Winter trip @ New York city

During next week i’ll be uploading my trip experiences right here. Stay tuned!

Marviq Cloud Computing Congress

Marviq is a specialised software development office that focusses on  enriching and connecting internal and external information systems. Marviq helps organizations with the implementation and administration of (web) technologie. This expertise enables them to offer an even beter service to their customers. This leads to more business and more profit.
Marviq is a Cloud Provider of Amazon and partner of Google Apps. During this event, speakers of Amazon, Google and Sun were allowed each 40 minutes of time to conveince the audience of there products.

First to speak was Niko Nelissen (Director Cloud Platform Strategie, Marketing Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems). I’ve seen his presentation before on Sun Cloud Event and CloudCamp, so i’m very familiar with the Sun Microsystems cloud strategie. Nothing new was said during his session. No comment was made about the take over of Oracle earlier this week. We’ll all just have to wait and see what will become of these companies in the future. I have no doubts that we’ll hear about them later.

The Amazon session was lead by Web Services Evangelist Simone Brunozzi. Same is above, nothing new for me. But just to fill this post a litle, i’ll give you the headlines of his session.
Amazon is known for his online bookstore. Amazon also offers other products like:
- S3 storage (Simple Storage Service)
- Cloudfront
- EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
- SQS (Simple Queu Service)

The Amazon Web Services pricinples are:
- Easy to use
- Security
- Flexible (easily scale up/down)
- Pay per use
- no commitment
- API
- platform neutral !!!!

S3 is the Storage infrastructure behind the Cloud that is offered as a seperate service toward customers. It is a storage service backend for developers that offers “a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs” based on multiple 1 tier bandwith providers.
Cloudfront is the Reliable Content Delivery System that enables you to easily acces the S3 infrastructure.
EC2… are basiclly “Servers on Demand”. You pay by the hour and have a choice between 6 different versions with a SLA of 99.95%. From S (0.10$/h) to XL (0.80$/h). Very important is the “High Availability”. Amazon has multiple Availability zones all over the world. So if the datacenter in Amerika goes down, the datacenter in Europe runs a backup and keeps your data available. A Reserverd instance for a year costs about 800$/year.
Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a Hosted Hadoop Framework.

Some use cases are:
- Smugmug
- Soocial.com
- GetMarvia.com
- Indy500 (web)
- Eli Lilly
- Animoto ( when they launched there facebook application, they went from 80 servers to 3500 servers in 3 days. EC2 had no problem with that!)
- Harvard (Oracle on EC2)

The future for AWS (Amazon Web Services) will bring:
- Load Balancing
- Auto Scaling
- AWS monitoring
- AWS certification

A question that followed was “How do you handle the licensing of a windows machine on EC2?”
The license of a windows machine on EC2 is handled by Amazon. You pay the EC2 price + license cost/hour.
For S3, you pay your S3 price + input and output ( $/GB + $/GB input or output)

More info can be found at http:aws.amazon.com

Final session was Google. Their session was nothing new. Sun and Amazon, told something new to people who are new to cloud computing. But Google just showed there Google apps like Gmail. I mean who doesn’t know Gmail?!  Here are some headlines.

According to Google, the problem today in businesses is the fact that the home technology is acceeding the business technology. Employees expect the same performance of their desktop pc  on their office pc. They want the same speed, bandwith, simplicity, etc… Google apps offers this within a safe environment. Cloud computing is like power in the early days… Every company used to have their own power plant… today there’s one central power plant for a certain geographical area. Cloud computing will do the same with our data.

Some facts:
- 15 hours of video are upload to youtube (in the cloud) each minute.
- 60% of internet users is 16-54 years old.
- google apps saves 50-70% costs.
- Gmail had the least downtime of all mail programs.
- Google assambles their own servers for internal use only.
- Google Apps Premier costs 40€/year.

