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Cloud Computing Workshop 2011: Oracle, Rackspace and Amazon

December 20, 2011 By frank Leave a Comment

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?

Filed Under: Announcement, CloudComputing, oracle Tagged With: aws, cloud computing, course, oracle public cloud, rackspace cloud, weblogic, workshop

Oracle Fusion Middleware and AWS Cloud Services

August 18, 2011 By frank 6 Comments

I yesterday gave a presentation at InSync2011 about Oracle’s cloud computing strategy, AWS cloud services and it’s current limitations. Amazon reacted quickly and updated their offering. We have been waiting for that. Keep going!

Filed Under: CloudComputing, oracle Tagged With: aws, weblogic

WebLogic JMS with SAF and JMS bridges or SQS : Legacy Integration in the Cloud with Oracle WebLogic, WebSphere and OSB / Apache Camel

July 18, 2011 By frank Leave a Comment

An interesting question popped up on my Oracle Middleware and Cloud Computing book site which I like to answer here for the benefits of all the others puzzling at similar integration questions. In the context of using JMS as an integration technology I’d like to summarize the usage scenarios for Oracle WebLogic JMS Store-and-Forward and JMS-bridges (both are included in WebLogic server).

Hi Frank – [ ...] We have a requirement to build 2-way asynchronous integration between an application running on WLS in AWS and a legacy J2EE app running on IBM WebSphere in our Data Centre. From your excepts my understanding is that SQS is intended for use only between AWS apps – is this correct ? I think we need to be looking at a full JMS solution for our integration – perhaps using WLS JMS Store-And-Forward – Thanks, Peter D

Hi Peter,

Based on your comment I cannot go into great detail or even provide a solid architecture that anwsers you question (one that will save you from more reading) but here are some important points to consider:

- Amazon’s SQS is not restricted to be only used from AWS instances. SQS is purely based on web services (or language bindings that encapsulate those WS calls) so you can use it from any computer. E.g. you can read or write to SQS queues from remote.

- WLS Store-and-Forward (SAF) can only couple WLS instances of the same version and does not bridge to other JMS providers. You cannot use SAF to transfer from WLS JMS to IBM MQSeries (or whatever Websphere might use). JMS is a pretty bad integration technology which requires to have the right messaging classes in your classpath. E.g. when writing messages from Websphere to a WebLogic JMS queue you are required to have the WLS JMS classes in Websphere classpath.

- You can use the WebLogic’s JMS bridge to solve the somehow messy classpath issues. WLS JMS bridge has to be deployed as JCA adapter (still the jar file from the other provider is required but it is not used in custom code). The bridge will automatically forward from e.g. WLS JMS to MQSeries and even supports transcations. However there is no support to bridge between WLS JMS and AWS SQS.

- Unlike let’s say Oracle Service Bus, if you are looking at Apache Camel there is support to convert incoming JMS messages to outgoing SQS. Note to Oracle’s product manager of OSB: we would appreciate to have SQS as a supported transport protocol or possibly as an SOA Suite JCA adapter. Thanks for considering it

regards,

Frank

Filed Under: CloudComputing, oracle Tagged With: aws, cloud computing, oracle service bus, service bus, sqs, weblogic

Reduce Costs Amazon AWS, Rackspace Cloud and other IaaS Providers

March 20, 2011 By frank 1 Comment

Anybody working regularly with IaaS providers such as Amazon or Rackspace can recount a personal story of a forgotten instance.

The most dramatic stories are not about a cheap micro instance – my personal story with AWS cost me some US$200 when I missed to turn off an EC2 instance and went for a diving trip to Egypt. I’ve got a number of suggestions that might save you some money.

Above all, you want to avoid paying for unused resources. Using auto scaling is a great mechanism for running only the required instances, and for example, to scale down at night when fewer EC2 instances are required.
Often the monthly bill tells you that there something is still running somewhere. Make sure you stop unused resources as quickly as possible. If you know in advance that you want them to be stopped at the end of the day, then use the Unix at command to schedule the termination of the instances.
Although AWS management console provides dashboards, there is no super-dashboard. Instead, you have to flip through all tabs yourself (starting from from the “S3” tab to “EC2” and all the tabs up until “RDS”). Only after checking all tabs can you be sure you have an accurate overview of the current resources for the selected region.
Remind yourself that the AWS management console is always displaying resources per region. Once you switch to another region, e.g. from Asia/Pacific to Europe, you will no longer be able to see instances running in Asia/ Pacific.
The console is sometimes out of sync. When this happens, remember to click on the refresh button so as to avoid only seeing outdated information.
The command-line tools I introduce later will work with resources for the default region in the US (unless you specify otherwise). Remain vigilant at all times e.g. when working in Europe do not start and then forget an instance in the US.
Always double check for running instances before engaging in another project, leaving for a sabbatical or a trip around the world.

Be careful and make sure you don’t wast money that is better spend for a fabulous diving trip.

These tips are taken out of my Middleware and Cloud Computing book.

Filed Under: CloudComputing Tagged With: aws, cloud computing, ec2, rackspace cloud

Come to my Cloud Computing Talk at DOAG 2010

November 17, 2010 By frank Leave a Comment

Come to my Weblogic and Cloud Computing talk from 15:00h – 15:45h
in room Kopenhagen.

- Win a copy of my Oracle Cloud Computing Book!
- Learn how to use a computer in the cloud for one year for free!
- Understand WebLogic showstoppers in public clouds and design tradeoffs for clustering, JMS, load balancing, CDNs and databases.

Filed Under: Announcement, CloudComputing, oracle, publishing Tagged With: aws, cloud computing, conference, ec2, rackspace cloud, weblogic

Win a Copy of Middleware and Cloud Computing Book

November 17, 2010 By frank

If you are interested in Middleware and Cloud Computing subscribe to my my newsletter and win one of the first two copies of my brand new cloud computing book. The drawing will be Dec. 15th 2010.

There are only 4 mailings per year and you can unsubscribe any time from the newsletter.

Filed Under: CloudComputing, oracle, publishing Tagged With: aws, cloud computing, cluster, database, ec2, load balancing, rackspace cloud, rds, weblogic

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

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

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