The Cloud in Review

The Cloud in Review

From the Desk of

Nathaniel Rushfinn


Copyright © 2010 CA. All rights reserved. CA confidential and proprietary information for CA internal use only.

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1

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A
Discussion on Cloud Operating Systems

Today
,

nearly every vendor offers a cloud computing solution. While CA Technologies uses the
NIST definition of cloud computing, for the sake of this discussion
,

I will categorize offerings into
three

groups
: Cloud P
lus,
Cloud Support
, and
Cloud Operating Systems
. “Cloud Plus” is the
group whose vendors simply append the word “cloud” to existing products. Practically every
company
,

including CA Technologies
,

does this

for
cloud switches, cloud backup systems and
cloud

security products. In
Cloud Support,

products that support cloud include network
management solutions that have been upgraded to support server virtualization or security
products that protect data
-
in
-
motion in the cloud. The third group,
Cloud Operating
Systems
,
contains solutions that provide the means to actua
lly build a “cloud” and provide
cloud services.
These solutions can be fully hosted or provide
d for

use on
-
premise.

Cloud computing requires that a dynamic pool of resources
be

available for provis
ioning. This is
the primary means to deliver on
-
demand, pay
-
per
-
use, and elastic services. The fundamental
pieces of cloud computing solutions are: compute resources, storage resources, and network
resources. In addition some solutions provide additional c
omponents such as an operating
system, a service bus, or a distributed database

--

all designed to support cloud computing.


C
OMPUTE

˳

S
TORAGE

˳

N
ETWORK
˳

S
ERVICE

B
US

˳

D
ATABASE

˳


O
PERATING

S
YSTEM

˳

H
YPERVISOR


Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Fujitsu are the giants in cloud computing.
Other n
otable players
are Rackspace, NASA, Eucalytus, Ubunta and Red Hat.

In this article
,

I will
compare and contrast the solutions that fall into the third group

--

solutions
that provide all of the fundamental components of cloud computing as a cloud operating system.


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Note: When doing a Google search on Cloud Operating systems, you might find result
s pertaining
to a lightweight desktop environment designed to run in the cloud. The most common examples
of this are EyeOS and iCloud. In this article we will not be discussing these products but only
those that enable data center
-
like operations in the cl
oud
.

Cloud Computing Operating System Vendors

Microsoft Azure

“
Azure

‘
Microsoft’s operating system for the cloud
’
:

Windows Azure offers a simple, reliable, and
powerful cloud computing platform that enables you to focus on business opportunities as opposed

to
operational hurdles”

Microsoft Azure is a hosted solution

which
,

essentially
,

cloud
-
enable
s

Microsoft .NET. Microsoft
Azure i
s one of the most complete cloud solutions on the market
.
Microsoft Azure provides
compute, storage and network resources
, to w
hich they add their
programming tools,
an
operating system,

a
database,
a
hypervisor and
a
service bus. The power of this solution is
its
compatibility across the entire development stack.

An important aspect of Microsoft Azure is
that it

provide
s

in
-
depth

support for the most popular
OpenSource development languages integrated into their service bus. The Azure
a
rchitecture
contains what they call AppFabric, for connectivity in the cloud
.

The solution has

programmatic
support for REST, SOAP and WS
-
* protoco
ls. SDKs are currently a
vailable for Java, Ruby and
PHP, delivering on the promise of open standards support.

In the US,
Mic
rosoft Azure is available only in

Microsoft
-
owned data

centers, while in

the Global
market
s
, Microsoft has a special arrangement
wi
th
Fujitsu
to offer it in their
data

centers.

Commentary

Mic
rosoft has the most complete cloud offering in the market. By hosting the solution
,

they
enable near perfect vendor lock
-
in. While the solution is based on 100% Microsoft products,
it

deserves res
pect
for its

completeness and in
-
depth support for cloud connectivity protocols and
OpenSource
products.

Compare and Contrast


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Currently
,

Azure is provided only in a fully hosted model, where
as

AppLogic is offered as a
complete cloud
-
in
-
a
-
box software solut
ion.

Azure provides everything from

operating systems,
databases and programming languages,

and while it very comprehensive it is also
very
complex.
The
AppLogic solution focuse
s

on a single task
—
rapidly
deploy cloud services
(applications) into the cloud
. AppLogic is
hardware and platform

agnostic and
is
designed to
avoid vendor lock
-
in. AppLogic

use
s

industry recognized
Xen

hypervisor
s, which

allow
s

applications to

run on

both

Windows and Linux operating systems.

