Cloud - Web and Service Cloud

Microsoft launched the Azure cloud based platform at the PDC today.  Microsoft has launched many file storage services that were their cloud offerings to date in Mesh, Foldershare, Groove and more.  Azure is what appears to be a real cloud platform to compete with Amazon and Google rather than just storage hosting.

Build new applications in the cloud - or use interoperable services that run on Microsoft infrastructure to extend and enhance your existing applications. You choose what’s right for you.

It appears so far that it is pretty Microsoft centric for tool support.  Of course the software and servers will be Windows.  This week and last, Microsoft platforms have made their way into the cloud platforms at Amazon and now Microsoft.  Google also recently announced the support of Java.  Another set of aquisitions at Rackspace in the buying of Slicehost and JungleDisk also seem to show the space heating up and the companies all believing in the cloud platform emergence and evolution that seems to be happening.

Amazon EC2 is officially out of beta, it is about time some of these services actually launched.  It is hard to convince people to use the cloud layer without being out of beta (AppEngine when’s it gonna happen huh?).

Amazon also launches with windows support, SQL Server support and much more.  This is great news in times where budgets are tight and people want to start scalable businesses but want to only pay for what is used.  The cloud layer will be a very attractive option to many.

Learn more about the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) at Amazon. There are already lots of great simple toos like ElasticFox (Firefox EC2 Extension) to help manage your AMIs from a browser.  You can start and stop armies of configured servers from a little extension in your browser.

Developers are getting many tools to build great things.  We hope more products are out of beta soon like AppEngine.

AppEngine is getting an update to it’s next available language besides Python (my particular favorite) in Java.  Apparently the top candidates were C++, Java and C# support for AppEngine but Java has been added due to the overwhelming library and developer support.

Microsoft also has been playing with entering the cloud with Mesh and now with “Strata”.  This would be a cloud for .NET developers.

There are already cloud providers for .NET mainly in Mosso’s offerings of any language being cloud enabled. But one from Microsoft will probably draw all the .NET developers to it like most Microsoft offerings.

Also, Amazon EC2 recently announced support for MS SQL Server and Windows servers.  So really any platform can also be used in Amazon EC2 in Amazon Machine Images. This took longer to happen due to the licensing per processor and server that most Microsoft software has.

This won’t be changing things much for me in the near term but having more platforms available in the cloud and on cloud systems is the natural progression.  At some point a platform might have advantages in cheaper processing but for now Python with AppEngine is still the best bet.

Google AppEngine is alot of fun, not only is it a good excuse to use Python but it is a touch of the future and lots of possibilities for programmers and engineers from all sized businesses to use. When they opened the gates I was one of the lucky 10,000 to get in. So what did I do, I setup three apps before I even knew that was the limit.  Then I was stuck.  Well today you now have up to 10 apps that you can run on appspot or your own domain. Make sure to update your SDK.

Next question is, when are they going to launch this out of beta?  I want to start using it for business.

We’re happy to announce we’ve released some small updates to Google App Engine. Among the more significant changes:

• More apps: Want to create more than 3 applications with your App Engine account? Now you can now create up to 10!
• Time windows for Dashboard graphs: Zoom in on the data in your dashboard to get a more accurate picture of whats going on. You can zoom in to see graphs for the last 24, 12, and 6 hour periods.
• Logs export: You can now use appcfg.py to download your application’s logs in plaintext format. Use appcfg.py –help for more information on how to download your logs.
• Send email as logged in user: If you’re using the users API, you can now send email from the email address of the currently-logged-in user.

Be sure to update your SDK and check the release notes for a full list of changes. Have more changes you’d like to see with App Engine? Let us know in our Google Group!

Today Mosso, a cloud provider that runs off of Rackspace and supports lots of languages, launched CloudFS to compete with Amazon S3.

CloudFS is new, untested but a bit cheaper than Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). This is where mainly ‘buckets’ of data of any content type can be stored and retrieved by a unique key across all resources. This is useful for image, content and media hosting and charges by the GB usually less than .15 cents per GB.

About CloudFS

ElasticFox is a pretty nice tool for managing EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) AMI instances AMIs (Amazon Machine Instances) from preconfigured AKIs (Amazon Kernel Image) or ARIs (Amazon Ramdisk Instances). For instance they have a AMI for fedora core 4 that is loaded with mysql and apache form amazon to get started quickly. Ultimately you end up making your own AMIs with the stuff you run on but these can get you started quickly.

It looks like this, it is built in XUL but could easily be built in AJAX or Flash or even Silverlight using APIs.

Figure 1: Shows the AMIs and your installed AMI instances.

Figure 2: Shows Available Preconfigured instances from Amazon and Others

Pretty nice little GUI to the EC2 service to help people ease into setting up and playing with cloud computing. For people running on the cloud already this is nice to have a quick web developer tool for testing, and quickly changing the dynamics of your resources with in your browser.

