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Posts Tagged 'private cloud'

Amazon and Eucalyptus Partnership: A Boost for Hybrid Cloud Development

Published March 29, 2012 Cloud Computing Leave a Comment
Tags: Amazon AWS, Amazon Eucalyptus Partnership, Eucalyptus cloud, Hybrid Clouds, private cloud

I was extremely pleased to hear that Amazon and Eucalyptus have partnered to provide formal support of their common API’s. I am certain I will not be the only one who finds this news exciting. Anyone who has attended Learning Tree’s Introduction to Cloud Computing course will have gained hands-on experience of working with a Eucalyptus private cloud. They will have learned the capabilities of this cloud and that Eucalyptus have an API that is compatible with Amazon AWS. This formal support agreement will enable the expansion of the API as well as the formality of the partnership bringing great credibility to the Eucalyptus cloud software.

Many organisations make use – or could make significant use – of on-premise (private) clouds as well as public clouds. Doing so often requires different toolsets and technical skills for efficient working. This partnership will now enable a uniform toolset and skill set to be used to access both the private and public clouds. Because of the wide range of services Amazon AWS provides, a wide range of infrastructure configurations could be rapidly self-provisioned including on-premise Eucalyptus and Amazon private cloud, on-premise Eucalyptus and Amazon public cloud or a mixture of on-premise Eucalyptus and Amazon public and private clouds.

Why would a mixture of on-premise Eucalyptus and Amazon cloud services be required ? There are many reasons for this. For instance, for periods of peak demand, where the on-premise infrastructure may not be sufficient, Amazon could be used to provide the extra required capacity. Another may be that services not provided by Eucalyptus are required but are available on Amazon and so Amazon is used. Some services may be better deployed to an Amazon cloud than on-premise – for security reasons. There are many, many reasons why a hybrid solution may be the preferred solution. What is clear is that this partnership, will, in my opinion, make the decisions easier to make because of the transparent switch from one to the other based on the common API’s and toolsets.

For anybody interested in learning more about Cloud Computing, the different types of cloud configurations, the way they can integrate – or not – consider attending Learning Tree’s Introduction to Cloud Computing course. Here you will gain an exposure to a wide variety of cloud computing products and services and importantly their strengths and weaknesses – all from a vendor neutral view. For Amazon AWS you will get a coverage of the services provided and also for Eucalyptus together with experience of using the toolsets to provision resources from these clouds. For related courses, check out Cloud Computing with Amazon Web Services and Implementing a Private Cloud Solution.

Chris Czarnecki

Private Cloud Course Planning Meeting

Published September 13, 2011 Cloud Computing 4 Comments
Tags: Cloud Computing, cloud education, private cloud

Last week we held our planning meeting for our upcoming private cloud course. The main purpose of that meeting was to nail down the content we wish to cover in the four day class. In attendance were the course author, Arnold Villeneuve, the Learning Tree Product Manager and myself as technical editor. We worked long and hard over three days trying to spec out the best course possible. We received quite a bit of feedback via email (and other) that we have attempted to incorporate into the course. Thank you to those who commented.

At the top of the list, predictably, was security. While this private cloud course was not originally intended to be another course on cloud security it is pretty clear that is still very much at the top of people’s minds. This seems to be especially true for people considering a private cloud solution. Therefore we have decided to include an overall emphasis on security in our course treatment of private cloud computing.

We plan to spend a couple of hours on day one discussing the business motivations for private cloud. We expect that there will be attendees who have only partially thought out reasons for wanting to implement a private cloud. You want to build a private cloud and we are here to help you. But, first, let’s talk about why.

Once we have decided that a private cloud is right for us what are the options?

Build your own and host it on-premises
Have a third party host your private cloud

In the course we will consider both of these. We will have hands-on exercises which explore off-premises private cloud solutions that are available from a number of hosters. We will also have the students build their own private clouds using classroom hardware and software.

We now have to make some hard technical decisions. What specific technologies will we cover?

For our on-premises private clouds we plan to feature OpenStack and Microsoft Hyper-V. This decision was made after careful consideration of a number of other options. Our goal was to feature two very different solutions: one open source and one proprietary. We also had some pretty interesting discussions about VMware and virtualization vs. true cloud computing. I can’t wait to hear from the VMware fans! Anyway, in the end, we wanted to stress that this is not a course on any one particular technology but rather it is a course on private cloud computing in general.

The course should be available to the public early next year. Look for it in your brochures and on our website soon!

Kevin Kell

Learning Tree Private Cloud Course: What Do You Think?

Published August 29, 2011 Cloud Computing 6 Comments
Tags: education, private cloud, training

We are in the early stages of development for our upcoming course title tentatively named “Building a Private Cloud: Hands-on”. The course will be written by Arnold Villeneuve. Yours truly will be on-board as a technical editor.

That gives me the opportunity to blog about the course as it goes from inception through to first public delivery. So, as the course development unfolds I will write about it here. Any comments that are made will be incorporated into the development process. That gives you, the prospective student, an opportunity to influence what will ultimately become the course. Pretty exciting stuff, eh? I know I am excited!

