Summer is almost here and it was really the time to clean up my blog a bit. Now there is a much more readable theme and all the CityDeal hamburger campaigns are gone. Hopefully nobody will be missing those?

I’ve been writing already about deploying applications instead of virtual machines and how I would like to move away from the machine instance and to a some kind of a service where you could select a system and the service would deploy and manage the needed computing resources. It now seems like this is starting to become a reality as there are providers like DotCloud and PHP Fog who take care of the infra while the customer just deploys the code.

I requested a beta invite to DotCloud which in contrary to PHP Fog is somewhat more multipurpose with other services than the PHP only. Actually, currently they have java, mysql, nodejs, perl, php, php-worker, postgresql, python, python-worker, rabbitmq, redis, ruby, ruby-worker, smtp, static as the deployment options. They also have some nice tutorials about how to use the system. The system is operated mostly locally from CLI and the code is pushed to dotcloud which seems like a nice way to do it as it is analogous to for example editing files locally and then using FTP to transfer the files to a web server.

As a test run, I went with installing WordPress as there is a good tutorial for that and only a few minutes later I had a running blog in DotCloud. I’m really liking this!

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.

So you have your great new application utilizing all the awesomeness of Amazon AWS? How you gonna sell it?

There are vague definitions of what is a cloud service and one of the prerequisites was that you could buy the service with your credit card and to pay only for the resources you use. Amazon DevPay allows developers to sell their AMIs (with application installed), all you need is a business in the US.

There are two ways how you can use DevPay: through AMIs you have built with the service installed and also by selling an application which uses S3 as the storage location. It’s a really good start, but still lacks a few things, like if you actually would like to provide high availability for the client who bought your AMI, the client will have to roll their own solution to achieve this. I bet in principle not many clients are willing to do that and would just like the application to be available.

When I think about this dilemma, a solution might be to have some kind of a root AMI which a customer would buy (and pay by the hour like crazy). This would then take care of the availability of the service by seeding new servers which are members of the application through some very wicked autoconfiguration. Actually, Elastra does almost this as their product allows the user to define architectures and then deploy them to Amazon. In principle, it would be possible to have an Elastra AMI with some configuration inside which the client could then deploy, but it does sound like a hack and not really something you could sell as a product. By the way, the Elastra’s product looks great for defining and deploying architectures at least internally within an organization.

The seeding of an application from a root AMI might make clients able to buy a redundant application and not pieces of it. So far, though, this is just a beautiful dream since the DevPay is not available in Europe so it isn’t possible to start with even the simplest model of serving an AMI of your superduperapp for the public. That is, if you don’t implement billing yourself. If I’m not totally wrong, the billing API is not public which makes rolling out your own solution impossible (you can’t either put limits based on usage charges in your account due to this reason).

I would be willing to adjust the definition of a cloud service regarding the pay by the hour and order by credit card before DevPay is available in Europe.

I’ve been thinking the relationship between operating systems and the reason why they exist – the applications. How does PaaS fit into the future of computing or is IaaS just a stepping stone to a world without the traditional one server, one application approach?

Having a background with enterprise IT, I know something (but not much) about deploying applications. Many of them are multi-tiered, the usual being front-end application servers with back-end database servers. Some may have a load balancer in front of the application servers. Thus, there are a few different roles a server must fulfill to deliver the service to a customer using the application these servers in whole produce.

How do you set up an application? It depends about the requirements of course, but basically there are some usual things, at least if you narrow the selectable services. VMware got an idea to bundle a few virtual machines into a vApp which can then be deployed. I have not personally used those, but they seem like an interesting concept. They do work in a bit different way than how an AWS instances would work since with VMware you have the luxury of for example vMotion taking care of VM migration in case the host dies… Giving there is a VMware HA cluster in place. Hiding the complexity this way sounds fantastic! I love it. I do want the same in Amazon AWS!

There has to be a way to group things in Amazon AWS. There are a few tools such as RightScript and Puppet which provide a way to move from a specific AMIs to specific scripts which produce a certain kind of servers. Using these scripts it should be possible to deploy a full application with various components. Puppet also makes it possible to update a class (with Puppet the servers may belong to a class, maybe clasess) of servers to have for example the latest resolv.conf file. Sounds nice! Essentially, this sounds a lot like Microsoft SCCM but for UNIX like operating systems.

How about a future where a business owner could just browse to an IT webstore, select a CMS installation with a rough estimate of usage and the system would just produce it by running the scripts in the backgroud? Or upgrade an existing system? How many IT admins would lose their jobs?