Event: Amazon Web Services AWS Michigan Meetup 12/11/2012

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Dec 100

Tomorrow (12/11/2012) we’ll be out at the monthly AWS Michigan meetup in Ann Arbor.  Jamie and Michael from RightBrain Networks will be presenting on some of things they’ve learned from their experiences running scalable WordPress sites on Amazon Web Services (AWS). They’ll also be talking about some of the things they learned from AWS re:Invent for those of us not lucky enough to attend.

If you’re interested in Cloud Computing, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Public Cloud, Private Cloud, OpenStack and other technologies and want to meet other people that are as well, check out the group - http://www.awsmichigan.org.

Event: AWS Michigan Meetup

Event Date: Tuesday, December 11th, 2012 @ 7:00pm

More info: http://www.awsmichigan.org/events/94452352/

Private Cloud: Openstack vs. Cloudstack vs. Eucalyptus

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Nov 147

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Cloud Computing Deployment Models

Cloud computing can broadly be broken down into three main categories based on the deployment model. Here is a definition of each one, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Public Cloud

Public cloud applications, storage, and other resources are made available to the general public by a service provider. These services are free or offered on a pay-per-use model. Generally, public cloud service providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft and Google own and operate the infrastructure and offer access only via Internet (direct connectivity is not offered).[28]

Private Cloud

Private cloud is cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally.[4] Undertaking a private cloud project requires a significant level and degree of engagement to virtualize the business environment, and it will require the organization to reevaluate decisions about existing resources. When it is done right, it can have a positive impact on a business, but every one of the steps in the project raises security issues that must be addressed in order to avoid serious vulnerabilities.[53]

Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models.[4] By utilizing “hybrid cloud” architecture, companies and individuals are able to obtain degrees of fault tolerance combined with locally immediate usability without dependency on internet connectivity. Hybrid cloud architecture requires both on-premises resources and off-site (remote) server-based cloud infrastructure. Hybrid clouds lack the flexibility, security and certainty of in-house applications.[52] Hybrid cloud provides the flexibility of in house applications with the fault tolerance and scalability of cloud based services.

Evaluting Private and Hybrid Cloud Solutions

We’re currently involved in several projects that require a hybrid cloud approach. Under this approach, some processing or storage would be handled inside the organization’s data center (private cloud) and other processing or storage would be handled using a public cloud such as Amazon Web Services or Rackspace Cloud. The decision on what workloads to run on the public cloud is generally driven by compliance requirements. An example would be: development and test systems, which use dummy data are candidates for public cloud where the production system is not due to data compliance requirements.

This type of approach is becoming more common and could be viewed as an improvement upon previous IT hardware virtualization initiatives.

In this post we’re going to describe the initial steps to evaluate existing private cloud solutions. This post does not dive into the technical differences between the software solutions, but rather looks at them from the standpoint of – which organization appears to be the most likely to become the market leader.

Private Cloud Computing Software

There are three primary software solutions in the private cloud space – Openstack, Cloudstack, Eucalyptus.  Each have their strengths and weaknesses and are complex products. Relative to other IT industry trends, cloud computing is still relatively immature. Relative to the public cloud, the concept of private cloud is even more immature.

Below is a quick overview of each of the projects.

Openstack

From their website:

About OpenStack

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.

Learn more about OpenStack’s compute, storage, networking, take a tour of the dashboard, or dive in and learn how to get started with OpenStack today.

Cloudstack

From their website:

What is CloudStack?

Apache CloudStack (Incubating) is software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform. CloudStack is used by a number of service providers to offer public cloud services, and by many companies to provide an on-premises (private) cloud offering, or as part of a hybrid cloud solution.

CloudStack is a turnkey solution that includes the entire “stack” of features most organizations want with an IaaS cloud: compute orchestration, Network-as-a-Service, user and account management, a full and open native API, resource accounting, and a first-class User Interface (UI).

CloudStack currently supports the most popular hypervisors: VMware, KVM, XenServer and Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).

Users can manage their cloud with an easy to use Web interface, command line tools, and/or a full-featured RESTful API. In addition, CloudStack provides an API that’s compatible with AWS EC2 and S3 for organizations that wish to deploy hybrid clouds.

Eucalyptus

From their website:

What is Eucalyptus?

Eucalyptus enables the creation of on-premise Infrastructure as a Service clouds, with no requirements for retooling the organization’s existing IT infrastructure or for introducing any specialized hardware. The Eucalyptus Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform maintains high fidelity with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API, allowing support for both on-premise and hybrid IaaS clouds.

This compatibility allows any Eucalyptus cloud to be turned into a hybrid IaaS deployment, capable of moving workloads between AWS and on-premise data centers. Eucalyptus is compatible with a wealth of tools and applications that also adhere to the de facto AWS API standards.

