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Cloud Computing 101 – How to Upload Files to Amazon S3

cloudtweaks — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:54:25 +0000

Here is a very simple little S3 tutorial For those new to Cloud Computing and AWS S3 Thanks to S3Browser for the illustrations.

With S3 Browser you can upload any number of files to Amazon S3.

Here are the step-by-step instructions that explain how to upload/backup your files.

Start S3 Browser and select the bucket that you plan to use as destination. You can also create a new Amazon S3 Bucket if necessary.

Files -> Upload File(s)

Upload

Files->Upload Folder

Select File

Select Folder

You need to select the file or files that you want to upload and click OK. If you want to upload a folder please choose the folder and click OK.

S3 Browser will start uploading your files and will display the progress on the Transfers tab.

Continue at: S3Browser

25 Resourceful Cloud Computing Blogs

cloudtweaks — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:23:53 +0000

Here is a good list of 25 Cloud Blogs to start the day that offer a variety of information related to Cloud Computing.

Reuven Cohen’s ElasticVapor Blog

John Willis’ IT Management and Cloud Blog

Government Information Security Blogs

How To Install and Run WordPress on AWS EC2?

cloudtweaks — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:07:57 +0000

Here is a fantastic illustration I’ve come across on how to get your WordPress site up and running in the cloud in 15 minutes. Very helpful!

Introduction

One thing we often hear from Web developers, especially those who offer Web site design and consulting services, is the need to get a Web site up quickly, which runs fast and gives them total control of the server for maximum flexibility and scalability. Today’s post offers a quick walkthrough on how to run WordPress on Amazon’s EC2 Cloud and the Microsoft Web Platform. After you followed the steps in this walkthrough you will have a live production WordPress blog on the Internet.
Here are quick summary of the steps you have to follow:

Sign up for Amazon EC2
Start an “Microsoft Web Platform – WordPress ” instance via the Amazon Web Services Management Console.
Retrieve the Administrator password and connect to the instance via RDP.
Finalize the WordPress installation.
Enter blog posts and browse to your blog.

1. Amazon EC2 Sign-up

Signing up for Amazon EC2 is a straightforward process. All you need is

a valid e-mail address,
a valid phone number you can be reached at (make sure the phone is nearby, you will be called during sign-up!),
and a valid credit card number

The sign-up URL is http://aws.amazon.com/ec2. It’s even easier if you are already an Amazon customer because you can use your existing credit card information and e-mail address.

Note: Billing data verification usually happens within minutes. It might take a couple of hours though. Currently (April 2010) the error message you get is not very meaningful:
“It looks like you don’t have an EC2 account*. To use the Amazon EC2 Console you must first sign up for Amazon EC2. It’s quick & free to sign up.”
Just be patient and wait for a little longer.

2. Starting an “Microsoft Web Platform – WordPress” Instance

Once you are signed up successfully you will have access to the Amazon EC2 Management Console. The URL is https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home.

Once you are logged in make sure you switch your region to “US West”. The Microsoft Web Platform images are currently only available in the US West region. Before we do anything lets set up the firewall rules (called Security Groups in Amazon lingo) for your WordPress instance.

Firewall Rules

Select the item “Security Groups” on the left hand side. Your existing Security Groups will show in the center pane. Click the “Create Security Group” button on top.

Name the new group you are about to create, for example “Microsoft Web Platform Firewall Rules”.

You want to configure the following rules:

RDP is needed so you can connect via Remote Desktop to your Amazon EC2 instance. The current “Source (IP or group)” settings allows these connections from any IP address. Please lock down this settings if you have more stringent security requirements.
HTTP is needed so your customers can connect via HTTP your Amazon EC2 instance.
HTTPS is needed if you plan to use SSL. You don’t need this setting if you do not plan to use SSL.
Port 8172 is opened to allow remote administration of IIS and publishing of content via Visual Studio 2010. You don’t have to open port 8172 if you do not plan to use remote administration or remote content publishing.

Now we are ready to launch an EC2 DotNetNuke instance.

Launching an DotNetNuke Instance

Click the “Instances” menu item on the left hand sid eand click the ”Launch Instance” button.

Now select “Community Images” in the resulting dialog.

By typing “microsoft/” in the “Community AMIs” dialog you will reduce the selection to the four Microsoft images:
Press “Select” in the “Microsoft Web Platform – WordPress …” row.