Azure provides all of the
tools necessary

to develop and run Windows applications.
AppLogic

on the other hand provides
a platform to run any business application. All of the business logic, software configurations and
even the development stacks like .NET and JAVA are fully encapsulated.

AppLogic

is purchased as a software license, but is also offered by global service providers as a
hosted service like Azure.

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon
EC2
)
:

Amazon EC2

is a web service that provides resizable
compute capacity in the cloud. It

is designed to make web
-
scale computing easier for developers
.

Amazon Elastic

Cloud Compute

is almost synonymous with cloud computing.
Today,
Amazon is
a
fully hosted solution built on industry tools. The core component of Amazon EC2 i
s

the
Amazon Machine

Image

(AMI)
.

AMI is a hosted solution of the Xen hypervisor. Amazon is a
complete cloud solution
, and
not simply a virtualization solution
. They offer all of the
core

cloud
components, plus
their
own Amazon Simple DB and programmatic access to MySQL thro
ugh
the Amazon Relational Database Service. They have created a complete cloud solution by
providing computer and storage resources with the necessary network infrastructure, and a rich
set of web services and APIs th
at provide everything from basic machin
e instances

sophisticated
cloud management tools.

Amazon EC2 is based on the Xen hypervisor
,

so support is a sub
-
set of Xen compatibility. EC2

currently supports a variety of operating systems including: RedHat Linux, Windows Server,
openSuSE Linux, Fedora
, Debian, OpenSolaris, Cent OS, Gentoo Linux, and Oracle Linux.


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Today all

machine images must run on a Xen hypervisor
,

though Amazon does provide

a
tool
called VMimport that can import
VMware virtual machines. However
,

today it is

currently

limited
to Wind
ows 2008.


Commentary

Amazon was
,

in my opinion
,

the first vendor to offer a complete cloud solution to the public. The
story
goes
that they developed these tools to run their own operation and
then
decided to offer
them as a service. The Amazon solution c
ontinues to mature at a rapid rate offering more and
more functionality as web services. The best indicator of Amazon’s success is the wide support
and connectivity to Amazon from other vendors. Many cloud solutions support the use of
Amazon EC2 as part of

their own cloud offering.

Compare and Contrast

EC2 and AppLogic use very similar approaches to delivering cloud. Both utilize the Xen
hypervisor for machine instances. They both use the idea of templates to easily construct
machine templates. Each ha
s

sto
rage and network resources available in a dynamic pool for
easy provisioning of single and complex apps.
Amazon provides all the basic building blocks for
customers to build their cloud services.

Amazon

today

is

offered only as a 100% hosted solution, whi
le AppLogic is offered as a turn
-
key softw
are solution that customers can
install

on
their own

commodity hardware.

This means
that AppLogic can be deployed completely within customer firewalls, allowing federal and
intelligence agencies to manage their own

private or virtual private clouds.

While AppLogic is a software solution, many

service providers

do offer AppLogic as a
fully
hosted service
,

removing the need for dedicated hardware
.


Amazon EC2 is a very flexible

solution
. In many ways
,

it is similar to

Azure in that developers have access to APIs and web
services to build very specific cloud services.
With this flexibility though comes a need for
programming expertise.

In contrast AppLogic includes ready
-
to
-
use appliances for high
availability, replica
tion and disaster recovery appliances so that customers can insure their
applications are available anywhere in the cloud with programming experience.


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Amazon is a complex solution with many pieces and interfaces.
AppLogic

provides a
single
interface to do

one thing

quickly
—
deploy and provision complex applications as easily as
deploying a single machine instance.


VmWare

“VMware customers typically
save 50
-
70% on overall I
T costs

by consolidating their resource pools and
delivering highly available machines with VMware vSphere.”*

*
Source
: http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/virtual
-
infrastructure.html

VMware

is the undisputed leader in server
virtualization
. In 1999 VMwa
re shipped t
heir first
product,
Vmware W
orkstation. T
his was quickly followed
by
GSX and ESX servers and
VMware

v
Center and
v
Motion
.
While virtualization had been used in other settings,
VMware

was the first
company to deliver a type 1 hypervisor with full

translation
for windows. Other systems required
that the Windows operating be modified
.

Th
eir

advanced
hypervisor

technology
and powerful
server tools allowed

them to dominate the industry

with more than 190,000 customers. As a
result,
VMware

has
become
s
ynonymous

with virtualization.