Read our story and learn about the history of Eucalyptus.

Openstack vs. Cloudstack vs. Eucalyptus: Quick Analysis

We’re always analyzing and reviewing new and upcoming technologies. One of the best ways to do this quickly is to simply look at Google Trends. This tool gives you a quick way to get a line graph of search trends over time, and drill down by different factors. This method can be done very quickly and works for almost any technology trend that is, or is going, mainstream.

We compared openstack vs cloudstack vs eucalyptus vs amazon aws. We only included searches over the past twelve months from the United States in the “Computers & Electronics” category. Here is a link to the full report and here are the results:

Interest over time:

Regional interest:

 

Openstack:

Cloudstack:

Eucalyptus:

Amazon aws:

Related terms:

Openstack:

Cloudstack:

Eucalyptus:

Amazon aws:

Conclusions

The main takeways from this is that, all technical capabilities aside, Openstack is far more popular than its two main competitors. This is especially true once you get outside of California. While its far too early to say who will win the private cloud platform war, its pointing towards Openstack. Its good to see some consistency across the US for both Openstack and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The question that a development company must ask is: Does it matter if there are other solutions that are technically superior, if the target market hasn’t heard of them?

Because of the Google Trends results and the fact that our business centers around Metro Detroit, we’re primarily focusing on Openstack for private cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for public cloud solutions.  We’ll still be working with the other solutions, but will likely be looking at them in a different light going forward.

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Cloud Computing and Cloud Infrastructure Myths

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Nov 90

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Most common cloud computing questions

The most common question we hear about cloud computing is “What is the cloud?“. There are a lot of terms, vendor specific definitions and confusion about cloud infrastructure so we’ll first define cloud computing before moving on.

Solid Logic’s cloud computing definition: Instantly scalable, programmatically-controllable compute, storage, and networking resources. 

This definition is also commonly referred to as Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IaaS). Infrastructure-as-a-Service abstracts the physical aspects of IT Infrastructure and provides a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to control all aspects of the infrastructure. It is very powerful and allows you to basically manage a data center from a development environment or software application.

Many of the people we speak to have never used Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace Cloud or another IaaS cloud provider, for different reasons. We’ve used IaaS for everything from High-Performance Computing to Video Hosting to low-cost development/test or non-production infrastructure. Our experience serves as a guide on which workloads fit well within an IaaS structure and which ones do not. It also allows us to prescribe  a customized, phased approach to cloud integration that minimizes cost and business risk in different ways.

The next comment that normally comes up when speaking to people about cloud infrastructure is: “The cloud sounds great, I hear it saves a lot of money but its just too risky/insecure/complex for us.” 

Organizations that have not yet embraced IaaS or “the cloud”  in their business generally do so for similar reasons. Most of the reasons center around perceptions that may be outdated or untrue – it depends on their scenario.

In our experience, their reasons generally fall into one of the categories below:

  • Cloud Performance (CPU, Disk, Network, Bandwidth, etc.) – I heard cloud servers are slow. The disks are slow and unpredictable. 
  • Budgeting/cost modeling – How do I know or estimate what my costs will be?
  • Cloud Security – It can’t be secure. Its called ‘Public Cloud’. Can other people access my files or servers?
  • Cloud Reliability – Netflix went down so it’s not reliable. What do I do if it goes down?
  • Cloud Compliance – No way, can’t do it – I’m subject to ABC, DEF or XYZ compliance requirements
  • Cloud Audit requirements – No way, the auditors will never buy-in to this.
  • Employee training – How do I find people to manage this?
  • Steep learning curve – How do I get started? Its seems really complex.

Cloud misperceptions abound

As the saying goes, perception is reality, and there are also a lot of misconceptions that increase fear of the technology and prevent people from moving suitable workloads to the cloud.

Popular news sources perpetuate the myths about cloud computing. It seems that every time Amazon Web Services (AWS) (who is by far the largest cloud provider) has any sort of hiccup or downtime, reporters jump on the bandwagon that cloud infrastructure is useless and breaks too often. Here is a link to a Google news search for this: https://www.google.com/news?ncl=dvYSd5T83PVQigMPa1-2GMz-snaDM&q=aws+down&lr=English&hl=en

How we’re addressing these concerns

We’re going to address each of these concerns by sharing much of what we’ve learned along the way. We hope to shed some light on what seems to be an increasingly complicated market with more and more terminology and complex jargon used every day.

