Posts Tagged ‘Cloud’

At my house, we share a single iTunes account because as much as I hate to admit it … I listen to the same music as my 11-year-old on occasion, so why buy the same music twice? I have my iPhone setup to automatically sync via any wireless connection, so I occasionally get new apps when someone else in the house downloads something.

Last week, my 8-year-old handed me his iPod and said, “Dad, can you enter the password so I can install BloodnGuns?” No way. He went through three or four reasons that he thought he needed the game, and I just went about my business. A couple of minutes later, he hands me the iPod again and says, “Dad, can you enter the password so I can install Temple Run?” Being a much tamer game, I said I would, but (knowing my son) I followed that up by saying, “Just remember: Anything you install goes to my iPhone, too.” If I entered the password for him for Temple Run, he would be authenticated and could then get BloodnGuns, so I just wanted to remind him that I was born at night, not last night.

The sneaky little guy looked up to me and grinned, “Oh yea, ‘cuz of that cloudamajigger thing.”

Once I finished laughing, I asked him what he meant by Cloudamajigger, and before he could answer, I told him to wait … I wanted to document how he would describe “The Cloud.” With two other kids at home, I thought it might be an interesting focus group of the way kids are learning about technology, so I made it a family project.

I asked each of them three questions and told them to email their answers to me”

1. What is “The Cloud?”
2. Where does “The Cloud” live?
3. What is SoftLayer?

Here are the responses:

The 6-year-old

1. The cloud shoots out a ball and the cloud is awesome!
2. In the sky. It is made out of water.
3. Where dad works, I think he makes monitors.

The 8-year-old

1. It’s a cloud in the sky and they shot a satellite in it. And they could see all the things you need to see on the internet.
2. See number 1 (Yes, he really typed that).
3. Where dad works, he works to make the Internet, and the Internet makes him work.

The 11-year-old

1. It is a group of people where when you post something everyone will be able to see it.
2. I don’t know.
3. A company.

You can see that the 11-year-old is darn close to those wonderful teenage years with that loquacious participation … Wish me luck!

I ask these same questions of people at conferences I attend and get generally the same answers as above. We can write reams of descriptions of the cloud, but in my world, it’s simply “The Cloudamajigger Thing.”

How would you answer those three questions?

-@Skinman454

As you may have read in one of my previous posts, SoftLayer partners with various startup accelerator programs around the world. This gives us the incredible opportunity to get up close and personal with some of the brightest entrepreneurs in the tech industry. Because SoftLayer grew out of a classic startup environment, we have a passion for helping new companies achieve their goals. From C-level execs all the way down the chain, we’re committed to finding the best innovators out there and mentoring them on their way to success.

We’re planning a pretty big public debut for the SoftLayer startup program in the coming months, but we want to start introducing you to some of the killer startup companies we already are working with. Today’s incredible business: Distil.

Distil is currently enrolled in the TechStars Cloud Accelerator program, where SoftLayer CSO George Karidis, CTO Duke Skarda, and I serve as mentors. After meeting the guys at Distil, I couldn’t wait to get them set up with us as well.

Here’s a quick insight into the company from a quick Q&A with the brains of the operation, Rami Essaid, Founder and CEO of Distil:

In my short conversation with Rami, I could hear his passion. That’s exactly what we’re looking for in companies who join the SoftLayer startup program. We can’t wait to see what the future holds for Distil.

If you enjoy reading about cool new startups, bookmark the Startups page here on the SoftLayer Blog or subscribe to the “Startups” RSS feed to meet some of the most badass startups in the world.

Calling All Startups!

Companies in our program receive mentoring, best practices advice, industry insight, and tangible resources including:

• A $1,000 per month credit for dedicated hosting, cloud hosting or any kind of hybrid hosting setup
• Advanced infrastructure help and advice
• A dedicated Senior Account Representative
• Marketing support

If you’re interested in joining our program and getting the help you deserve, shoot me an email, and we’ll help you start the application process.

