Ready to Cloud?

The Cloud World is Here, Welcome Chrome OS

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:39:00 +0000

Introduction

Finally, Google Chrome OS is here. Welcome to the era of the cloud. Keeping privacy aside (a much broader and difficult topic), in a few years all computers will be just a thin client of the internet. Is fantastic how you can open notepad on Google Chrome OS and all you type there is immediately on the Cloud. As this feature there are many other features that will be main stream in a few months.

Interesting Video

Enjoy Clouding, and Thanks for sticking around. Your comments are always welcome.

Website Spell Checkers, Commodity Service or Still a Premium

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:10:00 +0000

Hi Fellow Cloud Enthusiast,

I have been completely silent for the last two month due to a project and other things that have come up, but that does not mean that I have not been with my eyes open on all things happening on the cloud. I will post more on that later.

For now let's stay in topic. Sometime during last week I was looking for a good tool on the cloud that will give my client the ability to spell check their website in a easy, friendly and effective way. It was incredible to find out that the search or the decision was not easy. That make me think if online spell checking is a commodity or a premium service.

Below some of the best options currently out there.

Our Three contenders are:

INSPYDER - InSite

InSite is site-wide (site) spell checking and link validation tool. This tool requires an installation and it cost around $200 per licence or $50 for spell checking feature only. This tool gives out a nice report after the crawling completes. This is not a cloud (online website) tool, but it achieves the same as the others in this category. This type of tool have their market, I tend to stay away from them just because they need to be installed, they required to have an Internet connection at all time during the crawls, and there are some crawls that could take up to an hour depending on the size of your site.

This is a good options if your site is small, or if you are just checking a representative sample of your complete site.

Spell r US

Spell r US (site) is a rich Internet application that will check websites for spell errors. There pricing plan is simple and requires no contracts. They have pricing plans from 24/month to 900/month. Spell r US have some good features like custom dictionaries, word cloud, interactive help, and in the more expensive plans link checker as well. They seem to be the BMW of the online spell checking industry. I end up doing my project with them.

I have to say that they are the reason I think this is not a commodity as everyone else think to believe. This service can/will get very expensive if you use it on big websites, as much as $ 900 a month, but definitely check them out since they also have pre-paid plans.

Site Improve (site)

SiteCheck from SiteImprove is more than spell checking but I feel I have to keep them here since Spell R US also provide link checking and other features. This online tool brings to the table Link Checking, Spell Checking, Site Inventory and Accessibility. I got a trial account, and the first impression was that the User Interface needed some rearrangement. It was not easy for me to figure out how to get a printed report of the spell checking, actually I never found the printed report, I had to solve the spelling problems using their interface which was one of my clients requirement. I was moderately happy with the application, but the initial price proposal for our use was on the high side.

Opinion

From all three services evaluated the only service that has an export to CSV format feature is the Spellr.us, which will let us customize our reports. Also Spellr.us has a Broken Link/image feature and custom dictionary for law terms (Client Requirements). The service does not require a contract and can be used on demand. The cost to obtain the features to fulfill our requirement is $400 for a month of usage. That amount will allow us to scan up to 300 websites with no more than 10,000 pages each in a given month. We can discontinue the use of the service on the same month and wait another 3 months to activate it. Making the service around 100 dollars per month if you use only on specific months.

I hope you enjoy your spell checking process, and if you have comments or questions please go ahead and drop them here. As always enjoy your clouding!

Amazon CloudWatch finally becomes Usable

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 02:52:00 +0000

Today Amazon released the Console for CloudWatch. Allowing all EC2 users to obtain valuable information of their instances without further installing other applications on the instances. This step was necessary, useful and it was the only way of actually justifying the need to pay for the CloudWatch service. The Amazon people have placed a blog post with nice pictures that you can see if you click here.

Thanks for staying around and as always keep your clouding happy!!!

No More Excuses for Enterprises to adopt the Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:26:00 +0000

I am just very exited about the new VPC offering of EC2. This feature starts the new crash of the titans for Cloud Computing. Where Enterprise Data Centers, with millions of dollars and super expensive IT infrastructures collides with the Cloud Computing.

There are no more excuses now. No lengthy process to purchase a server, or to test a new service from your data center. With the VPC offering you can get a new server and make it part of your data center with a VPN connection. Your migration process is easier now.

All of you that want to test the cloud against your real infrastructure, just bring it in with VPC and enjoy the benefits without compromising too much.

I will like to hear from people actually testing this new VPC feature, please leave your comments or send me an email to geo [at] readytocloud.com I will really appreciate it.

Thanks and keep clouding!!!

Bring the EC2 Cloud Home with Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) from Amazon

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:42:00 +0000

Amazon just announced the release of their limited beta for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud or VPC, which lets you create your own logically isolated set of EC2 instances and connect it to your existing networking.

