessing the same information simultaneously.

Click to read more ...

The VeriScale Architecture - Elasticity and efficiency for private clouds

The modern datacenter is evolving into the network centric datacenter model, which is applied to both public and private cloud computing. In this model, networking, platform, storage, and software infrastructure are provided as services that scale up or down on demand. The network centric model allows the datacenter to be viewed as a collection of automatically deployed and managed application services that utilize underlying virtualized services. Providing sufficient elasticity and scalability for the rapidly growing needs of the datacenter requires these collections of automatically-managed services to scale efficiently and with essentially no limits, letting services adapt easily to changing requirements and workloads. Sun’s VeriScale architecture provides the architectural platform that can deliver these capabilities. Sun Microsystems has been developing open and modular infrastructure architectures for more than a decade. The features of these architectures, such as elasticity, are seen in current private and public cloud computing architectures, while the non-functional requirements, such as high availability and security, have always been a high priority for Sun. The VeriScale architecture leverages experience and knowledge from many Sun customer engagements and provides an excellent foundation for cloud computing. The VeriScale architecture can be implemented as an overlay, creating a virtual infrastructure on a public cloud or it can be used to implement a private cloud.

Read more at: http://wikis.sun.com/display/BluePrints/The+VeriScale+Architecture+-+Elasticity+and+Efficiency+for+Private+Clouds

GigaSpaces Launches a New Version of its Cloud Computing Framework

This post include detailed on who is using the platform and how from Enterprise applicaitons, to ISV that are looking for SaaS enablement, through partners and solution providers that are looking for to gain a competitive advantage and deploy application in short time to market and small initial investment.

HotPads on AWS

HotPads abandoned our managed hosting in December and took the leap over to EC2 and its siblings. The presentation has a lot of detail on costs and other things to watch out for, so if you're currently planning your "cloud" architecture, you'll find some of this really helpful.

Click to read more ...