CloudMess

So I’ve been doing a lot of contract consulting lately, which is about to wrap up. I’ve been working with and for some movers and shakers in the cloud world, including John Willis (a good buddy and all-around great guy) and Randy Bias (cloud guru extraordinaire). I’ve had a great opportunity to use and learn many private cloud tools. Eucalyptus, VMOps, OpenNebula, and a few others as well. I’m going to try and find some time to write some detailed info about what I’ve learned soon. Maybe this week.

Most lately, I’ve done some Chef development for some recipes to deploy a local, private cloud on your own hardware using Open Nebula. Just got done with a successful demo at CloudConnect where I set up a two-node cloud system plus a controller in just under a half hour in front of an audience of about 100 people. Biggest demo of my life, and it was the end result of literally a month’s work. We’re releasing the recipes open-source once I polish them up a little more. I’d really like to add kvm support and true LWRP templates for VM deployment. More to come, please stay tuned.

I just came across this blog post from Tim Bray, which gives some good insider-perspective on what Sun’s got building for a cloud offering. I’m intrigued:

• It’s not a hosted-application-cloud, it’s a real, honest-to-goodness IT virtual datacenter cloud a-la Amazon EC2.
• They’re developing an open api to control the thing. More on that later.
• The API is so open, you can join the project.

He’s also mentioned there’s a storage component, a computing component, powered by the Q-Layer technology that Sun acquired in January. Here’s a great YouTube clip of an interview with one of the Q-Layer principals. This is cool for the network admins in the crowd: a drag-and-drop browser based interface that allows you to build your virtual infrastructure graphically, similar to 3Tera.

What’s most interesting here is that, according to Tim, Sun’s REALLY getting the point here: open designs, open APIs. Creative Commons license on the API. This allows other virtual infrastructure providers to use the API for portability, so that you can build a cotrtol interface to manage multiple cloud infrastructures. The point, according to Tim, is “Zero Barrier to Exit.” No one wants vendor lock-in as a customer. Amazon has been somewhat aggressive in protecting their API IP, in the one case that someone has white-boxed it: Eucalyptus. With a common API, the portability barriers diminish, so that you’ll find most cloud-based ‘mission critical’ infrastructures spanning different offerings. Vendor lock-in means only one company gets that slice of the whole pie, where open barriers mean that one customer will likely pick two or more providers to minimize points of failure. That’s a truly positive development that will help the industry as a whole. I just signed up, and I’m looking forward to seeing how I can contribute.

I’m running off to the Atlanta Cloud Meetup in a few minutes, so I don’t have a lot of time to post, but here’s a few links that I’ve come across on some cloud updates:

• Google has updated the AppEngine SDK. I’m not a big AppEngine programmer, so hopefully someone will chime in on what’s cool and fresh on this one.
• Amazon just opened up Flexible Payment Services and are offering a free getting-started promo. There’s getting to be some nice service-based payment systems these days.
• Christopher Hoff’s put together a far better picture of cloud-type services than I’ve been doing with words. Take a look.