AaronDelp.com

Setting up Apple Family Share

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Wed, 30 Dec 2015 02:31:00 +0000

As a follow up to my previous post on Setting Up an iPhone for Kids, some asked how to set up Apple Family Sharing. I stayed away from this in the previous post because it can be complex and confusing. Enough folks asked I thought I would write it up.

First up, you have some decisions to make. There are actually two places for your Apple ID - your iCloud account and your iTunes account. They are both Apple ID's but you CAN make them different or the same. First, what are they?

iCloud - This is the account listed on your phone under Settings - iCloud. This controls where and how you back up your phone and data. Think of it as your personal stuff that you create (picture you take, notes you write, your contacts, etc.)

iTunes - This is the account listed on your phone under Settings - iTunes & App Store. It is listed at the top. Chances are unless you are a techie it is the exact same account as your iCloud Account. Think of this as stuff you buy in the iTunes Store. Adele's new Album, Star Wars Movies, and anything else is tied to this account. What you buy on this account is yours.

Most people I've seen use one of three possible choices (I recommend #3 so if you want to skip there, feel free):

1. Create One Apple ID for the family and use it for both iCloud and iTunes on all devices. This is super easy to set up because one account and one password! The problem here is also one set of data you create and purchase, across the entire family. If Thing One buys Pretty Little Liars, it shows up on your phone, if Mama purchases another smutty book, it shows up on your phone. Same goes for their contacts and calendar entries, everything is shared! I'm a big believer in personal space so this isn't a valid option for our family.

2. Create One Apple ID for each family member. Use this different one for each iCloud account but use the SAME account for iTunes. We did this for a long time. Anything you create has a personal space but anything you buy is shared. This allowed us to avoid conflicting contacts and calendars but allowed one big account for purchases (App Store Games are only bought once!). We did this for years but eventually as the girls wanted their own accounts, this wasn't going to fly. For some reason our tastes in music are different...

3. Create One Apple ID for each family member. Use this different account for both iCloud and iTunes and create an iCloud Family Share. While it can be complicated to setup, it is worth it. Since I already had an Apple account for each person in the family, I set myself as the Organizer and added everyone to iCloud Family Sharing and made sure their Apple ID was also used for iTunes. The Organizer can also share a payment method and purchases across the family. If your child is under 13, check this out for details on how to handle that and also how to do purchase approval for minors. It turns out since I already created my accounts before Family Sharing existed, they treat them like adults and not children. But, if you are starting out, take the time to set up your kids properly so you can take advantage of the extra payment approval options

NOTE: When you set up Apple Family Sharing, the default payment by the Organizer is the ONLY way to pay. At first I didn't like this because our oldest was actually managing her own account and payments and now she has to go through me. We have adjusted over time but know that BEFORE you decide to do it as that wasn't clear to me from Apple.

TIP: You can add gift cards or Apple Allowance to each child's account as well. It is even possible to pay them monthly or on a recurring basis this way. Apple iTunes credits apply before a purchase so that is good way to teach them responsibility as well (Thank Caroline McCrory for the tip!)

What if you are currently Option #1 or #2 and want to move to #3?

I was Sharing an iTunes Account (Option #2) but moved to Family Sharing (Option #3). It is possible but takes a little time and patience. If you still want to share purchases to everyone, this has to be enabled on each account. Right now none of us share our purchases but we are trying to talk Thing One into sharing hers because she has all the good music. To share your purchases with the family, go to Settings - iCloud - Family - (Touch on You) and enable Share My Purchases. There is no granularity here so ANYTHING you purchase will be shared with the family, you have been warned.

Anything not clear? Let me know...

Setting Up An iPhone For Kids

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Tue, 29 Dec 2015 00:01:00 +0000

In an attempt to both limit our children's data consumption and teach them responsibility, I came up with the following settings for the iPhones in our house. This will get you a phone that is somewhat locked down both in purchases and cellular data consumed.

Over the years Apple's IOS has gone from an "it just works" product to something that can be quite complicated to setup. The goal of this checklist is NOT about privacy or security, it is more about limiting data consumption as much as possible so we don't blow out our data plans. If you have questions, leave a comment below and I'll update as I can. This is current as of IOS 9.2

Limit Cell Data:

Prevent as many applications as possible from using data in the background while the device is off or other applications are active. If it is an application I want to stay up to date all the time or won't function without this features (Nike Running), I'll turn it on. Almost all applications I have turned off. Be sure to turn off any high bandwidth apps (SnapChat, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) Go to Settings - General - Background App Refresh and disable as many applications as you can.
Prevent as many applications as possible from using your location. I do this mainly for battery life as too many apps want to track you and use the GPS in the background. It's creepy and a waste of my battery. Again, I turn off as much as I possibly can and I turn off almost all background use. Settings - Privacy - Location Services. From here I change almost every app to either "While Using" if the app needs the GPS or "Never" if it doesn't. Some apps just don't need to know where I am. On my phone I have changed every application to either While Using or Never except the Weather App.
A few more location tweaks. I go to Settings - Privacy - Location Services - System Services and disable Location-Based iAds and Frequent Locations because again, creepy. I also change Settings - Privacy - Advertising - Limit Ad Tracking to On and hit Reset Advertising Identifier.
Next up is limiting cellular activity. Since most apps have already been disabled in the background, this is about stopping some apps from using cell data when you launch them. For instance, our youngest has limitations around certain apps (YouTube, NetFlix, etc.) to teach her the difference between wireless and cellular. One is free and one can cost a lot! Go to Settings - Cellular and scroll down to the "Use Cellular Data For:" section. Disable away... Lastly, I turn off Wi-Fi Assist at the very bottom. Again, this prevents confusion and headaches of a bunch of cell data being used without your knowledge.
Lastly, make the following tweaks to prevent unwanted/unknown use of cell data: Settings - iTunes & App Store and turn off Use Cellular Data