For the start-up business this is a great advantage. Allowing your EC2 instances, connect directly in a secure way to your small business network with pay as you go plans. The main benefit I see is being able to have EC2 servers, and translate them at your firewall with your own IP. This means it all looks like you. There are some picky clients out there, no offenses. With this feature you get the best of both worlds.

You need to have enough Bandwidth to be able to sustain the traffic that is expected but any good Network expert can help you on that task. I hope the Amazon folks keep the good work. Please submit your comments and if you find any good tools, comment about them.

Happy clouding!!!

New Lower Prices for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:59:00 +0000

Starting today Amazon has decrease the amount paid by people that will predict their EC2 usage and decrease the on-demand (chaotic) usage. This good piece of news for all cloud (EC2) users signifies savings, but if you read a little more into it, you will see the actual underlying issue.

In a few days, the 24th of August of 2009 in the Australian Architecture Forum 2009, Dr. Anna Liu is going to disseminate a research that proves performance issues on different cloud providers, among them Amazon EC2, by a factor of 20 percent depending on the time of day.

If Amazon is on that conference, which it should, then I am sure this is move towards, normalizing the amount of unpredicted on-demand usage on their infrastructure.

Well. If you are a steady user of the EC2, go ahead and get a few reserved instances, because they are good offers. Only by utilizing your ec2 instance for 20% of the year you can get break even on the offer.

Enjoy clouding and keep me posted.

News -- Evaluating Cloud Application Platforms

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:18:00 +0000

Anna Liu, Associate Professor in services engineering at the UNSW School of Computer Science, released a conference paper to be release and discussed on the Australian Architecture Forum 2009 where she will be approaching her findings on performance and reliability on main stream cloud providers.

Amazon EC2/S2/SimpleDB, Google's AppEngine, and Microsoft Azure are being compared in this test. The analysis simulated 2000 concurrent users connecting to services from each of the three providers, with researchers measuring response times and other performance metrics.

Here you can find more information on what Anna Liu had to say about the research, but the most interesting part is:

Response times on the service also varied by a factor of twenty depending on the time of day the services were accessed, she said

If you are attending to the Australian Architecture Forum 2009 in August 24, 2009 or the Object Oriented Programming, System, Languages, and Applications in Octuber 27, 2009. Please come back and drop a comment on how the discussion was and what your opinion.

We love to hear more of the interesting world of Cloud Computing. Enjoy clouding!

Congratulations to ALL SYSADMINS -- SYSADMIN DAY

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:28:00 +0000

Hi Cloud Enthusiast,

Today we commemorate an important day in history, is the 24 hour appreciation day for our SysAdmins. Those who take care of our viruses, who makes sure that the Internet is up, and that we don't get too much spam. They plan in advance, they keep up to date in technology so they can bring our organizations cost effective techniques and new technologies that impact the bottom line.

Those out there, SysAdmin or soon to be, CONGRATULATIONS. Thank you for your hard work, and for keeping your minds open to new advancements. We are clouding thanks to all of you!

Thanks and Congratulation!

Transitioning to a Cloud Provider -- QA Session

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 21:20:00 +0000

Dear cloud expert or cloud enthusiast,

I attended yesterday a webminar that RightScale and Zmanda offered online. I thought that it might be useful to have their question and answer session available to all of us. So below you can find all the questions and the respective answers that other people like you and me have on transition to the cloud.

Q: The limit in cloud computing I see is the internet speed, often download speed is very high but upload speed is very low, how can the initial data load be shortened?
A: This is definitely the bottleneck today. Most ISPs focus on download performance rather than upload performance. There are smaller vendors that provide better connectivity (such as direct connectivity to their data centers).

Q: There are some countries like Iran who cannot engage in business transaction with US because of the sanctions opposed on them. Can someone for example from those countries access their cloud environment?
A: This depends on cloud vendor. Some cloud vendors (who are not in US) permit this.

Q: Has the uptime of clouds such as EC2 been measured thus far ie. Percentage?
A: They offer a 99.95% SLA and we have seen great uptime. Using a solution like RightScale allows you to set up very fault tolerant systems that are spread across different zones.

Q: I’m struggling with identifying best practices and tools for key management.
NOT ANSWERED DURING THE WEBMINAR

Q: What use cases/projects turn out to be Unattractive for cloud use?
A: At this point apps that need real time interaction (less than 180 ms from action to result) or folks that need high levels of data center compliance. They are both being addressed currently.

Q: My software solutions require Windows servers, but my understanding is that you currently only support Linux. Do you plan to support windows platforms, and if so, when?
A: Zmanda support backup/recovery/DR solutions for Windows also.

Q: How do you get automatic scaling in the cloud? Specifically, how do you set up the cloud for peaks in volume i.e. turn additional servers on during the peak and off during the norm.
A: We have integrated monitoring, loadbalancing and autoscaling that allows you to grow your system based on increased demand. Please contact sales__at__rightscale.com for a live demo of how it works.

