Amazon’s Invasion of the CIA Is a Seismic Shift in Cloud Computing

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/06/amazon-cia/

Cloud Computing is OSSM

"Cloud Computing is OSSM”-A definition of Cloud Computing for the rest o fus

Banff Summit 2011 Cloud Camp: OSSM Lightening Talk -- Dave Nielsen, Cloud Camp

View more presentations from Cybera Inc.

Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software - Wired.com

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/meet-bill-gates

Then Bill Gates stood up.
He walked to the whiteboard and drew a diagram of how the system could work, from copyrights to code contribution to patents, and he said — in no uncertain terms — that the company had to make the move.
For Ramji — who would spend more than three and a half years as the company’s chief open source strategist — the moment Bill Gates stood up was the moment Microsoft turned the corner on its approach to free software. “He was given little to no credit by the open source community — or anyone in the tech industry — for really understanding open source and why it can be important, how it can be a competitive advantage, and why when your competitors start to use it, you have to too. He really got it, and in that moment, he taught us all.”

Facebook has been developed using open source.

It's interested to see what Cloud tools they are using.

http://developers.facebook.com/opensource/

Introduction
Facebook has been developed from the ground up using open source software. Developers building with Platform scale their own applications using many of the same infrastructure technologies that power Facebook.
Want to learn more? Check out Engineering at Facebook.

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Platform

Our Platform engineering team has released and maintains open source SDKs for Android, C#, iPhone, JavaScript, PHP, and Python.

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Developer tools

codemod assists with large-scale codebase refactors that can be partially automated but still require human oversight and occasional intervention.
Facebook Animation is a JavaScript library for creating customizable animations using DOM and CSS manipulation.
Online Schema Change for MySQL lets you alter large database tables without taking your cluster offline.
Phabricator is a collection of web applications which make it easier to write, review, and share source code. It is currently available as an early release and is used by hundreds of Facebook engineers every day.
PHPEmbed makes embedding PHP truly simple for all of our developers (and indeed the world) we developed this PHPEmbed library which is just a more accessible and simplified API built on top of the PHP SAPI.
phpsh provides an interactive shell for PHP that features readline history, tab completion, and quick access to documentation. It is ironically written mostly in Python.
Three20 is an Objective-C library for iPhone developers which provides many UI elements and data helpers behind our iPhone application.
XHP is a PHP extension which augments the syntax of the language such that XML document fragments become valid expressions.
XHProf is a function-level hierarchical profiler for PHP with a simple HTML-based navigational interface.

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Infrastructure

Apache Cassandra is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size across many commodity servers, with no single point of failure.
Apache Hive is data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop that provides tools to enable easy data summarization, adhoc querying and analysis of large datasets.
FlashCache is a general purpose writeback block cache for Linux. It was developed as a loadable Linux kernel module, using the Device Mapper and sits below the filesystem.
HipHop for PHP transforms PHP source code into highly optimized C++. HipHop offers large performance gains and was developed over the past two years.
Open Compute Project an open hardware project aims to accelerate data center and server innovation while increasing computing efficiency through collaboration on relevant best practices and technical specifications.
Scribe is a scalable service for aggregating log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers.
Thrift provides a framework for scalable cross-language services development in C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby.
Tornado is a relatively simple, non-blocking web server framework written in Python. It is designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services.

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Our engineers contribute to

Apache Hadoop provides reliable, scalable, distributed computing infrastructure which we use for data analysis.
Apache HBase is a distributed, versioned, column-oriented data store built on top of the Hadoop Distributed Filesystem.
Cfengine is a rule-based configuration system that is used to automate the config and maintenance of servers. Facebook uses Cfengine to maintain host configs and to automate many janitorial operations on our production tiers.
jemalloc is a memory allocator which is fast, consistant, and supports heap profiling. Facebook engineers added heap profiling and made many optimizations. Learn more.
memcached is a distributed memory object caching system. Memcached was not originally developed at Facebook, but we have become the largest user of the technology.
MySQL is the backbone of our database infrastructure. You can find our patches on Launchpad and learn more about how we use it on the MySQL@Facebook page.
PHP is an incredibly popular scripting language which makes up the majority of our code-base. Its simple syntax lets us move fast and iterate on products.
Varnish serves billions of requests every day to Facebook users around the world. Whenever you load photos and profile pictures of your friends, there's a very good chance that Varnish is involved.

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Mirror

We host a public mirror for projects such as Apache, Centos, CPAN, Fedora, GNU, Mozilla, MySQL, and much more...

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Licensing

Our Documentation and Code Licensing page has more information about open source licensing for the projects we contribute to and release.

