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Google Compute Engine seems to be no solution for the long haul

In an interview with GigaOM, Google‘s Cloud Platform manager Greg DeMichillie made an odd statement on the future of the Google Compute Engine which again have to lead to a discussion on the future-proofness of Google’s cloud service portfolio and if it makes sense to depend on the non core business areas of the search engine provider.

Google is to agile for its customers

After Google announced to close the Google Reader, I already asked the question how future-proof the Google cloud portfolio is. In particular, because of the background, that Google starts to monetize more and more services, those due to the revenue get a new KPI and thus are threaten a closure. Google Cloud Platform manager Greg DeMichillie exactly meets this question in a GigaOM interview and answered unexpected and not within the meaning of the customer.

„DeMichillie wouldn’t guarantee services like Compute Engine will be around for the long haul, but he did try to reassure developers by explaining that Google’s cloud services are really just externalized versions of what it uses internally. ”There’s no scenario in which Google suddenly decides, ‘Gee, I don’t think we need to think about storage anymore or computing anymore.“

Although DeMichillie to qualify in the end that Google wouldn’t shut down their cloud services in a kamikaze operation. However, it’s an odd statement on a service which is relatively as of late on the market.

These are things customers should better not hear

The crucial question is why a potential customer should decide for the Google Compute Engine for the long haul? Due to this statement one have to advise against the use of the Google Compute Engine and instead set on a cloud computing provider who has its actually core business in infrastructure-as-a-service and not be indulgent to sell its overcapacities and instead operate a serious cloud computing business.

I don’t want to speak of the devil and the devil shows up! But news like the sudden death of Nirvanix – an enterprise cloud storage service – to make massive waves and outface the users. This also Google should carefully understand if it wants to become a serious provider of cloud computing resources.

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Services @en

openQRM 5.1 is available: OpenStack and Eucalyptus have a serious competitor

openQRM project manager Matt Rechenburg already told me some of the new features of openQRM 5.1 at the end of July. Now the final release has been released with additional functions. The overall picture looks really promising. Although the heading at first can suspect that openQRM is something completely new, which is trying to outstrip OpenStack or Eucalyptus. But this is not by a long shot. openQRM already exists since 2004 and has built up a wide range of functions over the years. The open source project from Cologne, Germany unfortunately lost a little in the crowd, because the marketing machines behind OpenStack and Eucalypts run at full speed and the loudspeakers are many times over. Certainly, openQRM must not hide from them. On the contrary, with version 5.1, Rechenburg’s team again has vigorously gain functions and particular enhances the user experience.

The new features in openQRM 5.1

openQRM-Enterprise sees in the hybrid cloud an important significance for the future of cloud as well. For this reason, openQRM 5.1 was extended with a plugin to span a hybrid cloud with the cloud infrastructures of the Amazon Web Services (AWS), Eucalyptus Cloud and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC). Thus, openQRM is using AWS as well as Eucalyptus and UEC as a resource provider for more computing power and memory and is able to manage public cloud infrastructures as well as local virtual machines. This allows administrators, based on openQRM, to transparently provide their end-users Amazon AMIs via a cloud portal and to monitor the state of the virtual machines via Nagios.

Another new feature is the tight integration of Puppet. With that end-users can order virtual machines as well as public cloud infrastructures with personalized, managed software stacks. The best technical renovation is the consideration of the Amazon Web Services high-availability concept. Does an Amazon EC2 instance fail, automatically a new one starts. openQRM 5.1 is even able to offset the outage of an entire Amazon Availability Zone (AZ). Is an AZ not available anymore the correlate EC instance will be started in another Availability Zone of the same region.

According to CEO Matt Rechenburg, openQRM-Enterprise expands the open source solution openQRM consistently with cloud spanning management solutions in order to empower its customers to flexibility grow beyond the borders of their own IT capabilities.

In addition to technical enhancements much emphasis was placed on ease of use as well. In openQRM 5.1 the user interface for the administrator was completely revised. This ensures a better overview and user guide. Even the dashboard, as a central point has benefited greatly, by all of the information such as the status of the data center, are displayed at a glance.

