Posts Tagged ‘services’

I like to think that we are beyond ‘defining’ cloud, but what I find in reality is that we still argue over basics. I have conversations in which people still delineate things like “hosting” from “cloud computing” based degrees of single-tenancy. Now I’m a stickler for definitions just like the next pedantic software-religious guy, but when it comes to arguing minutiae about cloud computing, it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees. Instead of discussing underlying infrastructure and comparing hypervisors, we’ll look at two well-cited definitions of cloud computing that may help us unify our understanding of the model.

I use the word “model” intentionally there because it’s important to note that cloud computing is not a “thing” or a “product.” It’s a way of doing business. It’s an operations model that is changing the fundamental economics of writing and deploying software applications. It’s not about a strict definition of some underlying service provider architecture or whether multi-tenancy is at the data center edge, the server or the core. It’s about enabling new technology to be tested and fail or succeed in blazing calendar time and being able to support super-fast growth and scale with little planning. Let’s try to keep that in mind as we look at how NIST and Gartner define cloud computing.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a government organization that develops standards, guidelines and minimum requirements as needed by industry or government programs. Given the confusion in the marketplace, there’s a huge “need” for a simple, consistent definition of cloud computing, so NIST had a pretty high profile topic on its hands. Their resulting Cloud Computing Definition describes five essential characteristics of cloud computing, three service models, and four deployment models. Let’s table the service models and deployment models for now and look at the five essential characteristics of cloud computing. I’ll summarize them here; follow the link if you want more context or detail on these points:

• On-Demand Self Service: A user can automatically provision compute without human interaction.
• Broad Network Access: Capabilities are available over the network.
• Resource Pooling: Computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned.
• Rapid Elasticity: Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released.
• Measured Service: Resource usage can be monitored, controlled and reported.

The characteristics NIST uses to define cloud computing are pretty straightforward, but they are still a little ambiguous: How quickly does an environment have to be provisioned for it to be considered “on-demand?” If “broad network access” could just mean “connected to the Internet,” why include that as a characteristic? When it comes to “measured service,” how granular does the resource monitoring and control need to be for something to be considered “cloud computing?” A year? A minute? These characteristics cast a broad net, and we can build on that foundation as we set out to create a more focused definition.

For our next stop, let’s look at Gartner‘s view: “A style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using Internet infrastructure.” From a philosophical perspective, I love their use of “style” when talking about cloud computing. Little differentiates the underlying IT capabilities of cloud computing from other types of computing, so when looking at cloud computing, we really just see a variation on how those capabilities are being leveraged. It’s important to note that Gartner’s definition includes “elastic” alongside “scalable” … Cloud computing gets the most press for being able to scale remarkably, but the flip-side of that expansion is that it also needs to contract on-demand.

All of this describes a way of deploying compute power that is completely different than the way we did this in the decades that we’ve been writing software. It used to take months to get funding and order the hardware to deploy an application. That’s a lot of time and risk that startups and enterprises alike can erase from their business plans.

How do we wrap all of those characteristics up into unified of definition of cloud computing? The way I look at it, cloud computing is as an operations model that yields seemingly unlimited compute power when you need it. It enables (scalable and elastic) capacity as you need it, and that capacity’s pricing is based on consumption. That doesn’t mean a provider should charge by the compute cycle, generator fan RPM or some other arcane measurement of usage … It means that a customer should understand the resources that are being invoiced, and he/she should have the power to change those resources as needed. A cloud computing environment has to have self-service provisioning that doesn’t require manual intervention from the provider, and I’d even push that requirement a little further: A cloud computing environment should have API accessibility so a customer doesn’t even have to manually intervene in the provisioning process (The customer’s app could use automated logic and API calls to scale infrastructure up or down based on resource usage).

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak at Cloud Connect Chicago, and I shared SoftLayer’s approach to cloud computing and how it has evolved into a few distinct products that speak directly to our customers’ needs:

The session was about 45 minutes, so the video above has been slimmed down a bit for easier consumption. If you’re interested in seeing the full session and getting into a little more detail, we’ve uploaded an un-cut version here.