Require Password to Purchase EVERY time

This assumes you have an iPhone 5S or later with the fingerprint reader, if not use this as your guide.
The finger print reader is cool because you can use it in a bunch of place, including the iTunes Store. I have everyone's phone set up to require authentication every time because it makes them think do they really want to purchase this (they pay me for anything they buy). Go to Settings - TouchID & Passcode and enable TouchID for iTunes and App Store. Scroll down and change Require Passcode to Immediately.

Configure iCloud to BackUp and Find Your Phone

While no one tries to break or lose their phone, it happens... Because of this I make sure everything on everyone's phone is stored in iCloud. This way if the device breaks or is replaced, everything can be recovered pretty easily. To do this go to Settings - iCloud and purchase the 50GB iCloud backup plan. It's .99 month, don't be a cheapskate... (On a sidenote, some may have one Apple account for all devices, others have different accounts for everyone and set up Family Sharing. I have a link to setting this up here. Either way, purchase enough Cloud storage for everyone)
From Settings - iCloud - Photos enable iCloud Photo Library and enable all the rest of the options (Upload to My Photo Stream, Upload Burst, iCloud Photo Sharing). I set our phones to Optimize iPhone Storage
Not that your Photos are backed up in the cloud, let's back up all your phone applications and data. Go to Settings - iCloud - Backup. Make sure iCloud Backup is enabled.
Find Your Phone is next. Your kid lost their phone in the house somewhere but no idea where, this is a life saver. Settings - iCloud - Find My iPhone. Enable Find My iPhone and also Send Last Location.
Test Find My iPhone. From another phone, download Find My iPhone and login to the iCloud account used above. The device should display the location as well as the ability to Play Sound, Enter Lost Mode or even Erase the Phone

Bonus: Make Sure iMessage and FaceTime are set correctly

Have you ever received an iMessage or FaceTime from one of your friends but instead of their phone number, it shows up as an email address? I have no idea why but every once and awhile, Apple seems to change this setting. If you change the default address to your phone number you are much more likely to be recognized in everyone's address book.
In Settings - Messages - Send and Receive scroll down to "Start New Conversations From" and select your cell phone number.
Repeat this for Settings - FaceTime - CallerID and select your cell phone number.

Bonus #2: Apple Music Streaming

I honestly haven't disabled this one because it hasn't been an issue in our house but Apple Music does offer Apple Radio and music streaming which can use data. If you don't want this for your kids, go to Settings - Music and disable Use Cellular Data and High Quality on Cellular.

Bonus #3: Optimize Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter for Cellular

As mentioned by Josh Atwell in the comments, you can also disable autoplay of Facebook and Twitter videos to further minimize data consumption. A lot of folks do this for international travel in particular but great for kids as well
From the Facebook App (not Settings), go to More - Settings - Account Settings - Videos and Photos - Autoplay and set to On "Wi-Fi Connections Only"
From the Twitter App (not Settings), go to Me - Settings Cog (looks like a gear to the right of your profile picture) - Settings - Video Autoplay and change to "Use Wi-Fi Only"
From the Instagram App (not Settings), go to profile (right most button on the bottom), click on the gear in the upper right to access settings, Cellular Data Use - Use Less Data
From the Snapchat App (not Settings), Tap the Ghost icon in the top center, tap the gear (Settings cog) in the top right, scroll down to Additional Services and click Manage, Turn Travel Mode to On

SnapChat is Killing Your Family Data Plan

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 03:54:00 +0000

I posted this on Facebook and it blew up a bit so I thought I would do a quick blog post as well to continue to get the word out and expand on what I found. If you, or anyone in your family, has SnapChat on your mobile device, you probably went over your data allowance last month and this month and you have no idea why. We started having issues with a family member and their iPhone right after this rolled out and it would appear others are as well. We struggled to figure this out and had issues with our data plan the last two months. We did the following below and everything immediately went back to normal.

The super smart folks over at SnapChat decided to implement a new feature called Discover. It sounds great except for one little unknown "feature", it downloads MASSIVE amounts of data in the background, even when you are on cellular networks and has been draining peoples data plans left and right. There is NO option to turn it off in the app (at least on the IOS version).

If anyone in your family has SnapChat, go disable background updates for this app immediately. I have no idea if it breaks Discover and I don't really care, they should know better than to do this. Here's how to stop this behavior on iPhone/iPad. There is also a link at the bottom for Android folks as well.

