Cloud Confusion and the DoD

Last week the Department of Defense announced a new private cloud computing environment called RACE (Rapid Access Computing Environment). This was an announcement that received a ton of attention in blogs and the circles of cloud computing advocates and naysayers. The frustrating thing about announcements and the ensuing arguments that take place afterward is that there are very few people that really understand what cloud computing is and all of the facets that are involved. The problem really stems from the over-use of the term "cloud computing" to cover what seems to be every application that runs in your browser. Just because you don't know where the actual server is located, or because it runs in your browser does not make something cloud computing. As soon as the announcement was made about RACE, the comparisons to Google came flying in. First of all, this is not even the right comparison. I am behind using cloud computing for government applications, but if we are going to compare the systems, let's at least compare them fairly. RACE is more of an IaaS cloud service and Google is both SaaS (GMail, Google Docs, etc) and PaaS (AppEngine). It seems more fairly compared to the single service of EC2 provided by Amazon. I would love to take a deep dive into RACE, but unfortunately, and as expected for security, it is only available to someone with a government card or clearance. What they do say on the website though is that provisioning after a request only takes 24 hours. Is that truly on demand computing? Call me spoiled being able to provision dozens of servers with a single web service request in 5 to 10 minutes, but that is what I expect from a system now that claims to be on-demand. This is a great direction and good start for DISA. It is very encouraging to see the activity in the government space around cloud computing. We really need to stop lumping every cloud computing service or offering under the single banner of Cloud Computing. People will continue to make their offerings sound better than others with unfair comparisons and statistics. A common language and standard is needed for fair comparison. Until then, let the spin go on!

Google AppEngine supports Java

I should be sound asleep resting up for a big day tomorrow, but I couldn't resist.  I saw an announcement hit Twitter that I have been waiting on for a long while.  Google's AppEngine team has announced support for Java and has also released an Eclipse plugin that makes development much easier.  They are letting the first 10,000 interested in Java into give it a test run, so go over and get signed up.  If you are running Ganymeade then you can grab the Google AppEngine plugin from the update site at http://dl.google.com/eclipse/plugin/3.4.

It was extremely simple to go through the happy path after installation and get my first GWT application up and deployed.  In fact, Google provided all of the code.  Nothing better than a full example to get you going.
After installing the plugin, you will see that there are three new buttons that have been added to the toolbar.

 

They are for creating a new web application, compiling and deploying to AppEngine.  All that you need to do is click on the first button, name your application and give it a package.  After that, simply right click on the project and choose Run As > Web Application.  This will activate your local AppEngine installation and show the application which simply asks your name and gives a confirmation.

 Congratulations!

AppEngine to support Java

While I enjoyed programming in Python to complete the Juicy Ideas Website on AppEngine, I am really looking forward to trying Java out on Google's cloud computing platform. It was one of the most requested languages to be supported in the AppEngine forums. It will be really nice to test the real power of AppEngine with one of my primary languages. It is just much easier when you know all of ins and out and details of the beast you are trying to tame. Java on AppEngine should be announced officially very soon, even before the May Google I/O event. One of the things that I will be most interested in seeing is what libraries will be available to the developer. The available Python are very restricted and controlled and I am hoping that we do not see the same for Java, but I am guessing we will. There are so many utility jar files, such as Xalan and Xerces, all the Apache Commons libraries, and scores of projects on SourceForge. Will GAE allow me to deploy a WAR file with everything that I need in it? That would definitely be nice. The other fun topic will be the mapping to BigTable. I am looking foward to seeing how that is going to work. The excitement builds.... what do you hope to see?

Trip to Google

We had an absolute blast on the trip to the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. Last week I had the pleasure of traveling out to Google's headquarters with the winning team of the Juicy Ideas Competition.  Ryan Klinger, Spencer Price, Andrew Drake and Justin Henry from Appalachain State University won the competition in the Western North Carolina region and at the national level.  The team was able to take a tour of Google headquarters, get shuffled around in a limo, and present their winning idea at a Google TechTalk.  The weekend was absolutely amazing and lots of thank yous and props go to Mary Radomile, Susie Vaks and Matt Dunne of Google, Pam Lewis of AdvantageWest and Dale Carroll, now with the State of North Carolina as Deputy Secretary.
I am happy to say that the we also had a couple of meetings that were focused on the development of next years competition.  I am excited that we have started the process again and I know it will be just as fun next year.  Get ready, because it is going to be bigger and include many more schools nationwide.  So, if you think you have the next Juicy Idea that will change the way that we live and do business, watch for the announcement of the competition at your local college campus.
Because DigitalChalk was working on the technology behind the competition and putting that on Google's AppEngine platform, it was especially interesting to get to speak with Pete Koomen, one of two product managers working on the platform.  We were able to discuss what the experience was with the platform this year and what will make it even better next year.  At one point, during the registration for the competition, we were experiencing 25 hits/second on the AppEngine site for the competition and the platform handled it with grace.  Pete was able to share some of the experiences that they have had in the past year on the platform and some of what is coming in the future.  We had a great discussion on the future of cloud computing and what might be some ways to help make a common platform across the different cloud providers.  I will be looking at implementing some of what we talked about and releasing it to the open source community if I am successful.  Needless to say, I am very excited about the competition next year and I can't wait to see what new ideas we see!

Hyperic AppEngine CloudStatus

Apparently Hyperic is going to be launching Google AppEngine support very very soon. I received an email from Hyperic this evening that states

...we wanted you to be the first to know that we have expanded our CloudStatus service to include Google App Engine support this morning. Additionally, we have also created the first Cloud Service Plugin to include personalized application- and cloud-specific monitoring and management using Hyperic HQ. Finally, we have also provided a few key updates to the CloudStatus website and improved some of our Amazon Web Services monitoring reporting

I view this as great news that a monitoring tool vendor has taken the charge to provide "status" for multiple cloud platforms.  I can only hope that they continue to grow their base of infrastructures that they can monitor.
Just finishing up the Creative Juice Competition site on Googles AppEngine I am really interested in how monitoring could help me.  Having complete control of Amazon's EC2 instances has made monitoring with Hyperic very simple watching everything from AWS to CPU and memory.  It appears that CloudStatus for AppEngine will allow you to monitor the service itself as a whole, Datastore metrics, Memcache and URLFetch services. Hyperic is also releasing a plugin that will allow you to monitor your application inside and outside the cloud.  I will make use of this as soon as it becomes available for download and see what I think.  You can check it all out for yourself tomorrow morning at http://www.cloudstatus.com/appengine.  Enjoy!