Q: Is cloud computing the Actual OS? For the system.
A: The cloud is basically a collection of virtual servers that have basically nothing on it. We install the OS on top, then add applications etc.

Q: When you say “you set the rules” is the max scale or a monetary limit or something else?
A: You can set max scaling limits, but the rules I was referring to are based on hardware metrics that kick off additional servers or deprovision as needed to accommodate for load while optimizing the costs.

Q: So are you saying that the AWS, Rackspace and GoGrid have no management capabilities in their cloud offerings?
A: They have very good lower level management tools, RightScale provides easier useability, portability between clouds and full deployment lifecycle management. Basically we provide a framework to use the low level tools in a more powerful way.

Q: Yes, we see a latency of 300 ms between our office and EC2
A: Controlling EC2 location might reduce the location. There are other cloud vendors who may have data center closer to your internet access point.

Q: Zmanda website says cloud storage is $0.20/gb xfer plus $o.20/gb/mo storage. These are higher than actual Amazon costs. Is it possible for us to use our own S3 accounts and pay only Amazon pricing?
A: Yes. It is possible with our Amanda Enterprise product. Please contact zsales__at__zmanda.com

Q: On behalf of the healthcare industry, how does Rightscale respond to operating parameters / audits from FDA or similar regulatory agencies?
A: Cloud vendors such as Amazon respond to audits from regulatory agencies. Cloud storage is HIPAA compliant.

Q: If I do all my QA testing in the cloud, how do I secure it so that search-engines don’t access it or someone trolling? Is there a VPN solution so I can only allow people in my office to access the instances I setup?
A: All EC2 instances access require keys (private and public keys). These keys are not available to others. Some small cloud vendors provide VPN solution.

That's all for now. As always your comments are welcome and never forget to enjoy the cloud!

Cloud Computing Barriers -- Is it really security?

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:33:00 +0000

Today during a webminar hosted by RigthScale, Zmanda and Platform D about the transition to Cloud Computing. The host ran two surveys, which answers got me by surprise.

First, discussing the barriers on moving your DATA to the cloud. Second, the barriers on moving your APPs. When I was watching the percentages of people that choose security and privacy as the number one barrier I thought about what really meant having the security as a number one excuse, or may say reason.

If we think seriously about today's web infrastructure, and how the structure of well define security is almost always standardize, then the data you are protecting from the cloud is equally prone to errors in your data centers than in a cloud provider.

For mid-size company hosting all their server at Rackspace or Serverbeach, how more secure are those servers than in a cloud provider? I will leave this as an open question, since I am seriously interested in your opinion.

For mid-size company hosting all their servers internally, then the only benefit you may see, the local access to your data, is negligible compared to the extra amount of integrity and reliability obtained on a high-end cloud provider.

In my own opinion I think that most security concerns of people/organizations that are thinking of adopting the cloud for their data or apps is based on the lack of knowledge and understanding of the cloud provider(s) itself. I guarantee that most of the time there are IT techniques to keep or even increase the current security setup.

In a different post I will include some of the questions and answers that happened during the webminar. As always your comments are welcome and ENJOY THE CLOUD!

News -- Rackspace Down Again Two Times in Two Weeks

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:11:00 +0000

NEWS ALERT --
The Rackspace data center located in Dallas is down since 11:05 am CST today. We are currently waiting in the phone queue to get some more details on the extent of this outage. Once we know more we will notify the cloud community. Please leave a comment when or shoot me an email when you detect is up again. I will post an specific reason for this as soon as we know.

UPDATE

I just talked to one of Rackspace fanatical customer representative. At this moment they have no information for their customers in terms of what is the issue, and how long is going to take to fix it. They only told us to get updates from Twitter. They also have their ticketing system down, so I guess they have that system hosted in the Dallas data center.

Multiple Apache HTTPd Instances to Secure your Cloud Instance

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:08:00 +0000

Most of the time you start using a server on the cloud with a basic server configuration. Most likely Linux, but it could be windows. This small essay is for those of you that choose Linux.

There are many reasons why to start a second instance of Apache Web Server (httpd). The reason that I prefer, is the control web server speach. By having a second server, you are able to host some (php, perl, cgi, or other) scripts that will enable you, as the administrator or IT especialist, to administer that server in an easy and more efficient way.

Many of you out there might be trying to figure out, why someone is going to need this, but if you got to this essay is because you have been thinking about it. In my specific case, I cannot afford to have all apache modules on for my other application, and need to be on a non-default port. Also, I don't want people to login into the server for any other reason other than root tasks.

How to setup a second apache instance for Control purposes?

Setting up a second apache web server (httpd) instance for control and independent instantiation purposes could be an easy solution to be able to manage automatic maintenance and reliability tasks in an IT environment. Many times the idea of something is way much simpler than the actual implementation due to lack of standardization among OS distributions or default initialization scripts.

