Billing Alerts Help Prevent Surprise Bills

Published May 15, 2012 Cloud Computing Leave a Comment
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Recently I was travelling from my home town Leicester to London by train for a meeting with a consulting client. I arrived at the train station at 6am for a 6.30am train, purchased a ticket and then heard an announcement that the train drivers were on strike and a very limited service was running. A little frustrated I went to the train companies Web site to see if any schedule of this limited service was available only to be greeted by the screen below.

My immediate thought was that this could easily have been averted with the use of the auto scaling of cloud computing which works perfectly in such times of large spikes of traffic to a Web application.

Autoscaling of resources is a great facility but it is not as straightforward as maybe first appears. Technically, it requires configuration on most cloud services. Take for instance Amazon’s AWS. Here a load balancer must be configured and then the CloudWatch service must be enabled with thresholds set for scaling up and down the number of server instances. Added to this there are business concerns too. The obvious one being how much the services will really cost in any particular month. We could be happily running our systems, but at what financial cost ?

Cloud services such as Amazon and Microsoft do not enable the setting of spending thresholds, although Google’s App Engine does. This means paying by credit card or by invoice may result in a surprise at the end of each month–the bill may be much larger than expected if usage is large. As a user of Amazon AWS, my company have been aware of this for some time and regularly check our billing data for abnormal patterns. We were thus delighted to hear that Amazon have now announced billing alerts. This service allows you to configure spending thresholds which when reached for any particular service will send you an immediate notification. This means that you will be aware as soon as spending is above your accepted limit and can take appropriate action at that time. The billing service makes use of the standard CloudWatch alarms and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for sending alerts. The free monthly usage tier of CloudWatch is 10 alarms and unto 1000 email notifications can be sent before charges are incurred. This facility is a much needed and welcome addition to the Amazon Web Service portfolio.

If you would like to understand more about cloud computing, consider attending Learning Tree’s course, Cloud Computing Technologies:  A Comprehensive Hands-On Introduction,  which provides a thorough coverage of the business and technical benefits of cloud computing as well as exposure to the products from the major vendors. For those looking to use Amazon Web Services, Learning Tree also have an excellent four day hands-on Amazon Web Services course where the lower level details of using and integrating these services are covered.

Hope to see you at one of these courses soon.

Chris Czarnecki

Amazon AWS Releases Beanstalk for .NET

Published May 11, 2012 Cloud Computing Leave a Comment
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I have written about Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk for Java and more recently for PHP. This Platform as a Service (PaaS) is incredibly good and eliminates the need for much of the traditional administration required when running Web applications. For Java and PHP developers, as well as Ruby, Python and other languages, there is a wide choice of PaaS available from different vendors, which means that there is no fear of vendor lock-in when selecting a PaaS.

For .NET developers, the choice of PaaS has been limited to Microsoft Azure, or as of this week, Cloud Services. This is not a reason not to use the Azure PaaS, but with little competition, price , quality and performance, pressures do not come so readily to bear as when the market is competitive. Using other cloud vendors for deploying .NET applications, such as Amazon, means using their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) where servers are provisioned and configured behind a load balancer. This leaves all responsibility for updates and patches on server software with the end user–something PaaS eliminates. Today the landscape changes significantly for the better for .NET developers. Amazon announced the release (in Beta) of Elastic Beanstalk for .NET. This is a significant move by Amazon in the PaaS market and provides, immediately, a proven deployment platform for .NET application deployment.

Beanstalk for .NET uses Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machines with IIS 7.5 installed for hosting the .NET applications. The AWS toolkit for Visual Studio enables the development of standard .NET Web applications, including Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC, and via the toolkit these applications can be deployed to Beanstalk. There is no additional cost for using Beanstalk. You just pay for the AWS resources provisioned. By default this is a micro instance machine and a load balancer. For new accounts a micro instance is free for the first year.

For anybody wanting to use SQL Server in the cloud, SQL Azure, or as its known as of this week, SQL Database has been a zero administration solution. Again this has changed as of this week as Amazon have announced that it has expanded its Relational Data Service–a Cloud managed database service offering MySQL and Oracle to now also include Microsoft SQL Server. Multiple editions including Express, Web, Standard and Enterprise Editions of SQL Server 2008 R2 are available, and support for SQL Server 2012 will be available later this year. For organisations that already have licenses for SQL Server, Amazon has a “bring your own license” agreement where you pay just for the compute on an hourly basis. If you are not familiar with Amazon’s RDS, it handles the administrative side of databases, that is, the deploying, scaling, patching, and backing up  as part of the price plan.

