Your On-Ramp to The Cloud

Eucalyptus Certified Professional - Part 1 - Redefining How Certification is Done

2012-05-18T22:05:00.000-07:00

If you pay attention to Eucalyptus press releases (and c'mon, who doesn't?) then you're already aware that Eucalyptus Education is on the cusp of releasing our first major certification in the next couple of months. While that's exciting all on it's own, I'm personally even more excited about some of the major innovations we're making in terms of high-stakes certification exams, and want to bring some of those to light so that you can be prepared, and maybe even help us launch by participating in the beta program. If you're not already part of the Eucalyptus community mailing list, you might want to join soon so that you'll be the first to know... :)

So what makes the Eucalytpus Certified Professional and Eucalyptus 3 (EUCP3) so different than similar entry-level certifications from vendors like Cisco, SNIA, VMware, CompTIA, Microsoft, EMC, and dozens of other technical certifications? There are several things, actually, and over a few blog posts we'll highlight different ones, explain what we're doing, how it's different, and why we believe that makes the EUCP3 special. Some of the big ones we might discuss are:

Delivery method: The EUCP3 will be available globally via remote, secure, proctored delivery technology. You can take the exam from your home computer (and yes, it's still secure, just as if you took the exam in a Pearson/Vue or Prometric testing facility) as long as you have a web cam with a long cable and a microphone for VoIP audio.

Support resources during the exam: The EUCP3 will be the first certification of its kind that will be delivered in an open-book, open-notes format. You will be allowed to reference any printed material you like, short of printed copies of actual test questions (and even those won't be as much help as you might think... see below...) In the real world, you have complex problems, and you have access to external resources. We believe your testing environment should work in much the same fashion.

Test question development protocol: The reason we can allow remote delivery with open-book, open-notes is because of the way we are developing the certification test items. The questions are going to be more complex than some certifications, just like real-world issues you might run into, and you're going to be required to put knowledge pieces together rather than regurgitate memorized facts and numbers. We strongly recommend that you learn practical things about the software and know where to look for minutia if you need it.

Study guide and practice exam: One thing that always bugs us about certification practice tests is that they usually have nothing in common with the actual exam, and how well you do on them has no bearing on how well you'll do on the exam. Well, we're going to give you a practice exam that gives you questions that will mirror actual test questions, and you'll have a good idea about what to expect on the actual exam. Not only that, we're going to provide you with the complete format of the more complex questions and show you exactly what variables we might change in order to determine or change the correct answer from one form of the question to the next.

The skeptics may say that all of this is going to equal an exam that is too easy, or easy to cheat on. We welcome those skeptics to participate in our beta program when it is announced. This exam has been designed from the ground up to reflect real-world knowledge and skills, in as close to a real-world setting as a multiple-choice exam can get. The item development method is designed to thwart would-be cheaters *even if they have a copy of the entire question bank prior to taking the exam,* so if you're considering paying someone for copies of test questions or getting help from others on the Internet who violate the rules, you should be aware we have designed our questions so that the cheating is likely to do you more damage than good.

Bottom line: If you know the technology well, based on reference documentation and certification blueprint we will provide, you should have no problem earning the EUCP3 certification. If you try to get by on minimum study and rely heavily on your notes, or worse, you try to cheat in order to pass, you're likely going to be disappointed with your results. That's the way a certification should be, wouldn't you agree?

What do you think - does this sound too unrealistic? Are you thinking about participating in the beta? Do you have questions about the exam?

For some additional general information about the program, visit the EUCP3 Certification landing page. To join the Eucalyptus community mailing list, visit our mailing list page.

Why we don't get on-premise IaaS (insights for insiders) - Part 1

2012-05-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

Having been an employee at Eucalyptus Systems, Inc. for nearly a year now, I finally can say I get the cloud. I understand the concept, the benefits, the use cases, the technology (*whew*), and how to implement it in the real world (*double whew*). It is also very clear to me that I am in a distinct minority among technical gurus worldwide. Most people just don't get it, and there are some very good reasons for their confusion. I'm not sure there are any great answers to these reasons, but you can't fix a problem if you don't acknowledge it.

Problem #1: No easy ways to build a value proposition based on non-cloud experience.

When I teach our Cloud Connections: Cloud Foundations course, I spend more than an hour on the introduction to cloud computing, carefully building the scenario from the way IT organizations run today, virtualized or not, to how cloud technology and concepts layer on top of that to provide transformational benefit. I can get away with this in a technical training class where I've got lots of time, but in our sound-byte, "give me the overview" society of overly busy technical decision makers and IT professionals, you don't get that kind of time outside of the classroom. What happens then is the creation of a number of catch words, buzz phrases with specific meanings in the cloud, and "quick fix" webinars (admittedly by Eucalyptus and our coopetition as well) designed to convince the world of the benefits of cloud but without providing a foundation for those benefits that the user can frame internally. This leaves folks with a sense of being sold rather than educated, and/or with a vague sense of the value proposition but with no concrete ideas about what to do with it and why they should move, and move quickly. This is a significant problem for the industry today.

I spent many years in VMware education prior to joining Eucalyptus. Virtualization, when I started there, was still a relatively unknown technology, but we could explain a key and major component of the value proposition in just a few words: Virtualization allows you to run multiple "virtual servers" at one time on the same physical hardware, allowing you to dramatically reduce the money you spend on physical IT assets. We'd show you a picture of a physical server with several little virtual servers running on top of it, and for most people the value proposition was immediately clear, even if they were skeptical of the technology itself. They understood servers, low utilization, the need to separate applications, and the problem of datacenter sprawl before we gave them any information, and they could build on that knowledge to immediately understand what virtualization would provide to them.