-@PaulFord

This is a guest blog from our featured Technology Partners Marketplace company, Cloudant. Cloudant enables you to build next-generation data-driven applications without having to worry about developing, managing, and scaling your data layer.

Cloudant: Data Layer for the Big Data Era

The recipe for big data app success: Start small. Iterate fast. Grow to epic proportions.

Unfortunately, most developers’ databases come up short when they try to simultaneously “iterate fast” and “grow to epic proportions” — those two steps are most often at odds. I know … I’ve been there. In a recent past life, I attacked petabyte-per-second data problems as a particle physicist at the Large Hadron Collider together with my colleagues and Cloudant co-founders, Alan Hoffman and Adam Kocoloski. Here are some lessons we learned the hard way:

1. Scaling a database yourself is brutally hard (both application level sharding and the master-slave model). It is harder with SQL than it is with NoSQL databases, but either way, the “scale it yourself” approach is loaded with unknowns, complications and operational expense.
2. Horizontal scaling on commodity hardware is a must. We got very good at this and ended up embedding Apache CouchDB behind a horizontal scaling framework to scale arbitrarily and stay running 24×7 with a minimal operational load.
3. The data layer must scale. It should be something that applications grow into, not out of.

That last point inspired Alan, Adam and me to co-found Cloudant.

What is Cloudant?
Cloudant is a scalable data layer (as a service) for Big Data apps. Built on CouchDB, JSON, and MapReduce, it lets developers focus on new features instead of the drudgery of growing or migrating databases. The Cloudant Data Layer is already big: It collects, stores, analyzes and distributes application data across a global network of secure, high-performance data centers, delivering low-latency and non-stop data access to users no matter where they’re located. You get to focus on your code; we’ve got data scalability and availability covered for you.

Scaling Your App on Cloudant
Cloudant is designed to support fast app iteration by developers. It’s based on the CouchDB NoSQL database where data is encapsulated and transferred as JSON documents. You don’t need to design and redesign SQL data models or migrate databases in order to create new app features. You don’t need to write object-relational mapping code either. The database resides behind an HTTP layer and provides a rich permission model, so you can access, secure and share your data via a RESTful API.

Your app is a tenant within a multi-tenant data layer that is already big and scalable. You get a URL end point for your data layer, get data in and out of it via HTTP, and we scale and secure it around the globe. Global data distribution and intelligent routing minimizes latency between your users and the data, which can add 100s of milliseconds per request (we’ve measured!). Additionally, Cloudant has an advanced system for prioritizing requests so that apps aren’t affected by ‘noisy neighbors’ in a multi-tenant system. We also offer a single-tenant data layer to companies who want it — your very own white-labeled data cloud. As your data volume and IO requests rise (or fall), Cloudant scales automatically, and because your data is replicated to multiple locations, it’s always available. Start small and grow to epic proportions? Check.

Other Data Management Gymnastics
The Cloudant Data Layer also makes it easy to add advanced functionality to your apps:

• Replicate data (all of it or sub-sets) to data centers, computers or even mobile devices for local processing (great for analytics) or off-line access (great for mobile users). Re-synching is automatic.
• Perform advanced analytics with built-in MapReduce and full-text indexing and search.
• Distribute your code with data — Cloudant can distribute and serve any kind of document, even HTML5 and other browser-based code, which makes it easy to scale your app and move processing from your back-end to the browser.

Why We Run on SoftLayer
Given the nature of our service, people always ask us where we have our infrastructure, and we’re quick to tell them we chose SoftLayer because we’re fanatical about performance. We measured latencies for different data centers run by other cloud providers, and it’s no contest: SoftLayer provides the lowest and most predictable latencies. Data centers that are thousands of miles apart perform almost as if they are on the same local area network. SoftLayer’s rapidly expanding global presence allows Cloudant to replicate data globally throughout North America, Europe and Asia (with plans to continue that expansion as quickly as SoftLayer can build new facilities).