In the next dialog page (Instance Details) you can select how much computing power you want to have for your WordPress instance. It’s probably prudent to start with type small. Click the “Continue” button. Nothing to worry about on the next page either. Just click “Continue” at the bottom of the “Advanced Instance Options” dialog. Now we are getting to the “Create Key Pair” dialog.

If you already have a key, simply use it. If not you have to create one by entering a name for your key pair and clicking the “Create & Download Key Pair” button. As soon as you click the button a key pair will be created by Amazon an you are asked by your browser to download it. Save the file in a location where you will find it later. The key pair you created will allow you to decrypt the Administrator password that Amazon creates for your WordPress instance. Click the “Continue” button.

Note: Internet Explorer might not show the download dialog that asks you where to save the key pair file. If that happens to you, please look for the file (.pem) in Internet Explorers Temporary Files folder. On Windows 7 search for *.pem in “%userprofile%\ AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files”. Make sure you copy the .pem file to a more permanent directory .

Once you created your key pair you can configure firewall rules. You could for example only allow HTTP requests to the machine. Amazon calls firewall rules “Security Groups” which is a bit confusing if you ask me. For this demo we are picking the “default” Security Group which doesn’t put any firewall restrictions on the instance. You might want to configure these settings to be a bit more restrictive later on.
Click “Continue” to move to the “Launch” page. The only thing left to do on the summary page is to press the big “Launch” button. Once you do that Amazon EC2 will spin up your personal virtual instance of our WordPress image. Good job. It’s time to get some coffee. Spinning up your instance will take some time, usually around 3 to 5 minutes.

3. Retrieving the Administrator Password

After finishing the “Launch Instance” wizard you should be back on the main page of the AWS Management Console. Click the “Instances” link to figure out how your WordPress instance is doing.

You should see something like this:

Right click on the row and select the “Get Windows Password” menu item.

Now it’s time to use the key pair file (.PEM) that you created before. If the password is already available (you might have to wait a couple of minutes as said before) you will see the following dialog:

Open the .PEM file in notepad and copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl+A selects all, Ctrl+C copies it into the clipboard). Now paste the contents into the textbox of the dialog (Ctrl+V). Click the “Decrypt” button.

Note: Because decryption is a very CPU intensive operation you might run into the following security dialog if you use Internet Explorer: Contrary to intuition you have to press “No” to go on. You probably have to hit “No” a couple of times to get your password decrypted. More details on this security feature can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/175500
If you are interested in a more permanent fix you can execute the following command on command-line: reg add “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Styles” /v MaxScriptStatements /t REG_DWORD /d 0x5F5E100
By setting the MaxScriptStatements to 100,000,000 (0x5F5E100) I don’t see any security popups anymore.

Once the password is decrypted write it down or copy it to the clipboard and close the dialog. Finally we are ready to connect to the WordPress instance. Right click the instance and select “Connect”.

Click “Download shortcut file” in the dialog that follows:

The file to be downloaded is an .RDP file that has all the right settings to connect you to the EC2 instance in the cloud. Click “Open” if you use IE or double click the file in Firefoxes Download window and a Remote Desktop session is established. When Remote Desktop asks you for credentials you simply enter the username “Administrator” and the password that we retrieved previously.
Once connected you will get logged on to the remote machine. Don’t get to impatient because after the logon it will take a few moments until the WordPress install kicks in.

4. Finalization of the WordPress Installation

The initial logon will automatically launch the WordPress installation via the Web Platform Installer. You should see the following dialog:

Just click “Install” and you will be asked if it is ok to download the latest WordPress and MySQL bits. Most likely a local copy will be used for the install. Only if newer bits are available Web Platform Installer will go out and download new binaries. This should only take seconds given Amazon’s bandwidth.

Next you get asked for your MySQL password. Pick a good one!

After the MySQL install Web Platform Installer asks you some additional questions with regards to your WordPress installation.

Step 1 of 2 in Web Platform Installer

You can leave everything as it is. Only one change you might want to consider:
If you want to install wordpress as the root of your site you might want to remove the string “wordpress” in the “Application name” textbox. If you don’t do that you have to always enter http://%3cname-of-your-site/wordpress. Leaving the field empty will put the wordpress files into the root of the Default Web Site, i.e. you can enter http://%3cname-of-your-website/> to get to your WordPress blog. If you install WordPress in the root you will get a popup that warns you about overwriting content. That’s ok though. It only overwrites IIS’s default home page.

Click “Yes” and then “Continue”.

