AaronDelp.com

Citrix Synergy Keynote Live Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:11:00 +0000

Well, access has proved to be an issue (general wireless saturated, I have TWO MiFi's that both wouldn't work) so I'm writing this offline and will publish ASAP. Usual Live Blog disclaimer, this is me typing as fast as possible, probably spelling and formatting errors, please forgive that. Limited bandwidth so I'll add pictures a little later today as well.

Mark T (CEO is up) - introduction of Synergy 2013, packed crowd
Citrix Cloud Platform is up first, over 200+ production clouds, 40,000+ node scale, lots of references
Talks about CloudPlatform being based on Apache CloudStack, 35,000 community members, top level Apache project graduation fastest in history, most contributions of any Apache project
ShareFile - On-premise storage option, private and public cloud data storage, you choose where your data is stored
ANNOUNCE: ShareFile StorageZonce Connectors - application level connectors into the Enterprise
ANNOUNCE: Windows Azure support for ShareFile
MSFT update - 80% growth of XenDesktop on Hyper-V
A bunch of MSFT Windows 2012 and Windows 8 updates (too many and too fast to type)
Citrix Receiver for Windows 8 is out
Moving the Windows experience to a Mac is up next:
ANNOUNCE: Desktop Player for Mac - Run Virtual Desktops on the Mac, online, offline, encrypted, centrally controlled, tech preview coming next month
Cisco Partnership up next
XenDesktop on UCS is a large UCS use case (FlexPod as well)
Tighter Integration between Cisco and Citrix across the board in all product areas
NetScaler has taken off (MPX, VPX, SDX) as a replacement for Cisco ACE and joint interoperability and development coming in the future
Innovation Award: (videos shown of all the finalists, Miami Children's Hospital, USP - University of San Paulo, Essar) - Award goes to… USP for their use case of Cloud Platform and Cloud Portal!! Very exciting to see our customer receive this great reward. We are very proud of to partner with them to help them serve their customers, the students of the university!
Up Next: Going mobile
What is driving the industry? - Consumerization - Mobile devices and Bring Your Own Anything is taking over!
Generations - The next generations requires different access than the traditional IT would allow
Disruptions - self explanatory
The Pace - Everything is faster and at a greater magnitude in scope
Paradigm shift - "Don't Own Stuff" - more agile, more flexible because CAPEX and "stuff" isn't holding you back
"Move, Add, & Change" - How to move faster, change quickly, add and remove quickly. Orgs need to tackle this
for example 100,000 changes in an org cost 75 million once upon a time. now down to 25 million, savings and efficiency
It is all about Mobile Workstyles going forward
Up first, Windows Desktops still prevail in the Enterprise (about 85-90% today) - It is still a Windows world
What would XenDesktop and XenApp look like in a mobile cloud era? - Project Avalon -
ANNOUNCE: first release is called XenDesktop 7 - designed for simplicity and mobility
FlexCast - Windows Apps and Windows Desktops under one umbrella - FMA - Flexcast Management Architecture
1 package to download - automated installation and deployment
HDX Insight - end to end monitoring of HDX traffic
no more workload provisioning, app-by-app publishing, windows app migration (all about simplification of the operations and building)
HDX Mobile - HD video on any device, even over 3G, 100% increase in WAN efficiency, native mobile functions (access, device GPS, sensors, cameras, etc)
HDX mobile SDK for Windows Apps - take a .NET app, turn it into a Windows "Mobile" app through XenDesktop and XenApp, develop once and it will adjust to the device
Demo Time - Brad Petterson up to demo XenDesktop 7
Apps and Desktop provisioning all in one using Studio - showing Director with information from NetScaler and network traffic in real time. Shows XenApp/XenDesktop traffic, goes all the way to the app level, also shows a larger IT Support view that allows better troubleshooting across an entire org, shows an ability to assess and act on the infrastructure
Now demo of iPad mini connecting with Receiver to a Windows 8 virtual desktop, showing off the Windows 8 experience on an iPad mini, very fluid, flash video is seamless, also showing off a full screen movie streaming over the iPad
The redesign of Windows Apps is pretty cool to me, makes the VDI on a mobile device potentially less painful. Seems to be a natural progression
Up Next - Cloud Enable the CPU, GPU, Network and Storage
Delivering "intense" apps that would normally not be a candidate for delivery
Jen-Hsun Huang - CEO & Co-Founder of NVIDIA is up to talk about this
partnership has been around for along time, since 2006
talking about the "good old days" and how some projects actually failed over the years because the "cloud" wasn't ready for these intense workloads
Demo Time - Abode PhotoShop running on an iPad - pulls up a picture, using the GPU in the "cloud" to manipulate the picture in real time, shows very complex graphic manipulation in real time.
What about applications that have required the "big powerful workstations" until now because of the processing power required?
Talking about the design of the Boeing of 787, the databases on the back end (Data Gravity Again! Google It), made development around the world difficult
Instead using remote workstations driven by GPU's and only move the pixels, not the data
Showing various examples of apps running in realtime, actually showing a 4k video resolution file and editing in real time. Very cool
Now talking about how it happens on the back end. Virtualization of more than the CPU is required, we now need the GPU to be virtualized
New NVIDIA GPU's are designed with virtualization in mind, now integrated with virtualization
ANNOUNCE: virtual application running on a virtual desktop with a virtual NVIDIA GPU
Showing AutoCad, PLM (Manufacturing), vGPU remotely for the first time
Google Earth running on a virtual machine using a hand gesture technology (have to see it to explain it), Demo of hand gesture control of Google Earth in real time, really cool!!
It's called the NVIDIA GRID vGPU and is integrated into XenDesktop 7
Open GL Support, industry first direct GPU
Up Next - XenApp 6.5
Announce of Feature Pack 2 with many new features (too many to type here)
June will see shipping for both XenApp and XenDesktop
The world of apps is moving beyond Windows Apps
What about IOS, Android, mobile data?
3 big areas to mobile devices - devices + apps + data - need a strategy that takes both into account
Even if you take care of all three areas, the Experience is the most important factor
How do you deliver a consumer-like mobile experience at work?
3 things to do that - infrastructure to manage mobile lifecycle + mobile apple & data + developer tools and app ecosystem
XenMobile - How to deliver this - Provision, security, apps, and data to mobile devices
Want seamless windows integration
Worx Enroll - self-service device registration is the first step (provisioning)
Worx Home - Mobile settings, support, more (operations)
Demo Time - Showing of BYOD of an iPhone 5 using Worx Enroll and Worx Home
Enroll checks the device, checks if it is jailbroken (Boo!) and certifies the device
You then enroll and your "apps" are pushed to the device, Worx Home acts like a corporate app store, could be a desktop, an app, a mobile app, a file, etc.
XenMobile has GoToAssist built in for mobile device support in the Enterprise
Now sowing XenMobile admin UI, shows all devices in the enterprise with a very nice break down of the devices
This allows you as an admin to wipe the "business" side of the device
Now showing a new Samsung S4 and the Nokia with Windows 8, Android on a stick from Wyse
XenMobile is designed for the full mobile lifecycle
What about apps that talk to each other (copy, paste, etc)
You don't want salesforce data leaking out, evernote to contain confidential information for example, create a barrier between life and work
MDX Technology - Micro VPN and secure app containers, app specific lock and swipe, inter-app communication, conditional access policies
XenMobile now includes WorxMail (mail, calendar, contacts), WorxWeb, ShareFile as a "basis" for office communications
Demo Time - Showing email, have a sensitive email, can't open it or move it out of the app "container" but does it allow it on ShareFile
Showing another email with a link to the internal Intranet and it will fire up a micro-VPN and use WorxWeb to tunnel back
Showing an integration of ShareFile integrated with internal file shares on the intranet. Allows you to connect back to corp data on ShareFile along with document editing on the iPad
SharePoint connector into ShareFile - Pulls SharePoint into ShareFile, allows checkout of documents and editing with many SharePoint tracking features in place. Check back in with a Note as well
Podio - can now use the Chat API, (use GTM for real time interaction, Podio for team based actions), can also do video chat built into Podio with builtin one button, it uses HD Faces technology built into Podio
XenMobile has 3 version - MDM Edition, App Edition, and Enterprise Edition
Available in June
Worx App SDK - Worx Enable any mobile app
Also a Worx "App store" for IT to enable apps in the Enterprise
(NetScaler & wrap up content here but had some other things come up so missed them, sorry about that)

April Recap

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Mon, 06 May 2013 12:17:00 +0000

My trend of posting monthly recaps a few days late continues... Sorry about that, hopefully the May recap will be on-time. I was traveling most of April so the blogs this month tend to reflect that.

I'll start with the Cloudcast (.net) for the month of April. We published a record number of episodes. A HUGE thanks to both Amy Lewis and Brian Katz for their amazing contributions! Amy did a fantastic job as roving reporter and Brian's Mobilecast is really taking off! As always, please send us any show feedback, we love to hear from you!

