dKaiser

It’s been a hectic past month to say the least! First of all, I’ve been a proud father for about a month now and everything is fine on that front. Then again, we had a water damage (a forty year old weld let go) in our place and are currently trying to get permits from the city officials if we could actually fix and renovate the appartment a bit. Have a look here of what it looks like:

Sucks…

I have not been doing much of anything cloud related as I also moved to a new job from HP to Fortum and I guess somewhat also because I’m getting fed up with the hype. In my mind, cloud is just a way of sourcing the necessary resources, albeit having some characteristics not found elsewhere.

But, I’ll continue with clouds in fall when I hopefully have some more time.

Have a nice summer!

The instance I run this blog was slightly impacted a few days ago. All of a sudden I could not ssh into the instance and the Apache was running really painfully slow. It did not really work at all. While I was already fantasizing that my really super awesome new web-2.0-youtube-facebook-twitter crossbreed vKaiser.com had gotten some traction and was overloaded by the publicity, I ended up in the AWS site to see the service status. The service status was fine and my hopes were still high. Then the truth hit me, there were others as well in the forums who had similar issues, EBS based image becomes unresponsive and reboot does not help. Can’t either take a spapshot of the EBS volume, but stopping and starting might help. Just have to prepare for the instance to go down very, very slowly.

So, as I could not take a snapshot and was not particulary interested in using a few days old snapshots, I decided to just shut down the instance and give it the time it needs. Eventually, the server went down and I could restart it just fine. Situation back to normal. This incident could of course have been avoided easily by having a backup system ready or even a load balanced setup if I would have the money to run it.

No luck in getting traction.

I did my thesis for one Agile software company in Finland, the F-Secure Corporation. I did also work for the IT Operations team as an IT Engineer and was kind of suprised how difficult the project management and in general delivering the IT projects for Agile organization was. The conclusion I ended up with the study was that the IT could be run in the same fashion as software is developed using Agile methods. It has been interesting to find a similar approach from other sources as well, cloud computing being one of the catalysts in this change.

Devops is a concatenation of development and operations and essentially is the same what I was looking for in my thesis. We did even try the approach in practice and it did work really well! using Agile methods brought the necessary structure in IT projects. In future, this type of new way of doing IT is probably even more valuable, as customers of IT don’t anymore allow a server deployment to take weeks or even months or ever lasting IT projects without clear visibility.

Besides using Agile methods, what else must the IT do in order to fullfil the needs of a modern enterprise? I have already talked about Puppet which is an open source server management automation tool. Datacenter automation is bound to make a big impact in allowing datacenters (private cloud?) to compete with public clouds in ease and agility of deployment. The role of a sysadmin and the developer could start to blur ans sysadmin has to know about how to deploy servers using a scripting language. Interesting times!

I’ve been neglecting the blog for a while and feel sorry about that. The spring has been busy and will most likely stay like that, some bachelor parties and weddings and I am also going to be a dad in the beginning of June! The boy is already kicking strong!

But I also have some new cloud related things to tell you about. Since the blog isn’t exactly driving traffic too much and I had some free CPU resources, I started a new project, vKaiser.com, which is a more Web 2.0 oriented site. Well, an imitation of YouTube but with heavy connections to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. The site is by no means ready, but you are welcome to check it out – with Firefox. IE7 is ok too if you are not on compatibility mode. Interesting things to mention is the storage of the videos and thumbnails in S3 and the possibility to use CloudFront too.

And just to make this post a bit more cloud related and not just pitching my new site, a short story of what happened during the development at one point. As said, I had the Facebook Connect module as well as the Drupal for Facebook (yes, I ended up running Drupal as the CMS system) module installed but I had not enabled the Facebook Connect module since the Drupal for Facebook does essentially the same thing of connecting with your Facebook credentials. Or should do. I had and still have problems with the module as it forwards to a page which can’t be found but still after a few refreshes actually logs in. Anyway, I did go and enabled the Facebook Connect module while Drupal for Facebook had the same functionality enabled if another module would work a bit better.

Sure enough, after enabling the module I was watching a white browser screen with an Internal Server Error 500 with no access to the admin interface at all. What to do then? Should I mess with the database? Remove some modules and run update.php? Well, could not even access the update page. Luckily, I was running the site on an EBS based image! I had a week old (yeah, a bit old, but I did not mind) snapshot of the volume so all I had to do was to get the static files out from the bad volume, create a volume of the snapshot, shutdown the instance, detach the bad volume and attach the new volume. Boot up. Reboot had to be done too for some reason before I could see the log from AWS EC2 console. Reattach the elastic ip, copy the static files and I was back in business. Restore time below 10 minutes.

I love EC2.

I was invited to join Pilvisauna (Cloud Sauna) organized by Codento Oy on Thursday. While there was yet another blizzard going on outside, the athmosphere in the cozy event among the Finnish cloud industry pioneers was great!

Guest speaker Mr. Martin Buhr from Amazon gave a presentation about Amazon Web Services with some very interesting figures about the exponential growth of AWS. The second guest speaker was a former fellow of mine from F-Secure Corporation, Mr. Pirkka Palomäki, who gave a presentation about the cloud strategy F-Secure Corporation is implementing. It is clearly visible that without F-Secure’s cloud strategy, the rapid detection of new threats would be nearly impossible.

I wish to thank Codento Oy and Mr. Martin Buhr for inviting me to join this event. It was great! Especially great was Codento’s innovative version of an EBS, the Elastic Beer Storage :)