Heroku vs Engine Yard

Tags

Cloud computing, Engine Yard, Heroku, Platform as a service

Heroku vs Engine Yard

Analysis of Heroku and Engine Yard looking at ease of use, architecture, startup costs, and more.

Amazon AWS vs Google vs Windows Azure vs IBM Smart Cloud

Tags

Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Cloud computing, Google, Google AppEngine, IBM, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows

Amazon AWS vs Google vs Windows Azure vs IBM Smart Cloud

With last week’s gale of Google cloud announcements, it’d be easy to think that the Google has a competitive offering compared with Amazon Web Services. But when you look at the number of services Google fields versus Amazon, that is simply not the case.

Where is IBM Smart Cloud? Sorry we are talking about cloud and IBM is not in the loop.

Experience Amazon AWS—COMMON AWS PROBLEMS & SOLUTIONS

Tags

Amazon Web Services, AWS, Cloud computing, Google, Software as a service

Experience Amazon AWS—COMMON AWS PROBLEMS & SOLUTIONS

Although AWS is known for its wide array of features and reliability, problems can still occur. This post lists the most common AWS problems and what you can do to solve them.

Experience Amazon AWS—Elastic Beanstalk

Tags

Amazon S3, AWS, AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk enables you to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. What you need to do is just uploading your application. Capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring etc. are handled by AWS.

http://bit.ly/1021oDr gives you an instruction about how to deploy an Application Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk. I do not want to re-invent the wheel in this post. I will  talk about my experience.

1. The sample, TravelLog application, is basically a Spring MVC web based application (We can see the power of Spring. Many SaaS vendor uses Spring). But AWS’s spring implementation is obsolete, I think it is 2.6. thus it does not provide some Spring 3.0 new features.

2. The application itself is impressive. I can use it as my travel memorial.

3. The deployment is extremely slow (This is what I do not like AWS). It cost me approx 15 minutes to do both the deployment and launching of the Apache Tomcat v7. If you do not want to deploy the whole thing into AWS, you can use maven instead to generate a war file and then put it under your favorite  application server.

4.It gives us a good sample of how to use the SimpleDB NO SQL database.

private static Map<String, String> properties = new HashMap<String, String>();
static {
properties.put(“lobBucketName”,S3StorageManager.getKey().toLowerCase() + “-travellog-lob”+ StageUtils.getResourceSuffixForCurrentStage());
Configuration config = Configuration.getInstance();
if ( config.getServiceEndpoint(Configuration.S3_ENDPOINT_KEY) != null ) {
properties.put(“s3endpoint”, config.getServiceEndpoint(Configuration.S3_ENDPOINT_KEY));
}
if ( config.getServiceEndpoint(Configuration.SIMPLE_DB_ENDPOINT_KEY) != null ) {
properties.put(“sdbEndpoint”, config.getServiceEndpoint(Configuration.SIMPLE_DB_ENDPOINT_KEY));
}
}

private static EntityManagerFactoryImpl factory = new EntityManagerFactoryImpl(“TravelLog”
+ StageUtils.getResourceSuffixForCurrentStage(), properties);

public Journal getJournal(String journalId) {
EntityManager em = null;

try {
em = factory.createEntityManager();
Journal journal = em.find(Journal.class, journalId);
return journal;
}
finally {
if (em!=null) {
em.close();
}
}
}

5. It also shows us how to use the AWS S3 service, which provides storage through web services interfaces (REST, SOAP, and BitTorrent)

Let us take a look how s3 service is used to store a TravelLogStorageObject object.

// Make sure the bucket exists before we try to use it

//Every file you upload to Amazon S3 is stored in a container called a bucket
checkForAndCreateBucket(obj.getBucketName());

ObjectMetadata omd = new ObjectMetadata();

//ObjectMetadata represents the object metadata that is stored with Amazon S3

omd.setContentType(obj.getMimeType());
omd.setContentLength(obj.getData().length);

ByteArrayInputStream is = new ByteArrayInputStream(obj.getData());
PutObjectRequest request = new PutObjectRequest(obj.getBucketName(), obj.getStoragePath(), is, omd);

//PutObjectRequest uploads a new object to the specified Amazon S3 bucket. The //PutObjectRequest optionally uploads object metadata and applies a canned //access control policy to the new object.

s3Client.putObject(request);

Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 vs. VMware vSphere 5.1

Tags

Hyper-V, VMware, VMware vSphere, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 vs. VMware vSphere 5.1

This post will compare the newly Windows 2012 Hyper-V against VMware vSphere 5.1 in the following fields:

1. price

2.performance and scalability

3.Management tools

4.target customers

=====

Summary:

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V brings advanced virtualization features to small shops, but VMware still reigns at the high end

Experience Amazon AWS—Queue Service

Tags

Amazon Simple Queue Service, Amazon SQS, Java, Java Message Service, Message queue, Web service

Amazon SQS is a distributed queue system that enables web service applications to quickly and reliably queue messages that one component in the application generates to be consumed by another component. A queue is a temporary repository for messages that are awaiting processing.

You can find an introduction in http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSGettingStartedGuide/Introduction.html

Here I will tell you my experience

1. Since your JMS server is in cloud, you do not need to install/start/stop any JMS server (I really hate to configure JMS settings in an application server). What you need is just run the Java application(You must have a valid Amazon Web Services developer account, and be signed up to use Amazon SQS.)

