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Infrastructure as a Service : Just Compute and Go!

Posted on June 16, 2008
Filed Under cognifide, scalability | 1 Comment

Context: Some Investment Bank, Some large project, Some time ago…

Me: Wait up Scott (Scott is our SysAdmin. Disclosure: We still are drinking buddies!)
Scott: What now Gibbon! Whatever you’re selling, I ain’t buying…
Me: Stop your whinging you miserable jobsworth. I need 10 Linux servers tomorrow for about 5 hours of performance testing.
Scott: LOL – like that’s really gonna happen chump!
Me: I’ve got budget, approval and all the necessary papers, plus fat cat sponsors. Make it happen.
Scott: Look at me!
Me: <sigh>. Do I have to?
Scott: Do you think our datacentre is a freakin’ tardis?
Me: Noooo….but I do expect it have a few servers out the hundreds you claim to spend you time servicing. Don’t be so greedy. Share a little!
Scott: Seriously. I’ve got 2 hands, 10 mission critical applications I need to provision servers for like yesterday and no more space for new machines.
Me: I don’t want new machines. Just recycle existing ones.
Scott: That’s even worse. First I have to find them (talking days here), then make sure no-ones using them (talking months here), and then and only then install all your crap on them. Next day – Get Real! More like next month…
Me: I could get to the moon and back in that time with decent alien SysAdmin in tow…seriously, this is bad news.

Today

1) I don’t have to ask Scott for servers, I can get them myself. Hmmm, I wonder what Scott is doing these day

2) I don’t have to wait weeks for servers, I can get them in minutes.

3) I don’t have to buy nor own servers/licenses, I can pay on demand.

“I don’t need my own datacentre policed by some power crazy SA, with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), now I just Compute and Go!

Did you pick up on the Wash and Go tag line! One of my favourites eighties commericials but let’s get back to the script. IaaS is here and is picking up traction to point where I would seriously question any small to medium IT shop not thinking about downsizing their datacentre and/or putting to bed plans to create a new datacentre. Having pretty much instantaneous access to compute resources in the form of servers and storage, delivered as a metered service, means that you are now only limited by your imagination.

IaaS enables your systems to scale out in a cost effective manner. Grab more computing resources when you need them, release them when you don’t. Neverland! For development shops, the ability to periodically fire up a test environment and tear it down in a shot is pure candy. Not just test environments for that matter, but UAT, demos, integration, and so on.

The Players

First off the bat are Amazon Web Services with its S3 and EC2. IMO, Amazon are clearly the leaders in this space, despite the early critics telling Amazon to stick to minding their shop! If you want a server or storage, eight out of ten companies prefer Amazon. I’m not going to say any more here because the best place to talk to about is on the AWS Blog.

Another lesser known player is Flexiscale. Flexiscale is an outgrowth of XCalibre that has been in the hosting business for many years. Cognifide have been using Flexiscale for about 6 months now. The platform is new and continually improving. We are actively pushing them to make the management of their servers better. We work closely with their engineers and have built a console to manage our on-demand flexiscale servers. Cogniscale is freely available for download. It is not a supported product, use at your own risk, but if you any requests or feature improvements, please talk to Adam Najmanowicz who is the lead developer. He wrote a blog post about getting started with Cogniscale that is worth a read.

Then you get hybrids that sit on top of Amazon that provide management services such as RightScale. Also, you can of course roll your own IaaS in three easy steps. (1) Buy a server. (2) Install Xen or VMWare. (3) Pick one from the X new servers. Done!

Next Steps

IaaS is not rocket science. The whole point is to make things simpler. However, with IaaS, your SysAdmin is no longer the cable guy sweating under desk, fighting with wires, or banished to the datacentre/server room. In fact, they can focus on doing the stuff they enjoy. Administering infrastructure. Which leads us onto the topic of “Automated Infrastructure”. When a single physical box spawns say 12 servers, you cannot hope of continue to manage this infrastructure manually. People don’t scale. You need damned good tools to manage and monitor the enterprise.

Earlier, I wondered what Scott, our friendly SysAdmin would be doing these days. If he had any sense, he would be looking into tools such as Puppet, iClassify, Capistrano to name a few to help automate infrastructure. Something that is going to be real important to companies that wish to take full advantage of IaaS.

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