Asheville Cloud Computing Day

On August 10th, I will be speaking at an event in Asheville, North Carolina focused on Cloud Computing technology.  If you are interested in learning about how you can use cloud computing in your business or seeing what the City of Asheville is doing with the technology, this event is free and open to the public.  It is a very short mini-conference with a good line-up of speakers and we will also be hearing from Asheville's CIO, Jonathan Feldman.  I hope to see you there!

---

City announces speaker lineup for Asheville Cloud Computing Day 2011

ASHEVILLE - The City of Asheville's Information Technology Services Department is sponsoring "Asheville Cloud Computing Day 2011", a mini-conference scheduled for 9 to 11:30 a.m. Aug. 10 in the Municipal Building (100 Court Plaza, 4th floor).

The event seeks to share cutting-edge ideas about cloud computing, a technology that promises to improve city government, as well as other organizations that adopt it.

The agenda and speaker lineup will include:

• “Servers are Software: The Advantages of Cloud Architecture” - Joe Emison, VP, Research & Development, BuildFax.
• “How Citizens Can Use Open Data To Create New City Services” - Trevor Lohrbeer, CEO, Lab Escape.
• “Beyond the server: the rise of cloud-based desktops” - Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, contributing editor, CBS News and ZDNet.
• “The Playground of Today’s Tech Innovators: How Cloud Computing Changes The Game” - Troy Tolle, CTO, Digital Chalk.

RSVPs from members of the community interested in attending the event are appreciated, but not necessary. RSVPs or questions about the event may be directed to @avlcio on Twitter, or jfeldman@ashevillenc.gov.

For information about Asheville's Information Technology Services program, visit http://ashevillenc.gov/its.

DigitalChalk with HDLearn Technology

Today marks another release of DigitalChalk with an exciting update to our video capabilities.  We have launched DigitalChalk with HDLearn® Technology today allowing you to encode and deliver your videos in extremely high quality.  I first announced this capability when I spoke at the international cloud computing conference (ICICT 2010) in Cairo, Egypt last month and it was received with a great response.  If you were not able to see it at that time, I am sure that you will enjoy seeing it now.  We have completely changed the encoding and streaming capabilities of our site with this release, taking all of the worry about what do when building your courses away.  You will no longer have to choose what profiles you want to deliver to your students.  Now, when you upload a video to DigitalChalk, we automatically encode it into several different profiles without you having to choose.  We also have added technology to ensure the best delivery possible to your students.  We are now able to detect the speed of your students connection and make choices in real-time on what the best quality video is that they can consume regardless of their bandwidth.  With our new Pro+ and Business+ packages, your upload limit has increased to 1GB and it includes a encoding profile that is HD 720p.  DigitalChalk is the first on-demand training platform on the web that will allow you to deliver true 720p video to your students, and we are thrilled to see how you use it!

Alerts for EC2 through CloudWatch

Monitoring your applications running on Amazon's EC2 platform just got easier. Today, Amazon announced the public availability of CloudWatch for EC2 with Alarms. Instead of having to poll and ask CloudWatch for the current status, you can actually have that information pushed to you instead. This is a much more efficient way to monitor you applications running in the Amazon cloud. Right now the only new alarm that is supported is for Amazon SNS, but this is a huge step forward. Before today, CloudWatch could still trigger an Auto Scaling policy, but with the addition of SNS the doors are really opening up. Using Amazon SNS, you can do almost any type of notification that you would like posting to HTTP/HTTPS, Email, JSON, or directly into SQS. This makes the service very flexible. You are able to monitor CPU Utilization, Average Disk Reads, Average Disk Writes and Network traffic in and out.
Amazon has also enabled a new monitoring tab in the EC2 management console that will allow you to look at the graphs for these elements on each of your EC2 instances. The data only goes back to the 2nd of December since it was just released today, but this will be extremely useful for a quick read on how your instances are performing.

