Architecture, Development and Training
German only. Heute exklusiv auf deutsch ein Artikel den ich für das DOAG Magazin im Früjahr 2011 geschrieben habe:
Download: Oracle Fusion Middleware und WebLogic Server in der Cloud (PDF)
Teile des Artikels sowie zahlreiche Grafiken sind aus meinem “Middleware and Cloud Computing” entommen. Viel Spaß beim Lesen!
I am at S.F. at the Oracle Open World conference right now where Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Public Cloud in an entertaining and rather fun presentation just an hour ago. To see some more photos of the event and my paparazzi shot of Sting who already showed up for some 30 seconds: check out the Facebook site of my Oracle Cloud Computing book.
Larry picked up many ideas that I published earlier this year in my cloud computing book:
He was talking a lot about migrating from one cloud to another (mostly using AWS as an example, so they seem to be on the friend list). Also he emphasized that simple multi-tenant SaaS offers such as Salesforce.com with a shared DB are not real clouds and risky (because of the shared DB 
).
When Oracle’s position about clouds was rather fluffy (should I say cloudy?) even one year ago, I now hear them talking more about elasticity, self-service, chargeback etc.
What I didn’t like: So far this does not include pay-per use yet (one of my 4 criteria of cloud computing). Larry mentioned a monthly subscription during his keynote which was confirmed in the Thu morning keynote. Yet Oracle Enterprise Manger 12c is announced to provide metering at various levels.
I will post an update here as soon as there will be more details out tomorrow.
Apart from announcing the Oracle Public Cloud also Oracle Social Media (a part of Fusion Applications) was announced. See fotos on Facebook.
I always recommend to create your own EBS-based AMIs (e.g. for running complex software such as Oracle Fusion Middleware). This hold true for the classic AMIs as well as for the converted Oracle VM templates. Never rely on the existence of AMIs provided by Oracle because:
- Oracle can change or update (or remove) them any time.
- They often don’t exist for certain AWS regions, they are S3-based or only exist based on 32-bit OEL instead of 64-bit.
- Also, the AMIs provided often don’t exist for a specific version of Oracle products.
So always create your own copy! Yet here is something to consider:
AWS broke an EBS-based AMI of mine by deleting arbitrary block in the image. This is particularly annoying since there is no easy way to create an offline copy an EBS-based AMI. You could rsync the running image to local computer but there is absolutely no support to get this done in a user-friendly way from the AWS console.
The good: They informed me in time (being in Sydney if something happens in the EU regions gives you an advantage) and sent an apology. They also replaced the deleted blocks with empty blocks.
The bad: It cost me several days to create this AMI which was an OEL EBS-based, full-blown installation of Oracle SOA Suite 11.1.1.5 (I still have to check if it will be usable after a file system check).
For a more detailed explanation of what happened take a look at Amazon’s summary of the events. It summarizes to an error in the EBS software that was overlayed with a power outage in Dublin.
Hello Amazon: Why don’t you provide an easy way to have an offline backup of EBS-based AMIs for disaster recovery?When designing your cloud architecture sooner or later the question about the database will arise. Today Amazon Web Services announced the availability of Oracle database instances provisioned with the AWS Relational Database Service (RDS). However, there are many other options available, and in order to make an informed decision as to which will best suit your architecture, you should know the pros and cons of at least four:
I summarized my view in a detailed 12 page whitepaper (the weather here is too nice and I can’t bother myself putting all the screen shots into this blog posting).
The PDF describes all the details of RDS and compares them to the other options available. Also learn how to use WebLogic with RDS:
Cloud Databases and Oracle Whitepaper.
If you like to know more after reading the whitepaper have a look at my Oracle Cloud Computing book at Amazon and join the book’s Facebook site!
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
- 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 …
For an updated version of this workshop see here or contact me directly.
I’ll be offering a 2-day cloud computing workshop 2+3. May 2011 in city center of Munich. A second event is planned for Sydney later this year and will be announced by the Australian Oracle User Group.
After a basic introduction and the discussion of common misconceptions we will cover advanced topics such as how to achieve true elasticity, load balancing in clouds, queueing, notifications and databases in clouds. This workshop is centered around Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies such as EC2 EBS images, RDS, SQS, SNS, ELB etc.
