From the Blogosphere

Cloud Computing - A Blessing From the Clouds?

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:00:00 EST

Cloud computing is a kind of scalable service provided by distant vendor servers over the internet. The data storage and management tasks are assigned to a set of infrastructure, platform or software over a network or "cloud". This type of computing certainly comes with inherent flaws such as a danger of becoming too vendor dependant , a shrinking on-site IT department, questionable security and reliability issues etc. Also cloud computing requires a lot of investment which has led many detractors to suggest that this type of computing service would lead to an unfair monopoly of the big players in the business. But cloud computing is still in a stage of technological infancy, so it is only a matter of time before these concerns are ironed out.

Cloud Computing and Silos

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:00:00 EST

While writing a separate post on the business value of public versus private cloud computing investments I specifically called out the fact that infrastructure – virtual or physical – provisioned in a cloud environment is applicable only to that cloud environment; it really can’t be shared within the enterprise architecture or other public cloud computing environments, for that matter.

Cloud Computing Transaction Monitoring

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:30:00 EST

Web-wise, it’s a changed world from even a few years ago. The number of online transactions (defined as everything from an exchange of money, to searches, to downloads, etc.) has exploded because companies now use the Web to manage sales, marketing, communications, and product support strategies. Transactions have also grown via dynamic pages, secure Web sites, integrated search capabilities, and multimedia content. At the same time, transactions have become more complex.

VA and VAA: What a Difference an “A” Makes

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 12:45:00 EST

So are we talking tomayto/tomahto or apple/orange here? Actually, when we compare VMware’s virtual appliance (VA) approach with AppZero’s virtual application appliance (VAA) it’s really a lot more like apple/orangutan. Not better and worse, winner and loser, but different in type and kind and purpose and optimal use. A tectonic shift.

Hosting in Amazon Cloud

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:45:00 EST

Cloud Computing opens new opportunities both for business and for any person solving their particular tasks. The current series of articles has a goal to show that any person can use almost unlimited resources exactly for the price of using these resources. I don’t need Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport to get the nearest supermarket or even the work (although I wish I drove such car to my work several times), so I have a car a bit simpler.

What Does Enterprise IT Really Want from Cloud Computing?

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:00:00 EST

Analysts, bloggers and mainstream media have spent 2009 promoting cloud computing as “the next big thing” that will revolutionize the way companies buy and use computing power. But beyond the hype and the C-level interest in an exciting trend, there’s value to the cloud that appeals to the pragmatic, “show me” nature of enterprise IT.

The two main drivers for cloud computing are the same ones that have always motivated enterprise IT: save money (do more with less) and be more responsive to business needs. These goals are typically in conflict with each other, so that in tough times the first takes precedence and in boom times the second one does.

The cloud offers the promise of being able to do both, which is why it so attractive to the CIO and IT managers. The cloud potentially lets you offload from your expensive internal infrastructure and scale up/down/out as needed. Developers and SMBs may have started the cloud revolution, but the real transformation will be in enterprise IT, where the demand for computing resources is constantly changing and evolving — across seasons and application lifecycles, sometimes even during the course of a day. Rather than investing in capital equipment that may sit idle much of the time, the cloud model provides an attractive alternative, both for users who need computing power not available internally and IT departments trying to watch their budgets.

Today enterprises are trying to figure out how to leverage the cloud in a way that makes sense. It can be somewhat scary in these early days, as issues around security, control and integration are still being debated. What does it take to change the mindset from “we can’t do that” to “let’s try it”? What does enterprise IT need to have the confidence to get started in the cloud?

What IT really wants is to get access to this potential great resource, but to do so in a very low-risk, walk-before-you-run way. This means putting a limited, usually small, footprint into the cloud initially. It also means focusing on applications that are by definition separable from the data center, and probably not core to the business. For example, most of our early customers are putting development, test, business continuity and back-office applications into the cloud first, and thinking about how they will add the next set of apps and/or scale out the original ones if things go well.

IT also wants protection in case the cloud reality takes longer to deliver than the hype suggests. They want to be able to bring their apps back to the data center, or potentially to switch clouds if a better set of offerings comes along. As a result they don’t want to do a lot of work changing what they have today for a specific cloud or re-architecting their applications or internal processes.

Most of all, enterprise IT is looking beyond the hype and saying “show me how this could work in my environment.” They want results they can trust showing how the cloud can provide flexibility and cost savings that their internal data center can’t deliver alone – so they can make the case for embracing the cloud in a more meaningful way. So while IT managers are certainly reading the blogs and analyst reports about the future of the cloud, they’re serious about testing the cloud today, and pushing vendors to make the cloud work for fundamental enterprise needs.

Open Cloud Computing & Co-operative Community Clouds

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:45:00 EST

First in regards to Open Cloud Services, basically the concept goes like this; as we move away from the traditional client/server based models of the past to more web centric / service oriented opportunities of the future, we will see open source shift from application centric (source code) toward free open services and information. Cloud providers will essentially give away access in return for greater adopt of their platforms / services, increased customer acquisition and to accelerated creation of data and information. Basically the same reasons companies open source their applications today, just applied in a cloud context.

