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Google Fast Flip, a visual way to search google news

2009-09-15T04:53:02Z

Google Fast Flip is the latest experiment added to Google Labs. Google calls Fast Flip as a new reading experience combining the best of print and online worlds. Similar to a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially of recent news, headlines and popular feeds from individual top publishers. Google Fast Flip also offers personalized content and recommendations from friends and others from the community. Its available for a test drive here. It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft responds with possible integration of plex technology in bing search results in the future. The plex technology is available for a test drive for power point presentations here.

Amazon’s new data center in Oregon

2009-09-13T05:11:36Z

“Amazon.com has confirmed that a major data center under construction on the Columbia River in Oregon belongs to the company. Work at the site, however, has quietly come to a halt. Until now, Amazon’s involvement in the data center project at the Port of Morrow, a 9,000-acre industrial complex in Boardman, Ore., has been largely a matter of speculation. The company listed as the data center’s owner is Vadata Inc.,” reports Information Week. Complete article with pictures is available here.

Amazon introduces cloud management features

2009-05-19T03:09:21Z

Amazon announced three new features today that are mentioned below:

1. Elastic Load Balancing: Serves as a load balancer for distributing incoming traffic across EC2 instances and additionally increases the capacity (i.e. adds new instances) in response to incoming traffic. The load balancing of incoming traffic is done across EC2 instances in a single availability zone or multiple availability zones. The Elastic Load Balancer is charged at $0.025 per hour per instance plus $0.008 per GB of data transferred through it. “As an example, a medium-sized website running on 10 Amazon EC2 instances could use one Elastic Load Balancer to balance incoming traffic. If the Elastic Load Balancer ended up transferring 100 GB of data over a 30 day period, the monthly charge would amount to $18 (or $0.025 per hour x 24 hours per day x 30 days x 1 Elastic Load Balancer) for the Elastic Load Balancer hours and $0.80 (or $0.008 per GB x 100 GB) for the data transferred through the Elastic Load Balancer, for a total monthly charge of $18.80. Partial hours are billed as full hours.”

2. Amazon CloudWatch: Amazon CloudWatch provides comprehensive monitoring for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Elastic Load Balancing. Amazon CloudWatch is billed at a rate of $0.015 per hour for each Amazon EC2 instance that you wish to monitor. For example, if 10 Amazon EC2 instances are monitored 24×7 for 1 month, say 30 days then the CloudWatch cost would be $108. Also note that partial hours will be billed as full hours.

3. Auto Scaling: “Auto Scaling allows you to take a group of EC2 instances and set various parameters to have this group automatically increase or decrease in number. Auto Scaling can add or remove EC2 instances from that group to help you seamlessly deal with traffic changes to your application. Auto Scaling also monitors the health of each EC2 instance that it launches. If any instance terminates unexpectedly, Auto Scaling detects the termination and launches a replacement instance. This capability allows you to maintain a fixed desired number of EC2 instances automatically.” Auto Scaling is free to Amazon CloudWatch customers. However, each instance is auto enabled for monitoring and therefore CloudWatch monitoring charges will be applied.

Webspan integration service offers “any to any” integration

2009-05-06T05:06:32Z

Integration as a Service provider Hubspan partnered with IBM to offer integration platform as a service called Webspan. “WebSpan provides any-to-any integration, which means it works with all systems, protocols, content and applications, whether legacy, on-premise or SaaS-based. WebSpan enables companies to create affordable business community networks and to automate business processes.”

Softlayer’s CloudLayer, an alternative to Amazon cloud

2009-05-05T03:31:41Z

Softlayer, a Texas based on demand data center provider, announced today a line of cloud services called CloudLayer. CloudLayer comprises of four service offerings as described below:

CloudLayer Computing

An on demand compute environment similar to Amazon EC2. The CloudLayer computing is available with a minimum of a 2.0 GHz processor and offers a choice of operating system. CloudLayer computing supports full virtualization (i.e. storage, security and networking) using Citrix Xen Server and is available in the following capacity formats :

CloudLayer Cloud Delivery Network (CDN)

“CloudLayer CDN distributes content through a network with 21 nodes throughout the cloud, putting your content geographically closer to your end-users. This minimizes the distance the data has to travel, avoiding network traffic jams, decreasing latency, and improving the user experience. CloudLayer CDN includes robust tools for digital rights management and content monetization. CloudLayer CDN is available with two different distribution options:

1. Origin Pull —The first time content is requested, it’s pulled from the host server to the network and stays there for other users to access it until it’s automatically cleared 24 hours after the last demand for it.