So in summary, Amazon’s releases relating to Microsoft products is a direct, proven alternative to Microsoft’s cloud services, which enable developers to work with their standard tools, build applications using proven techniques and deploy with minimal effort. It will be interesting to see how this pushes Microsoft, both on pricing and innovation. My own view is that Amazon may well have just eaten Microsoft’s lunch in the PaaS and relational data area of Cloud Computing.

Chris Czarnecki

Amazon Extends Services for Microsoft Technologies

Published May 10, 2012 Cloud Computing Leave a Comment
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As someone who works primarily with Microsoft technologies I was delighted to see the Amazon announcement yesterday that they are going to offer two additional options for developers.

First, Amazon RDS is now going to include SQL Server in addition to MySQL and Oracle databases.

SQL Server is available in a variety of versions on RDS and, like Oracle, can have license fees included in the hourly instance charge or can utilize a “bring your own license” model for existing Microsoft Volume Licensing customers that have SQL Server covered by Microsoft Software Assurance contracts. In either case RDS allows SQL Servers to be provisioned on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go basis. The managed service provides automated software patching, monitoring and metrics, automated backups and the ability to create on-demand database snapshots. This offering appears to be in direct competition to Microsoft’s own SQL Azure, so the future should prove interesting!

Second, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk is now going to include support for .NET developers using the Windows/IIS/.NET solution stack rounding out the service offering which already supports Java and PHP.

Elastic Beanstalk is similar but somewhat different as a PaaS concept than Microsoft Azure. Azure is in many ways a more managed approach that takes care of a lot of administration for you behinds the scenes. Elastic Beanstalk exposes the entire underlying infrastructure to you if desired. Both offer a plug-in toolkit for Visual Studio that enables deployment directly from the development environment.

I am a great believer that competition is good and that certainly appears to be the case in the cloud as well. Amazon, in my opinion, has just raised the bar another notch. These two new services from Amazon will likely appeal to some developers familiar with Microsoft technologies. I wonder how, if and when Microsoft will respond!

Kevin Kell

Committing to the Cloud

Published May 8, 2012 Cloud Computing Leave a Comment
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When I teach Learning Tree’s Introduction to Cloud Computing course I often get questions about how components from different public cloud vendors can be used together in an integrated application. The answer, of course, is: “it all depends on the application.” Here I would like to give a more comprehensive response than that.

This will be the first of a series of blog posts that will explore that question in some detail. I will go through the process of building a real-world application using services from Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Further, I will do all development and testing in the cloud. Dev/Test is often a good use case for organizations wishing to get started in the cloud. I will use a very minimal local machine which will allow me simply to connect to cloud resources using only RDP, SSH and HTTP.

My application will be designed using an n-tier architecture. There will be, at a minimum, a tier for storage, business logic and presentation. Since I am attempting to illustrate interoperability between cloud vendors it may make some sense to host components for each of the architectural tiers with different providers. So, somewhat arbitrarily, I will choose to host the storage on Amazon Web Services (exact service to be defined later), the business logic on Azure (so I can program in C# J) and the presentation on Google App Engine (since it is very cost-effective).

Follow along over the next few weeks. We will go from square zero to a fully functional, interoperable web application that uses services from the “Big 3″ public cloud providers. We will provision our development, testing and deployment environments from a lightweight client (tablet PC). All the while we will track cloud costs and development time.

This should be fun!

Kevin Kell

Selecting a Private Cloud Vendor

Published May 2, 2012 Cloud Computing 1 Comment
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When considering adopting Cloud Computing, I hear many organisations express a strong preference for private clouds. Sometimes this is a rational view based on strict business rules for example to meet regulatory and audit requirements. Often, the preference is an emotional judgement based on the fact that a public cloud appears to be ‘less secure’.  What is clear is that private clouds have a significant role to play for a large number of organisations both now and in the near future.

Any organisation wishing to implement a private cloud has a large choice of both commercial and open source software to choose from. Consider the open source world and there are many strong offerings such as :

These are just a sample of the open source products that are available. It is interesting to consider the driving forces behind these products. OpenStack has RackSpace and Nasa amongst others, CloudStack has Citrix, and Eucalyptus has Eucalyptus Systems. All have commercial organisations pushing the development as well as the traditional open source contributors.