We don't have that easy, quick, clear value proposition with cloud computing in general, and IaaS in particular. We can talk about elastic resources, but then we need to explain what elastic means (and it means different things in different contexts... yuck...) We can talk about IT automation/consolidation, but then we have to explain why and how that's different from current processes and explain why we don't think that will threaten the livelihood of the person to whom we're talking. We can talk about application resiliency, decentralized management and control, security, disaster recovery, storage-as-a-service, "cloud bursting," and any of the other potential benefits cloud computing provides, but if we just use the buzzwords and catch phrases - and we do that a *lot* - the listener is again left with nothing more than a vague idea about the general idea of the cloud, and worse yet, potentially left with a threatening view of how the cloud might affect their livelihood if implemented in their company. What we desperately hope is that folks will be convinced enough by our salesmanship to explore further, but even then we don't have a lot in place today for them to hold onto as they make those next steps.

What we need to do is figure out the IaaS equivalent of server consolidation for virtualization and distill it into a short sentence that people with no prior cloud experience can understand within about 3-5 seconds of hearing it and seeing it illustrated. Either that, or every IT person on the planet needs to take the time to view the free Cloud Connections: Cloud Foundations (Free) recording available on Eucalyptus University. :)

Can you come up with a short sentence that encapsulates the primary benefit(s) of on-premise IaaS (private cloud) that could be easily understood by someone not already enmeshed in cloud concepts?

Eucalyptus Platform Concepts - Security

2012-01-11T11:13:00.000-08:00

Eucalyptus provides two primary mechanisms for instance security: Availability Zones, and Security Groups.

Availability Zones

An Availability Zone is a subset of the cloud (typically a collection of servers and storage) that shares a local area network. An Availability Zone receives a fixed amount of resources, and those resources can be controlled via quotas and access control lists.

Availability Zones vs. Clusters

A Cluster is a group of servers that provide resources to an Availability Zone. Clusters consist of a grouping of resources that are separated for administrative or technical reasons. Administrative reasons might include server ownership or compliance rules. Technical reasons might include different quality of service (QoS) requirements between users, a single cloud managing resources across different distributed datacenters, or the decision to deploy multiple hypervisors. A single cluster can only manage one hypervisor type.

As of this writing, in Eucalyptus there is a 1:1 relationship between Availability Zones and Clusters. Each Availability Zone can have only one Cluster Controller (CC), and if you must configure a separate Cluster, it will exist in a separate Availability Zone.

The two concepts are not inseparable. An Availability Zone is an administrative distinction, whereas a cluster is a collection of physical resources. In the future, you may be able to configure an Availability Zone that contains multiple clusters, if such a design was beneficial.

Security Groups

Security Groups are sets of networking rules applied to all virtual machine instances associated with a group. They define access rules for all instances that are part of the group - for example, accessible ports - and are in effect a firewall.

When a virtual machine instance is created, it is assigned to a default security group that denies incoming network traffic from all sources. Multiple security groups can be configured to allow multiple levels of security based on application needs.

For example, Susan has a multi-tier application that includes a Web Server front-end, an application server, and a database server. The web server needs to be accessed through Port 80 and Port 443. The application server might need to be accessible to the web server and on the internal network through Port 22. The database server might not need to be accessible at all other than through the application server. This can be accomplished by configuring three separate security groups with the appropriate rules.

This concludes our discussion of Eucalyptus platform concepts. In our next blog post we'll transition into a discussion around Eucalyptus architecture.

Eucalyptus Platform Concepts - Storage

2012-01-10T12:56:00.000-08:00

Eucalyptus clouds utilizes three types of storage: virtual machine ephemeral storage, cloud bucket-based storage, and Eucalyptus Volumes. Furthermore, Eucalyptus provides the ability to create volume snapshots.

Ephemeral Storage

When a virtual machine instantiates, all of its default virtual disks that are created on the node controller are temporary, or ephemeral. This means that if a virtual machine reboots, any data stored on that virtual machine's disks will not survive.

For cloud-designed, loosely-coupled, dynamic applications, this presents no problem. Data that requires permanence is stored somewhere outside the instance, or else on a Eucalyptus Volume.

Bucket-Based Storage

Eucalyptus provides bucket-based storage through a component called Walrus. Bucket-based storage is permanent storage that is shared across the entire cloud infrastructure, and potentially used by users outside of the cloud as well. A bucket holds an object, which is composed of a file and a metadata file that describes the object.

It may help some readers to think of buckets as analagous to folders or directories in typical operating systems.

In Eucalyptus, bucket-based storage primarily stores Eucalyptus Machine Images (EMIs) and Eucalyptus Volume snapshots. It can also be used for almost any type of data file when Walrus is deployed as a Storage as a Service solution.

Eucalyptus Volumes

Eucalyptus volumes are synonymous with Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes in Amazon Web Services. They are permanent storage that can be mounted as devices by Eucalyptus instances. These storage volumes behave like raw, unformatted block devices - or just like hard drives. You can create a file system on top of a Eucalyptus volume, or use them in any other way you would use a block device.

Eucalyptus volumes are configured in an Availability Zone, and can be attached to instances in that same Availability Zone. Multiple volumes can be mounted to the same Eucalyptus instance. Eucalyptus Volumes can also be attached to new instances via an administrative interface.

