Cloud Posts

This is a guest blog from Librato about Silverline. Silverline gives detailed information, presented in graphical form, on the actual usage of processor, memory and storage and network bandwidth at the application level. It also provides reliable estimates of application resource “demand,” which allows you to identify resource constraints as a potential source of performance issues and helps with capacity planning.

The Missing Link in Managing Cloud-Hosted Applications

Would you agree that one of the factors impacting the Quality of Service delivered by your applications is the availability of resources required for their execution? If you do, then you may wonder – as I do – why there aren’t more tools available to help you monitor and manage application resource consumption.

DevOps and operations teams use Cloud Resource Monitoring to keep track of the health and utilization of cloud resources, Real User Monitoring to ensure that their users experience the Quality of Service they expect, and Application Performance Management to find and fix performance issues in their applications.

What’s often missing is the ability to:

• Monitor and manage the use of resources at application level
• Ensure availability of resources
• Help in root cause analysis
• Improve resource utilization
• Do better capacity planning

Our Silverline Application Resource Management service fills this void by providing you detailed, application level data on the consumption of server resources (processor, memory, disk I/O and network I/O) and on the “demand” for these resources (i.e. how much of each resource an application would use if not restricted by resource availability). You can use this information to detect sudden changes and unusual patterns in resource consumption, identify situations in which applications are starved for resources, and to do capacity planning.

Silverline also allows you to guarantee availability of resources for individual applications or groups of applications, by setting resource quota. It guarantees that an application always receives resources up to its quota if it needs them but lets other applications use resources while it doesn’t need them. This makes it possible to run multiple applications on a server instance and guarantee that they will not interfere with each other, while at the same time improving the utilization of resources. It also allows you to make sure that critical applications (e.g. for collecting diagnostic data) are never starved for resources.

As a special case, you can use quota to let background workloads “harvest” spare resources: Simply set their resource quota to zero and they will only use resources not required by higher priority applications.

Silverline’s event handling feature allows you to set thresholds on resource consumption that can be used to send alarms or initiate automated actions. This allows you to receive early indications of problems like when an application’s resource consumption is exceeding normal levels or there is a significant gap between its resource use and resource demand. You can also take automated actions like killing rogue applications that consume too many resources.

If you’re looking for ways to improve the performance and availability of your SaaS or PaaS solution or to improve the utilization of your Softlayer cloud resources, give Silverline a try.

-Fred van den Bosch, Librato

The value of our cloud options here at SoftLayer have never been more noticeable than during the holiday seasons. Such a hectic time of the year can cause a lot of stress … Stress that can lead to human error on some of your most important projects, data and memories. Such a loss could result in weeks or even years of valuable time and memories gone.

In the past few months, I’ve gone through two major data-related incidents that I was prepared for, and I can’t imagine what I would have done if I didn’t have some kind of backups in place. In one instance, my backups were not very current, so I ended up losing two weeks worth of work and data, but every now and then, you hear horror stories of people losing (or having to pay a lot to restore) all of their data. The saddest part about the data loss is that it’s so easily preventable these days with prevalent backup storage platforms. For example, SoftLayer’s CloudLayer Storage is a reliable, inexpensive place to keep all of your valuable data so you’re not up a creek if you corrupt/lose your local versions somehow (like dropping a camera, issuing an incorrect syntax command or simply putting a thumb-drive though the washer).

That last “theoretical” example was in fact was one of the “incidents” I dealt with recently. A very important USB thumb-drive that I keep with me at all times was lost to the evil water machine! Because the security of the data was very important to me, I made sure to keep the drive encrypted in case of loss or theft, but the frequency of my backup schedule was the crack in my otherwise well thought data security and redundancy plan. A thumb drive is probably one of the best examples of items that need an automatic system or ritual to ensure data concurrency. This is a device we carry on us at all times, so it sees many changes in data. If this data is not properly updated in a central (secure and redundant) location, then all of our other efforts to take care of that data are wasted.

My the problem with my “Angel” (the name of the now-washed USB drive) was related to concurrency rather than security, and looking back at my mistake, I see how “The Cloud” would have served as a platform to better improve the way I was protecting my data with both of those point in mind. And that’s why my new backups-in-the-cloud practices let me sleep a little more soundly these days.