User cases:
- Genentech on Google Apps
- District of Columbia Tests Google Apps

More info can be found at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/nl/business/applications.html

The american way of living

It’s only a few hours after setting foot on Belgian ground, when i’m starting this post. The past week was eye opening, diving into the american culture was a complete new experience  that i recommend to everyone.

A couple of students (80) left for San Francisco to get in touch with the american way of living. It was a journey that was organized by our University College of West-Flanders. During this visit we visited several companies in the Silicon Valley like… Adobe, Sun Microsystems, HP, APPLE, CISCO, EA Games,etc… Other days we visited Yosemite National Park, Stanford University and San Francisco itself. Yosemite was mind blowing. It was icy and dangerous, but beautifull and worth it. San Francisco was very specteculair. It combines culture, development and tourism.Our stay was situated in Downtown San Francisco on Mason Street, a part that is not for away from Union Square and Market Street, the shopping centre of San Francisco. You can tell that this part of the city clearly depends on tourism. Another part of San Francisco is China Town. This part of San Francisco brings forward the cultural difference that runs the streets.

Our visit to Adobe was more then satisfieing. After signing our NDA, we got a peak on adobe’s future and present. And i can tell you that it’s very promising..! Companies like HP and APPLE were rather boring… HP looked like an old company, smelled old, it just wasn’t nice. Apple was very new and big, but eventhough we were under nda, they couldn’t tell us anything. Every question we asked was thrown a side with the answer: “I’m sorry, but we are not at liberty to discuss that.”

CISCO, Sun Microsystems and EA Games were nice. CISCO gave us a tour in their Cable center. Sun Microsystems gave us some background info on their products and a few demos in their demo lab. EA Games gave us a tour around campus. Absolutely stunning… they have their own gym, hair dresser, massage, etc…  People working at EA Games can practically live there.

CloudCamp @ WHD Cologne 2009

What do we mean with the term “cloud” today? How is cloud computing going to influence the future datacenter? Who will use the cloud? and How will we convince end users to step into the cloud?

Yesterday we found out the answers to these questions. CloudCamp 2009 was proud to present speakers like Kristof De Spiegeleer (Sun Microsystems), Martin Buhr (Amazon), Max Robbins (aiCache), Matt Rechenburg (openQRM) and lots more… Cloud is a widely used term, but what is cloud computing?;  When do we speak of a cloud?  According to Martin Buhr (Amazon) ( “My dog has a cloud.”) suddenly everyone is saying they have a cloud. The innovative concept that started with Amazon’s EC2 cloud has countless competitors today. It was only 2 days ago that Sun Microsystems announced it’s future steps on the cloud market in the US (yesterday in Europe). Amazon has its product, but due to the competition, they will have to keep working to it.

The day started with a keynote by Kristof De Spiegeleer from Sun Microsystems bringing Sun’s strategy on cloud computing. Sun offers a solution that combines all resources, incl. storage virtualisation into a cloud, public and private. And… it’s all accessible with a simple drag and drop web interface.Although Sun thinks private clouds to be the future, they will be launching there own cloud somewhere this year. No specific date was mentioned! Sun will  use the product of company Q-Layer (Belgium) called VPDC (Virtual Private Data Center) to be at the basis of there cloud infrastructure and management. Through the web interface, end users can manage an entire cluster as one instead of every single virtual machine one by one. A question Kristof wanted us to think about was: ” Will the Cloud replace our destop apps?”  Personally, I think it will and Sun is pushing it in the right direction. Sun has built in a feature in OpenOffice.org that provides us with a direct link between the Desktop App and the Cloud. You just hit the button “Save to cloud” to save your file on to the cloud. Sun’s solution will be delivered very Open and free of charge.  Sun’s idea of a cloud is a datacenter that dellivers resources when you need them on a scalable basis. The cloud should provide scalability and resource provisioning on demand. During the questions round, questions like “What will you do with mysql databases?” ; “What about storage? How will you scale storage?” and “Will scalability work with web2.0?”

