vmware vcloud

virtualization leader vmware has officially entered into the cloud computing space with vcloud. they've been promising this for over a year, and it has finally happened. the vcloud api allows for enterprises to deploy an internal cloud. this cloud, of course, is supposed to be based upon a software stack of vmware technologies. it does not seem possible to swap out vmware components for equivalent solutions from other providers. so, while this would enable vmware customers features such as elastic computing, i would argue that vendor lock-in excludes it from being an actual cloud.

webgl followup

a blogger has discovered webgl code in webkit, which is the rendering library for apple safari and google chrome.

cloud computing steals from microsoft

sam ramji, microsoft's open source guru, has announced that he is leaving microsoft for a cloud computing startup.  there's no indication yet on which startup it is, except that it's in silicon valley, which excludes companies with vested cloud interests like hp, amazon, redhat and cisco, as well as startups like eucalyptus and rightscale as they are not located in silicon valley.  perhaps cloudera?  the announcement

monitoring vm instances using ganglia

there was an excellent email (the author's name is matt massie) on the hadoop listserv on how to setup ganglia on an instance running within amazon.  the directions are not specific to amazon's aws, however, and is generalizable to any vm instance.  i've copied the email below.
---

Ganglia doesn't need to be patched to work.  The patches are for Hadoop if
you are running ganglia 3.1.x (because of a breaking change in the ganglia
message format from 3.0.x to 3.1.x).

Since you are running fedora, you should be able to bring ganglia up by
using the ganglia RPMs which are available in the fedora repo.

Try the following commands on each node in the cluster you want to monitor

# yum install ganglia-gmond
# service gmond start

You will need to open TCP/UDP port 8649 as well to allow ganglia
communication (see your iptables configuration).  You can verify that gmond
is working by connecting to TCP port 8649

$ telnet localhost 8649

You should see an XML description of the state of the cluster/node.  Let me
know when you are this far in the installation and I'll help you through the
next steps.

---
and some additional info from that same thread

Hadoop comes with a number of scripts to configure EC2 instances, see
"HADOOP_HOME/src/contrib/ec2/

bin"

If you take a look at "src/contrib/ec2/bin/image/hadoop-init" you will see
that it sets up Ganglia.

amazon's virtual private cloud

until now, one of the biggest strengths of amazon's cloud computing model is that it is geared towards small businesses and startups. yet simultaneously, the same model is also one of its biggest weaknesses, due to the lack of enterprise support. this has encouraged a host of competitors to fill in that void. today amazon enters that space as it announces that new functionality to provide an enterprise driven model of support for cloud computing, termed "virtual private cloud".

initially, i thought such an offering would bring gloom to competitors such as eucalyptus. speaking with a member of that group, however, indicates otherwise. they are excited, for two reasons. first, it validates their business model (not that they needed amazon's validation anyway). second, it encourages enterprises to try out their software, since eucalyptus can be run on software you already own. and because the api is the same to both clouds, such enterprises can contract additional hardware on demand. good news for eucalyptus indeed.

google voice & sms

another exciting piece of news today.  you can now forward sms texts sent to your google voice account to an email address.  even better, replying to that text in the email will send an sms back to the sending.  how cool is that?  communications in the cloud!  ;)   the official announcement.

eucalyptus enterprise edition (eee)

eucalyptus today has announced the first release for the enterprise.  the main feature that eee adds on top of the open source version is the inclusion of vmware's virtualization technology, thereby enabling enterprises already invested in vmware to not have to migrate to xen or kvm.  this will go will with the recent announcement by amazon for virtual private clouds, to be discussed in an upcoming post.  the eucalyptus press release is copied below for archival purposes.

---

Eucalyptus Systems Launches the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition Which Includes Support for VMware Virtualization Technologies

Eucalyptus’ First Commercial Offering Enables Enterprises to Transform Multiple Data Center Virtualized Environments into a Powerful On-Premise Cloud
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – Sept. 9, 2009 – Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., creator of the leading open source private cloud platform, today announced the company’s first commercial offering: the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE). EEE enables customers to implement an on-premise Eucalyptus cloud with VMware^®’s industry-leading virtualization technologies, including vSphere^®, ESX^TM and ESXi^TM.
EEE is the only on-premise cloud computing solution available today for vSphere customers, providing a robust, affordable cloud computing solution that leverages their investment in VMware technologies. EEE also supports other hypervisors typically found in a data center, such as Xen and KVM, providing customers the flexibility to configure cloud solutions that best meet their infrastructure needs.
“Eucalyptus Systems’ mission has been to support the open source Eucalyptus on-premise cloud platform while also delivering solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments, and we are proud to launch the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition as our first commercial offering for the enterprise,” said Dr. Rich Wolski, Eucalyptus Systems co-founder, CTO and former director of the Eucalyptus research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). “EEE represents the first step toward broader Eucalyptus-enabled cloud interoperability that leverages multiple virtualization environments and technologies.”
EEE is built on Eucalyptus -- an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own information technology (IT) infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a cloud that is controlled and customized by local IT. Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure.
For EEE, Eucalyptus leverages vSphere, ESXi, and ESX virtualization technologies to provide an on-premise cloud in the data center. EEE also includes an image converter that helps users develop VMware-enabled Eucalyptus applications that are compatible with Amazon EC2. Moreover, Eucalyptus supports popular open source hypervisors such as KVM and Xen, enabling EEE customers to choose the most appropriate software stack for each cloud application while maintaining a single cloud API that is Amazon compatible.
"As enterprises and governments increasingly seek to leverage the benefits of cloud computing in on premise infrastructure, existing datacenters are poised for transformation," said Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. "With the release of its Enterprise Edition, Eucalyptus is providing customers with the ability to blend their VMware, KVM and Xen assets into a single cloud fabric while ensuring compatibility with existing public cloud options."

