Whoops! Missed a day there. I was busy planning out events for 2010 for GoGrid! I realize now that this is somewhat difficult writing about Cloud News every day so I’m going to start something for Fridays called “This Week in Cloud” which will have some of the bigger Cloud Computing news stories that I came across. I may still do the regular “Cloud News” if there are events or items that warrant coverage. Without further ado, here’s what I read about that got my interest:

• Amazon’s Data Center Outage Reads Like a Thriller
  “When an Amazon Web Services data center lost power early Wednesday, the company wrote about the unfolding event with the brevity and tension of one its bestselling pot boilers.” (Source: CIO/ComputerWorld)
  • Commentary: Ok, we all know that outages happen, whether in the cloud or not. The cloud is under intense scrutiny so when there is even the most minor of hiccups, people scream and yell and pull out their SLA’s and demand immediate recourse. It’s never fun when I read about an outage since we are all birds of a feather working towards a common good. The reason I linked to this article in particular is because of the nature in which it was written…truly like a technology thriller! The funny thing is, I have been through a few outages in various companies that I have worked for and they are never fun. You are torn in many directions of trying to find out internally what is going one, and figuring out the best way to communicate with customers in a way where they won’t freak out but still understand that an “event” is being actively working on. When there is an outage, it truly does unfold organically (and hopefully not catastrophically, causing a cascade effect). Third party monitoring is important as is a good backup and disaster recovery strategy. (GoGrid recently partnered with Stratonomic who provides real-time DR solutions.)  Regardless, the Amazon Data Center outage did not last long and everyone was back on track (but hopefully thinking about making their IT infrastructure more resilient). It was nice to see that GoGrid had (and still seems to have) the highest marks on the Apparent Networks Cloud Provider Scorecard.
• Hackers Find a Home in Amazon’s EC2 Cloud
  “Security researchers have spotted the Zeus botnet running an unauthorized command and control center on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing infrastructure. This marks the first time Amazon Web Services’ cloud infrastructure has been used for this type of illegal activity, according to Don DeBolt, director of threat research with HCL Technologies, a contractor that does security research for CA.” (Source: PCWorld)
  • Commentary: I don’t want to turn this into an AWS bashing, that is not my intent (even though they are a direct competitor to GoGrid). But this news (old by internet news speed standards) is important to look at. Hackers are an inquisitive (yet destructive) bunch. Recently, I heard about how some hackers created a service (called AutoWhaler) to pull account details from phishing sites. Now if that isn’t innovation, I don’t know what is! Seriously though, hackers can cause a variety of damage to infrastructures that are not protected and actively monitored. The problem is, they are so innovative (or perhaps “creative” is a better word), that it is often difficult to prevent or plan for intrusions within one’s infrastructure. Obviously this and other examples simply prove that while Cloud Computing can help many, we still have a ways to go. On the flipside, this same type of invasion could well have happened within a server farm of physical servers. It’s just the Cloud has the spotlight now.
• Microsoft buys Opalis to strengthen cloud management capabilities
  “Moving to strengthen its management tools related to virtual environments, Microsoft Friday said that it has purchased IT process automation vendor Opalis for an undisclosed sum. Microsoft said the acquisition, which had been rumored for nearly two months, adds to its System Center portfolio needed tools that can manage highly automated and scalable virtual environments. The tools complement Microsoft’s strategy to stretch its management tools across on-premises environments and the cloud.” (source: NetworkWorld) (more…)

Raditha Dissanayake posted a blog entry comparing Amazon EC2 and GoGrid performance. Unfortunately, we think Raditha did not use the most rigorous methodology possible for doing his comparison. It would be inappropriate for GoGrid to performance test Amazon’s EC2. In fact, their Customer Agreement may actually make such activity questionable, but IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer).

Let’s take a more rigorous look at GoGrid disk subsystem performance.

Framing the Issue

As a start the entire issue is a LOT more complex than can potentially be covered here. Today’s disks, hard drive controllers, and operating systems have many different kinds of caching mechanisms. In addition, virtualization systems like Xen can impact results in unexpected ways. For example, did you know that Xen can be deployed in two major manners?