-Duke

We invite each of our featured SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partners to contribute a guest post to the SoftLayer Blog, and this week, we’re happy to welcome David Mytton, Founder of ServerDensity. Server Density is a hosted server and website monitoring service that alerts you when your website is slow, down or back up.

5 Ways to Minimize Downtime During Summer Vacation

It’s a fact of life that everything runs smoothly until you’re out of contact, away from the Internet or on holiday. However, you can’t be available 24/7 on the chance that something breaks; instead, there are several things you can do to ensure that when things go wrong, the problem can be managed and resolved quickly. To help you set up your own “get back up” plan, we’ve come up with a checklist of the top five things you can do to prepare for an ill-timed issue.

1. Monitoring

How will you know when things break? Using a tool like Server Density — which combines availability monitoring from locations around the world with internal server metrics like disk usage, Apache and MySQL — means that you can be alerted if your site goes down, and have the data to find out why.

Surprisingly, the most common problems we see are some that are the easiest to fix. One problem that happens all too often is when a customer simply runs out of disk space in a volume! If you’ve ever had it happen to you, you know that running out of space will break things in strange ways — whether it prevents the database from accepting writes or fails to store web sessions on disk. By doing something as simple as setting an alert to monitor used disk space for all important volumes (not just root) at around 75%, you’ll have proactive visibility into your server to avoid hitting volume capacity.

Additionally, you should define triggers for unusual values that will set off a red flag for you. For example, if your Apache requests per second suddenly drop significantly, that change could indicate a problem somewhere else in your infrastructure, and if you’re not monitoring those indirect triggers, you may not learn about those other problems as quickly as you’d like. Find measurable direct and indirect relationships that can give you this kind of early warning, and find a way to measure them and alert yourself when something changes.

2. Dealing with Alerts

It’s no good having alerts sent to someone who isn’t responding (or who can’t at a given time). Using a service like Pagerduty allows you to define on-call rotations for different types of alerts. Nobody wants to be on-call every hour of every day, so differentiating and channeling alerts in an automated way could save you a lot of hassle. Another huge benefit of a platform like Pagerduty is that it also handles escalations: If the first contact in the path doesn’t wake up or is out of service, someone else gets notified quickly.

Click to read ServerDensity’s last three tips. »

When I present about the SoftLayer API at conferences and meetups, I often use an image that shows how many of the different services in the API are interrelated and connected. As I started building the visual piece of my presentation, I noticed a curious “coincidence” about the layout of the visualization:

What does that look like to you?

You might need to squint your eyes and tilt your head or “look beyond the image” like it’s one of those “Magic Eye” pictures, but if you’re a geek like me, you can’t help but notice a striking resemblance to one of the most iconic images from Star Wars:

The SoftLayer API looks like the Death Star.

The similarity is undeniable … The question is whether that resemblance is coincidental or whether it tells us we can extrapolate some kind of fuller meaning as in light of the visible similarities. I can hear KHazzy now … “Phil, While that’s worth a chuckle and all, there is no way you can actually draw a relevant parallel between the SoftLayer API and The Death Star.” While Alderaan may be far too remote for an effective demonstration, this task is no match for the power of the Phil-side.

Challenge Accepted.

The Death Star: A large space station constructed by the Galactic Empire equipped with a super-laser capable of destroying an entire planet.

The SoftLayer API: A robust set of services and methods which provide programmatic access to all portions of the SoftLayer Platform capable of automating any task: administrative, configuration or otherwise.

Each is the incredible result of innovation and design. The construction of the Death Star and creation of the SoftLayer API took years of hard work and a significant investment. Both are massive in scale, and they’re both effective and ruthless when completing their objectives.

The most important distinction: The Death Star was made to destroy while the SoftLayer API was made to create … The Death Star was designed to subjugate a resistance force and destroy anything in the empire’s way. The SoftLayer API was designed to help customers create a unified, automated way of managing infrastructure; though in the process, admittedly that “creation” often involves subjugating redundant, compulsory tasks.

The Death Star and the SoftLayer API can both seem pretty daunting. It can be hard to find exactly what you need to solve all of your problems … Whether that be an exhaust port or your first API call. Fear not, for I will be with you during your journey, and unlike Obi-Wan Kenobi, I’m not your only hope. There is no need for rebel spies to acquire the schematics for the API … We publish them openly at sldn.softlayer.com, and we encourage our customers to break the API down into the pieces of functionality they need.