legal documents for startups

cloud computing is the next hottest thing, and i'm sure that there will be many startups around this technology.  one of the areas for a startup to address is legal affairs.  businessinsider is providing some boilerplate legal documents for startups to use as a reference.

delta cloud

this past week redhat announced delta cloud.  it is supposed to be a single api that connects to multiple clouds.  the idea has good intentions, but i wonder if it will become like drmaa.  drmaa was supposed to be a single api for grid engines, but never really took off, because each grid engine had its own idiosyncracies, and being a single api, drmaa needed to be the lowest common denominator of all of them, and thus was not very useful.  besides, who really used multiple grid engines anyway?

only time will tell what will happen to the delta cloud.

upcoming cloud talk, 9 sep 2009

clicker.com is hosting a talk to the los angeles cloud computing meetup group next thursday, 9 september, 7:15pm. details of the talk are copied below.
---

presentation and live demo of 3Tera's AppLogic cloud computing platform

Bert Armijo (blog.3tera.com) will be present and give a live demo of the 3Tera's AppLogic cloud computing platform - its features and real use cases based customer deployments.

Description From AppLogic:
AppLogic cloud computing platform allows users to combine any number of virtual machines into hierarchical structures such as web services, clustered data bases, and whole applications supporting the most popular data center operating systems - Linux, Solaris and Windows. Two levels of composition are supported at this time, assembled appliances and applications. Assembled appliances are placed into the AppLogic catalog to operate as a class definition from which instances can be instantiated on-demand for user applications.
At the application level via a drag-and-drop intuitive GUI applications are created using the AppLogic infrastructure editor. The composition provides a standardized set of commands for starting/stopping/backing-up/scaling/migrating/parameterizing/instantiating applications. This uniform set of capabilities enables applications that are complete and totally independent from the infrastructure they run on, including storage, networking, resource budgets, and parameterization. The resulting applications are created "in the cloud" at runtime and are completely portable between physical data centers without modification.

hadoop on mac os x?

i have been trying to setup an hadoop cluster on some macs, but have run into the problem that apple has not yet released a version of java6, which hadoop requires, to leopard (os x 10.5.*). more specifically, apple has only released java6 for 64bit intel processors (i.e. those with core 2 monikers). it seems that there may be hope after all, as someone reports that snow leopard (10.6.*) has 32 bit java6.



looks like i may be upgrading my systems soon, though it won't do much good for my ppc-based machines.

upcoming cloud talk, 3 sep 2009

uuasc (unix users association of southern california) is hosting a talk about how to build custom images for amazon's ec2.  details (copied from the webpage) are below.
---

Next Meeting, Thursday Sept. 3rd , 7pm-9pm
Location: Sun Microsystems, El Segundo

Building Custom Linux Images for Amazon EC2

Eric Hammond

IMPORTANT: Please be prompt, as we plan to start at 7 pm SHARP !! The building is locked at 7 pm and anyone who arrives after that time will require a Sun employee to escort them to the meeting. It is also highly probable that those who arrive after 7:30 may not be able to attend the meeting.
This month we will stick our heads back into the clouds, specifically Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud EC2, which uses Xen based virtualization to launch web facing servers on-demand.
At the September meeting of UUASC-LA, Eric Hammond, who hosted the EC2 BoF and the EC2 Linux for Beginners lab at SCALE7x, will expand on his recent presentation at OSCON 2009. The talk covers customizing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to create an Ubuntu or Debian machine image to your specs with a process you can modify and reuse as your needs change.
This talk expects that audience members are comfortable running and using a Linux system and have at least a basic familiarity with what Amazon EC2 is. Attendees who have run an instance on EC2 and have an understanding of shell scripting will get the most out of this presentation. Experts in virtual machine building will still pick up pointers for automating the process for EC2.
Eric Hammond is an Internet Startup Technologist who has been involved in the architecture, development, and leadership of a number of successful early stage startups including Citysearch.com, Stamps.com, Rent.com, ThisNext.com, and CampusExplorer.com.

Post meeting activities

Even if you eat pizza, you will still have room for dessert, so dont forget our optional gathering at Coco's restaurant in the Manhattan Beach mall, corner of Sepulveda and Marine Ave, for dinner and chatting. (Drive south of the meeting building down Sepulveda, turn left on Marine, and take an immediate left into the shopping area). The chocolate cream pie is a particular point of interest ;-)

---

Directions to Sun Microsystems, El Segundo

A big thank-you to Justin Roth of Sun, for providing us with our meeting place!

222 N. Sepulveda Blvd, Suite 1800, El Segundo, CA 90245
10th floor, to the right of the elevators.
Use the elevators on the west side of the building

This is one of the huge white "Pacific Towers" buildings. The one with
"Oracle" on the top, funnily enough...