The Cloudcast #81 - Data Gravity Meets Lean Analytics - w/ Dave McCrory & Alistair Croll
The Cloudcast #82 - SDN, Big Data, Internet of Things and What's Next - w/ Lew Tucker & Dave McCrory
The Cloudcast #83 - Accelerating Hybrid Cloud Options - w/ Rajeev Chawla
The Cloudcast #84 - Red Hat OpenShift - Are We There Yet? - w/ Diane Mueller, Ryan Jarvinen, Krishna Ramen

The Mobilecast #3 - Identity and Access Management - w/ Paul Madsen
The Mobilecast #4 - Data Categorization and Security - w/ Bill Pelletier
The Mobilecast #5 - App Development and Lessons Learned at Festo - w/ Steve Damadeo
The Mobilecast #6 - WiFi, Small Cells and Mobile - w/ Art King

Next up is my new TechTarget Blog, you have subscribed with your latest Google Reader replacement, right?? I'm really having a good time writing over there. This site (aarondelp.com) has always been more hands on and live blogs from events but the interest in the latest trends around Open Clouds and the operational aspects of cloud computing has been both great and humbling. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read the articles and provide feedback!

Will "THE CLOUD" Always Be Just Out of Reach? - My thoughts on why there is no silver bullet in the cloud computing world and why it all comes down to one thing: workload
Is PaaS the Gateway Tool for the Enterprise Cloud? - Will PaaS be the nudge the Enterprise needs to accelerate cloud adoption?
Impressions From The OpenStack Summit - Couldn't make the OpenStack Summit? Here are my thoughts
Expectations For the AWS Summit - Here is what I was looking for going into the AWS Summit
AWS Summit Wrap Up - My Summary of the AWS Summit event in San Francisco

The only blogging I was able to do on my site this month is Live Blogs from the AWS event. Here are all of them.

Thanks again for coming by and I'm looking forward to May!

AWS Summit Liveblog: RightScale - Hybrid IT Design

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:07:00 +0000

Usual Liveblog disclaimer: typing this as I go in the session, please excuse typos and formatting issues

Title: Hybrid IT - Steps to Building a Successful Model - presented by RightScale
Presenter: Brian Adler, Sr. Services Architect, RightScale & Ryan Geyer, Cloud Solutions Engineer

Brian is services, this won't be a product pitch ;)

RightScale is a CMP (Cloud Management Platform) - provides configuration management, an automation engine, as well as governance controls and does both public and on-premise clouds (I think the word private cloud must be on the naughty list at the show, all pitches do NOT use the dirty "p word")

RightScale allows management & automation across cloud resource pools

basic overview of terminology and where we have come in IaaS to Cloud Computing today

On-Premise Key Considerations

1. Workload and Infrastructure Interaction - what are the resource needs? Does this make sense in the cloud and which size instance would be best? Instance type is very important
2. Compliance - data may be contained on-prem for compliance
3. Latency - does the consumer require low latency for a good user experience
4. Cost - the faster it has to go (latency) the more expensive it will be in the cloud
5. Cost - What is the CAPEX vs. OPEX and does it make sense

Use Cases

1. Self-Service IT Portal (The IT Vending Machine) - Users select from fixed menu, for example, pre-configured and isolated test/dev

Demo Time - Showing off an example of a portal using the RightScale API's, basically push a big button, enter a few options, let it spin up an an environment, in this example they provisioned five servers and a php environment in a few minutes

2. Scalable Applications with Uncertain Demand - This is the typical web scale use case, fail or succeed very fast in the public cloud. "See if it stucks", once it sticks, maybe pull it in house if cost reduction can be achieved when the application is at steady state

3. Disaster Recovery - Production is typically on-premise and DR environment is in the cloud, this is often considered a "warm DR" scenario - replication in real time database from production to DR, all other servers are "down". You then spin up the other servers and the DB is already up and running, then flip the DNS entries over when DR is up and running. You can achieve an great RTO & RPO in this example. You can also do this from on AWS region to another.

Demo Time - Showing RightScale Dashboard with a web app demo + DR. Demo had 2 databases, master and slave replicating and in different regions (side discussions about WAN optimization and encryption here as well), Production in the example was in US-East AWS and DR was US-West AWS. The front end of the app was down in West. When you launch the West DR site, it will go and configure everything and automated as part of the server template. All DR happens just by turning up the front end in West

Design Considerations

Location of Physical Hardware- again speed vs. latency vs. location

Availability and Redundancy Configuration - This can be easy to hard depending on your needs

Workloads, Workloads, Workloads - Does the application require HA of the infrastructure? Will it tolerate an interruption? Can it go down? Will users be impacted?

Hardware Considerations - Do you need specialty? commodity?

(Sorry, he had others listed, I zoned out for a slide or two..)

On to Hybrid IT - Most customers start out wanting "cloud bursting" but most often an application is used in one location or the other. Check out the slide for the reasons.

Common practice is a workload is all on-premise or public. Burting isn't a common use case. If they do use bursting, they set up a VPC between private and public to maintain a connection.

Demo Time - What would a hybrid bursting scenario look like in the RightScale dashboard? Customer has a local cloud that is VPC connected to AWS. Load Balancers, one is private, one is in AWS. They are using Apache running on top of a virtual machine to maintain compatibility between private and public. DNS is using Route 53 (AWS DNS). RightScale uses the concept on an Array. As RightScale monitors the performance, additional instances are fired up and "bursted" or scaled out to AWS above and beyond the local already running resources.

You do not need the same LB's on the front end like the example above. For example could be in a local CloudStack/OpenStack environment with a hardware firewall in front but also include AWS and AWS ELB in the rules as well

Take Away - It is very possible to use both public and private and there isn't a need for a "one size fits all approach"

Great session, probably the best session of the day so far for me today.

AWS Summit Liveblog: Cloud Backup and DR

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:47:00 +0000

Usual Liveblog Disclaimer: This is type as fast as I can, blog may contain typing and formatting errors, sorry about that

Session: Technical Lessons on how to do Backup and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud (whew, long title)

Presenter: Simone Brunozzi, Technology Evangelist

Simone presented in the morning keynote on the Enterprise demo, good presenter

3 parts = HA -> Backup -> Disaster Recovery

HA = Keeping Services Alive

Backup = Process of keeping a copy

DR = Recover using a backup

(Simone has is using great examples using churches and monasteries but too long to type all of that out here.)

5 Concepts of DR

1. My backup should be accessible - AWS uses API's, Direct Connect, customer owns the data, redundancy is built it, AWS has import/export capabilities

AWS Storage Gateway as an example, using a gateway cache volume on-premise that will replicate to a volume in AWS public cloud, S3, snapshots, etc. Can be a GW-cached or GW-stored (one is a cache, the other is a full offline copy). Secure tunnel for transport over AWS Direct Connect or Internet

2. My backup should be able to scale - "Infinite scale" with S3 and Glacier, scale to multiple regions, seamless, no need to provision, cost tiers (cheaper options and at scale are available)

3. My backup should be safe - SSL Endpoints, signed API calls, stored encrypted files, server-side encryption, durability: multiple copies across different data centers, local/cloud with AWS Storage Gateway

4. My backup should work with my DR policy (I don't want to wait 10 years to recover) - easy to integrate within AWS or Hybrid, AWS Storage Gateway: Run services on Amazon EC2 for DR, cleat costs, reduced costs, You decide the redundancy/availability in relation to costs.

5. Someone should care about it - Need clear ownership, permission can be set in IAM with roles, monitor logs

Now a customer story:

Shaw Media - Canadian Media Company, before AWS - multiple datacenters, lot of equipment, downtime, different technologies across datacenters - they were told to change everything and become more agile and cost effective in the next 9 months to better serve the business

Solved the issue with AWS, fast deployment of servers, network rules, and ELB on AWS, first site in only 4 weeks, after that a full migration of 29 sites from a physical DC in 9 months - This was Phase one (This was main websites)

Phase Two - Other web services migration was next (check out the picture for the details), impressive stats. Typical web servers, apps servers, database servers, etc.

Lessons Learned - went to fast, didn't catch it... damnit

DR - Learn from your outages (test your policy on a regular basis and refine the document)

(Sorry, he's going to fast to type or even take pictures of the slides.... Really wish he would he gone slower in this section, the content was really good grrrrrrr)

Lessons to learn from DR

1. You NEED a DR plan in place - how will you recover? Can your business survive without it? For AWS, across Availability Zones (AZ's) or App DR with Standby (see pictures). The second option is cheaper to implement but will take a little longer to recover from.

Perform a business analysis of RTO & RPO (if you don't know what that is, Google it, you need to know what it is) In a nutshell, RTO, how long to get it back, RPO, how much data can I lose? This is the typical cost vs. performance trade off. Take the various AWS services as an example:

2. Test your DR - Many may say Duh! to this one but I'm always surprised how little customers actually do this. The ability to spin up capacity just for DR testing helps to minimize cost and the ability to not have a DR site to manage is pretty cool. Data Transfer speeds (Data Gravity) could be an issue in this kind of scenario

3. Reducing Costs - Took a screenshot, it was easier

Overall - great presentation although I wish he would have spent more time on the customer slides as there was some good technical content there...

AWS Summit Liveblog: Introducing AWS OpsWorks

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:20:00 +0000

Usual liveblog disclaimer, this could be messy, please excuse typos, sorry for that.

Chris Barclay, Product manager for AWS OpsWorks is presenting

Application Management Challenges - Reliability and Scalability are important, operations tasks typically: Provision, Deplot, etc.

