Rhm2ktmi's List: Cloud - IaaS

• Deploy and scale any application to your cloud in seconds, with just a few simple clicks. No need to compromise simplicity for flexibility. Your cloud, your rules. 

   

   

   

• But one announcement has elicited a rare mix of excitement, curiosity, and even outright confusion from analysts.

• That would be Amazon’s reveal of Lambda, which Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels simply described as “an event-driven computing service for dynamic applications.” It might sound like yet another service in the Amazon cloud’s ever-expanding portfolio. But really, it’s a tool to implement rules that carry out functions using Amazon’s manifold complex features, without requiring extensive configuration and maintenance.

   

• So here are a few recent snapshots from researchers that may be helpful in fleshing out just how big Amazon Web Services really is..
• Jillian Mirandi, senior analyst at Technology Business Research Group (TBRI), estimated that AWS will generate about $4.7 billion in revenue this year, while comparable estimated IaaS revenue for Microsoft and Google will be $156 million and $66 million, respectively
• In terms of relative growth rates, Microsoft Azure wins the race, according to new third-quarter numbers from Synergy Research Group. Again, that is because Azure started with a much smaller base than AWS.

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• IBM and Microsoft this morning announced that they’ll be supporting each other’s enterprise software on some of their respective cloud services.
• For instance, IBM middleware products like WebSphere Liberty, MQ and DB2 will work on Azure. Likewise, Windows Server and SQL Server will be supported in SoftLayer. The companies also say they’ll also make .Net supported in Bluemix.
• The Bluemix part of the partnership is particularly interesting. It will allow .Net developers to build applications on IBM’s Cloud Foundry platform as a service, which competes directly with Azure.
• IBM isn’t the first enterprise software that Microsoft has announced support for in Azure. Oracle is among the others also supported in Azure.
• The takeaway from this announcement is that both companies seem to be acknowledging that it’s inevitable there will be multiple successful cloud providers.
• The arrangement also strengthens Microsoft’s and IBM’s enterprise game against Google.

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• DigitalOcean will announce Friday that it is now supporting Linux OS specialist CoreOS, giving developers an easier way to deploy Docker containers on its platform.
• Users will now have the option to choose CoreOS as the base image that acts as the foundation for spinning up new servers; all a user has to do is create a droplet — a combination of compute, storage and networking resources — chose the region and location of the server, and then click on a CoreOS icon that will trigger the server’s launch, explained Mitch Wainer, DigitalOcean’s co-founder and chief marketing officer

• Enterprise-class workloads require more than 'best effort' from IaaS providers. This is the departure point for Dimension Data's maneuver into providing cloud services for SAP ERP.
• Using its Managed Cloud Platform (MCP), Dimension Data is able to support the deployment of different enterprise applications spanning communications services, bespoke applications, three tier applications or applications such as SAP.

• Mårten Mickos took to his blog to proclaim a big change of fortunes for open-source cloud Eucalyptus. But what would we expect him to say?

• New-look CenturyLink is making a new private cloud option — that exactly mirrors its own public cloud — available across 57 data centers. The company, like its many rivals, is targeting companies that want the warm-and-fuzzy feeling of private cloud paired with the ability to “burst” into public cloud as needed.
• They are based on our new CenturyLink platform and associated orchestration
• While there’s potentially huge business here among companies moving more workloads to cloud, there’ s no dearth of options, including VMware’s vCHS, which we’ll no doubt hear more about next week out of VMworld

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• VoltDB is one of an increasing number of vendors that offers an in-memory database. Essentially VoltDB offers real-time analytics that means that organizations can gather some insights from application data as it flows – the idea being that business value is generated when actions can be taken rapidly from insights derived.
• So far, so good, right? Well VoltDB is coming out today saying that customers who use its product on IBM IBM’s SoftLayer cloud infrastructure, see five times faster application performance than those running it on Amazon Web Services.
• VoltDB (and, clearly, IBM SoftLayer) argue that these results are important because in the era of big data, sometimes we forget the fact that, in terms of the processing of that data, speed is important.

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• Enterprise IT buyers may be intrigued by public cloud, but they need to be assured that their public cloud choice will work in a hybrid situation, and that’s where Google needs to prove itself with new offerings
• Solid peering and a virtual network [capability] is essential for Google to compete with AWS, Azure and VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service
• First and foremost, Google needs to come up with something analogous to AWS Direct Connect or IBM SoftLayer’s Direct Link, which provide a dedicated physical connection from a company’s own servers to its public cloud of choice.
• A direct connection, on the other hand, would let a company — say, Acme Paint & Glass, connect to its cloud provider via a physical link between its own private rack in a colocation center into the public cloud provider’s network.
• Google faces a unique challenge in this area as well. AWS, IBM and other companies typically partner with big data center providers like Equinix that host lots of other customers in the same facility.
• It is seems unlikely that Google would let third parties wire up their own networking in those facilities. If that remains the case, VPN would be the other connectivity option.