From the 105 freeway:
  Take the Sepulveda (aka hwy 1, aka airport) exit, but go SOUTH.
  It's about a kilometre down Sepulveda, on the left.
  Take a left just BEFORE the building, on Grand avenue, and turn
  into "Visitor Parking"

From the 405 freeway:
  Take the exit just south of the 105 (El Segundo Blvd)
  Go west for 2+ miles on El Segundo Blvd.

  Turn right onto Sepulveda Boulevard. Stay in the right lane and take
  another right onto Grand Avenue. Pass the building on the corner
  completely and turn into the second driveway on the right were it says
  "Visitor Parking."

Parking:
Parking in the adjacent structure appears to have cycled back to
non-free, for now.

Here's a map for ya!

amazon goes after the enterprise cloud

one of the major concerns about cloud computing for enterprises is data security.  it's thus a well accepted fact that amazon's cloud offerings would never be taken seriously by enterprise corporations, especially those subject to the yokes of sarbanes-oxley.  companies like eucalyptus systems, which offers software for enterprises to build out their own internal private clouds have benefitted from this requirement.  that doesn't mean that amazon can't try to win those potential customers over, however.  they've announced the ability for enterprises to create virtual private clouds (vpc) within ec2.  i have not read too deeply about the specifics of this offering, but it does not seem like there are any guarantees about how the data stored by any enterprise customers can be segrated from the rest of the cloud, and still be afforded the same quality of service provided to non-vpc clients.  the aws blog post for the announcement is here.

oozie, a workflow management system for hadoop

yahoo is working on oozie, a workflow management system to layer on top of hadoop. there is not much details on it thus far. sources and some discussion of the system can be found at the jira ticket. alejandro abdelnur, the main developer at yahoo, also gave a talk (slides) about it at the hadoop summit 09 in santa clara on 10 august.

hadoop world 2009

cloudera is hosting hadoop world 2009 in nyc on 2 october.  they are definitly spending a lot of time and energy building the community.

pyside, nokia's python bindings for qt

earlier this year nokia, which bought out trolltech last year, announced that they would release the qt library under lgpl (press release). this was great news for any company that wanted to sell a commercial c++ application with a qt-enabled frontend without release all of their sources. my understanding with companies is that it's not they are not willing to pay for use of the source code; its that the per-developer licensing model which qt employed was simply too high for most companies. unfortunately, riverbank computing, which develops pyqt, the python bindings to qt, did not feel the same way, and continues to license pyqt under the old model.

pyside is nokia's effort at bringing python bindings to qt. it looks like they are using boost python to accomplish the task, making the task that much more daunting. pyside currently does not support python 3.0, windows, or mac os x, thereby minimizing its usefulness for many use cases, and defeats the cross-platform-ness of qt. i understand that it satisfies nokia's corporate needs however, as their products are linux based.

it would be a share for pyside to not expand its coverage. i suspect that nokia will put in that effort, albeit at a slow crawl. i also wonder whether nokia considered the option to buy out riverbank computing, the way they did for trolltech. perhaps they are introducing pyside as a way to disarm riverbank before any such negotiations. time will tell what happens.

doug cutting to join cloudera

cloudera is very hot these days. not only did they get $11m of funding within 3 months, in a very challenging vc environment, they have now recruited doug cutting, co-founder of the apache nutch, lucene, hadoop projects. mike cafarella, the other co-founder, is already in cahoots with cloudera. the press release is copied below for archival purposes.
---

Doug Cutting joins Cloudera

Back in October, I promised to keep marketing and sales out of this blog. We wanted to concentrate on technical topics and to choose signal over noise. Mostly, that’s meant that I let other people do the writing.
I’m breaking that habit today so that I can announce — with great pleasure! — that Doug Cutting, co-founder of the Apache Hadoop project and creator of Nutch and Lucene, has agreed to join Cloudera beginning on September 1, 2009. Doug’s contributions to Hadoop over the years have been considerable. With Yahoo!’s backing, he split the data-parallel processing engine out of the Nutch crawler to create the Hadoop project. He’s remained an active contributor and commentator, providing guidance and advice to the growing community of Hadoop users and developers.
Doug will join his project co-founder, Mike Cafarella, at Cloudera. Mike has a full-time appointment as a professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan beginning in December. In the meantime, and part-time after he starts his academic work, Mike will be working as a consultant for us here.
In the near term, we expect no change to the specific project work Doug is doing. Cloudera is excited about Avro. We intend to continue to contribute to Hadoop and related projects, and we all expect that Doug will be a critical part of both our thinking and our activity there. Besides, of course, we’re very pleased to add such a capable and experienced systems engineer to our team.
We look forward to welcoming Doug on September 1!
—Mike Olson, CEO, Cloudera

webgl & webkit

khronos has announced a webgl initiative to bring hardware-accelerated 3d graphics (via javascript bindings) to the browser. a whole new world of possibilities once this happens. exciting! press release copied below.

