Rhm2ktmi's List: Cloud - Infrastructure

• However, he added, “As we started working with customers around what they were looking for in their overall cloud environment, we did hear the signal loud and clear that the AWS design pattern is incredibly relevant to them.” Often times, he explained, that means either hoping to bring an application into a private cloud from Amazon or perhaps moving an application from a private cloud into Amazon.

   

• Hilf thinks vendors targeting enterprise customers need to make sure they’re selling enterprise what they actually want and need, rather than what’s technologically awesome. “Our approach, from their feedback, is to take an application-down approach, rather than an infrastructure-up approach,” he said. “How do we think about a cloud environment that helps an application at all parts of its lifecycle, not just giving them the ability to spin up compute instances or virtual machines as fast as possible.”

   
• Despite the fact that it’s pushing a lineup of Helion cloud products that’s based on the open source OpenStack technology, Hilf is remarkably realistic about the dreaded concept of vendor lock-in. Essentially, he acknowledged, HP, Amazon and everyone else building any sort of technology is going to make a management interface and experience that’s designed to work great with their particular technology, and customers are probably going to be running multiple platforms in different places.

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• One thing is clear; enterprise IT vendors accustomed to reaping fat margins on up-front sales of software licenses and then healthy margins on yearly support and maintenance re-ups, will have a very hard time replicating that profitability in the open-source world.
• Luckily, for this Week in Cloud report, 451 Research took a stab at it and last week issued estimates on the revenue picture for OpenStack. It’s call? OpenStack revenue will hit $3.3 billion in 2018, up from about $883 million this year — a 40 percent compound annual growth rate over those four years.
• Whatever you think of OpenStack, it does seem to have won the branding and marketing war when it comes to open-source cloud frameworks. That’s so although even some OpenStack proponents concede that CloudStack is a more mature solution.

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• The most profound New Stack efficiency will come from radically streamlining developer and operator interactions with the entire application/infrastructure stack, and embracing new abstractions and automation concepts to hide complexity.
• The best practice in data center optimization for the last 10 years has been to take physical machines and carve them into virtual machines.
• Turing Award winner Barbara Liskov famously quipped that all advances in programming have relied on new abstractions. That truth is even more pronounced today.

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• Ericsson has a number of initiatives under way – including its new Cloud & IP group – to grow beyond its core telecom-equipment business. Annual sales have been stuck at $31bn since 2011. To that end, Ericsson has picked up its acquisition pace. The key acquisitions and partnerships for the recently formed Cloud & IP group so far this year are MetraTech (July), Apcera (September), GuardTime (investment, October) and Sentilla (October)
• Ericsson's view is that the very biggest companies haven't yet adopted the cloud in any material way due to security, policy control, governance and availability concerns
• Ericsson believes this is its key opportunity: to extend, enhance and bring the same secure, real-time operations to cloud service delivery as it does in its network-equipment business.
• In other words, do for computer, storage and data what it has already done for network management.
• • The construction of systems with assured end-to-end performance (the phone system delivers end-to-end services) 
   
   

   

   
   
• The construction of highly available systems that leverage the resiliency of the components (the ability to fail and reset rapidly, the design of the system as a whole to accommodate this kind of resilient component design)
• The ability to build policy-driven, global-scale applications that will be needed for a global enterprise to deal with governmental regulations on a worldwide basis (mobile operators today provide instantaneous, policy-defined service when you suddenly show up in a foreign county)
• The ability to build trusted and secure overall systems from many different components supplied by many different vendors
• The ability to help customers make transitions into new technologies, which Ericsson has done for decades, and is staffed to provide services targeted to the board room down to the equipment

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• Docker has undoubtedly been the most disruptive technology that the industry has witnessed in the recent past. Every vendor in the cloud ecosystem has announced some level of support or integration with Docker.
• Java’s main value proposition is Write Once, Run Anywhere – Docker containers are Build Once, Run Anywhere.

• Key players from the cloud ecosystem offering everything from low-level hypervisors (VMware) to SaaS (Salesforce) are watching Docker to assess its impact on their businesses.

   

• Docker is the first technology that makes it easy to create and manage containers and also to package things in a way that make them usable without a lot of tweaking. Developers do not need to be experts in containerization to use Docker.

   
• There are already startups like Tutum that offer Docker as a Service by imitating existing IaaS providers. Going forward, there is a possibility that Tutum will leverage multiple IaaS offerings to dynamically provision and move containers across them.
• The viability of Docker, and businesses that use Docker as IaaS offered to customers, is still an open-ended question.
• Since containers are lighter weight execution environments than VMs, Docker is well suited for hybrid cloud deployments.
• Platform as a Service was one of the first service delivery models of cloud computing. It was originally created to enable developers to achieve scale without dealing with infrastructure.
• The conflict in PaaS and what has caused slower adoption of PaaS, is the need by enterprises for a prescriptive way of writing, managing, and operating applications versus the desire that developers have to resist such constraints. Another concern is portability when writing applications on PaaS
• Docker delivers a simplified promise of PaaS to developers.
• Docker disrupts the PaaS world by offering a productive and efficient environment for developers.
• Multi-cloud management software is typically called a Cloud Management Platform (CMP). Some of the CMP companies including RightScale, Scalr, Enstratius (now Dell Cloud Manager), and ScaleXtreme were all started on the premise of abstracting underlying cloud platforms.
• Though there are many tools that fit into the DevOps equation that aim to bring developers and operations closer, Docker is a framework that closely aligns with DevOps principles. With Docker, developers stay focused on their code without worrying about the side effects of running it in production.