"Once Upon a Time..." - We took the time to develop everything by hand (home made bread)

Today we need to automate to go faster (cranking out automation in a factory like, mass produced way)

In Today's infrastructure, everything is considered code, including the configuration of the "parts", sounds much like a recent Cloudcast we did...

AWS OpsWorks is a tool to tackle this challenge, very reliable and repeatable and integrated with AWS, at no additional cost

Why use OpsWOrks?
Simple, Productive, Flexible, Powerful, Secure

Common complaint was there are a lot of AWS "building blocks" but many don't want to stitch them together, AWS at times can be complex because of large number of services offered

Chris turned over the presentation over to another person (didn't catch the name) at DriveDev, DevOps consulting group, focus on F500 and startups

He talked about a typical "old school" application development that went poorly. They were able to use built in OpsWorks recipes with the addition of Chef Cookbooks on top of it. Took customer and migrated them off private and into public with OpsWorks in a short amount of time. Basically, they were a success...

How are customers using OpsWorks today?

From OS to application using OpsWorks, From OS to your code using beanstalk, From OS up and automate everything with Chef or another tool

Takeaway - It depends on how much automation you need and at what level and up depends on which tool will be best.

Demo Time...

Talking about Chef and how OpsWorks uses it

The concept of Lifecycle events, based on this a recipe is triggered

Showing integration with github, keeps source and cookbooks out on git

Chris did a creation of a stack, PHP app server layer with MySQL on top, then added instances and started them up (could change to multiple AZ's for HA at creation)

After this, there are builtin Chef recipes that can be used, you can also add your own if need additional functionality, can also add additional EBS volumes if needed, elastic IP's, IAM Instance profiles, etc.

Talked about a time based instance - an instance that only exists during certain times of day, also threshold instances that can be fired up as needed (scaling of an app server based on memory, CPU, network, etc)

Added the app from git onto the stack that was built

Chris went from here into deep level git items that were above me (I admit I'm not the target audience here). The take away, he made a change, committed the change, performed a deployment, looked very easy

Now on to Permissions - talking about various

What's next? More integrations with AWS resources (i.e. ELB features) - Deeper VPC, more built-in layers (go vote on their forums, they will prioritize by public opinion)

Summary: OpsWorks for productivity, control, reliability

AWS Summit Keynote Live Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:19:00 +0000

This is a live blog from the AWS Summit Keynote by Andy Jassy. The usual disclaimer applies, I'll be typing fast and furious so expect misspellings and some formatting errors. Also, no Internet in the keynote (MiFi or conference) so I'll be moving this over to the blog after the keynote.

There are a TON of people at the event (I'll see if they announce numbers but easily in the thousands), impressive

Intro videos going on now…

Andy Jassy in on stage - starts with the age of AWS, 7 years old, March 2006

Now digging into the breadth of the services - they are very proud of the pace of innovation (see pictures attached)

With the exception of 2010, they have doubled the number of services every year, up to almost 160 services available today

71 new features so far in 2013

9 regions, 25 availability zones, 39 edge locations - also talked about the GovCloud and the requirements on it to support Public Sector workloads

Amazon S3 - Over 2 Trillion objects, 1,100,000 peak requests/sec

He's firing facts and figures now so fast I can't keep up. Nothing but speeds and feeds and stats to impress. He's talking very fast

Talking about customers and user base

Use cases - talking about the use case is really abut building blocks and letting the developers decide how to stitch together the blocks, AWS was not going to dictate the use cases

Talking about security - security is number one priority at AWS, talking about features access control from the edge, dedicated instances, encryption, etc.

Certifications are more important than security - They are HIPPA, ISO, SOX, FISMA, etc.

Now moving on to pricing (he's talking really fast, no transition in between topics)

They plan to remove cost from process and pass on to customers, 31 price drops to date, the more customers they have, the better economy of scale, they consider this a "wheel" more customers drives price drops which brings in more customers

AWS Trusted Advisor - checks for cost optimizations, security and availability checks, performance recommendations (running on demand vs. reserved instances for instance), pretty cool stuff. I remember hearing about this but never dug into it. It appears they are trying to change the mindset about steady state apps, they have brought this up a few times that you can run steady state in cloud, but need to do it on a reserved instance.

Now on to partners (again, no real transition) - The usual impressive list of both consulting and technology partners

AWS Marketplace - Their "App Store", 25 categories, 778 product listings - applications already configured and certified on the AWS ecosystem

Why are customers adopting cloud computing? (finally, a real transition)

1. Trade Capital Expense (CAPEX) for Operating Expense (OPEX) - $0 to get started and can fail fast if needed

2. Lower Variable Expense than most companies can do in house - they mention again how large they are and the economies of scale to pace on t customers (seems to be their new message) - They appear to be positioning themselves as the "Walmart of the Cloud" - Low Price Leader and pass savings on to you

3. You Don't Need to Guess Capacity - Talking about the typical predict up front model, what happens if you build it and nobody comes? What happens if too may people come? If the infrastructure is elastic no need for this planning and predictive step

4. Dramatically Increase Speed and Agility - Old World server request, usually takes weeks to get servers for development, AWS takes minutes and is all self service - compares development to invention, need to perform a lot experiments, need to experiment and fail with little to no cost or collateral damage, speeds up development

5. Stop Spending Money on the Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting - They do all the "infrastructure stuff" for you, talking about how the infrastructure typically doesn't differentiate your business in anyway but it also consumes a lot of resources in operations.

6. Go Global in minutes - Because of Regions and Availability Zones the ability to scale and go grow to a different region is much easier. No need to set up operations in another area of the world

Message is very Enterprise centric (no surprise there)

Sean Beausoleil is on stage now - lead engineer for Mailbox - 2 years ago - talking about their first product, it worked but wasn't "sticky" enough, the reason was because email still held most user's data. How to tackle the mailbox as a better tool and task management

Now a video about Mailbox uses - In case you haven't tried it, Mailbox basically turns your mail into a to-do list. They were overwhelmed with the response to the initial movie that was release as a preview. They needed a massively scalable back end to support. The product pulls from IMAP -> Cloud -> to device (see picture)

They knew they would need a massive backend on AWS, they copied their existing system to AWS, they found a lot of bottlenecks in the app as they scaled up in testing. They were able to test AHEAD of production. Some components of the app were rewritten. That is why the introduced the reservation system some of you that got the app may have seen. (I was on that list)

The created the reservation system so they could scale over time until they were sure they could scale. Even all this preparation didn't prepare them for the growth. They were handling 100 Mil emails a day in 2 months from launch. They are able to re-architect on the fly, comment was "you can't predict what production will look like until you are in production". I couldn't agree more based on past experience

AWS allowed them to optimize and scale and perform swaps of hardware instance sizes on the fly to balance the usage against the costs. They would model the workload and perform swaps of hardware seamlessly in the background with no downtime. I have to admit, that is pretty frckin cool.

Andy is back - AWS adoption into the Enterprise is the topic now

Andy is now talking about how most "old guard" are pushing for private cloud. He states none of the 6 points above are available in private cloud. He says old guard is high margin business that isn't the same as AWS. He is now talking about a balance of "old" on premise resources and new cloud era workloads - talking about Amazon Direct Connect, LDAP integration, VPC, etc. Says these tools to move from on-premise enterprises are the focus going forward. Mentions BMC and CA as partners in the future for single plane of glass management

How are Enterprises using AWS?

Strategy 1: Cloud for Development and Test - first and most common use case

Strategy 2: Build New Apps for the Cloud - this is the next generation of applications. Retire the old and create new apps, faster to build, less expensive to run, easier to manage, etc

Strategy 3: Use Cloud to Make Existing On-Prem Apps Better - Take in house apps and outsource the analytics for example for processing in the cloud. They mentioned a few enterprises including Nasdaq that do this today

Strategy 4: New Cloud Apps the Integrate Back to On-prem systems - AWS serves up the front end and the processing is on the back end on-prem

Strategy 5: Migrate Existing Apps to Cloud - he admits this is emerging and often requires consulting services, taking that very traditional workload and move it to the cloud

Strategy 6: All in - NETFLIX! No keynote is complete with out them…

Now up - Demo of Enterprise and cloud by Simone (need his name)

They want to show you how AWS is relevant in the Enterpise

3 parts - Authentication, Integration, Migration

Authentication - Talking about Okta, an AD integration partner, brings AD into the AWS, Created an AWS Admins group in AD and it will talk to AWS IAM and preform the changes to needed to access AWS - AWS admin rights

Integration - Storage Gateway for Backup and Recovery Volumes - volume on premise - replicates to S3, replication of data happens, stand up an EC2 instance and attach to the volume on AWS if needed - talked about iSCSI targets and how to attach them (that brings back memories). Once this is done you could map back to on-premise (little fuzzy on the details)

Migration - Talking about moving export an image from VMware vCenter on-premse, transfer to AWS as an image (AMI). From there you can copy to another region. the example here is move to USA first and then transfer to Singapore. I admit the use case of moving region to region is really cool.

Talking again about the perception of AWS and the Enterprise. The is obviously a focus.