Cloud Computing Basics

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:15:00 EST

It’s important to distinguish cloud computing from several similar models that are often confused for cloud computing. Grid computing, for example, uses a virtual super computer composed of networked, connected computers that act in concert to perform significantly large tasks. Utility computing is a model where computer resources are packaged and provided as a metered service, in the same way that traditional public utilities are packaged and provided. Finally, autonomic computing is often confused with cloud computing. This is a system of computing where the systems are capable of managing themselves.

Cloud Computing and The Israel Defense Forces

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:45:00 EST

Stepping off the airplane last Tuesday at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport I knew I was in for a memorable business trip. As I left the airplane I was greeted by a young female Israeli government official who seemed to recognize me by sight. This was to be my first indication of what was to become a very interesting few days in Israel.

Before I go into the details of my trip, I first need to give you some background which lead to my bizarre series of events. Although I was born in Haifa, a city in North Israel, I had left the country in 1982 at the age of 4, moving with my parents to Canada. Over the nearly 30 or so years since I left I have been lucky enough to travel all over world with generally little in the way of problems. Regardless of where I travel I've always use my Canadian passport, generally the Canadian passport provides me with a warm welcome regardless of the country I'm visiting. As an individual I've always identified myself both professionally and personally as a Canadian. When I speak, I like many other Canadians I throw in the casual "eh" at the end of sentences, and Americans routinely make fun of my "outs" and "abouts". I'm told they sound funny. So for all practical purposes, I am Canadian.

But because of where I was born, in the back of my mind I knew I was technically an Israeli citizen but never gave it much thought. Being born in Israel to a Swiss mother and Canadian father gave me a unique gift. This unusual "gift" is that of having three citizenships. Two of which, Israel and Switzerland require military service. Since leaving Israel at the age of 4 I have never had the opportunity to go back, not so much as a conscience decision as much as I never really had any reason to visit -- albeit for business or otherwise. But unlike Israel I have been to Switzerland many times over years and even have an active Swiss passport (which I rarely use). During my many trips to Switzerland, I have never been asked about military duty, so I falsely assumed the same would be true in Israel. Making what transpired all the more surprising.

Back to my arrival in Israel, at first I thought "Wow, Avner and the folks from the Israeli Association of Grid Technologies (IGT) who had invited to speak at their annual summit really go all out. I hadn't even gone through passport control and I'm already being greeted with a warm welcome". Well it turns out the welcome wasn't as warm as I thought. Next thing I know I'm being escorted to a secret label-less backroom at the airport. At this point I was told to wait. So for about two hours I waited as occasionally attractive young Israeli women with large machine guns would come in saying something to me in Hebrew, which I don't speak. After awhile they realized I didn't speak Hebrew and said "What kind of Israeli doesn't speak Hebrew" To which I responded, "A Canadian" They then ask me a series of questions. (Who my parents were, where I was born etc. Which they already knew)

The next part caught me by surprise, remember this is supposed to be a short (72hour) trip to Israel. A young woman tells me that as an Israeli citizen I have two conditions before I can leave: First I can't leave leave the country without permission from the dept of Interior and must get an Israeli passport. When I asked how long she tells me several weeks. Then the best part, secondly I must report for my Israeli military service in a place called Tiberias not far from Jordan and Syria on western shore of the Sea of Galilee as soon as possible. When I said again that I was just visiting, the official indicated that I was now officially in the Israeli defense forces (IDF).

I was now on my own in a country where I didn't speak the language and certainly didn't identify myself with. I was on my own effectively drafted into one of the most well funded and active defense forces on the planet. To give you some background on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), in 2008 Israel spent $16.2 billion on its armed forces, making it the country with the biggest ratio of defense spending to GDP as a percentage of the budget of all developed countries.($2,300 per person). Also all male citizens are required to serve three years in the IDF with exceptions made only on religious, physical or psychological grounds. Arguably the IDF is one of the most politically charged defense forces on the globe, not exactly how I envisioned spending my next three years.

It wasn't that I was afraid of being in the army, so much as the thought of potentially being away from my family in what most certainly felt like a strange foreign land. With an 11 month old baby at home and my wife and I expecting another I focused on how to get out of this most awkward predicament I suddenly found myself in. So now instead of focusing my attention on the business meetings and presentations I was supposed to have over the next few days I would have to focus on what felt like getting back my freedom. Luckly my new Israeli friends and business partners stepped up to help me out.

Some of the biggest help came from an Israeli business partner (who asked not to be named). When I eventually emerged that evening from the holding area in the Airport, he was there waiting for me and sprung into action. Within minutes he had called senior contacts within the Israeli Government, contacts that would eventually include the Deputy Prime Minster of Israel as well as various other high ranking officials. He then detailed a strategy that would have me visit both the Dept of the Interior as well as the biggest Army base in the country.

While my business partner was calling everyone he knew, the second day of my trip I attendeed the conference as much as I could. After all I was in Tel Aviv for the World Cloud Computing Summit and a CloudCamp Tel Aviv which ended up being both successes having great turn outs. Needless to say there is a tremendous amount of interest in cloud computing in Israel with several hosting companies announcing they would be offering cloud related products and services. But alas, this aspect of my trip was greatly overshadowed by my worries of being conscripted into the military as well as not being able to leave the country. Anyone who follows my twitter account could easily see I was somewhat stressed over the situation. But thanks to the huge outpouring of support from the Israeli's I met, my situation would soon be resolved with the greatest of efficiency. Literally dozens of people made phone calls and provided me with advice. It seemed that if you had a friend in the IDF, they would call on my behalf with at one point one senior military commander noting that that I must of been a very special person because he had received no less then 10 calls about me in the previous 24 hours.