Now the last few settings – Step 2 of 2

To make the WordPress install successful you need to configure WordPress’s MySQL connection and the credentials you want to use to administer WordPress. Enter the MySQL password you picked previously as the Database Administrator Password. These credentials will be used to create the wordpress database within MySQL.

Then pick some new credentials for the user account that WordPress itself uses to connect to the WordPress database in MySQL:

Everything else can be left in place without impacting the installation.
Once the install finishes you can get started with WordPress. Click the “Launch WordPress” link on the final Web Platform Installer page:

Now you are ready to go and you can customize WordPress to your liking.

One last tip: You can get to your blog from outside the Remote Desktop session. Your instance has a public DNS address you can use.

Copy the public DNS name shown in the AWS Management Console to the clipboard and enter it into the browser. If you need a more permanent DNS address you have to register a DNS name and also get an Elastic IP address from Amazon. But this is a story for another day.

Summary

It’s amazing how easy it now is to get a dedicated Web server on the internet and get started. With the help of Amazon EC2, the Microsoft Web Platform Installer and WordPress we just deployed a working and fully configured blog application to the cloud. Let us know what you think about this:Questions or feedback? Send itto ec2@microsoft.com.

Full Credit to Thomad at: ISS.Net

Install WordPress In Your Cloud Environment Using BitNami

cloudtweaks — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:11:51 +0000

BitNami WordPress Stack greatly simplifies the deployment of WordPress and its required dependencies. It can be deployed using a native installer, as a virtual machine, in the cloud or as a module over an already installed infrastructure Stack.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. The project was started in 2003. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

The BitNami WordPress Stack native installers were packaged using BitRock’s cross platform installer tool.

Get the tool

Amazon Web Services Introduces Cluster Compute Instances For High Performance Computing

cloudtweaks — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:46:38 +0000

BusinessWire · Tuesday, Jul. 13, 2010

Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2, a new instance type specifically designed for high-performance computing (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound applications. Customers with complex computational workloads such as tightly coupled parallel processes, or with applications sensitive to network performance, can now achieve the same high compute and networking performance provided by custom-built infrastructure while benefiting from the elasticity, flexibility and cost advantages of Amazon EC2. To get started using Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

Prior to Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2, organizations with advanced HPC needs have been required to fund expensive, in-house compute clusters by purchasing dedicated, purpose-built hardware. As a result, the demand for high-performance cluster computing often exceeds the capacity of many organizations, and many projects are cut altogether or wait in long queues to access shared resources. With Cluster Compute Instances, businesses and researchers now have access to the high-performance computing capabilities they need – with pay-as-you-go pricing, the ability to scale on-demand, and no upfront investments.

Cluster Compute Instances provide similar functionality to other Amazon EC2 instances but have been specifically engineered to provide high-performance compute and networking. Cluster Compute Instances provide more CPU than any other Amazon EC2 instance. Customers can also group Cluster Compute Instances into clusters – allowing applications to get the low-latency network performance required for tightly coupled, node-to-node communication (typical of many HPC applications). Cluster Compute Instances also provide significantly increased network throughput making them well suited for customer applications that need to perform network-intensive operations. Depending on usage patterns, applications can see up to 10 times the network throughput of the largest current Amazon EC2 instance types.

“Businesses and researchers have long been utilizing Amazon EC2 to run highly parallel workloads ranging from genomics sequence analysis and automotive design to financial modeling. At the same time, these customers have told us that many of their largest, most complex workloads required additional network performance,” said Peter De Santis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. “Cluster Compute Instances provide network latency and bandwidth that previously could only be obtained with expensive, capital intensive, custom-built compute clusters. For perspective, in one of our pre-production tests, an 880 server sub-cluster achieved 41.82 TFlops on a LINPACK test run – we’re very excited that Amazon EC2 customers now have access to this type of HPC performance with the low per-hour pricing, elasticity, and functionality they have come to expect from Amazon EC2.”

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is the primary high-performance computing facility supporting scientific research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. “Many of our scientific research areas require high-throughput, low-latency, interconnected systems where applications can quickly communicate with each other, so we were happy to collaborate with Amazon Web Services to test drive our HPC applications on Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2,” said Keith Jackson, a computer scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. “In our series of comprehensive benchmark tests, we found our HPC applications ran 8.5 times faster on Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2 than the previous EC2 instance types.”

