How to
Negotiating Cloud Computing Agreements
Mar 11th
Cloud computing has been characterized as a paradigm-shifting phenomenon that will change how we purchase IT resources. Though given different names, cloud computing has been around for some time, and the legal lessons learned from experience with traditional software licensing and outsourcing agreements can and should be applied to cloud agreements, but there are new issues which will need new solutions.
Cloud computing is a loose term that describes a variety of data storage, processing, and application services, normally provided by a third party using equipment not located on the customer’s site. These services include providing raw processing power on demand, special purpose applications on a subscription basis, and remote data storage. An early form of cloud computing was Application Service Provider or ASP services, and another is currently known as software as a service or SaaS. Cloud services are normally provided using internet technology, where the customer uses inexpensive hardware and an internet browser to access the service and/or remotely stored data.
The ease of access and simplicity of using cloud applications are part of its attraction. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the legal issues related to cloud computing. While traditional software licensing and IT outsourcing agreements can be used as a model for cloud computing, there are new risks and business practices not addressed in those older agreements that must be considered.
OUTSOURCING AGREEMENTS AS A MODEL FOR CLOUD AGREEMENTS
Cloud computing agreements are basically services agreements, as are outsourcing agreements. Many of the provisions included in outsourcing agreements have direct applicability in cloud service agreements. For example, the basic warranty that services will be performed in a good and workmanlike manner is a good starting point for warranty language.
Normally, outsourcing agreements will explicitly provide that a customer’s data belongs to the customer, and that the vendor will give the customer a copy of its data at anytime. The customer is normally only charged for media and the vendor’s time spent in providing those copies. Cloud agreements should contain similar provisions, but frequently don’t. In fact, some agreements allow the vendor to hold the customer’s data hostage if there is a dispute. Similarly, outsourcing agreements will frequently prohibit the vendor from suspending or terminating services abruptly. That prohibition prevents the vendor from exercising undue leverage in a dispute with the customer. Finally, outsourcing agreements normally require the vendor to provide termination assistance to the customer when the contract ends. This is normally provided at an hourly rate negotiated before services commence. Cloud customers will want to avoid agreements without similar protections, especially if the vendor is holding sensitive data or providing mission-critical services.
Similarly, outsourcing agreements frequently contain caps on fee increases. This prevents fees from rapidly escalating after a customer has made a long-term contractual or technological commitments to a vendor. Customers will want to include similar price protection clauses in their cloud agreements.
Outsourcing agreements also frequently contain a “litigation cooperation” clause which requires the vendor to preserve data and cooperate with discovery requests if the customer is involved in litigation. Those clauses allow the customer to fulfill its obligations in the event a litigation hold is required or it is served with discovery requests. The same issue arises under cloud agreements. If those cooperation clauses cannot be included in a cloud agreement, the customer should implement appropriate data backup plans to allow it to comply with its document preservation obligations in the event of litigation. Continue Reading at Law.com
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Amazon cloud : Amazon EC2 Setup Guide – Easy Educational Tutorial
Mar 3rd
This tutorial guides you how to setup an Amazon EC2 cloud computing account. You may note that in this tutorial we will only be creating an account and set that up for doing the cloud computing tasks. The steps after this stage (like launching an instance, accessing the cloud from your system using command line [...]‘
This tutorial guides you how to setup an Amazon EC2 cloud computing account. You may note that in this tutorial we will only be creating an account and set that up for doing the cloud computing tasks. The steps after this stage (like launching an instance, accessing the cloud from your system using command line etc will be covered in the next tutorial).
Introduction
In cloud computing you don’t need to have your own hardware (except for accessing the cloud) to do the computational tasks. It will be available in the cloud and you can pay as you use the service.
This makes it scalable and robust. Essentially, you will be pulling resources from so many computers in the ‘cloud’ for performing a particular computational task. Hence if you are running an application that requires so much of hardware resources then cloud computing is the right choice.