-Phil (@SoftLayerDevs)

As a bit of an introduction, I began my career as a GSP and hosted LAMP sites with WHM for SMBs … NBD. If you’re not fluent in “Tech Geek Acronym,” that sentence may as well be written in Greek. If I were to de-acronym it, I’d say, “I began my career as a Game Service Provider” and hosted Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP sites with Web Host Managed for Small- and Medium-sized Businesses … no big deal.” For many, the humble acronym is a cornerstone of what it means to be a true techie. Stringing together dozens of three-letter abbreviations (TLAs) to compose semi-coherent sentences would seem to demonstrate your mastery of technology … The problem is that if the reader of that sentence doesn’t have the context you have, it’s not very easy to easily get up to speed.

Every profession has their collection of acronyms. The little expressions serve as a verbal and written short hand for people who toil daily with the topics of their trade. I’m proud to confess that I’ve been using these minute medleys of letters for over twelve years. Given that I work on the Internet, I’ve been exposed to hundreds of acronyms in the fields of technology, business and management, and in my experience, I’ve had to break through several acronym “barriers” to get in the know. Because I happen to interact with customers every day as the manager of SoftLayer’s technical support department, I’ve encountered a few “Can you tell means?” responses, so I thought I’d write a quick blog post to clarify some of the common acronyms you may see in the SoftLayer vernacular.

Within support we have our CSTs (customer support technicians) and CSAs (customer support admins) who, with the help of SBTs (server build technicians), manage our massive fleet of servers. SBTs are the hands and eyes of our data centers, working closely with the hardware to ensure your server is online and operating in peak condition. The CSTs and CSAs are focused on the software and services that power your websites and applications.

Beyond employee title acronyms, you’ll probably see a collection of terms that describe the products and services that we manage. In support, we receive questions about accessing servers or CCIs (cloud computing instances) using KVM (Keyboard, Video and Mouse) or IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) through our VPN (Virtual Private Network). Once connected to our back-end network through a SSL (Secure Socket Layer), PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunnel Protocol) or IPSEC (Internet Protocol Security) VPN, you have access to services such as DNS (Domain Name Service), NAS (Network Attached Storage) or iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface). Finally, while discussing our network, I often refer to http://www.softlayer.com/diagrams/pod-network-diagram/dal05 to show the difference between a VER (VPN Edge Router) and a BCS (Back-end Customer Switch).

If you run across an acronym you don’t understand in a ticket, please let us know so we can share its full meaning … By using these shortened terms, our team can provider faster service (and you can read their responses quicker). I know that seeing all the bold TLAs above may seem a little off-putting initially, but as you have a chance to read them in the context of some of the other acronyms you already know, I hope you have an “Aha!” moment … Like finding the Rosetta Stone or the Code of Hammurabi. Given the quick glance at the terms above, if you want to learn more about one of the TLAs in particular, leave a comment below, and we’ll respond in another comment with details.

CBNO

-Chris

This is a guest blog from Jason Abate of Panopta, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in monitoring your servers and managing outages with tools and resources designed to help minimize the impact of outages to your online business.

5 Server Monitoring Best Practices

Prior to starting Panopta, I was responsible for the technology and operations side of a major international hosting company and worked with a number of large online businesses. During this time, I saw my share of major disasters and near catastrophes and had a chance to study what works and what doesn’t when Murphy’s Law inevitably hits.

Monitoring is a key component of any serious online infrastructure, and there are a wide range of options when it comes to monitoring tools — from commercial and open-source software that you install and manage locally to monitoring services like Panopta. The best solution depends on a number of criteria, but there are five major factors to consider when making this decision.

Read the rest of Panopta’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from Gleb Arshinov of Acunote, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in online project management and Scrum software.

Implementing Project Management in Your Business

Project management has a bit of a stigma for being a little boring. In its simplest form, project management involves monitoring and reporting progress on a given initiative, and while it sounds simple, it’s often an afterthought … if it’s ever a thought at all. Acunote is in the business of making project management easy and accessible for businesses of all sizes.