On your device go to:

Launch Settings -> Choose General
General -> Choose Background App Refresh
From Background App Refresh you can choose to disable all applications or just SnapChat

If you want to check how much cellular data SnapChat has been using on your device (assuming you have reset your usage counters recently), do the following.

On your device go to:

Launch Settings -> Choose Cellular
Scroll down to the section "Use Cellular Data For"
Scroll down to SnapChat, you will see the amount of data used since you last reset your counters right below SnapChat. It will probably say something like XXXX MB or XX.X GB. To give you an example, we had one iPhone that consumed 3.8GB of cellular data on SnapShat in 3 DAYS!
If you want to track it, scroll all the way to the bottom and hit the Button "Reset Statistics". This will reset everything to zero and you can check it again in a few days

Links that get credit for discovering this:

AWS Re:Invent Day 2 Keynote Live Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 18:29:00 +0000

Got here early enough to get coffee and get a good seat! Crap, seat not so good, still can’t see slides well… *sigh*

Werner Vogels on stage - Quick recap of yesterday’s announcements. Says the party artist will be announced at the end of the keynote

Talking about building applications on cloud - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger than they have ever been. (hint hint)

Services delivered in a broad ecosystem make the difference (trying really to differentiate on services it would seem) vs. just an IaaS platform

Splunk on stage - All core products run on AWS, Splunk cloud (they run it for you), Splunk Enterprise, etc.

What has changed over the last year? Customers are moving from just dev/test and peak apps and moving true production workloads en masse to AWS. Splunk can help with visibility between on-prem and AWS.

Mentions customers - Coca-Cola, Nike and their use cases. often POC on Amazon and then moving production to AWS. Saved time and money using AWS.

Mention of Finra - stock trading security regulator - no more standing up hardware, they moved all applications and Splunk to AWS to focus on what matters, not management of infrastructure. Mention of multiple regions and APIs for scalability

(I notice almost all guests on stages mention that, must be in the speaker notes for everyone. AWS is hitting scalability, API’s, and services as differentiators)

Werner back on stage - Slide -> AWS is Secure, Adaptive, Resilient, and Global. talking about “pushing a button” to make infrastructure appear

The Application Extends the Platform - talking about importance of API’s and extension of the platform in infrastructure as code and fitting tis into emerging application development models

(As an aside, the Splunk dude that just spoke sat down next to me… awkward)

OmniFone on stage - online music platform, talking about the music industry and the complications of music as an industry. They started with a 15 million platform, it didn’t hold up to the load. They could’t iterate fast enough. They had to start over and started over on AWS. “AWS was the only choice” (Also noticing that as a common theme of the guests, they are all saying it).

Now has a geographically scalable, redundant services across the globe on AWS. Building this platform has allowed the music industry to build what matters. They have delivered more audio/video faster than ever before.

Talking about high res quality sound and the challenges (about 150 times the file size of typical mobile file delivery). How do you deliver the large files in a large uninterrupted stream? talking about Podio (Neil Young’s company?) and what they are doing there

Werner back on stage - Broad Services drive the speed of development, talking about “agility as the Holy Grail” of application delivery. Increasing consumer choice is driving the market to a new model that needs to be agile and fast. Dev & Test is the Core to Agility

Says today budget’s of most CIO’s for Dev & Test are between 40%-60%. How do you optimize that and make that portion of the budget faster.

The Weather Company (The Weather Channel) on stage - talking about weather as a science and data platform. How do you great services based on information you can’t control but potentially affects both business and lives all around the world.

They have built a platform on AWS to feed others (Apple, Google, Yahoo, etc.) to move beyond cable. Also feed data to all major airplanes to help with traffic control. Provide data to local broadcasting companies all over the world. They want to be the “data warehouse” for all things weather in the world.

They didn’t start this way, had a traditional model of physical data centers with physical hardware. They had to change both the infrastructure as well as the culture.

(I like they brought the human aspect into this, not just technology, so often overlooked)

They choose AWS for scale (scalability point hit again), as well as confidence in the services. Platform has provided close to 100% uptime and weather forecast is less than a second by analyzing over 800 sources around the world. The platform allowed them to “go faster” and constantly improve the accuracy of forecasting over time.

Over 1 billion devices served from the platform between IOS8, Android, and downloads of apps on Mac/PC

Werner back on stage - Development is changing to support agility

Pristine (Google Glass specific company with a focus on healthcare) on stage - They are using AWS and…. drumroll please…. Docker!! (You knew it was coming!)

Slide - Containers are the key to our growth, this allows them to develop once and run everywhere. Rollback are simple, etc.

Talking about the combination of AMI’s for the base image and the layering of containers on top is the “perfect match” for them and allows them to go as fast as possible and scale beyond anything else that is out there.

Werner back on stage - Why do developers love containers? Going into to all the usual containers value proposition. talking about containers do present some overhead challenges set up.