It was interesting to hear last week that Eucalyptus Systems announced an oversubscribed $30 million Series C funding. This means that Eucalyptus has, to date, raised $55 million in capital to drive innovation, sales and customer support. Eucalyptus have over recent months announced partnerships and agreements with a number of organisations including Amazon, Wipro Infotech and CETC32. The latter two enable Eucalyptus to gain market share in India and China, both significant, if not the most significant IT markets in the world. This investment highlights the confidence markets have both in private cloud computing as well as Eucalyptus as a leading product.

All three of the above private cloud offerings provide rich Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms. Making a choice of which private cloud vendor to use is an extremely difficult decision. Many questions such as what are the core services, which hypervisors are supported, what storage mechanisms, account and administration services, support for high availability, integration with public clouds–these are just some of the questions that need to be considered and answered.

I believe that the integration with public clouds is a key question. When considering moving to the cloud, many organisations look for a like-for-like replacement for existing infra-structure. This may be appropriate, but often they miss opportunities to work in better ways–different, more efficient and cost-effective ways–because many services available on public clouds are not available on private clouds. Examples include Amazon’s highly scalable, low latency DynamoDB product. Using a securely integrated hybrid cloud–private and public–could be a solution that offers the lowest risk, highest availability option for many organisations.

In summary, a private cloud is often the appropriate solution for an organisation, but in most cases only as part of a bigger cloud solution. A public cloud nearly always has a role to play too, which when integrated with the private cloud provides a hybrid solution. Selecting an appropriate private cloud is not an easy choice and has to be balanced over functionality required, maturity, level of available support as well as an ability to integrate with public clouds too. This is not an easy choice. If you are considering a private cloud and are not sure of the choices and factors that should influence your decision, both from a technical and business perspective, why not consider attending Learning Tree’s Cloud Computing Course, where, over three days we discuss both the technology and business aspects of cloud computing. You will also get hands-on exposure to the Eucalyptus private cloud.

Chris Czarnecki

Microsoft Publishes Cloud Security Assessment

Published April 26, 2012 Cloud Computing 1 Comment
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The biggest inhibitor to Cloud Computing adoption is, without doubt, security. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has been working to alleviate these concerns–or at least bring transparency to the security procedures and processes of cloud providers. Their mission statement is stated as follows : “To promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing.”

The CSA have put together a group of initiatives known as the Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) stack. This provides details and guidelines for all cloud users, from auditors, end users and implementors to instrument and assess both private and public clouds against industry established best practices, standards and critical compliance requirements. Part of the GRC stack is a questionnaire known as the Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ). This questionnaire is provided in spreadsheet format and covers security procedures and processes undertaken by a cloud provider and how they comply with the CSA best practices. It is a form of self-assessment as an organisation completes this themselves.

Any organisation that wishes to publish their assessment can do so at the CSA Security, Trust & Assurance Registry (STAR). This central resource could evolve to be the go-to resource on cloud security best practices. As a start,  Microsoft is the first cloud provider to publish their CAIQ response to the STAR. They have done so for the following products:

  • Office 365
  • Windows Azure
  • Microsoft Dynamics CRM

A major benefit the STAR registry provides cloud consumers is that they are now provided with the transparency on the security of cloud services for registered organisations, in a way that is based on standards (ISO 27001) and best practices and easily accessible for no charge for. The information provided by the CAIQ questionnaire details what procedures are in place without disclosing how they are undertaken, thus protecting the provider from exposing both commercially and technically sensitive information.

With Microsoft leading the way in providing this information, it will be interesting to see if other major providers will follow suit. Amazon for instance have, for a long time now, published many of their processes and procedures at their Security and Compliance Centre. Will they complete the CAIQ questionnaire too ? What about Google, Salesforce.com and the other major vendors ? Over the next few months it will be interesting to see how these, and other vendors react to what  Microsoft has done. One thing is for sure:  the more information on security and best practices that vendors release, the better informed the cloud adoption decision makers will be to make better choices.

Chris Czarnecki

Learn more about cloud computing security with Learning Tree’s course Cloud Security Essentials: Best Practices for Secure Cloud Computing.

Amazon MarketPlace: The Future of Software

Published April 23, 2012 Cloud Computing Leave a Comment
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A few days ago I wrote about the UK Government’s CloudStore, a central service where cloud service providers can register and sell their software and services to UK government. I have also recently posted several blog entries about Amazon AWS. Today I find myself posting about Amazon again as they release another new service but this time it’s a little different. They have announced AWS Marketplace, an online store for cloud software that is similar to CloudStore but for all software purchasers.