Amazon is certainly hitting things on my wishlist this year. Now if they would only enable CloudWatch and Alarms for metrics on SQS!  Hopefully this is just around the corner. You can read more about the new features and the pricing of CloudWatch on EC2 here.

DigitalChalk takes SCORM to the Amazon Cloud

DigitalChalk, a learning management system serving the continuing education and professional training markets announces SCORM support on the Amazon Cloud.   

Infinity Learning Solutions, the parent company of DigitalChalk announced today that they have successfully released the fall 2010 Aristotle 4 version with full SCORM 1.2 support. SCORM 1.2 compliant content is now available in all editions of DigitalChalk including Free, Pro, Business and School. DigitalChalk also added a checkpoint enhancement to the Chalkboard Editor, a browser based multimedia lesson studio that is included in DigitalChalk. The Checkpoint feature lets instructors insert interactive prompts and questions into a multimedia presentation through the browser.

"Introducing SCORM support to DigitalChalk significantly expands the options our clients have for reusing existing content as well as broadening the range of compatible authoring tools we support," said Tony McCune, VP of Sales at ILS. "DigitalChalk is the first subscription based LMS that we are aware of running in the Amazon Cloud."

"Hosting a SCORM compliant system in an advanced cloud computing platform such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) poses some unique challenges. SCORM uses communication specifications that were originally designed before the cloud was invented. We took a system with it’s own personality and wove the SCORM specification into it," said Troy Tolle, Chief Technology Officer of ILS. "The team accomplished the task in an innovative and highly scalable fashion. There was no impact to the thousands of organizations currently delivering courses on DigitalChalk today."

The SCORM specification was originally created by the US Department of Defense. Introducing SCORM into DigitalChalk helps address the growing demand from the US federal government for scalable software as a service (SaaS) learning management systems on the Apps.gov cloud infrastructure, which is modeled after the AWS system.

"Not only is DigitalChalk an industry leader in delivery of online training and continuing education, DigitalChalk is the first Learning Management System to build a SCORM compliant system in the cloud using Amazon Web Services that we are aware of," said Wes Hester, CEO of Foxhole Technologies, a VA based federal IT services company.

To learn more about DigitalChalk, visit www.DigitalChalk.com or call toll-free in the US at 877-321-2451.    To learn more about Foxhole Technology and DigitalChalk in the Federal Market, please visit http://www.foxholetechnology.com/technology/cloud/digitalchalk.html. GSA Schedule 70: GS-35F-0569V
You can read more about the SCORM specification from Advanced Distributed Learning at www.adlnet.gov.

New Open Source Cloud Platform

Cloud services and platforms are popping up everywhere you turn and everyone is jumping onto the bandwagon it seems. I have even been asked by 2 startup companies that want to jump into the space if there are needs that still haven't been met with what is available now. This is a growing market and it is still in its very early stages, so there will always be room for more right now. Rackspace and NASA's announcement about OpenStack makes it a little easier to jump into the cloud software and infrastructure game. Rackspace is contributing some of its code under an Apache 2.0 licence to the open source community for the management of compute instances and storage. These seem like just initial starting points for contribution as they have also asked for other needs from the community. I would guess that we will see parallel offerings from OpenStack that mimic Amazon's AWS offerings since they are the largest player in this space. OpenStack's computing platform is currently scheduled to be available in an initial release state in October and the storage platform is expected in September. If you would like to dabble some before then, you can go and download the code at http://launchpad.net/openstack. There are projects there for the compute and storage platforms as well as projects for management from the web and from your favorite mobile device (iPhone, iPad, Android). Seeing another open source project in this space is a good thing. I hope that people don't immediately start trying to claim standards on cloud computing out of this project. I believe that it is still way to early to try to start standardizing everything. We start to kill the pace of innovation when standards are forced early. That being said, this will be a project to watch closely along with Eucalyptus and will be one to offer a great playground for ideas.

Cloud Computing ROI

It was a very easy decision for me to start DigitalChalk on a cloud computing platform.  The calculations were quick and easy 4 years ago with a small budget and a dream to build a global platform for training.  We had to scale as we gained customers because we didn't have the immediate capital to buy everything up front.  Today, I still spend time thinking of new ways to use the power of the cloud for our business and the ROI is still clear to me; but I have to say that it is something I get asked about every time I speak or talk to other people looking to take the plunge.  I had the pleasure of speaking with Jonathan Feldman, writer for Information Week, more than once over the past couple of weeks.  He has put together a great study helping the CIO, CTO and individual business units navigate the "gotchas" and common questions when it comes to moving to the cloud.  I was happy to see the report and I think it will help those of you looking to move or start some of your applications to the cloud.  I encourage you to take a moment and read the report.  It is an Analytics Report titled, Cloud ROI: Calculating Costs, Benefits, Returns and can be found here.  Great job Jonathan! It is good to see all of this research in one place.

Creativity for Amazon's Cloud Computing Continues

Amazon Web Services continues to move forward in innovative ways to get people to take advantage of their services. Two announcements last month enhance the EC2 service pricing and the Cloud Front delivery model. The availability of auction price instances (spot instances) in EC2 and the ability to do true Flash streaming from Cloud Front really put the squeeze on traditional hosting and edge delivery companies.
With the new Spot Instances in EC2 you can take advantage of the excess capacity that Amazon is not using at that time. Because that capacity changes as more instances are started, the price for those instances fluctuate. With good planning, this can be used to really save on cash. Over the past 20 days, the price of a Spot Instance has been less than 50% of the price of a regular priced instance much of the time. If you are considering using EC2 for some bursting tasks and quick turn around, I would look at the Spot Instances first. Because you set the price you want to pay and the price changes over time, your instance may be terminated if your price is less than the Amazon rate. For this reason, you must plan ahead when using them in a production situation. One good strategy here to lower your costs would be to purchase some Reserved Instances that will stay running and then start Spot Instances in peak situations. You can use the AWS API to see the current prices of the Spot Instances to know how to set your price at runtime. If you want to see the prices online and over time, you can use the AWS console or some other sites like Cloud Exchange. Because you cannot reserve Windows instances right now on Amazon, it makes a lot of sense to take advantage of the Spot Instances. As I write this, a small Windows instance is $0.12 an hour and you can have the same thing running as a Spot Instance for $0.042 an hour.

At about 1/3 the price of a standard small instance, it makes it very attractive to use the Spot Instances right now.

The announcement of streaming support from Cloud Front is also a great new addition. Delivering content to the end user from the closest data center helps improve performance. Until now, all that could be delivered was static content and progressive downloads. Streaming video from Cloud Front helps reduce your costs because only the viewed parts need to be delivered. It also does not store the file on the end user's machine. You can use Cloud Front to deliver videos in several formats, even H.264 allowing playback on the iPod and iPhone. Thank you Amazon!

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!

Amazon Import/Export

After a recent talk that I gave on cloud computing, one of the attendees contacted me with some questions about the "safety" of the data and also wanted to talk about vendor lock-in.  It is no secret that I am a fan of the Amazon Web Services cloud platform and so it followed that these questions all had to do with the way Amazon stores the data.  While these are typical questions, today the second question became much easier to answer.  Amazon Web Services announced the availability of AWS Import/Export.  Quite simply, Amazon is offering its customers a very easy way to ship a disk of data to them and they will push it into S3 to your specifications or grab your data out of S3 and put it on the disk for you.  This is very attractive because it can take days to actually move hundreds of GB on your office network into or out of S3 because of the simple limitations of bandwidth at the average workplace.  I am not a fan of vendor lock-in and have thought long and hard how to avoid it.  Any code that we write storing to and from Amazon's infrastructure is isolated enough so that we can switch it to another provider by reimplementing that single area. But, the fact still remains that it would take weeks to move all of our data and it would have to be done over an extended period of time. A strategy for this is to move data between two cloud providers instead of bringing it down locally and putting it back up. While moving over a backbone is still going to be faster, it will not be optimal.  With AWS Import/Export you are one step closer.  For $80.00 and $2.49 per hour, you can currently have all of the data on a disk pushed into Amazon's cloud and the export facility is coming soon.  I commend Amazon for providing so many tools and conveniences.

