Eucalyptus 2.0 was just released yesterday; the latest version of the Eucalyptus open source cloud introduces several new features, including iSCSI support for EBS volumes, S3 versioning, virtio support for KVM hypervisors, and new administrator tools:

• High Scalability: Eucalyptus employs a software design in which scalability is achieved at two levels: front-end, transactional scalability and back-end, resource scalability. The new version of Eucalyptus provides increased back-end cluster scale improvements to support massive private and hybrid clouds.
• Support for iSCSI protocol for EBS volumes: Eucalyptus now supports Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) protocol for EBS volumes, which can make overlaying a Eucalyptus cloud on top of existing IT infrastructure even easier. This feature gives Eucalyptus users the flexibility to situate the EBS controller machine anywhere on the cloud, including outside the broadcast domain of the cloud nodes.
• KVM virtio support: Eucalyptus 2.0 supports KVM virtio, an efficient abstraction for hypervisors and a common set of I/O virtualization drivers. Users now have the flexibility to choose between emulated device drivers or direct kernel supported I/O devices via virtio for performance tuning.
• S3 versioning: Eucalyptus 2.0 extends its innate compatibility with AWS with support for S3 versioning. Now users can perform version control on the objects stored in Eucalyptus Walrus. Through a well-defined API, Eucalyptus users can retrieve specific versions of objects.

Also Eucalyptus introduced enhancements to its open.eucalyptus.com website to make submitting patches to the Eucalyptus open source code easier and more transparent. Seems like many of these came as the result of the latest controversy about eucalyptus and its open core model that resulted in the launch of the highly publicized OpenStack at OSCon. This demonstrates again (if it was needed) that it’s good to have several alternatives and this will only result in innovation and progress.

Ok, I must admit that I was not at all excited when I received the notice from SoftLayer that they have been acquired. By who? GI Partners that controls their biggest concurrent ThePlanet. This is a deja vu for me and I really hope it will not end the same way. A few years ago I was a happy customer of EV1Servers a hosting company that was one of the best in the business. I was using them for most of my clients and had a great relation with them. And then it happened. You normally receive this like: “we are so happy to announce the acquisition, we are going to take this to a new level, and bla bla bla”. Ha. never happend. Maybe it’s great news for the owners and the people cashing out, but for clients and sometimes even employes this is not quite the same. We were doing great until now, right? We don’t want to change… Anyway, short story is that this went horrible wrong and the service and support from the new ThePlanet (that incorporated ev1 also) was terrible. I moved all my clients to SoftLayer and was a happy again.

Until now. I mean, anyone with some experience can easily see that SofltLayer has already grown a lot and lowered their level of performance and support. Their tech people seem much less experienced and interested to help you out as they used to be, but this is not such a big deal because from how I see SolftLayer’s strength is their automation; they created a system designed to not need them so much. You can do everything yourself: from their control panel, or even from their api, and as long that works correctly all is good. You can order a server using api calls, you can cancel a server using the api, reboot it and you can even respond a ticket using api. Now with this merger I am am assuming that they are going to bring ThePlanet infrastructure to use SoftLayer automation; this is the only way that would make sense. SoftLayer is so much better than anything ThePlanet has, and there is no question in my mind this is what will happen. Still the concern remains and unfortunately for me, I don’t see the next ‘place’ for me to move if this will be needed. SolfLayer raised the bar so high, and other hosting companies don’t even dream to be close to that. SoftLayer was built by some of the original ThePlanet people (back in the days when it still was a great hosting company) and with their experience they knew exactly what they wanted to build. And they were right… They’ve done a great job.

I would be really interested if anyone knows or can recommend some other advanced hosting companies like SoftLayer? they need to have an api for everything and cloud computing solutions. I would love to try them. Let me know…

Amazon just announced the limited beta of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a secure and seamless bridge between existing IT infrastructures and the AWS cloud. Amazon VPC enables us to connect our existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection.

“Amazon VPC enables you to use your own isolated resources within the AWS cloud, and then connect those resources directly to your own datacenter using industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN connections. With Amazon VPC, you can:

• Create a Virtual Private Cloud on AWS’s scalable infrastructure, and specify its private IP address range from any block you choose.
• Divide your VPC’s private IP address range into one or more subnets in a manner convenient for managing applications and services you run in your VPC.
• Bridge together your VPC and your IT infrastructure via an encrypted VPN connection.
• Add AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, to your VPC.
• Route traffic between your VPC and the Internet over the VPN connection so that it can be examined by your existing security and networking assets before heading to the public Internet.
• Extend your existing security and management policies within your IT infrastructure to your VPC as if they were running within your infrastructure.”

Besides the regular ec2 prices, we will have to pay for the VPN connection ($0.05 per VPN Connection-hour) and for the data transfer using the VPN tunnel ($0.10 per GB IN – and starting with $0.17 per GB OUT).

This is a great new service from Amazon that takes the cloud computing offerings to a new level. And this just when major competitors thought they were gaining on Amazon with their offerings, Amazon continues to innovate and launch great new services like this one .