Q1: What will you do with mysql databases?     A1: Sun will make everything scalable… MySQL is one them.

Q2: Can storage be scaled?   A2: Yes, it can… it’s called zfs.

After the keynote it was time for a live panel presenting Tony lucas (FlexiScale), Robert Rosier (iTricity), Matt Rechenburg (OpenQRM), Jari Koister (GroupSwim) and Martin Buhr( Amazon).
Handled questions were:

Q1:  Why offer fixed resources when scalable provisioning exists?
A1: Martin Buhr answers: “cloud scales up and down with the end users needs, without buying hardware. Amazon sais: ” Just buy a bigger slice”“.
Q2: When will there be a standard in cloud?
A2: When cloud will be used by end users, a standard will come forward.

Q3: The cloud is making its way to the end users. Will end users use (read: trust) it?
A3: People said the same when online payments came. Look at the internet usage now… the webshops are everywhere and almost everyone uses online payment.

Next… Lightning Talks of FlexiScale, iTricity, aiCache, Abiquo, OpenQRM, GroupSwim, Jinspired and RightScale found place.

FlexiScale:
Is Cloud Computing a thread or an opportunity? That’s the question hosting providers ask themselves these days. Because more and more infrastructure companies are coming onto the cloud market, existing, smaller providers will find themselves in a suddenly much bigger market then the market their in now. It isn’t going to happen over night, but will over a few years. Sun announced their cloud yesterday. Microsoft will soon come forward with their cloud. In the future, FlexiScale chooses hybrid cloud computing. They see dedicated servers with backups over multiple providers as an optimal solution. Why is cloud computing a thread? Lots of providers or hosting companies are not sure about taking the big step into Cloud Computing. So… system administrators are good at technology now, but that knowledge is a lot different then the knowledge they need for a cloud infrastructure. Result: Hosting providers do not have the knowlidge. This means that NOW is the time to step into cloud computing and update your sysadmins knowledge because it will break through. Don’t wait… big companies like Amazon are allready working on the 2nd generation of cloud technology. Keep up now or be left behind!

iTricity
iTricity preferres a combination of public, private and hybrid clouds. Their business is managing a huge amount of servers, to standardize the provisioning of servers. They deliver IAAS ( Infrastructure As A Service) to ISP or hosting providers. The model they handle states security, continueity and scalability. They provide costumized solutions at a fixed fee on a montly basis. iTricity offers 2 kinds of products:
- Datacenter Node: connect to the datacenter through the network or by VPN to access your services.
- Satelite Node: mini cloud on the premises.

aiCache
aiCache develops caching software for webservers in the cloud. The caching software is written for a 64-bit linux and makes it easy to role out your own CDN (Content Delivery Network). By reducing the effort company’s put in optimizing their corporate website and making it possible to cache dynamic content, company’s no longer need to worry about traffic peakes and slow response times while making more proffit. As an example you can use the CNN website… let’s say a plane just crashed. Traffic can increase from 500 users to 5000 users in just 5 seconds. That’s a big traffic peak! aiCache offers the solution…

Abiquo
Abiquo is a spin off that was born in 2002 as a University Research Group at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Abiquo offers a open source platform that makes it possible for everyone to have their own (private) cloud. Their business is focused on hosting providers because the have the infrastructure and the resources. Their future vision is a federation of clouds where content can be moved between these clouds. There product called AbiCloud gets deliverd in 3 versions: datacenter version, enterprise version and community version. For more information and a free download go to http://www.abiquo.com.

OpenQRM
What is Cloud computing? Is it SAAS (Software As A Service) vs. Automated Provisioning? According to OpenQRM it’s a symbiosis. OpenQRM offers an open source platform with a Cloud add-on. Why open source? Because most clouds exist on open source components, so let’s not re-invent the wheel.
The challenge lies with integration… We offer our platform as a “Server Appliance” by threating servers like files.Their platform threats hypervisors as resource providers bringing with it continous automation (like automated monitoring, network management, storage management and resource planning), single point of updates/backups, “N to 1″ fail-over (one system fails => sytem is automaticly re-deployed).