Amazon Releases New Cloud Computing Services

One of the big draws to the cloud is its ability to scale with your application.  That has become much easier with Amazon Web Services today.  Early this morning the Amazon Web Services team launched three new services: CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing.  Combining the use of these three services allows a user to configure and scale their application based upon information gathered by CloudWatch.  These are important additions to the Amazon Web Services offerings because it helps take more of the coding and configuration work away from the developers and system administrators.  This is a key benefit of cloud computing that AppEngine from Google and Azure from Microsoft have built in and they have kept completely transparent to the developer.  While Amazon has not made it completely transparent with the release of these services, it is a great step and may be exactly the middle ground that is needed.
CloudWatch allows you to monitor CPU utilization, data transfer and disk usage, request rate and traffic to your EC2 instances.  Based up on the information that CloudWatch gathers, you can set triggers that will look at that data over a time period and allow you to use the Auto Scaling to automatically add or remove EC2 instances to the specific group of machines working on a particular task.  Finally the Elastic Load Balancing helps you distribute the traffic coming into your application to your EC2 instances.  This is a welcome addition as it accomplishes fault tolerant load balancing for us without the cost of having to setup several HAProxy instances.  So, even though we incur the costs of using the new Elastic Load Balancing Service, it quickly pays for itself because we are able to remove our own load balancing configuration on EC2.  I am excited to see these new services finally go beta to the public and I am looking forward to more.

SpringSource Aquires Hyperic

It certainly isn't as big of a story as Sun being acquired by Oracle, but it is worth noting.  SpringSource has announced that they have acquired Hyperic.  SpringSource is the company that is the driving force behind the Spring Framework which is arguably the most widely used open source Java framework in enterprise software today.  Hyperic provides a software suite for monitoring applications and servers and they have recently been dabbling in providing some of these services for the cloud.  The team up of these two vendors is especially interesting because they both offer some great services and tools in through open source.  This partnership could really allow even more granular visibility into the Spring stack for monitoring.  It will be interesting to watch and see if we start to see a move to OSGi component monitoring especially in the context of the SpringSource dm Server.  I hope to see great things out of this and expect that there will be a lot of value there for the open source community.  We should watch for more tools for monitoring applications in the cloud as well from this pair.

Bruce Kerr - Tech's Weird Al

This is a great way to start the day. A simple little ditty from Bruce Kerr at Sun Microsystems on Cloud Computing. I hope you all enjoy.

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?

Rapidly Processing Video in the Cloud

Cloud computing is more than just a buzzword to those of us that rely on it everyday. It really makes computationally expensive tasks fun to tackle and much easier to pull off.  We had a very successful weekend processing a lot of video, and I thought I could take this opportunity to give an example of how the cloud computing model really saves in the end.  To give you a little bit of background, we needed to rapidly process some of the videos uploaded by our users this weekend in such a way that they would not even "feel" the difference.  We put Amazon Web Services to work on the task and accomplished what would have taken an estimated at 286 computing hours in 10.  Using a little SimpleDB, S3 and EC2 magic, we threw the problem to a grid of 20 EC2 instances that segmented and ripped through the videos in a fraction of the time it would have taken us otherwise.  What is so special about that?..  For us it was a great time saver and money saver.  I have included a screenshot of the AWS Management Console when we started the processing and after it was done and the instances were terminating.

