Cloud Architecture Revolution

The introduction of cloud technologies is not a simple evolution of existing ones, but a real revolution.  Like all revolutions, it changes the points of views and redefines all the meanings. Nothing is as before.  This post wants to analyze some key words and concepts, usually used in traditional architectures, redefining them according the standpoint of the cloud.  Understanding the meaning of new words is crucial to grasp the essence of a pure cloud architecture.

<<There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.>>

THOMAS REID, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

Nowadays, it is required to challenge the limits of traditional architectures that go beyond the normal concepts of scalability and support millions of users (What's Up 500 Million) billions of transactions per day (Salesforce 1.3 billion), five 9s of availability (99.999 AOL).  I wish all of you the success of the examples cited above, but do not think that it is completely impossible to reach mind-boggling numbers. Using cloud technology, everyone can create a service with a little investment and immediately have a world stage.  If successful, the architecture must be able to scale appropriately.

Using the same design criteria or move the current configuration to the cloud simply does not work and it could reveal unpleasant surprises.

Infrastructure - commodity HW instead of high-end HW

Click to read more ...

10 Things You Should Know About AWS

Authored by Chris Fregly:  Former Netflix Streaming Platform Engineer, AWS Certified Solution Architect and Purveyor of fluxcapacitor.com.

Ahead of the upcoming 2nd annual re:Invent conference, inspired by Simone Brunozzi’s recent presentation at an AWS Meetup in San Francisco, and collected from a few of my recent Fluxcapacitor.com consulting engagements, I’ve compiled a list of 10 useful time and clock-tick saving tips about AWS.

1) Query AWS resource metadata

 

Can’t remember the EBS-Optimized IO throughput of your c1.xlarge cluster?  How about the size limit of an S3 object on a single PUT?  awsnow.info is the answer to all of your AWS-resource metadata questions.  Interested in integrating awsnow.info with your application?  You’re in luck.  There’s now a REST API, as well!

Note:  These are default soft limits and will vary by account.

2) Tame your S3 buckets

 

Delete an entire S3 bucket with a single CLI command:  

aws s3 rb s3://<bucket-name> --force

Recursively copy a local directory to S3:

aws s3 cp <local-dir-name> s3://<bucket-name> --region <region-name> --recursive

3) Understand AWS cross-region dependencies

Click to read more ...

Are we seeing the renaissance of enterprises in the cloud?

A series of recent surveys on the subject seems to indicate that this is indeed the case:

Research conducted by HP found that the majority of businesses in the EMEA region are planning to move their mission-critical apps to the cloud. Of the 940 respondents, 80 percent revealed plans to move mission-critical apps at some point over the next two to five years.

A more recent survey, by research firm MeriTalk and sponsored by VMware and EMC (NYSE:EMC), showed that one-third of respondents say they plan to move some mission-critical applications to the cloud in the next year. Within two years, the IT managers said they will move 26 percent of their mission-critical apps to the cloud, and in five years, they expect 44 percent of their mission-critical apps to run in the cloud.

The Challenge - How to Bring Hundreds of Enterprise Apps to the Cloud

The reality is that cloud economics only start making sense when there are true workloads that utilize the cloud infrastructure.

If the large majority of your apps fall outside of this category, then you’re not going to benefit much from the cloud. In fact, you’re probably going to lose money, rather than save money.

The Current Approach

• Focus on building IaaS - Current cloud strategies of many enterprises has been centered on making the infrastructure cloud ready. This basically means ensuring that they are able to spawn machines more easily than they were before. A quick look at many initiatives of this nature shows that there is still only a small portion of enterprises whose applications run on such new systems.
• Build a new PaaS - PaaS has been taught as the answer to run apps on the cloud. The reality however, is that most of the existing PaaS solutions only cater to new apps and quite often the small, and “non” mission-critical share of our enterprise applications, which still leaves the majority of our enterprise workload outside of our cloud infrastructure.
• App Migration as a One Off Project - The other approach for migrating applications to the cloud has been to select a small group of applications, and then migrate these one by one to the cloud. Quite often the thought behind this approach has been that application migration is a one-off project. The reality is that applications are more of a living organism – things fail, are moved, or need to be added and removed over time. Therefore it’s not enough to move apps to the cloud using some sort of virtualization technique, it’s critical that the way they’re run and maintained will also fit the dynamic nature of the cloud.

Why is This not Going to Work?

Simple math shows that if you apply this model to the rest of your apps, it’s probably going to take years of effort to migrate all your apps to the cloud. The cost of doing so is going to be extremely high, not to mention the time to market issue which can be even an even greater risk in the end, as it will reflect on cost of operation, profit margins and even the ability to survive in this an extremely competitive market, if it is too long.

What's missing?

What we’re missing is a simple and systematic way to brings all these hundreds and thousands of apps to the cloud.

Moving Enterprise Workloads to the Cloud at a Massive Scale

Instead of thinking of cloud migration as a one-off thing, we need to think of cloud migration on a massive scale.

Thinking in such terms drives a fairly different approach.

In this post, I outlined what i believe should be the main principles for moving enterprise application at such a scale.

Read full post: http://www.cloudifysource.org/2012/10/30/moving_enterprise_workloads_to_the_cloud_on_a_massive_scale.html

Big Data In the Cloud Using Cloudify

Edd Dumbill wrote an interesting article on O’Reilly Radar covering the current solutions for running Big Data in the Cloud

Big data and cloud technology go hand-in-hand. Big data needs clusters of servers for processing, which clouds can readily provide.

Big PaaS

Edd touched briefly on the role of PaaS for delivering Big Data applications in the cloud

Beyond IaaS, several cloud services provide application layer support for big data work. Sometimes referred to as managed solutions, or platform as a service (PaaS), these services remove the need to ucale things such as databases or MapReduce, reducing your workload and maintenance burden. Additionally, PaaS providers can realize great efficiencies by hosting at the application level, and pass those savings on to the customer.

Click to read more ...

The Conspecific Hybrid Cloud

When you’re looking to add new tank mates to an existing aquarium ecosystem, one of the concerns you must have is whether a particular breed of fish is amenable to conspecific cohabitants. Many species are not, which means if you put them together in a confined space, they’re going to fight. Viciously. To the death. Responsible aquarists try to avoid such situations, so careful attention to the conspecificity of animals is a must.

Now, while in many respects the data center ecosystem correlates well to an aquarium ecosystem, in this case it does not. It’s what you usually get, today, but its not actually the best model. That’s because what you want in the data center ecosystem – particularly when it extends to include public cloud computing resources – is conspecificity in infrastructure.

This desire and practice is being seen both in enterprise data center decision making as well as in startups suddenly dealing with massive growth and increasingly encountering performance bottlenecks over which IT has no control to resolve.

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 ...

Virtualization and Cloud Computing is Changing the Network to East-West Routing

It’s called “east-west” networking, which when compared to its predecessor, “north-south” networking, evinces images of maelstroms and hurricane winds and tsunamis for some reason. It could be the subtle correlation between the transformative shift this change in networking patterns has on the data center with that of El Niño’s transformative power upon the weather patterns across the globe.

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..

The Cloud and The Consumer: The Impact on Bandwidth and Broadband

As providers continue to push the notion of storing all things digital “in the cloud”, network providers must consider the impact on them – and the satisfaction of their customer base with performance over their network services.

Click to read more ...

Web 2.0 Killed the Middleware Star

It started out innocently enough with a simple question, “What exactly *is* the model for PaaS services scalability? If based on HTTP/REST API integration, fairly easy. If native middleware… input?” You’ll forgive the odd phrasing – Twitter’s limitations sometimes make conversations of this nature … interesting.