Volume Snapshots

Eucalyptus provides the ability to create point-in-time snapshots of volumes, which are moved, or persisted, to bucket-based storage (Walrus) for long-term storage. By default, these volume snapshots are crash consistent, meaning that any data marked as written to the disk that still resides in a buffer will not be part of the snapshot.

It is important to note that snapshots in the context of a Eucalyptus cloud are for Eucalyptus Volumes only. The virtual machine instance itself is not backed up during the snapshot process. The instance is assumed to be disposable and easily replaceable, so to behave any differently would be to waste storage resources.

In our next post, we'll look at security concepts in Eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus Platform Concepts - Networking: Network Modes

2012-01-09T06:20:00.000-08:00

Eucalyptus cloud networking modes address two basic questions: Who assigns IP addresses? Can I use advanced features, like VLANs and Security Groups?

The networking modes supported in Eucalyptus are SYSTEM,STATIC, and MANAGED (plus MANAGED-NOVLAN).

SYSTEM Mode

SYSTEM is the default networking mode for Eucalyptus clouds. It assumes that virtual machine instances will be assigned IP addresses by an external DHCP server. Eucalyptus clouds in SYSTEM mode can not use Elastic IPs, Security Groups, or VLAN tagging. It is most often used in setting up test environments or proof-of-concepts (POCs).

STATIC Mode

Static networking mode assumes there are no other DHCP servers on the network. Advanced features such as VLAN tagging, Elastic IPs, and Security Groups are not available. The Eucalyptus cloud assumes responsibility for assigning IP addresses to instances. To do so, each IP address must be manually configured and assigned to a specific manually configured MAC address. Because of the labor-intensive nature of STATIC mode, it rarely gets used, and primarily exists for backwards compatibility reasons.

MANAGED Mode

The two MANAGED networking modes are the most common mode in Eucalyptus cloud deployments. In either of them, the Eucalyptus cloud assumes responsibility for assigning IP addresses to virtual machine instances in a controlled subnet, regardless of the presence of a DHCP server on the corporate network. In addition, the user can configure Elastic IPs, and Security Groups can also be used. The only difference between MANAGED and MANAGED-NOVLAN is that MANAGED mode can utilize VLAN tagging for virtual machine instance isolation, whereas MANAGED-NOVLAN can not.

In the next post we'll discuss storage concepts in Eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus Platform Concepts - Networking: IP Addresses

2012-01-06T12:09:00.000-08:00

Networking in Eucalyptus requires understanding of three different types of IP addresses and four different networking modes. In this post, we'll take a look at the different IP addresses and what they do.

Eucalyptus clouds deploy three different types of IP addresses: public, private, and elastic.

Public IP Addresses

Public IP addresses are probably the easiest IP address to understand in Eucalyptus. These are the outward-facing IP addresses users use to communicate with their virtual machine instances. These are not allocated directly to the virtual machines - rather, they are mapped IP addresses stored in an iptables database on the Cluster Controller (CC). The CC routes traffic intended for the Public IP to the Private IP address of the virtual machine to which it is assigned.

Try not to confuse the concept of a Public IP address in the cloud with the concept of a public IP address on the Internet. In Internet terms, a public IP address is a publicly routable address, whereas a private IP address is non-routable and requires Network Address Translation (NAT) in order to communicate with the outside world. In cloud terms, a Public IP address is whatever address a user might use to connect directly to a virtual machine instance. If that user is on your internal network, the cloud Public IP address might very well be in a non-Internet-routable private IP address range. For example, an instance can be assigned a cloud Public IP address in the 192.168.xxx.xxx range, which is a non-routable or private IP address in Internet terms.

Private IP Addresses

The Private IP address is the actual address the virtual machine receives, and the only one of which it is aware. Virtual machine instances also use cloud Private IP addresses for internal networking purposes. They must be configured on a separate subnet from the Public IP address range. For example, if Public IP addresses are configured in the 192.168.xxx.xxx range, Private IP addresses might be configured with a range of 10.xxx.xxx.xxx to avoid any chance of overlap.

Elastic IP Addresses

Elastic IP addresses are permanent Public IP addresses that can be mapped to different virtual machine instances by a user. This mapping allows a user to provide a publicly available service - such as a web site - with an IP address that never changes, even if the underlying virtual machine instance and its associated Private IP address changes.

For example, assume Susan has a CentOS 5.x web server at mywebsite.com, and she has configured it with an Elastic IP address. The actual IP configuration might look something like this:

Let's say Susan wants to upgrade the web server to CentOS 6.x. First, she would set up the new web server - a new instance in the cloud - and test it to make sure it was working properly.

Once she was satisfied that everything worked as it should, she would then re-map the Elastic IP address to the new server.

No changes to public DNS are required to make this change. The Eucalyptus cloud manages everything behind the scenes.

If something went wrong at this point, Susan could re-map the Elastic IP address back to the old web server, and the change would happen instantaneously. If, however, everything continues to work as expected, Susan can decommission the old server, and the upgrade would be complete.

In the next post, we'll continue our discussion of Networking concepts and define the Network Modes currently available in Eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus Platform Concepts - Virtual Machines

2012-01-05T07:06:00.000-08:00

A Eucalyptus cloud deployment utilizes a number of important concepts surrounding virtual machines, networking, storage, and security. We'll start with virtual machine concepts.

Eucalyptus virtual machine concepts that are important to understand include Eucalyptus Machine Images (EMIs), virtual machine instances, and virtual machine types.

