Cloud Vendor Selection

Picking the best cloud vendor is like looking for unicorns. It’s not gonna happen. I have yet to find a vendor that has everything I need. That’s why I have apps deployed at Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid.

Amazon AWS

Amazon was the first cloud vendor I went with, so I’m most comfortable with their infrastructure, api’s and products. I don’t like Amazons slow file-system performance, it can be a killer for certain applications. I also feel like Amazon is trying to eBay me to death with all sorts of transactional fees. Don’t be fooled by their low instance/hr costs. Trust me, they make it up on the back-end.

Rackspace

Rackspace, known for their oft-repeated “fanatical support”, is the newest cloud vendor I plan on deploying applications with. I’ve been looking at Rackspace (aka Mosso back in the day) for a while now, but their costs and server-management features kept me from becoming a customer. Not so anymore.

The support that you get from Rackspace is definitely fanatical and sometimes borderline maniacal. Rackspace really goes out of their way to get the job done. Amazon’s support is not even in the same league as Rackspace.

The cloud servers from Rackspace are probably the fastest out there. I’ve ran my own benchmarks against my applications and Rackspace has always come out on top. The Cloud Servers management console is simple, yet gets the job done. The iPhone app is great also. In fact it’s too good. My two-year old son was able to open my iPhone and spin up an instance a few months back.

So what don’t I like about Rackspace? DFW in a nutshell. When their Dallas data-center goes down, Web 2.0 goes dark. To be fair, some of the outages at the DFW facility was not the direct fault of Rackspace. You really can’t mitigate trucks knocking out power transformers. But it seems like the DFW facility was brought online under some Faustian deal.

It also would have been nice to have some sort of load-balancing solution instead of rolling my own.

GoGrid

And last but not least is GoGrid. The one early win I had with GoGrid was their support for Windows servers at a reasonable price. Their support is great, but not maniacal. GoGrid also seems to keep pumping out new products and feature enhancements at a pretty good rate. They tend to keep themselves competitive with all other cloud vendors.

GoGrid’s pricing is also competitive. I love that they don’t charge for inbound traffic. GoGrid introduced their own CDN last year. I have not personally tried it, but it’s nice knowing that it’s there and I don’t have to offload my CDN hosting to another vendor.

Free load balancer is also a very nice win.

I’m still waiting for Ubuntu support from GoGrid. CentOS is nice, but I roll with Ubuntu nowadays. Is it that hard to support? The GoGrid management interface is nice and gets the  job done for the most part. It can be a bit buggy at times. But a quick refresh usually fixes the issue.

Free load balancer is great. Re-creating your load balancer when you have to add another server to the pool – not so great.

While I’ve been with GoGrid, I have not seen that many datacenter outages. But GoGrid or certain GoGrid customers seem to be magnets for DDoS attacks.

Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategy

If you don’t have a backup and disaster recovery plan you might as well be playing with depleted uranium. Having a backup and disaster recovery plan is critical to any type of solution if it’s running in the cloud or on dedicated hardware.

Besides coming up with a plan, make sure you test your plan. “Theoretical” is  a four-letter word when it comes to backup and disaster recovery.

NoSql does not mean NoHeadaches

I’m a big fan of NoSql databases. So much so, I started GoNoSql.com to talk about the latest in NoSql databases. But that does not mean I’m going to use MongoDB or Riak on every project I work on. Pick the right tool for the job.

But If you do decide to take the red pill and go down that NoSql rabbit hole, you better understand the quirks of your tool. Your HBase / Hadoop cluster may be bad-ass, but how are you going to back it up? As a side note, Cosmin Lehene has written a great two-part article (Part One, Part Two) on his experiences with HBase/Hadoop at Adobe.

Irrational Exuberance

Does your application or service really need to be in the cloud?

I’ve spoken with a few startups who have insisted from Day 1 that their application or service needs to be running in the cloud. So I ask them, why and how did they come to that determination. Most say we need to be in the cloud to be successful from Day 1 or we won’t be taken seriously if we are running on a $59/mo. VPS plan. Fail on so many levels.