All in all it took roughly 48 hours to get my situation fully resolved. First with the issuing of an Israel passport (which was given to me 45 minutes after it was requested, a new record I'm told) as well as a visit to the largest military base in the country called Camp Rabin named for Yitzhak Rabin. The base was one of the first IDF bases and has served as the IDF headquarters since Israel's founding in 1948. Think of it like the Pentagon in the U.S.

One of things that struck me at Camp Rabin (other then it reminded me of a good unconference name) was the age of the average enlistee, somewhere between 18-21 years old, unsurprisingly all of which were heavily armed. It felt like a summer camp with guns.

After a few hours of back and forth between the IDF HQ and my outpost in Tiberias I was given my release papers. The papers were in Hebrew, but luckily my local partner who seemed to have became both my chauffeur and translator was there to help. He told me that I had been discharged from the IDF for the reason of "Old Age" and that it also said that I was free to leave the country.

Yes, one crazy business trip.

Cloud Computing Implementation Road-Map

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:30:00 EST

First, start by taking a broad look at the applications and other IT resources and systems under your "control" (both existing ones and planned ones); categorize them into mission-critical (i.e., if it goes offline your company will not "survive") and non-mission-critical. Both mission-critical and non-mission-critical can be further sub-categorized into core business practices (those that provide competitive differentiation) and non-core practices (typically internal activities such as HR services, etc.)

File Virtualization - The Short Primer

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:00:00 EST

George Crump over at Storage Switzerland has a pretty good introductory primer to File/NAS Virtualization. George and I haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, but that’s no surprise, I’m one of those people that wants analysts to prove they’re working on solid ground, and he’s an analyst. Both being type A personalities just guarantees that once in a while we’ll get a little sparky. This time though, he’s got a good intro written up, and though he doesn’t come out and mention it, the standalone, heterogeneous solution he talks about as the second type is pretty much what our ARX series products are all about.

The Next Frontier in the Cloud: Legacy Apps

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:00:00 EST

Although cloud computing momentum continues to build and scarcely a day goes by without a new cloud announcement or study, there’s been little real enterprise adoption and almost no meaningful case studies. In part, that’s because early cloud providers and vendors were focused on developers and technology start-ups when they designed their offerings, and larger, more established organizations were rarely on their radar screen. While start-ups can easily embrace new technologies and architectures, enterprises have far more constraints and have been largely limited to “tire kicking” the cloud with small applications that aren’t particularly meaningful for the business.

In-the-Cloud Approach to Cyber Security

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 10:15:00 EST

Security breaches or other unexpected interruptions can happen anytime to anyone -- whether you are a large enterprise or a small business. Fully maintaining communication network security is a demanding responsibility -- and typically not the best use of your limited IT resources, that would be better applied to delivering incremental new business technology benefits to your organization.

Is Cloud Computing Like Teenage Sex?

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:45:00 EST

It was once said back in the early ‘90s that “Client/server computing is a little like teenage sex – everyone talks about it, few actually do it, and even fewer do it right. Nevertheless, many people believe client/server computing is the next major step in the evolution of corporate information systems."

The Importance of Cloud Abstraction

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:30:00 EST

My colleague, Peter Palmieri, just penned a blog post about Microsoft’s recent announcement that the Azure platform will offer extensive and familiar relational database features via SQL Data Services (SDS). In his post, Leveraging Skills, Peter discusses the fact that .NET developers will be able to leverage their existing SQL Server database skills when developing against the Azure platform.

The Character of Cloud Computing

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 15:00:00 EST

Here's an important reminder for cloud service providers: character counts. Ethics, Values, and Trust are table stakes – for anyone who wants to succeed in business long term – but especially for cloud service providers. As a cloud customer, I am not simply buying/renting your hardware and software. I am grafting my company onto yours. We are intermingling our corporate DNA. I am loading my databases on your disk drives. I am modifying my internal processes to map to your services.

Telepresence – The Face of the Cloud

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 03:30:00 EST

As you can imagine given the ongoing economic challenges, and the demand for green technologies, businesses are seeking all viable means to cut expenses, including travel, while still conducting their business face to face; and cloud computing coupled with converged communications provides a way to meet that need.

Cloud Is the Gift That Keeps on Giving

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:45:00 EST

Brenda Michelson, Principal of Elemental Links, writes "elemental cloud computing" recently tweeted: "100k buys way more public, than private, cloud computing power" which started a short but inspiring conversation on the subject centering around the observation that "cloud is the gift that keeps on giving." That's alluding to the fact that the compute power purchased in "the cloud" is an annual expense, unlike private, cloud computing power which requires renewal at longer intervals, usually in the 3-5 year range. Still, Brenda is right at least in the short term. $100,000 purchases a lot more compute power in a public cloud computing environment than it will/would/does in a private cloud computing environment. The problem is that $100,000 in a private cloud computing environment is likely to provide more business value than would a comparable investment in a public cloud computing environment. And that's really the metric we should be using instead of CAPEX versus OPEX.