Amazon
Amazon is a leading service provider in this realm. They actually extended a part of their own network (which supports the amazon.com website) for providing services to third parties. All their services are PAYG (pay as you go) and you will be charged only when you are actually using the service.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers various services as described below:
- Amazon EC2 – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
- Amazon S3 – Amazon Simple Storage Service
- Amazon CloudFront (it is essentially an S3 to distribute the data)
- Amazon CloudWatch (as the name suggests, it is a monitoring service)
- Amazon SimpleDB (for handling data sets)
In this tutorial we will stick ourself to the first two services provided by Amazon – EC2 (cloud) and S3 (data storage).
Sign Up
Inorder to start using the service you need to go to the following site and register
You can use the same account (Amazon account) that you use to buy books from Amazon.
Once you have done that you see message like this:
Now go to this page and signup for the EC2 service. You may note that you need to signin again during this stage.
If you are using Amazon services already it will not ask you for a credit card. But if you want to use a new card, you can do the same by entering the details in the box provided at the end of the page:
Once you have done that you will asked to verify your identity. You can do the same by providing your phone number and clicking on the button ‘call me now’
Now you can expect a call from Amazon (my ADP1 phone showed the number as ‘unknown’!) and you can enter the PIN displayed in the web page, using the type pad.
Once you have done that correctly, you will be shown this screen:
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Salesforce Simplifies The Creation Of Business Applications With Visual Process Manager
Feb 3rd
2009 was a banner year for Salesforce.com. The enterprise cloud computing company made significant enhancements to its product lineup, reported overall strong earnings
, and even launched their own take on realtime enterprise social networking and collaboration, Chatter. Today, Salesforce is launching one of its first product enhancements for 2010: the Force.com Visual Process Manager.
Force.com, company’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications, will now allows companies to design and deploy business processes inside their apps without having to build the applications on other software. Customers can visually design any complex business process with a design tool and instantly run it in the cloud without writing a single line of code. The technology powering the Visual Process Manager is based on technology acquired from Informavores, call scripting startup Salesforce bought last year.
The Manager has several different components. The Process Designer essentially helps businesses sketch out applications with established set forms, questions, and choices, and logic components, like task assignments, decision trees, and approval processes. These components can be dragged and dropped into a visual process design diagram/ The Process Wizard Builder enables companies to design a “wizard” to help walk end-users, step-by-step, through their business process. The Process Simulator lets customers test out and review processes before they are deployed. And lastly, the real-time process engine will run all of a company’s sophisticated processes and provides realtime scalability.
For example, if an insurance company wanted to create a step by step business application for sales representatives to follow in order to create a price quote for insurance packages, the administrator could visually map out every question and step the sales reps need to take and then simple create an application that would automate these processes.
Prior to the inclusion of the Visual Process Manager, companies would have to build applications off of separate platforms, including on-premise software, hardware and infrastructure, to automate processes. The bonus to the Visual process Manager is that it integrates seamlessly into all of Salesforce’s applications. The Process Manager will be available to Enterprise and Unlimited Edition Force.com subscribers for $50 per user per month.
The company recently rolled out Force.com Sites, which lets companies build and run their applications for internal use as well as for public use on Salesforce.com cloud computing platform. And Salesforce also opened up an additional distribution channel off of Force.com: the Value-Added Reseller (VAR) program
While the opening up of the Visual Process Manager pales in comparison to the scale of launching Salesforce Chatter, both products represent Salesforce’s rapid pace of innovation. It should be interesting to see what 2010 brings for Salesforce; the company just raised $500 million, which we all expect will be uses towards a few acquisitions.
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How to install Wordpress in Amazon EC2 using BitNami?
Jan 28th
BitNami Cloud images extend stack appliances to run in a cloud computing environment. You can run BitNami applications on a pay-as-you-go basis, programmatically starting and stopping them. BitNami cloud images are currently available for Amazon EC2 and GoGrid, with planned support for additional cloud environments. Learn more about BitNami Cloud Images.
For both GoGrid and Amazon, the default application login information is provided below. Please change this to avoid unauthorized access:
password: bitnami
You can find additional documentation at the Bitnami Virtual Machine FAQ.