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• AWS Lambda runs your code in response to events such as  image uploads, in-app activity, website clicks, or outputs from connected devices. You can  use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end  that operates at AWS scale, performance, and security
• When you use Amazon EC2  instances directly, you are responsible for provisioning capacity, monitoring fleet  health and performance, and using Availability Zones for fault tolerance. AWS Elastic Beanstalk offers  an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications in which you retain  ownership and full control over the underlying Amazon EC2 instances.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host 7 has entered beta, giving Red Hat customers a lean, lightweight OS host for container-oriented cloudy IT.
• RHEL Atomic Host is based on RHEL 7, which means it inherits all of its parent platform's hardware certifications and its software ecosystem. It can be installed on bare metal or on supported hypervisors, including RHEL OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and VMware vSphere

• The main difference between Atomic Host and more typical RHEL installations is that Atomic Host is designed for admins who want to compose their applications from container-hosted "micro-services," rather than via the traditional, monolithic server software architecture.
• If you think this sounds familiar, it's probably because Red Hat wasn't the first to float the idea. In particular, CoreOS offers a Linux distro that's built along similarly minimalistic lines as Atomic Host. While Red Hat's offering is based on RHEL, however, CoreOS used Ubuntu as the foundation of its platform.

• Red Hat and CoreOS aren't alone in catching container fever, either. Nearly every Linux vendor is scrabbling to add support for Docker and its related technologies. Canonical, for example, recently announced plans to build an ambitious new container management daemon that will initially run on Ubuntu.

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• Specific to Docker, there are several issues with the current approach
• Kernel OS Fragmentation
• Large Image Size
• Still Insecure
• Immutable Servers & Unikernels
• two key concepts and start designing your operational systems with these approaches in mind
• Immutable Servers are a deployment model that mandates that no application updates, security patches, or configuration changes happen on production systems.
• Containers promote the idea of single-service-per-container (microservices), and unikernels take this idea even further.
• Unikernels allow you to compile and link your application code all the way down to and include the operating system.

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• Amazon Web Services today announced Lambda, a whole new web service in the public cloud that abstracts away the infrastructure underneath application code.

• While containers have been around for years, what makes Docker so popular is how it quickly ships any workload anywhere, with the flexibility to run apps on premise, in public and private clouds, and on bare metal servers.
• For Docker to maximize value in enterprise production environments, it needs trust. Trust comes from seeing that enterprise requirements like compliance and security are always met.

• In recent weeks there has been surge in activity around proposals which expand the scope of Docker.
• What is changing?  Up to now, Docker’s focus has been on how to represent, ship and run a single application, together with all its dependencies as a docker container image – and with the dockerfile as a convenient manifest.
• That is now the old Docker.
• Docker networking currently works by setting up a Linux bridge on a single host and wiring containers into it via virtual ethernet devices.
• In the new Docker world, we want multi host and we don’t want applications to include networking configuration.
• The Docker Networking Proposals
• You can get involved via the (now extensive) Github comment thread, where you will see the above teams in action including myself (monadic), plus CoreOS, Docknet, Calico, Zerotier One, Flynn, Cloudsoft, Google, Cisco etc.  

• The Weave position on internal networking APIs and OVS

   

  We are concerned that Docker will accrete over specific functionality in the guise of a “networking API”.  Getting APIs wrong can create damage that takes years to fix.

   
• Weave is complementary to and not in competition with OVS or any of the emerging large scale SDN and NFV vendors.
• Docker plugins are what the community should work to deliver.  They are how extensions and customisations should be made available in Docker. The best interests of customers are served by innovators competing to deliver great plugins.  So the plugin system itself must be great. The new Docker needs this: it is not just about clusters and networks, but also storage and many other integrated capabilities.

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• Rancher is an open source project that provides infrastructure services designed specifically for Docker. Rancher makes AWS-like functions, such as EBS, VPC, ELB and Security Groups, available and consistent across any servers running locally or in any cloud.
• Today, popular AWS features like Security Groups, VPC, ELB and EBS only apply to virtual machine instances. Rancher implements native support for these same services for Docker on AWS or any other cloud.
• No matter where you run your Docker containers, they will have access to a consistent set of storage and networking features.
• Rancher enables Docker to run equally well in your private datacenter, colo facility, lab, or public cloud.

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• There are already tools for service discovery, with or without Docker: etcd, SkyDNS and Consul, for example. weaveDNS is broadly similar to these (though somewhat younger), but has a different outlook, I would say. There’s three main points of difference:
• 1. weaveDNS needs little to no configuration.
• 2. weaveDNS avoids costly synchronisation.
• 3. weaveDNS works with unmodified applications.
• Among its current limitations:
• • weaveDNS uses weave’s UDP multicast to solicit answers from other servers when it doesn’t know a name. This probably won’t scale up very far, so we’re looking at other ways of doing that;
   
  • It’s far from a complete implementation of a DNS server — we don’t support recursive queries, or caching, for example. Caching is likely to be essential for most production deployments.

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• Earlier in the summer, Pertino introduced a cloud service that lets a user create and share a virtual LAN – a use case for extended virtual private cloud. Its goal is to make using the CNE as simple as spinning up an AMI on AWS.
• The cloud-based service rides on SDN; its control panel runs on AWS, and the data plane can run on a range of service-provider platforms
• CNE now also supports Docker containers

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• Once upon a time Red Hat and Mirantis got on very well. Just last year, Red Hat invested in and partnered with the OpenStack systems integrator, but then Mirantis released its own OpenStack distribution and buddied up with Canonical, and when Mirantis raised $100 million last month Red Hat was most definitely not a participant