I think the cloud will be victorious sooner rather than later if there are great tools to beat out traditional hosting. Finally making tools that aren’t locked to a hosting company with bad applications. At least it makes this area more competitive.

This is what makes Amazon’s model so attractive. Even though it is pieces and components, services will be built on it with great interfaces, probably much better ones than can be designed by the cloud provider themselves via great apis and componentization of cloud infrastructure.

• Download ElasticFox
• Amazon post about ElasticFox

ZDNet reports that Microsoft officially dropped a beta of Live Mesh to a familiar 10,000 developers, of which many slots were taken by Microsoft employees themselves who are programmers annoyingly referred to as ’softies’.

The service or system built on another term called Horizon is their competitor to Amazon’s AWS platform and Google App Engine as well as many other emerging companies and platforms offering scalable cloud based services.

From the looks of the schematics and diagrams it appears closer to a Google App Engine hosted service rather than a componentized Amazon model.

Amazon EC2 lapped up again and added EC2 persistent storage. Previously you had to store data in SimpleDB or S3 because your EC2 instances could go away at any time due to scale down and up. This is much like how on Google App Engine you need to store everything in the BigTable Datastore, because there is really no such thing as a physical location in a cloud that is elastic. But Amazon has one upped by adding persistant storage in EC2.

If you are a developer and not excited about the ability to make applications with no worry of scale or support in infrastructure, I am just not sure if you are a developer or more worried about change. I always have these ideas that end up being based on the fast that I would need at least 3-5 servers to pull off. Unfortunately when you are smaller or just trying out an idea you dont’ want to buy infrastructure for the most extreme case (large traffic spike) and then have servers sitting at 1% utilization the rest of the time. With cloud computing and service storage, this whole problem is abstracted away. Many times this is at a much reduced cost, you are only paying for minimal usage, not what your maximum usage would be.

One big element to the cloud computing rage is also that dynamic languages will win out. If you will note in all the new cloud technologies there is a recurring theme of BigTable/MapReduce datastores (eliminiating much of relational database ways), dynamic languages (removing static typing and adding flexibility for rapid deployment and development) and the developer has alot of freedom and power to innovate.

Consider cloud computing the point at which dynamic languages such as Python (maybe Jython, IronPython, etc), Ruby, and higher order parallel languages like Erlang won out. Google App Engine uses Python, SimpleDB from Amazon is built with Erlang, etc. These languages like Python and Ruby which are slower (Ruby is much much slower than Python, Python can hang with static compiled languages) but the scalability, ActiveRecord like BigTable architecture, and rapid prototyping ORMs which were previously seen as too performance intensive or slow could become moot with the power of Amazon or Google’s infrastructure.

It is just a real interesting time in technology, it a major leap, it should be recognized. If you are a developer or infrastructure specialist, you should be diving in.

Sun is also getting into the cloud computing and storage game with project Caroline.  I have heard Microsoft will also be joining possibly with CloudDB but all that is rumors right now.

The only companies in it now are Amazon and Google is emerging. There are also some competitors like Joyent.  But I imagine there will be many companies propping up that are using Amazon or Google or other clous services as their core product.

Amazon is still far far ahead in offering componentized pieces of architecture such as S3, EC2, SQS etc.

The models and entities framework for Google Apps is pretty fun. It is very similar to django models and ruby on rails but it is even more simplified. I have been playing with Google App Engine since it came out (was in first 10,000 yay!) and it is really fun. Prototypes have never been so rapid. I wish we got more than three apps to create, I have had to repurpose a few. I have lots of ideas I will be posting here and howtos.

To create a model:

class Person(db.Model):
  first_name = db.StringProperty()
  last_name = db.StringProperty()
  hobbies = db.StringListProperty()
 
p = Person(first_name="Albert", last_name="Johnson")
p.hobbies = ["chess", "travel"]
 
p.put() # creates/updates model and inserts data

To create an Expando model
Expando models are fun because they are dynamic. You can add properties to the classes on the fly and it expands automatically.

class Person(db.Expando):
  first_name = db.StringProperty()
  last_name = db.StringProperty()
  hobbies = db.StringListProperty()
 
p = Person(first_name="Albert", last_name="Johnson")
p.hobbies = ["chess", "travel"]
 
p.chess_elo_rating = 1350
 
p.travel_countries_visited = ["Spain", "Italy", "USA", "Brazil"]
p.travel_trip_count = 13
 
p.put() # creates/updates model and inserts data

Prototyping is extremely fast with Google App Engine. Python of course is always extremely fun to do. The winds are a changin’.

[ google app engine entities docs for the DatastoreAPI ]