Eucalyptus Machine Images

A Eucalyptus Machine Image (EMI) is a copy of a virtual machine bootable disk stored in a central cloud storage repository known as Walrus. Some people find it useful to think of them as virtual machine templates from which multiple identical instances - or copies of the virtual machine - can be deployed.
They are analogous to Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) in AWS - in fact, any of the 10,000+ AMIs available in AWS can be downloaded and deployed as EMIs in a Eucalyptus cloud without significant modification. While it is possible for a user to build their own EMI, it is usually simpler to find a thoroughly vetted, freely available image in AWS, download it to their Eucalyptus cloud, and use that instead.

EMIs can be Linux or Windows-based. When copied into a Eucalyptus environment, each distinct EMI is given a unique ID for identification, and a user can add additional descriptive tags for easy identification purposes.

Virtual Machine Instances

A virtual machine deployed from an EMI is known as an instance. An instance, then, is simply a running copy of an EMI. They can start and terminate in a programmatic, elastic fashion based on resource demands. In addition, they attach to storage and networking resources dynamically based on credentials provided to them.

Virtual Machine Types

Virtual machine types control what happens when a particular EMI is instantiated or deployed. The type definition specifies things like the number of CPU cores, memory capacity, and disk capacity that will be given to an instance upon instantiation. Thus, multiple Linux instances of varying size can be deployed from the same EMI. It is not necessary to create different templates just to specify different levels of resource availability.

In the next blog post, we'll look at networking concepts in Eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus Use Cases Part 3 - BC/DR, Cloudbursting, Remote Desktops, and Storage-as-a-Service

2012-01-04T06:40:00.000-08:00

Cloud Bursting and Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery

Assuming applications are developed in a dynamic, loosely-coupled fashion - for example, scalable web applications such as web site, gaming platforms, and e-learning environments - Eucalyptus clouds represent a cost-effective solution to highly voliatile, unpredictable workloads as follows:

Applications and middleware can request new compute and storage resources when necessary.
Any additional assets are released as soon as the rush passes.
Workloads can be evenly spread across already present hardware, even if these assets reside in different datacenters.
Administrators can adjust the information processing mixture to reflect seasonal variability, which helps maximize revenue.
When demands exceed internal capabilities, it’s easy to expand into the public cloud for extra capacity ("cloud bursting").
To diminish costs and complexity, all of the above capabilities can be automated.

This ability to "burst" applications from one cloud to another also represents a key component of a good Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) strategy. Even the most well designed, self-healing infrastructures can experience outages, just like Amazon Web services experienced in April 2011. In those situations, having a backup Eucalyptus cloud supporting your AWS applications serves as a way to avoid complete outages. That also works in the other direction. If you are running your applications in a Eucalyptus cloud and *your* infrastructure goes down for whatever reason, you can keep services running by moving them to AWS while you fix the problem, and then migrate them back once you have addressed the issues.

Storage as a Service

Eucalyptus supports internally created and managed Storage-as-a-Service offerings, which allows on-premise Eucalyptus clouds to deliver the following business and financial advantages:

By adhering to the well defined Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) API, Eucalyptus provides a simplified gateway to interact with cloud-based storage.
Authorized users can access this information from anywhere.
Administrators can construct and customize the exact storage topology without impacting users or impacting application software. Internal storage assets can thus be utilized fully.
It’s easy to define group-level storage policies without requiring any custom coding or other expensive configurations.
User credentials can be tied to storage usage, thereby facilitating accurate chargeback.
Full S3 API compatibility lets you transparently expand into the public cloud when necessary.

Remote Desktop Hosting

Eucalyptus clouds streamline the process of providing remote desktops to end users and help control related costs in a variety of different ways:

Administrators are free to configure, launch, and monitor remote machines from a central location using standardized images. This increases flexibility and boosts policy compliance.
Standardized procedures increase the accuracy of the resulting software environments.
In addition to manual requests submitted by administrators, software can also be configured to automatically request resources from the on-premise cloud yet still obey organizational policies and quotas.
Remote desktops are configured more quickly, leading to greater user productivity.

This wraps up our introduction to Eucalyptus. In the next series of blog entries, we'll begin to explore Eucalyptus platform concepts, starting with the way Eucalyptus interfaces with virtual machines.

Eucalyptus Use Cases Part 2 - Software Dev/Test, HPC, and Big Data/Analytics

2011-12-05T10:36:00.000-08:00

Eucalyptus clouds help improve software development and testing efficiency as follows:

Developers and testers can now self-provision their own infrastructure and only use what is needed.
Compute and storage resource provisioning time is reduced from months to minutes.
Internal resources are utilized at a much higher rate, further improving ROI.
The overall IT workload is reduced, yet organizational policies are still enforced.
Faster development and testing speeds the delivery of high quality software.
Infrastructure operating and capital expenditures are optimized across the entire organization

Due the the massive scalability, elasticity, and flexibility of Eucalyptus clouds, they deliver capabilities to support the largest needs represented by High Performance Computing (HPC), Big Data, and Analytics.

Eucalyptus clouds offer distinct business advantages in these scenarios:

Architects and designers are freed from needing to plan exact resource distribution patterns, which saves time and money.
High performance, scaled parallel processes can complete more rapidly without dedicating resources when they're not needed.
Hybrid clouds can be deployed to handle demanding tasks that exceed the resources available in the on-premise cloud.
Service providers can introduce more accurate and effective pricing models.
Eucalyptus clouds make it possible to design new and more innovative applications, with increased capacities and agility.