Cloud Computing Risk Assessment Report

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:15:00 EST

I've been traveling so there is a bit of a back log of news. In case you missed this, The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), working for the EU Institutions and Member States has released a Cloud Computing Risk Assessment report. ENISA is the EU’s response to Information security issues of the European Union. As such, it is the 'pacemaker' for Information Security in Europe. ENISA supported by a group of subject matter expert comprising representatives from Industries, Academia and Governmental Organizations, has conducted, in the context of the Emerging and Future Risk Framework project, an risks assessment on cloud computing business model and technologies. The result is an in-depth and independent analysis that outlines some of the information security benefits and key security risks of cloud computing. The report provide also a set of practical recommendations.

Werner Vogels, Bradley Horowitz, and Jonathan Zittrain

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:00:00 EST

I’m at Supernova. (live stream) I’ve come in a little late on an afternoon session. Werner Vogels talks about cloud computing. He contrasts it with a 1900 Belgian beer brewery that had to have its own electricity generator, which took a lot of maintenance and didn’t help it make better beer. He warns that any offering that taps into the large social networks may find itself with traffic suddenly spiking by orders of magnitude.

Making Cloud Computing Secure for the Enterprise

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:45:00 EST

For cloud computing to gain traction in the enterprise, IT and security executives need to be certain that their company’s applications and data are safe. But when security is partly out of enterprise control, it becomes impossible to know if sensitive information has been accessed or compromised.

Today, using a public cloud means moving from an internal environment where a company has complete control of data and processes to an environment where that control belongs to someone else, and is often opaque. Within the cloud, applications run in a multi-tenant virtual environment, sharing physical machines with other customers. Companies considering moving an application to a cloud have legitimate concerns about data being compromised or stolen, including unauthorized access by cloud administrators, exposure in the internet or rogue employees using the cloud to corrupt or leak sensitive information.

One solution is to keep sensitive data within the corporate data center and put the other application tiers in the public cloud. While this approach works well for some use case scenarios, the latency impact of the “reach back” into the data center can be unacceptable for many applications and users. The other option is to move the entire application to the cloud – including the database tier – for better performance and scalability, but this exposes the application to new potential threats such as those mentioned above.

Encryption is a well-known approach to addressing these types of security threats. For protection in the cloud, the enterprise would need to encrypt all data and communications. While it’s not that difficult to add encryption software initially to the application environment, the new configuration requires ongoing management and maintenance. And in order to run the application in the cloud, the enterprise needs to deliver the encryption keys to the cloud to decrypt the data, creating additional security risks by exposing the keys in the operating environment. In the worst case, poor configuration can expose the corporate data center to threats from the cloud.

In developing our security model at CloudSwitch, we worked closely with CSOs and security teams at several large enterprises to understand their requirements. As a result, our architecture addresses three areas of protection required to make cloud computing secure for the enterprise:

In the data center: Role-based access control protects data and processes from unauthorized access.
In the Internet: Connections are authenticated and data is encrypted to prevent data in transit from being exposed or compromised.
In the public cloud: Data is encrypted with keys under enterprise control, and can never be accessed by the cloud provider or unauthorized users.

The CloudSwitch security strategy is a key part of our vision to make the cloud a seamless extension of the corporate data center. Using CloudSwitch technology, companies can move applications and data to a cloud without modification, and back to the data center as needed. Companies can also select the right cloud for a specific application, based on security and compliance levels as well as service offerings and pricing structures. Only with control of applications and data at all times can enterprises take full advantage of cloud resources without sacrificing the security required by customers, internal users, regulators and other stakeholders.

New OpenSolaris VPC Gateway Tool

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:45:00 EST

Even more interesting would be if I could create and access a VPC from OpenSolaris running inside of VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro! That way, I could have an on-demand virtual data center in the Cloud that I could access from anywhere! It was from this concept, that I reached out to Dan McDonald and Dileep Kumar. Forming this virtual team, we applied our respective skills to this challenge. As things started to heat up, we pulled in Sebastien Roy and Sowmini Varadhan who provided invaluable support and architectural guidance without which we would still be in troubleshooting hell. (Thank you guys!) So, where do things stand? (Drum roll, please!)

Government Cloud Computing Value Survey

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:15:00 EST

As part of a continuing Government Cloud computing education program, Dataline, LLC has released a Government Cloud Computing Value Survey. This online resource has been designed as an aid to help Federal agencies explore the value of cloud computing. Through a 15 minute interactive session.

Most Cyber Attacks Can be Prevented with Monitoring

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:15:00 EST

I came across that number while reading a story about in Wired that reports on a Senate panel’s finding that 80% of cyber attacks can be prevented. According to the Richard Schaeffer, information assurance director for the National Security Administration (NSA), who testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, If network administrators simply instituted proper configuration policies and conducted good network monitoring most attacks would be prevented. Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, a group that represents banks, telecoms, defense and technology companies and other industries that rely on the internet, told the panel that much of the fault is with companies and governments who collect and store data. He said that “they do not understand themselves to be responsible for the defense of the data. “The marketing department has data, the finance department has data, etc, but they think the security of the data is the responsibility of the IT guys at the end of the hall.”

More on Microsoft's "Migrating Data To New Cloud"

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST

More commentary on Microsoft's "Migrating Data to New Cloud" patent application.

Visualizing the Boundaries of Control in the Cloud

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:15:00 EST

Cloud’s biggest problem isn’t security; it’s the continuous noise around security that distracts us from the real issues and the possible solutions. It’s not hard to create a jumbled list of things to worry about in the cloud. It is considerably harder to come up with a cohesive model that highlights a fundamental truth and offers a new perspective from which to consider solutions. This is the value of Dan’s stack.