---

Khronos Details WebGL Initiative to Bring Hardware-Accelerated 3D Graphics to the Internet

4th August, 2009 – New Orleans, SIGGRAPH 2009 – The Khronos™ Group, today announced more details on its new WebGL™ working group for enabling hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in Web pages without the need for browser plug-ins.  First announced at the Game Developers Conference in March of 2009, the WebGL working group includes many industry leaders such as AMD, Ericsson, Google, Mozilla, NVIDIA and Opera.  The WebGL working group is defining a JavaScript binding to OpenGL® ES 2.0 to enable rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standards.  The working group is developing the specification to provide content portability across diverse browsers and platforms, including the capability of portable, secure shader programs.  WebGL will be a royalty-free standard developed under the proven Khronos development process, with the target of a first public release in first half of 2010.  Khronos warmly welcomes any interested company to become a member and participate in the development of the WebGL specification.
The WebGL specification will leverage recent developments in Web technology including the Canvas element defined as part of the HTML 5 specification and the marked increases in JavaScript performance across all major browsers.  Accelerated OpenGL ES functionality that is directly accessible from JavaScript is expected to encourage a wide variety of 3D-enhanced Web applications including those using rich user interfaces for enhanced navigation and functionality - making the Web more enjoyable, productive and intuitive for end-users.
“The Web has already seen the wide proliferation of compelling 2D graphical applications, and we think 3D is the next step for Firefox. We look forward to a new class of 3D-enriched Web applications within Canvas, and for creative synergy between OpenGL developers and Web developers,” said Arun Ranganathan of Mozilla and chair of the WebGL working group.
“Google is committed to open web standards and is very excited to be part of the WebGL initiative,” said Matt Papakipos, engineering director at Google.  “We believe that WebGL is an important step toward making high-performance 3D possible in the browser.”
“The WebGL working group inside Khronos is a unique forum that is bringing together browser and silicon vendors to create a low-level, foundation API for 3D on the Web,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at NVIDIA.  “Khronos will be reaching out to the key Web standards groups and the wider community to ensure WebGL is an appropriate, dynamic and enabling piece of the Web ecosystem.”

cloud computing & the us government

the us government has released a rfq (request for quotation) for the cloud computing initiative. the document can be found here. reuven cohen, founder of enomaly, has a great writeup here.

eucalyptus upgrades

in addition to everything else, eucalyptus has been working with boto on building a new set of commandline tools that is agnostic of the underlying cloud controller, whether that is amazon's ec2 or their own offering.  the result of this effort is that with release 1.5.2, euca2ools is now available.  underneath, euca2ools uses the python based boto, but is meant (at least initially) as a seamless replacement of the commandline tools provided by amazon.  the eucalyptus public cloud has also been upgraded to 1.5.2.  rock on!

rackspace open sources their cloud apis

on the heels of releasing apis for their cloud offerings, rackspace has now open sourced those apis as well. press release is copied below for archival.

----

The Rackspace Cloud Goes Open Source with APIs


Company fostering foundation for open clouds and cross cloud interoperability; empowers cloud development community

SAN ANTONIO – July 23, 2009 – In a major advancement of its open cloud strategy, Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world’s leader in hosting, today announced it has open sourced the specifications for its Cloud Servers and Cloud Files™ APIs under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license. Developers are now free to copy, implement, and modify the specifications, helping to enable a truly open cloud.
The Rackspace Cloud™ worked directly with developers in an open community to create the specifications and has now released them through Creative Commons.  Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain through its free copyright licenses.

"We welcome Rackspace’s decision to provide their client-side tools as open source to the community,” stated Rich Wolski, Chief Technology Officer, Eucalyptus Systems Inc. “It builds confidence among developers to know they can 'see' how the APIs function at a programmatic level.  Moreover, by providing their API tools as open source, Rackspace is assuming a leadership position in helping to achieve cloud interoperability."
As part of its ongoing vision to open the cloud and speed cloud development, the company has also made available its Cloud Files language bindings for Java, PHP, Python, C#, and Ruby under the MIT license.  The source code for these bindings is publicly available on GitHub, a public software versioning system, at http://github.com/rackspace, where external developers can now contribute.  Rackspace has also produced a technical guideline for Cloud Servers language bindings which is also available on GitHub.  This guideline will enable developers to build Cloud Servers bindings in a variety of languages, but with a consistent design and feel.  Rackspace expects to offer a reference implementation in Python soon and is aware of Ruby, Perl, Java, and Twisted Python Cloud Servers bindings that are in the process of being developed.    
Rackspace’s commitment to openness extends to its work with the community and expects to continue to expand the range of language bindings as developers provide them and work with developers to help ensure they are notified quickly of new features and updated technical specifications.
"It's great to see Rackspace push the movement forward by getting more code into the hands of the community" stated, Alex Polvi, CEO, Cloudkick, a leading cloud management platform developer.  “We are thrilled to see the company moving so quickly and proactively to promote an open cloud.”
“Rackspace is committed to the development of open cloud solutions and standards. We are working quickly to offer a wide range of tools to help developers work with us to create these important building blocks for the cloud industry,” said Emil Sayegh, General Manager, The Rackspace Cloud. “Rackspace is dedicated to bringing a coordinated effort to cloud development.  We are working directly with our ecosystem of developers and the broader industry to share what we create with the open source community.  We believe open source APIs are an enabling factor in making interoperable non-proprietary cloud solutions a reality.”

rackspace's new cloud offerings

rackspace is already a big name in server hosting. they have now released their own api for running a cloud on those servers, with costs that best those of amazon. the press release is copied below. they also discuss the press release in a blog post.