One of the great features of Amazon EC2 is the possibility to dynamically query and use instance specific metadata, or even custom data. This can be useful for various reasons, and the greatest advantage I’ve personally seen into this, is the possibility to allow the instance to have some information on how to configure itself when first booting (using chef or puppet, or some other configuration management tool).

The Amazon documentation explains how to get this information, basically just by using simple http get requests on the ip: 169.254.169.254, like for ex (for the metadata index):
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/
or for the custom data:
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data

Eucalyptus supports this great feature (starting with v1.4), but we obviously need to target a different ip to retrieve this information (as the amazon ip has nothing to do with our internal cloud ). We need to use the cloud controller IP for the request and the port it is bound (by default 8773 if you have not changed it). This will look like this (you need to run it from inside the actual instance): Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago one of the major problems people faced to use Amazon EC2 into production environments was the dynamic state of the instances IPs. Every time one instance was started it was getting a new, dynamic IP. This has been addressed with the introduction of Amazon Elastic IP Addresses, but even when using this, the private IPs are still dynamic and most of the time people will want to communicate between several instances on the private allocated IPs and not on the public ones. This article will show how you can easily automate the process to update DNS hostnames for your EC2 instances, by adding to the AMI’s the logic for this. I will use for this a master DNS server running bind9, but this can be adapted to any other DNS server. Read the rest of this entry »

Between 20-24 April 2009 I attended to CloudSlam09, the 1st annual virtual conference on cloud computing. This was a global event, using the webex technology, covering latest trends and innovations in the world of cloud computing. Being a virtual event it allowed me to easily attend and listen to several keynotes and talks from the comfort of my home/work office. Obviously this is a huge advantage as not so many people can leave their jobs for 1 week to go at such events. This was a great idea for such an event and a perfect match for the topic.

Besides the obvious advantages of a virtual event, I would like to outline also some disadvantages: besides a rather poor sound quality for some speakers, the biggest minus for me was the inability to focus on a single talk uninterrupted. This because, being actually at work I had to deal with all the usual stuff that I have to do normally (the ones called emergencies). Being on a real event would imply other type of ‘noise’ but anyway .

Read the rest of this entry »

Ubuntu released official images for Amazon EC2 for Intrepid (8.10) and Hardy (8.04) releases (not Jaunty image yet). These are server edition images. I’ve always used the great alestic ec2 images created by Eric Hammond for any Ubuntu or Debian release I needed in the past and was very happy with the quality of the images Eric maintained. This was also seen by the Ubuntu team and they worked with Eric to create their official images with the same quality and most of the features of what most people were used for Ubuntu images so far in EC2 world.

In my opinion here are the advantages of the newly released official Ubuntu images:

• officially support by Canonical (Eric has done a great job in patching and updating his images, but I am sure he has better things to do and let the Ubuntu team do this).
• custom kernels: for Intrepid 2.6.27 and Hardy 2.6.24 by having Amazon support in doing this (while alestic images were using the default Amazon Fedora kernel 2.6.21 image).
• apt mirrors in the ec2 cloud provided by Ubuntu: us.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com and eu.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com
• RightScale support for advanced integration with the RightScale platform for RightScale users.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon just announced “reserved instances”, guaranteeing uptime and a price reduction if customers commit to Amazon’s cloud solution for a year or more.

“We’ve learned that some of our customers have needs which aren’t addressed by the spot pricing model. For example, some of them were looking for even lower prices, and were willing to make a commitment ahead of time in order to achieve this. Also, quite a few customers actually told us something even more interesting: they were interested in using EC2 but needed to make sure that we would have a substantial number of instances available to them at any time in order for them to use EC2 in a DR (Disaster Recovery) scenario. In a scenario like this, you can’t simply hope that your facility has sufficient capacity to accommodate your spot needs; you need to secure a firm resource commitment ahead of time.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon just extended its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to Europe. S3 has bee available for Europe for about one year, and now we can also run EC2 instances in Europe to achieve lower latencies with EU locations. The new EU region called eu-west-1.ec2.amazonaws.com is completely isolated from the US region (us-east-1.ec2.amazonaws.com) to achieve the greatest possible failure independence and stability. This means that resources found on the US region (like ami’s, ssh keypairs, etc.) are not available to the EU region and will need to be created (or copied/mirrored) here also.

“With today’s launch, you can take advantage of the latest features for Amazon EC2 including multiple Availability Zones, Elastic IP addresses, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). In the near future, Amazon EC2 will also add support for Windows Server and SQL Server in the EU which is a new feature that was recently introduced on Amazon EC2 in the U.S.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Cloud computing management software RightScale secured $13 million in second round venture funding (after first round $4.5 million back in April).

Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, commented: “Over the next five years, spending on IT cloud services is expected to grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012, according to industry research firm IDC. Specializing from its inception exclusively on cloud computing technology, RightScale is well positioned to maintain its leadership position as this industry matures. The company has two years of real-world cloud computing experience and thousands of live deployments. Over 200,000 servers have been successfully launched using the RightScale cloud management platform.”

Full Press Release: http://www.rightscale.com/news_events/press_releases/2008/08december2008.php