New features have been introduced for the openQRM-Enterprise Edition, too. This includes a new plugin for role-based access rights management, which allows fine-grained setting permissions for administrators within the entire openQRM system. With that complete enterprise topologies can be mapped to openQRM roles in order to restrict administrators who are responsible only for virtualization in the enterprise to the management and provisioning of virtual machines.

Further renovations in openQRM 5.1 include an improved support for virtualization technology KVM, by now using it for KVM GlusterFS volumes as well. In addition, VMware technologies are better supported. This means that now even existing VMware ESX systems can be managed as well as local or over the network bootable VMware ESX machines and can be install and managed.

openQRM takes a big step forward

Although openQRM significantly longer exists on the market as OpenStack or Eucalyptus. Nevertheless, the level of awareness of both projects is larger. This is mainly due to the substantial marketing efforts of both the OpenStack community and of Eucalyptus. But technological and functional openQRM must not hide. On the contrary, openQRMs functions is many times more powerful than that of OpenStack or Eucalyptus. Where the two focus exclusively on the topic of cloud, openQRM also has a complete data center management solution included.

Due to the long history openQRM has received many new and important features in recent years. However, as a result it also lose track of what the solution is able to afford. But who has understood, that openQRM is composed of integrated building blocks such as „Data Center Management“, „Cloud Backend“ and „Cloud Portal“, will recognize that the open source solution, especially in the construction of private clouds, provides an advantage over OpenStack and Eucalyptus. Especially the area of ​​data center management must not be neglected for building a cloud to keep track and control of its infrastructure.

With version 5.0, the structures already begun to sharpen and to summarize the individual functions into workflows. This was worked out by the 5.1 release once again. The new look and layout of the openQRM backend has been completely overhauled. It looks tidier and easier to use and will positive surprise all customers.

The extension with the hybrid cloud functionality is an important step for the future of openQRM. The result of the Rackspace 2013 Hybrid Cloud survey showed that 60 percent of IT decision-makers have the hybrid cloud as the main goal in mind. Here 60 percent will or have withdrawn their applications and workloads in the public cloud. 41 percent left the public cloud partially. 19 percent want to leave the public cloud even completely. The reasons for the use of a hybrid cloud rather than a public cloud are higher security (52 percent), more control (42 percent) and better performance and higher reliability (37 percent). The top benefits, which hybrid cloud users report, including more control (59 percent), a higher security (54 percent), a higher reliability (48 percent), cost savings (46 percent) and better performance (44 percent).

openQRM not surprisingly orientates at the current public cloud leader Amazon Web Services. Thus, in combination with Eucalyptus or other Amazon compatible cloud infrastructures, openQRM can also be used to build massively scalable hybrid cloud infrastructures. For this purpose openQRM focuses on its proven plugin-concept and integrates Amazon EC2, S3 and Eucalyptus exactly this way. Besides its own resources from a private openQRM Cloud, Amazon and Eucalyptus are used as further resource providers to get more computing power quickly and easily.

The absolute killer features include the automatic applications deployment using Puppet, with which the end-user to conveniently and automatically can provide EC2 instances with a complete software stack itself, as well as the consideration of the Amazon Availability Zone-wide high-availability functionality, which is neglected by many cloud users again and again due to ignorance. But even the improved integration of technologies such as VMware ESX systems should not be ignored. Finally, VMware is still the leading virtualization technology on the market. Thus openQRM also increases its attractiveness to be used as an open source solution for the management and control of VMware environments.

Technological and functional openQRM is on a very good path into the future. However, bigger investments in public relations and marketing are imperative.

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Google expands the Compute Engine with load balancer functionality. But where is the innovation machine?

In a blog post, Google has announced further renovations to its cloud platform. In addition to the expansion and improvement of the Google Cloud Datastore and the announcement of the Google App Engine 1.8.3, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offer Google Compute Engine has received a load balancing service.