Announcement - AWS Container Service - deploy environment to make containers easy. (huge applause). All with an API, integrates with Docker repositories, also integrates with Mesos

Demo of Docker containers into the system on stage now (I can’t see the screen well sadly). Instances (AMI’s set up), register the cluster with the service. Name the Docker image that will be used, start running the task. Single instance, deploy and scale to 5 instances, deploy front end.

Scale up to 30 instances (different instance types as well)

(Got a call.. had to step out… I’m sure it was awesome… sorry about that)

Docker CEO, Ben on stage - Where isn’t Ben these days?! Good for him and good for Docker….

Developers are content creators - Docker removes the “crap work (my words)” from development and allows developers to go faster.

5 steps to containers -
1. isolation of process in an OS
2. good API’s to run anywhere
3. create an ecosystem (Docker Hub)
4. create a new container based app model
5. create a platform for managing it all

Talking about Gilt.com - joint AWS and Docker customer, before docker 7 apps and hard to deploy, 300 micro services and 100+ deploys per day

Just passed over 50 million downloads of Docker!

Werner back on stage - Simplification drives reliability and performance

What are the primitives of cloud in an execution environment?

talking about data, triggers, and actions of applications. A data change triggers an action to update other portions of data.

Why don’t we architect that way? need to create a full, complex stack to “run a function and modify data”

Announcement - AWS Lamba - An event driven computing service for dynamic applications. You just write code and no underlying infrastructure (it’s always there somewhere, they are just taking it away so you don’t have to worry about it)

Basically state changes and events drive the system (new pricing model?) - write code without infrastructure. - (Another PaaS without calling it a PaaS?)

code only runs when needed - cost efficient and efficient

Really interesting concept - Talking about IoT (Internet of Things) and triggers as the new currency

Netflix on stage - talking about micro-derives and Lamba, they can replace inefficient existing services with trigger based serves.

Encoding Media Files is an example - get file from studio, chunk it up, process it, ship out to CDN’s
Backup for Disaster Recovery - they can now do backups based on triggers and events vs. time
Security - when an instance is spun up, trigger security check to make sure it is configured correctly

Werner back on stage - Units of cost for Lamba - number of requests, execution time - there is a free tier for each customers each month - today it is available as a preview.

Announcement - New Instance offering C4 (based on Haswell processor), up to 36 vCPU’s, EBS optimized by default and included in the price.

Announcement - New EBS - SSD backed EBS up to 10,000 IOPS (up to 160Mps) and 20,000 IOPS (up to 320Mbps)

Intel on stage now - talking about C4 instance… speeds… feeds… The processor is actually an AWS exclusive

My take: It would appear they have hit on a few key differentiators to move forward beyond iaaS. Scalability (to differentiate from on-prem), API’s for developers (to differentiate from other public clouds), and services across the broad ecosystem. They want to be the developers model of choice and seem to get the only way to get “next generation applications” is to enable the developers and start down the micro-services and containers path.

Well played AWS… well played…

Over all, super impressed with year vs the keynotes of past years.

AWS Re:Invent - ARC307 - Infrastructure as Code Session

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 21:52:00 +0000

Live Blog of the AWS Re:Invent Infrastructure as Code Session (ARC307)

Packed house - This session is offered in one of the large ballrooms. At least 1,000 people in the session and this session on the live stream as well. David Winter & Alex Corley from AWS as well as Tom Wanielista from Simple.com presenting

David up first - his background is a very traditional datacenter hardware centric background. He had a project to build on AWS.

Started simple with manual spin-up of instances, it wasn’t fast enough one person using a console. He needed to go faster. API was the next step, he then built a bash script. His first steps…

Hired somebody else, they then wrote the same in python. This was the beginning of using this as a “cookie cutter” repository for test/dev. Then one day something bad happened… (Security related event)

Production went down… hard. (Security groups were removed by beta product they were testing), all networking went “deny all” in the security groups, locking everyone in the world out

Had to rebuild them all by hand… (ouch) How do you prevent this from ever happening again.

AWS Cloud Formation was now the basis for “Infrastructure as Code”. Too much configuration that was done by hand needed to be automated to recover quickly. Also, this allows iteration of new development cycles very fast as a side benefit to go forward.

Alex Corley is up - version control to wrap complex systems and provide a template for roll out. Cloud Formation uses a model methodology to define the infrastructure. You create models in Cloud Formation (CF from now on), JSON structure

CF supports just about all AWS services today (security groups, compute offerings, network services, etc.)

version control is built in CF. Store the intended stated (next rev) in CF and do a code review before it is published. Can use many different repositories (GitHub for example)

Create a template, check it in, code review, deeply worldwide across AWS regions. All automation handled through CF.

Tom from Simple.com - (customer testimony) - simple is a bank. SOA architecture on AWS from Day One.

They started at the console just like most everyone. As they developed features and grew, this got out of control. They didn’t know who changed what and what happened.

And then along came PCI compliance… No way to audit and report on the current infrastructure. Had to start over from scratch.

Goals: Security / Insight / Growth / Speed - these were the 4 pillars of the new infrastructure.

