Redhat Living in the Clouds

The Amazon Elastic Compute Clouds that is. Redhat announced the availability of Redhat Enterprise on EC2, so now you can get Redhat Enterprise benefits but pay for it on demand.

Available at a starting price of $19/month per customer plus $0.21 per hour for every deployed server, plus additional bandwidth and storage fees.

From the sounds of it, it looks like they've just packaged RHEL up as a paid AMI so it'll be as easy as launching any old instance. Not a bad idea for enterprise Linux customers.

The Perfect Excuse to use Facebook at Work: Server Monitor for Facebook

Here's a great, free tool to monitor your servers from within Facebook. This is the description on the app's about page:

Monitor your web servers in Facebook! Get a notification when your site goes down and when it comes back up. Show your server status on your profile too so your friends can see if you're a network admin rockstar or not.
Features

• Notifications via Facebook feed, email and SMS
• Checks every ten minutes
• 10 second setup
• FREE!

4 Part Series on High Availability Architectures

The bloggers at Tech IT Easy have written a series on High Availability Architecture after attending an HA training course. It's java oriented on the code side, but the ideas apply across the board.

1. Availability

In this article, they discuss what availability is and how to achieve it.

It is critical to define at the very early stages of the project this availability target (i.e the time ratio the system is available for the user). This really is a business input that IT architect need to address, bearing in mind that the characteristic curve of the cost/availability ratio is linear up to the 99.99% range at which point the cost explodes while attempting to reach the last thousandth.

2. Scalability

In this article, you will learn about the different ways of scaling out each tier of your system:

1. client/web layer
2. application / business layer
3. database layer

3. Performance

This article covers performance considerations for each tier. There are some good tips in here that everyone should have in their arsenal. I'm a big fan of what they call the "Asynchronous Trick"; off-loading anything that takes time to queue that can be processed by a bunch of worker threads. This is also the key to liveliness.

Another tip on whether to use frameworks such as

For information, it’s worth mentioning that big internet giants such as Amazon for instance just don’t use such frameworks in order not to lose control on piece of processing that actually is critical in terms of performance. Read this article on that very subject.

4. Technology Trends

Not all that useful, but some interesting tech is in the pipeline, Grid everything in particular.

JGroups Benchmarks on EC2

Blogger Paul Moen has an interesting post about JGroups performance on EC2.

New York Times Uses EC2 and S3 to Convert Articles from 1851-1980

A New York Times hacker, Derek Gottfrid, blogs about how he used Amazon Web Services to convert all the New York Times articles from 1851 to 1980, from scanned images to pdf. In his post, he says:

I then began some rough calculations and determined that if I used only four machines, it could take some time to generate all 11 million article PDFs. But thanks to the swell people at Amazon, I got access to a few more machines and churned through all 11 million articles in just under 24 hours using 100 EC2 instances, and generated another 1.5TB of data to store in S3. (In fact, it work so well that we ran it twice, since after we were done we noticed an error in the PDFs.)

Ain't it a beautiful thing? Just fire up 100 computers for 24 hours, then throw them away. And throwing them away is environmentally friendly...

Read More at NY Times.

Microsoft Planning Cloud Utility to Compete with Amazon

In the July financial analyst meeting, Ray Ozzie was asked:

QUESTION: Ray, I wonder if you would comment on Amazon's EC2 beta offering, and is there any sort of a timeline you could give us of when Microsoft may have a similar offering?

His response:

RAY OZZIE: Amazon has several services under the category of Amazon Web Services, Elastic Computing, EC2, S3, which is a storage thing, SQS is a queuing service. These are it's really great, because it's essentially showing the industry and today it's mainly showing primarily showing Web 2.0 startups that there might actually be something there with regard to this utility computing model. Whether it's the right set of services exactly, or whether the way that they've designed them is exactly what matches the needs of those potential developers, there are some questions. But I think they've done the industry a service by beginning to open people's eyes to the potential.

I don't have any announcements at this point in time. But directionally, I think you could see in my presentation that we believe very heavily in this utility computing fabric concept; it's the only way, even internally focused, it's the only way we can get scale amongst all the properties we run internally. And I think it just makes sense to offer those services to developers and to enterprise customers over time.

I'm glad he sees the light, it will be interesting to see what Microsoft and the others offer up. I'm expecting Google to launch something like this soon as they seem like the company that has horizontal scaling nailed (next to Amazon of course).