This week, the Updated Feature department announces extra functionality for our free Elastic Server Manager service. You may remember Elastic Server Manager from such releases as last year. An updated version of this lightweight monitoring and administration tool is available right now.
Elastic Server Manager provides a consolidated view of what's happening on your Elastic Server and how the individual components are operating. For those of you who've spent some time in the Elastic Server factory, you know that custom assemblies can include a boatload of components, each one with its own administrative needs. Elastic Server Manager lets you start/stop servers, check logs, assign user permissions, time sync, and more. One-click access to critical data such as uptime and memory usage can be a great thing when you're being hounded with questions.
New with this release is a secure web services API, accessible via SOAP and REST. Developers can connect additional web service-enabled programs to the management features automatically built-in to every Elastic Server. This magic is enabled by Elastic Server "rubberbands," those small, springy software components that connect all or part of an Elastic Server to an outside monitoring system. Wire up your homegrown monitoring program to Elastic Server Manager's front-end and manage all of your systems in one place. Logging on to the console or SSHing works just fine, but if a clean GUI maintenance utility is what you crave, then you'll marvel at Elastic Server Manager's at-a-glance information and utility. The Elastic Server Manager tool is free for account holders.
Check it out There are several ways to view this new feature.
Gaze upon the fantastic-looking static screenshot above
Watch the screencast demo posted below. It takes you through each feature step-by-step (6.0 minutes, .mov) You can also view a full-screen version of the demo on our site.
Click around our live demo hosted on Amazon (username: admin, password: admindemo). This site will be up for one month.
Watch Elastic Server Manager at work on your custom-assembled virtual server. Create your server now.
Questions? Comments? Holler back here or in our Support Forums.
Well it is now Fall, and of course a young man's fancy turns to baseball and the World Series. As a result, "the boys of October" in the form of William Fellows (451 Group), Duncan Johnston Watt (Enigmatec) and I just wrapped a panel on Cloud Computing at the High Performance on Wall Street Conference moderated by A-Team's Pete Harris. (I will connect it up below.)
The core topic of this conference tends to be shaving microseconds off of your messaging load to be able to handle the extreme loads of quote volumes being put out by the global financial exchanges. The vendor section is a "who's who" of computer scientists who live, sleep, breathe the ambitions of lowered latency.
Fortuitously though, Pete Harris is looking ahead to the time very soon where virtualization overhead approaches negligible - and other dimensions of high performance kick into competitive play.
Pete's kickoff question was to the effect of "what lessons can financial service teams learn from broader industry adoption of cloud computing". What I think this means to a "high performance" audience is that they should be looking ahead to what new attributes might be a part of high performance computing in the near future.
Some of these new attributes are:
"Mass performance" in the form of managing order of magnitude more computing devices than they have ever managed before. As one of the competition starts leveraging the use of thousands to 10's of thousands of dynamically available virtual machines; then all of them will have to.
"Duration performance" in the form of now that you have 10's of thousands of devices available to you, why not leave some of them running as "agents" or "views" on some of your more complex financial transactions. Leave them on for a while.....say 20 years?
"Integrity Performance" in the form of transforming key exogenous audit requirements into elements suitable for what is the same, and what is new in cloud computing.
"Dynamic Performance" in the form of dealing with the mass of devices with speed, precision, reproducibility and audit sanctity. Get these devices set up, running, and torn down in response to business needs.
This last point is the one that ties to baseball and our business at CohesiveFT. Baseball is a simple game in its essence. "Get them on, Get them over, Get them in." Easy. Right?
This is the key to dynamic performance; get the vm's assembled, get them up and running in the cloud(s), have them do their work - and tear them down. Get them off the playing field and then start over in the next "inning". Easy? Right?
Last week in the hallways of VMworld and in a panel at 451 Group HTS, Enigmatec's CTO Duncan was showing an example of this capability demonstrating how Enigmatec, Scalent and CohesiveFT have solutions that when combined contribute well to making this happen.
Maybe we can help your IT team use the cloud - and do the "easy" things. Something to think about while watching the Chicago Cubs win the World Series this October.
All hail Rails! If you are planning to attend ChicagoRuby.org's WindyCityRails conference tomorrow, Yan will be presenting a session titled, "Virtualization and Elastic Servers." As compelling as this session may sound printed here on on our blog, the title doesn't do justice to the accompanying explanation that Yan will provide.