The rebuilt using AWS Cloud Formation, then they wrote cloudbank in Python. Middleware between simple.com and AWS Cloud Formation from an operations stand point. Everything stored in github. They modify cloud bank, it talks to CF. Jenkins cluster in the mix

cloud bank applies the AWS standards under the covers (security groups, network settings, etc.)

What are the benefits of this automation? They write code every day, they simple added the ability to spin up infrastructure and moved this into the code flow greatly increasing efficiency and agility of the organization. This also makes the infrastructure programmable. For example, there is a chance in PCI compliance, simply push out the change in code. The developers can now handle the infrastructure.

They have evolved from 20-200 people and are still using this method.

David back up - demonstration time (Alex doing demo)

Alex - demo application (web application) running on AWS. Cluster of 5 machines. talking to a git repo, made a chance in the code to increase the size of a graphical fix. commit the change, refresh and it was fixed.

Supposed to be 5 machines, only one is talking. Modified Cloud Formation instance to talk to 5 hosts, commit, refresh the app, now more instances talking to the front end.

Last issue, throughput is insufficient now. Double infrastructure now from 5 machines to 10 machines to get more bandwidth to the front end. This spins up 5 new AMI’s, some custom configuration and insertion into the cluster, all done with a commit

Application problem, security problem, infrastructure problem - all three fixed through the same process and change management model

Wrap Up:

Good for startups - Agile, developers ramp quickly

Good for Enterprises - Template driven, compliance oriented infrastructure

AWS Re:Invent Day 1 Keynote Live Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 18:45:00 +0000

Place is PACKED. Over 13,000 here. I’m way in the back, can’t see the slides on the screen well but can see the big screens showing the current speaker. I should have been here earlier but needed coffee. Priorities…

TL;DR - See My take at the bottom

Jassy up first - over 1 million active customers, lots (and lots) of logos slides (public sector, Enterprise, SI’s, etc.)

AWS Market Place - huge growth, 2000 offerings, 7 mil in downloads

Slide about Enterprise IT Vendors and how most large multi-billion “Enterprise IT Vendors” are all shrinking while AWS is growing (yes, they included themselves in that category)

Lydia Leong (Gartner) quote thrown up on the screen - he is really trying to embrace the Enterprise vs. just telling them they are doing it wrong in past years keynotes

Moves on to the “Old Way” of doing things, Enterprises spend millions for slow, inflexible infrastructure and software

AWS is the “The New Normal” - multiple data centers (mentioned fault tolerance), 11 regions, 28 availability zones - went on to mention all the features that are built into every region (backup, identify management, monitoring, analytics), complete offering of services and all offered on demand as needed and can spin up as needed (This has to be the longest list of features I’ve ever heard, he has been going on for about 3 minutes and I’m not sure he has taken a breath)

Still going….

Now talking about the features in the service. Many others offer a basic service, AWS goes deep on most offerings (another list of offerings, he is going into compute and how they are differentiated i.e. GPU specific, small compute, large compute, etc.)

Still going on list of services… Jassy is the Energizer Bunny of feature lists

First Customer is up - MLB (Major League Baseball) - CTO of MLB.com, started from scratch, now a six billion business for MLB. They built a PaaS they share with other providers (ESPN, etc.). Want to be on any screen at anytime for events. StatCast is hosted on AWS, new system to go really deep and apply big data and prediction to baseball stats and players.

How do they capture the data? Radar sampling that tracks ball over 2000 a second, can “see” the baseball rotation it is that accurate. 17 Petabytes of data per season. AWS was the only one with scale and bursting capability (what do you do in offseason when you don’t need it). Keep adding to data warehouse over time to provide historical stats.

How does it work - collect data locally, use Amazon Direct Connect to export into AWS. From there MLB’s real time PaaS delivers StatCast to devices

Example - Breakdown of play during the World Series, shows how runner started slow (because he thought is was easy) and then sped up at the end. He was out by .2 second. If he ran the whole time, he would have been safe by over a foot.

Jassy is back - talking about transformation to Cloud Native Applications. You don’t have the option to move slow anymore.

Second Customer is up - CEO, Healthcare Company (sorry, didn’t catch the name, Phillips maybe) - going through a real world customer use case who had cancer and how they determined this (took blood that indicated it, found the cancer, showed patient how to adjust lifestyle and live with it vs. radiation treatment). This was real time data and fitting a treatment to the customer vs. other traditional alternatives using big data.

How do we turn a mountain of data into Actionable Items? This is where real time data comes into play. They are adding a PetaByte a month to the system right now (common theme here of scale and how no one else can scale like AWS). No one can support the large amounts of data.

Jassy back - Slide - Is there hope for a new normal in the area of relational databases? Old world DB’s are expensive, locked in. Many Enterprises are looking to MySQL and PostGres as an alternative. The OSS DB’s are hard right now….

(Announcement) - Amazon Aurora - Commercial Grade Database Engine - in development for 3 years, MySQL compatible but at 5x performance, same or better availability than Enterprise versions at 1/10 of the cost of the leading solutions in the market.

Product dude brought out for Aurora (didn’t catch his name) - Biggest Enterprise pain today is world class databases. They started with a blank slate and knew they wanted MySQL compatibility.

