Cloud Computing Info

Cloud computing is an IT manager’s dream which allows firms to create new virtual server environments in minutes according to Mike Klein, president of Online Tech who describes his decision to go “all in” to cloud computing as one of the best moves his company has ever made. He pointed out that he’s now able to offer the same levels of service with only one tenth of the physical equipment that his organisation used previously. However, many other IT decision makers are more reluctant to jump aboard the cloud.

I’m a keyboard user. That’s why I like my blackberry. It fits my hand perfectly and the keyboard rocks. The Bold 9000 had the perfectly sized keyboard but my new torch runs a close second.

Of course, the torch supports a lot more application storage as well as Blackberry 6 OS. I loooove it.

Most of the keyboard short cuts from the bold era still work but there are new ones and, because of the touchscreen capability, some changes. To help me remember, I decided to throw together a cheat sheet.

The Blackberry Torch Keyboard Shortcut cheat sheet is hosted on Scribd. Check it out.

LewisC

Looking to spin up a computer in the cloud somewhere but don’t want to spend a bunch of money until you’ve played around for a while? Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud, AWS EC2, gives you a couple of options to start with. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about what EC2 is. I’ve done that plenty here.
First up, if you don’t already have an AWS account, now’s the time. Starting Nov 1, Amazon is offering a free year (with some limitations) of AWS. To get the free service, you must be a new user.

Rackspace has announced the availability of Windows Cloud Servers. They are offering Windows Server 2008 is 32 bit and 64 bit versions for 2008 SP2, 2008 R2 and 2008 R2 SP2. You can grab various CPU and memory combinations and the cost/hour is very competitive.

You’ll pay a bit more for Windows than you do for Linux but that’s pretty standard as MS charges licensing fees to the provider.  The cost per hour is actually cheaper on Rackspace than it is on Amazon EC2 but the box you get at Rackspace is not as beefy.

This morning I saw a post by Om Malik at GigaOm, OpenStack Wants to Be Android of The Cloud. Very interesting article and it’s the first I’ve heard of OpenStack.
I’m a huge AWS fan and I think it is still be best product for the public cloud. However, it doesn’t do much in the private arena.
I’ve been following Cloud OSes for a while but that is a completely different than cloud infrastructure. I’ve also been following Eucalyptus and a few minor projects.

Eucalyptus has a lot of promise, but I am liking the true open source commitment of OpenStack.

Ok, now they’ve gone and done it. Amazon just doesn’t know when to quit. Is there a web service they don’t want to own? I josh. I like Amazon and like to see them put new and useful services out there and I am a big proponent of competition. I think competition is good for everyone as long as it doesn’t become predatory.

Now, Amazon has been going after Paypal for a while now with Amazon Checkout. But now, they have made this a super simple, no login, purchase tool with PayPhrase – the easy-to-remember shortcut for paying on Amazon.com and other websites.

AWS Price Decrease

Upcoming Price Changes

Effective November 1, 2009, we will be lowering prices for all On-Demand instances. The tables below show the existing and future On-Demand prices.

How often does a vendor REDUCE their prices, and thereby lowering your bill, without some nasty contract renegotiation? In my experience, never. One more reason to really like Amazon’s web services.
Starting November 1, 2009, EC2 prices are dropping 15% across the board (for linux AMIs). For a small image, that means a drop from $0.10/hour to $0.085/hour, large is going from $0.4/hour to $0.34/hour and the extra large are going from $0.8/hour to $0.68/hour.

Yep, looks like Amazon finally clued in to the fact that SimpleDB is pretty much useless for any mission critical work. They’ve added a new web services, Relational Database Service, abbreviated RDS.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.
Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database.

Generate Your Keys

Now that you have chosen your instance, but before starting you actually start your instance, you need to generate your key pairs. The keypairs are SSH keypairs. A later post will explain SSH in greater detail but the keys come in a pair because there is both public and private components.

SSH is a Secure SHell. This is a command prompt like a DOS box or a telnet connection. However, unlike DOS and Telnet, it is very secure. The private key is the local machine’s secret password. The public key is shared to any host that the local machine will connect to.

Choose an AMI

Amazon, and Amazon clients, are providing a huge variation of machine images. The short story is that you can choose between MS-Windows, Linux and Sun Solaris for your OS. The real story is that it is a bit more complicated than that.

The real question is what applications do you plan to run and what expertise do you have on hand or plan to hire? A quick example is a database like MySQL. MySQL runs on various operating systems. If you have Windows expertise, you may want to stick with windows.

Amazon is offering an exceptionally cool new feature called “AWS Import/Export”. Basically, you ship amazon your USB or eSata device and amazon will plug it into their hardware and load it.

With terabyte datasets becoming the norm, and petabyte on the way, I knew Amazon would eventually address this in some way. They did it faster than I thought they would.

You’ll pay per device and per load hour in addition to normal S3 storage and calls. You won’t pay any transfer fees.

This will be huge for people who want to make large data sets available (internally or externally for pay) and for CDN users.

Choose Your Tool

When working with AWS, you have a choice of tools. You should try several tools and use the one that works best for your needs. Some tools are provided by Amazon and others are provided by third party developers. I cover seven tools in chapters that follow this one but that list is not a comprehensive list. It’s just the tools that I have used myself and that I know for a fact do work.

Some services are more programming tools that anything else. SQS is like that. It is a queuing service that you will plug into your applications.