2. To view the messages your sample code created is easy.

1) Comment the “delete queue/message” part of the sample code

CreateQueueRequest createQueueRequest = new CreateQueueRequest(“MyQueue”);

String myQueueUrl = sqs.createQueue(createQueueRequest).getQueueUrl();

sqs.sendMessage(new SendMessageRequest(myQueueUrl, “This is my message text.”));

2) Switch to AWS Management view in your Eclipse, and you can see the queue, in this sample it is called MyQueue, in the following screen dump.

3. Receiving messages

ReceiveMessageRequest receiveMessageRequest = new ReceiveMessageRequest(myQueueUrl);
List messages = sqs.receiveMessage(receiveMessageRequest).getMessages();
for (Message message : messages) {
System.out.println(” Message”);
System.out.println(” MessageId: ” + message.getMessageId());
System.out.println(” ReceiptHandle: ” + message.getReceiptHandle());
System.out.println(” MD5OfBody: ” + message.getMD5OfBody());
System.out.println(” Body: ” + message.getBody());
for (Entry<string, string=””> entry : message.getAttributes().entrySet()) {
System.out.println(” Attribute”);
System.out.println(” Name: ” + entry.getKey());
System.out.println(” Value: ” + entry.getValue());
}
}

Experience Amazon AWS

Tags

Amazon Web Services, AWS, Cloud computing, IBM, Software as a service

Amazon provides a bunch of cloud services like IaaS, SaaS, DaaS etc. This page gives you tutorials about how to use AWS’s services. http://bit.ly/ZYKl4y

In this post I will only focus on the IaaS part and try to compare it against IBM’s Smart Cloud since both of them provide an IaaS cloud service. A tutorial about how to provision an instance within AWS can be found in http://bit.ly/12fIE0u

1.Both of them are able to provision a bunch of operation systems. However for IBM’s approach you need to provide your own license for commercial OS like Windows. For AWS it provides an amazon license (I successfully installed Windows 2012 through AWS on 02/05/2013. No license required.) I noticed Windows 2012 is free for 180 days. Thus I think IBM supports more types of OS.

2.Amazon provides a more convenient way to access its instance. For instance after provisioning a windows instance ,for IBM you need to do the remote desk by yourself (unfortunately I am using windows 8 and I have no idea where remote desk is situated), but AWS provides a remote desk file. So I just double click that file and input my password.All done.

3.I am located in Australia. I can provision an instance in Australia. But IBM does not provide an Australian region, so I have to use Singapore instead. I am not saying Singapore is not safe. But as an Australian, my instance is oversea. The user experience is not good. BTW as I know one of IBM’s policies is you need to put your cloud stuff within Australia.

4. When right click the provisioned instance, AWS provides a Amazon menu (which provides some short cuts for some basic features like reboot machine, terminate machine etc.) while IBM gives a normal browser menu. Below is the menu from AWS.

5. For IBM Smart Cloud I am an enterprise user, thus I have more options in CPU and Memory. For AWS I am a free user, thus what I can use is just 1core CPU and only 613M of memory. But for a purchase user AWS provides more options. Please see below I found the max number of CPU is 16 and the max number memory it supports is 60.5G.

=====

Summary

In this post, I compared Amazon AWS and IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise. Both of them are good candidates for IaaS. However based on my experience, IBM has a long way to go against this field.

Experience IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise

Tags

Cloud, Cloud computing, IBM, Tivoli Service Automation Manager

Like Amazon AWS, IBM Smart Cloud provides an IaaS platform to provision OS instances (In this sample we will provision a Windows 8 instance).It is PAYG as well. In this post we will give you an experience of provisioning an instance through IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise. There is a comparison between IBM Smart Cloud and Amazon AWS for your reference. http://bit.ly/WWkoSW Based on my experience IBM has a very long way to go.

1. go to https://www-147.ibm.com/cloud/enterprise/dashboard and log in using your own account. Then it will go to this screen

2. Click the Add Instance button, it goes to the next page.

3. As I mentioned previously in this sample we will create a windows 8 instance.So in Image name we select Windows 8.

4. you can add your own IP if you have. After placing the order you go to this page.

5. It goes back to the control panel page and you may find the status can be changed from initially Requesting to Provisioning (to provision a Windows 2008 instance it cost me approx 30 minutes) then to the Active status(I believe in the back ground it uses TSAM or ISDM)

You may find the server configuration is CPU2, RAM: 4G Disk 60G

Once the status changed to Active, it means your machine is ready.

6. Since it is a sample, we will delete it. See the Delete Instance above. You can click it to de-provision an instance.

7. Once an instance is removed, you may see the following page

You may find the sentence “You do not have any instance at this time” in the page.

===

Summary

In this post, we illustrate how to provision/de-provision a Windows 8 instance in IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise.

A decent introduction to OpenStack

OpenStack is a collection of open source technologies that provides massively scalable cloud computing software. OpenStack can be used by corporations, service providers, VARS, SMBs, researchers, and global data centers looking to deploy large-scale cloud deployments for private or public clouds.

The Ultimate Dropbox Toolkit & Guide

The Ultimate Dropbox Toolkit & Guide

Dropbox , the app we all (at least many of us) know and love, has a plethora of advanced uses to make life so much easier in managing data between multiple computers and online. We’ve posted several roundups of tips and tricks for Dropbox and now we present our ultimate toolkit and guide.