If you’re venturing out to fight the crowds of last-minute holiday shoppers or if you’re just enjoying the sights and sounds of the season, be sure your memories and keepsake digital property are part of a well designed SRCD (secure, redundant and concurrent data) structure. Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when setting up your system:

• Create a frequent back-up schedule
• Use at least two physically separate devices
• Follow your back-up schedule strictly
• Automate everything you can for when you forget to execute on the previous bullet*

*I’ve used a few different programs (both proprietary and non-proprietary) that allow an automatic back-up to be performed when you plug your “on the go” device into your computer.

I’ll keep an eye out for iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps that will allow for automatic transfers to a central location, and I’ll put together a fresh blog with some ideas when I find anything interesting and worth your attention.

Have a happy Holidays!

- Jonathan

With all of the cooking and eating going on around Thanksgiving, Summer’s Truffle Mac and Cheese blog inspired me to think back on any of the “expertise” I can provide for SoftLayer customers in the kitchen. One of the first things my mother taught me to cook was brisket. While it might not be as exotic as 3 Bars Barbeque, it’s pretty easy to make. Everyone who tastes it sings its praises and thinks it took forever to prepare, and while it does have to cook in the oven for about four hours, there are only five ingredients, so the “preparation” time is actually only around ten minutes. Since it’s not exactly a family secret, I don’t think I’ll get into any trouble for sharing it:

Easy-To-Make Brisket Ingredients

• 1 Brisket – I’d recommend having the majority (not all) of the fat trimmed off at the store
• 2 1/2 Cups of Ketchup – Buy the largest ketchup bottle and plan on using a little more than half
• 1 1/2 Cups of Water
• 1 Packet of Onion Soup Mix
• 1 Can of Tomato Paste (Optional, adds flavor)

Instructions

1. Pre-heat oven to 300 degrees
2. Mix all of the non-brisket ingredients and pour them on top of the brisket in a large roaster (one with a lid would be preferable)
3. Make sure the entire brisket is covered. Pick it up to get your other ingredients underneath.
4. Pop it into the oven for four hours at 300 degrees.
5. Take it out, let it cool, and enjoy!

That’s the basic, original recipe, but I’ve found a few ways to make it juicier along the way. One tip is to pull the brisket from the oven after about three and a half hours and slice it against the grain. If you have an electric knife, this is the perfect chance to use it, and if you don’t, this could be an excuse to get one. Put the brisket back in the roaster for another half hour, and you’ll love the results. Because ovens differ, just make sure it’s moist before you take it out to serve.

At this point, you’re probably asking yourself what a brisket recipe has to do with SoftLayer. If you’ve used our Build Your Own Cloud wizard, you might already see the similarity: You can put something together that seems dauntingly time consuming quickly and without breaking a sweat … And the end result is amazing. There are a few simple steps to making an impressive brisket, and it takes a few clicks to build a customized cloud instance with all the benefits of SoftLayer’s global network and support.

Too often, selecting a cloud instance involves more limitations than it does choices, so we wanted to make sure the BYOC service enabled customers the granularity to choose CPU, RAM, and storage configurations on newer, more powerful servers than our competition. Just like my tweak of the original recipe, we want customers to have the ability to tweak their cloud platform to provide the best application performance, cost efficiency, and availability for their specific needs.

If this blog left you hungry, you’ve got everything you need to make an amazing brisket. If you don’t have the ingredients (or the four hours) you need to make one now, you can try the quicker BYOC recipe:

SoftLayer Cloud Ordering Ingredients

• The device you’re using to read this blog.
• A list of what you want on your cloud instance.

Instructions

1. Visit SoftLayer’s Build Your Own Cloud page.
2. Select the options you want and submit your order.
3. Start using your custom cloud instance in less than 20 minutes!

Happy Building!

-Rachel

A month ago, Summer talked about how SoftLayer defies the laws of physics by being in several different places at the same time. With a worldwide network and data center footprint, that’s always going to be the case, but when we have several events going on in a given week, we’re even more dispersed. As Summer mentioned in her Server Challenge blog this morning, she traveled east to New York City for ad:tech with a few SLayers, and I joined a team that headed west for Cloud Expo West in Santa Clara, California.

We set up shop on the expo floor and had the opportunity to meet with interesting and interested attendees between session. In addition to our exhibit hall presence, SoftLayer had three SLayers featured in presentations, and the response to each was phenomenal.

Our first presenter was none other than SoftLayer CTO Duke Skarda. His presentation, “Not Your Grandpa’s Cloud,” was about dedicated servers and whether cloud computing may be surpassing that “grandpa” of the hosting industry. Joined by RightScale CEO Michael Crandell, Duke also announced our SoftLayer’s new relationship with RightScale. If you didn’t have a chance to join us, we have a treat for you … You can download Duke’s presentation from Sys-con!

