Cloud computing seminar
Last Monday (19 April) I gave a seminar about cloud computing for a Swedish bank. Below you can find the slides. In contrary to most of my previous presentations, this slide deck is in English.
Cloud Computing and Security
Last week (Mars 11, 2010), I gave a seminar (in Swedish) regarding cloud computing in general and the security aspects in particular, for HAS 4.0. HAS is an annual course in security with a very broad perspective, organized by Logica and Cornerstone.
Here are my slides from my two hour presentation.
Cloud Computing and Testing
Yesterday evening I gave a seminar about Cloud Computing with the bias towards testing. I have uploaded my slides to SlideShare (see below).
Cloud Computing seminar at easyFairs IT-Show
Today, I gave a seminar (in Swedish) about what is Cloud Computing and how to use it. Here are my slides from the presentation.
Into the Cloud
I have previously investigated virtualization. A few years ago I used VMware WorkStation to run Fedora and Ubuntu on top WindowsXP. And before last summer, I used WMWS for a customer project running a deskop Ubuntu and two server Ubuntus (one with Oracle and the other as the project server). This autumn I discovered KVM @ Ubuntu.
During this year I have been “kicking the tires” of the next logical step of virtualization; from personal/organizational virtualization into global cloud computing. The prime player of this new technology area is Amazon - the online book company. Other players, such as Google and Microsoft, are expected to follow.
The concept is simple: use an (open source) virtualization technique (Xen, @WikiPedia), apply it to a global collection of data centres, define a simple pricing model and tell it to the developer community. The result on the other hand is far from simple - indeed it is a revolution. Why? Because it changes our perception of how to design a system architecture.
When I started with computers, which - by the way wasn’t that long after the Jurassic period - both processing power and memory space were scarce resources. Over time these restrictions of the mind has gradually dissolved, leading to the war-cry ‘memory is cheap, so let’s waste it‘. Today, nobody would be embarrassed of a 4GB foot print application. However, we still design a system architecture in terms of a few heavy weight nodes, say 2 or 4 nodes in a cluster of WAS/WLS/JBOSS app servers plus at least one DB server.
This has two consequences; either we buy too much hardware wasting money or we buy too little hardware leading to unacceptable response times and crashes. The right amount of hardware is not possible to achieve, because the system load varies over time.
With virtualization in general and a global cloud computing supplier as Amazon in particular we have relaxed the last bit of the system design restraints, leading to the contemporary war-cry ‘servers are cheap, so let’s waste it‘.
With cloud computing we have instant access to an unbounded number of computing resources, whenever we need it. (I hope you don’t take me literary when I’m using the term ‘unbounded’. I simply mean many more than you uses today).
From the system design point of view the interesting topic is: which factors of my architecture will change when I run my application over a dynamic number of servers, all with ephemeral storage?
I intend to describe Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its cloud computing service EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) from a practical point of view, in a series of blog posts. This was the first, introductory post.
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Jens Riboe
