Erik Howard

• Should Google Buy Twitter?
  Posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 in twitter – Comments: (0)
  The Motley Fool has a new article on why Google should buy Twitter.They assert that Google would be the most suitable match for Twitter. They could afford to buy the non-revenue generating Twitter in this bad economic environment.They would have no problems hosting Twitter. Google has the horsepower and bandwidth to prevent Tweet Overload. The culture and vision of both companies would not clash as much as a Microsoft Twitter tie-up.
• Getting Started with Amazon EC2
  Posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 in cloud computing – Comments: (0)
  Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a commercial web service offering that allows you to rent your own server in which to deploy your applications. The infrastructure is highly scalable and allows you to increase or decrease your computing horsepower based on demand. Think of it as your own elastic data center where you only pay for the resources that you use.
• Enterprise Adoption of Cloud Computing
  Posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 in cloud computing – Comments: (0)
  While startups, consultants and individuals are rushing to put their applications in the cloud large enterprises are, for the most part, are still sitting on the fence.What is preventing adoption of cloud computing for enterprises. It basically comes down to a few issues – security, accountability and standards.Most cloud vendors, but not all, are mum (publicly at least) on the exact details of their cloud infrastructure.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a commercial web service offering that allows you to rent your own server in which to deploy your applications. The infrastructure is highly scalable and allows you to increase or decrease your computing horsepower based on demand. Think of it as your own elastic data center where you only pay for the resources that you use.

EC2 uses Xen virtualization for its instances (servers). EC2 instances come in 3 sizes Small, Large, and Extra large. Amazon sizes instances on what’s called “EC2 Compute Units”. One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.

EC2 Standard Instances
Most applications are well suited for these types of instances:

• Small Instance: 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform
• Large Instance: 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
• Extra Large Instance: 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

EC2 High-CPU Instances
This family of instances has proportionally more CPU resources than memory and is better suited for computational-intensive applications.

• High-CPU Medium Instance: 1.7 GB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 350 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform
• High-CPU Extra Large Instance: 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

For most blogs, company websites and low-traffic ecommerce sites, a Small Instance will be fine. You can always migrate up to a larger instance.

Getting Started
For this article we are going to launch a 32-bit Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy AMI (Amazon Machine Instance) from Alestic. Amazon provides a few AMI’s designed to get you up and running quickly. They also have over 1,700 Community AMI’s. You can select from Fedora, Ubuntu, Windows, CentOS and other flavors of Linux.

Before you can create your first instance, you will have to Sign Up for Amazon EC2.

Amazon EC2 Signup

After signing up, visit the AWS Management Console page. Click on the Go to Amazon EC2 Console button.

Launch EC2 Management Console

Before you create and launch your EC2 instance. You should first create a Key Pair. You will use this key pair to login to your instance after it’s been created.
To create your Key Pair, click Key Pairs in the left Navigation menu. Next, click the Create Key Pair button in the Key Pairs window. Enter a descriptive name for your new Key Pair in the Create Key Pair dialog window.

Create Amazon EC2 Key Pair

Next you will be prompted to download your newly created Key Pair. Download your newly created Key Pair; you will need this to login to your new instance later.

Save EC2 Key Pair

NOTE: AMAZON DOES NOT STORE YOUR PRIVATE KEY PAIR. IF YOU DO NOT DOWNLOAD YOUR KEY FILE AT THIS POINT YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO LOGIN TO ANY INSTANCES THAT WERE CREATED USING THIS PRIVATE KEY PAIR.

Now let’s go ahead and find our Amazon Ubuntu AMI and fire it up. Click the Dashboard link in the left hand navigation menu and then click the Launch Instances button.

Launch Amazon EC2 Instance

Select the Community AMI’s tab. Enter ami-71fd1a18 in the search field. This is the AMI id of the Alestic 32-bit Ubuntu Hardy server. Click the Select button to continue.

Alestic Ubuntu Hardy AMI

Now we are going to set some options for our Ubuntu AMI. First type in the number of instances you want to create, we are only going to create 1 for this article.
Next, select the Small instance type. In the Key Pair Name drop-down, select the new Key Pair we just created. In the Security Groups listbox, select default. We will skip the Advanced Options for now.

Amazon EC2 AMI Options

Click Launch to start you new Ubuntu Amazon instance!

Amazon will now attempt to start you instance. This may take anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. To check on the status of your instance click the Instance link in the Navigation window.

Amazon EC2 Instance Status

You can connect to your instance with any SSH client. Find the Key Pair file you created previously for this instance. Make note of the Public DNS address of your new instance. For example, to connect to my test instance I just created, I would use the following SSH command:

ssh -i Web1.pem root@ec2-67-202-37-5.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Web1.pem is the private Key Pair that I created for this instance. If you did not save your Key Pair, then you will have to destroy this instance and create a new Key Pair and start a new instance with the new Key Pair.

Once you have finished playing around with your instance, make sure you terminate the instance so you won’t be charged for the idle instance.
In future articles, I will show you how to setup Elastic IP’s, Elastic Block Storage, run shell scripts to setup your new instance and creating an instance using only Amazon’s EC2 API.

The Motley Fool has a new article on why Google should buy Twitter.

They assert that Google would be the most suitable match for Twitter. They could afford to buy the non-revenue generating Twitter in this bad economic environment.

They would have no problems hosting Twitter. Google has the horsepower and bandwidth to prevent Tweet Overload. The culture and vision of both companies would not clash as much as a Microsoft Twitter tie-up. Imagine also the new market Twitter’s content would open up for Google’s ad-machine.