This is one of those instances, where is easier said than done. Apache httpd, depending on your distribution, will come with an init.d script that will relay on many things outside the control of the apache server itself. The first thing there, and most dangerous, at least in Red Hat Enterprise 4, is the killproc command that is used to kill all processes with a given name. This command makes the stop argument of httpd script a very dangerous task to run in a production environment.

In our own production environment with 6 tomcat servers running and 1 httpd (1st instance running) it produce the unpredictable behavior of stopping some of the tomcat services (not all) and the initial httpd environment.

Below are the steps that are needed to overcome the issues above and make sure that your second control instance of httpd will be independent and solid from any other script initialization.

Assumptions:

Red Hat Enterprise 4
Apache 2.0.52 installed with built: Feb 18 2009 7:54:31

STEPS:

Copy the httpd initial script to a second instance with <#cp /etc/init.d/httpd /etc/init.d/httpd2>

Copy the httpd binary to a second instance with <#cp /usr/sbin/httpd /usr/sbin/httpd2>

Copy the apachectl to a second instance with <#cp /usr/sbin/apachectl /usr/sbin/apachectl2>

Copy the sysconfig httpd config file with <#cp /etc/sysconfig/httpd /etc/sysconfig/httpd2>

Copy the httpd.conf file with <#cp /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf /etc/httpd/conf/httpd2.conf>

Change the following settings in httpd2.conf file:

PidFile run/httpd2.pid
Listen xxx1
ErrorLog
logs/error_httpd2_log
CustomLog logs/access_httpd2_log combined
ServerName domain.com
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html"

Change the /etc/init.d/httpd2 file with the following settings:

/etc/sysconfig/httpd2 instead of httpd

Httpd=${HTTPD-/usr/sbin/httpd2}

prog=httpd2

pidfile=${PIDFILE-/var/run/httpd2.pid}

lockfile=${LOCKFILE-/var/lock/subsys/httpd2}

CONFFILE=/etc/httpd/conf/httpd2.conf

Make sure that the new service will be up on restarts with chkconfig command.

As always, I hope you keep enjoying the cloud world and your comments are always welcomed.

News -- Rackspace big hosting provider is Down

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:35:00 +0000

Another point for Cloud providers. Even though in theory Downtime can and will happen to all (cloud or traditional providers), the big and famous data center, Rackspace has gone down twice in the last 2 weeks. Rackspace provides the Fanatical support, which is really good, but they have been facing some outages, that drives people to use more cloud servers and trust less the traditional hosting provider.

NEWS BIT:

The Rackspace data center located in Dallas is down since 3:25 pm today and we still don't know until what time it will be up. We are currently waiting in the phone queue to get some more details on the extent of this outage. Once we know more we will notify the cloud community.

Thanks and keep clouding!!!

Community Technology Preview CTP -- Azure Invitation

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:19:00 +0000

Finally I got my invitation to participate in the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Azure Cloud. I feel the same way as a boy in Christmas day with all the toys. I am posting the invitation letter here in case you are interested. The CTP includes enough VM time to do some cool things, so I will start coding right away.

If you have comments or questions, please be welcome to post any in the comment area. Enjoy Clouding!!!

Windows Azure -- My Initial Windows Azure Application

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 04:20:00 +0000

I really like the idea of the Microsoft Cloud competing with other cloud services like Amazon AWS and Google's cloud. Amazon AWS and Google App Egine has been up for a few years now, so I really expect that Azure is delaying their deployment because they are preparing a great solution for us.

As I mentioned in my previous Azure post, the initial impression I had was poor due to the lack of easy start-up examples and Operating System requirements like Vista and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (which contradict the principal of a cloud os). This by no mean implies that the service is poor. Even though I don't have a token for the Windows Azure Beta phase, after a few hours of reading the sdk and the local Development Fabric and Storage solution. I understand that the Azure system has the potential to be a winner.

Any .NET service architecture with the Azure platform will have the benefit of no worriying about load balancing, windows server running out of memory or hugging the CPU. Basically you host your service and they take care of everything else. Another big plus is that, you are able to host the same service inside your enterprise since the full cloud scenario is replicated by the Dev fabric and solution. So you have an easy way of transporting your apps to private or public cloud.

In theory, you are able to emulate the same behaviour in Amazon EC2, by cloning the EC2 linux service and virtualizing your environment in the private network. The situation with the later, is the amount of details that you will have to be watching that Windows will take care for you.

Ok. So back to Azure and an my initial setup. Basically, the first time I tried this I got two requirements: Windows Vista and Visual Studio 2008 with SP1. Fun things! I got my virtualization running and installed a Windows Vista machine with VS 2008 and also the SP1. Now that I have all Azure requirement I started following their Quick Lap around the Windows Azure tutorial.
The tutorial is the equivalent of hello world program in any language, but using a the Azure LOCAL platform. Yes, as I said before, they replicate their azure platform locally so you can test all your services. They actually recommend testing all your applications and calls to the API, first to the local development fabrics, and then to the actual cloud. Not that I have many options, since I am still waiting for my token to use the Azure cloud.