News from the Google Cloud Datastore

To further increase the productivity of developers, Google has expanded its Cloud Datastore with several functionalities. These include the Google Query Language (GQL). The GQL is a SQL-like language and is specifically aimed at data-intensive applications to query Entities and Keys from the Cloud Datastore. Furthermore, more statistics can get from the underlying data by the query of metadata. Google sees this as an advantage, for example, to develop an own internal administrative console to do own analysis or debug an application. In addition, improvements to the local SDK were made. These include enhancements to the command line tool and support for developers using Windows. After the first version of the Cloud Datastore has support Java, Python, and Node.js, now Ruby has been added.

Google App Engine 1.8.3

The renewal of the Google App Engine version 1.8.3 mainly directed to the PHP runtime environment. Furthermore, the integration with the Google Cloud Storage, which according to Google is gaining popularity, was reinforced. From now on functions such as opendir() or writedir() can be used to directly access bucket in Cloud Storage. Further stat()-ing information can be queried via is_readable() and is_file(). Metadata can also be write to Cloud Storage files now. Moreover performance improvements through memcache-backed optimistic read caching were made, to improve the performance of applications that need to read frequently from the same Cloud Storage file.

Load Balancing with the Compute Engine

The Google Compute Engine is expanded with a Layer 3 load balancing functionality which allows to develop scalable and fault-tolerant web applications on the Google IaaS. With the load balancing function, the incoming TCP/UDP traffic can be distributed across different Compute Engine machines (virtual machines) within the same region. Moreover, this ensures that no defective virtual machines are used to respond to HTTP requests and load peaks are offset. The configuration of the load balancer is carried out either via command line or via the REST API. The Load Balancer function can be used free of charge until the end of 2013, then the service will be charged.

Google’s progress is too slow

Two important innovations stick out in the news about the Google Cloud Platform. On the one hand, the new load balancing function of the Compute Engine, on the other hand the strengthen integration of the App Engine with Google Cloud Storage.

The load balancing extension is admittedly much too late. After all, this is one of the essential functions of a cloud infrastructure offering, to ensure to develop scalable and highly available systems and which all other existing providers on the market already have in their portfolio.

The extended integration of the Cloud Storage with the Google App Engine is important to give developers more S3-like features out from the PaaS and create more opportunities in terms of access and to provide the processing of data in a central and scalable storage location.

Bottom line, it can be stated that Google continues to expand its IaaS portfolio steadily. What stands out here, is the very slow speed. From the innovation engine Google, which we know from many other areas of the company, is nothing to see. Google gives the impression that it has to offer IaaS to not lose too many developers on the Amazon Web Services and other providers, but the Compute Engine is not highly prioritized. As a result, the offer has treated very little attention. The very late extension to the load balancing is a good example. Otherwise you might expect more ambition and speed to invest in the expansion of the offer, from a company like Google. Finally, except for Amazon, no other company has more experience in the field of highly scalable infrastructures. This should be relatively quickly transformed into a public offering, especially like Google advertises that customers can use the same infrastructure on which also all Google services are running. Apart from the App Engine, which is classified in the PaaS market, the Google Compute Engine must continue to hire back. This will be the case for a long time, if the expansion speed is not accelerated, and other essential services are rolled out.

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ProfitBricks opens price war with Amazon Web Services for infrastructure-as-a-service

ProfitBricks takes the gloves off. The Berlin-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) startup acts with a hard edge against the Amazon Web Services and reduced its prices in both U.S. and Europe by 50 percent. Furthermore, the IaaS provider has presented a comparison which shows that its own virtual server should have at least twice as high as the performance of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Thus ProfitBricks is trying to diversify on the price and the performance of the U.S. top providers.

The prices for infrastructure-as-a-service are still too high

Along with the announcement, CMO Andreas Gauger shows correspondingly aggressive. „We have the impression that the dominant occurring cloud companies from the U.S. are abusing their market power to exploit high prices. They expect deliberately opaque pricing models of companies and regularly announce punctual price cuts to awaken the impression of a price reduction.“, says Gauger (translated from German).