Grokking the Goodness of MapReduce and SPDY

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:00:00 EST

Certainly no one would seriously argue that web applications are fast enough for everyone. SPDY is one suggested solution, but what if we combine MapReduce and SPDY? Could we develop an architectural solution that leverages the best of SPDY without requiring entire infrastructure changes to support a new protocol?

More than a couple of people have mentioned Map/Reduce as a means to achieve workload-level distribution of applications in a cloud computing environment. I hadn’t looked into Map/Reduce but finally decided that if that many very smart people were thinking it was a solution, I should look into it. After reading through a few tutorials and articles on the subject, including a much referenced lecture from a UW Madison (yeah! Badgers!) professor, I began to wonder how well we could combined MapReduce with SPDY as a means to improve application delivery. [The referenced ‘illustrated’ PDF from the lecture is hard to find. You can access it here. ]

From Google’s paper on Map/Reduce:

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large datasets that is amenable to a broad variety of real-world tasks. Users specify the computation in terms of a map and a reduce function, and the underlying runtime system automatically parallelizes the computation across large-scale clusters of machines, handles machine failures, and schedules inter-machine communication to make efficient use of the network and disks.

Programmers find the system easy to use: more than ten thousand distinct MapReduce programs have been implemented internally at Google over the past four years, and an average of one hundred thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google’s clusters every day, processing a total of more than twenty petabytes of data per day.

It isn’t just the protocol (SPDY) that’s apposite to application performance and more specifically, web application performance. After looking through Map/Reduce, it would certainly appear that the combination of the “programmatic model” and SPDY would definitely provide the kind of scale and processing speed necessary to achieve a “speedier web.”

THE WAY IT WORKS TODAY

When we want to scale a web application today we need to build out an architecture that load balances requests across a pool of servers. Clients are limited in the number of connections that can be opened to any given host, but that number is now in the 6-8 range for modern browsers. The connections are synchronous, meaning that once a request is sent a reply must be received before the next request can be sent.

Each object in a page can be mapped to a request and thus the browser’s task is to distribute object requests across its available connections and then to aggregate the responses into a document that can be rendered for the user’s viewing pleasure.

In much the same way, the load balancer also distributes the requests across its pool of available resources: the application instances. The Load balancer is capable of handling much high volumes of connections, of course, and it can intelligently distribute requests based on a variety of parameters. An advanced load balancer (application delivery controller) can distribute requests based on the URI, values in HTTP headers, and on data in the actual request (payload). But it is still bound to the same synchronous request/reply pattern as the browser. In order to achieve high scalability and fast performance, the load balancer optimizes connections and uses as much information as possible when distributing requests. The latter is often a matter of configuration: even though the load balancer can use a wide variety of environmental factors upon which to base its load balancing decision it must be configured to do so and many an administrator/architect ignores these capabilities.

The result is still synchronous, with potentially multiple connections per client being utilized to return as many objects in parallel as possible. Both the browser and the load balancer are essentially parallelizing requests and responses.

WHAT IF WE COMBINE MAP/REDUCE and SPDY?

The biggest difference to note immediately is the lack of synchronous communication. SPDY is asynchronous, and thus the browser need not parallelize the requests. Using SPDY the browser could, as it was parsing the main page, simply send a request for each object it encounters back to the origin server.

Remember that SPDY allows for only one connection per browser, so all requests for component objects in a web page would need to be sent over that single connection. Aside from the synchronicity, this is not much different than would be the case is browsers were programmatically limited to a single connection per host.

Right now it appears the usage of SPDY is simulating traditional behavior; that is, the browser is still responsible for parsing out the “main page” and initiating individual requests for each component, albeit in the case of SPDY over the same connection.

If you have the capabilities afforded by Map/Reduce on the web/application server (or intermediary of some kind), could we not take advantage of that? Using Map/Reduce it certainly appears (and I may be completely off-base, but someone, I’m sure, will correct me if that’s the case) you could push the parsing (disaggregation) of the “main page” to the server/intermediary and let it “map” and “reduce” (aggregate) its component objects into a single, completed page that can then be returned to the client over that single connection. The “map” function is used to apply the same function to a large set of inputs, and all we’re doing is saying the function is “load/generate this page”, after all. The application of compression and security policies can be applied either at the component or complete page comprising all HTML required. The rest of the infrastructure need only act on a single, completed page in which all pertinent data exists, greatly simplifying processing.

It would have to be selective in that only some included content needs to be “reduced” into the main page. Some objects – navigational links, for example – can’t be included because, well, it would break the entire web. But there is a subset of objects that could be included that might result in improved performance overall. This is where SPDY (or at least its core functionality as applied to HTTP) comes into the picture, as its asynchronous nature would improve the delivery of objects that can’t be included in the core HTML for whatever reason. Distinguishing between the two could be as simple as an attribute on an anchor element such as “aggregate=true” with a default of false, just to try to maintain backward compatibility.

This would remove the need for the browser to parse the original page and subsequently issue requests, eliminating the round trip time for each object from the overall response time. While the resulting page is larger because it contains the complete HTML necessary, the browser can more effectively employ progressive rendering techniques on the complete page as soon as data begins returning.

