Eddie Budgen will be on the panel at the 2008 Top-IX Annual Conference in Torino (Turin, Italy) this December. The objective of the conference is to provide some lively, and possibly controversial input, for a wide ranging European audience as to the real meaning and state of Cloud Computing today and in the near-, & medium-term future.
Turn up or tune in …… it should be educational and fun.
Common Technical terms and definitions:
Cloud & Cloud Computing; Generally refers to accessing computing elements across the internet with no knowledge of the technical implementation supporting the requested resources. Encompasses, SaaS and now extends to Hardware as a Service and Platform as a Service.
Computing resources; the collection of computer hardware,storage, network, switches and routers that provide the raw physical horsepower for computing. Operated with some general purpose or specialized operating system and most often with various pieces of middleware software to support general purpose services to applications software.
Hardware as a Service & HaaS; Extends the principle of SaaS to offer pay-as-you-go access to remote hardware resources
Platform as a Service & PaaS; Extends the principle of SaaS to offer pay-as-you-go access to complete business application computing platforms – HW, OS, App server, database, message queues. Amazon EC2 is a leading example of PaaS.
Service Oriented Architecture & SOA; The general principle guiding modern software applications development to create loosely coupled discrete software functions and expose, call and manage them via open standards and protocols.
Software as a Service, SaaS; the principle of delivering business functionality through computer software accessed via the internet with no software installed on site. The first real example of the pay-as-you-go business model in modern software development.
Virtualization; provides a software interface to completely abstract operating systems from the physical hardware layer. You can manage your computing resource via a logical software layer. The prime benefit of virtualization is better utilization of hardware.
Virtual Machine, VM; Abstracting logical access to hardware resource
We have looked at the leading Virtualization server providers and extended the sense cloud application platform to two Virtualization technology providers.
Xen and VMWare are the leading Virtualization server providers today, and offer best in class performance for both servers and operating systems together with the highest degree of management functionality. So, while every modern operating system can be virtualized with industry-leading performance, they all suffer for being disconnected from a business approach to scaling.
The sense virtualization platform compliments existing Virtualization servers. Built on sense the sense virtualization platform federates VMs to;
The role of Sensible Cloud’s innovative cloud application platform sense, is to match the business layers of an agreement (Business SLA) with the physical layer of a virtualized platform, by instantiating the right number and quality of VMs depending on defined business rules, and maintaining a consistent and real time catalogue of what “hardware” in the cloud is available to operate a new VM instance.
sense virtualization platform
Amazon’s recent announcment of the production relase of their leading cloud platform EC2 had a very intersting embedded note.
Amazon EC2 now offers customers a Service level agreement (SLA). This sounds great, but what does it really mean for your business reliability? If your EC2 service is not up for at least 99.95% within your availability zone, then Amazon will give you a 10% discount on the following years subscription costs. This is not bad for a broad brush approach, but what do you do if you need to provide your own more fine grained business SLA to your customers as?
sense provides business SLA enforcement on Amazon’s EC2 platform. This means you can add an SLA to your applications or service and sense will automatically manage and instantiate additional AMI’s with the required platform and application software and add this resource to the pool available for application execution. This ensures that your high value applications receive the computing resources they need at the time they need it – and you only pay for what you use.
With flexibility to also include J2EE and virtualization solutions along with the Amazon EC2 Platform, you could also increase your overall relaibility by adding a small cluster to your Amazon platofmr or adding Amazon EC2 to extend your own server farm.
Whichever way you look at, with sense and Amazon cloud computing has just gotten SLA savvy
Amazon Web Services Blog: Big Day for Amazon EC2: Production, SLA, Windows, and 4 New Capabilities.
Comments (0)