Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 Autoscaling

 

How many blog posts have you read that were written on a ferry? Well this is post makes it one more. Live from famous Manly ferry since I am currently offering a number of Amazon and Oracle Cloud Computing Workshops in Australia.

Elasticity is a key criteria for cloud computing. Autoscaling is automated elasticity. Interesting enough is widely unknown how this will be implemented on the Oracle Public Cloud for the Java Service.

Autoscaling on AWS can only be configured with lengthy commands from the command line but not from the web cased AWS console. Getting all the parameters right can be tricky, so here is one of the easiest examples and a hands-on screen cast using it:

 

 


as-create-launch-config surfLaunch --region ap-southeast-1 --key access --image-id ami-b83374ea --instance-type t1.micro
as-create-auto-scaling-group surfScale --launch-configuration surfLaunch --region ap-southeast-1 -availability-zones ap-southeast-1a,ap-southeast-1b --min-size 2 --max-size 4
as-describe-auto-scaling-groups --headers --region ap-southeast-1

as-describe-auto-scaling-instances --headers --region ap-southeast-1
as-put-scaling-policy ScaleDown -auto-scaling-group surfScale --adjustment=-1 --type ChangeInCapacity --region ap-southeast-1
as-put-scaling-policy ScaleUp -auto-scaling-group surfScale --adjustment=+1 --type ChangeInCapacity --region ap-southeast-1

 

as-execute-policy ScaleUp --auto-scaling-group surfScale --region ap-southeast-1

as-describe-scaling-activities -g surfScale --region ap-southeast-1 --show-long

 

as-execute-policy ScaleUp --auto-scaling-group surfScale --region ap-southeast-1

 

mon-put-metric-alarm HighCPUAlarm --comparison-operator GreaterThanThreshold --evaluation-periods 1 --metric-name CPUUtilization --namespace "AWS/EC2" --period 600 --statistic Average --threshold 80 --alarm-actions "XXX" --dimensions "AutoScalingGroupName=surfScale" --region ap-southeast-1

 

mon-put-metric-alarm LowCPUAlarm --comparison-operator LessThanThreshold --evaluation-periods 1 --metric-name CPUUtilization --namespace "AWS/EC2" --period 600 --statistic Average --threshold 20 --alarm-actions "XXX" --dimensions "AutoScalingGroupName=surfScale" --region ap-southeast-1

 

REMOVE ALL:

as-update-auto-scaling-group surfScale --min-size 0 --max-size 0 --region ap-southeast-1
as-delete-auto-scaling-group surfScale --region ap-southeast-1

as-delete-launch-config surfLaunch --region ap-southeast-1

 

The comments section is open now for your suggestions how this will be done with the Oracle Public Cloud.

Oracle DB with OEM in Amazon Cloud

Since today Oracle EM is available with the Relational Database Service in Amazon Web Services.

RDS instances come with a free trial for 60 days and there is no additional cost for OEM.

I recommend to read my Cloud Databases whitepaper to get started, follow the discussion of Oracle DB instances in this previous posting and give it a try yourself.

Here is a screencast that explains how to create an Oracle DB instance in AWS, how to enable OEM (just in case you are an admin) and how to connect to your cloud instance with a local installation of NetBeans (in case you are a developer).

 

AWS Cloud: Use Same Access Key in Different Regions (or in All Regions)

In the Amazon cloud you require an access key to connect to your instances. This key is can be generated when you create your first instance. It’s then downloaded to your client and you specify it when connecting to the instance. Typically you need one key per AWS region.

However, you can use the same key also for different or all regions. You have to connect to a running instance and then copy it from the instance’s authorized_key file under .ssh/and import it as a key pair in the new region as shown in the following video.

Cloud Computing Workshop 2011: Oracle, Rackspace and Amazon

This year I really kept the best until the end! Last week I was running a 2-day cloud computing workshop with a 2-hour hands-on management presentation the night before the workshop for Contribute in Belgium. Contribute is an Oracle Platinum partner and being surrounded by Oracle Fusion Middleware experts, DBAs, application architects and senior level management the technical level of the workshop was very high with many interesting discussions.

We covered Oracle Public Cloud (OPC), Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace (RS). OPC is not available yet, but the overall functionality including its limitations for the first release is more or less known and quite interesting compared to let’s say running WebLogic on AWS.

To prove the point I was running WebLogic 12c on AWS cloud with 30GB of heap on a high-mem 4xl instance with 8 cores. Proving the point cost me a bit more than US$2.

Typically I expected that the more tech savvy audience prefers AWS over Rackspace, yet this time people were impressed by the easy setup of Rackspace and the way they handled a minor problem with their web console file-upload feature during a live chat session.

Among hundreds of other details we looked at the I/O performance. The performance of Amazon’s EBS is known to be interesting (you may want to read this as ‘difficult’). See Adrian’s posting for a thorough explanation, some benchmarks here, and some more details there.

The out-of-the-box performance looking at Rackspace Cloud is more consistent and there is a surprisingly high throughput which is almost independent of the data size. Here is some data comparing a local laptop disk, to the disks attached to the Rackspace Cloud servers to my brand new consumer SSD (not sure if a 512 GB SSD still qualifies as ‘consumer’). All numbers refer to a READ-benchmark with increasing data size.

Laptop HD (500GB SATA): 80 MB/s

Laptop SSD (Crucial m4): 281 MB/s

Rackspace (SAN): 302 MB/s

 

I am only posting the screenshot for one of the Rackspace I/O measurements since quality isn’t perfect. There is some older data with graphs available in a previous post of mine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now I am still curious about the dip on the left part of the graph which is consistent over several instances and measurements. Any comments?

Oracle Technologist of the Year Cloud Architect Award for Frank Munz

Last week I received the Oracle Technologist of the Year Award, Cloud Architect.

It makes me feel flattered and it’s of course a great honor for me being on this list of fame together with companies such as Dell, TurkCell and others! The award is part of Oracle’s Excellence Awards program. The winners were selected by a panel of judges that scored each entry across multiple categories.

I know there was a tremendous amount of support for the nomination of my Oracle Middleware and Cloud Computing book by my customers, workshop participants, individual book reviewers, Oracle user groups, middleware experts and even some people at Oracle HQ – many thanks to all of you!

Read the full story in the Oracle Magazine: