Nati Shalom's Blog

OpenStack is Coming to Israel

I'm very excited to announce our first OpenStack Israel event on Wednesday the 30th of May in Petach Tikva in collaboration with the IGT Cloud and Rackspace. Since Avner Algom and myself started to work on the event a few months ago I was positively surprised to see the amount of local innovation and work that is already taking place here at Israel in this space. As I write this post, it looks like we’re getting close to 200 registrations, and all of this has been achieved for the most part by word of mouth, a clear indication of the growing interest here.

We’ve got a nice lineup of presenters covering different parts of the stack:

• Chmouel Boudjnah (Rackspace):  Compute, Storage 
• Arturo Suárez  (StackOps): How to Create an OpenStack Powered Service Provider in 30 Days
• Roy Amir, (Alcatel Lucent): OpenStack Quantum - Network as a Service
• Zohar Alon (Dom9): Overview the Security Controls Built into OpenStack
• Samuel Bercovici (Radware): Cloud Load Balancing and Application Delivery Control (ADC) Services in OpenStack
• Uri Cohen (GigaSpaces), Camuel Gilyadov (ZeroVM): PaaS and Big Data on Openstack
• Alex Glikson (IBM),  OpenStack-Based Cloud Hosting Infrastructure

Shlomo Swidler will be leading two panel discussions, during the first discussion we’ll review the shift toward Open Source in the cloud and the effect of that move on the cloud industry. In the second panel we’ll try to predict some future directions and trends we expect for OpenStack.

I would also like to take this opportunity and welcome our distinguished guests from Rackspace, IBM and StackOps:

• Mac Devine, Director and CTO, Portfolio and SO Offering Management, Global Technology Services, IBM Distinguished Engineer
• Chmouel Boudjnah Principal Engineer at Rackspace Hosting
• Arturo Suárez Co-founder of StackOps Technologies

During the event we reserved a slot for lightning talks -  If you have an interesting story you'll have the chance to share it during the event.

Anyway this event is going to be a kickoff for a series of meetups around OpenStack that is planned throughout the year. We'd appreciate any help in this regard, so if you have suggestion for a meetup this is your chance.

I would like to finish up with special thanks to Marc Coollier and Luaren Sell from Rackspace who's been very instrumental and supportive throughout this process. We wouldn't have been able to pull this off without their close help.

 

Mapping the Cloud/PaaS Stack

Cloud is evolving at an incredible pace, changing almost every aspect of our industry. It’s only natural then, that with this change also comes a continuous evolution of how we classify and categorize the various components of the cloud stack.

In earlier days, it was enough to draw the lines between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and while this categorization is still very handy, we are beginning to see the lines between these categories start to blur. On the one hand, we see more IaaS providers starting to move up the stack, and on the other hand, we are seeing new categories such as DevOps gaining popularity and bridging the gaps between the IaaS and the PaaS layers.

 

I was recently asked to draw a map of how I see the current cloud stack. This ended up being an interesting exercise. To make things simpler I decided to focus on the IaaS/PaaS piece, both because this is my area of expertise, and also because IMO this is where many interesting developments are taking place. I ended up with the diagram below, which I thought would be worth sharing in order to get feedback and different perspectives.

It’s important to note, that this diagram is not based on any scientific scoring of different products in the market. I'll leave that part to the analysts. The specific products I chose to use are only there to illustrate and support my analysis of the components in the stack and where they map to within each category.

What's Driving the Cloud Stack?

The two main (and often conflicting) driving forces behind the evolution of the cloud stack are Productivity and Control. As cloud started to emerge it was productivity that took center stage, often by giving up almost completely on the level of control. As the industry started to mature we started to see an evolution where we could have various degrees of tradeoffs between these two driving forces. A good indicator of this, is the rise of DevOps and Private Clouds. We could also see the new open source movement as yet another major step in that direction - the most notable one is OpenStack, and the recent Citrix announcement about the moving of Cloud Stack into the Apache Foundation.

We could also see similar movement happening on the PaaS layer, where VMware launched Cloud Foundry as both a self-service PaaS for development productivity, and as an open source project to provide users with more control. Cloudify takes similar yet more explicit moves in that direction by bringing DevOps and PaaS together, in addition to making it open source.

 

Mapping the PaaS Stack

Geva Perry wrote a good summary mapping the current Java PaaS players in his post Listing the Java PaaS Public and Private Clouds . Geva chose to classify the different players based on their private/public cloud position and language support (Java in this particular case). Obviously the correlation behind public/private cloud and productivity/control is fairly close, so I can see where he was coming from. While this makes a lot of sense, I believe that it’s not accurate enough as there are still solutions that work on both private and public clouds and are not limited to just Java - Cloudify included. So is there a better way to classify the PaaS providers?