The other major draw to SoftLayer was the transparency they provide about our infrastructure. If you run a data layer, IO matters! SoftLayer provisions dedicated hardware for us (rather than just virtual machines), and they actually tell us exactly what hardware we are running on, so we can tweak our systems to get the most bang for our buck.

Get Started with Cloudant for Free
If you’re interested to see what the Cloudant Data Layer could do for your app, sign up at cloudant.com to get your FREE global data presence created in an instant.

-Michael Miller, Cloudant

The open-source model has significantly revolutionized not only the IT industry but the business world as well. In fact, it was one of the key “flatteners” Thomas Friedman covered in his tour de force on globalization — The World is Flat. The trend toward collaborating on online projects — including open-source software, blogs, and Wikipedia — remains one of “the most disruptive forces of all.”

The success of open-source projects like Linux, Ruby on Rails, and Android reveals the strength and diversity of having developers around the world contributing and providing feedback on code. The community becomes more than the sum of its parts, driving innovation and constant improvement. The case has been made for open source in and of itself, but a debate still rages over the developing case for businesses contributing to open source. Why would a business dedicate resources to the development of something it can’t sell?

The answer is simple and straightforward: Contributing to open source fosters a community that can inspire, create and fuel the innovation a business needs to keep providing its customers with even better products. It makes sense … Having hundreds of developers with different skills and perspectives working on a project can push that project further faster. The end result is a product that benefits the open-source community and the business world. The destiny of the community or the product cannot be defined by a single vendor or business; it’s the democratization of technology.

Open-Source Cloud Platforms
Today, there are several open-source cloud platforms vying for industry dominance. SoftLayer has always been a big proponent and supporter of open source, and we’ve been involved with the OpenStack project from the beginning. In fact, we just announced SoftLayer Object Storage, an offering based on OpenStack Object Storage (code-named Swift). We’ll provide code and support for Swift in hopes that it continues to grow and improve. The basic idea behind Swift Object Storage is to create redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of standardized servers to store petabytes of accessible data. I could go on and on about object storage, but I know Marc Jones has a blog specifically about SoftLayer Object Storage being published tomorrow, and I don’t want to steal too much of his thunder.

We have to acknowledge and embrace the heterogeneous nature of IT industry. Just as you might use multiple operating systems and hypervisors, we’re plan on working with a variety of open-source cloud platforms. Right now, we’re looking into supporting initiatives like Eucalyptus, and we have our ear to the street to listen to what our customers are asking for. Our overarching goal is to provide our customers with much-needed technologies that are advancing the hosting industry, and one of the best ways to get to that end is to serve the needs of the open-source community.

As I write this blog post, I can’t help but think of it in terms of a the Lord of Rings reference: “One ring to rule them all.” The idea that “one ring” is all we need to focus on as a hosting provider just doesn’t work when it comes to the open-source community … It all comes down to enabling choice and flexibility. We’ll keep investing in innovation wherever we can, and we’ll let the market decide which ring will rule where.

What open-source projects are you working on now? How can SoftLayer get involved?

-Matt

Bringing server hardware to a “Cloud Expo” is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. Why would anyone care about hardware? Isn’t “the cloud” a magical land where servers and data centers cease to exist and all that matters is that your hardware-abstracted hypervisor can scale elastically on demand?

You might be surprised how many attendees at Cloud Expo Europe expressed that sentiment in one way or another when SoftLayer showed up in London with the infamous Server Challenge last week. Based on many of the conversations I had with attendees, some of the most basic distinctions and characteristics of physical and virtual environments are widely misunderstood. Luckily, we had a nice little server rack to use as a visual while talking about how SoftLayer fits in (and stands out) when it comes to “the cloud.”