GroupSwim
According to Jari Koister you should just go to the site and the product will sell itself (http://groupswim.com/products). They offer several business collaboration software products to help your organization operate more effectively. Each one automatically organizes and finds the important information your employees and customers create every day. This benefit is not only cool, it saves time and money making your employees and business more effective.

Jinspired
Jinspired commes forward with a java tool set called JXInsight. JXInsight is a comprehensive enterprise Java performance monitoring, problem diagnostic, transaction analysis and application management solution available in the marketplace today. The transaction oriented monitoring solution, JXInsight, offers application insight into business transactions consisting of multiple resource transactional units of work across distributed systems recording resource consumption and response for transaction patterns and contextual paths. Jinspired links performance management with cost efficiency to create cost groups for billing in case of hosting providers. They track costs per user for used resources. In other words, they relate costs to demanded services. An detailed example of Activity-based costing can be found at http://williamlouth.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/abc-for-cloud-computing/

RightScale
When RightScale did a couple of survey’s with questions like: “What’s driving people to the cloud?” and “What’s driving your interest to cloud management?”, the same answer showed up. They expect the Cloud to provide them scalability (scale elasticly to load) and agility (get resources when you need them). When talking about cloud management, customers want a solution that provides them increased automation, complexity managment en fast onramp. RightScale offers that solution as a management platform.

After all the lightning talks, there was an unconference with  Max Robbins involving the selling of cloud technology.

MaxRobbins started his unconference with a couple of questions that he wanted to ask to the audience. During the cloudcamp day, he noticed that only selling companies where present at cloudcamp. When he asked the room if there where end costumers in the room that were interested in the cloud, he had no one raising there hand. Max concluded that only 1% of the entire world was getting into the Cloud. Why? Why isn’t the medical community going into the cloud? Answer like insufficient security, confidence problems and complexity come up. Well let’s have a look… Insufficient security? Credit cards are used widly on the internet, we have encryption engines, secure lines, etc… I don’t think that cloud computing is done less secure then business is being done right now. Confidence problem? I think so… Again, credit card usage on the internet took a long time to boom. Today, every webshop uses online payment with credit cards or other alternatives… it was a process that evolved over the years. I think cloud computing is going the same way.

What companies are in the cloud? Tell me?
- Media: Martin Buhr told us that channel 4 (UK) had to cut there it staff with 30%, so they needed an alternative for there services. As they tested the cloud, they saw that it performed extremely well and they started using the cloud for all different kinds of services.

- Biopharma: they need lots of processing power just for a few calculations, so why would they buy all the hardware instead of using the resources they need when they need it from inside the cloud.

The final presentation was by Martin Buhr from Amazon. Amazon has been delivering cloud services for over 4 years with their product called EC2 ( Elastic Cloud Computing). During these 4 years, amazon learned 1 thing in perticular. Costumers don’t care about the infrastructure you use, or the type of storage… They care about the service they get. So instead of putting all those efforts into your infrastructure, you should put those efforts into your costumers experience.
Before cloud computing was invented, 70% of the effort was put into infrastructure and 30% of the effort into costumer service. Now… with cloudcomputing, they can switch those numbers. Today they spent 30% of all efforts on IT infrastructure and 70% on costumer experience and that’s a big progress!
Another advantage to cloud computing that isn’t that obvious are it projects. Most of the IT projects don’t get to see the daylight because of hardware restrictions or others. With cloud computing these problems are minimized if not gone. You just give a developer his own private cloud environment to test. This way you don’t need to reserver an entire server to one project.

Last but not least is Amazon’s vision on why people would enter the cloud:
- cost savings
- operational flexibility (up/downscaling of infrastructure)
- operational focus