News from Jul 07, 2009

InfoWorld: Sun upgrades freeware virtualization tool

by Tom Jowitt

Sun has upgraded one of its most popular freeware products after releasing a major new version of its open-source virtualization tool xVM VirtualBox, which includes the ability to cope with demanding server workloads.

VirtualBox proved popular when it first appeared back in 2007 from Stuttgart, Germany-based Innotek. Sun later acquired Innotek in February 2008. At the time, Sun revealed that the product had been downloaded over 4 million times, but Sun now says it has surpassed 14.5 million downloads and 4 million registrations worldwide, as well as more than 25,000 downloads a day.

So what is VirtualBox? Well, it is a x86 virtualization product designed for both enterprise and home use. Essentially it is both a desktop and server-virtualization hypervisor, and is freely available as open source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

It runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and OpenSolaris hosts, and supports a large number of guest operating systems including Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.

Put simply, if a user downloaded and installed VirtualBox onto their laptop, they could then run most any other popular operating system on the same machine besides its native OS. Or they could run several operating systems at the same time, depending on what hardware resources are available.

This makes it an incredibly useful tool for software developers who want to target multiple operating systems in order to maximize their audience and return on investment (ROI). VirtualBox gives them the opportunity to run things such test environments etc, on a single laptop for example.

Back in September last year, Sun said it had improved VirtualBox's performance and platform support when it released VirtualBox 2.0. But now the company has released a major upgrade, version 3.0, which it says offers improved desktop and server virtualization features.

On the desktop side, it can now run Microsoft Direct3D support for Windows guests, which allows for graphically intensive Windows applications, such computer modelling, 3D design and games software, to run in a virtual environment. Support for version 2.0 of the Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) standard has also been added, which allows for high performance graphical applications that typically use graphical hardware acceleration. Finally, support for a wider range of USB devices, such as iPods, mobile phones and storage devices has also been added.

But it is on the server side, which has seen the most significant updates. With more and more multi-threaded database and Web applications making use of multiple CPUs, VirtualBox 3.0 can now support virtual SMP systems with up to 32 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) in a single virtual machine. This now gives VirtualBox the ability to run 'heavyweight data-processing workloads.'

TheRegister: Google code cloud punts on-demand embarrassment

by Ted Dziuba

Fail and You. Last week, users of Google App Engine - Google's application hosting platform - discovered a new feature in the product: downtime (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/02/google_app_engine_fail/). App Engine was offline for roughly six hours, and for much of that time, even the status page which tells users about downtime was unavailable. Now that's a strong way to send a message.

As a reminder: Google App Engine is Google's response to Amazon Web Services. Amazon has set up a scheme where customers can have full access to virtual computers and can also pay for scalability-included services like S3 for storage and a messaging system. It's a fair balance between automatic scaling and control. Google, on the other hand, offers developers a Python and Java API to its database back-end and absolutely zero control over the machines on which your application is running.

App Engine developers must go through the effort to contort their program to Google's data storage mechanism, which in some cases can be a far cry from SQL. The benefit to this is that you don't have to worry about scalability, ever. Allegedly. It's sort of like how a heroin addiction means that you don't have to worry about reality, ever.

As with anything that flies through a cloud, Google App Engine can suffer a double flame-out and crash to the ground, killing hundreds and swearing a large subset of the population off of air travel for quite some time. Google has paying customers for App Engine, and maybe Wonka doesn't quite understand this, but when people pay you for a service, they expect a certain amount of transparency and honesty.

Watching Google's response to the App Engine downtime reminded me of the cruel 2008 US Vice Presidential debates, where everyone watching just wanted to pull Sarah Palin aside and say "Sweetie, this is a grown-up event. You need to use your big-girl words now." Google's explanation for six hours of downtime was basically, "Shit got ill."

The meat of Google's postmortem on the failure was this, a message posted to the App Engine e-mail group: "There was a serious issue in one of App Engine's datacenters with GFS, Google's low level storage system. GFS underlies Bigtable, which in turn underlies App Engine's Datastore. GFS also provides storage for our application serving infrastructure, so GFS unavailability caused problems for Datastore reads and writes, as well as application serving."