I’ve been in and around project management for years now, and while I could talk your ear off about Acunote, I’d rather share a few “Best Practices” for incorporating project management in your business. As you begin to understand how project management principles can be incorporated into your day-to-day activities, you’ll be in a better position to understand the value proposition of tools like Acunote.

Read the rest of Acunote’s Guest Blog! »

One of the many perks of being a SoftLayer customer is having access to your own private network. Perhaps you started out with a server in Dallas, later expanded to Seattle, and are now considering a new box in Washington, D.C. for complete geographic diversity. No matter the distance or how many servers you have, the private network bridges the gaps between you, your servers, and SoftLayer’s internal services by bringing all of these components together into a secure, integrated environment that can be accessed as conveniently as if you were sitting right in the data center.

As if our cutting-edge management portal and API weren’t enough, SoftLayer offers complimentary VPN access to the private network. This often-underestimated feature allows you to integrate your SoftLayer private network into your personal or corporate LAN, making it possible to access your servers with the same security and flexibility that a local network can offer.

Let’s look at a few of the many ways you can take advantage of your VPN connection:

1. Unmetered Bandwidth

Unlike the public network that connects your servers to the outside world, the traffic on your private network is unlimited. This allows you to transfer as much data as you wish from one server to another, as well as between your servers and SoftLayer’s backup and network storage devices – all for free.

When you use the VPN service to tap into the private network from your home or office, you can download and upload as much data as you want without having to worry about incurring additional charges.

2. Secure Data Transfer

Because your VPN connection is encrypted, all traffic between you and your private network is automatically secure — even when transferring data over unencrypted protocols like FTP.

3. Protect Sensitive Services

Even with strong passwords, leaving your databases and remote access services exposed to the outside world is asking for trouble. With SoftLayer, you don’t have to take these risks. Simply configure sensitive services to only listen for connections from your private network, and use your secure VPN to access them.

If you run Linux or BSD, securing your SSH daemon is as easy as adding the line ListenAddress a.b.c.d to your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file (replace a.b.c.d with the IP address assigned to your private network interface)

4. Lock Down Your Server in Case of Emergency

In the unfortunate event of a security breach or major software bug, SoftLayer allows you to virtually “pull the plug” on your server, effectively cutting off all communication with the outside world.

The difference with the competition? Because you have a private network, you can still access your server over the VPN to work on the problem – all with the peace of mind that your server is completely off-limits until you’re ready to bring it back online.

5. Remote Management

SoftLayer’s dedicated servers sport a neat IP management interface (IPMI) which takes remote management to a whole new level. From reboots to power supply control to serial console and keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) access, you can do anything yourself.

Using tools like SuperMicro’s IPMIView, you can connect to your server’s management interface over the VPN to perform a multitude of low-level management tasks, even when your server is otherwise unreachable. Has your server shut itself off? You can power it back on. Frozen system? Reboot from anywhere in the world. Major crash? Feeling adventurous? Mount a CD-ROM image and use the KVM interface to install a new operating system yourself.

This list is just the beginning. Once you’ve gotten a taste of the infinite possibilities that come with having out-of-band access to your hosted environment, you’ll never want to go back.

Now, go have some fun!

-Nick

All of my life I have been awkward in some way or another; afro in middle school, braces in high school, soccer player in a football loving town, not to mention that I have tripped at least once a day for roughly 11 years now. The most frustrating however, is that from middle school through high school, when clothing actually mattered, I was always too tall and too skinny to make any of the trendy threads fit me. Have you ever been able to find 28X33 jeans? I sure couldn’t. So I settled for 30X32’s and everyone enjoyed the visible cinch in my waist from my belt and a nice view of my sweet white tube socks shining from right below the cuff of my jeans.

When I was a kid, I could’ve sworn that we had a magical washing machine, because in the few instances when I actually found a nice small shirt that didn’t make me look like I had a blanket draped over my skinny bones, I went home, washed it like every normal human being does and presto chango, the drying machine would spit out a crop top circa 1980. Unless you are shopping for dress shirts or online, this predicament still haunts young, preteen boys such as my old self.