What ar ether working on next? Amazon VPC is a focus (to continue to build the Enterprise), Direct Connect, Amazon Route 53 (DNS Services)

I'm actually gonna bail on the rest of this so i can go get a seat in the labs before they fill up. (Scratch that, line is so long for the labs they are useless)

They appear to be positioning themselves as the "Walmart of the Cloud" - Low Price Leader and pass savings on to you. Key message also was to recognize that Enterprise will continue to use on-premise

Summary - Good stuff, it is good to hear them focus on the Enterprise and do it an a way that isn't as in your face as it was at the AWS:ReInvent conference.

March Recap

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:02:00 +0000

This post is a few days late but I wanted to put together a recap of everything that has been happening in March. To say March was a busy month was an understatement! I'm not sure how much content I'll be able to post here in April as I have two speaking engagements to prepare for and I have decided I'm going to transition this blog away from Blogger and Feedburner to a WordPress hosted site. Look for the new site probably sometime in late May based on my schedule right now.

March was our busiest month in recent memory at The Cloudcast (.net). We published seven podcasts in March including the beginning of our expansion plans with our first podcast branch, the Mobilecast, as well as our first in a series of guest hosts, the always awesome Amy Lewis at Cisco. Our goal for 2013 is to extend our reach into areas people have told us they want as well as some new faces to the podcast. Please tell us what you think!

The Cloudcast #76 - Bringing Depth to PaaS for Real World Deployments
The Cloudcast #77 - OpenStack, PaaS APIs, Platform Tools, Automation & News
The Cloudcast #78 - Open Source Software 101
The Cloudcast #79 - DevOps Evolution and the Phoenix Project
The Cloudcast #80 - Regional Cloud Madness

The Mobilecast #1 - A Year of Going Mobile
The Mobilecast #2 - Health, Fitness and Wearable Computing

In addition to this blog I have also been asked to blog about Cloud Computing over at Tech Target. I have a pretty extensive consulting and operations background so I have been asked to think about cloud computing from an operations standpoint. I'm aiming for at least one blog a week over there. Please head on over and subscribe to the blog! I met my goal in March, here are links:

What Happens When Your Cloud Goes Away?
Cloud Applications and Vanishing Software Generations
Will Clouds Ever Be Open?
Impacts of Cloud Workload Consolidation

Last (but not least!) on this site I published two articles, one on the NYC Cloud Computing Meetup I attended and a new semi-regular news link round up I plan to do.

NYC Cloud Computing Meetup Recap
In Case You Missed It #1

As always, thanks to everyone for coming by and look for big changes coming "soon"!

NYC Cloud Computing Meetup Recap

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:26:00 +0000

Last week I was able to attend the New York City Cloud Computing Meetup. It was a very cool event and Joe Brockmeier presented Deploying Apache CloudStack from API to UI.

Deploying Apache CloudStack from API to UI from Joe Brockmeier

Joe did an awesome job (as always) and the meetup was nicely attended, I would estimate about 40-50 people were in the room. Here are a few random thoughts and impressions in no particular order:

The session was very interactive. It took the crowd a little bit to come out of their shell but once they did the discussion was very free form and constructive
The level of questions were very good. Many were about how to implement and architecture related questions about specific features. Snapshots in particular generated a lot of discussion on slide 26. It appears we are starting to move beyond the basic cloud definitions and into the nitty gritty of implementations
There were customers in the room and they greatly helped with the discussions (Thanks Jeff @ DataPipe!). It was great to hear how their real world experiences were put to use and how they were able to tackle some of the issues and concerns brought up
I like how Joe started with some features of the NIST definition and then added an additional point (see slide 4). I agree with Joe that API access is crucial going forward
Slide 15 (the architecture overview) generated a lot of real world discussion in the room that I believe was very helpful to everyone

All in all a great event!

In Case You Missed It #1

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:15:00 +0000

I'm going to try something new and see how this works. I read a LOT of Cloud Computing news. When I was speaking on a panel recently I was asked afterwards why I don't share a lot of the news I find interesting and thought provoking. Great question and here is an initial attempt to do just that.

Below is a list of articles I found interesting over the last two weeks and some commentary on what I see going on in the industry. I'm still not 100% on the format so let me know what you like and want to see changed.

Events & Misc. Links

Portability: No Snowflakes For You - David Nalley put together an awesome post on how thinking about portability and how you may be doing it wrong. Best article I've read in awhile and addresses a concern I see over and over again.
AWS Summit 2013 Announced - I'll be attending the San Francisco event as well as the Boot Camps and hope to blog while I'm there
Monkigras 2013 Videos Posted - If you want to see some awesome presentations, go check this out. A must attend event to say the least
The first Triangle (as in the Raleigh & RTP area) OpenStack Meetup is this week
Simon's On Structure - Another great and thought provoking article by Simon. Are you a Pioneer, Settler, or City Planner?
Bay Area CloudStack Meetup Recap
Apache CloudStack Weekly Update - I subscribe to the AWS, OpenStack, and CloudStack Weekly Updates so I can follow as much as possible. The CloudStack Weekly Update is new so I wanted to highlight it here
RightScale first to sell Google Compute - GigaOm & DataCenter Dynamics Links

Amazon News
Amazon continues to steam ahead but the last few announcements have been very interesting. In their quest to add more value (and lock-in) to their ecosystem, a bunch of small companies with products built around their cloud were put on notice. How does a small startup compete with AWS when they decide to move into that space? Time will tell...

Amazon OpsWorks - Build "stacks" and deploy apps easily
AWS Diagnostics for Windows Servers - AWS pushes into the Enterprise by showing Windows more love
AWS Trusted Advisor & GigaOm Article - Free trial announced, I see a lot of "little guys" impacted by this one

Open Compute
One big OpenStack story to focus on from yesterday, IBM going "all in" with OpenStack. I saw this one coming a mile away. Even though I'm now employed by one of the vendors I posted about I still contend that it depends on which vendors show up to the OpenStack Party. As an outsider looking in it appears HP is "phoning it in" (and a lot of people are leaving), while IBM and RedHat are getting serious.

IBM Goes All-In on OpenStack - Wired and All Things D Links

VMware

Beating up VMware has become the cool thing to do. I joked about it on Twitter but I believe the VMware's message from PEX (VMware Partner Exchange) last week sent the wrong message the same way I felt AWS sent out some bad mojo at their conference late last year. The big guys tend to approach this as all or nothing and everyone else is the enemy (it's their job, don't blame them) but most customers I talk to don't see it this way at all.

James Staten on VMware's Innovator's Dilemma
Randy Bias' Analysis of VMware's situation - Randy is Cloudcast Alumni and love him or hate him, he will always tell you his opinion

ApacheCon LiveBlog: Software Defined Networking (SDN) in CloudStack

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 22:16:00 +0000

This is a live blog from ApacheCon that I'm attending this week. This session is with Chiradeep Vittal.

Usual Live Blog Disclaimer: This is more of a brain dump typing as fast as I can, please excuse typos, format, and coherent thought process in general.

Introduction is about how does Amazon built a cloud (see his previous session for this part)
SDN Definition - Separation of Control Plane from the hardware performing the forwarding hardware - Also centralized control
Central control eases configuration, troubleshooting, maintain over time
Eliminates the tedious "log into every box" idea of network maintenance, log into controller
OpenFlow is that SDN? - NO, it is a protocol for the control plane to talk to the forwarding elements
Control is on the "top" and forwarding is on the "bottom"
flexibility example, different route based on direction. Box A and Box B, different flow from A to B and B to A if needed
IaaS and SDN go hand in hand - Agility, API configuration, Scalability, Elasticity (all the ity's!)
SDN enables virtual networking - the illusion of isolated networks on a physical wire
SDN does have issues - Discovery of virtual addresses -> physical address mapping for instance
He is now going over a multi-tenant topology example:

CloudStack model - map virtual networks to physical network - define and provision networks and manage elasticity and scale
CloudStack Network Model is very robust (see pic, too much to type, things in box tend to be SDN functions)

How de we put this together?
CloudStack Service Catalog - Cloud users don't see the "guts" of the configuration, the cloud admin or operator designs the service catalog and presents this to the users

example - Gold Network - LB + FW + VPN using virtual appliances
Platinum - LB + FW + VPN but using hardware devices

Now going over topology example of the Gold offering & Platinum (uses Juniper firewall and Netscaler to Load Balance:

In both examples the users has no idea if they are on the Gold or Platinum network
Multi-Tier virtual networking - can define application tiers and isolate based on need as well, who is connected where
Orchestration - He went through the Multi-Tier example and demonstrated all the steps that would have to be down manually (too many to list) and this will all be done through orchestration
CloudStack Orchestration Architecture (see picture) - plugin Framework allows this to happen

SDN works with CloudStack through the plugin model, the SDN controller talks to the plugin, today there is integration with Nicira NVP, BigSwitch, Midokura, and CloudStack Native (requires XenServer)

CloudStack Native Controller uses GRE and and talks to Open vSwitch on the XenServer
All isolation happens through the concept of a tenant key over the GRE tunnels. Each tenant has a unique key
What makes the CloudStack controller different?

It is purpose built for IaaS and is not a general purpose SDN solution
Proactive model - Deny all flows except ones programmed by the end-user API - others send to central controller and may have problems at scale
Use the CloudStack virtual router to provide L3-L7 services (mainly because most hardware doesn't understand GRE today)

ApacheCon LiveBlog: Powering CloudStack w/ Ceph RBD

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 19:47:00 +0000

This is a live blog from ApacheCon that I'm attending this week. This session is with Patrick McGarry.