MathWorks is a leading developer and supplier of software for technical computing and model-based design. The company now enables its customers, using MATLAB and Parallel Computing Toolbox on their desktops, to scale data-intensive computation problems up to access greater compute power with Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2, which are running MATLAB Distributed Computing Server. “Cluster Compute Instances give MATLAB users the opportunity to test and run their high performance computing problems for data-intensive applications in the cloud at a price and performance level that allows us to continually innovate and meet customer needs,” said Silvina Grad-Freilich, Senior Manager Parallel-Computing at MathWorks. “We’re thrilled to allow our customers to leverage Amazon Web Services as an easily accessible way to meet their needs for increased compute power.”

Adaptive Computing provides automation intelligence software, powered by its Moab technology, for HPC, data center and cloud environments. Moab is the management layer for more than 50 percent of the resources at the top computing systems in the world. “The availability of Cluster Compute Instances on Amazon EC2 gives organizations access to on-demand and highly available HPC resources,” said Michael Jackson, COO and President of Adaptive Computing. “For years we’ve helped customers build and manage the world’s most complex large-scale computing clusters, and now with Cluster Compute Instances, customers can leverage Adaptive Computing’s familiar automation software tools to manage HPC resources on Amazon’s leading cloud infrastructure.”

David Patterson is a world-renowned expert, author and academic who has been recognized with more than 30 awards for research, teaching and service. He is the co-inventor of RAID, RISC and several other computer innovations and has taught computer architecture at University of California, Berkeley, since joining the faculty in 1977. “The high-performance networking of Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2 fills an important need among scientific computing professionals, making the on-demand and scalable cloud environment more viable for technical computing,” said Patterson.

Cluster Compute Instances complement other AWS offerings designed to make large-scale computing easier and more cost effective. For example, Public Data Sets on AWS provide a repository of useful public data sets that can be easily accessed from Amazon EC2, allowing fast, cost-effective data analysis by researchers and businesses. These large data sets are hosted on AWS at no charge to the community. Additionally, the Amazon Elastic MapReduce service enables low-friction, cost effective implementation of the Hadoop framework on Amazon EC2. Hadoop is a popular tool for analyzing very large data sets in a highly parallel environment, and Amazon EC2 provides the scale-out environment to run Hadoop clusters of all sizes.

For more information on Amazon EC2 and Cluster Compute Instances, visit http://aws.amazon.com/hpc-applications.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth’s Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Kindle and Kindle DX are the revolutionary portable readers that wirelessly download books, magazines, newspapers, blogs and personal documents to a crisp, high-resolution electronic ink display that looks and reads like real paper. Kindle and Kindle DX utilize the same 3G wireless technology as advanced cell phones, so users never need to hunt for a Wi-Fi hotspot. Kindle is the #1 bestselling product across the millions of items sold on Amazon.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and www.amazon.cn. As used herein, “Amazon.com,” “we,” “our” and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management’s expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com’s financial results is included in Amazon.com’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

Contacts

Amazon.com, Inc.
Media Hotline, 206-266-7180
www.amazon.com/pr

Cloud Computing For Dummies Basic Cheat Sheet

cloudtweaks — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:49:07 +0000

Cloud Computing For Dummies Basic Cheat Sheet

Cloud computing models vary: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Manage your cloud computing service level via the surrounding management layer.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The IaaS layer offers storage and compute resources that developers and IT organizations can use to deliver business solutions.
Platform as a Service (PaaS). The PaaS layer offers black-box services with which developers can build applications on top of the compute infrastructure. This might include developer tools that are offered as a service to build services, or data access and database services, or billing services.
Software as a Service (SaaS). In the SaaS layer, the service provider hosts the software so you don’t need to install it, manage it, or buy hardware for it. All you have to do is connect and use it. SaaS Examples include customer relationship management as a service.

Deploying Public, Private, or Hybrid Clouds

Cloud computing happens on a public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud. Governance and security are crucial to computing on the cloud, whether the cloud is in your company’s firewall or not.

Public clouds are virtualized data centers outside of your company’s firewall. Generally, a service provider makes resources available to companies, on demand, over the public Internet.
Private clouds are virtualized cloud data centers inside your company’s firewall. It may also be a private space dedicated to your company within a cloud provider’s data center.
Hybrid clouds combine aspects of both public and private clouds.

