Head in the Clouds

I had the pleasure last week of working with a Bothell-based hardware vendor, Silicon Mechanics, and a company called Private Cloud Leasing to get CloudStack up and running on what is literally a datacenter on wheels (the small unit in the picture).

We took this Cloud-on-Wheels to the LinuxFest Northwest show at Bellingham Technical College, and put it on the expo hall floor.

On Sunday, we unplugged it and rolled it out of the expo hall, across the plaza, and up to one of the classrooms for the CloudStack session. The unit itself is self-propelled, runs on UPS,  and you can basically move it around any building that is wheelchair accessible.

The Cloud-on-Wheels generated A LOT OF ATTENTION (it’s very blue) and thus was a great draw to the booth and session.  As we rolled the unit through the hallways of the college, it was a bit like the Pied Piper…we had a group of folks following us, curious to see what we were doing with this thing. 

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So we can be found on Technorati search index this is a verification post - 9CPGBFHN7TDM.

Apparently Stephen Colbert did a bit on his show called Head in the Cloud.  While it has very little to do with what we talka bout with regards to Cloud Computing here at CloudStack.org it was a pretty funny bit. Since it's almost the same name of the blog and sort of funny, I thought I would share the video as it is humorous.

 

The future of cloud computing is something we talk about quite a bit around here, so I was eager to read some of the new year predictions that tend to pop up right between Christmas and New Years. I read one written by Matt Asay who writes the Open Road column over at CNET. He argues that it will be a good year for technology consolidation, as...

One of the most interesting articles I've read in the last year is a Network World piece about how Bechtel is "Google-izing" it's IT infrastructure.

If you read the article, you learn quickly that what drove Bechtel CIO Geir Ramleth to mimic Google, and other companies like Salesforce.com and Amazon, was nothing more complicated than a desire to deliver more flexible services to end...

One of the most powerful but lesser known features of CloudStack is it's ability to integrate with networking devices like F5 and NetScaler loadbalancers. 

With CloudStack 3.0 you can deploy NetScaler with core Load Balancing rules. The core protocols like TCP, HTTP and UDP are supported and you can use the load balancing algorithms like Round Robin, Source IP and Least connection. It also supports session persistency based on Source IP and Cookie.

There's a nice overview of how that works over on the Citrix blog. 

this tips will be useful especially in the test and evaluation stage from a CloudStack project.

ok, here we go!

The resource_count table contains the quantity of  user_vm, public_ip, volume, snapshot,  template and the first acction is add the user_vm and volumes to another account, here's a example.

mysql> select * from resource_count where account_id = 22;
+-------+-------------+--------------+----------------+--------+
| id  | account_id | domain_id | type    |count |
+-------+-------------+--------------+----------------+--------+
| 151 |         22 |      NULL | user_vm   |     1  |
| 152 |         22 |      NULL | public_ip  |     0  |
| 153 |         22 |      NULL | volume     |     2  |
| 154 |         22 |      NULL | snapshot  |     0  |
| 155 |         22 |      NULL | template   |     0  |

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A few months back during Cloud Expo, I had a chance to talk with Alex Bederov from Nokia and he showed me a spreadsheet that Nokia was using to analyze the usage reports from CloudStack. I thought this was fascinating, particularly from a private cloud perspective. While there are products like Amysta or CloudPortal that handle taking the usage records and billing against them, private clouds typically don't need that same level of billing services. This is a wonderful middle ground. In the interim Alex has written up his way of interacting with CloudStack usage database - and we've now published it as a KB article 

 

http://docs.cloud.com/Knowledge_Base/Using_Microsoft_Excel_to_analyze_CloudStack_usage_records

Alex was quite nice and even provided a sample spreadsheet to look at, and it's linked at the bottom of the KB article. 

Hopefully this will benefit a lot of folks just looking to do some basic reporting against the usage database. 

High Availability is one of those things often touted by cloud pundits as one of the miracle features of 'the cloud'. As a recovering sysadmin, things like availability, uptime, mean time to recovery, fault tolerance, and redundancy are near and dear to my heart.

How services and applications are built and used is changing. The older way of thinking, was to centralize everything, buy the most reliable hardware you could get and that is as available as you could make things. (Read that as closer to mainframe thinking) And that type of thinking generally worked (and still does in many cases) OK - but it's not without problems; Namely, it's expensive and failure still occurs.

As the industry has continued down the consumption of computing services pathway the need for reliability has grown exponentially. People want and need better reliability - and the old way of 'ensuring' availability doesn't scale very well. That led us to what most people talk about when they consider HA today. Much less expensive machines but using redundancy in components - and actually architecting High Availability at the software level. This led to things like Linux-HA, Pacemaker, Zookeeper, Corosync, etc. and to applications and services designing some of their own distributed (and thus more highly-available) capabilities - such as database replication, web load balancing, etc.