Usual Live Blog Disclaimer: This is more of a brain dump typing as fast as I can, please excuse typos, format, and coherent thought process in general.

(No title slide picture this time - missed it)

What is Ceph - storage that does object, block, and file all in one; block is thin provision, snapshots, cloning - object has REST API
RADOS (Google it) object store at the lowest level
Why Object at the lowest level - more useful than blocks, single namespace, scales better, simple API, workload is easily parallel
Because of this: define a pool (1 to 100's), independent namespaces and object collections
(Topic change) - Architecture
aggregate a bunch of different machines so that you can have a "large enough" front end to handle large number of requests in
In this "pile" you will have monitors. Monitors provide consensus for decisions, always an odd number, do not store data (traffic controllers) to the storage nodes (OSD nodes)
On an OSD node -> physical disk -> file system -> OSD layer
CRUSH - pseudo-random placement algorithm for data placement, CEPH "secret sauce", allows for stable mapping and uniform distribution with additional ruled configuration (can apply weights, topology rules)
How does it work, take an object, talk to monitors, CRUSH breaks it up, places it around according to the rules
What happens when something breaks? If an OSD node is lost, the ones with the copy of the data replicates the blocks somewhere else according to CRUSH rules and moves on
How to talk to it? LIBRADOS - library for RADOS, support for C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP
Also RADOSGW - Rest gateway compatible with S3 & Swift
CEPH FS - A POSIX-compliant distributed file system with a Linux kernel
RBD - reliable and fully-distributed block device sitting on top of the object store
RADOS Block Device (RBD) - storage of disk images in RADOS, allows decouple of VM from the host, images stripped across the pool, snapshots, copy-on-write clones
What does this look like? vm's are now split across the cluster, great for large capacity as well as high I/O instances of vm's
same model as Amazon EBS
it is a shared environment, so you can migrate running instances across cluster
Copy-On-Write Cloning (he gets lots of question on this) - think of a Golden Image Master vm and you want 100 copies - You spin the 100 instantly and it takes up additional storage as needed and the vm's grow.
Question: Is there a performance impact to this? A: No, but as usual it depends on the architecture (how many devices are hitting it)
CloudStack 4.0 and RBD? via KVM, no Xen or VMW support today
Live migrations are supported
No snapshots yet
NFS still required for system vm's
Can be added easily as RBD Primary storage in CloudStack
snapshot and backup support should be coming in version 4.2, cloning is coming, support for secondary storage in 4.2 (backup storage is coing in 4.2)

ApacheCon LiveBlog: DevCloud - A CloudStack SandBox

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 19:08:00 +0000

This is a live blog from ApacheCon that I'm attending this week. This session is with Sebastien Goasguen.

Usual Live Blog Disclaimer: This is more of a brain dump typing as fast as I can, please excuse typos, format, and coherent thought process in general.

Today's talk will focus on DevCloud and CloudMonkey
Sebastien giving overview of IaaS market in general. He was actually an OpenNebula guy prior to CloudStack
With IaaS setting up a virtual sand box can be tricky since there are a larger number of moving parts: hypervisors, storage, networking
DevOps - quick introduction to DevOps to help everyone understand why this is such a big movement in the industry right now (bringing development coser to the operations)
This helps us set up an environment to enable a software defined datacenter that allows for automation at all levels
Now talking about ASF (Apache Software Foundation) and CloudStack. He has a LOT of analysis around the community. The growth once joining as an incubation project shows a HUGE spike (CloudStack is now the #1 Apache project when it comes to commits)
On to the internals of CloudStack, goal is to be as agnostic as possible (multi-hypervisor, both block and object storage)

Network tends to be the most challenging for new folks (firewall, load balancing, basic networking vs. advanced networking, VPN, etc.) - See the bottom line on the picture above
Apache 4.0 was released in November, 4.01 was just released, 4.1 set for March. Goal is new release every six months
Architecture -> Zone(datacenter) -> Pods(rack) -> Cluster (hosts) -> primary & secondary storage -> Instance (virtual machines)
Centralized management server - can be multiple management servers behind a load balancer and replicated MySQL for large scale

system vm's are used to communicate from the management server to some features (firewall, secondary storage, etc.)
(Topic change) - What is DevCloud - CloudStack in a box, aimed at developers but can be a local EC2/S3 "cloud in a box"
self contained - cloudstack management server, ttyllinux (to stay small), system vm's, MySQL, interface all on one laptop - on a beefy laptop expect a good number of instances
What is CloudMonkey - cloudstack CLI - great for auto-completion of features, tabular output, help, scriptable, shell interaction, etc.
Intro - Launch CloudMonkey, you now have a shell to talk to your cloud, need to do a key exchange, then ready to access your devCloud instance
Demo Time - He is running VirtualBox on a Mac Book Air, he is using a NAT interface, forwarding a few ports needed (8080, 2222, 8443, 5901, 7080) - The vm uses nested vm's to launch inside the virtual machine on the laptop
2nd Demo - He is running the 4.01 release on his laptop directly from the sourcecode instead of the devcloud vm as well.
Back to DevCloud - He shows the system vm's up and running and an instance that is halted.
Went into Web UI - Gave an overview of the Infrastructure, you will have a zone and pod that is defined (named devlcoud), from there a single host as well
Secondary storage - NFS storage is built in and emulated, primary storage is "local". No need to stand up an external NFS service
templates - the system vm's and the small linux template are already included.
Sebastien went through creation of a new instance using the included tiny instance and shows everything spinning up.
You can take snapshots (saves to secondary storage)
The first time a template is used it is pulled from secondary storage and copied down to primary storage
Global Settings - EC2 API feature turn on if you want to run EC2 commands against it
Now going over CloudMonkey features
First thing, set the API key (get this from the UI)
Now you can do common tasks (list virtual machines, start/stop virtual machines, etc.)
Another way to use DevCloud: different network type, 2 vNICS, one host only and one NAT
Build it from source (need Maven dependencies), deploy the database, basically build it yourself. Because you build it this way, there are no zones, pods, etc. You build everything yourself.
One thing you can do with this is build your entire infrastructure from scripts. This allows you to test build process of CloudStack for replication. This is a very powerful use case!

Really great presentation and great overview to those new to CloudStack and DevCloud!

ApacheCon LiveBlog: Object Storage with CloudStack & Hadoop

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 23:26:00 +0000

How does Amazon build a cloud:

Commodity Hardware -> OpenSource Xen Server -> AWS Orchestration Software -> AWS API -> Amazon eCommerce Platform
How would YOU build the same cloud on CloudStack - You can in much the same way: Hardware -> Hypervisor -> CloudStack -> API -> Customer Solution

CloudStack is built in the concept of a Zone (much like an AWS Zone)

Under the zone is a logical unit of Pods (think of it as a rack)

Secondary Storage is used for Templates, snapshots, etc. (items that are storage and not changed often, need to be shared across pods)
Cloud Style Workloads = low cost, standardized hardware, highly automated & efficient (it's the Pets vs. Cattle analogy)
At scale, everything breaks eventually
Regions and Zones - Region "West", hope a Region will not go down when another Region goes down. - Replication from one Region to another Region is the norm
Secondary Storage in CloudStack 4.0 today

NFS is the server default - mounted by any CloudStack Hypervisor, easy to set up
BUT - doesn't scale well, "chatty", maybe need WAN optimize. What if 1000 hypervisors talk to one NFS share?
At large scale NFS shows some issues
One solution is use object storage for secondary storage

Object Storage has redundancy, replication, auditing built in to the technology typically
In addition, this technology enables other applications, API server in front of the object store and you know have "Dropbox", etc. typically static content and archival kinds of applications
Object is 99.9 availability and 99.(eleven 9's) durability according to Amazon S3 and Massive scale (1.3 trillion objects in AWS today serving 800k requests per second
Scalable objects can not be modified, only deleted (called an Immutable object)
Simple API with a flat namespace - think KISS princisple
CloudStack S3 API Server - understands Amazon S3 API with a Pluggable BackEnd, default backend is a POSIX filesystem (not very useful in production), Carringo was mentioned as a replacement, also HDFS replacement
Question - Does CloudStack handle all the ACL's / Answer: Yes
FollowUp - Does that mean SQL Server is a possible constraint / Answer: Yes
Integrations are available with Riak CS and OpenStack Swift
Upcoming in CloudStack 4.2 - Framework to expand this much more
Given all of this, what could we build? (Topic switch)
Want an Open Source, scales to 1 billion objects, reliability & durability on par with S3, S3 API
This is now a theoretical design (hasn't been tested)
(See picture for architecture)

Hadoop meets all of these requirements and is proven to work (200 million objects in 1 cluster, 100PB in 1 cluster), need to scale, just add a node, very easy
BUT - Name Node Scalability (at 100's of millions of blocks, could run into GC issues), Name Node is a SPOF (Single Point of Failure) - this is being worked currently, Cross Zone Replication (Hadoop has rack awareness, what if further apart?) - this isn't really tested today, where do you store metadata (ACL's for instance)
take a 1 billion objects example (bunch of assumptions here) - needs about 450GB per name node, 16TB / note = 1000 data nodes
Name Node management is federated (sorry this is vague, getting beyond my knowledge of Hadoop architecture at this point). Name Node and HA really hasn't been tested to date
NameSpace shards, how do you shard them? Do you need a DB just to store this?? What about rebalancing between node names?
Replication over lossy/slower links (solution really breaks down here today)

Async replication - how do you handle master/slave relationships?
Sync - not very feasible if you lose a zone (writes never acknowledged so will not continue)

Where do you store Metadata?

