a journey to the darker side of

Cloud Computing

by Matthew McCullough

Matthew McCullough

10min

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➊A brief History

1960

“computation may someday be organized as a public utility”

-John McCarthy

Shared Time

circa 2006

“It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing – they should be in a “cloud” somewhere.”

-Eric Schmidt

SaaS

Virtualized Serverswith an API

➋What is the Cloud?

A style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.

-NIST (draft)

“

[Developers] need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the cloud that supports them.

-Aggregate of Tim O’Reilly, Luis M. Vaquero

“

Scalable

Dynamic

Pay-per-use

Minimal state

Affinity-less

Scale up

Scale down

Grid?

➌Why the Cloud?

Cost of startup

Experimentation

Transition to Production

No licensing fees

Instant availability

What’s the most expensive item on a

startup’s balance sheet?

You!

Time savings

Hardware setup time

OS setup time

Database setup time

Web container setup time

Server setup

Server destruction

❹Cloud Players

From most open to most constrained

Rackspace Cloud SitesRackspace Cloud Servers

Amazon EC2

Google App Engine

Levels of Abstraction

Operating System Images

Predetermined

or abstracted away

Programming languages?

Anything?

PHP?

Python?

Java?

File Systems

Rackspace CloudTraditional File System

Amazon EC2Elastic Block Storage

Mor.phTraditional File System

Google App EngineNone

Datastores

Amazon EC2Simple DB

Google App EngineBig Table

Operating Systems

Debian, Fedora, Ubuntuon Rackspace Cloud

Windows Serveron Amazon EC2

1000 variants of Linuxon Amazon EC2

CentOS Linuxon Mor.ph

Custom Linuxon Google App Engine

Pricing

Rackspace Cloud

1.5¢ per hour

Amazon EC2

Google App Engine

We’ll give it away free and make up for it in

volume!

❺Google App Engine

April 8th, 2008

Google AppEngine

Python

April 7th, 2009

Java!

But more like

Banned

Java⅘

Getting Started with

GAE

Free to start

Cell Phone #

Regular Google Account

10,000: first wave

95 minutes

25,000: second wave

Everyone: third wave

Technology Stack

SDK

Shell scripts to manage apps

Source code included

SDK-version-locked by the SDK JARs you

include

Subset of JDK 1.6

Custom Class Loaders

Sandbox

Whitelist of Classes

Caution!

Might work on desktop,but not on GAE

Application ID

Globally Unique

required for deployment

___.appspot.com

Servlet API

Jetty

JSPs

Java Mail API

Google Web Toolkit

Authentication(2 options)

Integration withGoogle Accounts

Admin & User Level Permissions

Roll your own(hint: use SpringSecurity)

Memcache(as an alternative to persistent disk storage)

Low level API

JSR-107 / JCache(javax.cache)

BigTable

Relational Database?

Relational Database

Can import from existing DB

JDO

JPA

Low level BigTable API

Limited GORM-JPA

DataNucleus

Logging

java.util.logging

System.out == infoSystem.err == warning

Log4j

❻Dark Clouds

a few GAE NOs

No Hibernate

No file writing

No threads

No server affinity

Even for sequential requests

No sockets

But... you can use URLFetchfor HTTP/HTTPS resources

No JNI

No more than 30s

common Concerns

Large Setups more economical to self-host

Out of your hands

Uptime?

Do you trust the vendor?

Databases without foreign keys is a new

frontier

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do... Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about... It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

-Larry Ellison

a journey to the darker side of

Cloud Computing

Code Examples http://github.com/matthewmccullough

Twitter

@matthewmccull

Email

matthewm@ambientideas.com

Blog

http://www.ambientideas.com/blog sidebar has my social networking profile links

Resources

• http://mor.ph

• http://appengine.google.com

• http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers(formerly http://mosso.com)

• http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Resources

• http://www.browsermob.com

• http://highscalability.com/

• http://highscalability.com/useful-cloud-computing-blogs

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri796Hx8las&feature=channel

Photo Credits

• www.ambientideasphotography.com [clouds]

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scientist)

• http://www.nga.org/Images/AM07SAT09HIRES.JPG

• All others purchased through iStockPhoto.com