Disqus - Latest Comments for LuisSala

Re: Contest: Tell Us About Your Road to the Cloud and Win a MacBook Air - ReadWriteCloud

Luis Sala — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 19:47:25 -0000

Limiting my initial comment to 300 words forced me to be as concise and terse as possible. Hopefully this reply will answer your questions.

There's plenty of discussion out there as to what constitutes "cloud". Not being a "purist", I subscribe to a hybrid of different notions but I'll narrow my response to the realm of "Infrastructure as a Service" aka "utility computing" as implemented by Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud and VMWare's vCloud among others.

In this context, "the cloud" doesn't exist without virtualization, though the opposite is not necessarily true (virtualization ≠ cloud).

If I were to distill it to one over-simplified statement it's thus:
virtualization + APIs + metered billing = cloud computing (IaaS)

You can discard the metered billing portion when dealing with so-called "private clouds", but what distinguishes this form of cloud computing from the form of virtualization we've grown accustomed to over the decade or two preceding the advent of cloud computing is that for the first time, you can programmatically control your infrastructure instead of having your IT staff run around in a datacenter provisioning new bare-metal servers every time you need to scale out your application.

This leads into your second question... The advantage of combining an easy-to-use API with virtualized infrastructure allows for a wide variety of tasks to be automated.

You stated the problem in your question when you said that you currently have to login and configure your servers. This, I'm sure, is a time-consuming process that I wouldn't doubt is the same for every new instance of your support application that you have to start up.

You can use a change-management tool or something similar to serve as a "database" of vital configuration information such as database connection details, firewall/load-balancer rules, iSCSI details, backup server details, etc.

Now, imagine you have a network monitoring tool that keeps tabs on crucial system parameters such as CPU-load in this simplified example.

With automation in-place, you could trigger the automatic provisioning and configuration of a new virtual instance in the event of CPU load exceeding a certain threshold.

This is where having an API for your virtualized environment comes in. It's not difficult to develop scripts that tell your virtual infrastructure to startup a new instance. When the server starts up, another series of scripts take care of pulling the necessary configuration details from your configuration management tool and properly configuring the server.

There are various tools to facilitate this such as Puppet and Chef which work on Un*x, Linux and Windows.

The time and effort saved through automation offers a convenience that would've otherwise been difficult to achieve and allows IT to do more, do so faster, and with less strain on their resources.

This has proven to be a rather long-winded response... Hopefully you see that taking a "cloud-oriented" approach requires thinking about your infrastructure and services in a relatively new fashion and perhaps gives you some ideas of how to put this into practice.

Re: Contest: Tell Us About Your Road to the Cloud and Win a MacBook Air - ReadWriteCloud

Luis Sala — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 13:34:52 -0000

IS VIRTUALIZATION REQUIRED?

Before switching to virtualization, consider that most application performance issues are solvable through a combination of performance tuning (memory management, thread/connection pool sizing, etc.) and/or upgrading hardware.

ASSUMPTIONS:

The main assumption going forward is that the application in question can be properly tuned for maximum performance and supports some form of clustering/load-balancing.

Clustering capabilities allows the deployment of the application to multiple servers and distribute the load among them. Applications lacking this capability will likely not benefit from being switched to a virtualized infrastructure.

I'm also assuming that you're implementing a “private” cloud as opposed to using a public cloud service.

BENEFITS OF VIRTUALIZATION:

Virtualization offers many benefits, and combining the power of virtualization with the principles of cloud computing (public or private) we find ourselves possessing powerful tools for achieving horizontal scalability, dramatically accelerate new server/service provisioning, eliminating downtime and reducing costs.

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK:

First, consult your application and virtualization vendors for advice on what the ideal topology would be.

Three primary areas to focus on are:
- Server Hardware
- Networking
- Storage

You can design your own environment or leverage pre-configured packages such as vBlocks which combine all the necessary elements from industry leaders such as VMWare and its partners.

AUTOMATION FOR OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY:

The biggest ROI is obtained by simplifying the day-to-day tasks such as deployment/provisioning and disaster recovery planning through automation.

Use a combination of source/change control, continuous build and deployment tools (Puppet, Chef) to implement “push-button” provisioning and automatic configuration.

Properly implemented, tasks that would otherwise take hours to accomplish will be done in mere minutes and are applicable in disaster recovery situations to quickly provision a secondary environment.

CONCLUSION:

There's much more to discuss, but I hope these principles prove useful and help you get underway.

Re: The CMS Vendor Meme – Alfresco

Luis Sala — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:04:24 -0000

As the original Copyright holder and employee of a UK-based firm, I deeply resent that you have blatantly re-posted my blog post in its complete form without any form of direct attribution and utter disregard to the rights of the original author.

I appreciate that the post was picked up, but permission is granted to quote the post, in excerpt form, provide a clear and obvious link back to the original post, and finally give adequate attribution to Alfresco Software, Ltd. and myself.

Please address this at your earliest convenience.

Re: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Apple Store...

Luis Sala — Thu, 22 May 2008 22:11:57 -0000

James, I too have picked up Cloud Studio, but don't forget ElasticFox! It's a Firefox extension that pretty much does everything under the sun all without having to fire up Eclipse or use the command-line tools.

http://developer.amazonwebs...