Posts Tagged ‘cloud computing’
Don’t Trust Your Computer.. Or Anyone Else’s
Last week was a bad week for tech people all over the world. There were outages reported at several major datacenter providers, including the likes of Rackspace, Equinix, and Google. As any good system administrator will tell you, what goes up will come down. Having a contingency plan is critical to any business that relies upon its web services (who doesn’t anymore?). Any person who spends any time working on computer systems knows that you can’t trust them any farther than you can throw them. You have to keep a close eye on them and monitor them closely. Somehow, they always end up surprising you.
Fortunately for me, I wasn’t directly affected by any of these outages. Small as it is, my blog stayed online as it isn’t hosted in any of those datacenters. Unfortunately, I did have a bit of an issue last week and it went on for some time without being caught. I’m not sure that my issues were related to any of these major outages, but one of the plugins I’m using makes a call to an external system that had some problems. I’m not going to point out which it was since it could have happened to any of them, but the lesson that I learned is worth mentioning.
What Happened
I use a plugin that pulls data off another system. That system was down which caused page load times to skyrocket. During the day I was checking my AdSense account noticing that pageviews were quite low, but didn’t really have time to look into it. Later that night I saw that pageviews were still really low so I decided to look into it. The Wordpress backend of my site was pretty snappy so I went to view the frontend. The page took forever to load. My site is on a shared web server, but I just so happen to be the system administrator at that hosting company so I quick logged into the shell of the web server. Loads were normal with no I/O wait, low CPU usage, and normal memory usage.
After checking loads of my own systems – something that’s already monitored, but I checked anyway – I popped open Firebug and reloaded the page. Bingo. I found the culprit. It was the service I talked about earlier that was slow to respond. I disabled the plugin and the site worked again immediately.
What I Learned
While my site is extremely small and I would not invest much time in this at this point, as you add external services to a site, it’s important to monitor those services as well as your own. Just because you watch that services are alive and responsive on your own web server, the services on others’ web servers are just as important as they can have a detrimental effect on your services as well. Of course, there’s nothing that you can do to control those services outside of SLA’s, but in my case, if I knew about the outage I could have simply disabled the service to minimize the effect on my site. Okay, I know I wasn’t losing millions of dollars or pageviews. I barely lost tens of page views over the whole thing, but as software and web services start relying upon ‘cloud’ services, keeping a close eye on all of those services is key.
Tags: cloud computing, performance
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Jul 7th, 2009
Why Windows Needs ‘the Cloud’ To Fail
Buzzwords and hype aside, the world is moving towards a web-based future. This future inevitably means that our workstations are no longer our “application servers”, but we are starting to shift that responsibility and that management into the data center. It just makes sense. Bandwidth has become drastically more available and we have become increasingly mobile, leaving traditional desktop applications in the dust. This shift in paradigms, however, causes one of two things to happen. Either we a) build plugins into existing desktop applications such as Microsoft Office to accommodate these changes, or b) we stop using desktop applications altogether (or mostly). While “option a” is definitely a viable option, we would really be using a workaround to allow old technologies to work with new techniques for accessing information.
As this shift away from dependence on traditional desktop applications happens, we become increasingly dependent upon browsers. Since a majority of browsers are fairly cross-platform, the dependence upon the platform of the operating system is suddenly stripped away as well. A vast majority of Linux haters’ complaints about Linux revolve around file sharing, permissions, and application compatibility. If we start to depend upon web-based applications, suddenly those issues are no longer issues that the desktop operating system has to handle, thus Linux becomes a much more viable, cheaper option for users. Shares and permissions issues will be handled through their respective web applications. Application dependencies and compatibility will become the responsibility of the server administrators, not the end user. That makes even a $122.99 (from Newegg) price tag on a Windows Vista Upgrade license look pretty steep.
If this paradigm should come to completion (or at least completion for most users), the world’s dependence upon the Windows platform will be no more. We won’t need to have our PCs on a domain with Windows Group Policy. We won’t need to depend upon Windows-only libraries or applications. We even don’t have to depend upon media players (assuming all the web multimedia vendors play fairly).