----

The Rackspace Cloud Announces Public API for Cloud Servers



Expands power of the cloud, offering more control and flexibility and automation features including mobile management of cloud with new iPhone application

SAN ANTONIO – July 14, 2009 – Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world’s leader in hosting, today announced the availability of the public beta of its Cloud Servers® API.  Cloud Servers, part of the company’s portfolio of cloud services, is a leading Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that provides inexpensive compute capacity that can be instantly sized allowing businesses to pay only for what it uses—as needed.  Through the open, standards-based API, Rackspace Cloud customers can now manage their cloud infrastructure with greater control and flexibility. The API, for example, enables elastic scenarios as users can write code that programmatically detects load and scales the number of server instances up and down. 

The Rackspace Cloud solicited feedback and conducted intensive testing with its partners and cloud developers to help ensure that the community shaped the API.  With today’s announcement, users now have control panel and programmatic access to the company’s cloud infrastructure services: Cloud Servers, Cloud Files and Slicehost.
The Cloud Servers API will introduce four new features including:
Server Metadata – Supply server-specific metadata when an instance is created that can be accessed via the API.
Server Data Injection – Specify files when instance is created that will be injected into the server file system before startup. This is useful, for example, when inserting SSH keys, setting configuration files, or storing data that you want to retrieve from within the Cloud Server itself.
Host Identification – The Cloud Servers provisioning algorithm has an anti-affinity property that attempts to spread out customer VMs across hosts.  Under certain situations, Cloud Servers from the same customer may be placed on the same host.  Host identification allows you to programmatically detect this condition and take appropriate action.
Shared IP Groups – While Rackspace has always supported shared IPs, it’s been made simpler with the creation of
Shared IP Groups and the ability to enable high availability configurations.

Rackspace Cloud customers will be able to manage their Cloud Servers or Cloud Files accounts anytime, anywhere on their iPhones thanks to an application built off the APIs by developer Michael Mayo. The application is expected to be available in the App Store within a month. 

“It’s been a great experience to collaborate with the Rackspace Cloud team on the development of the Cloud Servers API,” stated Michael Mayo, iPhone application developer.  “Working together with the Rackspace team enabled me to develop my application much more quickly.  I’m very pleased with the open feedback process as it makes my work a lot easier.”
With the API, developers can create applications for the Rackspace Cloud which can automatically access compute power as required. The Cloud Servers API also allows developers to work with partners on pre-built applications.

"After testing, it is apparent the Cloud Servers API was created to meet the needs of the community." said David Day, CTO, Zeus Technology. "The ReST API has a complete feature set and is easy to use. We are excited to be building on such a robust platform."

“With the launch of our API, we’re looking forward to working with our partners and the developer community to create a powerful cloud ecosystem which we believe will generate new tools and applications to make cloud hosting even easier and more efficient,” said Emil Sayegh, General Manager, The Rackspace Cloud. “We see programmatic control as essential for igniting an ecosystem around the Rackspace Cloud.  It’s a key tool for generating the ‘next big thing’ in cloud because it gives developers the power and control to bring their great ideas to fruition.”

The Cloud Servers API is implemented using a RESTful web service interface. Aiming to build a cohesive approach to all products in the Rackspace Cloud suite, Cloud Servers shares a common token authentication system that allows seamless access between products and services.  Launched earlier this year, Cloud Servers is a compute service that provides server capacity in the cloud to businesses of all sizes and leverages key technology developed by Slicehost, LLC, a Rackspace wholly-owned subsidiary. Until today, interactions with Cloud Servers only occurred via the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel (GUI) and now programmatically via the Cloud Servers API.

For more information or to obtain access to the Cloud Servers API, please visit: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers/compare

hadoop summit 09

yahoo is hosting a summit for the hadoop community on 10 june. the agenda looks full of juicy topics, including pig, cascading, usage with condor, etc.

cloudera, a startup focused on bringing hadoop to the enterprise, just completed series b round funding for $6m. this is on top of the $5m they got from series a round funding just less than 3 months ago! press release is copied below for archival purposes.

---

Cloudera, the Commercial Hadoop Company, Closes Series B Funding

Tue Jun 2, 2009 9:01am EDT

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Jun 02 (MARKET WIRE) -- 
Cloudera, the commercial Hadoop(TM) company, today announced that it has
secured a Series B venture capital funding round led by Greylock
Partners, bringing its total funding to date to more than $11 million.
Aneel Bhusri, Partner at Greylock, has joined Cloudera's Board of
Directors. Existing investor Accel Partners, which led the Series A
round, also participated in the round.

    With proven investments such as Red Hat and WorkDay, Greylock Partners
brings deep expertise and operational experience in enterprise software,
particularly in data management.

    "Cloudera is uniquely positioned to take advantage of a large market
opportunity around big data in the enterprise," said Aneel Bhusri, partner
at Greylock Partners. "The rapid adoption of Hadoop/MapReduce, Cloudera's
team of leading experts on big data who come from Facebook, Google, Oracle
and Yahoo!, and their rapid customer acquisition strongly positions the
company to lead this revolution in data management."