Elastic Server lets you build your own Ruby servers on-the-fly. Just check a few boxes and your custom Ruby stack is ready for deployment to Amazon EC2 or other virtualization platforms. Developing on a virtual machine minimizes the risk that you will fubar your environment (not that you will, we're just sayin'...)
Are you jonesin' for your own Ruby server now? Head over to the Ruby on Rails portal, select 1.x or 2.x, choose the components for your stack, and you're on your way. Also, check out the community servers and templates that are available for download. Want to see more magic? Be sure to ask Yan for a demo at the event tomorrow or visit us in the forums.
Our man Yan is on the scene in Vegas, but wifi is sketchy (at a conference, really?) Below is a recap of highlights from the keynote speech. -----
8:10: Paul talks about his personal history in the computing industry and watching changes in the landscape over the last thirty years
8:21: "As we go forward in 2008, obviously the big buzzword is Cloud "
"We are moving fundamentally away ffrom a device centric world to a world that is application, information, and people centric."
"[...] increasingly think of infrastructure as a giant computer in which applications can be provisioned in a more manageable scalable and extensible way."
8:26: "How can we make decisions about forward provisioning infrastructure without having to predict exactly what's going to happen with your application load on a daily, monthly, yearly basis?"
8:27: "A new layer of software is coming to existence. There will be a new layer of abstraction in the data center. An elastic, self managing, self healing software substrate, a Virtual Datacenter Operating System."
8:28: Hardware partner announcement: Intel has introduced Xeon 7400 with support for vMotion
8:31: "If you look at a framework like Ruby on Rails, the traditional operating system has all but disappeared. I think we'll see a lot of experimentation in that area. We'll see the operating system deconstructed and tailored more specifically to the applications."
8:42: "We are working on the vCloud initiative,will allow, a set of services that will allow you to distribute your application across resources inside the firewall and outside the firewall."
vCloud Demo: VMWare demos an elastic SLA policy engine that is able to use customer metrics like a 4-second response time to provision resources in the cloud on the fly to deal with increasing demand.
8:53: Paul talks about user environments living across devices. vClient initiative, again the focus is on customers: every client will want their custom OS, application stack, etc. Demo of laptop provisioning using virtualization technology on a USB key.
VMWare mission summary:
Allowing our customers to become increasingly cloud-like in their internal operations. Using infrastructure much more efficiently and provision applications flexibly. Allow you to federate internal resources with external cloud resources. Work to solve the desktop dilemma with technologies for customer-centric provisioning of OS and application stacks.
A quick scan of the Elastic Server factory floor shows VMware as the most popular virtualization format selected for custom Elastic Server assembly at this time. What better way to enhance all of those VMware-clad servers than to certify them as VMware Ready? In conjunction with the VMworld 2008 conference this week, VMware is announcing its VMware Ready Virtual Appliance Program (formerly the Certified Virtual Appliance Program). As part of this announcement, CohesiveFT (that's us) has been selected as one of the companies that can help you create certified virtual apps.
What this means The VMware Ready Virtual Appliance Program is a verification program designed to ensure the best possible user experience by promoting virtual appliances that are VMware verified and ready to run on virtual environments. You can offer virtual appliances that are optimized to run on VMware Infrastructure, create a better user experience, and clearly communicate that your virtual appliances are safe, tested, and ready to run in a production environment. As part of the program, you'll also get to visual seal of approval, the VMware Ready logo, a symbol of quality amongst customers who find, evaluate, and purchase virtual appliances.
You can learn more about how to test and validate your production-ready virtual app on the VMware site. At this time, VMware Ready certification is a manual process, but the good news is that Elastic Server can get you most of the way there. (As soon as VMware is ready to support dynamic assembly, our Elastic Server platform will help you certify your servers immediately. It's not that we're opposed to mere static assembly, but when you're us and you have a real-time assembly capability, why not build and certify on-the-fly?)
VMware Ready is just one of the exciting announcements coming from CohesiveFT and the Elastic Server factory this week. Subscribe to our blog and Twitter feeds for more news. Also, if you're looking to meet with us in Vegas this week? Contact us with your whereabouts and we'll seek you out at the show.
A huge congratulations to the Django team on the release of Django 1.0! The Django community at large and Python developers around the world are rejoicing as this milestone release becomes available for download. But before you run off to celebrate at Saturday's release party, why not take a few mere minutes to push your Django 1.0-ready apps to production using the new Django site on Elastic Server?
