a Sojourn in the Clouds

I have been learning IBM's Mashup Center, demoing to clients, and weaving it into my Web2.0 briefing as an emerging technology. I am able to do this in the Lotus Greenhouse as a free service from IBM. Recently IBM released version 2.0 of the product and after a product webinar I was ready to try the new/improved product. Alas, the greenhouse only had version 1 (that has just been remedied). Anxious to get going I fired notes off to people in IBM asking when I would get the new shiny version. I then stumbled on the fact that IBM had v2.0 available on Amazon's EC2 and if one was only using it for developer investigation (compared to a mashup for multiple users) then the product was FREE.

IBM provided a getting started video and pdf so off I went. I would listen to the video for a bit and then try to repeat the steps. There are a lot of things to do up in Amazon Web Services to get started and several freeware programs one needs to download in order to get things to work. I got stuck several times and finally resorted to reading the pdf line by line and carefully doing EXACTLY what was written. I never got my Ultra VNC to work but was able to use my Firefox browser to link directly to the Mashup Center Instance running on EC2.

For the configuration I had requested (Linux with 4GB storage) I was paying Amazon about $1.75 for each 24 hour period. I left it on for a few days while I developed and demoed for a client and was then able to terminate my instance.

If I did not have access to Lotus Greenhouse, and I was someone wanting to play around with a program like Mashup Center then using a infrastructure cloud is a good way to do it. And how do I like IBM's Mashup Center? Let me build up some more examples and then I will post a blog with my experiences.

It's Raining, It's Pouring

I attended a Webinar today where IBM discussed their Cloud Computing initiative including their "Cloudburst" offering. David Dworkin of the Tivoli business unit took the audience through

justifications for going to cloud which included a survey conducted last year of companies that had implemented a cloud application. The top three reasons for going to cloud for these companies was:

1. Innovation
2. Time to Profitability
3. Reduced costs

IBM is recommending that companies first move to internal clouds that reside safely inside the corporate firewall but consolidate various departmental applications. They claim such a move will have following benefits:

• Can reduce IT Labor costs by 50%
• Can improve capital utilization by 75%
• Reduce provisioning cycle times from weeks to minutes
• Can reduce end user IT support costs by 40%

In my opinion it seems Amazon EC2 is more SMB start-ups with quick roll out and low up front costs while IBM is aiming at Fortune 500 with large IT budgets under pressure.

During the webinar the host asked the audience (I did not see how many were attending) a couple of survey questions...

Which best describes your organization's level of adoption of Cloud Computing services? None, but not evaluating. 33.8% None, but currently evaluating one or more services. 27.4% Currently getting ready to trial a Cloud Computing service. 9.6% Limited trial adoption of one Cloud Computing service. 14.5% Currently running one or more crucial set of business tasks through the Cloud. 14.5%

David thought this was a little surprising compared with survey results IBM sponsored last year. He speculated that companies may be using clouds without being aware of it.

What are the biggest reasons your organization has yet to migrate any services off to the Cloud? Concerns over security 38.0% Need to "own" and manage the data center 19.0% Regulatory obstacles 12.0% Management does not see the potential for quick ROI 13.0% No skepticism, just looking for the right solution 42.0%

Of course remember that this population had already self selected to having enough of an interest in cloud to invest time in attending the webinar so these answers do not represent the general market.

Failure to Launch

When I attended the Cloud Camp last November I had run a session called "Failure to Launch" which was members of the audience talking about their early experiences with Cloud Computing. I was looking for some lessons learned and possibly some unique risk factors associated with Cloud Computing. What I heard was that projects in the cloud are influenced by factors common to most other emerging technology projects. The best example was given by Uri Budnik of RightScale. He had to keep the customer anonymous but did share the following:

Name of Project - Planned Major News Event for major news media 

Project Dates - Project began three weeks before hard news deadline

Technologies used - AWS EC2, RightScale, HAProxy, DNS round robin, Mongrel, My

What happend? - The system was unacceptably slow in early versions and could not be improved. Some of the content would not load. The customer introduced a last minute architectural change the morning of the event that required rollback in order to launch. 

Lessons Learned - Need more through testing.

I heard some similar profiles from other participants about classic software engineering problems...  scope creep, lack of testing, lack of communication with stakeholders, unrealistic schedule expectations.

In the Clouds

Last week I attended the Federal Cloud Camp in Chantilly VA. This event had over 150 people attending. It is an un-conference with people from the audience able to propose a topic for discussion. Over the five hour conference there were 5-6 five minute lightning presentations from the sponsors and then three time slots with four rooms being used = 12 presentations from the participants. Yours truly lead a session on "Failure to Launch - lessons learned from early experiences in Cloud Computing". I will post a seperate blog on that in a few days. In addition to running my session, I attended a session on Hadoop / map reduce and one on applications for the cloud.

I heard some discussion over exactly what Cloud Computing is, comparing and contrasting with SaaS, Utility computing, Grid computing, and Autonomic computing. I believe most agree that Cloud Computing has aspects of all these plus the characteristic of server transparency to the application and user.

The Hadoop session had some users who were experimenting with the technology. For example, one individual from DOD had taken 23 Playstation3 and was running map/reduce between the systems and also on each of the cell co-processors. 

During the Cloud applications session there was a lot of discussion about how to improve applications. One speaker thought having stateless applications improved portability wihile another thought that middleware could manage state transparently to the application.

My general observation is that Cloud Computing is still embryonic with a need for standards developed to allow application transparency accross Clouds provisioned by different vendors.