Would Google want to spend $1 Billion plus for Twitter? They already index public Twitter content. What other benefits could be had from a Twitter acquisition?

While startups, consultants and individuals are rushing to put their applications in the cloud large enterprises are, for the most part, are still sitting on the fence.

What is preventing adoption of cloud computing for enterprises. It basically comes down to a few issues – security, accountability and standards.

Most cloud vendors, but not all, are mum (publicly at least) on the exact details of their cloud infrastructure. Large enterprises want assurances that their applications and their data will be secure in the cloud.

If I had to pick one cloud vendor who I trusted the most in the security arena, I would go with Joyent. They are going to be a little more expensive than your commodity cloud vendors, but you are getting rock-solid service, security and support for your money.

As a potential corporate consumer of cloud services, I would want to know how my usage is being tracked and billed. “Just trust us” is not a good answer.

Right now there are no standards when it comes to deploying applications into the cloud. Applications deployed on Google App Engine need to be modified for App Engine’s environment. Same is true for Microsoft’s Azure platform.

There are no standard API’s for managing instances and services in the cloud. If you decide to move your application from one cloud vendor to another. You will probably have to re-write any custom applications you developed to manage your cloud presence.

Cloud computing can and will play a big part in enterprise architectures. Cloud vendors need to figure out how to address the concerns that potential enterprise customers may have.

Should you host your next application in the cloud or should you continue to host your application on dedicated servers?

If you were itching to put your next application in the cloud, you may want to hold off on that move. In some cases it makes sense to start your application in the cloud, but in most cases it doesn’t. In the past, reliability was a big concern with hosting in the cloud. Your instance could disappear at any time without notice. There were no up-time guarantees or solid SLA’s. Most of these concerns are melting away as the cloud computing industry starts to mature.

If looking strictly at price points, cloud computing may seem just a little more cost effective than renting a dedicated server. But it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. For cloud servers, you are paying for the resources that your virtualized instance uses. With a dedicated server, you pay the same amount regardless how much that server is used.

Don’t fall for the cloud computing marketing hype of “pay for only what you use”. Who in their right mind is only going to let their servers run from 9am to 9pm to save costs? What they really mean is if your application needs to scale, create a few more virtualized instances to handle the load. When the load subsides, you can destroy those instances since you no longer need those resources. If you had experienced high loads with a dedicated server, you would have to quickly have your vendor provision new hardware. That process could take anywhere from 2-24 hours. That doesn’t include the time you would spend getting the server ready for production.

Most virtualized cloud instances are un-managed, meaning it’s your responsibility fore the care and feeding of your instance. Dedicated servers come in managed and un-managed flavors. A managed dedicated server is usually more expensive than an un-managed server. So if your computer administration skills are on the week side, you’d probably want to go with a managed dedicated server. There are a few companies, such as Enki, offer managed cloud computing services.

There are also other companies (Rackspace, GoGrid) that offer a hybrid strategy of dedicated servers combined with a cloud to handle spikes in traffic or temporary large computing projects.

I’ve managed dedicated servers now for many years with many different vendors. Each experience has been different from the next. From 99% reliability to outright fraud. My experiences with cloud computing have been favorable. But don’t expect much hand holding.

As far as cost, again – it depends on the type of application you want to host. If you just want to host a blog, you will probably be better off with getting a virtual private server (VPS) than a dedicated server or putting your application in the cloud.

If you find yourself transcoding thousands of videos, running a social network, need your content distributed globally, hosting a Facebook application, or have some other unpredictable high-volume application, then the cloud is the place for you.

If you know what your bandwidth requirements will be month-to-month and you can plan your growth, then it will probably be more cost effective to stick with dedicated servers.

Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has officially been released.  The ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework is an addition to ASP.NET . I’ve created an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Resources page to help ASP.NET developers download and learn more about the new ASP.NET MVC framework. If you would like to add something to the list or have any changes, just leave a comment or send me a Tweet.

Just finished downloading IE8. The install downloaded with no problems and delays. Nice job. I was expecting to have to wait till later this evening to try and download IE. The installation went fine on my Sony Vaio laptop running Vista Ultimate. Your mileage may vary.

After a reboot (when is this going to be fixed?), I fired up IE8 to see what our Microsoft Overlords have doled out to us. IE 8 will ask you if you want to go with some a default configuration or customize your settings.  Some people will get a little confused by certain terms – Accelerators comes to mind. What exactly am I accelerating anyway? Thankfully there are not a lot of setup screens and the process took less than 20 seconds.

The basic interface has not changed that much. Few new buttons here and there.  One thing you will notice immediately is the speed of the browser. This is prehaps Microsoft’s fastest web browser to date. It does not feel slugish. Browsing from page to page was very snappy and responsive. The rendering of pages is very clean and crisp. I didn’t notice any layout problems with any page that I browsed. Microsoft does provide a Compatibility view for web pages that are not so XHMTL compliant.

One thing that I’m really excited about is the new Javascript debugger located off the tools menu. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting for decent Javascript debugging in IE. The debugger is a cross between Firebug and the Developer toolbar plugin for FireFox.

With the IE 8 developer tools your able to do:

• Browse DOM objects
• Set breakpoints and step thru your code
• Profile you code
• Validate CSS, HTML, Feeds
• Manage Cookies
• Includes a ruler, color picker
• Outline div’s
• and much, much more

I was skeptical about this relase of IE. It seems pretty solid out of the gate. I won’t switch over from FireFox to IE 8 quite yet as my main browser. Security is the big unknown right now. Not just with IE 8, but with any web brower on the market right now. Regardless, good job Microsoft.