Store in HDFS along with the object, reads become expensive and meta data is mutable (needs to be edited), needs a layer on top of HDFS
Use another storage system (like HBase) - required for Name node federation anyway, but ANOTHER system to manage
Modify the Name Node to store the metadata

high performance (doesn't exist today)
not extensible and not easy to just "plug in"

What can you do with Object Store in HDFS today?

Viable for small size deployments - up too 100-200 million objects (Facebook does this) with datacenters close together
Larger deployments needs development and there is really no effort around this today

ApacheCon LiveBlog: CloudStack Top 10 Network Issues

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 20:31:00 +0000

This is a live blog from ApacheCon that I'm attending this week. This session is by Kirk Kosinski.

Usual Live Blog Disclaimer: This is more of a brain dump typing as fast as I can, please excuse typos, format, and coherent thought process in general.

Kirk was an original cloud.com support engineer so he has seen a LOT over the years
# 1 Issue - VLANS! - biggest single reason for issues in CloudStack, check switch misconfiguration (Are all VLANs trunked by default?)

Does DHCP work for a certain number of the VMs? Lead indicator of this problem, vm's are running on the same host but the VLANs are messed up
So many reasons why VLANs could be a problem, this can be very hard to troubleshoot depending on the complexity of your environment (firewalls, layers of switches, etc)

#2 - Hypervisor problems - mostly network related again - NIC drivers, bonding (especially Xen), cabling, etc.

don't try to manually hack your management server database!

#3 Open vSwitch on XenServer - It is the default now. Make sure you run the latest patches!
#4 Security Groups - KVM, works out of the box most of the time, Xen, must enable Linux bridge back-end, must install Cloud Supplemental Pack (XS < 6.1), doesn't work on vSphere currently
#5 Host Connectivity - between hypervisors to system vm's and secondary storage
#6 CloudStack "Physical Networks" - not necessarily "physical", traffic labels - multiple NICS, etc.
#7 Console Proxy virtual machine - Connectivity from management server to end users web browser

check realhostip.com connection, check SSL cert status

#8 Templates - was it eth0 and you are now using eth1?, sysprep for Windows errors
#9 Password Reset Feature - reset script problems, check DHCP client & version

Daemon Problems - check 8080/tcp on virtual router (socat process, stop and restart)

#10 User and Meta-Data - Start/Stop vm, Start/Stop virtual router, Destroy/Recreate virtual router, check management-server.log

ApacheCon LiveBlog: CloudStack's Plugin Model

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 19:30:00 +0000

This is a live blog from ApacheCon that I'm attending this week. This session is by Don Lafferty.

Usual Live Blog Disclaimer: This is more of a brain dump typing as fast as I can, please excuse typos, format, and coherent thought process in general.

Open Source Community Leadership Drives Enterprise-Grade Innovation is the opening bullet

Of course, CloudStack's plugin model permits this!

This presentation will be a case study for the addition of Hyper-V as a newcomer (meaning Don is a new comer) support into CloudStack - This shows where Don is coming from and challenges as he is getting started in this ecosystem
To be able to learn to plugin to CloudStack, you need to break it into pieces to make the learning curve more manageable: Hardware management (provisioning plugins), CloudStack Orchestration, Adapters (to bridge Orchestration & Provisioning) & Framework
Plugin serves two masters: Server component (java, adapter API's, RESTful API's, etc.) & Server Resource (Agent Proxy i.e KVM or Direct Connect i.e. Xen)
Follow the Apache Process for New Features:

Announce over mailing list
Publish Spec & Design
JIRA Ticket
Setup Dev Environment
Branch on github, use your own public branch
Submit changes to Review Board

Decide which wiki you want to use: Incubator Wiki (cleaner, simpler or CloudStack Wiki (more in depth, harder to new comers) - DO NOT use the pre-Apache wiki!
Don recommends breaking the project into small steps to start just to learn the Apache process. Once you have the process down, then move onto more complex development
For the Hyper-V example he broke this into Phase 1 (talk over Message Bus to talk to an agent) and Phase 2 (WS-Management to the WMI layer)
Reuse and Repurpose rather than Rewrite! (There is a ton of CloudStack code that exists, use it!)
Don discusses Phase One - He borrowed code from the KVM version of the agent and communicated over the message bus and combined with code from the Hyper-V plugin for OpenStack
Don went into some code examples and command examples - over my head :) - Take away, how do you want to structure the "conversation" between the management server and the agent.
Pay attention the development mailing lists and see if a development trend helps solve your issue. (i.e. NFS to secondary storage in CloudStack, Hyper-V of course prefers an SMB connection, there was a project already going on to make this happen so no need to do that code)
Make Preparations for IP Clearance - These things take time and need to make sure the source code can be donated to the Apache Foundation to make sure everything is kosher from a legal standpoint.
Session wrapped up with Q&A around how much of the learning curve is Apache related vs. CloudStack related. It is a "two headed monster" to get going. You have to learn the process and you have to learn the product. They go hand in hand.

List of Cloud & Vendor Events for 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:49:00 +0000

I've been doing a little bit of advance planning for 2013. I will by no means be attending everything here but since it was a pretty long list I figured I would publish it for others so you might find some benefit as well. If you have some additions or I left things out, leave me a comment and I'll update! Thanks!

Cloud Computing Events

CloudExpo Europe - London (1/29-1/30)
ApacheCon - Portland (2/24 - 3/2)
O'Reily Strata - Santa Clara (2/26-2/28)

SXSW Interactive - Austin (3/8-3/12)

Cloud Matters - Banff, Alberta, Canada (3/11-3/12)
Cloud Camp - Boston (3/12)

Cloud Connect - Santa Clara (4/2-4/5)
OpenStack Design Summit - Portland (4/15-4/19)

OpenCloudConf - (Not scheduled yet? Was first week of May in 2012)

Interop - Las Vegas (5/6-5/10)
CloudCon Expo - San Francisco (5/14-5/15)
Gluecon - Broomfield, CO (5/21-5/23)

Cloud Expo - NYC (6/10-6/13)

Interop - Tokyo (6/12-6/15)

GigaOm Structure - San Fran - (6/19-6/20)

O'Reily Velocity - Santa Clara (6/18-6/20)

O'Reily Oscon - Portland (7/22-7/26)
BriForum US - Chicago (7/30-8/1)

Interop - NYC (9/30-10/4)

O'Reily Strata Europe - (No date yet, was first week in Oct for 2012)

GigaOm Structure - Amsterdam - (10/15-10-16)

OpenStack Design Summit - (Not scheduled yet? Was mid-October in 2012)
Cloud Connect - Chicago (10/21-10/24)

O'Reily Strata + Hadoop World - NYC (10/28-10/30)

Cloud Expo - Santa Clara (11/4-11/7)
Defrag - Broomfield, CO (Not scheduled yet? Was mid-November in 2012)

Vendor Sponsored Events

Cisco Live - London (1/28-2/1)

Opscode ChefConf - (4/24-4/26)
EMC World - Las Vegas (5/6-5/9)

NetApp Insight - Las Vegas (not announced yet, typically early May)

Citrix Synergy - Anaheim (5/22-5/24)

Microsoft TechEd - New Orleans (6/3-6/6)
Red Hat Summit - Boston (6/10-6/14)
Cisco Live - Orlando (6/23-6-27)

PuppetConf - San Francisco (8/22-8/26)
VMworld - San Francisco (8/26-8/29)

VMworld - Europe (Mid-October usually, not announced yet)

Citrix Synergy - Europe (end of October usually, not announced yet)

NetApp Insight - Europe (not announced yet, typically mid-November)

Amazon AWS re:Invent - (no date yet, end of November in 2012)

NetApp Insight - Asia (not announced yet, typically mid-December)

Help the Cloudcast Give Back!

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 21:30:00 +0000

In case you haven't already heard on our podcast, the Cloudcast (.net) is raising money for the North Carolina Children's Home. We're doing it in a slightly unusual way, by running the Krispy Kreme Challenge. We'll be taking video, maybe wearing costumes, eating lots of doughnuts, and hopefully keeping them all down. If you would like to support us head on over to our page and we will match any donation!! Check out the video below from last year's race to check out the craziness. Thank you!!!

Links to Everything CloudStack Collaboration Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 07:44:00 +0000

Lions and Tigers and CloudStack Monkeys Oh My!

This weekend the first ever Apache CloudStack Collaboration Conference was held in Las Vegas! A HUGE thanks to David Nalley, Karen Vuong & Joe Brockmeier for pulling off such an incredible event! If you thought the cloud wasn't "real world", take a look below. The content was amazing!

This document is intended to be a living archive of the content from #ccc12. This is by no means an inclusive list. If you see a link that I haven't included, please leave me a comment and I will update this article as quickly as I can. I believe the sessions were recorded and as soon as I get a link I will add it as well. Thank you!