What excites me about AWS Marketplace is that as a software vendor myself, who deploys to Amazon AWS, is that this is an instant, easy marketing tool for our software. As a purchaser of software, I have a focus point to find relevant software that can be purchased on a pay-as-you-use basis with no worries about hosting, scaling, etc. The work of installing and running the enterprise class software on Amazon AWS has been completed by the vendors or solution providers. This, to me, is the future of software. The AWS Marketplace brings to software the same simple, secure, shopping experience that many of us enjoy on the Amazon e-commerce store.

Let’s take a look at AWS Marketplace in more detail. The current products are in three main categories:

    • Software Infrastructure
    • Developer Tools
    • Business Software

In each of these categories there are many subcategories. Let’s take an example and look at the benefits of this service. My personal software company develops primarily Java-based enterprise applications. To host this, one option is IBM’s WebSphere. We recognise the power of this environment but due to costs we have not been able to deploy to this platform whilst remaining competitive to our customers. This has now changed. On AWS Marketplace we can now run WebSphere for between $0.79 and $1.49 per hour. This price include EC2 instance costs but not data transfer costs. This is incredibly cost effective and is just an example of how small and medium sized organisations can now access enterprise software that until now has been the privilege of large businesses. Other software organisations such as SAP and Sage also have products on the marketplace. The marketplace also offers a number of open source software configurations as well as commercial.

For software vendors, Amazon is a great place to sell products too. Amazon provides access to hundreds of thousands of potential customers in 190 countries and handles all the difficult things like billing and metering. To maintain quality, Amazon are careful who they let publish to the marketplace. Organisations must have a proven track record with a history of satisfied customers as well as stable products.

In summary, Amazon have released a new service that is sure to change not only the way we buy software, but also what software we use. For this I am extremely excited and grateful. They have provided me with access to software I could not use before.

Chris Czarnecki

Amazon CloudSearch: Simplifying Search

Published April 17, 2012 Cloud Computing Leave a Comment
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As the owner of a company that builds Web applications, I appreciate the need for having a good search facility built into the application. This is important for all the applications we build, but particularly for the e-commerce applications when failure to find relevant products to a search request can result in the significant loss of revenue. I am sure all of you have experienced the frustration of entering a search term into a Web sites search box only to receive results that are not relevant or that no results came back. Over the last few years a number of open source search solutions have been developed that begin to address the complexities of search. Examples include Lucene and Solr. These systems are excellent but using them required a high degree of knowledge in not only the programming but also in their installation and administration.

With this background, I was really excited to hear that Amazon have launched a new Cloud Web Service known as CloudSearch. Have you ever searched on Amazon’s Web site and been impressed by the accuracy and thoroughness of the results ? If so you have been using the technology behind the new CloudSearch service. So what is this service and what does it provide ?

Amazon CloudSearch is a fully managed search service in the cloud. It enables developers to concentrate on building applications and provides all the search functionality required with none of the normally associated complexity. The service is easy to use but incredibly powerful. To use it requires the creation of a search domain. Data is uploaded to the search domain in either XML or JSON format that must conform to Amazon’s Search Document Format (SDF) and Amazon then indexes it and makes it available for complex searches within seconds. Each domain has an endpoint URL to which the searches are sent and then the results are returned in JSON format by default or XML if specifically requested. To prevent unauthorised access to the search domain endpoints, security settings enable access to be restricted to individual or ranges of IP addresses. These addresses will typically be the machines of the Web application that has the search facility built into it.

The pricing model for CloudSearch is based on the number of machine instances running to support your search needs, and there are three instance sizes to choose from initially. After this there is a small charge for bulk data upload to the service and then the normal data transfer costs out of the cloud that applies to all AWS data. Given the sophistication of the service, together with the simplicity of its usage, this is an incredibly attractive proposition Amazon have again provided as part of the AWS portfolio. I am  impressed that I am using this service within two hours of reading the documentation. If you require search in your applications, I urge you to take a look at this service.

Chris Czarnecki

Amazon S3 Storage: A Flexible Cloud Storage Solution

Published April 16, 2012 Cloud Computing 1 Comment
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Amazon S3 storage is one of the AWS services that has been around the longest and is one of the most widely used. For those unfamiliar with S3, it enables individual data items, ranging in size from one byte to five terabytes to be stored in scalable storage. There is no limit to the number of items, referred to as objects, that can be stored in S3. Amazon have recently published the usage statistics for the end of Q1 2012 for this service. At this time there are 905 billion objects stored in S3 with Amazon routinely handling 650,000 requests per second for access to these objects. The number of objects is growing daily by more than one million. This is an incredible amount of data.

