The next version of Ubuntu Linux (9.10 code named Karmic Koala) it has been announced,will be very cloud oriented. This starts with their continuation of work to make it easy to deploy to Amazon AWS EC2 but extends beyond  that to incorporate the Eucalyptus Project in their server version.

EUCALYPTUS, which stands for “Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems” is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. In simpler terms it is an open source version of Amazon’s EC2.

What this will mean is that Ubuntu server will have the tools required to create your very own cloud computing compute cloud built in. So making your very own internal cloud will get both easier to implement and easier to support.

The Eucalyptus Project

Eucalyptus is on version 1.3 and it includes the following features:

• Interface compatibility with EC2 (both Web service and Query interfaces)
• Simple installation and deployment using Rocks cluster-management tools
• Stand-alone RPMs for non-Rocks RPM based systems
• Secure internal communication using SOAP with WS-security
• Overlay functionality requiring no modification to the target Linux environment
• Basic “Cloud Administrator” tools for system management and user accounting
• The ability to configure multiple clusters, each with private internal network addresses, into a single Cloud.

The interface compatibility is important as it means that theoretically, the tools that already exist for managing Amazon EC2 should work on your internal Eucalyptus cloud. having Ubuntu put some of their weight behind the project will probably mean that the development progresses at pace and it will be simplified further and made more stable, ready for a production environment.

Eucalyptus Cloud Achitecture

Ubuntu involvement also means that support for a solution built on Eucalyptus is going to be less risky, Ubuntu is quickly establishing itself in the server space (as it did in the desktop Linux market initially) and proving a clean easy, stable server operating system.

As management tools for Amazon EC2 continue to mature, we can expect Eucalyptus to benefit also via that compatible interface. This will add value to Eucalyptus as a solution potentially.

Eucalyptus uses XenServer for it’s virtualisation back-end, so as Citrix have released more features into the wild, we can expect Eucalyptus to be able to achieve some very clever feats in the next couple of years.

It might be a good time to look at Eucalyptus and XenServer and perhaps start some trials now, so that when Ubuntu 9.10 is released you are well positioned to use it in your own internal cloud solutions.

In the run up to Christmas, people are starting to take care of the admin tasks that need doing.
One of them is backup.

With this in mind we have just sent a small email out to some local businesses about our Cloud Backup solution. With a hope that we catch people whilst they are preparing for the festivities and make them realise that perhaps they can utilise “The Cloud” to protect their business data with minimal costs… less than tape!

I have been backing up my data to “The Cloud” for proabably 2 years solid now; and it is nice to be able to help others utilise the technology. I was so sick of having to buy external hard drives, then bigger drives, replacing lost power supplies, etc etc.

Now I just backup via the internet. I can do it from home, the office, Starbucks, where ever I can get the internet. Because the software sends only changes, the bandwidth usage is okay too. because the data is encrypted BEFORE it is sent, I am comfortable with it sitting in an anonymous data centre. As per my previous post in relation to the DPA, I genuinely think the data is probably more secure in “The Cloud” than on my laptop!

I really hope that this email that has been sent, catches the recipients eye. And that they considder backing up to “The Cloud”. It just makes so much sense!

Lance

Some time back my colleagues and I needed to build an example usage for server automation product Cassatt Collage (since renamed Cassatt Active Response ). It needed to be relatively portable, and yet show off as many of the bells and whistles as possible.

What we decided to do was build a “Medium Availability Cluster“.
(It appears that “Medium Availability Cluster” appears to be a term we coined.)

A Medium Availability Cluster is just a term we used to describe a configuration of servers that is able to automatically recover from a failure in hardware (or software) with minimal downtime automatically. This is not a system that never skips a beat, this is a compromise solution that will fail briefly whilst it recovers.

The idea of the build was to show the power and benefits of server automation. We were not trying to show the power management or load balancing functionality that the Cassatt products offer. It was a simple example of how Disaster Recovery could be automated by software.

So how to create a medium availablity cluster…

To start with, build up a server and install your server management/automation software (Cassatt, OpenQRM, Puppet, etc.)

Once this is up and running use the included tools to create your “images” for your MySQL, Apache tiers.

In the example build we created, it was 2 MySQL servers, 2 Apache servers and a load balancer.
MySQL was configured to be a MySQL Cluster, Each Apache server was a basic Apache build with a simple PHP application running. We added the load balancer also to give a single point of failure.

A more sophisticated configuration that is particularly relevant to smaller sites, is to utilise Virtualisation via VMware, Xen, KVM, etc. Then each server in the tiers is in fact a virtual server on a physical host. You can include the host server (such as VMware ESX), inside your automation software configuration also.

Depending on how you do all this, you will want some spare physical servers included in the mix so you can cope with the hardware failures.

Okay, once it is built, time to play!