Let's say that you were tasked with maintaining the computing platform for your company's web services. After six hours of service outage, your supervisor asked you for an explanation of what happened, and you follow Google's lead. You say, "There was a serious issue with one or more of our computers." Ass, meet curb.

Almost a year ago, Amazon's S3 storage service suffered roughly eight hours of downtime. Amazon's postmortem on the failure included details about specific bugs in their message passing system, and how their wonderfully scalable system could also scale errors quite wonderfully. Amazon identified an oversight in their own code with respect to error checking, so as a customer, you could be sure that somebody is on that shit.

Google, on the other hand, doesn't feel like telling anyone exactly why GFS failed. Was it a bug in the code? Was it a traffic issue? Did Augustus Gloop fall into the chocolate river?

As far as preventing future such failures, Google is equally as tight-lipped. Their postmortem only says this: "The team has been actively working on a solution in the medium-term that would allow us to switchover data centers immediately without consistency problems."

Um, fantastic. When will that be deployed? Why specifically could you not fail over in this case? Do you realize that you're being paid for this? By comparison, Amazon outlined four changes they made to their system, in both code and monitoring, to prevent that type of failure from happening again.

One could argue over the necessity of up-time for the types of apps that appear on App Engine. After all, the world only needs so many RSS readers and Twitter clones. But this highlights the greater risk of hosting your applications in the - and oh it pains me to say this, but for the sake of brevity - cloud. Every time there is downtime like this, be it Google App Engine or Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, tech pundits all tell us that it's not ready for prime time. What the fuck does that even mean? My guess: "My editor wanted me to cover this story and I lack the originality to make any meaningful contribution."

I'll go out on a limb here. Hosting production services on platforms like App Engine is never a good idea. It may be fine for some toy application or a web service that you never plan to make any money from, but when your livelihood depends on it, will you really trust the business to a company whose failure response is the technical version of "whoooa, sorry bro, my bad?" Clearly, you can draw a line when it comes to outsourcing. But for serious business, if you can't put your hands on the metal - or order someone else to put their hands on the metal - then you're due for an embarrassment. And it's nobody's fault but your own.

Google's sell really appeals to the engineers, but I hope that the decision makers can see through the bullshit. Automatic scalability? Really? Or did you guys drop too much capital expenditure on machines and have to come up with a way to make a return on that investment? Maybe it's less of a tell than I think it is, but the App Engine main product page has a prominent link to the terms of service at the top, and no link or contact information for support. Google's introverted population certainly knows that it's easier and cheaper to legalese your way out of a customer's problem than it is to hire a person to pick up the phone.

Man, supporting real people is way harder than selling ads. ®

CNet: Three debates that will benefit cloud computing

by James Urquhart

Cloud computing is one of those operations models that has already started to disrupt the way in which everyone consumes software.

It is also starting to have an effect (albeit tiny right now) on the way in which people and organizations consume (or don't consume) hardware. Cloud computing has become a part of the core information technology "fabric" of many.

Cloud computing does, however, generate more than its fair share of disagreement and debate. Vendors, customers, bloggers, twitterers, and even consumers have spend many thousands of hours, hundreds of thousands of words, and millions of dollars trying to convince the world that their view of cloud computing is "the one." Meanwhile, thousands of other very smart people are questioning the core assumptions on which cloud computing's value proposition rests.

You would think this dissent would be detrimental to the adoption and growth of cloud computing, but it's not. Partially that's for the relatively lame reason that every new definition and every new "must-have" feature expand the possibility of what cloud computing is...thereby growing the term "cloud computing" through a sort of linguistic acquisition strategy.

However, it is also in part due to the fact that these debates are spurring a huge amount of brain power to focus on some really difficult-to-solve cloud-related problems. The tension created by disagreement and debate in the cloud computing marketplace is spurring entrepreneurs, vendors, and even individuals to achieve their independent visions of what could be. Tension drives innovation, in this case.