These results motivated me to write about the different ways in which users access S3 and the kind of ways they are using it. For those unfamiliar with S3, then storage buckets, which are URL addressable entities are created in S3 and the data objects placed in these. A simple usage scenario is storing Web application assets in S3. For example, a typical Web application has many images and handling the delivery of these images to remote clients, even when cached, places an unnecessary load on the applications servers. A cost-effective way to offload this work is to place the images on S3. Since these are URL addressable, the HTML pages can link to the images here. This means as pages are requested, the images are delivered from S3 storage, freeing the servers the Web application runs on from this workload.

Another way that S3 is being used is via the AWS Storage Gateway. This service, still in beta mode, enables a cost effective, secure, off-premise data backup and disaster recovery mechanism. On-premise storage appliances connect to the storage gateway, providing a secure communication channel to S3 storage. Data stored using the Storage Gateway is automatically encrypted. For disaster recovery, point-in-time snapshots can be taken of on-premise data and sent to S3 providing secure and immediate access to backups should the need arise.

What is interesting is the number of different ways Amazon AWS provides for accessing S3. The simplest is via the Web management console, but this is only really practical for small amounts of data. Other ways include a Web Services API, command line tools, AWS Import/Export developed for large data sets, the above mentioned storage gateway, direct connect pipes for performance as well as many third party backup services.

With a range of security settings on S3 buckets, controlling who has read/write/update access, S3 offers an incredibly safe and cost effective scalable storage solution. If you have a storage requirement that can be off-premise, needs to be low latency yet scale and be secure, I urge you to seriously consider Amazon S3. In my experience over the last two years its a fantastic service. The usage statistics are strong evidence that I am not the only one who thinks so.

For related course information check out Learning Tree’s course entitled Cloud Computing with Amazon Web Services™.

Chris Czarnecki

CloudStore Opened by UK Government

Published April 11, 2012 Cloud Computing 2 Comments
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The UK government has a target that 50% of IT spending will be on cloud services by 2015. Over the past two years a framework known as G-Cloud has been under development with the aim of providing a route for the easy procurement of IT services on a pay-as-you-use basis. A major step to meeting the government goals was achieved when they launched CloudStore recently.

CloudStore lists 1700 IT services from over 250 suppliers and this list will grow. The way the services are listed is based on the SPI model:

  • Software as a Service
  • Platform as a Service
  • Infrastructure as a Service

There is a fourth category known as specialist cloud services, which are primarily companies that offer cloud computing consulting services. Each entry in CloudStore provides a description of the service and pricing details, providing a competitive environment where services can be compared, easily enabling the most effective solution to be chosen. What is great is that this marketplace is open to SME’s with 50% of organisations falling into this category. Previously, government IT supplies and contracts had been the preserve of large organisations with a lengthy procurement process resulting in long term contract lock-ins with expensive escape clauses–not always cost-efficient for government.

It is great to see the UK government take this new approach to IT procurement and I am confident it will be successful. If we now consider the larger G-Cloud strategy aims which are partly summarised as:

  • Achieve large, cross government economies of scale
  • Deliver ICT systems that are flexible and responsive to demand in order to support government policies and strategies
  • Take advantage of new technologies in order to deliver faster business benefits and reduce cost
  • Meet environmental and sustainability targets
  • Allow government to procure in a way that encourages a dynamic and responsive supplier marketplace and supports emerging suppliers

If we take the word government out of the above goals, many of these could be equally applicable to all organisations whether business, charity, social, etc. It is just an effective way of buying IT at whatever level you are working. This is what cloud computing can do for business. At the moment, the uptake in cloud computing is significant but not at a critical mass level. This is totally understandable. Many organisations already have investments in IT that are currently sufficient, there is a concern about trust, security and reliability of cloud computing that can only be reduced through evidence built over years of success.

So in summary, the UK government has taken a significant step towards streamlining the IT procurement process through CloudStore. Their approach is a model that I believe can become more generally applicable for all buyers of IT services, that is a centralised directory of available services, enabling buyers to compare similar services on price as well as quality of service. If this evolves as expected, it will level the playing field for IT suppliers, enabling large and small organisations to compete equally and providing IT purchasers with a wider choice available at a better price with no long term contracts to negotiate.

Chris Czarnecki

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