Keynote Presentations:

"The Most Interesting Man in the Cloud" Peder Ulander opened the event. I will post his slides shortly.
Aneel Lakhani from Gartner. Enterprise + Cloud + Open
Jim Jagielski - Apache Code, Community, and Open Source
Tom Raftery from GreenMonk - Can We Hack Open Source Cloud Platforms to Reduce Emissions?
John Willis (@botchagalupe) from EnStratus - Analyzing a Complex Cloud Outage

Networking Session Presentations:

Rohit Yadav - DevCloud & CloudMonkey - CloudStack Demos; Link to the code.
Hugo Trippaers - CloudStack & Nicira NVP Integration
Floyd Strimling - Monitoring CloudStack Deep Dive
Michael Ducy - DudeOps - Why the Big Lebowski is About Building a Cloud
Somik Behera - Networking Considerations for CloudStack
Dan Bode - Integrating CloudStack with Puppet & code link
Jason Hancock - Running Puppet on CloudStack Instances & YouTube Video
Ed Laczynski - Solving the Cloud Puzzle - The Complete Stack Explored
Chiradeep Vittal - The Evolution of CloudStack Architecture
Andrew Bayer - CloudStack and jclouds
John Griffith & Dave Cahill - CloudStack and Cloud Storage
Roeland Kuipers - Mission Critical Cloud Computing
Uri Cohen - Building a Carrier Grade PaaS with CloudStack
Geoff Higginbottom - Introduction to CloudStack Networking
Chip Childers - 6 Months In: What I've Learned about Apache Projects
Diane Mueller - Adventures in Deploying a Private PaaS on CloudStack
Andy Gross - Riak Cloud Storage
John Kinsella - CloudStack Secured
Prasanna Santhanam - Continuous Test Infrastructure
Dominic Curran - Under the Hood: Open vSwitch & OpenFlow in XCP & XenServer
Jessica Tomechak - Open Writing! Collaborative Authoring for CloudStack Documentation
Rajesh Ramchandani - High Value Cloud Service
Kelcey Damage & Clayton Weise - CloudStack in Production - Considerations & Design
Duncan Johnston-Watt - Quality Control in a Cloudy World
Chiradeep Vittal - Apache CloudStack: A Not So Cloudy Future
Alex Huang - Apache CloudStack Evolution Proposal
Funs Kessen - Storage in a Mission Critical Cloud(stack)
Marcus Sorensen - Implementing CloudStack's VPC Feature
Marcus Sorensen - Using CloudStack with Clustered LVM
Donal Lafferty - Supporting Hyper-V 3.0 on Apache CloudStack
Ben Cherian - Making a Case for Distributed Overlay-Based Network Virtualization
UPDATED: Mice Xia - Integrate 3rd Party Security with CloudStack

Announcements:

CloudCat - Manage & Report on CloudStack - Site & Code Links
Basho Riak CS supports Multi-DataCenter Replication

My apologies ahead of time for any typos and/or botched names. It is very late on a Sunday but felt it was important to get this out as quickly as possible. Just about everyone listed here is on Twitter so feel free to look them up! Thank you again for everyone who attended the conference!!

This Month on the Cloudcast (.NET)

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 06:17:00 +0000

Another month has come and gone at the Cloudcast (.NET). November was a great month for content. We managed to get in a number of podcasts, produced some new You Tube videos, attended the AWS re:Invent conference, and we announced we will once again be running the Krispy Kreme Challenge to raise money for the North Carolina Children's Home. If you like the show, please consider sending a donation here (we will match donations!) Thank you!

Episode #62 - Jesse Andrews stopped by and he was awesome to talk to about the current state of OpenStack and some great info on both the Folsom and Grizzly releases. As a side note Jesse and I finally got to meet face to face last week at the AWS conference, awesome dude!
Episode #63 - James Watters from VMware gave us the low down on VMware's Cloud Foundry PaaS and updates since we last spoke to Dave McCrory awhile back.
Episode #64 - Cloudcast alum Raejeanne Skillern gave us an update on Intel and the recent Intel Developer Forum.
Episode #64.5 - Brian and Aaron take a break to talk about what we're thankful for (hint: our listeners) as well as announce our pledge to not only raise money for the Krispy Kreme Challenge, we will match all donations for the first $1000!
Episode #65 - Aaron catches up with Mat Ellis from Cloudability at the AWS re:Invent conference and Matt breaks out the number one reason why you could be a "cloud noob".
Episode #66 - Another AWS re:Invent episode, this one with Solomon from dotCloud. Solomon was great to talk too and I really feel his company is brining some unique features into the PaaS space.

AWS re:Invent Werner Vogel Keynote Live Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 18:20:00 +0000

This is a live blog of Werner Vogel's Thursday morning keynote on the next generation of cloud architectures. This will be quick and dirty so I can keep up with the information as it is presented.

Werner takes the stage to Nirvana playing... getting the crowd fired up
usual recap of Day One announcements of the S3 price reduction and the new data warehouse service offering
Werner shows a slide from 2007 that he created and shows how the message is still relevant today (removed the heavy lifting of capital constraints - physics, people, scope)
AWS developed because Amazon's core business needed to scale and they were too constrained to continue to grow OR there was capacity that was underutilized. They were having trouble with the peaks and valleys of traffic to the business (Think Black Friday)
11.10.10 - turned off the last physical web server supported Amazon business, 10.31.11 - turned off the last physical server supporting UK business removing the physical constraints to growth for their business
Key aspects of a 21st century architecture - secure, scalable, fault tolerant, high performance, cost effective
everything is a programmable resource - data centers, networks, compute, storage, databases, load balancers, all just services now - No more "hugging" anything
when a project focused on fixed resources, 31% never compete, 52% over budget due to inaccurate resource estimates, changing requirements, unmanaged risk, scope creep and complexity
If you are no longer "bogged down" by resources, Werner fells this will change and numbers will be more positive.
How do you change this mindset?
Take a step back and dont think of the resources anymore. i.e. An EC2 instance is not a server anymore
Decompose into smal loosely coupled, stateless building blocks
discussing imdb.com - their old architecture - running on Amazon Web Servers attached to IMDB Service. The architecture wasn't scalable. There was a tight coupling between the business. If Amazon went up, IMDB had to go up
After architecture was to loose couple the html code on S3 so if Amazon scaled up, IMDB wouldn't have too
Automate your application and processes
Werner says humans are terrible at automation, if you have to ssh or login to an instance, it isn't automated. He recommends Chef or Puppet
Let Business levers control the system
Be Agile, break down to small building blocks, let the business decide and be able to pivot in a short time to the new demands
Architect with cost in mind
Time for customer testimony
Ryan Park - Pinterest technical operations now on stage
Introduction to Pinterest
Design Principles used - Flexibility (Apache ZooKeeper used to redirect and balance as well as AWS Load Balancer)
Scalable (decomposed everything into services vs. monolithic design), databases are thousands of shards, no one server contains the whole database
Measurability (monitor application and infrastructure performance at all times)
peak traffic is USA times - autoscale to shut down 20% after hours reduces the cost when traffic is lower
used reserved instances for the standard traffic and then do on-demand and spot instances to handle the elastic load throughout the day. Watchdog processes look for spin up, spin down
$54 a hour to run initially, after changes, $20 a hour to run
Werner back discussing the spot instance market
Now talking Resilient design aspects (you shall protect your customers at all times)
Protecting your customer is the first priority
Encrypt all user data!
Amazon encrypts all traffic in transit as well as at rest
HTTPS is used everywhere
In production, deploy to at least two availability zones
You need to protect your business, if you go to production, span zones, period
Integrate security into your application from the ground up
"If firewalls were the answer, we would still have moats around all are cities" - classic quote
Build, test, integrate and deploy continuously
Don't wait for the "next version" to implement features, constantly iterate and deploy
Amazon average deployment time between "versions" is 11.6 seconds, constant iteration of the site (wow, that is amazing!)
Shows the old architecture, was very error prone, this method wasn't possible in the old model.
In the old way, roll back was almost impossible, today roll back is a single API call
Dr. Matt Wood - Chief Data Scientist for Amazon is on stage to give a demonstration
decoupled, stateless architectures are easy to maintain at scale but you don't need to be Amazon to take advantage of this.
Live Demo Time - Photo Management Application running on EC2, showing version 1.0 running
put full stack into version control so all dependencies are "stored" as a template including your bootstrap environment. Super easy to manage this way
everything is a load balanced, stateless architecture built across 10 instances
simulated traffic coming into site and data is in Dynamo DB
photo comes in, photo is processed and clean up, then published
discussion of the cost of processing 1000 images using version 1.0 of the product
spun up version 2.0 of the product using a different (faster) instance type, will this make a difference in the costs?
New Instance is launched to the load balancer, cost metric went down in real time so saving money just by using the template with a faster instance.
Since this brought cost down, replace the rest with faster instances and costs have now gone down, on the fly without the user being aware
"Don't become attached to your compute infrastructure"
Back to Werner - Don't think in single failures
"There is always a failure waiting around the corner"
Don't treat failure as an exception, treat it as a normal possible state
On stage now - Alyssa Henry, VP of Storage to discuss S3 design
S3 runs within multiple availability zones
How does an S3 request get processed (say a put request)
Load Balancer -> Availability Zone -> Web Server -> Index service and storage service stores on multiple instances in multiple facilities
What happens in a failure? redundant at all areas so even if an availability zone goes down you simply change DNS weight to route traffic away from failure
Adaptability - Weren't sure how the traffic would grow so they needed loose coupling of services so they could scale in whatever direction the customers took them
S3, circa 2006, saw amazing growth, built a new storage service that was side by side with the new storage and migrated over time from the old service to the new service. In place migration and upgrades (better performance, higher availability, and lower costs to customers) without downtime. There wasn't a "version 2.0" version of S3 offered, the users simply were migrated over to it
Werner back - Now talking Adaptive design
Assume Nothing
Build your architecture focused on your customer, not the available resources at your disposal
You get more business value by starting from scratch with no assumptions
This prevents you from being locked in (i.e capacity planning on a project, what if you are wrong?)
On Stage: CEO of Animoto - Brad Jefferson
Brad explains the site (user video creation site)
each video is custom rendered frame by frame on their site, a single server per video, this caused an EC2 instance explosion when announced Facebook integration
went from 100 instances to 5000+ instances in 12 months
In 2007 all was on AWS except the rendering, these were homegrown in house servers
In 2008, rendering was done on AWS using extra large instances
they were good at building videos, not on building servers
2009, high-CPU extra large instances, higher performance (faster to render for users, higher resolution), added medium instances for lower resolution to lower costs
in 2011 Cluster GPU instances (quadruple extra large instances), now full HS video and streaming before the video is even finished rendering
Werner back on stage
Werner talking about the AWS Startup Challenge, if you own a business, submit for possible EC2 credits to help build startups, deadline is the next 7 days
Announcement: Two New EC2 Instance Types