In server
Virtualization
, a

hypervisor lets you share the resources of
a
single physical machine
across multiple virtual machines or guests
.

In virtual infrastructure, the idea is expanded beyond
a single physical server.

Th
e Vmware virtual infrastructure not only provides the hypervisor but
also
manages all of the
storage, network and computing resources. Additionally it provides automation for provisioning
and disaster recovery. After nearly 10 years Vmware renamed ESX Ser
ver v4.0 to Vshpere.


In 2008
, at about the same t
ime,
VMware

began
the

transform
ation from a virtualization
company to a cloud company.

These acquisitions were extensive including: Integrin, TriCipher,
Zimbra Terracotta, Genstone Systems, Mulesoft, Sopher
a, Heroku, Engine Yard, Skyway
Software, Chordian,
and SpringSoft

Their acquisitions varied from
open source

application
development to IT management solutions. Most technologies went into expanding
the
core of
vCenter and their hypervisor technology.
In a
ddition,
they also purchased companies like
SpringSource and Zimbra. SpringSource, an
open source

group, pr
ovides training and support

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for Java web programming frameworks Spring, Grails and the programming language Groovy
(note
:

Groovy and Grails is akin t
o Ruby on Rails). SpringSource has strategic partnerships with
Salesforce.com and Google.

And Zimbra is an
open source

email collaboration platform akin to
Microsoft Exchange.

In 2010
VMware

launched vCloud Director. VMware
h
as now positioning itself as th
e clear
leader in Cloud Computing. With their flagship product vSphere coupled with vCloud
,

they now
provide cloud computing solutions for public, private and hybrid cloud.


Commentary

VMware

clearly invented virtual computing in the Windows x86 environme
nt. For almost a
decade
,

VMware ESX server remained unchallenged as the only viable platform for the
enterprise. Today,
VMware

finally has competition from XEN server, but organizations are still
cautious of deployment in miss
ion critical environments. D
es
pite its total dominance in
the
hypervisor world,
VMware

has transitioned to cloud computing with a complete solution.
Reviewing

our definition of a cloud operating system,
VMware

is complete. They of course
provide a hypervisor as well as management of vi
rtualized storage net
work

resources.

They

do
not provide an

operating system, but
their hypervisor
ensure
s

100% compatibility with all the
major OSes.
VMware

does not

provide a database as part of their stack, but they do provide
support and certification

for running databases in their virtual machines. Finally, as part of their
open source

acquisitions
,
VMware

does
have

a SOA bus that they leverage in building vApps.
VMware’s

solution is b
uilt on solid proven technology, but
it
is not revolutionary.

Perha
ps they
summarize it best themselves, “
VMware

an evolutionary approach to an IT
revolution
”



Compare and Contrast

AppLogic and
VMware

are most similar in what they offer

-

yet

very

different in how they deliver
it.


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Both solutions provide a means for publi
c agencies to build their own public, private and
community clouds.
Both are

complete solutions that install on bare
-
metal servers and create a
virtual infrastructure to deploy business applications. AppLogic
has

the Global Catalog that
contains virtualize
d business applications.
VMware

has

vCloud Director, their catalog and
vApps, or virtual
appliances
. Both solutions leverage a type 1 hypervisor. AppLogic currently
uses the XEN hypervisor and is releasing support
for
the
VMware

hypervisor vShere in versio
n
3.0. Both solutions use a pool of virtual compute, storage and network resources to rapidly
provision resources, and both solutions offer HA and DR solutions.

H
ere is where the similarities
stop.

By its own adm
ission
,
VMware

is an evolutionary approach
.

A
ppLogic maintains a revolutionary
approach.
VMware

is
currently seen as
the most solid hypervisor technology on the market.
Their cloud solution makes the virtual machine the unit of measure.
Vmware builds e
verything
from the bottom up
,

and applications
are multiple virtual machines in an OVF format

that are

grouped together and published in a catalog.

From an infrastructure perspective,
VMware

uses
a

solid established approach of attaching all of the servers with Fibre Channel to a SAN. While
reliable, i
t
does
require proprietary hardware
,

and

it is expensive. From a server perspective,
VMware users typically use fast and powerful servers with lots of memory. Th
ey do this,

so that
they can run as many virtual machines as possible to maximize their investm
ent in
VMware
. To
provide resiliency and disaster recovery
,

these powerful servers are clustered together.