In our next post we'll look at use cases around Cloud Bursting and BC/DR, Storage as a Service, and Remote Desktop Hosting.

New Eucalyptus University Press eBook Available

2011-11-28T07:37:00.000-08:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog post to bring you an important announcement:

The first book in the Cloud Connections series is LIVE on Amazon!

http://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Connections-Foundation--premise-ebook/dp/B006C35DMO

Product description:

This book is your personal on-ramp to cloud computing, particularly private and hybrid cloud solutions using Eucalyptus, the most widely-deployed private Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) software in the world. It includes an in-depth and authoritative explanation of cloud computing, cloud vs. virtualization, and the various models of cloud computing, then explains where Eucalyptus fits into the overall picture and how that benefits organizations like yours. It follows up with an overview of Eucalyptus platform concepts and architecture, and finally contains a section filled with hands-on exercises to help you make your first cloud connections a reality. The book explains how to set up a Windows desktop for managing a cloud, how to quickly build your first cloud with Eucalyptus FastStart, and how to practice what you have learned in the Eucalyptus Community Cloud.

We originally planned to make it available for $0.99, but due to its size (with full-color graphics, screenshots, and all), the Amazon Kindle version had a minimum price tag of $1.99. We're also publishing to Barnes and Noble, and if it can be cheaper there, we'll let you know.

Note: You don't have to own a Kindle to read the book. You can download a Kindle reader for you PC, or read it from a web browser using Amazon's cloud e-reader.

Eucalyptus Use Cases Part 1 - IT Consolidation

2011-11-18T07:08:00.000-08:00

Companies choose to deploy Eucalyptus clouds for a large number of reasons, including but not limited to:

IT consolidation,
software development and testing,
remote desktop hosting,
high performance computing (HPC), big data, and analytics,
"cloud bursting" web and other dynamic, loosely coupled applications,
business continuity / disaster recovery (BC / DR), and
storage as a service.

In this post, we'll take a look at IT consolidation.

Eucalyptus clouds increases resource utilization and diminishes administrative overhead in a number of meaningful ways:

Instead of being stranded and underutilized in isolated silos, all information processing resources become part of a global cloud. From the perspective of consumers of the cloud resources it appears as if they’re all in one data center.
Physical hardware and storage are decoupled from critical business logic. This removes dependencies on these assets, which means that deploying a new application or on-boarding a new customer no longer necessarily means buying additional storage or hardware or tedious policy configurations.
Administrators are free to provision resources for consumers without needing to tell them where they are, even if those assets are located in disparate data centers all over the world. This significantly increases resource utilization yet doesn’t require additional administrators.
Efficient Quality of Service (QoS) and service differentiation, along with accounting, charge-back and metering provided by the Eucalyptus platform ensures that the flexibility of the Eucalyptus layer seamlessly dovetails into service providers’ business logic and analytics.

All of these advantages help transform the role of IT into a true service broker. Instead of being tasked with furnishing and maintaining individual servers, it’s now possible to supply cost-effective utility-style computing backed by solid Service Level Agreements (SLA). This not only means that an IT group can service more customers with the same physical hardware resources, but also service more customers with the same IT human resources.

In the next post, we'll take a look at Software Dev/Test and HPC, Big Data, and Analytics.

Eucalyptus Benefits - Part 2 of 2

2011-11-16T07:06:00.000-08:00

Multiple Hypervisor Options

Eucalyptus supports Xen, KVM, and VMware hypervisors. This provides companies with the ability to choose the underlying hypervisor they need based on cost, features, and performance requirements. This also allows companies to deploy multiple hypervisors in the same environment without the need for multiple management interfaces for the users of the system. Thus, some applications can be deployed in high-end, relatively expensive sets of resources if they require them, while applications that don't require the same level of resources can be deployed on lower-cost hardware and software.

Common Linux Platform Across Components

The various components that make up a Eucalyptus deployment install on the same underlying Linux operating systems. No specialized versions of Linux are required to support Eucalyptus.

Resource Pooling

Eucalyptus allows IT organizations to pool physical resources across departments and have those resources allocated and deallocated in a dynamic fashion. This is often referred to as the "elastic" nature of the cloud. This allows an IT organization to do more with less - serve the needs of a larger number of customers while using less physical resources than might otherwise be required. For example, a company's retail division might experience a dramatic increase in resource needs in the months of November through January, wheras their accounting division might experience dramatic increases in the months of March and April. In a non-cloud environment, this might require building out infrastructures for each group that went heavily underutiliized for the majority of the year. In a Eucalyptus cloud environment, a single set of resources can be shared and quickly redistributed based on needs at the moment. This is also extremely beneficial in environments where a company hosts multiple applications that have highly variable and unpredictable workloads - for example, a number of different web sites. Eucalyptus makes it relatively easy to quickly deploy additional resources to the applications that need them at the moment they need them, in nearly real-time.

That's it for the general benefits of the Eucalyptus cloud platform. Next we'll start to evaluate some common use cases for Eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus Benefits - Part 1 of 2

2011-11-09T06:45:00.000-08:00

On-Demand, Self-Service IT Provisioning

Eucalyptus clouds can be configured so that users can connect to a Eucalyptus cloud, provision a server from a list of available images and configuration options, and have that server deployed within minutes without any human interaction from a member of an IT staff.