I thought about a good example of something that you will find in almost any website today, and I the first thing that came to mind was the classic example of URL Rewriting. An example of this is, when you type in your browser http://www.application.com/feed/rss but you actually are calling something like http://www.application.com/rssfeed.xml?param=value. So I wanted to exemplify this easy and common procedure in the cloud architecture.

void context_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e) { HttpApplication app = (HttpApplication)sender; if (app.Request.RawUrl.ToLower().Contains("/default.aspx")) app.Context.RewritePath("feed.aspx", "", ""); else if (app.Request.RawUrl.ToLower().Contains("/tag")) app.Context.RewritePath("feed.aspx", "", "Label=tag"); if (app.Request.RawUrl.ToLower().Contains("/sitemap")) app.Context.RewritePath("feed.aspx", "", "Label=sitemap"); }

The code above is basically the code written in the httpModule to modify each URL as they come in. Ok. So I created the URLRewrite class in a normal .NET application using CSharp (C#) and test it, then I created the same class in a Azure Cloud Service following the same steps. And it was a disaster. I was unable to replicate, or even call any of the requests.

The bottom line here is. There is some work that the Azure platform needs. I am sure is probably more in the documentation and bringing people onboard using their system more than putting functinoallity in it. Because it was three or four times harder to do a simple example in the Azure system than in the Google Apps or Amazon AWS.

Mr. John Shewchuk and Mr. Dennis Pilarinos did a terrific job explainig the .NET services currently available. They actually wrote some Java and Ruby code to use those services, like you will expect for a Cloud Platform. They seem to understand the new road Microsoft should be taking a long time ago. So I want to take this opportunity to urge, Mr. John Shewchuk and Mr. Dennis Pilarinos to convice the folk in the Azure Platform division to make a video like the one they did and to put out there more rest type of calls to use the Azure Platform.

Ok. Folks. I really expect that you have enjoyed the long monolog here, and that you see that we will have many options as far as Cloud Providers. Azure has promissing value but still too much to cover, but we hope they will perform. I will keep clouding for you, and as always keep your self entertained in the cloud. Thanks and leave your comments or thoughts are always welcome.

Windows Azure Platform - Microsoft Shooting Themself in the Foot

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Today I was determine to test the Windows Azure Platform, but for Microsoft own reasons I was blocked from doing it. I have written at least 10 articles mentioning the Amazon AWS services. Some about other tools but almost all surrounding the Amazon Services. So I am decided to give a try to the other players out there.

After reading many posts in the media about how people is saying that there is Amazon and the others, I wanted to prove that they might be talking too loud. Only to find myself in the mist of a very unsatisfied experience.

After reading Microsoft Windows Azure Platform website, opening an account, agreeing to the terms that God knows what they say, and viewing a few tutorial videos, I decided to install the Windows Azure Tools for MS Visual Studio 2008. All going well until a few seconds on the initial Install screen I got the message in the screen shot below.

How is this possible? Why Cloud services will require an Operating System to work on? Why saying we have a Cloud Service and not allow people with other OSs to work with it? They even say they have a java SDK, which at this point I seriously doubt it will be of any good.

I understand that I am trying to install a pseudo local cloud imitating the Microsoft Azure platform in my machine. At least that is what I understand, but having to read this message dry and simple puts me in a ackward position. I will give it a try again in a few days and will report back. In the mean time, keep yourself clouding!!!

Really Simple Amazon Cloud Watch Example Step by Step

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Thu, 28 May 2009 03:00:00 +0000

Have you bean in the situation that you want to see something working, just to stop imagining it in your mind? Well this is one of those situations for me. I really wanted to have a good real example of the CloudWatch amazon service. CloudWatch is the new Amazon web service that will monitor and enable other features like on-demand growth of instances and load balancing for Amazon Cloud Computing Center. In this brief example, I will show you how to enable a server into CloudWatch Amazon service, pull some CPU and Network statistics, and read them in your favorite xml reader. Very basic stuff, but very valuable when you want to see how things work to be able to assemble the big picture.

First, let's start by disclosing our pre-requisites. Things that you might not care or you are not reading this essay for. The following list of items are needed to do your own example, if you think you want to know more about any of them, place a comment and I will be happy to assist:

Opening an Account with Amazon Web Services
Turning on a Linux or Windows server on Amazon EC2 service

Enable Monitoring in a Server Instance

In this step we are going to enable monitoring for CloudWatch service to kick in. Remember CloudWatch service has a cost of 1.5 cents per hour per instance. A little in the high side in my own opinion, but my bet is that Amazon is going to lower that price in a few months or even in the coming weeks, if it does not happen then I guess there are people that is able to pay 15 percent of the server price for monitoring only. Ok. Back to the topic that we care. In order to turn on and off monitoring we are using the AWS Javascript scratchpad. Easy to download, no installation required and super easy to clean up afterward. The only server information you will need to activate the monitoring is the Instance ID.