At this point we are looking over various possible course outlines. We have a pretty good idea about what we want to cover in the course but nothing is yet set in stone. Our course planning meeting next week will solidify things further.

In terms of what to cover, we have many options. Let’s consider a matrix of possibilities:

Service \ Deployment	Private	Hybrid	Community	Public
SaaS
PaaS
IaaS	X	X

Table 1. Possibility Matrix

So, since it is a course on private clouds, we have to at least cover the first column, right? I really do believe, however, that most people already equate private clouds with IaaS. Yes, there are definitely use cases for private PaaS (I like the Azure in a box concept) and even private SaaS, but these are less common. I think we should focus on IaaS.

But what about the second column? It is also my belief that most private clouds do not stand alone. I think we have to cover ways in which private and public clouds can co-exist and collaborate. By definition this is a Hybrid cloud.

I think we should consider both on-premise and off-premise approaches.

I think we should cover at least two very different private cloud offerings. Presently we are considering OpenStack and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Please tell me what you think!

Kevin

Eucalyptus Private Cloud – First Impressions

Published May 24, 2011 Cloud Computing Leave a Comment
Tags: Eucalyptus cloud, private cloud

In a recent post I mentioned that I was evaluating the Eucalyptus private cloud for use on Learning Tree’s Cloud Computing course. What I am keen to be able to add to the course is hands-on experience to attendees of provisioning resources from a private cloud and the associated tools for monitoring and controlling cloud usage and utilisation. The Eucalyptus cloud has a set of command line tools, euca2ools, for provisioning resources which have commands and options compatible with Amazon EC2 and S3 services. However, as a first exposure to Eucalyptus I am keen that attendees have a visual tool to work with. Then we can delve deeper with the command line tools.

Harold Spencer, Jr. at Eucalyptus suggested I try the HybridFox plugin for Firefox to access the Eucalyptus cloud. This provides a browser based interface to the cloud where I can configure key pairs, set up security groups, launch instances, attach volumes and much more. This is exactly what I had hoped to use and demonstrate in the course. Five minutes later I had a Linux instance launched in the cloud and had logged in via SSH. Here is the proof of my launched instance ! The green bar indicates a running instance.

I think that configuring and launching a machine instance will make a great short introductory exercise for attendees, following a presentation of the Eucalyptus architecture. The instructor can then log into the Eucalyptus management console and show the vital statistics for each user such as number of instances launched and CPU hours used. With this foundation there is so much more to investigate, demonstrate and have the attendees do.

So in summary, my first impressions of the Eucalyptus private cloud are: wow – this is so neat, well thought out and straightforward to use. I feel truly excited about what we can begin to do with this cloud in the course. It has also got me thinking about the applications Eucalyptus may have in my consulting work. Before I finish, I would just like to say thanks to Steven Fitzgerald and Brady Murray of Eucalyptus for their total patience and support on this project.

Chris Czarnecki

Evaluating The Eucalyptus Private Cloud

Published May 20, 2011 Cloud Computing 1 Comment
Tags: Eucalyptus cloud, private cloud

It only seems like yesterday that I completed the latest revision of Learning Tree’s Introduction to Cloud Computing course and yet here I am working on the next one already. Thats the reality in a fast changing world like cloud computing, the course development process never really stops. The development team is always working behind the scenes to ensure attendees receive the most current and relevant information possible.

One of the great things about a new revision is that it enables us to incorporate feedback provided by attendees as to what they would like to see in the course. For this Introduction to Cloud Computing course, the two areas attendees would like to see more details on are: 1. Private clouds and 2. Security. These are both being addressed in the revision I am working on and scheduled for delivery in July.

For the private cloud, I am currently investigating in detail the Eucalyptus Cloud. This product is open source and also has an enterprise edition offered by Eucalyptus Systems. For the Learning Tree course, Eucalyptus systems have very kindly provided a private cloud for Learning Tree to use and I am currently evaluating it and working to provide hands-on exercises in the course. The aim is to allow attendees to gain hands-on experience of provisioning IT resources on demand from a cloud computing software system that could be run on their own premises and existing IT infrastructure. My work and experience with the Eucalyptus Cloud has been very rewarding and positive so far and I must say the support I have received from the people at Eucalyptus Systems has been first class.

As development moves on, I will keep you informed on my progress and what will find its way into the course. If you are interested in learning about cloud computing and how it could benefit your organisation why not consider attending. A schedule can be found here. I will hopefully see you at one of the events.

Chris Czarnecki

Improved Amazon Private Cloud Security: EC2 Dedicated Instances

Published March 28, 2011 Cloud Computing Leave a Comment
Tags: Amazon cloud, Amazon EC2, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, cloud security, private cloud

Back in October last year I posted an article titled ‘How Dedicated is Your Private Cloud ?‘. The main theme was that whilst organisations like Amazon offer private clouds on Amazon infrastructure, your virtual machines may actually be co-hosted on the same physical hardware as other organisations virtual machines. What is private in such scenarios is the virtual network your instances are connected to.