This, of course, is all hypothetical, but it has to be in the back of the mind of Microsoft executives. Linux and Apple don’t currently control a very large market share, however, they pose a huge threat indirectly through ‘cloud computing’ to the traditional software licensing software used by Microsoft. Red Hat has all but conceded victory to Microsoft in the traditional desktop world where we depend upon desktop-based applications. However, they are working towards meeting Microsoft where the battle is moving.
Tags: cloud computing, linux, microsoft
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Mar 26th, 2009
Red Hat CEO: Significant Barriers in Switching to Linux on the Desktop
Yesterday at the Open Source Business Conference, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst shared his thoughts on why Linux on the desktop is irrelevant to Red Hat. Whitehurst says that financial reasons as well as practical reasons are barriers to the market for Linux. For one, he says, that he’s not quite sure how one would make money doing it. An interesting point, indeed. One of the biggest advantages of running a distribution of Linux such as, say Ubuntu, is the cost. If you can eliminate the “Windows tax” by building a machine, the cost of the OS is free. That cost is what drives quite a few people to the platform. There is, of course, significant value in the software as well. The freedom to choose an operating system is really what Linux is all about, but trying to sell Linux on the desktop, Whitehurst says, is not even being considered. He also notes that a lot of Linux developers prefer to have Macs as their workstations.
The other reason the CEO says that it’s pointless is the fact that the desktop is, in effect, going away. Quoting the famous Wayne Gretzky, he says that he’d “rather think about skating to where the puck is going to be than where it is now.” If the netbook market, cloud computing, and virtualization is where we’re headed, then it is certainly not worth it to Red Hat or any other Linux distribution to try to compete with Microsoft on the game that’s almost over, but rather getting a head start on the game that’s just beginning.
Tags: cloud computing, linux
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Mar 26th, 2009
Ubuntu 9.10 Server to Focus on Cloud Computing
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of the Ubuntu foundation, announced today the plans for Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”. The server version will focus on developments both in the Amazon EC2 cloud as well as allowing users to build their own elastic computing clouds utilizing the Eucalyptus platform.
Ubuntu started offering official AMI’s to run on EC2 just a short time ago and is planning on building out its list of images to allow users to deploy pre-installed packages of the OS and applications to run on EC2 and other clouds as well as building on the ubuntu-vmbuilder software as well. Ubuntu-vmbuilder is an application that lets users automate the creation of virtual machines for testing and development purposes as well as deployment of applications which is right on track with the elastic computing idea. Shuttleworth promises to make an easier way to interact with clouds: “Wouldn’t it be apt for Ubuntu to make the Amazon jungle as easy to navigate as, say, APT?”
The other thing they will be focusing on with the new release is integrating the Eucalyptus platform into the OS. Eucalyptus is an open source suite to build an elastic computing cloud similar to Amazon’s EC2 using your own hardware. It uses the Xen hypervisor just like EC2 and it meant to be able to interface with EC2’s web services as well as query interfaces. Plans for Ubuntu server are to allow the “cloud” resource pool to grow and shrink with the resource requirements of the cluster. In theory, all servers would run during peak hours and as resources are no longer required, the physical hosts would be suspended or shutdown all together to conserve energy.
Tags: amazon, cloud computing, ubuntu
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Feb 21st, 2009
Sun Builds Its Own Cloud
Sun announced yesterday at SugarCRM’s SugarCon that it is building its own cloud computing platform to compete with Amazon’s EC2 offerings. Sun sees adding a hosted computing platform as a great business opportunity for the suffering company during economic hard times. “There will be lots of clouds and we see Sun as being a major player in that area,” said Lew Tucker, VP and CTO for cloud computing at Sun. Sun’s Solaris OS has had the capability of operating in a paravirtualized “cloud” environment for years and from the sounds of it they have simply built a reporting and billing mechanism around their zones and will be hosting the physical machines for users.
Tags: cloud computing, sun
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Feb 4th, 2009
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