Things you need to activate and deactivate CloudWatch in our Instance of EC2

Instance ID for your server. (e.g. i-1cdfa754)
AWS Javascript scratchpad or any other AWS client.
Run the MonitorInstace command from the AWS EC2 Scratchpad

Below a few images of what you should see when you run the MonitorInstance Command.

This first image is the menu from our Scratchpad configuration selecting the MonitorInstances command.

After you pick the monitor instance command you will place the Instance ID in the text box. An Invalid Instance ID will throw an error, go ahead and experience this by yourself.

After you type the instance ID press the Invoke button.

You will get a separate browser where you will see a lot of XML displayed and in between the lines something like the image below.

Getting the Monitor Statistics

At this moment the instance that you entered in the step above is configure and Amazon is monitoring it without the need of installing software in the server, opening ports in anybody's firewall, or even configuring anything anywhere. Now the fun part. Let's read the monitoring information. And create something useful.

In order to get the monitor statistic you will need the Amazon CloudWatch ScratchPad also downloaded into your computer. You will use the same Access Key and Secret Key and start executing web service commands. As you can see in the image below the CloudWatch API is pretty simple only two Commands: ListMetrics, and GetMetricStatistics

First, let's see what is available to us. We use the ListMetrics command. I am not going to post the full response, just the section that we will use in this example essay. This ListMetrics command do not require any parameters placed. Just select the command and click Invoke Request. You will get something similar to this:
From the output of the ListMetric command we need to obtain a few parameters that we will need in the GetMetricStatistics command.

Measure Name (e.g. CPUUtilization, NetworkIn, etc)
Dimension (Name and Value)
Namespace

You will place the three parameters mentioned above in the blanks of the GetMetricStatistics command together with the Statistics (Average, Minimum, Maximum, Sample, Sum) , Period (for now leave it at 60), Start Time and EndTime. An example of that screen below:

Again you click on Invoke request, and you should get the CPU Utilization for the 10 minute period of 60 seconds from 1 to 1:10 on the 26th of May of 2009. It will be something similar to this file. For those of you that got the hang of the images here is a little something:

Now with the xml file, it is a matter of getting a XML reader (for sake of simplicity I will use Excel) and convert the data points into a graph. You will see that most of your data points are the same between Min, Max, and Average that is because we use the InstanceId intead of using something like the Instance Type which will give you statistic among many other servers. I guess, there is no need for me to say how to create a graph in Excel but it will end up being something similar to this, or many other ways since options is not one of the things that Excel lacks.

I hope you have enjoyed the example and at least have a better understanding of what CloudWatch is all about. As always keep your comments coming and if you have suggestions I am open for them as well. Thanks and keep clouding.

Cloud Watch, Real IaaS from Amazon

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Wed, 20 May 2009 03:10:00 +0000

Cloud Watch is one of three new services just release by Amazon Web Services a few days ago. This service offers hardware (ironic for a virtual server) vitals monitoring for the Amazon EC2 instances. The price to monitor an Amazon EC2 instance for a full month is approximate $ 10.80, which seems a little high taking in consideration that Amazon is charging $72, for a full server for 30 days.

So Amazon is charging 15% of their pricing for the smallest instance to be able to monitor it. It will not surprise me, and it will probably be wise from Amazon point of view, to reduce that price a few dollars per month to attract more users and use their decreased price as a hook technique.

Price aside, the service is flexible and has many uses. The ability of monitoring all your infrastructure without installing services, opening ports, keeping an eye on vulnerabilities, and reporting no matter what is very tempting. I took the task to download the Amazon Cloud Watch API and ScratchPad, to be able to post a blog entry on a "Hello World" type of example for the service. For my surprise, even though the service looks simple to configure and use, the API is not well documented and the CloudWatch system did not reply with measurements right away. I will give it a few days before I can have something to demonstrate.

Always looking forward for your comments, and as always, Enjoy the Cloud!

Experiment with Amazon EC2 Billing and your Data in the Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:12:00 +0000

Introduction

A few days ago a colleague and friend of mine was talking with me about secure ways to have your data backed up and accessible all the time. By obvious reason the term store your data in the cloud came out soon. The debate was among many things: DVD, LTO, CD, External Hard Drives, Servers, Cloud. At first sight the cloud idea seemed good and within a reasonable price. The question that came out of the discussion was the fact that Cloud providers charge your Credit Card for what you consume in terms of Cloud Resources (the same as your electric bill). So the question arise, what happen if you store your important data in the cloud (assuming you took security measures) and your CC expires? Well, this article will explain a small experiment that we did with Amazon Cloud Provider. Soon you will know if your data disappears the moment you don't pay your Amazon your bill.