In contrast, t
he power and beauty of AppLogic is its simplicity.
From the beginning, i
t was
designed to be single complete solution for building clou
d. AppLogic is
a
fully object
-
oriented
platform and not a collection or grouping of parts. In

AppLogic
,

Virtualized Business Services
encapsulate everything needed
to run that application.

By
using
AppLogic’s

visual designer, an
administrator can
move, cop
y,
and resize

a
business service
with

the click of a mouse
.
With

AppLogic
,

not just the virtual machine is abstracted from the hardware, the entire business
application is abstracted from the hardware. It is this revolutionary approach that allows
organiza
tions to move their applications in and around the cloud

easily
. AppLogic takes a
completely different approach when it comes to infrastructure. AppLogic uses only commodity

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servers. It requires no expensiv
e SAN or Fibre Channel
devices;

i
t does not requir
e RAID
controllers

or any type of NAS. AppLogic relies on a grid of dissimilar hardware rather than
clusters of identical machines. The AppLogic grid
easily
scales up and down. When a new
commodity server is added to the grid, new storage and compute resou
rces are available
automatically.

VMware

is the industry standard hypervisor. Since 2008 they have acquired more than a dozen
companies to
piece

together a solution for cloud computing.

AppLogic is a single application with a core kernel and one GUI. It
is one solution that provides
a turn
-
key platform for managing and deploying applications in the cloud.


Eucalyptus v2.0

“
Eucalyptus Systems

delivers private cloud software. This is infrastructure software that enables
enterprises and government agencies
to establish their own cloud computing environments. “

Eucalyptus provides a complete cloud solution by supporting many different types of resources.
Their cloud controller supports access and control to both public and private cloud resources,
including m
achine images, storage devices, a service bus and access control with a data base.
It even supports the Amazon API. The support for resources is very extensive. For computer
resources, Eucalyptus supports multiple hypervisors including Xen, KVM, ESX and Wi
ndows
Machine Images. They have support for all types of storage, including NAS, SAN, and iSCSI.
Their controller is even API
-
compatible with Amazon EC2 for both machine instances and
storage.


Commentary

Eucalyptus is a complete solution with the ability
to dynamically provision a wide array of cloud
resources. The unique controller approach provides great flexibility in creating private and virtual
private clouds. Because their architecture supports the use of different hypervisors, storage and
networking
, customers avoid vendor lock
-
in.


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Compare and Contrast

Eucalyptus is similar to AppLogic, in that it is a purchased solution which allows customers to
build and host their own private clouds. It provides access to all of the core resources to
manage a clo
ud solution. Eucalyptus is very flexible, giving the customer the option to choose
storage and networking and compute resources. The flexibility requires that users make more
choices and do more configuration. AppLogic is different in this regard in that i
t provides a turn
-
key solution with storage, networking, and hypervisor support all built in without the need to
build and configure the underlying infrastructure. With Eucalyptus, customers can choose but
then must assemble and configure all of the compon
ents. With AppLogic, customers only need
a usable block of commodity servers. AppLogic turns these resources into a pool of resources,
supplying the storage, volume management, high
-
availability, and replication all under the hood.


Red Hat

“
Red Hat

delive
rs the infrastructure needed for reliable, agile, and cost
-
effective cloud computing.
Red Hat's cloud vision is
unlike that of any other IT vendor
.”

“In a market full of hype, Red

Hat makes the cloud real and compelling. Today.”

The Red Hat cloud solution
is
comprised of

their standard products offerings: Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, Enterprise virtualization and JBoss
Enterprise

Middleware.

Red Hat has a certified cloud provider program. Their current partners include Amazon, IBM
and Savvis, who run Red

Hat

products. In the NIST cloud model, they offer a PaaS Cloud
Solution which is based on offering a flexible application deployment environment. The solution
is based o
n Red Enterprise and JBoss. Their
portability model is based on a Java Virtual
machine and
the ability to use programming frameworks lik
e

Seam, or Spring,

Struts
,

Ruby etc.
Red Hat
pitch
es that

by using open standards and OpenSource development tools
that there is
no vendor lock
-
in.

They also make a point that

“Salesforce.com cloud

is

built on R
ed Hat”



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Commentary

Red

Hat

is the undisputed leader in the enterprise
OpenSource
market. Red Hat Enterprise is
used in Federal and DoD
data centers

around the world to run mission critical apps. With the
purchase of JBoss, Red Hat now has a Service Orient
ed Architecture (SOA) and a service bus.
With the addition of a hypervisor
,

they have positioned themselves with the ability to run the
cloud. Red Hat is a great operating system and JBoss is an excellent Java application server
;

but even with the addition

of KVM, this doesn’t really put them in the same category as
Microsoft, Amazon or Eucalyptus
.