The draft SPDY protocol, by allowing asynchronous requests, eliminates approximately half the round trip times by not requiring immediate responses, but by leveraging Map/Reduce capable systems on the server/intermediary side we can eliminate more ( #objects * RTT to be exact). We also completely eliminate the negative impact on the network (and thus application performance) from dealing with many small packets generated from many small objects.

The RTT between the server/intermediary and internal application servers is still applicable, but because this is almost always over high-speed, low-latency LAN connections (and we’re paying that price regardless) the impact on overall performance remains minimal.

AREN’T YOU ARGUING AGAINST APPLICATION DELIVERY CONTROLLERS?

If you think of application delivery controllers as nothing more than load balancers then it certainly might appear that way, wouldn’t it? But load balancing, while an integral component to an application delivery controller, is not the be-all and end-all of its capabilities or its only role in high-availability architectures. Optimization and acceleration still applies, as does security and its myriad related functions. So, too, does ability to transform requests on-demand, both ingress and egress. Context is still as important, if not more so in an architecture such as the one described, and given an application delivery controller generally sits in what is a strategic point of control in a data center architecture- traditional, virtualized, or cloud computing – it is still the best place to provide most application delivery functionality.

So no, I’m not shooting myself in the foot by postulating on a web-application architecture using SPDY and Map/Reduce (or some similar mechanism that has yet to be designed) as a core means to achieve fast and highly-scalable web applications. The use of SPDY and Map/Reduce would only speed up the internal processing and reduce the latency associated with the traditional request/reply paradigm. It does not address high-latency links, congestion, conditional network problems, or security-related issues. It doesn’t solve the problem of regulating request rates nor prioritization nor business-layer load balancing. And there are many BHQ (Big Hairy Questions) involving such a solution that would need answers before it could be useful, such as the handling of off-domain requests and credential mapping for integrated widgets/gadgets/sites.

Besides, it is somewhat interesting to note that much of the functionality described by Map/Reduce, when applied strictly to URI-based workloads (think REST and even SOA) already exists in application delivery controllers. It isn’t, after all, just about load-balancing, it’s about intelligent routing of requests based on context, like the URI. The single-session concept is something already demanded by service-providers (RADIUS, DIAMETER, SIP) and some application delivery controllers can handle this type of message-based load balancing [PDF] scenario, so all that’s left is the aggregation of the disparate components into a single page for delivery. So it’s possible that the definition of such an architecture combined with the protocol could be natively supported by application delivery controllers with relative ease. What’s necessary is to break out of the connection-oriented processing paradigm inherent in load balancing and proxies and HTTP, and in some cases we’re half-way there already.

It is definitely interesting to contemplate a new architectural solution to the problems associated with HTTP and performance. Map/Reduce is also certainly one answer to moving cloud computing out of its current instantiation toward truly on-demand resource utilization on a per-workload basis. It’s an interesting concept and one that obviously works well for Google, given the number of applications in its repertoire that apparently take advantage of the model. Thus it (or similar concepts) is certainly something to consider for potentially broader usage outside of Google’s infrastructure.

I don’t think anyone would argue that the web is “speedy” enough as it is, so exploring new concepts is something we need to do. We may find a thousand ways not to do it – and this may be one of those ‘not’ ways – but eventually someone will find a way.

Related blogs & articles:

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,load balancing,SPDY,Google,MapReduce,parallelization,MBLB,message-based load balancing,architecture,infrastructure,application delivery,optimization,acceleration,security

Virtual Infrastructure in Cloud Computing Just Passes the Buck

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:45:00 EST

There are many good reasons to go down the virtual infrastructure road. The illusion that it’s cheaper than dedicated hardware solutions is not one of them.

I was reading an interesting predictive article on WAN optimization that contends that virtualized WAN optimization controllers (WOC) are, well, just better than sliced bread. One of the reasons why the author opined this way was presented as the great benefits of horizontal scalability (linear) in cloud computing environments.

Savings and scalability. This approach ensures that there is no need for dedicated hardware to support WAN optimization, saving on CAPEX and OPEX. Cost savings will also be realized through virtual scalability. As enterprises add more services or applications to be accessed by additional remote workers via the cloud, the virtualized WAN optimization model will be able to scale linearly.

The implication here is clear: WAN optimization via virtual solutions saves CAPEX and OPEX over dedicated hardware and additional savings are achieved through virtual scalability. But that’s ignoring that the initial investment cost is simply shifted from CAPEX to longer-term OPEX when scalability enters the picture. Not just scalability of the solution, but the impact of application and virtual infrastructure scalability on the solution as well.

VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE is just PASSING the BUCK

Back in the old days we used to deploy all our infrastructure as software. As you needed more compute resources, you deployed bigger, beefier servers on which to deploy said solutions. That’s vertical scalability. Today we prefer the cloud computing model: horizontal scalability. Pay as you grow, compute resources on-demand. Whatever you want to call it the appeal is certainly in the perception that it’s easier and, perhaps more importantly, cheaper than traditional hardware-based scalability solutions. But it’s not accurate at all to equate this model with what is essentially “cheaper” scalability. The operational expenses associated with management, the cost of additional licenses, integration, and the hourly costs associated with the cloud computing environment in question all must be factored into the equation lest we fall prey to the hype that encircles cloud computing today.