The workshop includes a free copy of my Middleware and Cloud Computing book, printed course material, a pre-configured lab environment to take home as a virtual image on DVD.
Please contact me via email for registration and further details.
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$200 when I missed to turn off an EC2 instance and went for a diving trip to Egypt. I’ve got a number of suggestions that might save you some money.
Be careful and make sure you don’t wast money that is better spend for a fabulous diving trip.
These tips are taken out of my Middleware and Cloud Computing book.
Scaling for AWS and most other clouds is quite interesting. As I mentioned in my podcast on OTN and also in my “Middelware and Cloud Computing” book you cannot dynamically resize a running cloud instance. E.g. there is no API call to ask for 2.2 GHz CPU speed instead of 1.8 GHz or to dynamically add another 3.5 GB of RAM.
All you can do is switch to another EC2 instance type while the instance is not running. This is why I like to say scaling nowadays involves some granularity (since you can only select the next bigger/smaller instance).
It was alway possible to resize a stopped EC2 instance using
frank@ubuntu:~$ ec2-modify-instance-attribute i-d8bc3eaf –t m1.xlarge
Now this functionality was finally included into the AWS Management Console. Jeff has a nice blog posting with many screenshots explaining how it works.
Yes, it took me a while for this announcement. Books are surprisingly time consuming even after they are written. Yet the two copies of my book
are already on their way to the happy winners:
- T. K. from Xensio (DE)
- E. F. from Sunrise (CH)
Congratulations
And a Merry Christmas to all of you!
P.S. An official announcement of the book will follow. It’s available in the US and can be ordered in DE and UK.
PP.S. We are almost living in 2011. Marketing is changing. Show the world that you LIKE the book’s web site. Spread the word, invite your friends, tell your colleagues. There will be more stuff to be won… Cheers!
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.
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.
I did a basic test trying to measure the un-tuned out-of-the-box I/O performance of Rackspace Cloud instance with the HDTune utility on a Windows Server 2008 instance. According the the RS documentation their disks are local RAID10. Then I run the same utility on 8 core extra large EBS backed EC2 instance provided by Amazon (wanted to make sure it is not an issue due to a small EC2 instance size). According to the docs EBS should provide consistent performance of a SAN regardless of the instance type.
Here are the somehow surprising results. I was expecting, that they perform somehow equal but RS is in the range of 300 MB/s whereas the EC2 instance is below 40 MB/s.
Interesting enough also the CPU usage is quite different: 2% only for AWS and 31% for RS.
I welcome any comments and I am aware that the tool is meant to measure disks and not RAID or SAN volumes. Still I am surprised by the huge difference. I wonder if the difference is only due to the difference of local RAID vs. SAN. Also I wonder how is the SAN attached then, since the SAN performance is still worse than my laptop disk.
WebLogic whole-server migration is a compelling solution for the availability of servers and pinned resources such as JMS on those servers. It simply moves the IP address to the new candidate machine before starting the managed server there. From the perspective of the managed server there is no change at all, since even the IP address is the same. The crucial point however is the availability of floating IP addresses that can be automatically reassigned by the wlsifconfig.sh script.
On EC2 there are only two IP addresses per instance, a public and a private one. You cannot get additional IP addresses, so whole-server migration isn’t of much use.
In fact, you could get an elastic IP address, which is a reassignable, static IP address assigned to an EC instance. Still an elastic IP is not useful for server-migration because assignment of the address requires the EC2 command-line and cannot be done directly from the cluster script using ifconfig.
This text is a digest of my upcoming book about cloud computing with Oracle.
Quite often I chat with customers about cloud computing and tell them they could have a server running in the cloud for as little as 1 cent per hour. Then their next question is: “Well, if it is running in the cloud, how can I access it then?“.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about it. Just because your server is running in the cloud, doesn’t mean it is not tangible. So the short answer is: “Use ssh and connect to it.“. Your server is not hidden in a nebula – it’s fully connected to the internet (at a fantastic bandwidth, a WebLogic 10.3.2 package download is completed in 4 mins at 3.8 MB/s) . For Amazon’s AWS you typically have to provide a X.509 certificate and RackspaceCloud uses password for root login with ssh.
Even if your managing the cloud from your Windows desktop you are not out of luck connecting to a UNIX server in the cloud, there are a couple of options:
Oracle Middleware and Cloud Computing Book