Either ‘paravirtualized’ or ‘hardware virtualized’. The two different models almost certainly impact any testing methodology. And yes, you guessed it, Amazon and GoGrid don’t configure Xen in the same way. Amazon uses paravirtualization and GoGrid uses hardware virtualization. Beyond this public information neither Amazon nor GoGrid provide significant details about their infrastructure considering it, rightfully so, proprietary intellectual property.

Without a deep understanding of all of the issues it’s difficult to do a test much less a proper comparison.

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2008 was an action-packed year for us here at GoGrid and ServePath and we have many accomplishments to be proud of. I thought it would make sense to reflect back on what major things we did over the year as well as a few other notables that happened within the industry. The easiest way for me to do this is through a blog post Chronology (not every post is highlighted):

1st Quarter 2008

• 01.03.08 – GoGrid Blog was launched
• 01.29.08 – “Sneak Peak” at GoGrid
• 02.01.08 – Twitter and Joyent go different ways
• 02.05.08 – Understanding “Clouded” Computer Terms – a post that made a 1st attempt to explain Cloud, Utility, Grid and other Computing terms.
• 02.13.08 – Dilbert does a series on Virtualization (here, here and here)
• 02.15.08 – Amazon’s S3 has major outage (my comments)
• 02.21.08 – GoGrid launches a new public website in anticipation of the product launch
• 03.11.08 – GoGrid Public Beta LAUNCH! After over 2 years of development, GoGrid hits the streets with many Cloud Computing firsts:
  • 1st Cloud Infrastructure provider with a Web GUI
  • 1st to offer Windows Server 2003 in the Cloud
  • 1st to offer Microsoft SQL Server in the Cloud
  • 1st with free Inbound Transfer
  • 1st with free f5 Load Balancing
  • 1st with free 24×7 Support
  • 1st with Persistent Storage
  • 1st with free managed DNS
  • 1st with 100% Uptime SLA
  • 1st with public and private VLANs
• 03.17.08 – Drilling down on the details of new GoGrid accounts
• 03.18.08 – Even I wasn’t initially on board with the whole “Cloud Computing” term. My thoughts have changed obviously.
• 03.28.08 – The initial GoGrid FAQ’s start rolling out.

2nd Quarter 2008 (more…)

The start of a New Year is upon us so it is time to get a list together of things that you will do (or do your best to do) in the coming year. Everybody has their own personal Resolution lists, but what about your Business ones? How are you going to remain competitive? What steps are you going to take to cut your budget to remain lean and mean? Are you going to stick with your current methods or adopt some new strategies?

Here are some “Resolutions” that you can think about as you ready your business for 2009.