Infrastructure Integration

Eucalyptus clouds are designed to be able to overlay existing infrastructures. No special hardware is required to deploy a Eucalyptus cloud, nor is it necessary to massively recofigure an existing datacenter in order to convert the resources available into cloud-available resources. In practice, Eucalyptus is also sometiems used to provide dedicated compute, netowork, and storage resources separate from existing infrastructures.

Industry-Standard APIs and Tools (AWS)

Eucalyptus clouds integrate easily with the Amazon Web Services public cloud, making hybrid cloud solutions relatively easy to deploy. Applications developed in a Eucalyptus private cloud can be ported to the Amazon public cloud with no reconfiguration required, and vice versa. This also means that the more than 10,000 available Amazon Machine Images (which are similar in concept to virtual machine templates) can be downloaded and used in a Eucalyptus private cloud, again, with no reconfiguration required. The tools used to manage AWS can also be used in Eucalyptus, and Eucalyptus tools can manage AWS environments.

Next post: More benefits!

Eucalyptus is AWS Compatible and Hypervisor Agnostic

2011-11-07T07:39:00.000-08:00

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is by far the most widely used public cloud in the world. Eucalyptus is highly compatible with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Simple Storage Service (S3) APIs.

Eucalyptus is designed to easily support most available and future hypervisors. As of this writing, Eucalyptus fully supports KVM and Xen. Additionally, the Enterprise Edition supports the proprietary VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisors.

Eucalyptus clouds provide many key benefits to companies that deploy them. In the next few posts we'll take a look at these benefits including:

on-demand, self-service IT provisioning,
integration with existing infrastructures,
industry-standard APIs and tools,
multiple hypervisor options,
a common Linux platform across components, and
resource pooling.

Eucalyptus is Open Source, Modular, Distributed, and Scalable

2011-11-04T08:16:00.000-07:00

Eucalyptus is open source: if you want to modify it, contribute to it, assess its security, or just learn from it you can download it and have the source code at your fingertips. The Eucalyptus development process is in the open, as are bug reports, community contributions, and security advisories. This means that companies that deploy Eucalyptus can be assured that the product has been thoroughly vetted by the open source community, and any issues discovered can be mitigated in a rapid fashion.

Eucalyptus' design is modular. The Eucalyptus components have well-defined interfaces via WSDL (pronounced 'wiz-del') - the Web Services Description Language. According to dictionary.reference.com, WSDL is "(a)n XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either 'document oriented' or 'procedure oriented' information." In other words, communication between the components happens in a well-defined but abstract manner, meaning that compenents can be changed or replaced with minimal to no configuration required on the part of other components in the system.

Eucalyptus allows most of these components to be installed on the same physical server, or on separate physical servers as business, security, and resource needs dictate. Components can be installed strategically close to the needed resources. For example, storage services can be installed close to physical storage resources, while management services can be installed close to the resources they manage.

This flexibility allows Eucalyptus to be extremely scalable and to acheive optimal performance in diverse environments. It can be installed on a very minimal setup - a two-server test cloud, for exammple - or installed on thousands of cores and terabytes of storage.

Next post: AWS Compatible and Hypervisor Agnostic.

Introduction to Eucalyptus

2011-11-03T06:31:00.000-07:00

Eucalyptus is the world's most widely deployed software platform for on-premise (private) IaaS clouds. It is an open source cloud computing platform that integrates with multiple hypervisors - including Xen, KVM, and VMware - and implements the industry standard Amazon Web Services (AWS) API. This flexibility and adherence to industry standards provides the customer with significant operational and financial benefits, but leaves the customer in control of their infrastructure and cloud strategy.

Eucalyptus was born as a University project of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The name Eucalyptus is an acronym and stands for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. In 2009, the Eucalyptus team started a company (Eucalyptus Systems Inc.) to commercialize Eucalyptus. Currently there is Eucalyptus, the open source project, and Eucalyptus EE (Enterprise Edition), which is the commercial version of Eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus clouds benefit from a number of key characteristics, including:

the open source nature of the product,
modular, distributed, and scalable design,
the ability to work with multiple hypervisors, and
the ability to deploy hybrid cloud solutions via adherence to the industry-standard Amazon Web Services API.

In the next few posts, we will break down those characteristics and explain the benefits that provides to you, the consumer.

Cloud Computing Deployment Models

2011-11-02T06:34:00.000-07:00

The three primary cloud deployment models are public, private, and hybrid clouds.

A public cloud is one in which "(t)he cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public . . . and is owned by an organization selling cloud services." (NIST) The cost of the infrastructure is shared across many organizations, and public clouds tend to be very large and thus able to take advantage of economies of scale. This means that applications can often be deployed in public clouds at lower costs than other cloud deployment models. On the other hand, data control represents a significant challenge for public cloud applications. Many companies house applications and confidential, proprietary data that would not be appropriate to be placed in a shared computing and storage environment.

A private cloud is one in which the ". . . infrastructure is operated solely for an organization." (NIST) Private clouds attempt to provide similar convenience and elasticity of resources that public clouds provide, but allow an organization much greater control over the location of and access to the company's applications and data.

A hybrid cloud deployment typically tries to maximize the benefits of both public and private clouds. A company will have two or more unique clouds available, but these clouds ". . . are bound together by . . . technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds)." (NIST) Hybrid cloud deployments allow an organization to take advantage of the cost benefits associated with public clouds while simultaneously protecting confidential data in private clouds. Hybrid clouds also provide a mechanism for better business continuity and faster disaster recovery. If a public cloud hosting an application goes down, that application can theoretically be reinstantiated in the private cloud with little downtime.

