All about Grid and Cloud Computing: Discover the limits

The guys from OpenNebula made a great announcement on the OCCI mailing list: http://www.ogf.org/pipermail/occi-wg/2009-November/001505.html

Dear OCCI members,

The OpenNebula team is proud to announce the dawn of the OpenNebula Cloud. Although this can be shortened to ONE Cloud, it is in fact two, although both of them are accesible using two interfaces: OCCI and EC2.

* Dummy cloud. This cloud offers an interface to an OpenNebual instance configured using dummy drivers. This means that it will offer a seemingly infinite capacity to run VMs, but it actually won't ever run any VM instance. This 'dummy' cloud is offered to test the OCCI and EC2 interfaces

* Real cloud. The OpenNebula instance that supports this clouds has access to physical server, and will offer the possibility of configure virtual networks, launching real VMs and access them using public IPs. This 'real' cloud VMs will have a limited capacity and is not meant to provide VMs on demand for personal uses, but rather to test OpenNebula cloud functionality.

The aim of these clouds is to allow for interface testing and foster the creation of an ecosystem built on top of OpenNebula clouds.

More information on configuration of the clients and usage of the two clouds can be found here [1].

Best regards,

The OpenNebula Team

[1] http://opennebula.org/doku.php?id=cloud

Cloud Computing is a hype topic, most of you know that. Still there is a lot of interesting stuff going on during the past months and weeks. As one of the chairs of the OCCI (http://www.occi-wg.org) working group I had the great opportunity to present the status and some cloud related work during the Cloud Computing and its Applications conference. I was invited by Ian Foster to present the following slides:

What it comes done to is the following: During OGF27 (http://www.ogf.org/OGF27) we stated to present one of the first standardized Cloud interfaces. We are almost there and soon the specification will be out in the public comments phase of the OGF editor pipeline. More important than having one standard is to have the standards collaborate while each focus on a different aspect. For example the Cloud Data Management Interface driven by SNIA (http://www.snia.org). Now we need some more efforts like demos demonstrating interoperable and portable cloud solutions.

If you wanna know what is going on for OCCI right now: We had a lot of blog posts, mails, etc going on...

BTW the OCCI sessions during OGF27 itself went pretty well and both OCCI and myself have been in the closing remarks from Craig Lee:

I really like OpenSolaris. If you haven't tried it yet you should give it a try. Still there are some things where I choose other operating system over OpenSolaris. Missing ports for some of the application I use is one point... But never the less OpenSolaris has some killer features which makes is worth a try. For example ZFS, Zones or DTrace. One tool I absolutely like when using Linux is the packaging system and the ability to clean up orphaned (e.g. with help of deborphan) packages. After some googleing it seemed that there is nothing in OpenSolaris yet to do so. But here are some tips and tricks to keep your installation clean as long as the feature is not available...

1. On a laptop use ZFS compression: zfs set compression=on rpool
2. Turn of the caching in pkg. (This will save you a lot disc space!) pkg set-property flush-content-cache-on-success True Downloaded packages are then no longer kept on your harddrive in /var/pkg/download
3. deactivate unneeded services / uninstall software. This is a personal one - Decide what tools you wanna have and which ones not (Presumably you can uninstall a lot of the languages packs). Some service which you could deactivate are: svc:/application/desktop-cache/input-method-cache:default svc:/application/desktop-cache/mime-types-cache:default svc:/application/desktop-cache/icon-cache:default svc:/application/desktop-cache/desktop-mime-cache:default svc:/application/print/ppd-cache-update:default Use the following command to do so svcadm disable ${svc} svccfg delete ${svc}
4. Find leaf/orphaned packages - This is more complicated but also a very important part. Especially some libs which you do not need any longer tend to stay. What you can do is the following - Find all the dependencies using /bin/pkg search -l \'depend::\' And then find all installed packages: pkg list All items which are installed but nobody depends on - are therefore leafs/orphaned. But be carefully - this will also list eclipse etc. But this is a way to find the orphaned libs. Personally I did some parsing with python to parse the two list of dependencies and installed packages to find the unique ones.

