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:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oracle Cloud Computing Buch zu gewinnen!

(Posting in GERMAN ONLY)

Während der DOAG2011 Konferenz können Sie ein Examplar des Oracle Cloud Computing Buches gewinnen:

✘✘✘ Unterstützen Sie die Oracle Cloud Computing Buch Seite und klicken Sie auf “gefällt mir”.

✘✘✘ Oder melden Sie sich bei der munz & more Info-Newsletter an. Es erscheinen ca. 4 Ausgaben pro Jahr mit Informationen über Vorträge und Workshops zu Cloud Computing, Oracle WebLogic, Service Bus und SOA Suite.

Die Gewinner werden Ende November benachrichtigt. Der Rechtsweg ist ausgeschlossen. Link zur Amazon-Seite mit Kritiken zu “Middleware and Cloud Computing”.

Ebook Released: Middleware and Cloud Computing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a couple of fun days playing with (mostly disastrous) tools, converters and the Kindle itself I published the first Kindle edition of “Middleware and Cloud Computing”. It contains more than 100 coloured graphics (well, of course they are not coloured on your b/w Kindle, but on the Kindle reader for your Mac, PC, Android, iPad etc) and more than 100 clickable links to additional resources, publications and tools.

Please spread the word, twitter it to the networked part of the known universe and don’t forget to LIKE its Amazon and Facebook site. Do you you really, really want to support it? Sincerely? The best you could do is writing a review once you have read it.

 

thanks and best wishes,

Frank

Amazon’s AWS outage – did the Cloud Fail?

 

There was a major outage in one of Amazon’s regions affecting several availability zones last Thursday.

– For a summary of the events and their impact see this blog entry of RightScale (I guess but I am not sure if it was written by Thorsten). The RightScale blog is updated now with some more details of the event.

 

– George Reese, the grand homme of Cloud Computing, calls this event a shining moment for clouds. Don’t get me wrong. I am big fan of George, not only because he is following me on twitter :). He gave a podcast interview repeating that you need to design for the cloud by designing for failure instead of sticking with your traditional architecture.

– Amazon did an poor job communicating what happened. Failures are a part of business but they have to be dealt with accordingly. Add this to your lessons learned list about Clouds. At least I did. Here is their summary.

In my Cloud Computing book there is a whole chapter about RightScale (who provided the best analysis so far) as well as a section about disaster recovery and another one on designing for clouds (“why it is not enough to simply run WebLogic on AWS”) . There is also a free chapter for download available at Oracle’s Archbeat site.

IMHO this event teaches us that it is not enough to know how to simply run WebLogic on AWS or any other IaaS cloud provider such as Rackspace. By the way, this is one of the reasons why my book has more than the initially planned 120 pages …