  • Re +Kaazing: wouldn't this be the appropriate solution for a big player who does NOT establish physical peering/interconnect for Hybrid Cloud?
• Amazon offers a Virtual Private Computing (VPC) option that lets customers cordon off an area of the bigger, public cloud for their own use
• Google provides the building blocks for VPC, said Sebastian Stadl, CEO of cloud management company Scalr, who was able to use Google’s Networks feature to build logically isolated environments.
• Other wish list items include disaster recovery as a service and media encoding that would enable easier handling of massive video and other files
• And, if we’re talking enterprise, Google will need to deal with the usual roster of enterprise applications — the Oracles, SAPs and Microsofts of the world. Google knows how to run webscale workloads, but there are different requirements for those bread-and-butter applications that most companies run to survive

  • This also opens the conversation to consider overlays like Bracket.
• If you win the user’s desktop, it’s easier to sell more software and services to those users and the IT admins supporting them.
• For example, its cloud storage APIs are “100 percent compatible” with Amazon S3’s API, pointed out MSV Janikiram.

  • Is the S3 compatibility of GCE something that might be used effectively by Aerospike?
• The company’s work around containers and its Kubernetes container management also could make Google infrastructure a key component of hybrid cloud deployments going forward
• Red Hat, IBM and Microsoft also back Kubernetes,
• If all these players use Kubernetes as a standard container management framework, it will be easier going forward to run workloads between the various clouds

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• There are many ways for IBM to get to the $7 billion revenue run rate it has promised Wall Street it can hit as it exits 2015. One way was to take its existing application hosting services and merge them with a true cloud provider, and then make more acquisitions from there to quickly build up its book of business.
• Instead of buying Rackspace and adding it to SoftLayer, IBM decided it was cheaper to merge its own fifteen hosting centers with the thirteen datacenters already owned by SoftLayer and then spend another $1.2 billion building these out and adding a dozen new ones until it has 40 datacenters globally linked by SoftLayer’s private network and using its own bare metal and cloud controller software.
• SoftLayer was a pioneer in bare metal clouds and in getting server nodes equipped with GPU accelerators, and bare metal still accounts for a large portion of its business.
• The idea is that the Dallas and Ashburn sites will be tied together, offering government agencies disaster recovery and load balancing across these two facilities, all within a secure, internal network.
• This private network, which was built four years ago by SoftLayer, is a key differentiator for what is now IBM’s public cloud, says Karidis. What it means is that customers who deploy servers and storage on the SoftLayer cloud can automatically use this network, which has hundreds of gigabits of traffic coming into every datacenter and two public and two private network cards running at 10 Gb/sec running inside of every server.
• And that means you do not have to use the public Internet to get at data that lives in a SoftLayer environment. You just go to the closest point of presence and then link right in, and so we see anywhere from 30 to 40 percent latency improvements because we eliminate all of the public hops.

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• Over the years we've spent a good amount of time testing and thinking about how to compare cloud services.
• Some services, like content delivery networks (CDN), managed DNS and object storage are relatively easy because they have few deployment options and similar features between providers.
• Comparing cloud compute or servers is a different story entirely. Because of the diverse deployment options and dissimilar features of different services, formulating relevant and fair comparisons is challenging to say the least.
• To do so, I'll present actual comparisons from testing we've done recently on Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and SoftLayer.
• compute instances from different services you are considering.
• Before comparing compute services, you should have an idea about the type of workloads you'd like to compare.
• For the web server workload, our focus was CPU, disk read and external network performance
• For the database server workload, our primary focus was CPU, disk read and write, memory and internal network performance.
• CPU cores-to-memory ratios are often where it is nearly impossible to match services exactly
• Once you've picked services and compute instances to compare, and workload to focus on - the next step is to choose benchmarks that are relevant to those workloads.

• The benchmarks we chose are SPEC CPU 2006 for CPU performance, fio for disk IO, STREAM for memory, and our own benchmarks (based on standard Linux tools) for internal and external network testing. More details about these benchmarks, and the runtime configurations we used are provided in the report.
• SPEC CPU 2006 is an industry standard benchmark for measuring CPU performance using 29 different CPU test workloads.