  1. We’re working on a comprehensive cloud computing benchmarking report. The report will make an apples-to-apples comparison between cloud instance sizes and existing in-house infrastructure. It will use common benchmarking tests that anyone can replicate in their environment. It will allow organizations to make informed business decisions on whether or not they could benefit from integrating “the cloud” into their IT infrastructure and software development approach. Sign up here for a copy of the cloud computing benchmark report.
  2. We’re going to present some cost models and budgets for common scenarios. We’ll integrate both tangible and non-tangible costs and benefits that we’ve searched for but haven’t seen included anywhere else. Contact us for a cost model for a specific use case.
In all we’ll address each of the bullet points above in detail. Stay tuned…

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The impact of friction on doing the right thing

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Nov 40

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Friction vs. Momentum in Life

This post is not focusing on the aspects of friction and momentum in a physics sense, but rather in a philosophical sense, and the way they impact a person’s business and personal life.

Basically, if you reduce friction on an object or in a process and increase its velocity you will get sustained movement – momentum. Conversely, the more friction a process has in it, the more likely it is to grind to a halt without something or someone moving it along.When these concepts are understood, processes can be changed to actually make it easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing. This has huge implications in all aspects of life and makes it much easier to
hit goals and objectives.
Friction is the force resisting the relative motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers, and material elements sliding against each other.

Source: Wikipedia

In classical mechanics, linear momentum or translational momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. Like velocity, linear momentum is a vector quantity, possessing a direction as well as a magnitude:
676dc21daca293b822638428a5ea3c2e The impact of friction on doing the right thing

Source: Wikipedia

Impact of friction: Hurricane Sandy Red Cross Donations

Like several hundred million other people, I’ve been watching a lot of the news about Hurricane Sandy that hit the east coast last week. The devastation that occurred is unreal.

Being in Michigan I was lucky enough to just get some wind and a bit of rain. I didn’t even lose power for any part of the storm.

Friday night (11/2/2012) I tuned into the Red Cross / NBC Hurricane Sandy telethon. Aerosmith, Bruce Springstein, Sting and others were on and it was a great show. The telethon raised almost $23 million to help victims of the tragedy. During the show they mentioned how to donate to the Red Cross to help out the victims of the storm on an iPhone. Being that I have an iPhone and was going to donate anyways (Link to the Red Cross Hurricane Sandy donation webpage), I flipped through to see how easy it was.

Apple did an outstanding job with the process and technology to donate. The process is as smooth and painless as possible. To donate to the Red Cross all a person has to do is:

  1. Go into iTunes.
  2. Click on Red Cross logo on the homepage.
  3. Sign in with iTunes password.
  4. Pick how much money to donate from a drop down.
  5. Click OK and you’re done.

4 clicks and a password to help hurricane victims. Pretty amazing really……

Apple has eliminated all friction in donating to the hurricane victims for the millions of people with iPhones. This drives better results than a clunky or frustrating process that is so common today.

How many less people would donate if they had to fill out a long form with a bunch of useless info????? Sure, this is common sense but still not common to see in practice.

Apple eliminated friction in the donation process and thereby made it easier to do the right thing than it is to do the wrong thing.

When its easier to do the right then than the wrong thing, positive momentum can be created which can then build on itself and create long lasting change.

There are a lot of ways this impacts both business and personal life that we’ll explore at a later date.

Any way that friction can be eliminated from a part of one’s life, either in business or personal, the better the outcome will be.

More posts by Eric

PS – Here is another link to the Red Cross Hurricane Sandy donation webpage

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2012 Second Presidential Debate WordCloud

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Oct 170

We like to do some ad-hoc text analysis from time to time to break things up a bit and work with new tools and software. We’ve done some similar things with Twitter #hashtag text analysis titled Michigan Lean Startup Conf. Twitter Visualizations.

In the spirit of the upcoming election and debates, I thought it would be interesting to put out some something to summarize the words used by both of the candidates in the 2012 Second Presidential Debate on October 16, 2012. We grabbed the text from here. We’re not diving into anything overly complex here but it does put last night’s debate in a different context that we found interesting.

The way the graphic turned out is interesting: president, governor, jobs, thats people. 

Link to the WordCloud: http://www.solidlogic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/wordcloud_debate_transcript.png

2012 Second Presidential Debate Word Cloud

wordcloud debate transcript 2012 Second Presidential Debate WordCloud

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How to build a word cloud

The easiest way to build a word cloud is to use one of the great free online tools like Wordle to build the graphic. If you need a more customized approach or need to create something like this in software, you can use several software tools to make it a lot easier. More details to come on the methods and code behind this later on but its based on Python and R, both of which we use quite a bit for data analysis and development projects.   The code for this was created by myself and our CIO, Michael Bommarito. Its based on some of the work he’s previously made available here: Wordcloud of the Arizona et al. v. United States opinion and Archiving Tweets with Python.

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To get customized analysis like this, or to ask us anything else please use the contact us.

 

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