Now that we've covered a lot of the generic cloud-related terminology and concepts, in the next post we'll begin an exploration into Eucalyptus, the company and the product.

Cloud Computing Service Models

2011-11-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

Cloud computing is an umbrella term that can describe three different service models, as well as three different deployment models. In this post, we'll take a look at the primary service models for cloud computing.

The three service models for cloud computing are Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (Paas), and Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas). All three allow a user to run and interact with applications in a cloud, however they present different levels of control, flexibility, and complexity.

Software as a Service, or SaaS, allows a user to use a third party's ". . . applications running on a cloud infrastructure." (NIST) The consumer does not manage or control the application or the infrastructure on which it runs. Compared to other cloud computing service models, SaaS applications are relatively simple and quick to implement. Examples of SaaS applications include Salesforce.com and Google Docs.

Platform as a Service, or PaaS, allows a user to create and control applications in a cloud environment, but the user ". . . does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure, including network, servers, operating systems, or storage . . ." (NIST) The user is limited to the languages and tools provided by the PaaS provider, and applications developed on one PaaS application may not work in another cloud environment. Examples of PaaS offerings include Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine.

Infrastucture as a Service, or IaaS, gives the user the ability ". . . to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources . . . and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications." (NIST) The user manages and controls everything except the underlying cloud infrastructure (hardware and network resources). IaaS clouds provide the greatest flexibility and largest number of options of the three service models, but also typically represent the greatest degree of complexity when deploying applications. Examples of IaaS providers include Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace. Eucalyptus is also an IaaS solution.

In the next post, we'll define the three deployment models for cloud computing.

Cloud Computing vs. Virtualization: The Differences Part 4 - Virtual Machine Failure Recovery and A Nifty Summary Chart

2011-10-31T08:17:00.000-07:00

With virtualization, if a virtual machine fails a virtual machine administrator must attempt to recover the failed virtual machine, or at least to recover the data from the virtual disk file.

In cloud computing, if a virtual machine fails, the user can discard that instance and create a new one, and then reattach any persistent volumes (in Amazon referred to as Elastic Block Stores, or EBS volumes) to the new instance.

In summary, virtualization and cloud computing require different mind sets in order to fully maximize the benefits of each approach. The table below summarizes the differences between the two.

So that sums it up for a high-level look at the differences between cloud computing and virtualization. In the next post, we'll start diving into the different cloud computing models that are out there and try to sift through some of the terminology in a way that will help make the differences between SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, as well as Public, Private, and Hybrid clouds more clear for everyone.

Cloud Computing vs. Virtualization: The Differences Part 3 - Application Resource Changes and Virtual Machine Provisioning

2011-10-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

With virtualization, if an application needs additional resources - for example, more CPU - the virtual machine administrator will reconfigure the virtual machine to make more resources available. This may require downtime.

In cloud computing, if an application needs more resources, the user simply uns another instance of the virtual machine. This requires an application that can take advantage of this kind of dynamic provisioning capability.

With virtualization, an IT administrator must provision a new virtual machine. This process typically involves communication with the IT group via support tickets or direct contact. While the time to provision the virtual machine from a standard template takes only a few minutes, the actual time it takes to provision a new virtual machine from request to implementation requires hours, if not days or weeks depending on the procedures required and the availability of IT administrators.

In cloud computing, a user can self-provision a virtual machine based on available templates, known as images, and standardized virtual machine sizes. Since no direct interaction with IT is required, the actual time to provision a new virtual machine instance consists of the time it takes to fill out the web form plus the time it takes the cloud to create the new instance. This normally takes a matter of minutes.

In the next scheduled blog post, we'll look at the different mindsets in how one recovers from virtual machine failures in traditional virtualization vs. the cloud, and then summarize all of these differences in a handy-dandy chart.

Cloud Computing vs. Virtualization: The Differences Part 2 - Ephemeral Storage and Resource Allocation

2011-10-27T06:20:00.000-07:00

In this post we look at Persistent vs. Ephemeral storage and virtual machine resource allocation.

With virtualization, virtual machines behave like physical machines. All storage is normally persistent, meaning that data written to a virtual machine immediately and permanently writes to the virtual disk. Virtual machines behave like physical servers, and their data persist across reboots.

Note: Virtual machines can be configured to delete changes to virtual disks
when power cycled, but this does not represent a typical deployment choice
in virtualized environments.

In cloud computing, virtual machines behave like temporary resources and utilize the concept of ephemeral storage. Power off a virtual machine in the cloud and any data contained in that virtual machine is immediately deleted. Permanent data, if required, resides on something like an Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volume (in Eucalyptus, known simply as a Eucalyptus Volume), which can be dynamically attached to a new instance of a virtual machine at will. Nothing about the virtual machine instance is permanent outside of the volume.

Recent cloud computing offerings provide the capability to use persistent volumes

as boot partitions, meaning a cloud virtual machine can be configured to behave

like a virtual machine in a virtualized environment. This may provide benefit

when running a non-cloud application in a cloud computing environment.

When it comes to resource allocation, with virtualization virtual machine resources get defined at virtual machine creation. The creator has complete control over how much memory, CPU, networking, and storage resources the virtual machine can access.

In cloud computing, virtual machine instances get resources allocated according to predefined templates configured by the cloud administrator. Users may only have the ability to choose between a few different virtual machine sizes - for example, small, medium, and large. Users do not have the ability to further configure resources for their instances.

