Cloud Jason

[DEMO] Introduction to Virtual Systems with IBM Workload Deployer 3.0

Part 4 in my video series... here I introduce the concepts of Virtual System in IBM Workload Deployer and how to deploy them to the cloud...

 

[DEMO] Making your Application Elastic with IBM Workload Deployer 3.0

Part 3 in my series.. this one shows how to extend the simple application to make it elastic on the cloud with a Scaling Policy.

 

[DEMO] Simple Application Deployment with IBM Workload Deployer 3.0

Part 2 in my video series.. this one shows how to deploy a simple application to the cloud with IBM Workload Deployer 3.0 Virtual Applications.

 

[DEMO] Introduction to IBM Workload Deployer 3.0

To celebrate the launch of IBM Workload Deployer 3.0 I have started working on a series of demo movies showing the capabilities of the product. I am going to try to walk through all of the interesting new features of IWD in this series. So here you go, the first in the series, a basic introduction to the Workload Deployer user interface...

 

 

Daring Fireball: It's All Software

Here’s Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, writing about iCloud: Here’s how Google and Apple’s vision of the cloud differ: for Google, the cloud means cloud + web; for Apple, cloud computing means cloud + software, with the internet stuff happening behind the scenes.

via daringfireball.net

Interesting article about Mobile and Cloud and the difference between Apple's and Google's vision of cloud as it relates to mobile. In both cases it is the APIs on the backend in the cloud that provide the real power...

Measuring the Performance of Your Cloud

As our customers continue their aggressive migration to shared resource environments in the form of Private Clouds, they are asking questions about measuring performance.

via www.ibm.com

Great blog entry by Jerry Cuomo on performance considerations for cloud, including a look at the key performance measurements that you should consider for a private, PaaS style cloud.

Beyond Initial Provisioning...

As we have been working on IBM Workload Deployer and the notion of workload patterns, one of the things that has been driving us is the idea that the cloud can help with more than initial provisioning. Many cloud systems are great for getting you up and running quickly.  You can deploy complex software quickly through images and automation around images. But after you get an application running on the cloud, what happens next?  How do you handle failures? How do you grow the environment as load increases? How do you patch and update the application and middleware?  How do you debug problems? These parts of the lifecycle of the application are just as important as initial provisioning. But does the cloud automate these aspects as well? Many cloud systems do not. With workload patterns we do.  Workload patterns handle the entire lifecycle of the application on the cloud. That is made possible because workload patterns get you out of the business of saying how to deploy the software and instead has you focus on what you are trying to deploy. This level of abstraction allows the workload pattern to control how the middleware is being used and therefore allows the cloud to know how to rebuild something on failure or grow the environment. I believe this is really powerful.  I can now deploy my app and be assured that it is managed throughout its lifecycle.  This is a critical capability of PaaS environments. Initial provisioning is not enough.

Internet security: Keys to the cloud castle | The Economist

CONSIDER the purchase of a home in two adjacent gated communities. Both have houses with truly impregnable locks. In one community, whenever you need to enter your house, you visit the management office and show your driving licence. A guard walks you to your home, and lets you in using the master key that opens every door lock in the community. You can stay inside indefinitely. If an employee misuses the key to wander into homes or, heaven forfend, a thief gets his hands on it, all bets are off—the households' sanctity has been compromised.

via www.economist.com

Interesting analogy about cloud security models... relevant in PaaS systems too as we think about the relationship between the PaaS management system and the deployed applications.

Amazon EC2 Outage Summary

Great summary from Amazon on the root cause of the recent EC2 outage...
http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/

Workload Deployer Demo at IMPACT 2011

While at IMPACT 2011 in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago Jerry Cuomo and I did a presentation on the 10 Attributes of Cloud Computing and IBM Workload Deployer. In this session I walked through a demo of some of the key ideas in Workload Deployer. Check out the Cloud Mini-Main-tent and let me know what you think...  skip to 1:05:15 in the video to get to the good stuff. 

 

Watch live streaming video from ibmimpact at livestream.com