Elastic Beanstalk? It’s not a fairytale, Amazon disruptes the market once again

Amazon.com is easy to label as the 500 pound gorilla in the market of cloud computing services–and rightly so. They are one of the pioneers in innovative service oriented technologies, and have a strong hold on the market. They definitely have not become complacent in their standing however, and their newest technology dubed “Elastic Beanstalk” is good evidence.

I really can’t get the image of the fairytale I remember as a kid, “Jack and the Beanstalk”, whenever I hear the name mentioned. All joking aside though, this is a serious and disruptive product. Amazon’s reputable and solid core of on-demand computing and network services can now be leveraged as the back-end for an PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) they call the Elastic Beanstalk.

Their first unveiling of the service is going to be offered for Java applications using the Tomcat application stack. This is a great way to start as they are following the pattern of the other providers in the space (force.com had Java as an early platform), and in it’s own right tomcat applications are cross-platform and very scalable–perfect for PaaS. As time goes on, other application platforms will be offered I am sure, but this is a very safe and smart choice to start with a new product like Elastic Beanstalk.

What makes it different? Aside from the well established service that is behind Elastic Beanstalk, the components that make up the working parts of the platform can be fine-tuned and customized if you want. It will be happy to manage a lot of these things for you, but allowing people to have that control if they want to is a very attractive feature. Another way Amazon is being extra savvy in approaching the enterprise customer to use their computing cloud for mission critical and high performance apps.

A robust application that runs on a new PaaS like Elastic Beanstalk needs a stable and effective way to manage resources and adjust to demand. For Java based apps running on EB, an application performance management solution like AppDynamics gives a new venture into the cloud that edge that it needs to meet user demand and uptime requirements. APMs as they are called can not only monitor perform health-checks on complex software, but in the case of a cloud based solution, can be the orchestration piece for scaling on-demand. AppDynamics has a free version that you can use to get more familiar with how it works, just check out their web site: http://appdynamics.com

Resources:

http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/?ref_=pe_12300_18337730

http://appdynamics.com

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/19/amazon-web-services-introduces-elastic-beanstalk-for-easier-app-deployment/

http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/fabrics/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000873&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All

Sprint’s MPLS Network Maps

I found this part of Sprint’s business/commercial data services site (http://sprint.net). Very interesting if you are into MPLS and internet backbones, etc. They also display the network maps for Sprint’s presence all around the globe: https://www.sprint.net/network_maps.php

Cloud Computing Management Solutions

Looking at the different solutions out there for managing cloud server instances on various computing providers (AWS, Rackspace Cloud, GoGrid, etc) from one pane of glass. I have resources scattered across these providers and I need a way to manage them without having to work with several different management interfaces.

Open source software would be preferred so I could run it on-premise and customize it to my needs (and maybe even develop it further). Commercial solutions could work too (including SaaS) if it fits the feature needs and is cost effective.

So far I have found the following as possible avenues:

http://www.kaavo.com/

http://cloud42.net/

http://www.rightscale.com/

http://code.google.com/p/scalr/

Any input on better ways to solve this issue is most welcome!

djbdns as an alternative to BIND

How does djbdns compare to BIND in a production environment? Some would argue that it is more secure than a BIND implementation, but many still use BIND because of it’s ease of use and the amount of vendor and platform support available for it.

Share your thoughts about this if you like.

Barracuda 380 SSL VPN

I am implementing the Barracuda 380 SSL VPN appliance this week. So far it has done a very good job at being a quick “one size fits all” VPN solution. The price is definitely steep though ($2,000+).

Update: I had some problems getting the appliance to start up. It kept hanging when it was trying to start the VPN service. After calling Barracuda tech support, they explained that it needs to be able to access their servers over the internet to register itself before it can start up. The only problem is, there are only four preset IP subnets and gateway configs that it will allow until it starts up completely (at which point you can change it). It really is an an inconvenience if your network does not happen to conform to one of these four (although they are all RFC 1918 IP blocks at least). After setting up a small internet gateway I had laying around to the one of the preset IP configs, it seemed to be hanging again at the start-up sequence. After about 2 minutes or so it booted up and I was able to set the appliance IP address to something on my subnet. All was just peachy after that!

Salesforce.com Acquires Heroku

This is another defining step in Salesforce.com’s quest to shape the Platform-as-a-Service space. Heroku is a Ruby on Rails PaaS that has a very elegant and simplified offering for people trying to build a ROR application with low overhead. Salesforce.com has made huge strides towards using it’s application infrastructure as a model for a computing/hosting offering, and it is exciting to see it taking form.

Salesforce.com recently launched a similar product in tandem with VMWare called “VMforce” that aims to offer a Java platform on demand.  VMWare technology is claimed to be the back-end of the offering, but I can’t really see any meaning to this other than a marketing strategy that leverages the established brand name. The developer can’t really utilize anything that a VMWare product like vSphere would offer as the infrastructure is presented transparently to them as an on-demand service. So why talk about the infrastructure technology when the beauty of PaaS is supposed to be that you don’t have to deal with that very element?

The Ruby platform from Heroku doesn’t talk much about the technology that runs their infrastructure, rather its explained as a service that “just works”. This is the beauty of PaaS, at least to the developer, and Heroku has a great offering that exemplifies this. I am not implying that VMforce has a poor architecture or features in comparison to Heroku, I am just pointing out that the marketing for the former dulls the edge that makes PaaS a “force” to contend with.

The official blog post about the acquisition can be found here:

http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/12/8/the_next_level/

The Tabernacle Project

My wife made this site a while back, it is pretty cool I think

http://tabernacleproject.info/

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone…hope that everyone is having a blessed holiday season! 

Great Java Alternative for MediaWiki

If you are looking for a way to run a wiki application on the Java platform, JAMWiki may be worth a look. I was looking for a simple wiki software that was easy to setup, allowed for common wiki management functionality right out of the box, and was open source (of course). I was attracted to JAMWiki because it utilizes a Derby database engine built right into the application, so a single .war file was all that was necessary to deploy it.

I choose to use Oracle Glassfish 3 to deploy it on, but you can use a number of Java Web Application servers like Tomcat, Jboss, etc. It resembles the popular MediaWiki in many ways, but there are some features that differentiate it.

http://jamwiki.org/wiki/en/JAMWiki