Compatibility with MySQL 5.6… 6 million inserts per minute, 30 million selects (I heard some folks around me saw wow to that one, I guess that is a big deal), data automatically backed up to S3 and highly available, crash recovery in seconds, database cache survives restart (no warming). Most features available only in Ent. class offerings.

Offered at .29 per hour (audience clapped at that)

Jassy back on stage - Talking about Software Deployment now. Pushed 50 million deployments in last 12 months using “Apollo” (codename for their internal project… I sense an announcement coming)

(Announcement) - AWS Code Deploy - Central monitoring and control, works with “virtually any” language and tool chain set, available today, free to use. Performs roll backs of code as well as commits.

Talking about CI/CD now. Develop, Build&Test, Deploy, Monitor & Analyze

(Announcement) - AWS Code Pipeline - Integrates with existing tools, used internally in Amazon

(Announcement) - AWS Code Commit - code repository without size limits.

All exist together and work with external partners. (wonder who they will play nice with)

Now talking about compliance - They are now ISO-9001 compliant. They have been working with healthcare customers to achieve this level of certification.

Security up next - talking about encryption

(Announcement) - AWS Key Management Service - Encryption, IAM and policies all in one place (sorry for lack of details here, had to take a call)

OK, back…

Talking about Service Catalog (coming in 2015) - AWS Service Catalog, create a grouping of resources, create an offering, serve it out in a service catalog… They say Enterprises want this

(This *COULD* be interesting. I talked to Ent folks about this years ago and it never took off because it was too hard or costly to create the offerings and serve out the catalogs to multiple clients. If they make this easy to consume and usable, it could take off IMO. Enterprises want it but never really adopted it at scale. This was the original Enterprise vision of “cloud”, a portal of services)

Talking New Applications vs. Old Applications (here comes the Jassy we know and love… bring on the part where he tells everyone they are doing it wrong and need to do it the AWS way)

Dev/Test - Many Enterprises are using Dev/Test as a starting point for AWS.
Mobile - The future of applications and architecture
Talking about companies migrating fully over to AWS. Feels like the days of virtualization (we want to be a 100% virtualized environment!). I doubt that will ever happen. Some workloads might go AWS…

CTO of Intuit on stage - They are moving all their applications to AWS. As Intuit evolves into a majority SaaS company. Over 8,000 employees, 3,000 engineers. Multi-billion online and mobile services. Had lease on datacenter up and migrated over to AWS. 6x cost savings, 1/5 of the time for buildout, developers were able to move faster. Over time this trend increased, starve the old, build new in AWS. Many acquisitions were built on AWS so that made absorbing them into Intuit very easy.

Jassy back - Talking about Hybrid Infrastructure (not Hybrid Cloud according to AWS). Jassy talking about a lot of Enterprises that still have on-prem resources because they aren’t ready to move to cloud. Talking about all the Hybrid features (VPC, Direct Connect, vCenter Integration, Access Control, Directory Service).

CTO of Johnson & Johnson - 270 operating companies in 60 countries, 100,000+ employees, more stats,,, blah blah blah…

Thousands of Servers, Complex IT Ops - new strategy, less servers, automated IT, greater business efficiency

120 applications running in AWS now, plan to triple that in the next 12 months (they have to have THOUSANDS of apps, so I wonder what the percentage actually would be)

They want to move to Amazon Workspaces for Desktops

Jassy back - Slide - Partnering is the new normal (Announcement coming?)

Talking about culture of AWS - Customer focus comes first, AWS is pioneering (first to market), long term orientation

They will never call you at the end of a quarter to close a deal to make numbers (difference between am OPEX subscription model vs. a CAPEX purchase model)

AWS as a trusted advisor, Cost Optimized Service and Advice - over a 350Mil in cost reductions on behalf of customers

My take: Keynote felt very different from past years, company has moved from announcing more offerings (look, new compute offerings!) to announcing services to expand the ecosystem. Makes sense as the growth has slowed and they need to pick it up. Felt like a VMworld keynote from 5-7 years ago. A company that is starting to branch out and may very well start eating their own ecosystem so they can continue to grow. Also thought it was weird the pre-announced a few things this year. Not sure if they didn’t get them out in time but pretty sure they haven't done that before. AWS has gone from the “stealth IT little guy” poking the Enterprise in the eye and telling them they are doing it wrong and is now embracing the idea that they need the Enterprise and they now need to be nice to them. The fact that Jassy didn’t crap all over “Hybrid Infrastructure” and actually talked about it at the end helps prove this point.

I believe the Aurora and CI/CD announcements will move the needle and look really awesome. The security announcements were needed to fill out the Enterprise portfolio. The Service Catalog could be interesting when it releases.

OpenStack Summit Session Voting - Please Vote!

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 13:19:00 +0000

Time to dust of the blog and beg some folks for votes on OpenStack Summit sessions...

First off, here are some great sessions I would love to see and I encourage you to vote for! There are so many submissions picking a few is difficult:

Scott & Ken's great session on VMware & OpenStack: OpenStack for VMware Operators

Getting Started with OpenStack

OpenStack Performance Tuning

Multitenancy with Cinder: How Volume Types Enable It

Lastly, I have three sessions up for consideration, please vote if you are interested and I hope to see everyone in Paris!

