With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...| By Thorsten von Eicken | Article Rating: |
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| November 14, 2008 06:20 AM EST | Reads: |
11,273 |
Thorsten von Eicken's RightScale Blog
The cloud is coming of age. Amazon took another huge leap forward when it announced that EC2 is now out of beta, together with an SLA that is evidence of Amazon’s commitment to provide top-notch service. Their uptime has been stellar, and they are now standing behind their offering contractually in a much stronger way, and signaling how customers can set their expectations.
Read about the announcement on the AWS blog and on their CTO’s blog.
The advent of Windows on EC2 is welcome news too. Even though Windows is not typically the OS used for serving highly variable workloads, it is a sign of the cloud maturing that even the more static workloads typical of Windows deployments will be more easily allocated and managed using cloud resources. (Mhh, I wonder whether the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference happening next week has something to do with the timing of the announcement…)
RightScale is of course supporting the new features that enable launching and bundling Windows instances, and we’ll have everything on our production systems within a couple of days. (Update: our Windows support went live the same day as Amazon’s announcement and we’ll be adding some more functionality soon; feedback and suggestions are always appreciated!) In case you’re wondering, EC2 is supporting Windows Server 2003 R2 for the time being. Windows Server 2008 is apparently on the roadmap but not available at present and it’s apparently against the T&C’s to upgrade on your own.
But let’s shift over to the differences between Windows and Linux instances (apart from the obvious).
Launching
Launching a Windows instance really is no different from launching a Linux instance: you just pick a different machine image (AMI). But once it’s running, the game changes: SSH is not exactly the most popular remote access tool for Windows, so instead you get to use RDP, Windows’ Remote Desktop Protocol. But there’s a catch: what’s the administrator password? Well, Amazon has concocted something I can’t really describe with any other word but a hack: at boot time, the ec2-configuration-service that Amazon added to the Windows AMIs generates an admin password randomly, encrypts it with your SSH private key, and writes it to the console output. You then use a command line tool (or ElasticFox) that reads the console output, locates the encrypted password, and uses your SSH public key to decrypt it. Then you get to type the password into the RDP client. [Expletive deleted...]
We’ll have an RDP button in the RightScale UI that will automate all this and get you into your server with far fewer hassles. Launching an RDP client from the web browser isn’t very smooth, unfortunately, specially as we want to support non-Windows users.
Bundling
Bundling is very different on Windows instances than Linux instances. The Linux approach of creating a loopback filesystem in a file, tar-ing and encrypting up the root disk onto that filesystem and then uploading that to S3 doesn’t quite cut it. Not that the process is all that great under Linux either: it’s one of the most fragile and frustrating aspects of EC2, and one we avoid using as much as possible with our server templates and RightScript mechanism.
For Windows there now is a “please bundle my instance, will you” API call to EC2. Nice! Except for the fact that it will shut the instance down in order to bundle it up! In Amazon’s words: “Internally, it queues the bundling task and shuts down the instance. It then takes a snapshot of the Windows volume bundles it, and uploads it to S3.” The API gets a couple of new calls to start the bundling and then to query on the progress of the bundling.
Of interest here is also the fact that Amazon recommends deleting all temp files using the Windows Disk Cleaner tool, then defragmenting, and finally zeroing the free space using “sdelete.” The last step is presumably because they’re bundling the raw disk partition and not the files in the filesystem and zeroing the unused space reduces the size of the compressed image.
For the RightScale UI we rolled all these API calls into a single bundling button: you press it, we make the calls, EC2 makes it happen, you watch the progress.
Mounting EBS volumes
Another slight difference is mounting Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes on a Windows instance. You can theoretically attach up to 8 volumes to an instance, and they appear as drive letters ‘a’ through ‘h’. But the local disks also appear using these drive letters, so the low-down is that you can mount 5 EBS volumes on a small instance, 4 on a large, and 2 on an extra-large.
Pre-announced monitoring and auto-scaling services
We’re quite excited about Amazon’s pre-announcement of monitoring and auto-scaling services. The details are still quite sketchy through our sources, but all indications are that they’ll integrate very nicely into the RightScale system, giving our customers the choice of using our monitoring system or Amazon’s or both. We’ve been focusing on all the configuration management and dynamic configuration that needs to occur when doing autoscaling, which is much more than just launching instances when the monitoring system says it’s necessary. On top of that, the architecture of the multi-server deployment must be designed to actually support auto-scaling as well as failure tolerance. This is precisely why we offer our customers server templates for popular software stacks with all the hooks for auto-scaling already in place.
All in all, the announcement amounts to two great leaps forward for the cloud computing world: broader OS support and a stronger business commitment for EC2. It seems that cloud solutions get stronger and stronger with each passing quarter. Of course, managing the increasing complexity through design, architecture and automation remains a critical ingredient in this picture — and one that continues to be our main focus at RightScale.
Thorsten von Eicken is part of a star-studded lineup of speakers at SYS-CON's 1st International loud Computing Conference & Expo. Between them, they'll be covering every aspect of the hottest IT topic for years, with not just Amazon but also IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Intel, HP and a host of others all offering, using or developing high-end computing services typically described as “cloud computing” - through which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided as a service using Internet technologies.
Forrester Research analyst James Staten calls cloud computing "classic disruptive innovation - where the mainstream dismisses the product and small companies have time to create a real differentiated value." But there are so many offerings just now that what infrastructure architects are looking for above all is a set of organizing principles they can use to guide them in choosing between them all.
Such principles. and a host of associated topics, will be addressed in San Jose by a Top Speaker Faculty that includes:
- Dr Werner Vogels - VP & CTO, Amazon.com (Keynote)
- Mike Feinberg - Senior Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Group, EMC
- Steve Herrod - CTO, VMware
- Rob Weltman - Director of Grid Services, Yahoo!