1. Invest some time in understanding the term “Cloud Computing” – there are several easy-to-understand definitions and movies that have come out that make Cloud Computing a bit more understandable. This one was done at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo. Then came the GoGrid “Cloud Computing in Plain English”. Recently, there is a new “In Plain English” from the actual Common Craft folks (whom we got our inspiration from). And here is a more technical presentation that came out recently. Regardless, there are lots of sources out there for quick understandings. I have been maintaining a Bookmark RSS feed as well of many of the Cloud Computing blogs and sites. Subscribe to that feed for updated links. Also, read through the popular Cloud Computing Group on Google. Lastly, you can check Wikipedia for their ever evolving definition of Cloud Computing.
2. Do some research on different Cloud Providers – no Cloud Computing provider is the same, and the differentiation is continuing. Last year (2008), I introduced the idea of the Cloud Pyramid which has Cloud Applications (SalesForce) at the top, then Cloud Platforms (Google App Engine or Microsoft Azure) in the middle and finally Cloud Infrastructure (GoGrid and Amazon EC2) as the bottom foundation. Also hooked into it are Cloud Extenders (e.g., Amazon’s SQS) and Cloud Aggregators (RightScale). It’s pretty obvious that there are many choices to be made and that these are very specific to the type of business you are running. In fact, we will be further segmenting the IaaS (Cloud Infrastructure) section more over the next few weeks. Briefly, GoGrid is now being positioned as a “CloudCenter” (which is essentially, a DataCenter equivalent but in the Cloud). More on that later. In the meantime, compile a series of questions for yourself and for your prospective provider. We will get a list together of things you might want to ask (post to come).
3. Review your IT Budget – If you are like most companies out there, you are going through your 2009 budgeting (or have done so already and are probably on your 10th revision now). One way to make your CFO happy is to reduce your Capital Expenditures (CapEx). The easiest way to do that is to really take a hard look at Cloud Computing. If you can slash your CapEx spend by downsizing your physical server footprints, you can easily upsize that same footprint in the Cloud.
4. Empower your Programmers – Cloud Computing offers something new to Programmers: the ability to programmatically control their IT infrastructure. Using an API, Programmers can skin the functionality provided by Clouds as well as develop “intelligent” applications that scale dynamically, for example.
5. Empower your IT Staff – Be sure that you don’t ignore your IT Staff as you look at the Cloud as a physical IT infrastructure alternative. They have some best practices and standards that should be incorporated in what your IT strategies will be. Let them experiment with the Cloud so that they fully grasp what it can do for your organization. They may tell you that it is a great direction to go in, or, they may say that your current infrastructure simply cannot be ported to the Cloud. There may also be some hybrid solutions (like GoGrid’s Cloud Connect) that will give them the best of both worlds.

These are just a few Cloud Computing New Year’s 2009 Resolutions to get you thinking. What are your business resolutions for 2009?

Peter Wayner, contributing editor of the InfoWorld Test Center, today posted a side-by-side comparison of 4 Cloud Computing providers: Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid and AppNexus, titled “Cloud versus cloud: A guided tour of Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid.” What was fairly obvious was that there isn’t a clear “winner” simply because Cloud Computing is so new and standards are still being written. What was clear, is that Wayner believes that GoGrid is “easy to use” and differentiates itself through the offering of both Windows and Linux cloud server images.

Wayner writes:

“GoGrid also has a wider variety of OS images ready to go. There is the usual collection of CentOS/Fedora and common LAMP stacks. If you need Windows, you can have Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0, and Microsoft SQL Server is available at extra cost. There are also images with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, and the Facebook application server. These make it a bit easier to start up. “

Wayner also recorded a video of his analysis of GoGrid. Below he shows how a GoGrid cloud server can be easily and quickly deployed as well as some of the management features within the GoGrid control panel:

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This insightful post on the RightScale blog recently got me thinking. The term “Cloud Computing” is much too vague. People want and need “slots” or “segments” where they can group things. This is how the mind operates through categorization and ordering. So, to possibly help with this, I would like to propose a “Cloud Pyramid” to help differentiate the various Cloud offerings out there.

There are other ways to display this hierarchy, however I elected to show it as a pyramid. For example, if one were to weight the graphic by the number of providers within each segment, the pyramid would be upside-down. The point here though is to show how these cloud segments build upon and are somewhat dependent upon each other. While they are directly related, they don’t require interdependence (e.g., a Cloud Application does not necessarily have to be built upon a Cloud Platform or Cloud Infrastructure). I would propose, however, that Cloud trends indicate that they will become more entwined over time.

Cloud Application

Within this part of the pyramid, users are truly restricted to only what the application is and can do. Some of the notable companies here are the public email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Quicken Online, etc.). Almost any Software as a Service (SaaS) provider can be lumped into this group. Most retail consumers use the services within this Cloud. You get pre-defined functionality and you cannot much further than that. Applications are designed for ease of use and GTD (getting things done). SalesForce, a huge Cloud Application/SaaS provider that has led the way for hosted software, falls into this category as well, however, their force.com product does not. Even online banking offerings could be lumped into this group.