Methodology

At the moment of the experiment we did not have a Credit Card near the expiration point (that will be presented in a later post) laying around. Thus we use another technique to provide a close reality check between Amazon as a Cloud Provider and the relation of your data and their money. We proceeded in the following way:

Created an Amazon account with a Credit Card.
We subscribed in EC2 and S3 services from amazon.
We turned on EC2 windows and Linux instances.
We created EBS drives and hook them with the Linux and EC2 instances.
We setup basic web servers and MySQL databases for each instance.
We created backups from the MySQL into S3 and also filesystem level backups in S3.
We waited about a month. Before the Amazon bill was ready, we call our CC provider and ask them to block all charges from Amazon.
Waited until Amazon charge us and block our account.

Results

After Amazon tried charging our credit card and the American Express bank refuse the bill, our Amazon AWS login did not work anymore. For our surprise, our AWS keys kept working. So we were able to:

Download and upload data into S3.
Keep managing instances of EC2.
Using all our instances services (Database, WebServer, and others).

The Amazon Cloud service passed the test. They were reliable and trust worthy enough not to turned off all the instances and delete all the data in S3. Obviously this is a small test and not enough to say that is the rule. I will like to hear your impressions, experiences and concerns.

Tips for Keeping your AWS Services Running:

Always use a second credit card in the account registration as a backup.
As a contingency plan keep your data located in a different place than your cloud provider.
Do not trust the data storage, always use some type of encryption.

If you have suggestions on how to do any of the tips above please leave your comments they are greatly appreciated.

Growing and Shrinking Tomcat Workers in the Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:19:00 +0000

Introduction
As part of our Cloud Apache Tomcat Series of articles, I have put together a small tutorial to guide people on how to disable, enable, and stopped workers at run time.

What you need to know?
If you are an apache tomcat administrator or avid user, you will probably find this article useful. Also if you have setup tomcat as a load balancer with apache mod_jk module in the past this journal entry will be helpful.

Purpose
Basically the main topic here is how to change a worker variables at run time using the mod_jk status manager api.

Let's see. In our previous post we show an example on how to setup an apache load balancer with three tomcat workers using mod_jk apache module. You can find this in our post here.

The first step is to make sure you have the jkmanager api enabled within apache load balancer. The apache load balancer is responsible on sending request to each tomcat worker, the ultimate goal is to tell the balancer device or devices that we are going to disable, enable or stop a worker. Enabling us to modify that worker in any way even restarting it or shuting down completely.

In order for us to enable the jkmanager module in the apache load balancer we need to have the following lines in our httpd.conf file:


      <Location /jkmanager/>
      JkMount jkstatus
      order deny,allow
      allow from <your ip address>
      allow from 127.0.0.1
      deny from all
      </Location>

      <IfModule mod_jk.c>
      ...
      JkMount  /jkmanager/* jkstatus
      ...
      </IfModule>

The workers.properties file is the place where you tell the load balancer how is configured. The changes on the "workers.properties" file are:

 worker.list=router,tomcat1,tomcat2,...,tomcatn,jkstatus
worker.jkstatus.type=status

Now that you have setup a worker called jkstatus mounted in httpd.conf file in jkmanager location when you hit via a browser the url http://your.web.server/jkmanager/ you should find a management console for your load balancer and all your workers. Now let's get to business.

If you want to disable worker one at the load balancer you need to query the following url:

http://your.web.server/jkmanager/?cmd=update&w=router&opt=256&from=list&att=vwa&val0=1&val1=0&val2=0

If you want to enable all workers again to start accepting new requests you need to query the following url:

http://your.web.server/jkmanager/?cmd=update&w=router&opt=256&from=list&att=vwa&val0=0&val1=0&val2=0

In the mist of implementing this solution for my company, I posted a question in the StackOverflow forum that lead me to the answer. The following link is the answer posted by me to my question (kind of ironic) but this website is super helpful. A very helpful link to build more of the urls to execute actions in the load balancer is the tomcat reference official page.

What to do with this knowledge?
Now that you know how to automatically disable, enable, and stop workers, you are able to create an array of servers ready to use in Amazon EC2, GoGrid, or even in your private cloud. Disable or pause the servers that you don't need immediately and bring execute the urls to enabled them with wget or any other command line execution web execution program.

If you have questions or you are not clear about something feel free to comment here or send me an email. Thanks for your continues support and happy clouding....

Google's Data Center to the Waters with the Pirates

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Fri, 01 May 2009 12:30:00 +0000

In general terms Cloud Computing is less expensive than traditional own your own server computing (OYOSC). Mckinsey may report differently, but in general terms is just great to be able to pay for computing as another utility. With Google again thinking outside the box (and the land), they just got approved a US patent to build a Water based data center, powered by water. Being able to decrease the ownership of their data centers in at least three ways: Power, Property tax and Real Estate Costs.

