Private cloud and importance of OpenStack

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Chintana

On my last post, I mentioned that it’s getting more important having a solid open source private cloud solution. Without a doubt OpenStack is getting very good traction from the community, which is a good thing. As it turns out, for WSO2 Stratos (open source middleware platform as a service for enterprise) a private cloud is a very important part. Specially when most popular public cloud offering, Amazon EC2 is having so many issues.

In WSO2 data center, we run the entire platform on UEC which ships Eucalyptus and we haven’t seen any of the problems we faced with EC2. Ok, private cloud – very important.

As a platform as a service, it’s important to be able to run on top of many IaaS vendors. Same goes for private cloud solutions. So, if Stratos is to be run on OpenStack the auto scaling code should be working. Stratos auto scales on Amazon EC2 that’s the API that’s been implemented. It’s always a pain to support a different API. OpenStack is said to have an EC2 SOAP API but I couldn’t find the extent to which operations are supported. I’ll definitely have a definitive answer if I contact one of the devs. This post however was not about that.

Mark Shuttleworth wrote an excellent blog about some concerns over OpenStack. As Mark correctly observes, it’s not the right thing to innovate at the API level. As eternal perfectionists it’s very easy to get into having cleaner and powerful APIs. Then again from a pragmatic perspective it’s energy that’s better put into where it matters.

WSO2 Stratos already have a working implementation that is tested. Effort of implementing and testing for another API is going to be time consuming. Whether it’s a bad or a good API when we have to get it running we’ll implement it nevertheless.

There are many concerns that needs more attention than having a good API. Higher IO and network throughput comes to the top of the list ‘cos that’s what it matters from a user’s perspective. It’s great that people debating this issue and looking to make a difference!

Posted in amazon, openstack, private cloud, stratos | 2 Comments

Amazon EC2 woes

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Chintana

Samisa has written a great blog about instability and unpredictability of Amazon EC2 when we ran WSO2 Stratos on it for months. Also, Azeez shares his views which is similar.

As a result of Amazon EC2 issues, mainly relating to unacceptable I/O and network delays hosted version of Stratos which we call StratosLive was so damn slow. Now it’s hosted on real hardware and the site is way way faster!

In the long run, enterprise-wide software are better off running on real hardware. Investing in more powerful machines. Or horizontally scale with a number of cheap machines. I can see Amazon’s appeal for a very short term computing problems. Or as Azeez mentioned, cloud bursting for one. Problems like this infamous article about Amazon EC2 trying to solve. Value you gain for paying exuberant bills for Amazon EC2 is very little at the end of the month. Specially when you’re running it long term.

IMO, this is one reason why a reliable private cloud infrastructure matters. In my experience open source private cloud software has a lot to improve. The free stuff by VMware is good for playing around. When you need I/O and network performance + provisioning, you have to pay big bucks.

Posted in amazon, ec2, iaas, private cloud | 1 Comment

WSO2Con 2011 – Must attend sessions

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Chintana

WSO2Con 2011 is just around the corner. This time packed with great set of sessions and lots of entertainment. So the question is what would be the top five talks that you would be attending to. That’s not easy. Samisa, Asanka and Jonathan has written about their favorite talks. Top five picks that I would be looking forward to hearing would be,

  • Using WSO2 ESB with SAP ERP (Retail) by Harsha – John Keels Holding PLC is one of the largest conglomerate in Sri Lanka. As a public liability company it’s really interesting how they went about adopting open source middleware products into their core business processes. As the person who spearheaded the effort and provided guidance for the team, Harsha’s talk is going to be interesting providing practical insights into the whole project
  • Building Cool Applications with WSO2 StratosLive by Shankar – Stratos provide a rich framework for building applications. Developers can concentrate on making cool applications without having to worry about a whole heap of infrastructure related aspects. They’re taken care of. Interesting to get a head start on application development from Shankar
  • Open Source Adoption in the Enterprise by Prajod – Enterprises have been a big no no for open source software. However, it’s been changing really fast. Going to be interesting hearing more insights into open source adoption from Prajod
  • Quality – The key to successful SOA by Charitha – Traditional software QA and testing what I read during my undergrad is from a different era. The projects those days usually ran for years. Now, project durations are measured in weeks. Project life cycles are getting shorter and you have to adjust testing and QA efforts accordingly. Have to adopt new methods. SOA testing is even tougher given plethora of possible integration scenarios with other products. Going to be great hearing QA and testing insights from Charitha
  • Develop, Test and Deploy your SOA Application through a Single Platform by Chathuri – I’ll confess. I’m not an ardent fan of Eclipse. When you compare it with IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse does feels like some one kicked you in the nuts. That’s just me ;-) I am thrilled to get to know more about Eclipse + Carbon Studio for application development for the WSO2 middleware platform

Full agenda.

Posted in wso2, wso2con | Leave a comment