In the same spirit of the framework built for rapid web development, our engineers decided to kickstart the availability of Django 1.0 inside the Elastic Server platform. (This portal was built for the community, so if there are any Django developers out there who want to take over ownership, give us a shout at: marketing at cohesiveft.com)
If Django lets you build apps quickly, then Elastic Server helps you test and push those apps to production just as fast. Build a test server and deploy it to Amazon EC2 in real-time. Don't see your component in the library? No worries. Just upload it yourself and share it with the community of over 1,000 users.
We like to think of Elastic Server as the Great Enabler, allowing you to package your apps for prime time, and do it all by yourself. The flexible platform stretches to fit all of the latest stuff you need to power your apps. Oh yeah, did we mention you can do it all for free?
(We wanted to call Elastic Server the "Elasticizer" but the writing team at the Sterling Cooper agency thought it too scintillating a term.) Assemble your app with Django 1.0 today.
Django and the Django logo are registered trademarks of Lawrence Journal-World.
We just put the finishing touches on a white paper titled, "Software Manufacturing: Custom Application Stacks for Virtualized Infrastructure and Cloud Computing." (1.8MB .pdf). As you'll see, the cover is mostly white, and the document is indeed paper-shaped, as a white paper ought to be. For those who are looking to minimize the number of words they take in, here's a quick high-level summary about the document.
Summary Historically customers have acquired their middleware software on a vertically-integrated basis from one or a few category-dominant vendors. However, a customer revolution in service-oriented architecture (SOA) and service-oriented infrastructure (SOI), combined with ever more complex business needs, has driven customers to a multi-sourced middleware component architecture. As these market mechanics have evolved over the last decade, the middleware market is moving from single-sourced, tightly-coupled, vertically integrated middleware, to multi-sourced, loosely-coupled, vertically aware application and middleware stacks. While multi-sourcing allows customers to apply the latest middleware innovation to their business, it comes at the price of exploding complexity, as they manage many more combinations of available and applicable software components. Despite this, CohesiveFT (CFT) believes application stacks do not need to be complex to install, configure, deploy, or manage; whether to physical, virtual or cloud computing infrastructures.
CFT provides an on-demand platform that enables customers to build and manage application stacks for the virtualized data center; whether owned by the enterprise or “in the clouds.” The Elastic ServerTM platform provides the ability to assemble, manage and deploy a virtualized application stack that is dynamically defined from component libraries consisting of open source, commercial source, and proprietary customer code. It dramatically improves the quality and consistency of application stack assemblies at the same time that it reduces time to market.
The Elastic Server platform allows customer choice of individual components at defined architectural layers, covering components from just above the hardware, up to the application itself. By offering an Elastic Server Community Edition to the global developer community, CFT tracks timely insight and trends about the evolving virtualized server environment at large, software component interaction information and proven configuration rules. CohesiveFT’s built-to-order application stacks:
deploy to all major virtualization formats and an increasing number of cloud computing providers
are given a unique identity, encapsulated, and injected with management and integration services
include a connection to an online patch management system
are able to track internal configuration changes for systems management and compliance purposes
The Elastic Server platform performs as a “content management system” for component assemblies allowing customers to ensure that only the components they want and approve go into their servers. It provides application stack lifecycle management and rapid provisioning; also recording each server’s unique history, enabling monitoring and patch management. In the data center, unique software servers can be managed just like other network devices - each manageable, portable and maintainable. The speed and agility afforded by dynamic Elastic Server assembly allows organizations to reclaim resources spent on infrastructure maintenance, allocating them instead to new initiatives that will differentiate their businesses.
Still here? You probably want to one-click download the 7-page paper in its entirety. It's a compelling read, replete with fancy charts.
Interested in creating your own Elastic Server filled with components you choose? Stop by the factory to start assembling a cloud or virtualization-destined server in real-time. Want to learn more about how you can use Elastic Server in your Enterprise? Holler back in the comments or reach out via our Contact form.
New with this release is a secure web services API, accessible via SOAP and REST. Developers can connect additional web service-enabled programs to the management features automatically built-in to every Elastic Server. This magic is enabled by Elastic Server "rubberbands," those small, springy software components that connect all or part of an Elastic Server to an outside monitoring system. Wire up your homegrown monitoring program to Elastic Server Manager's front-end and manage all of your systems in one place. Logging on to the console or SSHing works just fine, but if a clean GUI maintenance utility is what you crave, then you'll marvel at Elastic Server Manager's at-a-glance information and utility. The Elastic Server Manager tool is free for account holders.