Cluster High Memory 240 GB, 2x120GB
High Storage 48TB on 24 HD's with 117GB for "big data"

Talking about the importance of collection of data metrics to determine where your business is going
Don't look at averages, means... what if 20% of your customers are having a bad experience?
Look at 99.9% of your customers, do not focus on the average
"control the worst experience your customers are getting"
Announcement: AWS Data Pipeline, data driven workload service to move data from one service to another

Orchestration service for data workflows
Automated and scheduled data flows
pre-integrated with AWS data sources
Easily connect with 3rd party and on-premise sources

Demonstration - AWS Data Pipeline, Dr. Matt Wood back on stage

create a pipeline is a drag and drop interface
pre-made templates (example is Dynamo DB to S3)
configure the source, destination and requirements
automate this by setting a schedule
Another Example - Data Logs from S3
Create a Daily Report and analyze using map reduce (new Hadoop Cluster) - pay as you go log analysis
After Hadoop analysis, reports will be stored in another S3 bucket
In addition to the daily logs, create a weekly roll up analytics report

Conclusion and wrap up time....

In conclusion, very interesting stuff!

This Month on the Cloudcast (.NET)

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 16:41:00 +0000

Another great month for the Cloudcast (.NET) podcast. Here is a summary:

Episode #58 - The Cloudcast's first ever live round table discussion at Build a Cloud Day. I thought it went very well and you can hardly tell where I edited us getting kicked out of the room (saved for the bloopers show)
Episode #59 - Luke from PuppetLabs. Personally I think one of the best interviews we've ever done. Luke was great to talk to and really knows his stuff. The conversation went some places I didn't expect but overall awesome quality and always good to have Nick riding shotgun.
Episode #61 - Justin from Basho. The concept of NoSQL scale out databases is new to me and I learned a TON on this show. Justin did a great job explaining some of the nuts and bolts of databases and cloud storage.

First one to spot our mistake this month gets a prize...

My Next Challenge: Are You Working to Your Strengths?

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 13:17:00 +0000

Last night on Twitter the bomb dropped. Yesterday was my last day of employment with VCE and shortly I will start as the Senior Director of Technical Marketing for Cloud at Citrix. I wanted to take some time to tell everyone about my journey to this role and how I believe my path could affect your career as well.

While the response was overwhelming and positive (I mean that, thank you everyone! I was floored at the response last evening on Twitter!), the number one question was “Why?”. The answer to this question lies in knowing your strengths and constantly working outside your comfort zone to challenge yourself to do better things in our industry.

Over the last 16 years (has it really been that long?!) my career path has been mainly trial and error, with sometimes mixed results. My “light bulb” moment actually came while I was recently doing some consulting for a company. The entire company is based around the Strengths Finder 2.0 book and exam. Everyone in the company is required to take it and their top 5 strengths are listed on the back of their badge. As part of my time there, I took the test and learned a good bit about myself. For those that are curious, my top 5 are Input – I love to gather input, Learner – I’m always learning, Achievement - I live by checklists and goals, Communication – I love to communicate, and Woo – Winning Others Over – I love to bring you to my side.

When I stepped back and thought about the portions of my role within VCE I really enjoyed I realized they often fit into one or more of my top 5 strengths. From there it was a matter of trying to find a role that would allow me to utilize these strengths as much as possible.

By accepting this new position at Citrix I have found a role that I believe firmly fits all of my strengths and I’m very excited for the next phase of my career. I challenge you to do the same. Are you working to your strengths? Do you naturally enjoy your core job functions?

In summary, go learn what makes you tick. Don’t wander around waiting for the next job to find you. I suggest taking the Strengths Finder 2.0 test. With that information, ask yourself are in the right role in your organization? If not, Fix it!

NOTE: I bet you didn’t expect this article to go there, did you? For those looking for gossip/dirt on why I left VCE or would like to read more into my departure, please don’t. VCE has treated me awesome over the last two years and we parted on very good terms. VCE is doing just fine and I believe will continue to lead the converged infrastructure market for years to come.

Listen to The Cloudcast

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 18:19:00 +0000

If you're interested in Cloud Computing I'd encourage you to listen to "The Cloudcast (.net)" podcast here, or go over to The Cloudcast website and get connected to the feeds via iTunes, Facebook, YouTube or RSS.

Taking Rackspace Private Cloud for a Test Drive

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 16:07:00 +0000

Rackspace has released something very cool that I wanted to share with everybody! Today they released their Private Cloud product based on OpenStack. Some details on the product:

Designed to run on bare metal but can be virtualized!
Based on the Essex release
Not all features are supported (see the documentation) but there is enough there to take it for a test drive.
Completely automated installation, answer a few questions and Chef does the rest!
The documentation is very straightforward for installation and basic administration tasks for both bare metal and virtualized (KVM, VMware Fusion, Workstation, vSphere) environments
In my experience it works with both an i5 and i7 Mac with Fusion 4.X

So, why this article? Because as always, I wanted to push this a little bit. The documentation calls for a minimum of 6GB (4GB for the controller + 2GB for a compute node) so you will need a workstation with 8GB at a minimum. I decided to start with that but I also used two laptops to run multiple compute nodes. Lastly, I also tried to reduce the memory footprint down to work solely on the MacBook Air but my results aren't stable enough so far. I will continue to play and see if I can make that configuration work.

The environment:

An i5 Mac Book Pro with 8GB and OCZ SSD. This is my laptop machine I've used in previous home lab configurations. The base recommendation for the controller is 4GB and 2GB for each compute node. I loaded up my controller and one compute node on this laptop.
An i7 Mac Book Air with 4GB. I added another compute node on this machine.
To get the machines to "bridge" the networks I changed the default settings on the virtual machine for each node to Bridged instead of NAT. This allowed me to piggyback onto my home wireless router to send packets back and forth. My home router gives out DHCP on the 192.168.3.100-254 range so I hardcoded my controller to 192.168.3.10, compute node1 to 192.168.3.11 and compute node2 to 192.168.3.12.

Both laptops were running Fusion 4.X without any problems. I tried to use my wife's laptop (an i5 just like mine except 4GB and local HD) when she wasn't looking to add another compute node but she is running Fusion 3.X and the node wouldn't load. I don't mess with mama's laptop so I decided not to tempt fate any further.
It worked great!! Here's the picture of the home lab on the kitchen island:

Summary:

I have been following the OpenStack community with great interest and so far this appears to be the easiest way to take OpenStack for a test drive. I was up and running in less than an hour and will continue to tinker and learn. A huge thanks to the Rackspace team for lowering the barrier to entry for people interested in OpenStack as it continues to build momentum!

[DISCLAIMER: I participated in the beta of this product. I provided feedback in exchange for early access to the software. I was not compensated in anyway nor solicited to provide this post.]

EMC & Puppet Labs Announce Project Razor

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Wed, 23 May 2012 15:19:00 +0000

Something really cool happened this morning! EMC and Puppet Labs jointly announced a next generation provisioning system called Project Razor. Brian and I had a chance to sit down with Puppet Labs and EMC to get some exclusive information on the project for a Cloudcast that we released this morning. If you are at EMC World, be sure to check out Chad's World featuring Razor tonight at 5:30

Rather than tell you all about it, here are a bunch of links hot off the press (but go listen to the podcast!!):

UPDATE: Since I posted this here are a few links to actually get it and posts on how to get started as well!

Getting Started with Razor Blog Post - Great post by the always awesome Nan Lui (great meeting you this week Nan!)
Project Razor Wiki - github's wiki on Project Razor
Razor github - Get it!