Real HA comes from proper architecting. We are moving away from a critical application running on a single piece of hardware. Folks have started to realize, through the pioneering work of folks like Amazon, Netlfix, and Zynga, that failure is assured. Trying to avoid failure is fruitless - embracing failure and architecting systems to expect, and properly react to failure is the path to availability.

Along the path, HA became a buzzword, and is still one of those essential checkboxes that must be completed for enterprise computing purchases. Like cloud-washing that we see so much of now, it has led to some abuse of the term, and over time the term has changed meanings. This is pretty taxing on people who actually care about the underlying technology. But this post isn't a rant about buzzword-washing and definition dilution - it's about HA in the cloud.

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Hi everyone!

We had an awesome time at the Silicon Valley Cloud Expo! Thanks to those that visited our CloudStack booth, participated in our sessions and attended our personal lunch and learn.

During the expo, we had a lot of questions and discussions on a variety of aspects around cloud computing and CloudStack. We also had a lot of end-users visiting our booth interested in getting specific information (i.e., how to get started, networking, best practices) to take back home. We took some notes and will be creating various interactive video and sneak peaks series over the next couple of months to shower you with CloudStack goodies.

Just in time for the holidays, we’re treating you to a 7-part series on networking with CloudStack. Over the next few weeks, this series will have our resident CloudStack community “guy” David Nalley and Product Architect Chiradeep Vittal illustrate some of the common network topologies and features that CloudStack supports. They will identify some networking challenges in cloud computing and provide best practices and use cases on how to leverage Cloudstack to overcome them. This video series is a must-see for developers and network/systems architects, or anyone interested in Cloud computing!

Episode 1: Introduction to Network Services with CloudStack

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Recently, Citrix announced that it will donate CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).  This is a very exciting moment in the history of the CloudStack project.  The ASF is the premier open source foundation in the world and it has a track record of successful, completely open projects.  The CloudStack project has been increasingly open during its life.  But, “increasingly open” isn’t good enough.  We have to be 100% open in our technical discussions to run the project in the meritocratic fashion that successful Apache projects use.  In this blog post I’ll do a brief review of CloudStack openness and list out the changes we’ll be making over the next few months to transform CloudStack from a largely single-entity development effort to a collaborative, community project.

CloudStack 1.0 was proprietary software.  Closed specs, closed discussion, closed bug database, closed source.  The CloudStack 2.0 release in May, 2010 transitioned CloudStack to an open-core model.  About 95% of the source was available under GPLv3 and the bug database was open, but the technical discussions were closed and few technical documents were publicly available.  In August, 2011 Citrix published 100% of the CloudStack source code.  We started publishing some technical specs, but the discussions were still closed.

In late 2011, in conjunction with the Acton release, we started doing a better job publishing technical specs.   Not perfect – we weren’t iterating the designs in the open – but good progress.  We also (finally) came up with a process for accepting contributions.  In 2012 we’ve created a publicly available project dashboard , started publishing meeting minutes, and getting a larger number of non-Citrix contributions.

That’s good stuff, but there are some fundamental changes needed to make it more open.  Instead of publishing designs and discussion results after the fact, we have to publish the earliest version and then iterate in the open.  We also have to have the technical discussions on the cloudstack-dev mailing list (see below for the new one), and not on our internal engineering list.  This will take policing -- and I’m part of the problem here -- but through force of will a few folks can make a big difference here.

We also need to ask more of the community.  Our bug database is open, but, there’s no place to go with an “ask-list”.  Nowhere can you easily see important features with no owner, nor can you easily search to find the bugs with the most votes.  We need to pick a few features with a variety of technical needs and ask the community to help out.  That part is easy, BTW.  CloudStack has so many potential integrations in the datacenter that just listing those would give years of work to interested parties!

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With CloudStack Acton now released, there's precious little time to stop and rest. Instead, we are already rapidly working on the next CloudStack release, codenamed Bonita.


As part of this release we are making a concerted effort to make the entire CloudStack development process far more transparent and inclusive. I do ask that you be patient with us in this process, the level of cultural change is massive. The first step is to at least let folks know what's going on - and Haroon (The project manager for the project) will be posting meeting minutes, status updates, etc. on the cloudstack-devel mailing list. Once we have communication down we'll work on making things far more inclusive and participatory.

So for Bonita - the status from a PM view will be here:
http://confluence.cloudstack.org/display/RelOps/Bonita

You'll also note that Haroon has published meeting minutes from the few meetings that have occurred; for instance you can see Bonita Kick Off Meeting:
http://confluence.cloudstack.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1344273

We welcome your participation as we start work on this release.

After many months of hard work and long weekend hours, we are finally releasing the Acton release.

This is the first major CloudStack release since our 2.2.x series and it includes many new features such as:

- - Network as a Service
- - Projects
- - LDAP Support
- - Openstack Swift Support
- - Netscaler MPX/VPX/SDX Support
- - vSphere 5.0 Support
- - XenServer 6.0 Support
- - Brand spanking new User Interface
- - and many others

I want to take a moment and thank the community for all of their help. The beta process resulted in hundreds of community discovered and reported bugs. This release also had a far greater level of non-Citrix contribution, from bug fixes and even some major feature contribution.