Let me give you three examples of what I am talking about. These are probably the three most important examples of how disagreement is driving technology road maps industrywide. Some of these disagreements are clearly self-serving--established systems vendors protecting their markets while enthusiastic entrepreneurs attempt to redefine the markets outright. Some are just different ways of seeing the same subject, but with profound effects on the choices made by vendors and individuals on each side of the debate.
Consumer and small/midsize business versus enterprise

One of the biggest sources of tension among those that debate cloud computing definitions is the difference between the needs of individuals and small/medium businesses (SMB) versus those of their larger enterprise counterparts.

The former is looking to minimize cost and complexity as much as possible by eliminating the need to own things. Consumer/SMB is a market in which providing service through standardized devices reigns supreme, and the requirement to own anything other than basic access devices-laptops, Netbooks, smartphones, and the like-is detrimental. This marketplace sees the issue as outsourcing as much information technology as possible and is willing to place a high level of trust in providers to achieve that.

Enterprises, however, tend to be much more concerned maintaining their existing investments in IT while gaining a return on investment for new spending on new technologies or processes. A tremendous amount has been spent on making IT a trusted resource (though clearly with mixed results). Enterprises won't move forward on cloud unless they can maintain that level of trustworthiness without excessive expenditure.

So the consumer/SMB market is trying to drive the enterprise towards pure IT as a service, and the enterprise is trying to get cloud providers to up their game in security, control, service levels, and compliance. All are very good for cloud customers as a whole.
Public cloud versus private cloud

Closely related to the problem of how to run IT is where to run it. And by running it, I don't necessarily where the hardware is running, but where controls that define "the cloud" are maintained. Who owns the systems that manage the cloud and that define things like access rights, available software images, and network service configurations?

This is essentially the heart of the debate about how much service is provided by IT--how much cloud must be on the Internet for it to be cloud. Those who believe "private clouds" are unnecessary generally believe that you can get everything you need from your public cloud provider. Take Amazon Web Services, for instance. Using its console, its messaging infrastructure, its data stores, and so on, many developers are arguing that there is little reason to build and operate new applications anywhere else.

The argument for private clouds, however, is generally based on the risks inherent in external public clouds-things like lock-in, data ownership, regulatory concerns, security, etc.-as well as the alleged ability of private clouds to provide a smoother migration path to external clouds than going straight to public clouds today.

So, the public cloud crowd is pushing internal IT and individuals toward using third-party services to replace capital intensive IT, while the private cloud crowd is pushing cloud service providers to see interacting with existing IT infrastructure as an enabler for cloud adoption. Again, both are good for cloud customers.
Open source versus proprietary

While the previous two arguments have been about how and where to operate IT, this debate is a little different. It is about software technology, and it is actually about much more than cloud computing. On the surface, it's the same old "free versus commercial" debate. But when you dig down from a cloud perspective, you find nuances that will be critical to the future form of the cloud.

You've probably read about the debate regarding whether cloud computing is the logical conclusion of open source. Many open source companies note that in order to profit from open source, they must be exceptional service businesses. As cloud computing is all about service delivery, it is a natural model in which to sell open source services.

That argument, while critical, isn't the whole story, however. The other side of the coin is the debate about whether one can build competitive cloud services using anything other than open source. Most of the leading clouds available today are heavy users of open-source software, and many of the most compelling server images in Amazon's image library are based on open source.

Folks like Microsoft and VMWare, however, would beg to differ and are working furiously to prove to the market that their value add is worth the cost of their software. The argument is that these companies can pay for innovation and for a partner ecosystem that drives new business and have the customer relationships to work through long-term cloud deployment issues.

Here, the open-source community is playing a critical role in driving a new business model for software delivery (free software, for-fee service), while the so-called "proprietary" platforms are building ecosystems that push open source to continually reinforce its value to developers.

In the end, while I have preferences in each of these debates, it is impossible to declare any winners at this point. And that is good, as our constant testing of each others' principles will lead to an ever-increasing richness in cloud computing offerings for years to come.