Overall these actions saved me 4Gb of space. Next thing to play with is tuning ZFS :-) Installing it on hybrid system. Have a look here: http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test

Last weeks HPC workshop has been great! Very interesting presentations and a lot of good talks. Nice to meet and great the people behind so many projects inside and outside of Sun working on Cloud, HPC, Sun Grid Engine, Service Domain Manager and similar! Slides can be found here: http://wikis.sun.com/display/SunHPC09. This includes my slides: http://wikis.sun.com/download/attachments/170755116/20090825_open_cloud_frameworks_hpc_tmetsch-v0.2.pdf

So happy to see the poster I made at the Sun HPC workshop:

Here is the talk I gave at GridKa School 2009 in Karlsruhe. Recordings will follow later – so stay tuned. The slides itself might not be to easy to read because they are designed for presentation not for Offline usage.

A transcript can be found here: http://85.114.139.198/nohuddleoffense/?p=369

Twitter gives you an unique chance to show your customers that your are actually improving your product. Twittering that bugs are fixed an when new features are added, tested and released helps keeping the noise down in forums etc. Also (future) customers can retweet or suggest additions. So to all management: Let your software developers twitter! It will help your product!

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Take your current product and sell it as 'the Cloud'...:-)

Tweet: sometimes 140 chars isn't enough - new blogpost: http://bit.ly/HtbeB #cloudcomputing #OCCI

When I started listening to the audio book of 'Hector and the search for happiness' which is written by Francois Lelord I didn't expect much...But it was a very pleasant 5 hours car-ride when getting home. In total Hector the protagonist comes up with 23 lectures of what happiness is. I just wanted to add #24:

Happiness is when you know that you are happy

Just a short (meaning: very short) tutorial on howto create a OpenSolaris USB stick:

1. Install OpenSolaris in VirtualBox
   
2. Boot OpenSolaris and install the SUNWdistro-const package
3. run pfexec usbgen osol-0906.iso osol-usb.img /tmp
4. run pfexec usbcopy osol-usb.img

From twitter:

don't ask what the cloud can do for you - ask what you can do for the cloud: define, implement and work on standards #OCCI #cloudcomputing

It have been some busy weeks. But great things have happen over the past weeks. The OCCI working group which tries to deliver one of the first standards in the cloud community is moving along very well. We have almost finished our first document describing the use cases and requirements for a Cloud API. This API should be capable of deploying, managing and monitoring virtual workloads (like virtual machines) in a Cloud. The draft can be found on our website: http://www.occi-wg.org. BTW there is a small one-pager describing OCCI. The draft of the specification can also be found on the OCCI website.

Next to that the cloud community is engaging to work together on cloud standards. The wiki on http://cloud-standards.org shows this. There is a nice overview (which might need some refinement) demonstrating where which standard might apply (I took if from the Wiki so it might be outdated).

Overall it seems that the work from SNIA, DMTF and OGF is coming together pretty nicely. For the last days I have been working on presentations and papers to present the work done in OCCI and RESERVOIR. For example a paper forcloudcomp 09 describing howto use OCCI to get RESERVOIR and the SLA@SOI project interoperate. Also upcoming are talks about RESERVOIR, the Cloud in general and OCCI at GridKa school, Sun HPC workshop and other smaller events. Also a poster about the Cloud and the Sun Grid Engine, Service Domain Manager and RESERVOIR is on its way. So great times to be in the clouds...

By following the right people you might get information faster and only the information you want. So better then the old print media?Is this the new information exchange media - or just a waste of time (search for the video of Kevin Spacey explaining twitter to David Lettermann...)

Are individuals the better reporters? Is their a need for reporters anymore? Or will they all start to tweet and you can follow those who are good?

And this all might be true if you are interested in the fact that the dog from the Taco Bell ads died...:-)