    Cloudera's mission is to bring the Hadoop/MapReduce platform -- a powerful
new way to store and manage vast volumes of data -- to the enterprise. The
combination of under-utilized data within corporations and the new
generation of data-intensive applications demand a new data analytics and
data processing platform. Hadoop/MapReduce has proven to be the solution
that can serve this new market need. Hadoop is already the data processing
engine behind some of the world's largest and most popular Internet
businesses. With this latest capital investment, Cloudera plans to drive
the company's growth across all strategic functions including product
development, training, support, sales, and marketing.

    "Cloudera has all the ingredients to change the game and data management.
The Hadoop technology has been proven to solve the big data problem, the
founding team comes with the deepest implementation experience in Hadoop
and MapReduce, and customer adoption and interest is accelerating. The
growth we have seen since the company started just eight months ago has
been very strong," said Ping Li, general partner at Accel Partners. "We
firmly believe the company will become a category leader in a growing and
new market around data management."

    "We are thrilled to have Greylock on the Board to help take the company to
the next phase of growth," said Mike Olson, CEO at Cloudera. "The
expertise Accel, Greylock and our other investors bring will further
accelerate Cloudera's penetration of the enterprise and Internet markets."

    Cloudera's other investors include Diane Greene (former CEO of VMware),
Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL), and Jeff Weiner (President of
LinkedIn).

    About Cloudera

    Cloudera (www.cloudera.com), the commercial Hadoop company, develops and
sells Hadoop, the open source software that powers the data processing
engines of the world's largest and most popular web sites. Founded by
leading experts on big data from Facebook, Google, Oracle and Yahoo!,
Cloudera's mission is to bring the power of Hadoop, MapReduce, and
distributed storage to companies of all sizes in the enterprise, Internet
and government sectors. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Cloudera has
financial backing from Accel Partners and angel investors who include
Diane Greene (former CEO of VMware), Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL),
and Gideon Yu (former CFO of Facebook). Cloudera's advisors include the
founders of the Hadoop project, Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella.

    

Media Contact
Ray George
Page One PR for Cloudera
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open cirrus summit 2009

open cirrus is "an open cloud-computing research testbed designed to support research into the design, provisioning, and management of services at a global, multi-datacenter scale", with collaborators from academia, government, and corporate entities world wide, including hp labs, intel research, yahoo research. there is an upcoming summit to be hosted by hp labs in palo alto. more information at the summit agenda page

upcoming cloud talk, 4 june 2009

eucalyptus systems and rightscale are giving a talk of their respective technologies on 4 june 2009 to the cloud-la meetup group. event details are copied below for archival purposes.

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Hello All,

We have two presentations that I think many of you will be interested in.

• Dr. Dmitrii Zagorodnov of the Eucalyptus project will be presenting a technical talk about the eucalyptus project
  
• Uri Budnik of RightScale will give a presentation about their platform.
  

USC Information Sciences Institute has graciously offered to host this event at their Marina Del Rey location.
map
The venue is a private building and the access is restricted. Please call one of the organizers to let you in if you dont find anybody in the lobby. We will send you a mail with that information.
Parking:
Malls east and west of Lincoln & Mindanao (max 3 hours).
Street side (if lucky) on Mindanao between Lincoln and 90 East.
Street side on Mindanao between Lincoln beyond 90 West.
Parking lot on Mindanao beyond Admiralty Way (on the left)
I'm looking forward to these two talks, and hope to see many of you there.
~Michael Fairchild

i bit the apple

so i finally decided to bit the bullet and sign up for mobileme.  i wanted a single device that would allow me to see all my calendars (ical, google, exchange) in one place.  it's ironic that there's no software application on any desktop that does this, but the iphone does (with the help of mobileme).  so i am now a user of a cloud-enabled service.  i'm liking it so far, but we'll see how it goes.

open source eucalyptus systems gets $5.5m series a funding

congratulations to eucalyptus systems for this round of funding. this is particularly indicative of their potential given the current economy and venture capital ecosystem. their press release is included below for archival purposes.

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Press Release / April 29, 2009

Eucalyptus Systems Debuts as Open Source Private and Hybrid Cloud Company

Benchmark Capital Leads Series A Financing to Launch Business Based on the Popular Eucalyptus Open Source Cloud Platform

Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., creators of the leading open source private cloud platform, today announced that it has closed a $5.5 million Series A round of venture financing led by Benchmark Capital with BV Capital also participating. The funding marks the launch of Eucalyptus Systems as a private company that will build and service enterprise-grade products based on the Eucalyptus open source private cloud software. Eucalyptus Systems’ mission is to support the open source Eucalyptus cloud platform and to deliver on-premise private and hybrid cloud computing solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments.
“Eucalyptus Systems will ensure the viability and growth of Eucalyptus well beyond its life as a university research project, while also extending the technology to meet the needs of organizations that require high scalability, reliability, and enterprise-grade support,” said Dr. Rich Wolski, Eucalyptus Systems co-founder, CTO and former director of the Eucalyptus research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). “Eucalyptus Systems will enable businesses of any size to leverage their own IT resources to get the benefits of cloud computing without the concerns of lock-in, security ambiguity, and unexpected storage costs that can be associated with public clouds.”
Eucalyptus is an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own information technology (IT) infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a “cloud” that is controlled and customized by local IT. Moreover, a local cloud based on Eucalyptus adds capabilities such as end-user customization, self-service provisioning, and legacy application support to data center virtualization features, making IT customer service easier, more fully featured, and less expensive.
Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon AWS public
cloud infrastructure. The Eucalyptus design gives users the flexibility to seamlessly move applications from on-premise Eucalyptus clouds to public clouds, and vice versa. Eucalyptus
also makes it easy to deploy “hybrid” clouds, which use public and private cloud resources together to get the unique benefits of each. To assist customers with setup, deployment, training,
and support, Eucalyptus Systems has created the QuickStart program, the ideal first step for organizations looking to partner with Eucalyptus experts on critical cloud infrastructure initiatives.
“We are excited to partner with Benchmark Capital as we launch Eucalyptus Systems,” said co-founder and CEO Woody Rollins. “Benchmark has a history of successful collaboration with
open source companies, and we are pleased that Eucalyptus Systems will join MySQL, Xen, and Zimbra as a Benchmark company.”
“Eucalyptus Systems is a pioneer in open source cloud computing, bringing together some of the industry’s most promising technologies to enable major IT cost savings and efficiencies,”
commented Kevin Harvey, general partner at Benchmark Capital. “The Eucalyptus management team includes some of the most accomplished and experienced engineers in the field of cloud
computing, and I look forward to working with them as they bring the benefits of secure, private cloud computing to the enterprise.”

Eucalyptus Management Team

The Eucalyptus management team includes Co-founder and CEO Woody Rollins, Co-founder and CTO Dr. Rich Wolski, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Matt Reid, and the team of Ph.D. computer science engineers from the Eucalyptus project at UCSB. In addition, Andreas Von Blottnitz, former CEO of AOL Europe and Citrix Online, is chairman of the board, and Dr. Klaus Schauser, founder of AppFolio and founder and CTO of Citrix Online, is serving as an
advisor.

The Emerging Standard for Private and Hybrid Cloud Computing

Eucalyptus, which is an acronym for “Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems,” is quickly becoming an industry standard for private and hybrid
cloud computing. To date, Eucalyptus has been downloaded over 14,000 times in 72 countries. In addition, Eucalyptus software is the cloud computing engine behind the Ubuntu Enterprise
Cloud (powered by Eucalyptus), which was recently announced as part of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Eucalyptus will ship with every copy of Ubuntu, starting with the Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition, made available on April 23.

About Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.

Eucalyptus Systems develops enterprise-grade technology solutions built on the open source Eucalyptus software for private and hybrid cloud computing. Originally developed as part of an
academic research project, Eucalyptus technology is quickly becoming the standard for on-premise cloud computing, delivering the cost efficiencies and scalability of cloud architecture with the security and control of deploying on an organization’s own IT infrastructure. Eucalyptus Systems’ mission is to support the open source Eucalyptus platform and to deliver private and hybrid cloud computing solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments. For more
information about Eucalyptus, please visit http://www.eucalyptus.com.
Eucalyptus and Eucalyptus Systems are pending trademarks in the U.S. All other trademarks are property of their respective
owners. Other product or company names mentioned may be trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.
Press Contact:
Lisa Sheeran
Sheeran/Jager Communication for Eucalyptus Systems
510-724-2267
press@eucalyptus.com

amazon adds map-reduce to their cloud offerings

amazon has announced the addition of map-reduce computational framework (using hadoop enabled images) to their cloud offerings, called elastic mapreduce. this is a huge step, as it relieves developers from having to write a huge chunk of code for coordinating their job distribution over their cloud cluster. the press release is copied below.
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Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon Elastic MapReduce - a Web Service for Processing Vast Amounts of DataNew Service Utilizes Instantly Resizable Hadoop Framework on Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 for Data-Intensive Compute Jobs SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apr. 2, 2009-- Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced the public beta of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, you can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as you like to perform data-intensive tasks for distributed applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research. As with all AWS services, Amazon Elastic MapReduce customers will still only pay for what they use, with no up-front payments or commitments. To sign up for Amazon Elastic MapReduce and other AWS services, go to http://aws.amazon.com.
Prior to Amazon Elastic MapReduce, running Hadoop or other MapReduce-based clusters required time-consuming set-up, management, and cluster tuning. Now, Amazon Elastic MapReduce makes it more affordable and less time consuming to run parallel compute jobs, building on top of the on-demand, resizable compute capacity of Amazon EC2. Using this service, customers can spin up and tear down Hadoop clusters on Amazon EC2 on a moment’s notice. To assist customers in executing these highly distributed applications, AWS is providing a number of sample applications and tutorials to get started using Amazon Elastic MapReduce.
“Some researchers and developers already run Hadoop on Amazon EC2, and many of them have asked for even simpler tools for large-scale data analysis,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services. “Amazon Elastic MapReduce makes crunching in the cloud much easier as it dramatically reduces the time, effort, complexity and cost of performing data-intensive tasks.”
Amazon Elastic MapReduce creates data processing job flows that are executed by Hadoop software on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon EC2. The service automatically launches and configures the number and type of Amazon EC2 instances specified by customers. It then kicks off a Hadoop implementation of the MapReduce programming model, which loads large amounts of user input data from Amazon S3 and then subdivides it for parallel processing using Amazon EC2 instances. As processing completes, data is re-combined and reduced into a final solution, and the results deposited back into Amazon S3. Users can configure, manipulate, and monitor job flows through web service APIs or via the AWS Management Console.
“Netflix is continually pursuing new technologies that extend our ability to deliver the best movie rental experience to our more than 10 million subscribers. Amazon Elastic MapReduce provides a powerful capability on top of the already robust Amazon Web Services technology platform. We’re enthused about the potential for this new technology to provide an even better experience to our members,” said Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt.
"MapReduce is a key component of our matching infrastructure," said eHarmony Vice President of Technology Joseph Essas. "Amazon Elastic MapReduce cuts down on configuration and management time, making the entire process much more efficient."
About Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows businesses to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.
About Amazon S3
Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.
About Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel; Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial.
Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.
Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and www.amazon.cn.
As used herein, “Amazon.com,” “we,” “our” and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.
Forward-Looking Statements
This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, indebtedness, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.
Source: Amazon.com, Inc.
Amazon.com, Inc.
Media Hotline, 206-266-7180

