Cloud Computing from an Entrpreneur's Viewpoint

Introduction to Cloud Computing

J Singh

President, Early Stage IT

Sept 17, 2009

Emulating a Previous Megatrend

• An on-site power plant…

…replaced by an off-site power plant

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Characteristics of Cloud Computing

•On-demand self-service

•Ubiquitous network access

•Resource pooling

– Location independence

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– Location independence

– Homogeneity

•Rapid elasticity

•Measured service

Source: NIST

Where it makes sense

• Need to get started and test out business concepts

– No Capital Expenditures

– Elasticity – buy for average use, not for peak

– Outsource server administration

• Open Source Software

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• Open Source Software

– Free Open Source Software licenses restrict resale

• FOSS licenses do not restrict service

• The economics make it possible to start LILO companies

– A little in, a lot out

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Players in the MarketPlace

• Some established players– Amazon

• Simple Storage Service, Elastic Compute Cloud, SimpleDB, Simple Queuing Service

• FPS, FWS, MTurk

– Google• Google App Engine

• Google Apps

• Some new players– Cloud Administration Services

• Rightscale

• Scalr

– Virtualized Data Centers• Rackspace

• Mosso

– Private Clouds

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• Google Apps

– Microsoft• Azure

– EMC• Atmos

– IBM• Collaboration w/ AMZN, GOOG

– Salesforce.com

– Facebook.com

– Private Clouds• Eucalyptus

– Transition Products• TwinStrata

• CloudSwitch

• Confession:– I don’t follow the

Entrepreneurial Landscape closely

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Cloud Computing Nuts and Bolts

• Amazon / Google Clouds

• S3 Programming

• Introduction to EC2

• Google App Engine Virtual OS

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• Google App Engine Virtual OS

• Woven Clouds

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Amazon / Google Clouds�

• Amazon EC2

– Flexible and configurable

– Interact with the machine at the OS level

– Good for hosting existing programs in the cloud

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• Google App Engine

– Interact with the machine at the ‘virtual OS’ level

– Tightly controlled, not possible to break out of the virtual OS

– Good for new development

�Source: Dion Hinchcliff, ZDNet, April 2008

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• Just two concepts

– Bucket

• Max 100 per account

• Unique name system wide

– Object

• If public, addressable as

http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket-name/object-name

• Access controlled by ACL

• Atomic access. Read, write but no update, no rename

Using S3

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• Atomic access. Read, write but no update, no rename

• Replicated storage but with latency

• Access methods

– APIs: SOAP and REST (preferred)

– Every request must be signed with ID and Secret Key

• Applications available

– Explorers, e.g., S3Fox, JungleDisk

– Backup solutions

– Used by storage-based businesses, e.g., SmugMug, Pixily, SlideShare

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Using EC2 (pg 1)

• Concepts

– EC2 Instance: a machine running in Amazon’s cloud

• Regions: 3 locations in the US, 2 in Europe

• Make an API call to get one, another API call to return it

• Need an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) when requesting an Instance

– Provided by many vendors, some free, others for a price

» MSFT, ORCL, SUNW, IBM, RHT, Rightscale, Scalr, Cloud in Code

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» MSFT, ORCL, SUNW, IBM, RHT, Rightscale, Scalr, Cloud in Code

– You can make your own private AMI

– You can offer your own special AMI for sale to others

– Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

• Storage block, attached using mnt

• Can be backed up to S3

– Static IP address

• Reachable from the domain registrar

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Using EC2 (pg 2)

– Access Methods

• APIs: SOAP and REST

• Every request must be signed with ID and Secret Key

• Once you have an instance, you can open a ssh window.

– Applications available

• ElasticFox, Amazon EC2 Console, Eclipse plugin

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– Other facilities

• Load balancing

• Auto-scaling

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Google App Engine (pg 1)

• Programming Languages

– Python, Django-like Web Application Framework

• Templates, CSS, HTML

– Java

• I’m not up to speed on this, but it uses the same virtual OS

• Client-side facilities

• SSL constraint

– Supported:

• http://abc.appspot.com

• https://abc.appspot.com

• http://www.abc.com

– Not supported

• https://www.abc.com

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• Client-side facilities

– Javascript, AJAX, YUI, GWT, jQuery, Flash

• Development Environment

– Can be any, I like Eclipse

– Local Sandbox

– Upload to Google

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Google App Engine (pg 2)

• Virtual OS facilities

– Datastore, an object database based on Goggle’s BigTable

• Designed for massive parallelism for serving web content

• Transaction atomicity handled differently from normal databases

• Multiple copies of each table replicated across Google’s servers

• No local file system

– If you need to store something, put it in the Datastore as a blob

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– If you need to store something, put it in the Datastore as a blob

– User API (provides authentication based on Google IDs)

– MemCache, ability to keep certain data in memory

– UrlFetch, ability to invoke any http request

• Examples: Google Docs, OpenID, Captcha, Amazon AWS

– Email, Chat APIs

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Extending the Paradigms

• Heterogeneous Clouds

– Combining multiple clouds can help you leverate their individual strengths

– But overall availability may be compromised

– Examples:

• Google App Engine for web

• Massive Parallelism

– Paradigms that exploit the available redundancy

– Were not economically feasible before

– Examples:

• Hadoop. An open framework for parallelizing intensive data

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• Google App Engine for web server, AWS for specialized processing

• Facebook front ends for Google App Engine-based applications

• Google App Engine/Salesforce.com interfaces

for parallelizing intensive data mining tasks

• BrowserMob / LoadStorm. Load testing. Unleash hundreds of browsers at an application

• Search / Indexing Applications. Divide up the task among thousands of machines

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Summary

• Cloud computing is changing the paradigm for how computing gets done

• It is a multi-year change,

– Accelerated by current cost pressures

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• Advantages go to the early adopters

– So do the risks

• It’s uncharted waters

• It’s fun!

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Thank YouThank You

J Singh

[email protected]

(978) 760-2055

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