When we didn’t have a line of participants waiting to try their hand at our in-booth competition, we were able to use it to “show and tell” what a cloud hardware architecture might look like and what distinguishes SoftLayer from some of the other infrastructure providers in the industry. We’re able to show our network-within-a-newtork topology, we explain the pod concept of our data centers and how that streamlines our operations, and we talk about our system automation and how that speeds up the provisioning of both physical and virtual environments. Long-term memory is aided by the use of multiple senses, so when each attendee can see and touch what they’re hearing about in our booth, they have a much better chance to remember the conversation in the midst of dozens (if not hundreds) they have before and after they talk to us.

And by the time we finish using the Server Challenge as a visual, the attendee is usually ready to compete. As you probably noticed if you caught the Cloud Expo Europe album at Facebook.com/SoftLayer, the competition was pretty intense. In fact, the winning time of 1:08.16 was set just about twenty minutes before the conference ended … In the short video below, Phil presents the winner of the Cloud Expo Europe Server Challenge with his iPad 2 and asks for some insight about how he was able to pull off the victory:

Being the international debut of the Server Challenge, we were a bit nervous that the competition wouldn’t have as much appeal as we’ve seen in the past, but given the response we received from attendees, it’s pretty safe to say it’s not the last time you’ll see the Server Challenge abroad.

To all of the participants who competed last week, thanks for stopping by our booth, and we hope you’re enjoying your “torch” (if you beat the 2:00.00 flashlight-winning time)!

-@khazard

Our customers are not concerned with technology for technology’s sake. Information technology should serve a purpose; it should function as an integral means to a desired end. Understandably, our customers are focused, first and foremost, on their application architecture and infrastructure. They want, and need, the freedom and flexibility to design their applications to their specifications.

Many companies leverage the cloud to take advantage of core features that enable robust, agile architectures. Elasticity (ability to quickly increase or decrease compute capacity) and flexibility (choice such as cores, memory and storage) combine to provide solutions that scale to meet the demands of modern applications.

Another widely used feature of cloud computing is image-based provisioning. Rapid provisioning of cloud resources is accomplished, in part, through the use of images. Imaging capability extends beyond the use of base images, allowing users to create customized images that preserve their software installs and configurations. The images persist in an image library, allowing users to launch new cloud instances based their images.

But why should images only be applicable to virtualized cloud resources?

Toward that end, we’re excited to introduce SoftLayer Flex Images, a new capability that allows us to capture images of physical and virtual servers, store them all in one library, and rapidly deploy those images on either platform.

Physical servers now share the core features of virtual servers—elasticity and flexibility. With Flex Images, you can move seamlessly between and environments as your needs change.

Let’s say you’re running into resource limits in a cloud server environment—your data-intensive server is I/O bound—and you want to move the instance to a more powerful dedicated server. Using Flex Images, you can create an image of your cloud server and, extending our I/O bound example, deploy it to a custom dedicated server with SSD drives.

Conversely, a dedicated environment can be quickly replicated on multiple cloud instances if you want the scaling capability of the cloud to meet increased demand. Maybe your web heads run on dedicated servers, but you’re starting to see periods of usage that stress your servers. Create a Flex Image from your dedicated server and use it to deploy cloud instances to meet demand.

Flex Image technology blurs the distinctions—and breaks down the walls—between virtual and physical computing environments.

We don’t think of Flex Images as new product. Instead—like our network, our portal, our automated platform, and our globe-spanning geographic diversity—Flex Image capability is a free resource for our customers (with the exception of standard nominal costs in storing the Flex Images).

We think Flex Images represents not only great value, but also provides a further example of how SoftLayer innovates continually to bring new capabilities and the highest possible level of customer control to our automated services platform.

To sum up, here are some of the key features and benefits of SoftLayer Flex Images:

• Universal images that can be used interchangeably on dedicated or cloud systems
• Unified image library for archiving, managing, sharing, and publishing images
• Greater flexibility and higher scalability
• Rapid provisioning of new dedicated and cloud environments
• Available via SoftLayer’s management portal and API

In public beta, Flex Images are available now. We invite you to try them out, and, as always, we want to hear what you think.