Red Hat provides some very important tools that can be used
in building a cloud solution
,

but
by my definition,
they are not a cloud operating system.

That
fact
that SalesForce.com uses Red Hat doesn’t equate Red Hat to Cloud.


Compare and Contrast

Red Hat Enterprise is an operating system with support for a Hypervisor. AppLogic uses the
Xen hypervisor and provides support for Red Hat Enterprise as part of the app
lication stack.
Red Hat offers JBoss as its strategy for application portability. AppLogic supports JBoss, as well
as other Java application development stacks. JBoss is provided as a ready virtual image in the
AppLogic
catalog.

AppLogic supports and offer
s Red Hat and JBoss as components in platform offerings. Thus
there is little to compare and contrast.


UBUNTU Enterprise Cloud (UEC)

“
The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud
(
UEC
) brings Amazon EC2
-
like infrastructure capabilities inside the

firewall.
The UEC is powe
red by Eucalyptus, an open source implementation for the emerging

standard of the EC2
API”

Commentary

Ubuntu gets an honorable mention. They appear poised to bring the simplicity and love
of
Ubuntu to their followers around the world who want cloud.
Ubuntu

uses Eucalyptus paired with

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its

own operating system.
With these two powerful tools an
y

“
geek
”

can assemble a quality
cloud.

The capabilities of Eucalyptus have already been discussed
,

so there will be no compare and
contrast.


Rackspace &
OpenS
tack

“
Open
Stack

is a collection of open source technologies delivering a massively scalable cloud operating
system.”

OpenStack was started as a partnership between

by RackSpace and NASA.
OpenStack

is
based on NASA’s Nebulae software, and is offered by Rackspace Host
ing as a service. The
code is available for download under the Apache 2.0
OpenSource
licensing agreement at
www.openstack.org.

OpenStack

addresses cloud in the same manner as Amazon. They

have
two interrelated
projects: OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Obje
ct Storage
. OpenStack Compute manages
the cloud fabric. This currently means making machine images available as cloud resources.
They currently support Xen, KVM, and QEMU.
OpenStack

Object Storage uses clusters of
commodity servers to create redundant, sca
lable storage for the cloud compute fabric. It is not
an operating system but a persistent store for machine images and data.


Commentary

The forces of Rackspace and NASA, combined with support from industry leaders like Dell,
make the
OpenStack

project on
e of the most formidable competitors on the market. While
OpenStack

is its infancy compared to Amazon, the power of the brain trust at NASA and the
OpenSource

community at large
,

could make
OpenStack

one of the most powerful cloud

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computing projects. The c
ombination of
OpenSource
projects, the scientific community and the
private sector make this the solution to watch,


Compare and Contrast

When OpenStack is offered by Rackspace, it provides all of the benefits of a fully hosted
solution like Azure.
The fac
t that the core of the software is freely available and supports all
popular hypervisors and operating systems circumvents the problem of vendor lock
-
in.
OpenStack

positions itself as a cloud operating system to position large groups of virtual private
ser
vers

rapidly
. With its use of object machines and object storage
,

it is
the solution
most similar
to AppLogic.

AppLogic
and OpenStack are
similar

in their approach to using an
object
-
oriented
model.
AppLogic takes this approach further and encapsulates mor
e components at a higher level on
the solution stack.

AppLogic

not only provisions virtual machines along with their requisite
storage, it
rapidly
provisions

all three types of cloud services in the NIST model
. AppLogic can
easily provide basic virtual mac
hines with storage and networking as

Infrastruct
ure
-
as
-
a
-
Service
(IaaS). It can just as easily provide Platform
-
as
-
a
-
service (PaaS) with all required development
platform like .NET, LAMP, Java. And finally can provide Software
-
as
-
a
-
Service (SaaS) by easily

provisioning
complex applications (SaaS) with the same ease as
a
single virtual machine object.

OpenStack

is an
OpenSource
project
, making it
freely available to everyone
.

AppLogic fully
supports all
OpenSource
projects as ready application images in the

AppLogic catalog. As
commercial software, AppLogic is offered exclusively by CA Technologies and is back
ed up

with
the support of a $ 4 Billion dollar company.