- Peter Nickolov - President CTO, 3Tera
- Kevin Haar - President & CEO, Appistry
- Songnian Zhou - Co-Founder & CEO, Platform Computing
- Patrick Harr - CEO, Nirvanix
- Gerrit Huizenga - Cloud Solutions Architect, IBM
- John Keagy - CEO & Co-Founder, GoGrid/ServePath
- Sajai Krishnan - CEO, ParaScale
- Reuven Cohen - Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly
- Mike Eaton - CEO, Cloudworks
- Jonathan Bryce - Founder at Mosso (Rackspace)
- Nati Shalom - CTO, GigaSpaces
- Don MacAskill - CEO & Chief Geek, SmugMug
- Billy Marshall - Founder & CEO, rPath
- Dr Thorsten von Eicken - CTO & Founder, RightScale
- Jonathan Pyke - Chief Strategy Office, Cordys
- Jason Stowe - Founder & CEO, Cycle Computing
- David Young - Co-Founder & CEO, Joyent
- Dave Durkee - Founder, CEO & Technical Director, ENKI
- John Janakiraman - CTO, Skytap
- Stuart Charlton - Chief Software Architect, Elastra
- Lars Leckie, Principal, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
- Dr Rich Wolski - Professor, U.C. Santa Barbara
- Javier Soltero - Co-Founder & CEO of Hyperic
- Omer Trajman - Director of Field Engineering, Vertica Systems
- Rachel Chalmers - Senior Analyst, Enterprise Software, The 451 Group
and with a special Cloud Bootcamp on November 20 led by - Alan Williamson, Founder at Blog-City.com, Creator of BlueDragon
All breakout sessions are all listed in further detail here.
Speaker Faculty - SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo 2008 West
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Published November 14, 2008 Reads 11,273
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By Thorsten von Eicken
Thorsten von Eicken is the CTO and a founder of RightScale and is responsible for the overall technology direction of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform. Previously, he was founder and chief architect at Expertcity (acquired by Citrix Online), where he directed the architecture of the company's online services, including the popular GoToMeeting service. von Eicken also managed the Expertcity/Citrix data center operations, where he acquired deep knowledge in deploying and running secure, scalable online services. He was a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...Feb. 16, 2012 07:30 AM EST Reads: 784 |
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"Having been in the IT field for many years, I believe the cloud computing chapter in the industry is an exciting one and I am proud to be a part of it," said National Reconaissance Office (NRO) Chief Information Officer Jill T. Singer Tuesday, as it was announced that she was one of 10 winners of the 2012 CloudNOW "Top Ten Women in Cloud" Awards.
2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for app...
As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...
Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where ...
With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
Can you bring services from the cloud to your customers faster and have them adopt it with ease of use or bring the power of bundled services to the fingertips of your clients without creating new rigid ‘apps stove pipes'? Do you want to prevent your business running away to public and unmanageably immature cloud services?
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Hans van de Koppel, Sr. Enterprise Architect at Capgemini, will take Cloud Expo delegates to the developing world of clou...
Is Big Data destined for only the top 3,000 companies worldwide? What about medium or small companies who are equally as data-driven? Is there a place for Big Data in SMB markets? When I talk to SMB companies about their use of public cloud services, it’s a no-brainer. Pay as you go, lower costs up...
Israel-based startup Porticor launches this week with technology aimed at giving enterprises a way to encrypt data held in cloud computing services, including those from Amazon and Rackspace.
Porticor Virtual Private Data is focused on protecting data at rest in cloud-based computing centers where ...
Statistics matter, not only in business, but increasingly also in our social life - well, at least in our social media life. Some of the statistics I noticed this week were round numbers, like 1000. With 1000 representing both the number now showing under "followers" in Twitter and the revenue numbe...
Let's face it right now the cloud is pretty immature. The level of automation and management of these environments are analogous to the early assembly lines, but it won't be this way long. This is not the industrial revolution and it moves at a wicked fast pace. Before we know it the next generation...
In previous posts such as Cloud Computing: Hype, Vision or Reality?, Hyped Cloud Technologies, PAAS is not Mainstream yet, SaaS is going Mainstream, Future applications: SaaS or traditional? I discussed Cloud Computing.
Recently I read Joe McKendrick's interesting article titled:Cloud Computing Mar...
Having covered Cloud Foundry, Force.com, Google App Engine and Red Hat OpenShift, we now take a look at Microsoft’s PaaS offering, Windows Azure.
Microsoft Windows Azure Platform is a Platform as a Service offering from Microsoft. It was announced in 2008 and became available in 2010. Since then Mi...
Many virtualization vendors offer certifications. With that in mind, is there really any value in pursuing these certifications from Microsoft and VMware? Is one more "valuable" than the other?
First, let me say that I am a big proponent of technical certifications. That is the reason why I have my...
There are – according to about a bazillion studies - 4 billion mobile devices in use around the globe.
It is interesting to note that nearly everyone who notes this statistic and then attempts to break it down into useful data (usually for marketing) that they almost always do so based on OS or dev...
What are some good reasons to adopt cloud storage? Cost, durability and flexibility.
So let me talk about performance, instead.
As part of our daily testing, we do routine performance measurements across a broad swath of cloud storage providers. It gives us a check to ensure that the various Cloud...
They all automatically combine disaster recovery with backup, since the backups are stored offsite at the cloud provider’s data center.
The better cloud backup options completely automate both backup and restore, removing what historically has been a complex, order-and process-intensive, manual tas...