In 2 to 4 years we will have our first water base data center, and I am sure that security will transform from hackers to actual pirates. Yes, pirates! Well, if they have their eyes in vessels with oil, what makes you think, they will not attack water data centers. I am sure not for the data but for the ransom. So the next security gadgets for data center will be real anti-piracy (in the literal term) security.

Quoting directly from the US Patent document, the paragraph below is a simple explanation from Google. Most likely, the real intend is to save them money, make cloud computing even cheaper, and save the world from all this over consumption of energy. At the end, Google is not that evil! right?

Thus, it can be beneficial to distribute computing power closer to users. As such, data centers may be moved closer to users, with relevant content sent from a central facility out to regional data centers only once, and further transmissions occurring over shorter regional links. As a result, every request from a user need not result in a transmission cross-country and through the internet backbone--network activity may be more evenly balanced and confined to local areas. Also, transient needs for computing power may arise in a particular area. For example, a military presence may be needed in an area, a natural disaster may bring a need for computing or telecommunication presence in an area until the natural infrastructure can be repaired or rebuilt, and certain events may draw thousands of people who may put a load on the local computing infrastructure. Often, such transient events occur near water, such as a river or an ocean. However, it can be expensive to build and locate data centers, and it is not always easy to find access to necessary (and inexpensive) electrical power, high-bandwidth data connections, and cooling water for such data centers.

Thanks and keep enjoying the Cloud!

Your main tool for the Cloud, YOUR BROWSER -- Google Chrome Videos

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:58:00 +0000

Google Chrome browser has been gaining share market continuously since its release. Now that IT Professionals across the world are going to use browsers to access their Cloud or Virtual Infrastructure, and less people is needed to download and install application at their desktops, browsers are even more important.

In my own opinion, I am avid Firefox user, that will go with the faster (firefox is not in that category), more practical and secure browser available. Plug-ins, add-ons, widgets are the winning factor in the race. And Chrome is still a little behind in the plug-in arena.

But Google is still trying to promote the use of their new browser and the video below is a funny and refreshing way of executing that promotion. Please enjoy the video and the cloud. Take advantage of it, remember you are saving the planet by using more cloud and less servers with 5% cpu utilization.

Amazon S3 Explorer Tool -- CloudBerry

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:18:00 +0000

The people from CloudBerry Lab has done a very good job with its CloudBerry Explorer application. Allowing users to manipulate information and data across platforms. Similar to what Firefox Plugin S3Fox does, but enhanced in functionality. The CloudBerry tool allows you to send data from S3 account 1 to S3 account 2, or S3 to local PC, and probably in the future from S3 to FTP or SFTP (This is a free hint for the people in CloudBerry Lab).

People adopting the cloud are in need of tools, so all the developers with free time in their hands should start building tools for the cloud. why not?

A snapshot of how the Cloud Berry toolbar looks like below.

As you can see is intuitive and it has some other features that are nice, like allowing users to create small urls within the tools.

Thanks and enjoy your time in the cloud.

Cloud Computing Specific Search Engine

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:46:00 +0000

Cloud Computing Search Engine is the place where you will find relevant cloud computing information. Below is the list of the sites that we have included in the google custom search engine.

David Cloud Computing Podcast
Cloud Musings by Kevin L. Jackson
Mike D's Virtualization Blog
Reuven Cohen Blog
Cloudy Times
Thinking Out Cloud -- Perry's Blog
Cloud Computing Security
It Mgmt and Cloud Blog
The Wisdom of Clouds (out dated)
And of course the blog you are reading now.

I am open to submissions of other Cloud Computing, Virtualization, IaaS and other related topics Blogs or sites to be included in the custom search index. It is a great way of searching the topic you like with the sites you love.

Please send your comments and let me know what other sites we should include.

Zmanda partnering with Sun's Cloud?

noreply@blogger.com (G. Kiragiannis) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:53:00 +0000

In the first Sun Microsystems' press release, where they announced the new cloud offerings in the Cloud Expo 2009, they mentioned Zmanda, the open source backup solution, as their partner for their cloud backup system. Today during a conversation with a Zmanda representative, I inquire about their partnership with Sun's new cloud system. The company had no immediate response. I am specifically curious on how Zmanda will help backup MySQL, open source database engine, now that is owned by Oracle, not open source database engine.

Even though the markets of Oracle and MySQL are very different I will be curious to know what is their strategic thinking inside Sun/Oracle in regards their database engines. I have no idea, if the silence of Zmanda reresentative was related to the fact that he did not know how Zmanda was going to partner with Sun or if it has any relation with the idea of a cloudy horizon for our well appreciated Database Engine, MySQL.

If you have any ideas, or have read any official statement, please link them here. I will be interested to know.