You can find the binaries here: http://bit.ly/x2svsr

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CloudStack is please to announce the release of version 2.2.14. This
release is largely a bugfix release.

While most of our development effort seems to have been directed at
the upcoming Acton (3.0) release as seen by the plethora of
pre-release builds, we have continued to work on the 2.2 CloudStack
releases, fixing bugs and increasing stability.

You can find binaries here:
http://bit.ly/ziBbrE


Release notes (PDF) are here:
http://bit.ly/xbOHCo

You will note that the community has added Portuguese and French
language support to the UI

You will also note that there are separate binaries for EL6.0, EL6.1 and
EL6.2, please make the correct choice if applicable.

The latest version of the CloudStack Acton beta builds is now out and available for consumption.

Things should be getting into pretty good shape now as we wind our way closer to GA.

You can find the binaries here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cloudstack/files/Pre-release%20software/Acton_beta_feb1/

You'll also notice several new documents, the first is the new features document showing off all of the cool stuff in Acton, the second is the Admin guide, which has been long awaited by many folks.

Please help test this release - the more bugs we find now, the less that will exist in GA. As always test things that are important to you, but please also consider testing:

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2012 is fast approaching! Before we head into the New Year, one last clouducation post for 2011.

At the end of every year, I reflect on all the things that have helped shape our cloud community. It’s been an incredible time in this space and even more exciting year for CloudStack team. With that, I thought that this post should be focused on Cloud Predictions for 2012.

Thank you for your continued support and making 2011 an exciting year for us. In appreciation of your support- Mark, David and I put together a nice thank you gift and I would like to take this opportunity to share it with you folks (we’ve been practicing this for months!). Have a wonderul holiday season everyone! Enjoy!

 

 

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Cloud enthusiast!

Before I dive into our interesting reads for this week, I would like to inform you that the CloudStack team will be attending Cloud Expo Conference next week! If you're in the area next week and would like to attend the show, you can, FOR FREE!

Attend the show as our VIP guest, participate in our sessions and visit us at booth 514! We will have a live demo of our latest version of Cloudstack, product experts to answer your quetsions and a bunch of CloudStack goodies at our booth! We would love to meet you!

Here are your interesting reads, enjoy!

Rise of cloud computing has complicated the security landsccape 

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 It's Friday! Here are your interesting reads for the week!

German Researchers disclose Amazon Cloud Vulnerability 

Amazon has fixed a cryptographic hole in its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC 2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) services that could allow hackers to compromise customer accounts. 

Infographic: What Your Admin Should Know About Cloud Management

How fast is the average virtual infrastructure growing? Woud you believe that 80% of the are adding 10-50 VMs annually? And that 63% of those surveyed are handling cloud computing installations. 

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Below are your interest reads for this week! Enjoy!

Clouds vs. Outsourcing: The Next Battleground

IT outsourcing is being disrupted by IaaS from cloud providers. Analysis of Pricewaterhouse's recent Future of IT Outsourcing and Cloud Computing survey of 489 firms indicates that a majority will soon favor the pureplay infrastructure service providers.   

Apple vs. Google vs. Microsoft: A look at the stacks

“On the client computing front, it’s shocking how much Apple, Microsoft and Google are starting to look alike. The real battle is in the cloud though.”

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 It's Friday, here are your interesting reads for this week! Enjoy everyone!

Cloud Computing Now Makes it Easier (and Cheaper) to Innovate: Study 

A recent suvey of 1,035 business and IT executives, along with 35 vendors, conducted by the London School of Economics and Accenture, has unearthed this new emerging role for cloud computing- as a platform for business innovation. Many people tehse days still see cloud within its' information technology context, as a cheaper alternative for existing systems. But this may only be the first and most obivious benefit. The study's authors, Leslie Willcocks, Dr. Will Venters and Dr. Edgar Whitley - all of London School of Economics and Political Science - identified three stages cloud computing moves into as it's adopted by organizations

Citrix Acquires ShareFile, the “Dropbox for Enterprise”

The move is in keeping with Citrix’s vision of a so-called “personal cloud” – a collection of files, apps and personal data unique to every person and accessible from any location and device.

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Peder and Sheng have written a good article for CIO on the "7 Requirements for Building Your Cloud Infrastructure" Here are the

highlights. Visit CIO for the fulll article which is well worth the...

Last week at VMworld 2010 we demonstrated how customers can leverage the innovation of Cloud.com CloudStack integrated on a NetApp, Cisco and VMware cloud environment. The whole SMTC project at NetApp is an aggressive push to address one of the main inhibitors of cloud computing in the enterprise and it is clear they...

Right now, a huge number of service providers are making plans to launch computing clouds, and I thought it would be interesting to outline some of the requirements I often hear from prospective cloud providers here.

1. "Our clouds need to run on inexpensive storage."
- This is a huge issue for most service providers. The storage industry is built on the back of...