2. POP Pull —Content is stored on all 21 nodes around the globe, remaining available “at the edge” of the network at all times.”

The plan for using Softlayer’s CDN is shown below.

CloudLayer Storage

CloudLayer storage competes with Amazon S3. However, it is completely different in its structure and operation. Unlike Amazon S3, CloudLayer offers a wide choice of access methods and devices such as of native Windows client or WebDAV access (Windows, Mac and Linux), rich Web 2.0 client, native applications for BlackBerry, iPhone, and Windows Mobile devices. CloudLayer Storage pricing is shown below.

SpringSource acquires Hyperic to make Java application management easier

2009-05-05T02:18:28Z

SpringSource, maker of the popular Spring framework, acquired Hyperic today. With this acquisition SpringSource completes the “Manage” phase in a typical application life cycle.

The Build Phase

SpringSource offers Spring framework that is widely used in building enterprise Java/JEE applications.

The Run Phase

SpringSource also contributes most of the bug fixes to Apache Tomcat meaning, it has a major role in the “run” phase for those enterprises using Tomcat.

The Manage Phase

Hyperic which is well known for its application monitoring and management products provide SpringSource with the ability to monitor, manage the applications deployed on these servers such as Tomcat or any other JEE server platforms. Hyperic’s monitoring and management products compete in the market segment consisting of the likes IBM Tivoli, HP Operations Manager and CA Unicenter among others. Hyperic through its product Hyperic Operations IQ, an application performance management product that correlates business and system metrics, can make life easier for managing and supporting Java enterprise applications. Hyperic Operations IQ competes directly with HP Operations Orchestration and VMWare’s Appspeed.

Other articles of possible interest:

Analysis of Oracle’s acquistion of Sun Microsystems

Cloud migration services: vSphere, C3, Cloud IQ Manager & Cloudkick

2009-04-26T23:12:24Z

Recently there has been some momentum in the migration of an application/service’s compute environment from one cloud (private or public) to another (in this context refers to a public cloud provider). Implementing such an architectural strategy of using multiple cloud providers makes sense in the events of:

1. Planning and execution of service resumption due to a disaster
2. Moving your business to a new cloud provider
3. Cost economics and flexibility in the context of moving a private enterprise cloud to public cloud when handling spikes in traffic among other reasons.

When a services’ compute environment is running on multiple clouds hosted by different providers then the immediate needs are:

1. How can such environments be managed efficiently?
2. How can applications or services be provisioned easily across cloud providers?

At last year’s VMWorld conference, VMWare and Citrix announced VDCOS (now called vSphere) and Citrix C3 that support application delivery and orchestration services for applications/services hosted in a cloud. (See my coverage here. The visual representation of this announcement and how this would fit into an enterprise is depicted in the architectural diagram above). In addition to vSphere and C3, there are two more great services: Appistry Cloud IQ Manager and Cloudkick, that attempt to answer these challenges of easy cloud management, service provisioning, cloud environment migration and configuration management (currently Appistry IQ Manager supports service provisioning, cloud environment migration and configuration management). Mentioned below is a brief summary of their offerings.

Cloudkick Offerings:

1. Cloudkick provides a single pane for server management called a virtual control center.
2. Alert when a server is unavailable. The delivery of alerts can be through email or voicemail.
3. Provides analytics on network bandwidth, load averages and other system related performance metrics.
4. Currently supports Amazon EC2 and Slicehost cloud providers. However, the company plans to add more providers to its list.
5. Service is Free.

Appistry Cloud IQ Manager Offerings:

1. Offers more powerful features such as migrate existing applications to be packaged and deployed to a cloud without rearchitecture.
2. Application life cycle management (i.e. start, stop and update) across multiple instances in a cloud.
3. Provides a single rich GUI based console to manage applications and the cloud.
4. Enables easy creation of private cloud environments.
5. Allows an API which can be integrated for alerting.
6. Currently supports cloud providers such as: Amazon, GoGrid and Skytap.

As TechcrunchIT mentions here “as technology companies roll out their cloud platforms, like Microsoft will be doing soon with its platform, Azure, and businesses begin to become increasingly reliant on the cloud, these management tools will become even more useful. And Cloudkick could gain good traction in this space if they integrate their application with more than just two types of platforms.” However, it makes me wonder when migrating from one public cloud to another, would the data transfer between them be optimal? In the event of a private cloud moving to a public cloud, such limitations can be addressed using, for example Citrix Repeater (formerly Citrix WANScaler).