Cloud Computing Characteristics

Cloud computing requires searching for a cloud provider. Whether your cloud is public, private, or hybrid, look for elasticity, scalability, provisioning, standardization, and billed usage:

Elasticity and scalability. The cloud is elastic, meaning that resource allocation can get bigger or smaller depending on demand. Elasticity enables scalability, which means that the cloud can scale upward for peak demand and downward for lighter demand. Scalability also means that an application can scale when adding users and when application requirements change.
Self-service provisioning. Cloud customers can provision cloud services without going through a lengthy process. You request an amount of computing, storage, software, process, or more from the service provider. After you use these resources, they can be automatically deprovisioned.
Standardized interfaces. Cloud services should have standardized APIs, which provide instructions on how two application or data sources can communicate with each other. A standardized interface lets the customer more easily link cloud services together.
Billing and service usage metering. You can be billed for resources as you use them. This pay-as-you-go model means usage is metered and you pay only for what you consume.

Cloud Computing Issues

Cloud computing issues span models (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS) and types (public, private, or hybrid). Computing on the cloud requires vigilance about security, manageability, standards, governance, and compliance:

Cloud security. The same security principles that apply to on-site computing apply to cloud computing security.
- Identity management. Managing personal identity information so that access to computer resources, applications, data, and services is controlled properly.
- Detection and forensics. Separating legitimate from illegitimate activity.
- Encryption. Coding to protect your information assets.
Cloud manageability. You need a consistent view across both on-premises and cloud-based environments. This includes managing the assets provisioning as well as the quality of service (QOS) you’re receiving from your service provider.
Cloud standards. A standard is an agreed-upon approach for doing something. Cloud standards ensure interoperability, so you can take tools, applications, virtual images, and more, and use them in another cloud environment without having to do any rework. Portability lets you take one application or instance running on one vendor’s implementation and deploy it on another vendor’s implementation.
Cloud governance and compliance. Governance defines who’s responsible for what and the policies and procedures that your people or groups need to follow. Cloud governance requires governing your own infrastructure as well as infrastructure that you don’t totally control. Cloud governance has two key components: understanding compliance and risk and business performance goals.
Data in the cloud. Managing data in the cloud requires data security and privacy, including controls for moving data from point A to point B. It also includes managing data storage and the resources for large-scale data processing.

The Cloud – Manage Your Amazon S3 Account with CloudBerry Explorer

cloudtweaks — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:18:57 +0000

If you have an Amazon S3 account you’re using to backup your data, you might want an easy way to manage it. CloudBerry Explorer is a free app that runs on your desktop an provides an easy way to manage your S3 account.

Installation and Setup

Just download and install the application with the defaults.

When the application launches you’ll be prompted to enter in your username and email to get a registration key. Or you can continue on by clicking Register later.

Now you will want to set up your Amazon S3 account. Click on File \ Amazon S3 Accounts.

Double-click on the New Account icon.

Next enter in your Amazon account Access and Secret keys, select SSL if you want, then click the Test Connection button.

Provided everything was entered correctly, you’ll see the Connection Success screen, just close out of it.

Continue…

Images and Info from: HowtoGeek

Why Cloud Computing Will Never Be Free

cloudtweaks — Thu, 27 May 2010 16:43:23 +0000

The last time the IT industry delivered outsourced shared-resource computing to the enterprise was with timesharing in the 1980s when it evolved to a high art, delivering the reliability, performance, and service the enterprise demanded. Today, cloud computing is poised to address the needs of the same market, based on a revolution of new technologies, significant unused computing capacity in corporate data centers, and the development of a highly capable Internet data communications infrastructure. The economies of scale of delivering computing from a centralized, shared infrastructure have set the expectation among customers that cloud computing costs will be significantly lower than those incurred from providing their own computing. Together with the reduced deployment costs of open source software and the perfect competition characteristics of remote computing, these expectations set the stage for fierce pressure on cloud providers to continuously lower prices.

This pricing pressure results in a commoditization of cloud services that deemphasizes enterprise requirements such as guaranteed levels of performance, uptime, and vendor responsiveness, much as has been the case with the Web hosting industry. Notwithstanding, it is the expectation of enterprise management that operating expenses be reduced through the use of cloud computing to replace new and existing IT infrastructure. This difference between expectation and what the industry can deliver at today’s nearzero price points represents a challenge, both technical and organizational, which will have to be overcome to ensure large-scale adoption of cloud computing by the enterprise.