Amazon Machine Images
To deploy a BitNami Stack on Amazon EC2, copy the appropriate AMI name from the table below (based on whether you want to deploy on servers (in the US or Europe) and visit the BitNami AMI Guide for a tutorial on how to get started.
| United States | Europe | |
| WordPress 2.9.1-0 (Ubuntu 9.04) | ami-2d0ae744 | ami-05cae171 |
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Cloud Computing Forum – Break Through With Oracle
Jan 27th
Cloud Computing Forum – Break Through With Oracle
| Take Advantage of Cloud Computing Today
Ready to break through the haze around cloud computing? In this full-day event for IT professionals, Oracle experts clarify how organizations can take advantage of enterprise cloud computing. You’ll learn the what, why, and how of cloud computing, so you can develop your organization’s own cloud strategy and roadmap. You’ll see real-world solutions in action and learn how Oracle is helping enterprises achieve breakthrough agility, quality of service, and efficiency, while controlling security, compliance, and cost. Attend the Cloud Computing Forum to learn:
Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how your organization can break through with cloud computing. Register today for the Cloud Computing Forum. |
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How to run your first Cloud MapReduce job? Cloud Computing
Jan 21st
Tutorial: how to run your first Cloud MapReduce job
This tutorial covers how to run an existing sample application in Cloud MapReduce. We cover the details on how to write an application for Cloud MapReduce in the how to write application tutorial.
First, let us get a copy of the source code. The easiest way is to download a release, e.g., CloudMapReduce-0.7-release.zip. Unzip it to a directory, e.g., “/workspace/cloudmapreduce”.
Alternatively, you can check out from the source code repository, which always has the latest fixes compared to a released version. Run
svn checkout http://cloudmapreduce.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ cloudmapreduce
svn is the subversion client program used for checking out source code. If you are on a Windows platform, you may need to use Cygwin to get the svn command. Or you can use a graphical interface, such as Tortoise.
Once checked out, go into the main directory and compile the source code.
cd cloudmapreduce mvn install -DskipTests
Maven (mvn) is a build compilation system. You can get it from Maven download, or you can use Eclipse’s export feature to compile it.
We’ve working to include some automated testing behind the codebase. As you can imagine the dependencies on AWS make a bit complicated.
The Integration test requires that you’ve set your AWS API info as environment variables – something like this in bash:
export AMAZON_ACCESS_KEY_ID='abcdefghijklmnop' export AMAZON_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY='1234567891012345'
Then, to run the integration test (a clone of the WordCount example):
mvn test
or to test then install
mvn install
You should now have a cloudmapreduce-api-….jar in cloudmapreduce-api/target directory and a cloudmapreduce-examples-….jar in cloudmapreduce-examples/target directory (they are in the root directory in a release zip file). These are the executable files we will run. You can run it anywhere. In fact, you can run it in the SETI@HOME style, where you harvest idle computing cycles. A node can join the computation any time, and it can automatically figure out the overall job status and join the computation, but that is a more advanced topic. You can also run it from EC2 manually, but we will describe an easier way — using a pre-built AMI — to run it in EC2 in the following first.
Run Cloud MapReduce job using the pre-built AMI
Let us first upload the executable files to a bucket in S3. There are a variety of tools to use, I use S3fox, which is a plugin for the firefox browser. Assume we put them under S3 bucket mybucket.
Now we can launch instances in EC2 to start the job. Again, you can use a variety of tools, but I use ElasticFox, a plugin for firefox. The following picture shows the steps to use with ElasticFox. (note the AMI ID shown is out of date).
- Find the image we built. Find image ami-d29775bb. The AMI id may change when we rebundle the image, but the manifest will always be huanliu/CloudMapReduce.manifest.xml.
- Click the launch button to start instances
- On the launch page, specify the number of instances you need. There is no complex cluster setup needed, just launch them and they will process in parallel.
- Set the user data. The user data specifies the job parameters. We will discuss the parameter shortly.
- Click the launch button. Your instances will boot up, and as soon as they are up, they start processing your job.
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Cloud Computing Diagrams From Around The Web
Jan 19th
Here are a few other cloud computing diagrams that we’ve come across from a variety of sites.
Thanks to all those that have put these together.