ProfitBricks has therefore the goal to attack the IaaS market from the rear on the price and let their customer directly and noticeably participate from technical innovations resulting in cost savings.

Up to 45 percent cheaper than Amazon AWS

ProfitBricks positioned very clearly against Amazon AWS and shows a price comparison. For example, an Amazon M1 Medium instance with 1 core, 3.75GB of RAM and 250GB of block storage is $0.155 per hour or $111.40 per month. A similar instance on ProfitBricks costs $0.0856 per hour or $61.65 per month. A saving of 45 percent.

Diversification just on the price is difficult

To diversify as IaaS provider just on price is difficult. We remember, Infrastructure is commodity! Vertical services are the future of the cloud, with which the customer receives an added value.

To defy the IaaS top dog this way is brave and foolhardy. However, one should not forget something. As hosting experts of the first hour Andreas Gauger and Achim Weiss have validated the numbers around their infrastructure and seek with this action certainly not the brief glory. It remains to be seen how Amazon AWS and other IaaS providers will react to this stroke. Because with this price reduction ProfitBricks shows that customer can actually get much cheaper infrastructure resources as is currently the case.

As an IaaS user there is something you should certainly do not lose sight of during this price discussion. In addition to the price of computing power and storage – which are held up again and again – there are more factors to take into account, that determine the price and which are actually just call to mind at the end of the month. This includes the cost of transferring data in and out of the cloud as well as costs for other services offered around the infrastructure that are charged per API call. In some respects there is a lack of transparency. Furthermore, a comparison of the various IaaS providers is difficult to represent as many operate with different units, configurations and/or packages.

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Exclusive: openQRM 5.1 to be extended with hybrid cloud functionality and integrates Amazon AWS and Eucalyptus as a plugin

It’s happening soon. This summer openQRM 5.1 will be released. Project manager and openQRM-Enterprise CEO Matt Rechenburg already has told me some very interesting new features. In addition to a completely redesigned backend design the open source cloud infrastructure software from Cologne, Germany will be expanded with hybrid cloud functionality by integrating Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and their clone Eucalyptus as a plugin.

New hybrid cloud features in openQRM 5.1

A short overview of the new hybrid cloud features in the next version of openQRM 5.1:

  • openQRM Cloud works transparently with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus.
  • Via a self-service end-user within a private openQRM Cloud can order by an administrator selected instance types or AMI’s which are then used by openQRM Cloud to automatically provision to Amazon EC2 (or Amazon compatible clouds).
  • User-friendly password login for the end-user of the cloud via WebSSHTerm directly in the openQRM Cloud portal.
  • Automatic applications deployment using Puppet.
  • Automatic cost accounting via the openQRM cloud billing system.
  • Automatic service monitoring via Nagios for Amazon EC2 instances.
  • openQRM high-availability at infrastructure-level for Amazon EC2 (or compatible private clouds). This means: If an EC2 instance fails or an error occurs in an Amazon Availability Zone (AZ) an exact copy of this instance is restarted. In case of a failure of an entire AZ, the instance starts up again in another AZ of the same Amazon region.
  • Integration of Amazon S3. Data can be stored directly on Amazon S3 via openQRM. When creating an EC2 instance a script that is stored on S3 can be specified, for example, that executes other commands during the start of the instance.

Comment: openQRM recognizes the trend at the right time

With its extension also openQRM-Enterprise shows that the hybrid cloud is becoming a serious factor in the development of cloud infrastructures and comes with the new features just at the right time. The Cologne based company are not surprisingly orientate at the current public cloud leader Amazon Web Services. Thus, in combination with Eucalyptus or other Amazon compatible cloud infrastructures, openQRM can also be used to build massively scalable hybrid cloud infrastructures. For this purpose openQRM focuses on its proven plugin-concept and integrates Amazon EC2, S3 and Eucalyptus exactly this way. Besides its own resources from a private openQRM Cloud, Amazon and Eucalyptus are used as further resource providers to get more computing power quickly and easily.