I’m sure that you can imagine my frustration as I always wished that someone would just offer more customization and options to provide me with a better fit. Instead of satisfying the customer, these companies limited their customer base by expecting the customer to bend and adjust to the options of the provider. But who is the servicer and who is supposed to getting serviced? Fortunately for those out there looking for cloud computing instances equipped with specific and varying RAM, CPU and storage needs, look no further. Softlayer Technologies now offers a revolutionary new service called Build Your Own Cloud (BYOC for short) that allows you to completely customize your cloud service and tailor it to your exact specifications. BYOC is featured in reviews by both Neovise and PCWorld. Neovise praises the new development stating that “This new ability to personalize the size and price of cloud servers can benefit every SoftLayer customer.” The impressive part of this development is that we are the first and only ones offering such a service and once again we are on the cutting edge of technology and leading the way for other hosting services to follow. After all, in the words of Nathan Day, Softlayer’s CTO, “One thing we’ve learned along the way is that one size doesn’t fit all. (PCWorld)” So when considering who can meet your needs the best, just remember that at Softlayer, you can have it your way.

-Scott

South by Southwest (“SXSW”) Interactive wrapped up last week, and one of the recurring themes was how location-based services (LBS) are changing the landscape of social media. When you port social media apps to the mobile phone, a world of LBSs are opened to you.

There are many use cases for LBS, many for social media, and the intersection of the two are even more interesting.

As seen with foursquare and Gowalla, bringing in LBS into a social application that lets you add tips/comments to restaurants, bars, etc. instantly turns it into a quick way to see where the “hot” places are currently in your area. Adding game mechanics (like badges) only makes foursquare even more addictive.

This is the new hotness.

The intersect between Location-based services and social media.

Is it any surprise that twitter started supporting location-based tweets this week? They’re simply keeping up with the trend. I expect to see location-appropriate contextual ads in applications on mobile phones more now. If you’re walking down 5th street, and you’ve given your application access to GPS information, advertisers would love to be able to tell you to drop by their shop on your way to wherever you’re headed.

ShopSavvy, for instance, could push notifications to customers using that app letting them know where deals are in their proximity.

There are detractors. Plenty of people still want to keep their location private. If you’re an at-risk person (in an abusive relationship, for instance) you should think twice before turning on location-based services. More and more websites/applications these days are starting to set very “open” defaults rather than restrictive defaults. As Danah Boyd recently said, we were once a people who kept information private and decided what to make public. Now we are more and more making data about ourselves public by default, and take more effort to decide what to make private.

Edit: A day after I posted this, I found an article by Kevin Nakao which provides more detail on location-based services. It is a great reader and can be found here.

I heard a story over the weekend, and somehow I translated it into a blog about SoftLayer. The story went something like this. “A horse walks into a bar…” Oops, wrong story.

A little background, as you may know it was really cold here last week in Texas terms and a sunny day here is usually not 20 degrees for the high. Now for the story, the person told me that he is not really adept at checking his gas gauge on a regular basis and for certain he would not think far enough ahead to get gas on the last warm day before the cold air hit. So he jumps in his car and takes off down the freeway. About 20 minutes into the drive he notices his low fuel light is on and he can’t remember the last time he filled up or approximately how many miles he has driven. He has run dry on fuel a couple of times in the past and doesn’t want to risk it in the cold weather. He has no choice but to pull into the first station he sees and fill up the tank. As he is filling up he starts to think about how much cheaper the gas is closer to his house and how much extra he will be paying for his lack of attention. He makes a mental note that in 2010 he is going to pay more attention to detail and be a little more on top of things going forward.

Has this ever happened to you? Not just with fuel, but how about in technology? How many times have you “jumped” in to a new provider and not checked the gauges? How many times has your hosting provider run out of fuel on you? How much did that down time cost you? Was it more expensive because you just had to do whatever it took to get back up and running? What if you had planned ahead and had better disaster recovery scenarios in place? Could you have same time, money and effort?

Did you know that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again the same way expecting different results? How can you stay with a failing provider if they are insane? How can you keep using CAPEX for equipment that is obsolete the minute you take it out of the box? How can you keep running your site, application or database without a good backup policy? You still haven’t added that next piece of redundancy, why not? All these bad habits that you continue to carry from year to year have to go! These are no different than eating too much chocolate! That is the habit I am giving up in 2010, what is yours?

Make 2010 different. Give us a call.