Five minutes after Duke left the stage, SoftLayer Director of Product Innovation Marc Jones spoke to Cloud Expo attendees about “Building at Internet Scale in a Hosted Environment.” His focus was how businesses could enable technologies, design and architecture of Internet scale solutions in a hosted environment. He shared trends from SoftLayer customers and partners, explained what SoftLayer believes Internet-scale is from a technology perspective, and the products and services in the market that create a scalable solution.

On Day 3, SoftLayer Director of Corporate Analytics Francisco Romero presented a question to attendees: “How Smart is it to Build Your Own Cloud?” With concerns around security, hardware, software and flexibility, is a business better off going with a hosted solution over building its own cloud infrastructure. Spoiler alert: He showed how the hosted environment was head-and-shoulders over the in-house environment in most cases.

All in all, Cloud Expo West was an exemplary tradeshow for SoftLayer … Three fantastic speakers in two days driving traffic to our booth where we could share how SoftLayer has built our cloud and how our approach is part of a bigger effort to drive innovation in the world of hosting.

As Summer mentioned in her post, we want to see your smiling faces at our booths and in our presentations in the future, so bookmark the SoftLayer Event Calendar and start planning your trips to meet us in 2012!

-Natalie

This is a guest blog from ICC Global Hosting’s Mark Moeller. ICC’s Hosted Virtual Desktop delivers full-featured Windows desktop computing environments, including Microsoft Office, anti-virus, and data storage to any device, anywhere, anytime.

Accessing Desktop Apps Anytime, Anywhere, from Any Device

The computing world is changing rapidly – driven by the consumerization of applications, the demands for employees to be in an “always on” mode, and the revolution of mobile computing. End users have become App savvy and with the advent of the “there’s an app for that” generation applications that have become very easy for end users to install and run on their own. The computing platforms they use have become self-service in nature and new applications are now easy to find and no longer require IT to research, purchase, install, and manage. In fact, IT departments have lost control over what applications run on these devices posing a huge support problem and security threat.

In today’s economy organizations demand their employees to do more with smaller staffs forcing employees to be “always on” with e-mail and other work data now delivered to their desktops, smart phones, tablets, and home computers. People on average now access work data and applications from three devices with new choices of mobile devices available almost daily.

VDI Sticker Shock – With all of these changes many IT departments have considered virtual desktops as a solution to provide access to multiple platforms, remote access, and secured network stored data. Consultants and vendors have been trying to sell organizations virtual desktops as VDI, but most organizations suffer from sticker shock facing huge start-up costs and little or no economies of scale. Most organizations fail to see any potential ROI with VDI solutions and end up tabling the decision for next year’s budget.

Read the rest of ICC’s Guest Blog! »

This guest blog was contributed by Wendy Nather, Research Director, Enterprise Security Practice at The 451 Group. Her post comes on the heels of the highly anticipated launch of StillSecure’s Cloud SMS, and it provides some great context for the importance of security in the cloud. For more information about Cloud SMS, visit www.stillsecure.com and follow the latest updates on StillSecure’s blog, The Security Samurai.

If you’re a large enterprise, you’re in pretty good shape for the cloud: you know what kind of security you want and need, you have security staff who can validate what you’re getting from the provider, and you can hold up your end of the deal – since it takes both customer and provider working together to build a complete security program. Most of the security providers out there are building for you, because that’s where the money is; and they’re eager to work on scaling up to meet the requirements for your big business. If you want custom security clauses in a contract, chances are, you’ll get them.

But at the other end of the scale there are the cloud customers I refer to as being “below the security poverty line.” These are the small shops (like your doctor’s medical practice) that may not have an IT staff at all. These small businesses tend to be very dependent on third party providers, and when it comes to security, they have no way to know what they need. Do they really need DLP, a web application firewall, single sign-on, log management, and all the premium security bells and whistles? Even if you gave them a free appliance or a dedicated firewall VM, they wouldn’t know what to do with it or have anyone to run it.

And when a small business has only a couple of servers in a decommissioned restroom*, the provider may be able to move them to their cloud, but it may not be able to scale a security solution down far enough to make it simple to run and cost-effective for either side. This is the great challenge today: to make cloud security both effective and affordable, both above and below 10,000 feet, no matter whether you’re flying a jumbo airliner or a Cessna.

-Wendy Nather, The 451 Group

*True story. I had to run some there.