If you have jobs that would take more than a couple of hours to do, it would be well worth your time to take a dive into the Amazon Web Services model.  The Management console made it very easy to start all 20 instances with a single click and take them down afterwards.  We used the new ability to copy content in S3 to a working bucket and the data storage of SimpleDB to help keep our EC2 instances from double processing.
I get a lot of requests to help people understand and harness the power of the cloud, and there is so much that you can use it for that the use cases are varied for every customer.  While our production systems are built to do live scaling and processing based upon load, I thought that this stand alone problem would be one of the more typical use cases to share.  It really shows that an isolated problem can be solved much faster with more resources very cheaply.

TIGR Team looks at Cloud Computing

As part of the transition to President Obama, a Technology Innovation and Governmental Reform Team (TIGR Team) has been setup. This would be a great team to be on and to work with. Obama effectively used the internet to win the election and it now appears that he has put together a team to continue to use the technology that is available now to help bring our government up to date. That is a huge undertaking, but it will be fun to watch and experience. I think that every state should have their own TIGR team to help reform their state. I have personally been talking with every person I can grab in the local, state and national political arena to drive this point with them. We can use cloud computing and web services to provide all the necessary computing infrastructure and data to anyone that needs to use it. Take a look at this video for a small glimpse into what is being talked about.

Amazon SimpleDB for FREE

Have you wanted to dive in and try some parts of the cloud, but you just were not willing to pony up any cash? Amazon is giving you that chance with their latest announcement for web services. Yesterday they opened up SimpleDB into a public beta. SimpleDB allows you to store, retrieve and query data similar to a database. The difference is scalability. SimpleDB is great for storing simple data relationships that you need to be able scale and have the ability to handle large volumes. As of yesterday, Amazon is offering 25 machine hours, 1 GB of data transfer and 1 GB of data storage for free for at least the first six months. That is more than enough runway to test out an application or to help anyone prove out a concept. It should let the average user execute over 2 million requests against SimpleDB without paying a dime. We are currently using SimpleDB for some of our prepping and internal work at DigitalChalk and it has been working very well. Here is your chance... jump on in and let me know if you need any help learning to swim.

Google Voice Search on iPhone

Well, it is finally in the AppStore. The Google application now includes voice search. It took a little persistence to get it, but I was able to download it to my phone. When I did this last night, iTunes was not showing an update was available, but when I searched for the application and downloaded it again, it came with voice search. So, if it isn't there today for you, try just downloading the application again. My first search was on Cloud Computing. It did rather well I must admit.

Microsoft in the Cloud

Well, we knew it was coming... Microsoft has been working on a cloud computing initiative and today... Oops! Amazon beat them to the punch. Amazon announced today that they will be putting Windows on EC2 before the end of the year. This has to be a bummer for Balmer and company over at Microsoft who have been working on an initiative that should be announced next month. I am very interested to see how Amazon is pricing this and how they deal with Microsoft licensing. I really hope that they keep to the same model where they charge by the hour instead of throwing extra requirements for a valid license key for each server you stand up. That would defeat the purpose of "infinite" scalability. I haven't seen any talk about the model yet other than a mention of the same "pay as you go pricing", but I am sure interested in the nitty gritty details. I can't say for certain that we will be using Windows on Amazon at DigitalChalk, but I will be playing around on it you can be sure just to see how it performs.

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!

Creative Juice Competition

I know, shame on me. I haven't posted anything for a month now. But today, I do have something worth writing about. I have been busy in the ether of cloud computing this past month. Obviously working on DigitalChalk which resides on the AWS cloud but I have also been working many long nights with Google's AppEngine and have released a site today which runs almost exclsively on it. The site can be found at http://www.creativejuicecompetition.com . Creative Juice is a competition that DigitalChalk is helping sponsor that challenges students to create "value" out of a throw-away object. The contest is designed to help foster imagination, creativity, team work and entreprenuership skills. There are 5 regions across the US competing and the throw away object for each region is secret and will be revealed on the launch date for the region. I am excited about seeing what these students can come up with as value. We are still furiously working out some final details and prizes which I will soon be blogging about. Trust me, there are some really really cool prizes we are working on!