The Essential Characteristics of Cloud Computing

This is where we come full circle and timesharing is reborn. The same forces are at work that made timesharing a viable option 30 years ago: the high cost of computing (far exceeding the cost of the physical systems), and the highly specialized labor needed to keep it running well. The essential characteristics of cloud computing that address these needs are:⁴

On-demand access. Rapid fulfillment of demand for computing and continuing ability to fulfill that demand as required.
Elasticity. Computing is provided in the amount required and disposed of when no longer needed.
Pay-per-use. Much like a utility, cloud resource charges are based on the quantity used.
Connectivity. All of the servers are connected to a high-speed network that allows data to flow to the Internet as well as between computing and storage elements.
Resource pooling. The cloud provider’s infrastructure is shared across some number of end customers, providing economies of scale at the computing and services layers
Abstracted infrastructure. The cloud end customer does not know the exact location or the type of computer(s) their applications are running on. Instead, the cloud provider provides performance metrics to guarantee a minimum performance level.
Little or no commitment. This is an important aspect of today’s cloud computing offerings, but as we will see here, interferes with delivery of the services the enterprise demands.

Continue… Credit to: Communications of the ACM

EC2 Site Architecture Diagrams – Cloud Computing Images

cloudtweaks — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:12:37 +0000

The following diagrams will show some of the common site architectures in the Cloud. Depending on your computer resource requirements and budget, RightScale provides you with the flexibility to create a custom architecture that provides the necessary performance and failover redundancy necessary to run your site in the Cloud. Several of the most common architectures are described below. Use one of the setups below as a model or easily customize a setup for your own purposes.

All-in-one Single Server Setup

Use one of the “All-in-one” ServerTemplates, such as the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) ServerTemplate to launch a single server that contains Apache, as well as your application and database.

Basic 4-Server Setup with EBS

This is the most common architecture on the cloud. Each front-end server acts as a load balancer and application server. You also have a master and slave database for redundancy and failover. Backups of your database are saved as EBS Snapshots.

Basic 4-Server Setup without EBS

If you do not require the persistent storage of EBS, you may consider using our standard MySQL-S3 setup, which saves regular backups to your S3 bucket. Each front-end server acts as a load balancer and application server. You also have a master and slave database for redundancy and failover. Backups of your database are saved as gziped (*.gz) dump files. You can use the same non-EBS, MySQL-S3 database setup in other architectures as well.

Intermediate 6-Server Setup

In the intermediate architecture, the two front end servers are used strictly as load balancers, so you can expand out the number of application servers.

Images and Source provided by: RightScale

Cloud Tools – Deploying Java Spring and Grails applications

cloudtweaks — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:09:05 +0000

Cloud Tools is a set of tools for deploying, managing and testing Java EE applications on Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and VMware environments. There are three main parts to Cloud Tools:

EC2Deploy – the core framework. This framework manages virtual instances (e.g. EC2), configures MySQL, Tomcat, Terracotta and Apache and deploys the application. See this blog entry for an overview.
Maven and Grails plugins that use EC2Deploy to deploy an application
Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that are configured to run Tomcat and work with EC2Deploy. See list of installed software.

NEW: Cloud Tools now has adaptors for vSphere and vCloud (Terremark vCloudExpress platform), see the blog entry.

Grails Plugin

The Grails plugin makes it easy to deploy a Grails application to the cloud. It takes care of configuring MySQL, Tomcat and Apache and deploys the application. The plugin provides many scripts including:

cloud-tools-deploy – deploy the web application
cloud-tools-describe – display information about the running EC2 instances
cloud-tools-redeploy – redeploys the application
cloud-tools-stop – terminates the instances

You can download the plugin from here. See GettingStartedWithTheCloudToolsGrailsPlugin for information about configuring the plugin.

Maven Plugin

The Maven plugin is an easy way to use Cloud Tools. Once you have configured the plugin in the pom.xml you can deploy your web application with “mvn cloudtools:deploy”. This goal will:

Launch the specified number of Amazon EC2 instances
Configure a MySQL master database: create the schema, and run your database initialization scripts
Configure zero or more MySQL slaves (optionally in a different availability zone)
Upload your web application to EC2
Configure one or more Tomcat servers and deploy your web application
Configure an Apache instance to load balance across the Tomcat servers

The Cloud Tools maven plugin also supports the following other goals:

cloudtools:jmeter – runs a load test
cloudtools:redeploy – redeploys the web application
cloudtools:dbsave – save a database snapshot in S3
cloudtools:dbrestore – restore the database from S3
cloudtools:clone – creates a copy of the cluster
cloudtools:describe – describes the cluster
cloudtools:list – lists the available clusters
cloudtools:stop – shutdown the cluster

See these instructions on using the Maven plugin.

Source: Cloud Foundry