One of the reasons you see cost savings in cloud computing is that the costs of the hardware – the physical servers – are shared. You only pay a “nominal” fee per hour for using that hardware. The cost of that hardware is shared across hundreds of other customers, all seeking the same reduction in operating and capital expenditures. So far, so good. Sharing the physical hardware certainly does spread the cost around and results in a cheaper operating environment – at least for the customer.

But when you start virtualizing the infrastructure (as in virtual software equivalents) you generally don’t get to share the costs of the solution and you never share the costs of management. Most of the time you just share the same costs you do for any other generic virtual image: the underlying physical hardware. You’re also forced to scale horizontally based on the capacity constraints inherent in the virtual image. The provider and/or solution vendor sets the RAM/compute resources available for the virtual instance and if you need more resources when you’ve reached the largest configuration you’ll have to start scaling horizontally. Whether you want to or not. The second image incurs the same management costs as well as the hourly fees. Likely, too, you’re paying for the licensing because virtual versions of solutions aren’t free, after all, unless you’re leveraging open source solutions that are.

You don’t share those costs with anyone. They are yours, and yours alone. The buck passes from CAPEX to OPEX. CAPEX is reduced, yes, but OPEX? Not so much. Perhaps that’s better from an accounting point of view, but from a total cost perspective it doesn’t really change much.

SCALABILITY of APPLICATIONS IMPACTS COSTS of VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE

You can, of course, choose the largest image and thus avoid horizontal scalability. But that is going to increase the costs of the solution overall. Consider the virtual equivalent of an application delivery controller delivered via Amazon EC2 on its largest (quadruple large) image is $4.80 / hour (based on pricing listed by Zeus Technologies for its virtual solution on Amazon). It is unlikely you’ll have any hour in which that solution is not used. Assuming even one request handled per hour, every hour, every day you’re looking at more than $42000 per year. Don’t forget, too, you may likely have additional charges for bandwidth – both ingress and egress. Not nearly as “inexpensive” as purported. You could start smaller, but that means it’s more likely you’ll need to “upgrade” midstream. This is far easier to do with a virtual infrastructure than with hardware, at least from a physical deployment perspective, but it is just as disruptive a process and may lead to jumping onto the horizontal scalability path earlier rather than later because it is so easy to simply “add another instance” when compared to “upgrade to a new image.” Consider, too, that deploying virtual infrastructure means it is not integrated with the rest of the environment. That may not sound bad, until you realize that automatic scalability means new instances of applications – and perhaps other infrastructure solutions - may be popping up that you need to manage via the infrastructure. How is the infrastructure going to know about it? Either you are manually managing this process or you are going to be doing some integration work. That’s yet another soft-cost of “scalability” that isn’t factored into the equation when comparing hardware to virtual infrastructure.

Contrast that to a model in which services are provided via shared hardware infrastructure solutions. The cost of the hardware is not nominal. But like the rest of the physical infrastructure its costs are shared across all customers. Providing traditional network and application network solutions as services is inherently better suited to a cloud computing environment in that it allows the management costs to be shared (the provider manages the solution, not the customer) and is completely on-demand. Scalability is not the concern of the customer and generally speaking the limitations on RAM/compute resources do not exist in the same way they exist in virtual solutions. Bandwidth in both scenarios can be limited or unlimited, depending on requirements and implementation. Integration should also be taken care of by virtue of the fact that it’s a part of the cloud computing environment and the provider likely wants to ensure that they are billed properly for services rendered.

The current method of deploying a virtual infrastructure actually breaks the “shared resources, shared costs” model of cloud computing and negates the cost savings associated with the elimination of CAPEX for the hardware with the OPEX costs of management, integration, licensing, and a more constrained operating environment that ultimately leads to the need to scale out sooner than would otherwise be required. Certainly a shared model could be implemented via virtualized software solutions, but this model has the same implementation roadblocks as hardware solutions that lead to non-implementation today. Virtual infrastructure shifts many of the management and maintenance-related burdens offloaded by a public cloud computing model back onto the organization and requires more vigilance and dedication to ensuring the overall architecture is operating as expected.

VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURE is PROBABLY YOUR ONLY OPTION

Today, virtualized infrastructure may be the only option for an organization to obtain the control and choice that is currently lacking in today’s cloud computing environments. Deploying hardware solutions and associated services requires an investment on the part of the provider and additional time and investment in developing the means by which customers can take advantage of the solution via services. While most providers invest in hardware solutions without pause, they rarely take the next step in integrating its offerings as services for customers. This means that if you need specific infrastructure components – application acceleration, WAN optimization, web application security – that you’ll likely need to go the virtual infrastructure route. That’s not all bad; this path leads to control and isolation of implementation and configuration, which can be a requirement for conforming to organizational security policies. Organizations having concerns about the impact of other customers sharing infrastructure resources (they already do, but a service-based model brings this to the fore) will almost certainly want to take advantage of the isolation afforded by a virtualized infrastructure implementation.

I’m not arguing against virtual infrastructure in theory or against the control and choice they offer customers. There are challenges with such implementations, mind you, but that’s not really the point today. I’m simply arguing against the “it’s cheaper” mantra that is patently false and fails to take into consideration all the variables in the equation and instead focuses only on the most tangible ones.

There are certainly benefits realized from both deployment models and it is up to the organization to decide which model is right for them. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking virtual infrastructure is a “cheaper” solution, because when you step back and take a look at the entire cost of a solution, that’s just not the case and in fact a services-enabled infrastructure may be a much more financially advantageous solution – except for the provider.