Characteristics:

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Today, InfoWorld’s Tech Writer, Bill Snyder, brought GoGrid solidly into the race with Amazon’s EC2 with his article titled “Red Hat the latest proof that cloud computing is serious business.” Snyder, who has been following technology and the business of technology for 25 years, discusses GoGrid’s “point-and-click infrastructure” and its ease of use in this article.

While Bill mentions that cloud computing may not be ready for large-scale business or the enterprise, he does point out that it is a force to be reckoned with and that the services of GoGrid and Amazon’s EC now “will give a lot of users a chance to take cloud computing for a low-risk, real-world test drive.” I personally predict that the adoption of cloud computing and cloud infrastructure by the enterprise will be a slow uptake at first, most likely rolling out into skunkwork divisions, short-term projects or IT evaluation scenarios, but that within a few years, business not seriously considering “the cloud” will be behind in their technical and competitive advantages.

Snyder highlights a real-world GoGrid success (that I covered here) about how ScribbleLive was able to handle multiple million page view requests in a short amount of time during the Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference. He emphasized the importance of easy and quick scalability coupled with cost-effectiveness provided by GoGrid:

“ScribbleLive, a two-person operation, quickly scaled up using GoGrid, and was able to keep running with little or no loss of throughput. The price: $15 for a day of server time, plus bandwidth charges. Hmm. Maybe the folks at Mozilla, who tried to set a world’s record for downloads of the new Firefox browser but wound up crashing their site, could have done something similar.”

Simplicity is another key factor that Snyder outlines in his review, stating:

“In theory, at least, setting up servers on GoGrid seems almost too easy. Once a client signs up for the service, an IT staffer can point a browser to GoGrid’s site and choose a configuration from a variety of pull down menus. GoGrid supports Windows Server 2003, CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

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8.27.08 – Note: Facebook and MySpace-enabled servers are currently unavailable on GoGrid. However, we have added other server images since the writing of this article. The table below has been slightly modified to reflect some changes. For a comparison of GoGrid to Amazon’s EC2, please see this page.

With the Facebook QuickStart Servers available now on GoGrid, we have received questions as to how the GoGrid service compares with others in the cloud computing and Facebook space. While this is not the “end-all” comparison, it does provide a point of reference between GoGrid, Amazon EC2 and Joyent.

Chart updated on 8/27/08.

*Pricing based on GoGrid Advanced Cloud and Transfer 200 GB plans

With GoGrid there are other choices as well for RAM and Storage allotments (1GB RAM servers have 60 GB disks and 2 GB RAM servers have 125GB disks). Key differentiators are the FREE support and Load Balancing offered by GoGrid as well as support for both Windows and Linux servers (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and CentOS 4.4.) More OS images are added on a regular basis so check back regularly.

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This note was sent to us by a new GoGrid user (Hareem Haque) and frankly it scared us. But then we read on further in the note:

“Honestly speaking. Your GoGrid is all false advertising. It does a whole lot more then what is stated on the site. I ran a CentOS 4.4 server yesterday for a brief but crucial period. The unit itself gave me no headaches. I simply installed all my apps. And off we were testing the app with our clients. Everything worked fine and flawlessly. Thanks to the load balancer we did some load tests. And I could not find anything bad about GoGrid. I am going to start moving my EC2 instance applications over to GoGrid. “

Hareem, who works in Telecommunications in Canada, currently has 4 Amazon Machine Images (AMI’s) running on Amazon’s EC2 (all clones) running as a clustered FTP server and is now in the process of replicating this environment on GoGrid. He set up a CentOS 4.4 server on GoGrid and installed vsftpd on it and ran some tests of 10 – 20MB Flash Video Files (.flv) , moving then to 2 – 100MB Window Media Video (.wmv) files and finally 1 – 1GB MPEG-4 (.mp4) file. He got a throughput of 10mbps with GoGrid and only 7mbps with EC2. With these solid benchmarks, he’s moving forward with more GoGrid servers now.

He also said he was extremely happy that there was no charge for the load-balancing and that it “came in handy.”

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