-Marc

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

This is a guest blog from Mike Rabb, VP of business development for CopperEgg, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. CopperEgg provides real-time insight into the speed and availability of applications and services on cloud, virtual and physical server.

Knowing Your Apps Are Up and Running = Peace of Mind

Whether you are building or managing apps in the cloud, it’s important they stay up and running optimally. With cloud performance monitoring by CopperEgg you can do just that! RevealCloud Pro takes less than 10 seconds to install and provides performance monitoring so you can rest assured and know your apps are up and running smoothly.

With RevealCloud Pro you gain real-time insight into the speed and availability of services by monitoring CPU, network load, uptime, blocked processes, memory space, disk space and more. At the first sign of trouble, RevealCloud Pro can immediately alert you email, SMS or Pagerduty when performance in one or more areas is outside of normal ranges. You can even take action via a webhook. This enables you to uncover and correct performance issues often before the system goes down. In addition, historical tracking over the last 30 days enables you to uncover trends in performance and capacity that could otherwise go unnoticed.

With a rapidly growing customer base spanning over 50 countries, we know we are on to something good! Read what they have to say…

Customer Speak
Eduardo Fernandez, president of Shuttle Cloud, is a current Softlayer customer, and he shared a little about his experience with RevealCloud Pro:

“Our business is built in the cloud so monitoring performance is critical. With RevealCloud Pro, we have an easy to install and easy to use product that gives us everything we need to monitor our instances and ensure our systems are running optimally. I like the high level view RevealCloud provides of all instances on one screen so I can see the health of our systems at-a glance. By contrast, members of my team need to know in real-time if any of our instances are either not responsive or have a very high load, memory or processing issue. By receiving alerts as soon as an issue occurs via cell or email means we can address things immediately. We also use the historical tracking to monitor trends and look at activity during the overnight hours.”

In addition to cloud performance monitoring, RevealCloud Pro also works on servers located on premise, in the data center, or in virtual environments. RevealCloud Pro makes viewing multiple systems simple, and is ideal for those who want to compare performance among their servers with no hassle.

Offer for SoftLayer Customers
Experience RevealCloud for yourself … It’s addictive! Try RevealCloud Pro for free today.

- Mike Raab, CopperEgg

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

At times, the meticulous planning, logistics and execution around the SoftLayer Amsterdam data center launch has felt like a clandestine military operation. Today, the wait is over! We’re finally ready to go “LIVE” with our new state-of-the-art facility, along with network Points of Presence (PoPs) in Amsterdam, London and Frankfurt.

Having a European presence not only gives us proximity to customers but a foothold into the entire continent to help drive more innovation and deliver a better end-user experience. Currently more than 50 percent of our business is done outside North America, so our continued expansion into international markets is so vital to long-term growth.

Amsterdam is our “digital gateway” into Europe, extending our capabilities so customers can deploy, scale and manage their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions based on SoftLayer’s private network. Here’s a quick glimpse into what the new data center offers:

• Capacity for more than 16,000 servers
• Redundant network infrastructure
• Fully-automated platform
• Unique pod design concept

And here’s an actual glimpse into the data center (taken last week as we were putting the final touches on the racks … as you can see by the unbound cables at the backs of the server and the reference labels in the front):

We now have 13 data centers and 16 PoPs worldwide. Each data center functions independently, with distinct and redundant resources, while still being fully integrated into SoftLayer’s existing facilities. The end result for our customers is maximum accessibility, security, and control.

Our goal for Europe is to deliver the BEST cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting solutions on the continent … just like we do in North America and Asia. Ten months of painstaking research, work and preparation are done, and now our customers will get to reap the rewards.

What are you waiting for? Get your first server in Amsterdam! To celebrate the launch of the new facility, we’re offering our Triple Double special on servers provisioned in AMS01 for a limited time: Free double bandwidth, double RAM and double HDD!

Now it’s time to send our clandestine military operation’s “Go Live Crew” to an undisclosed location to start preparing for our next strategic infiltration …

-@quigleymar