Which may be the real reason the only option you ever have is a virtual one.

Related blogs & articles:

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,WAN,WAN optimization,WOC,cloud computing,virtual infrastructure,virtualization,capex,opex

Cloud Computing in Practice

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:00:00 EST

James Urquhart has assembled a very impressive list of examples of Cloud Computing in practice. Examples include: * Number of applications running on Force.com: 135,000 * Number of applications hosted by Ruby on Rails platform service vendor Heroku: 40,000+ Objects stored in Amazon Web Services S3: 64 billion (as of August 2009)

Diffusing Technology into Generation Z

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:00:00 EST

Us “Baby Boomers” tend to believe we have accomplished a lot in the years ranging from our roots of hard rock, to the birth of basic internet technologies in the early 1970s. We started our generation with black and white television, experiencing everything from the assassination of President Kennedy to absorbing the wonders of man walking on the moon.

A Decision to Monitor From the Cloud is Wise

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:15:00 EST

When people talk about businesses using the cloud, we often think of companies in the classic sense – some global, private enterprise or even a mid-sized company deciding to re-apply resources and save by switching data storage and apps virtually.

How Real Clouds Are Made

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

How are Clouds made? By leasing an anonymous-looking building, buying commodity servers by the mile, then engaging an infrastructure guy like Randy Bias to put it together? No - I meant real clouds. So on the day after Thanksgiving, I brought my son to the Liberty Science Center in Liberty City, New Jersey, just across the Hudson from Manhattan. It's a great place - we agreed afterwards that it's right up there with San Francisco's Exploratorium. Boston Museum of Science membership got us in for free.

The Cloud and Your Monitoring Vendor

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:15:00 EST

If you’re shopping around for a company that monitors your website transactions, servers or networks, there are many points of comparison that would be worth your time covering in a request for proposal process. But here are some major points that are worthwhile asking a potential vendor: - How quickly and efficiently can you update your [...]

Mobile Application Integration Platform

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 03:00:00 EST

An increasingly large amount of data is being consumed by mobile handheld computers and Smart phones. This data can come from a wide variety of sources and be in many different formats including GPS, LBS (location based services), SMS, voice, Email, Video, digital photos, barcode scanning, RFID, voice memos, documents and Bluetooth data connectivity to a large variety of data collection tools and equipment. The data can come from many different ERPs, database applications and SaaS (software as a service) offerings in a cloud computing environment.

SaaS & Business Intelligence at Dreamforce

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

I was lucky enough to be at Dreamforce 2009 last week and wanted to pen down a few thoughts while the event is still fresh in my mind. I don’t think there was any earth-shattering news there, and I got the feeling (both onsite and online) that a lot of people didn’t really grasp the value of Benioff’s announcement (or strategy) about “socializing” the platform with Chatter. I, for one, certainly couldn’t make sense of Colin Powell’s presence at one of the keynotes (not sure what he can possibly offer the world of SaaS but maybe I missed something). But overall it was an enlightening conference and here are some of my impressions (and they pertain mostly to the SaaS BI realm).

SQL Server 2008 R2 Nov CTP Installs Easily on Windows 7

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

I had problems installing on Windows XP SP3 but it was very easy on Windows 7 Ultimate Evaluation copy (build 7100). If you have Visual Studio 2008 you may need to apply SP1 before you complete installation on Windows 7. I installed a named instance Hodentek\KUMORI (ver 10.50.1352) which is a minor upgrade to SQL Server 2008 RTM. If you want to work with a database in the cloud (SQL Azure) you need SQL Server 2008 R2 Nov-CTP.

Cloud Computing Service: Amazon EC2 vs Google GAE

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST

Though different cloud service providers are following different strategies, these are the two uniquely different approaches. Others either are similar to one of these or fall somewhere in between. I have excluded SaaS from this discussion - you can see the comparison between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS on this post on Cloud Strategy.

ILM Was Cloud Computing Buzzword de Jour A Few Years Ago

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

Disclaimer, warning, be advised, heads up, disclosure, this post is partially for fun so take it that way. Remember ILM, that is, Information Lifecycle Management among other meanings. It was a popular buzzword de jour a few years ago similar to how cloud is being tossed around lately, or in the recent past, virtualization, clusters, grids and SOA among others. One of the challenges with ILM besides its overuse and thus confusion was what it meant, after all was or is it a product, process, paradigm or something else?

Cloud Computing in the Land of the Rising Sun

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

I just got back from a week in Toyko. My trip was actually quite the experience, the first time I've gotten the chance to visit Japan. I was there in part to attend CloudCamp Tokyo as well as an action packed week of meetings. Other then 7 days of sushi, which got old pretty fast, I had an amazing time.

Go East for Cloud Computing Expansion

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:15:00 EST

In the story, I also noticed that Amazon also put out a new software development kit for .NET and support for private content in Amazon CloudFront – the company’s content delivery service. This is the kind of support that enables, say, a website that sells digital products, to restrict downloadable merchandise to paying customers. I like to hear about the development of support services that make companies feel more secure about doing business on the cloud. We have enough examples of security breaches, outages and other cloud snags that make consumers and businesses jittery. And, of course, I think supplemental services for website owners, such as website transaction monitoring and incidence notifications, go a long way to increasing a sense of security.