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• In what surely marks a trend of resurgent interest in so-called 'bare-metal clouds' – and what is also a natural evolution for the infrastructure provider business – Rackspace is launching a new IaaS offering called OnMetal that allows users to self-provision real, physical servers and manage them with OpenStack, also provisioning a self-contained and user-operated OpenStack IaaS environment for orchestrating virtual machines.
• In effect, as with similar announcements from OpenStack systems integrator Mirantis and European infrastructure provider Leaseweb, this takes the concept of a hosted private cloud and automates it in the IaaS model
• The standard competitive landscape for Rackspace still applies here, but OnMetal now puts Rackspace head-to-head with advanced, highly automated dedicated server providers that either offer true IaaS or or straddle the line of true IaaS.
• This includes the likes of SoftLayer, OVH, LeaseWeb, Internap and others that have offered bare metal as a service, or dedicated 1:1 physical hosts, including smaller providers like baremetalcloud.com, LiquidWeb, iWeb, Codero and ServerPronto
• Mirantis beat Rackspace to market with its OpenStack Express in partnership with SoftLayer, a direct equivalent
• including PEER 1, ViaWest, Windstream and CenturyLink

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• The new commercial-help service is called CoreOS Managed Linux, which the company describes as being an “OS-as-a-service” offering that provides organizations with constant patches and updates in case they don’t want the responsibility for having to deal with that type of admin work themselves.
• Polvi and CoreOS CTO Brandon Philips, also a co-founder, first started working on a version of the Linux OS that was built with security in mind.
• Using the idea of how Google’s Chrome browser has auto updates that make it a whole lot easier for folks to do their patching, Polvi and his team developed a streamlined version of its Linux OS that had auto-updating capabilities as well as other tweaks that make it suitable for running exclusively on servers instead of having to be modified to do so.
• Docker containers have been generating a lot of stream in the application development marketplace, but in order for a container to function, it needs an operating system from which it can latch onto and harness its power since containers don’t have their own OS. This is where CoreOS comes into play.

• When asked about current competitors in the field, Polvi named a few, noting that Red Hat’s Project Atomic is “a direct response to CoreOS.” Red Hat is also a member of the Docker governance board.

   

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• Oracle's OpenStack distro is currently classified as a technology preview, and it installs over the latest version of Oracle Linux and the early-access beta release of Oracle VM 3.3. The individual packages that provide the various OpenStack services are available from Oracle's public beta YUM repository
• Previously, Oracle has kicked in funds to the OpenStack Foundation, but it hasn't offered any OpenStack binaries of its own
• There's been little love lost between Oracle and Red Hat ever since the database giant launched its Linux distribution in 2006. Oracle Linux is essentially a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), built from code lifted from Red Hat's own source trees.
• Oracle has posted a get-started guide for customers who want to try out the OpenStack preview, available here [PDF]
• There was no word on when Oracle expects to release a production-grade, commercial version of OpenStack, but when it does, the database giant says it will continue to support the entire software stack as part of its Oracle Linux and Oracle VM Premier Support offerings, at no additional charge.

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• Labor costs continue to be a large percentage of IT budgets – more than 54% according to the Server and Virtualization Study, Wave 13, conducted by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research.
• In that study, time to provision is the leading metric on which teams were judged, narrowly beating out time to issue resolution.
• There is a significant investment required to bring integrated systems to market, and this has limited the number of vendors in the market
• One of the more ambitious efforts at integrated infrastructure, VCE was built as a collaboration between VMware, Cisco and EMC
• Cisco has been expanding its cloud management offerings, and VMware has extended its networking capabilities

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• With the latest version of its SmartDataCenter private cloud, though, Joyent means to compete directly with a different class of product: private-cloud solutions like OpenStack
• SmartDataCenter supports a broad range of operating systems and virtualization technologies, and it features a container-based approach to managing applications that was derived from Solaris and built specifically for multitenancy.
• Joyent also features strong Node.js support and integration for SmartDataCenter, along with high-grade debugging solutions.
• But according to Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill, the largest advantage afforded by SmartDataCenter isn't in the feature set alone, but in the way it leverages the boots-on-the-ground experiences Joyent has in building its public cloud.
• One possible exception to that rule is HP, with its OpenStack-powered HP Public Cloud aimed at enterprises trying to move their existing internal systems to private and hybrid clouds. But HP is only one party among several contributing to OpenStack
• Originally, Joyent tried to find a market for SmartDataCenter with public cloud service providers, but it didn't gain traction.
• The fact that SmartDataCenter isn't an open source product might also keep potential adopters at bay.

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