Ruby Clouds: Engine Yard Vs. Heroku

Ruby Clouds: Engine Yard Vs. Heroku

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday December 01, @08:08AM 
from the silverest-lining dept.

snydeq writes"InfoWorld's Andrew Glover provides an in-depth comparison of Engine Yard and Heroku, two cloud-based, platform-as-a-service offerings for Ruby development. 'To put it simply, Heroku will appeal more to developers and Engine Yard will appeal to operations folks. Consequently, when evaluating the two platforms, one's choice usually comes down to what's more important: Heroku's rapid deployment via a hands-off infrastructure, or Engine Yard's total control over all aspects of application deployment, provisioning, and monitoring.'"

Amazon’s Silk Is More Than Just A Browser: It’s A Cloud OS for the Client

From: http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2011/09/amazon-silk

The Internet is on, er, Fire with chatter about Amazon’s new tablet, the Kindle Fire. It should be, because the birth of a credible iPad competitor is huge. In the long term, the most important part of Amazon’s announcement this morning isn’t the fairly vanilla tablet hardware or even the tablet’s spit-shined version of Android. What will really make waves is Amazon’s new web browser, Silk.

Silk is the first truly new, mass-market, client software delivery mechanism to be built from the ground up with the cloud—not just the web, but the cloud—in mind. But before we look at what Silk is, it’s helpful to take a quick glance at one thing it’s not.

The main thing that Silk is not, is Google Chrome. Chrome is essentially an OS in browser drag, and in this respect it’s very much a “fat” take on “thin client.” Google’s browser treats tabs the way that an OS treats running applications, and it walls them off from each other in separate processes so that problems with one tab don’t affect the rest of the browsing experience. You could sum up Google’s overall design approach to Chrome with something like, “the web is now an application delivery mechanism, and the browser is the OS that those apps run in.”

The fact that Chrome comes with such an extreme amount of OS-like baggage is what keeps it off of handheld devices. Devicemakers are much better off with a more traditional, lightweight browser like Android’s. At least, they were until today.

Like Chrome, Silk is a “browser,” and also like Chrome, it’s a lot more under the hood. Or, rather, it can be a lot more under the hood, depending on how you choose to use it.

Read the rest at the link above. 

CloudStack Goes Open Source

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/08/29/1653214/CloudStack-Goes-Open-Source

"CloudStack has dropped the open core model and gone completely open source. The latest merge of formerly-proprietary features include VMware and OracleVM support as well as support for dynamically managing hardware network and storage devices. CloudStack is the same software used by Edmunds.com, Zynga, Godaddy, and 60 other of the largest clouds."

KVM: Kernel Based Virtual Machine

 Everytime I hear this I think,  KVM switch (with KVM being an abbreviation for keyboard, video & mouse)


KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). It consists of a loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko. KVM also requires a modified QEMU although work is underway to get the required changes upstream.
Using KVM, one can run multiple virtual machines running unmodified Linux or Windows images. Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc.
The kernel component of KVM is included in mainline Linux, as of 2.6.20.

KVM is open source software.

Main site:  Kernel Based Virtual Machine 

Joyent, Cloud Software for Service Providers

http://www.joyentcloud.com/technology/

http://www.joyent.com/documents/Joyent-Cloud-Based-Application-Architectures-Using-Smart-Computing-White-Paper.pdf

http://www.joyentcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Joyent-Smart-Architecture-for-Cloud-Computing.pdf


http://www.joyent.com/documents/Joyent-SmartMachine-and-VirtualMachine-Data-Sheet.pdf


Joyent SmartOS uses Solaris under the hood,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyent

Joyent is a cloud computing software and services company based in San Francisco, California, since 2004. Joyent provides application virtualization.
JoyentCloud, Joyent’s hosting business unit, offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) for large enterprises including LinkedIn, Gilt Groupe, and Kabam. In March 2009, Joyent extended its business by licensing its Smart software to Dell.^[1] Joyent is a supporter of open source projects including Node.js and Illumos. Employees of Joyent are referred to as “Joyeurs”.

ActiveState Acquires Perl Cloud Company, Phenona, to Accelerate Cloud Strategy

ActiveState Acquires Perl Cloud Company, Phenona, to Accelerate Cloud Strategy

Vancouver, BC – June 14, 2011 – ActiveState, the dynamic language experts offering solutions for Perl, Python, Tcl and other web languages, is announcing today that it has acquired Phenona, a Perl Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud company based in Seattle, WA. This announcement follows on the heels of ActiveState’s Stackato cloud platform announcement last month, an enterprise cloud offering based on VMware’s Cloud Foundry. Phenona’s 15-year-old founder, Daniil Kulchenko, will join the ActiveState team part-time since he is still a student in high school.

Read more

BayLISA had a some great talks last week

BayLISA a group dedicated to Sysadmins, had a some great talks last week.

• Force 10 bare metal provisioning demo.  (IaaS, Cloud component)
• Arista Networks vmtracer demo
• Logstash, with Jordan Sissel 
• FreeNAS BSD based Open Source NAS sponsored by IX Systems.

Logstash really looks a lot like a Open source version of Splunk.

What is the Cloud?

Components of a Cloud.
There are three main categories of cloud computing service, called the SPI model (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS).