In my opinion, the absolute killer features include the automatic applications deployment using Puppet, with which the end-user to conveniently and automatically can provide EC2 instances with a complete software stack itself, as well as the consideration of the Amazon AZ-wide high-availability functionality, which is neglected by many cloud users again and again due to ignorance.

Much attention the team has also given the optics and the interface of the openQRM backend. The completely redesigned user interface looks tidier and easier in the handling and will positively surprise the existing customers.

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Infrastructure is commodity! Vertical services are the future of the cloud.

In 2014, the infrastructure-as-a-service market expects a total revenue of estimated $6 billion worldwide. A good reason to try its luck in this cloud segment. Numerous providers have jumped on this train in recent years and try to catch market share from the top dog Amazon Web Services (AWS). No easy task, since the innovation curve of most followers behaves rather flat compared to AWS. One reason is stiffened in the adherence to the word infrastructure in infrastructure-as-a-service. Arguments to change from AWS to a competitor because of a significantly higher performance sounds tempting in the first moment. But at the end of the day the maturity of the portfolio and the view over the entire offering counts and not just a small area where you have procured a technological advantage.

Infrastructure-as-a-services indeed mean services

Even if the Amazon Web Services was the first IaaS provider on the market, the word „web services“ take a central role in the philosophy of the company. Started with the basic and central services Amazon EC2 (computing power, virtual machine) and Amazon S3 (storage) more new services were rolled out in very short periods of time, which only have in the broadest sense something to do with infrastructure. Services like Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon SWF or Amazon SES help AWS customers to use the infrastructure. Starting a single Amazon EC2 instance has in fact just as much value as a virtual server at a classic webhoster. Neither more nor less – and is in the end even more expensive per month. So, who hopes to be invited to the party by offering infrastructure components – virtual computing power, storage, gateway – in the future, will probably have to stay out.

To largely stay out of the price war, Amazon, Microsoft and Google currently fighting on, is also advisable. While this pleases the customer, but will sooner or later lead to a market adjustment. Moreover, if you look at how Jeff Bezos leads Amazon (eg Kindle strategy), he gets involved in price wars, just to gain market share. Therefore IaaS providers should prefer to use the capital to increase the attractiveness of their portfolio. Customers are willing to pay for innovation and quality. In addition, decision-makers are willing to partially spend the same for cloud solutions or even more as for on-premise offerings. The significance is enhanced on the flexibility of the enterprise IT, in order to give the company more agility.

To match this, a tweet from my friend and fellow analyst Ben Kepes from New Zealand who hit the nail ironically on the head.

Vertical services are the future of the cloud

The infrastructure-as-a-service market has not yet reached its zenith by far. Nevertheless, infrastructure has become a commodity and is not innovative anymore. We have reached a point in the cloud, where it is important to use cloud infrastructures now to build vertical services on it. For this, companies and developers, along with virtual computing power and storage, are depending on services from the provider to operate its offer, performant, scalable and fail-safe. Despite the meanwhile extensive service portfolio from vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google still a lot of time, knowledge, effort, and thus capital is needed to reach this state. Furthermore, only proprietary infrastructure-related services are offered to work with the infrastructure of the providers. Everything else should be self-developed under the aid of these services.

For this reason, the market has a lack of service-portfolios from external providers that can be used by companies and developers in order to use ready-services on-demand which otherwise must be developed on the infrastructures and platforms themselves. Suchlike value-added services can be integrated horizontally into the vertical services for a specific business scenario and be used when needed.

This BBaaS (business-bricks-as-a-services) integrate provider-independent in existing infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service and create added value for the user. The individual business components are standardized and already highly scalable and highly available implemented as web-services and can be easily integrated without much effort.

More about the BBaaS concept can be found at „Business-Bricks-as-a-Service (BBaaS) – Business Building Blocks in the Cloud„.