Predictable Cinder Performance with SolidFire Storage

Building a Cloud Career in OpenStack

Ask the Experts: Challenges for OpenStack Storage

Cisco Live: Lenny Kravitz & Imagine Dragons! What?!

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Thu, 13 Mar 2014 14:07:00 +0000

This post has a personal as well as corporate level. First the personal. I was recently selected as a Cisco Champion! A huge thanks to Cisco for allowing me access to the program and they have done an amazing job of incubating and developing a program to get their word out in new and creative ways. I threw the graphic label up on my site but I haven't really had the bandwidth to talk about it until now. Cisco has chosen a great community and it has been an awesome ride so far!

Ok, enough of that. The Cisco Champions got the scoop yesterday on some great upcoming announcements for Cisco Live! coming up May 18-22 in San Francisco. I'm hoping I can make it to the event but planning for the "day job" is still in the works. If want to register, HURRY UP! Deadline for Early Registration expires tomorrow, March 15th.

What is there to look forward too at the event?

Rowan Trollope (better known as the person who tries to keep Peder Ulander in line) did a great post yesterday on the Next Generation of Cisco Collaboration Experiences. This is the biggest announcement of new products since TelePresence and I can't wait to hear more about the products in the near future. A few highlights of the new products to look forward to at Cisco Live!

· Cisco Telepresence MX Series learn more

· Cisco Telepresence SX10 Quick Set learn more

· Cisco TelePresence Precision 60 Camera learn more

· Cisco TelePresence SpeakerTrack 60 learn more

· Cisco TelePresence SX80 Codec learn more

· Cisco Business Edition 6000 Enhancements learn more

· Cisco Business Edition 7000 learn more

· Cisco Intelligent Proximity learn more

But who is playing the Customer Appreciation Event?!

Historically I haven't been a big fan of going to the customer appreciation shows (too many guys in too small a space) but there is NO WAY I would miss this one! Lenny Kravitz and Imagine Dragons playing at AT&T Ballpark! Yup, you heard it hear first. The event will be Wednesday night, May 21st. I can't wait! (Pro Tip: Either catch an early bus back to beat the lines or drink enough you won't mind waiting on transportation back. Of course, Uber or a Taxi is your friend as well!)

Goldilocks & Supply Chains with VMTurbo

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 01:55:00 +0000

I'm fulfilling a New Year's Resolution to get back into blogging. Life has been crazy (but good crazy) and it's time to reestablish some old habits.

If you listen to the Cloudcast you know that Shmuel Kliger, CEO & Founder of VMTurbo was a guest back in December. I didn't know it then but that episode was the first step in a major education that I wanted to pass along to everyone.

Let's start with what you probably think about VMTurbo. You probably think they are a monitoring solution for virtualization, specifically VMware. If you thought this, you are not alone. I'll attempt to convince you that VMTurbo has a pretty unique value proposition and is properly aligned at the intersection of a bunch of upcoming data center operations trends (Software Defined Anything, Public and Private Cloud, etc.). Version 4.5 of their product was released a little over a week ago and here are a few items I observed in the last few months digging into the product.

VMTurbo Isn't Your Daddy's VMware Monitoring Tool

A major shift within the last 12-18 months has been the advance of multiple hypervisors and private cloud IaaS projects and products. The virtualization world isn't a one horse race anymore. Many other hypervisors are now "good enough" and the case can be made for certain workloads to run on non-vSphere environments. As you can see over on the new product page, VMTurbo works with all the major hypervisors and private/public cloud IaaS offerings. They cover vSphere, vCloud, Xen, Hyper-V, CloudStack (and Citrix CloudPlatform), OpenStack, Azure, and AWS. This is smart of them, really smart. I see workloads moving all the time to different environments (and sometimes moving back). Finding a tool to cover all possible infrastructure combinations is difficult currently.

What Do You Mean It Isn't Just a Monitoring Tool?

This is where VMTurbo gets really interesting for me. As mentioned on the podcast, I'm an old data center operations guy and it has always been a passion for me. I have been exploring not just WHAT VMTurbo does but HOW it does it as well. Yes, the product monitors complex systems but the WAY it does it is very different. This isn't just a bunch of agents running on machines and sending alerts back (or SNMP traps!) and then somebody gets an email or a page to take a corrective action. Just because you get an alert doesn't mean you know what corrective action needs to take place. What is the cause? Is there a problem downstream (a hot spot on a disk on a volume or LUN creating disk latency)? Monitoring systems often detect "black outs" (something is down) but don't do as well with "brown outs" (something isn't performing optimally) because most monitoring systems don't understand the connections from the lowest level of hardware all the way up to the application and potential performance impacts. Only by understanding how application resources are mapped to physical infrastructure can insight be gained into optimal performance of a system.

This is where VMTurbo comes into play. The product uses a Supply Chain Model to map every input and output of hardware and software in a system to understand potential impacts as well as potential improvements. Every product you consume has a supply chain. How does a product get from various raw materials into a finished offering that is consumed by you? Think about that for a second...