cloudera raises $5m series a funding

cloudera is a company focused on providing commercial support for hadoop.  they just announced raising $5m series a funding.  the press release is copied below.
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Cloudera, the Commercial Hadoop Company, Announces $5 Million Series A Financing Led by Accel Partners

Investors Include Top Executives From High Technology Firms Flickr, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, MySQL, Opsware, Palm, VMware, Wily Technology, Yahoo!, YouTube

Highlighted Links

http://www.cloudera.com/hadoop

BURLINGAME, CA--(Marketwire - March 16, 2009) - Cloudera, the commercial Hadoop™ company, today announced that it has closed a $5 million round of Series A financing led by Accel Partners. Founded in late 2008 by leading experts on big data from Facebook, Google, Oracle and Yahoo!, Cloudera's mission is to bring the power of Hadoop to organizations large and small. Hadoop, a powerful new way to manage and mine vast volumes of information, is the data processing engine behind some of the world's largest and most popular Web sites.
"We're fortunate to have Accel Partners as our venture capital partner as well as the financial support of some of the most respected and successful private investors and technology executives in high technology," said Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. "We believe that Hadoop is a disruptive new technology for mining valuable business information in the enormous streams of new data generated in enterprises today. Processing this kind of big data has been too expensive or too technically difficult for all but the most sophisticated IT organizations until now. Our mission is to use Hadoop to make big data processing capabilities accessible and affordable for all companies."
"Cloudera has critical elements that we look for in category-defining companies -- a world-class founding team, great technology, and a disruptive and large market opportunity," said Ping Li, a partner at Accel Partners. "Cloudera is uniquely positioned to bring the power of Hadoop to businesses, whether it be a scale out implementation inside a modern enterprise or harnessing the benefits of a hosted cloud solution." Li has also joined the Cloudera board of directors.
The founding team at Cloudera includes:

--  Mike Olson, who was vice president at Oracle and prior to that CEO at
    open source database pioneer Sleepycat Software;
--  Christophe Bisciglia, who created and led Google's Academic Cloud
    Computing Initiative that partnered with the National Science Foundation
    (NSF) to make Google-hosted Hadoop clusters available for research and
    education worldwide;
--  Dr. Amr Awadallah, co-founder of VivaSmart, acquired by Yahoo! where
    Dr. Awadallah served as vice president of engineering and used Hadoop
    extensively across the Yahoo! online services, including mail, search,
    finance and news;
--  Jeff Hammerbacher, conceived, built, and led the data team at Facebook
    responsible for driving many of the applications of statistics and machine
    learning as well as building out the infrastructure to support these tasks
    for massive data sets.
    

In addition to Accel Partners, investors in Cloudera include Mike Abbott (senior vice president, Palm), David desJardins (early Google employee), Caterina Fake (co-founder, Flickr), David Gerster (entrepreneur), Diane Greene (former CEO of VMware), Youssri Helmy (entrepreneur), Dr. Qi Lu (president of the Online Services Group, Microsoft; former executive vice president, Yahoo!), Marten Mickos (former CEO, MySQL), In Sik Rhee (former chief tactician, Opsware; founder, Loudcloud), Mendel Rosenblum (founder VMware), Jeff Weiner (president, LinkedIn; former senior vice president, Yahoo!), Dick Williams (CEO, Illustra; former CEO, Wily Technology), Gideon Yu (Facebook CFO; former senior vice president, Yahoo!; CFO, YouTube).

berkeley on cloud computing

the rad lab at berkeley has published a paper that provides an executive summary of cloud computing. the paper, titled "above the clouds: a berkeley view of cloud computing", covers many topics; this blog post will not do it justice. the short version is that cloud computing is a good thing, it's good that it has finally arrived, and gives 10 obstacles to overcome in order for it to thrive. these are:
* availability of service
* data lock-in
* data security
* network bandwidth support
* performance unpredictability
* storage scalability
* distributed debugging
* computational burst framework
* reputation
* software licensing
read the full paper for the juicy bits!