Here is my suggestion:

I would classify the PaaS providers based on those who focus on delivering PaaS through a self-service portal I’ll refer to them as PaaS service providers, where they assume full control over the underlying infrastructure and own the entire operation of your application - this is where I would put GAE, Heroku etc. Next will be  those who gives you the tools to build your own PaaS on private or public clouds, I’ll refer to them as PaaS stack providers - this is where Cloudify and I believe, Cloud Foundry and Stackato also fit in.

The second sub-category of classification would be on the level of openness and control i.e. open source, language support, cloud environment support, DevOps support and such.

In any case, we can easily get into a complex matrix of features/mapping for even more fine-grained classification but this far beyond the scope of this post which is merely drawing a rough map rather than providing a complete competitive analysis.

How would you categorize the Cloud/PaaS Stack?

As I noted earlier, this is just my own personal view on the subject. I hope that this will spark an interesting debate in which we may either come out smarter, or possibly even more confused. :)

GigaSpaces Cloudify & VMware Cloud Foundry the new PaaS Jailbreaker

I was reading Krishnan Subramanian's post, Two Events That “Clouded” Our Thinking In 2011. The thing that caught my attention was Krishnan's comments on why PaaS is a superior alternative to DevOps: 

The shift in the thinking about the enterprise cloud consumption also poured water into the “DevOps” concept advocated by vendors and pundits with their foot in the IaaS world. When organizations embrace PaaS instead of infrastructure services, we don’t need the DevOps marriage and the associated cultural change (believe me, this cultural change is giving sleepless nights to many IT managers and some consultants are even making money helping organizations realize this cultural change). With PaaS, organizations can keep the existing distinction between the Ops and Dev teams without worrying about the cultural change. In fact, with cloud computing, the role of the Ops is not going away but it stays in the background offering an interface which developers can manage themselves.

Krishnan represents one of the common attitudes and subjects of debate between two main paradigms for developing and managing applications on the cloud:

• PaaS -- PaaS takes a developer, application-driven approach. A PaaS platform provides generic application containers to run your code. The PaaS platforms deals with all the operational aspects needed to run your code such as deployment, scaling, fail-over, etc.
• DevOps -- DevOps takes a more operations-driven approach. With DevOps, you get tools to automate your operational environment through scripts and recipes, and keep full visability and control over the underlying infrastructure.

The Difference Between PaaS and DevOps

Both PaaS and DevOps aim toward the same goal -- reducing the complexity of managing and deploying applications on the cloud. But they take a fairly different approach to deliver on that promise.

Christoper Knee summarized it in his blog post DevOps and PaaS -- Friend or Foe? as the difference between Developers and SysAdmin:

• Developers may ask: "if I have a self-service portal for deploying applications (aka PaaS), do I need SysAdmins at all?"
• SysAdmins may ask: "isn't PaaS just a monstrous black box that prevents me from provisioning the specific services we need to deploy real-world apps?" ... The typical SysAdmin thinks that they can get to 75% of PaaS functionality with DevOps tools like Chef without giving up any systems architecture flexibility.

In one of my earlier post on the subject, Productivity vs. Control tradeoffs in PaaS, I tried to outline the main limitation of most of the current "blackbox PaaS" implementations:

I thought that Carlos Ble's post Goodbye Google App Engine (GAE) is a good example that illustrates why the initial perception behind GAE as a simple platform that provides extreme productivity can be completely wrong.

...developing on GAE introduced such design complexity that working around it pushes us 5 months behind schedule.

Part of the reason that brought Carlos through that experience IMO is that in the course of trying to make GAE extremely productive the owner made the platform too opinionated, to the point where you lose all the potential productivity gains by trying to adopt their model. In addition, with a platform like GAE you have very little freedom to leverage existing frameworks such as your own database, or messaging system, or any other third-party service that can in itself be a huge contributor to productivity.

Instead, you're completely dependent on the platform provider's stack and pace of development, and that in itself can work against agility and productivity in yet another dimension. In this specific example, Carlos couldn’t use a specific version of a Python library that would have made his productivity higher, and instead had to work around issues that were already solved elsewhere. This is a good example how the lack of flexibility leads to poorer productivity even in the case of simple applications.

Putting DevOps & PaaS togatehr 

It looks like more people in the the industry have come to recognize that rather than looking at DevOps and PaaS as two competing paradigms, it might be best to combine the two, as Christoper Knee pointed out in his post:

 

What if you could get a PaaS that wasn't a black box, enabling developers to deploy apps easily while still giving SysAdmins the ability to provision any services they needed (a la Cloud Foundry)?