Take the computer or mobile device you are reading this on as an example. Every part, thousands of them, have to be made from raw materials, brought together, shipped, and offered to you as a product. You are the consumer. Now, think about an application or a workload as that consumer. All the underlying parts (disk, memory, compute, network) need to be combined and offered as services (hypervisor, virtual machines) that are consumed in various amounts by the application. Furthermore, each resource can serve as both an input and an output. Some will take resources, but will also serve resources to others.

By taking this approach, everything in the system becomes Data (with a capitol D). Once everything in the system is Data, you can start to apply some universal concepts such as a Common Data Model and System Optimization through the Economic Scheduling Engine. I'm going to take each one of those in turn.

What is a Common Data Model and why should I care?

By taking a complex infrastructure and breaking it down into a Common Data Model (compute, storage, network, hypervisor, etc.) it becomes very easy to add new systems and components. Remember above when I stated that VMTurbo supports the various hypervisors as well as IaaS projects/products? At a very fundamental level all products break down in the same way (Common Data) and once broken down we can begin to understand the mapping between components. This mapping gives us greater insight into connections for root cause analysis as well as making additions of new components and software very easy because the initial mapping is already complete. The latest version of VMTurbo has added hardware from Cisco UCS as well as storage from NetApp. I'm sure this integration further down the stack will continue and will be a great value add for converged infrastructure products (FlexPod anyone?). Here is an example of a mapping in the interface:

Here is anther way to understand this mapping. When I was at IBM supporting business parters about 10 years ago virtualization was just starting to heat up. Part of the early days of this market was convincing customers with physical infrastructure to go virtual. The demand was there but the tools at the time were not. Because of this my team would go in and analyze physical environments and then break them down (using a common data model) and carve up workloads and perform a manual calculation of how much virtual infrastructure would be required to support the proposed environment. We would map out applications down to the basic compute, memory, storage, and networking requirements. This was a complex operation that took weeks and lots of manual calculations and Excel formulas to accomplish. VMTurbo does basically that same thing and does it automatically without human intervention! This could have saved me hundreds of hours back in the day!

The Common Data Model is about more than just analysis. VMTurbo is able to recommend and (if configured to do so) will actually remediate environments to optimal operations. That takes me to the next section.

What is System Optimization through the Economic Scheduling Engine and why should I care?

We've talked Supply Chains to death, let's talk about Goldilocks for a bit. Most people in our field don't know it but they are always searching for a Goldilocks State of Operations. Our customers are looking for something that isn't too big, isn't too small, but just right. The problem with this is our applications and workloads are often dynamic and changing and so finding the "just right" spot is hard because it is constantly shifting. Too little resources and application performance may suffer, too many resources and we are wasting money through over provisioning of resources.

This is where the whole "cloud computing" idea comes into play. Cloud computing can be boiled down to the concept of Dynamic IT, dynamic pools of scalable resources. As our application workload shifts and moves, our underlying IT infrastructure must shift and move to compensate. This is what we call a "perfect state" in an economy system. We are providing just enough resources to be consumed.

VMTurbo uses this model to constantly monitor the resources demands and attempt to move and shift resources as needed. Think of it as VMware DRS for your entire infrastructure. The only way to do this is to map and understand the relationships of the infrastructure to the applications and how to make corrections as needed. VMTurbo attempts to provide a Goldilocks State of Operations to your entire infrastructure.

If you are still with me, thank you! In conclusion, VMTurbo is a pretty unique product that I have been having a great time digging into for the last few months. Through the use of VMTurbo's Common Data model as well as the Economic Scheduling Engine they are able to really provide a product that is well suited to tackle the increasingly complex infrastructure interdependencies as well as ever increasing and shifting application workloads. Go check out the site for more information.

Disclaimer: As noted, Shmuel Kliger was a guest on the Cloudcast podcast of which I am a co-founder. I also attended a pre-release briefing and product demonstration on VMTurbo 4.5. No compensation was given or expected and I'm writing this blog post because I think it is cool tech and wanted to help get the word out.

Image Credits: VMTurbo

Big thanks to M. Sean McGee for his Goldilocks UCS Blade Post a few years back. The title is an homage to that post.

Catching Up - What Have I Been Up Too

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Delp) — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 13:32:00 +0000

What happened to the last 3 months?! To say it has been a busy summer has been an understatement. Hopefully more blogs coming in September for some cools things I'm working on but here is a recap of the last few months.

Engineer's Uplugged S3E1 talking about cloud computing workloads and environments
Speaking in Tech Podcast talking OpenStack, CloudStack, etc.
Huffington Post Top 100 Cloud Computing Experts on Twitter
Follow up post from the Cloudcast on how many we've had on the show
I'll also be presenting a vBrownBag Session on Apache CloudStack at VMworld
I also hosted a series of podcasts with Enterprise Management 360 for Citrix:

I've also been generating a lot of content over the summer, too much to list here. Go check out my blog on Tech Target as well as the latest episodes of the Cloudcast and Mobilecast. Thanks again for coming by!

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.