Without a good understanding of cloud computing and the underlying technologies that make this possible, private cloud means one thing, yet to those with a good understanding of cloud computing will know that there are different levels of ‘private’ cloud when that cloud is hosted by a third party. Amazon, as part of their AWS have offered a virtual private cloud (VPC) for some time now. With the Amazon VPC, instances are co-hosted with instances from other organisations. Until today that is. Today, Amazon have announced EC2 dedicated instances which ensure that all EC2 compute instances will be isolated at the hardware level. It is possible to create a VPC in EC2 that has a mixture of dedicated and non-dedicated machine instances all on the same network based on application requirements.

In addition, earlier this month Amazon made some changes to the way VPC’s can be accessed. Originally, the only way of accessing an Amazon VPC was from an IPSec Virtual Private network (VPN). This required extra onsite resources for many organisations. The VPN restriction has now been relaxed and and Amazon VPC can now be accessed by the Internet. Amazon are certainly making the private cloud something that is now comfortably within reach of all organisations.

For anybody who would like to gain an understanding of what cloud computing is, the underlying technologies and how it can benefit their organisation, Learning Tree have developed a Cloud Computing course that provides hands-on exposure to a variety of cloud computing tools and services. In addition, currently under development is a course dedicated specifically to Amazon AWS. If you are interested, more details are provided here.

Chris

Public Awareness of Private Clouds

Published November 28, 2010 Cloud Computing 1 Comment
Tags: Cloud Computing, private cloud

Yesterday, I flew from London Heathrow to New York. On arriving at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 I was surprised but pleased to see floor to ceiling advertising banners running the length of the terminal decorated with the text “Your Journey to the Private Cloud begins here”. The adverts have been placed by EMC.

As somebody who has been leveraging the cloud and consults on Cloud Computing, seeing such a public positive message on Cloud Computing was refreshing. EMC have, over the last five years been moving over to a private cloud. In doing so they have saved, over the five years, $104.5 in capital expenditure energy and space saving costs. Storage utilisation has increased from 68%-80% and IT has saved 1.5 petabytes of storage capacity. The experience EMC have gained and the impressive transformation of their IT has put EMC in a great position to help organisations achieve similar transformations. A private cloud is a better, more logical way for an organisation to manage its IT resources and services and for the business to consume these. Implemented correctly, a private cloud positions IT as a flexible pool of resources that can be utilised as and when required by the business. Private clouds also address a lot of the security and governance concerns raised when Cloud Computing is discussed.

Deciding if a private cloud is suitable for an organisation is not a simple decision. The technical and business aspects need to be considered as well as the existing infrastructure, staff skill sets and future IT requirements. Undertaking research on Cloud Computing to determine its viability for your organisation can be a time consuming process and one that can result in an incomplete picture being built. To enable organisations to fast track this research process and to ensure all the major factors are correctly understood, Learning Tree has developed a course that provides attendees with the key information and skills in three intensive hands-on days. Why not attend and join EMC as an organisation that is benefitting from Cloud Computing.

Chris

How Dedicated Is Your Private Cloud ?

Published October 8, 2010 Cloud Computing 2 Comments
Tags: cloud computing training, Dedicated private cloud, private cloud

On a recent consultancy assignment I was advising an organisation on their cloud computing strategy. The team were convinced that they required a private cloud and rightly so – their deployment scenario demands a private cloud for security reasons. A key question to be decided was should the cloud be on or off-premise. When deciding on a private cloud, this is not the only question to be considered – especially if an off-premise private cloud is required. The reason being is the term ‘private cloud’ can mean different things depending on the cloud provider being used.

Consider the following scenario – you provision an off-premise private cloud from a provider. Most providers will host your resources on a separate virtual LAN configuration – the key here being virtual LAN. Your resources will still be on machines that are potentially shared by others. An interesting offering that is different to this is from Stratogen. Amongst their cloud range they offer a dedicated private cloud as well as a private cloud. How does the dedicated private cloud differ from their private cloud ? The key word here is dedicated. Your cloud is hosted on a custom built infrastructure, with fully dedicated resources – you and you only. Of course there are cost implications, but the security is stronger as well as performance less affected by the activity of others. To further add to the options, it is possible to have a hybrid private cloud – a mixture of on-premise and off-premise private clouds, which could be dedicated or VLAN based.

So what started off as looking like a simple decision for my consulting client, i.e private cloud or not, actually required a lot more consideration based on how dedicated the private cloud should be, as well as hybrid or not. Gaining the knowledge of this vital area of cloud computing is not easy. Most vendors use the general term ‘private cloud’ without fully explaining the details. This makes it difficult for organisations to fully appreciate what they are actually buying into and what are the consequences. It is this kind of knowledge that you gain on Learning Tree’s Cloud Computing course. I am next teaching this course in London – October 27-29. If you are thinking of coming along, register quickly its almost full! Hopefully I will see you there.

Chris

Perspectives on Cloud Computing from Learning Tree International

Posts Tagged 'private cloud'

Amazon and Eucalyptus Partnership: A Boost for Hybrid Cloud Development

Learning Tree Private Cloud Course: What Do You Think?

Eucalyptus Private Cloud – First Impressions

Evaluating The Eucalyptus Private Cloud

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