When we designed the CloudLayer Computing platform, our goal was to create an offering where customers would be able to customize and build cloud computing instances that specifically meet their needs: If you go to our site, you’re even presented with an opportunity to “Build Your Own Cloud.” The idea was to let users choose where they wanted their instance to reside as well as their own perfect mix of processor power, RAM and storage. Today, we’re taking the BYOC mantra one step farther by unveiling the local disk storage option for CloudLayer computing instances!

For those of you familiar with the CloudLayer platform, you might already understand the value of a local disk storage option, but for the uninitiated, this news presents a perfect opportunity to talk about the dynamics of the cloud and how we approach the cloud around here.

As the resident “tech guy” in my social circle, I often find myself helping friends and family understand everything from why their printer isn’t working to what value they can get from the latest and greatest buzzed-about technology. As you’d probably guess, the majority of the questions I’ve been getting recently revolve around ‘the cloud’ (thanks especially to huge marketing campaigns out of Redmond and Cupertino). That abstract term effectively conveys the intentional sentiment that users shouldn’t have to worry about the mechanics of how the cloud works … just that it works. The problem is that as the world of technology has pursued that sentiment, the generalization of the cloud has abstracted it to the point where this is how large companies are depicting the cloud:

As it turns out, that image doesn’t exactly illicit the, “Aha! Now I get it!” epiphany of users actually understanding how clouds (in the technology sense) work. See how I pluralized “clouds” in that last sentence? ‘The Cloud’ at SoftLayer isn’t the same as ‘The Cloud’ in Redmond or ‘The Cloud’ in Cupertino. They may all be similar in the sense that each cloud technology incorporates hardware abstraction, on-demand scalability and utility billing, but they’re not created in the same way.

If only there were a cloud-specific Declaration of Independence …

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all clouds are not equal, that they are endowed by their creators with certain distinct characteristics, that among these are storage, processing power and the ability to serve content. That to secure these characteristics, information should be given to users, expressed clearly to meet the the cloud’s users;

The Ability to Serve Content
Let’s unpack that Jeffersonian statement a little by looking at the distinct characteristics of every cloud, starting with the third (“the ability to serve content”) and working backwards. Every cloud lives on hardware. The extent to which a given cloud relies on that hardware can vary, but at the end of the day, you &nash; as a user – are not simply connecting to water droplets in the ether. I’ll use SoftLayer’s CloudLayer platform as a specific example of that a cloud actually looks like: We have racks of uniform servers – designated as part of our cloud infrastructure – installed in rows in our data centers. All of those servers are networked together, and we worked with our friends at Citrix to use the XenServer platform to tie all of those servers together and virtualize the resources (or more simply: to make each piece of hardware accessible independently of the rest of the physical server it might be built into). With that infrastructure as a foundation, ordering a cloud server on the CloudLayer platform simply involves reserving a small piece of that cloud where you can install your own operating system and manage it like an independent server or instance to serve your content.

Processing Power
Understanding the hardware architecture upon which a cloud is built, the second distinct characteristic of every cloud (“processing power”) is fairly logical: The more powerful the hardware used for a given cloud, the better processing performance you’ll get in an instance using a piece of that hardware.

You can argue about what software uses the least resources in the process of virtualizing, but apples-to-apples, processing power is going to be determined by the power of the underlying hardware. Some providers try to obfuscate the types of servers/processors available to their cloud users (sometimes because they are using legacy hardware that they wouldn’t be able to sell/rent otherwise), but because we know how important consistent power is to users, we guarantee that CloudLayer instances are based on 2.0GHz (or faster) processors.

Storage
We walked backward through the distinct characteristics included in my cloud-specific Declaration of Independence because of today’s CloudLayer Computing storage announcement, but before I get into the details of that new option, let’s talk about storage in general.

If the primary goal of a cloud platform is to give users the ability to scale instantly from 1 CPU of power to 16 CPUs of power, the underlying architecture has to be as flexible as possible. Let’s say your cloud computing instance resides on a server with only 10 CPUs available, so when you upgrade to a 16-CPU instance, your instance will be moved to a server with enough available resources to meet your need. To make that kind of quick change possible, most cloud platforms are connected to a SAN (storage area network) or other storage device via a back-end network to the cloud servers. The biggest pro of having this setup is that upgrading and downgrading CPU and RAM for a given cloud instance is relatively easy, but it introduces a challenge: The data lives on another device that is connected via switches and cables and is being used by other customers as well. Because your data has to be moved to your server to be processed when you call it, it’s a little slower than if a hard disk was sitting in the same server as the instance’s processor and RAM. For that reason, many users don’t feel comfortable moving to the cloud.