Most applications don’t need the flexibility or scale that comes with cloud computing. That lowly $59 VPS will work for quite a while. But don’t forgot about backups! In fact most of my applications are running on VPS servers. I’m slowly moving things over to Linode (referral link). I’m really impressed with what Linode has to offer. Everything just works.

Don’t fall into the premature optimization trap or feel you have to deploy into the cloud because everyone else is doing it. Get lean and do a bit of customer development to find out who your customers are and what pain points you are trying to solve. I’m sure you will find out that you are probably not going to get a million uniques during your first month in business.

Automation and Repeatable Processes

Manual-intervention is the process killer. Manual-intervention is the little-death that brings obliteration. I will face my automation fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see it’s path. Where the automation fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only  I will remain.

While I may not have the parts for the Bene Gesserit order, take the advice and try to automate as much as you can. Automation saves time and grants predictability. Once a process has been automated, make sure it is repeatable.

Monitoring and Management

While it’s easy to sign-up with a cloud vendor and spin up a few servers. It’s not so easy to manage your new creation. If your lucky enough to have a technical founder or someone on your staff who understands the care and feeding of servers, your one step to winning the battle. If not, abandon hope all ye who enter here.

I’ve been working with Linux, Windows, AS/400′s, blah, blah, blah for years and I still learn new things everyday. Googling the Intertubes won’t make you a server management expert overnight either. Select a company that offers maniacal support (hint, hint) or hire somebody to keep your bloody infrastructure up and running.

I even have a virtual assistant who babysits my servers. Mind you theres not much to do since a lot of processes are automated. But when something does go wrong, I can sleep well at night. No more getting woken up at 2am when my cron scripts detects du %use is at 99%. Oh snap!

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1. Dell Cloud Computing

Dell – seriously!? What makes this line of hardware any different from the servers your selling by the thousands to all the cloud vendors out there now? From their press release they state:

• New integrated cloud infrastructure solutions comprised of pre-tested, pre-assembled and fully-supported hardware, software and services enabling public and private cloud builders to easily and quickly deploy and manage cloud infrastructures with confidence
• New Dell Cloud Partner Program works with leading independent software vendors (ISVs) to offer customers easy-to-buy and deploy cloud solutions and blueprints optimized for Dell platforms
• New Dell PowerEdge C-series servers with hyperscale-inspired design for high-density compute performance with efficient energy consumption and low operational costs
• New Dell Cloud Services including consulting, deployment and support help customers plan, manage and reduce complexity when adopting cloud computing models

Nothing is new except that Dell can now charge cloud vendors more money for Dell’s new Cloud Edge hardware and even more money if you engage Dell’s consulting services.

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Today Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, released Ubuntu 9.04.

What makes this release stand out from previous Ubuntu releases is the new Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud services.

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud services is the first commercially-supported Linux distribution that enables businesses to build private cloud environments inside their firewalls. Companies will now be able to create their own private clouds pretty easily.

The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is powered by open source system known as Eucalyptus.  The Eucalyptus API matches Amazons EC2 API. If you really are dying to create your own private cloud, check out the Ubuntu Eucalyptus Getting Started documentation.

Besides supporting creating private clouds, Ubuntu 9.04 will also be fully available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Thanks to the work of Alestic and others, creating an Ubuntu EC2 instance was quite simple. With Ubuntu 9.04, Canonical is taking more of a leading role in helping customers deploy Ubuntu EC2 instances.

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1. Dell Cloud Computing

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.

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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.

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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.

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It remains to see how much traction Sun will gain in the growing cloud computing services market. I’m very satisfied with Amazon’s service. Joyent and GoGrid are also great vendors.

Consultants, small businesses and startups have been quick to latch onto cloud computing. For them, it’s a big win. No data center to maintain, an on-demand scale-out infrastructure and pay for the resources that you actually use.

There are downsides to putting your data in the cloud. At the top of the list is security. Followed closely by data persistence, resource availability, backup and recovery.

A new issue that has cropped up lately is regulatory compliance. All cloud vendors are pretty mum about giving away details of their cloud infrastruce. So it makes it very difficult for large corporate enterprises to assert that what they put out in the cloud is secure and in compliance.

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