I also came to that realization myself, as I pointed out in my  2012 predictions: 

In 2012, we’ll see many of the DevOps tools, such as Chef and Puppet, integrated into application platforms, making it easier to deploy complex applications onto the cloud. In the same way, we’re going to see more Application Platforms adopting the automation and recipe model from the DevOps world into the application platform. The latter have the potential to transform the opinionated PaaS offerings as we know them today, with Heroku and GAE leading that trend, into a more open PaaS offering that better fits the way users develop apps today, and provide more freedom to choose your own stack, cloud, and application blueprint.

What Makes a Cloudify and CloudFoundary a PaaS Jailbreaker?

The CIO Maginze article Cloud computing disrupts the vendor landscape defines a new class of PaaS platforms that I think represent the definition for a DevOps PaaS:

A PaaS that allows developers to use whatever tool they want to build their cloud applications and the platform tackles the deployment, scaling and management of these apps in the cloud data center.

VMware CloudFoundry is one of the more notable references in that category. Quoting Christoper Knee:

CloudFoundry runs anywhere, incuding on your laptop. CloudFoundry's service container concept is particularly strong, kind of an appliance on steroids.

These ideas were the founding concept behind Cloudify, i.e. putting DevPops & PaaS togather in a single framework. As with CloudFoundry, Cloudify enables you to break away from the "blackbox PaaS". However, even though CloudFoundry is significantly more open than most other PaaS alternatives, at the core it is still based on the "my way or the highway" approach (aka opininated architecture), which forces you to fit into a specific blueprint that is mandated by the platform. Cloudify, on other hand, pushes the envelope even further by adopting the concpet of recipes that was first introduced by DevOps frameworks such as Chef and Puppet. It introduces  more application-driven recipes through the introduction of Domain Specific Language that extends upon the groovy language.

The Cloudify recipes give you the full power to plug in any application stack on any cloud (including a non-virtualized environment) and manage them in similar way to the way you would manage them in your own datacenter or machines. You can also call Chef and Puppet from within the recipes. All this, without hacking the framework itself. As with other similar DSLs, the Cloudify DSL was designed to express even the most complex application management tasks, such as <recovery from a data center failure> in a single line and avoid all the verbose script and API calls that are often involved when you work at the infrastructure level.

All this makes Cloudify an even more open alternative that fits a large variety of the current enterprise application stacks, including:

1. JEE applications
2. Big Data applications
3. Multi-tier applications
4. Native applications (C++,..)
5. .Net, Ruby, Python, PHP applications
6. Multi-site applications
7. Low-latency applications (that can't run on VMs)

It also makes Cloudify more open for special customization of the existing stack, like in the case of:

1. An application that needs a certain version of MySQL (not the one that comes with the framework)
2. An application that needs to run on Redhat (not Ubuntu). or even more interesting -- a case where there are mutiple applications, each needing a different OS served at the same time.

Cloudify also provides a more advanced level of control geared for mission-critical apps, including:

1. Monitoring the application stack and topology
2. Adding custom application metrics
3. Adding custom SLAs

It can also work on wide variety of cloud environments, including Microsoft Azure and non-virtual enviroments.

One of the great powers of the recipe is that it is a great collaboration tool. Once you develop a recipe, it is very easy to share it wtih different groups -- whether internal groups like developement, QA, and operations, where the recipie provides a programmatic definition of thier environment, or it can be shared between the product team and the pro-services team, where your sales and pro-services can easily install and update product versions in a consistent way, as well as reproduce customer scenarios and share them with the support team. Recipes are also a great tool for collaboration through a wider community network, where users can collaborate by sharing common recipes and best practices over the web.

Quick Introduction to Cloudify Recipes

Below is a short snippet that shows a simple application recipe, of a typical java-based web application based on JBoss as the web container and MySQL as a database. The application recipe describes the services that comprise the application, and thier dependencies. The details on how to run MySQL and JBoss is provided in a seperate recipe for each of the individual services. A more detailed description of how a service recipe would look like can be seen here. 

application {
       name="simple app"

       service {
              name = "mysql-service"
      }
       service {

              name = "jboss-service"
              dependsOn = ["mysql-service"]
       }
}

To get a taste, you can try one of the available recepes such as Cassandra, MongoDB, Tomcat, JBoss, Solar, etc., just as a simple way to try out these products on your own desktop or on any of the supported clouds, without the hassle that is often involved in doing so and without even direct relation to Cloudify per-se.

 

References

• Productivity vs. Control tradeoffs in PaaS
• DevOps and PaaS - Friend or Foe?
• PaaS shouldn’t be built in Silos
• Two Events That “Clouded” Our Thinking In 2011
• Cloud computing disrupts the vendor landscape
• Cloudify docs