Anything as a Serivce (XaaS) is a term used to all of these.

1. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet.
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a paradigm for delivering operating systems and associated services over the Internet without downloads or installation.
3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) involves outsourcing the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components.

What is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)?
Infrastructure as a Service is a provision model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components. The service provider owns the equipment and is responsible for housing, running and maintaining it. The client typically pays on a per-use basis.

Characteristics and components of IaaS include:

• Utility computing service and billing model.
• Automation of administrative tasks.
• Dynamic scaling.
• Desktop virtualization.
• Policy-based services.
• Internet connectivity.
• Virtual Servers, and Virtualization

Sometimes referred to as (HaaS) Hardware as a Service.


Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a way to rent hardware, operating systems, storage and network capacity over the Internet. The service delivery model allows the customer to rent virtualized servers and associated services for running existing applications or developing and testing new ones.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is an outgrowth of Software as a Service (SaaS), a software distribution model in which hosted software applications are made available to customers over the Internet. PaaS has several advantages for developers. With PaaS, operating system features can be changed and upgraded frequently. Geographically distributed development teams can work together on software development projects. Services can be obtained from diverse sources that cross international boundaries. Initial and ongoing costs can be reduced by the use of infrastructure services from a single vendor rather than maintaining multiple hardware facilities that often perform duplicate functions or suffer from incompatibility problems. Overall expenses can also be minimized by unification of programming development efforts.
On the downside, PaaS involves some risk of "lock-in" if offerings require proprietary service interfaces or development languages. Another potential pitfall is that the flexibility of offerings may not meet the needs of some users whose requirements rapidly evolve.
 

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet.

SaaS is becoming an increasingly prevalent delivery model as underlying technologies that support Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) mature and new developmental approaches, such as Ajax, become popular. Meanwhile, broadband service has become increasingly available to support user access from more areas around the world.
SaaS is closely related to the ASP (application service provider) and on demand computing software delivery models. IDC identifies two slightly different delivery models for SaaS. The hosted application management (hosted AM) model is similar to ASP: a provider hosts commercially available software for customers and delivers it over the Web. In the software on demand model, the provider gives customers network-based access to a single copy of an application created specifically for SaaS distribution.
Benefits of the SaaS model include:

• easier administration
• automatic updates and patch management
• compatibility: All users will have the same version of software.
• easier collaboration, for the same reason
• global accessibility.

The traditional model of software distribution, in which software is purchased for and installed on personal computers, is sometimes referred to as software as a product.


SaaS can be build on PaaS on IaaS


-------------------------------
This is still a draft article from here on down.
I am in the process of still writting.
John 6/17/2011
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Examples:

• Amazon web services, BeanStalk, Elastic Compute EC2
• VMware
• Windows Azure
• SalesForce.com
• Google Gmail
• CloudBees

Scale out vs. Scale up.

Tools:
Enterprise Java three tier application
MySQL, MongoDB
NoSQL, CouchDB

Memory or Cache (Redis, memcached, Gemfire)

RabbitMQ, AMQP, JMS for messaging in the cloud. 
Amazon SNS, SQS

POJO? Apache Hadoop?  HDFS, HBase, Hive

Makara, an open-source software-project for cloud deployment and management managed by Red Hat

MAP/Reduce

CAP Theorem
C: Consistency: All nodes see the same data
A: Availablity: Node failure does not prevent survivors from operating
P: Partition Tolerance: System works even though message are lost

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cloud_computing_providers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_%28operating_system%29

Redis key-value store server.

Redis is an advanced key-value store.

It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.

Written in ANSI C, it's open-source, networked, in-memory, persistent and  journaled. 

Supported languages or language bindings include C, C++, C#, Clojure, Common Lisp, Erlang, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Lua, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Scala, Go, and Tcl.
As of 15 March 2010, development of Redis is sponsored by VMware.

http://redis.io/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redis (data store)
Redis: Lightweight key/value Store That Goes the Extra Mile
Evolving the Key/Value Programming Model to a Higher Level 

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol

The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open standard application layer protocol for message-oriented middleware (MOM).  The defining features of AMQP are message orientation, queuing, routing (including point-to-point and publish-and-subscribe), reliability and security.


It's similar to JMS for Java but not language specific. 

http://www.amqp.org/confluence/display/AMQP/Advanced+Message+Queuing+Protocol

Notes on Cloud Computing

From a recent BayLisa meeting, in which the speaker failed to arrive, the topic of the night was "Cloud Computing". The first order of business was to define its meanings.

The moderator started by asking if anyone had direct experience in this or similar. I started by stating I had worked in a video-over-the-internet business in the late 90s. Then stated that "cloud computing" was marketing hype.

To make this short, this is the best definition I could write down:

Cloud Computing

Either a high-speed on-demand distributed or a high-speed on-demand clustered computing with invisible redundancy. The best uses to date appear to be optical recognition, and audio recognition. In addition, there are working businesses very reminiscent of "Thin Computing".