In response to the call for better-performing storage, there has been a push toward incorporating local disk storage for cloud computing instances. Because local disk storage is physically available to the CPU and RAM, the transfer of data is almost immediate and I/O (input/output) rates are generally much higher. The obvious benefit of this setup is that the storage will perform much better for I/O-intensive applications, while the tradeoff is that the setup loses the inherent redundancy of having the data replicated across multiple drives in a SAN (which, is almost like its own cloud … but I won’t confuse you with that right now).

The CloudLayer Computing platform has always been built to take advantage of the immediate scalability enabled by storing files in a network storage device. We heard from users who want to use the cloud for other applications that they wanted us to incorporate another option, so today we’re happy to announce the availability of local disk storage for CloudLayer Computing! We’re looking forward to seeing how our customers are going to incorporate cloud computing instances with local disk storage into their existing environments with dedicated servers and cloud computing instances using SAN storage.

If you have questions about whether the SAN or local disk storage option would fit your application best, click the Live Chat icon on SoftLayer.com and consult with one of our sales reps about the benefits and trade-offs of each.

We want you to know exactly what you’re getting from SoftLayer, so we try to be as transparent as we can when rolling out new products. If you have any questions about CloudLayer or any of our other offerings, please let us know!

-@nday91

This is a guest blog from Dave Jilk of Standing Cloud, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in automating cloud application deployment and streamlining management.

Standing Cloud’s Application Layer for the SoftLayer Cloud

When we first came across the SoftLayer Cloud, we were impressed by the breadth of what it allowed the user to do through a web browser. Beyond the basic infrastructure capabilities of provisioning servers and storage (that you can find from other providers), the SoftLayer console and API allow full access to the networking, security, and server console capabilities of the system. It’s as though you can take over the mind of a network administrator and have him or her do your bidding.

Read the rest of Dave’s Guest Blog! »

In a new SoftLayer series, Duke Skarda sits in the hot seat to answer some hot topic hosting questions from Kevin Hazard.

This session’s topic: Hybrid Computing.

Who would you like to see in the hot seat, and what hot topics do you want to hear about?

-Duke

What does “the cloud” mean to you right now? Does it mean “the Internet?” Is it how you think of outsourced IT? Does the nephologist in you immediately think of the large cumulonimubus creeping up the sky from the South? We read about how businesses are adopting cloud-this and cloud-that, but under many definitions we have been using cloud servers for years.

A couple years ago, Kevin wrote a post that gave a little context to the “cloud” terminology confusion:

The Internet is everywhere and the Internet is nowhere.

The fact that we can’t point to anything tangible to define the Internet forces us to conceptualize an image that helps us understand how this paradox is possible. A lot of information is sitting around on servers somewhere out there, and when we connect to it, we have access to it all. Cloud, web, dump truck, tubes … It doesn’t matter what we call it because we’re not defining the mechanics, we’re defining the concepts.

For years, hosting companies have offered compute resources over the Internet for a monthly fee, but as new technologies emerge, it seems we have painted ourselves into a corner with our terminology. For the sake of this discussion, we’ll differentiate dedicated servers as single-tenant hardware-dependent servers and cloud servers as multi-tenant hardware-independent servers.

Dedicated servers have some advantages that cloud servers typically haven’t had in the past. If you wanted full OS support and control, predictable CPU and disk performance, big Internet pipes, multiple storage options and more powerful networking support, you were in the market for a dedicated server. If your priorities were hourly rates, instant turn-up, image-based provisioning and control via API, cloud servers were probably at the top of your shopping list.

Some competitive advantages of one over the other are fading: SoftLayer has a bare metal product that supports hourly rates for dedicated resources, and we can reliably turn up dedicated servers in under 2 hours. If you select a ready-made box, you might have it up and running in under 30 minutes. Our development team has also built a great API that allows unparalleled control for our dedicated servers.

On the flip-side, our cloud servers are supported just like our dedicated servers: You get the same great network, the ability to connect with other cloud and dedicated instances via private network, and predictable CPU usage with virtual machines pinned to a specific number of CPU cores.

Soon enough, deltas between dedicated performance and cloud functionality will be virtually eliminated and we’ll all be able to adopt a unified understanding of what this “cloud” thing is, but until then, we’ll do our best to express the competitive advantages of each platform so you can incorporate the right solutions for your needs into your infrastructure.

Engage …

-Duke