Next post: Application Resource Changes and Virtual Machine Provisioning.

A quick interruption of the tutorial... Recorded Cloud Fundamentals Session Available (Free)

2011-10-26T11:17:00.000-07:00

We have recorded a session of Cloud Connections: Cloud Fundamentals held for the British Institute of Technology and E-Commerce, and are making the recording available to anyone. The total recording is 2.5 hours. We may replace this recording in the future if we capture what we feel is a better one, but if you want to view the first session, you can do so with the following instructions:

1) Log into the Eucalyptus University LMS: http://education.eucalyptus.com

If you have already registered for a Eucalyptus University course you should already have an account, but anyone who doesn't can easily create one by clicking on the following link, which also automatically registers you for the course:

http://eucalyptus.absorbtraining.com/user/content_popup.asp?username=cloudfundamentals&password=eucalyptus&autologin=true

(You can skip to step 4 if this is you...)

2) Click on "Add New Course"

3) Select the "Cloud Connections: Cloud Fundamentals - British Institute of Tec" course and enroll.

4) You should be able to launch it immediately, and any time in the future by logging back into Eucalyptus University and clicking on "My Courses."

The recording is in two pieces - a short piece before the Internet went out briefly, and the rest of the class. Note that it can take a few minutes for the course to start playing after it launches while the course loads.

Enjoy!

Cloud Computing vs. Virtualization: The Differences Part 1 - Virtual Machine Location

2011-10-26T06:49:00.000-07:00

Virtualization and cloud computing often work together, however cloud computing introduces key differences in the way IT resources are configured and organized. These differences include:

the virtual machine location,
persistent vs. ephemeral storage,
virtual machine resource allocation,
application resource changes,
virtual machine provisioning, and
virtual machine failure recovery.

With virtualization, a virtual machine is usually configured on a specific physical server (also known as a host), and the decision of which host to run the virtual machine on belongs to the person configuring the machine.

In cloud computing, a virtual machine is configured to run in a specific availability zone, which means the person configures the virtual machine to run on any available resources within that zone, and the cloud determines the placement of the virtual machine.

Note: Some VMware licenses provides the ability to create a DRS cluster, which can be

configured to select the host on which a virtual machine will run from the available hosts

in the cluster. While this represents a cloud-like capability, an availability zone in a true cloud deployment might theoretically consist of many clusters, meaning the user might have access to

a much broader collection of resources.

Next post: More differences - Persistent vs. Ephemeral Storage, and Resource Allocation

Cloud Computing vs. Virtualization

2011-10-25T06:46:00.000-07:00

Virtualization often represents a key building block of cloud computing deployments. This sometimes leads to confusion about where virtualization ends and cloud computing begins. The two technologies can coexist, but they exhibit distinct characteristics and provide different kinds of value to an organization.

Virtualization allows multiple "virtual machines" to run on a single physical machine.

These virtual machines exist as a set of files that interact with a layer of software called a hypervisor. Hypervisors abstract the underlying physical resources and allow these files to operate as though they were real hardware. For example, a virtual disk file gets presented as a hard drive to an operating system running in a virtual machine. A configuration file tells the hypervisor how many CPUs, how much memory, and how many NICs to present to the virtual machine. An operating system (OS) installs on this virtual hardware in the same way it installs on physicall hardware, and applications are then installed on the OS in the usual manner. These applications running in virtual machines provide identical services to the same applications running in physical machines.

Virtualization provides many benefits compared to traditional physical IT infrastructures. It allows dramatic cost reduction through more complete utilization of physical server resources. Applications typically need to run on their own server for security, maintenance, and uptime purposes. With virtualization, applications that might only use a small percentage of a physical server share resources with other applications, thus reducing the number of physical servers that IT must deploy to meet business needs. Virtualization also increases flexibility of an IT infrastructure. Since a virtual machine consists of a set of files and the hypervisor abstracts the physical hardware, an entire virtual machine can be copied and moved from one physical server to another, even if the underlying physical hardware has changed. This makes hardware updates and server lifecycle management significantly easier to manage, and introduces intriguing capabilities from a business continuity / disaster recovery (BCDR) perspective.

In the next post, we'll take a look at what distinguishes virtualization from cloud computing.

Cloud Computing Essential Characteristics #3, #4, and #5: Resource Pooling, Rapid Elasticity, and Measured Service

2011-10-24T11:07:00.000-07:00

Resource pooling means ". . . computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers . . . (with) resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand." (NIST) In other words, Susan may share IT resources with other business units, or even other companies depending on the type of cloud she uses. She makes sure her group has the resources it needs, and may not care who else might use those same resources, or where her resources physically reside.

Rapid elasticity refers to the ability to ". . . quickly scale out, and . . . quickly scale in." (NIST) In other words, if Susan suddenly needs 10 identical servers, she can provision those immediately, and then quickly deprovision those servers when the need subsides. She might also have the capability to configure her servers to automatically self-provision and self-deprovision based on resource demands.

Measured service means charges for IT resources consumed in the cloud are based on actual resources consumed. Thus, cloud resources ". . . can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service." (NIST) In other words, Susan gets billed for provisioning new servers in the same way she gets billed for electricity when she turns on a light in her office. When she provisions a new server, her charges start based on the size and type of server she selected. When she deprovisions the server, those charges stop accruing.

Here's a fun little video that gives a nice overview of both the features and benefits of cloud computing. Enjoy!