Comparison between Amazon EC2 and Google GAE

Though different cloud service providers are following different strategies, these are the two uniquely different approaches. Others either are similar to one of these or fall somewhere in between.

I have excluded SaaS from this discussion – you can see the comparison between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS on this post on Cloud Strategy.

Why is GAE potentially disruptive?

• Over the last decade, Google has build a huge cloud infrastructure for its search and other services

• The infrastructure has been build using very cost effective hardware
• Fault tolerance is designed into the architecture
• They have perfected technologies and algorithms like MapReduce and BigTable created for such infrastructure
• It is highly scalable

• Google is following a strategy of opening up their infrastructure for developers to use – for example Closure JavaScript Toolset
• They will optimize cloud access through Chrome OS and Android Mobile OS

Their economy of scale will be difficult to match.

What about Microsoft – they are constrained by the fact that they have to defend their desktop business – which will prevent them from following optimal cloud strategy!

Over the weekend I provisioned a Windows 2003 server on Amazon’s EC2 and installed Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (plus all the pre-req’s). The idea was to bundle it up as a base image when finished so that I can run up a CRM image for UAT/Test/etc purposes when needed. The installation went fine, in fact, no different to installing Microsoft Dynamics CRM on a ‘normal’ server however, I unfortunately didn’t do enough research before starting and have found out that the D drive isn’t going to be persisted when it’s turned off!! Grrr >:(

As I was installing CRM over the weekend, one of my colleagues was installing TFS 2010 and he has put together a post on his experience- worth a read if you’re planning on doing anything on EC2.

Background

I’ve been using the Amazon EC2 environment for a while now, mostly for basic development or testing environments. Since these environments have all been reproducible very easily we haven’t worried too much about getting them setup to resist an instance failure.

This week however, I’ve had three separate conversations regarding how we can get environments safely built for more complex applications:

• Team Foundation Server Beta 2
• Microsoft CRM / SharePoint Server Development Environments
• Oracle SE1

In each of these cases, the environment is only required for a short time while developing or demonstrating … then they will be shut down again.

Each of these needs some form of database storage … and since this will be a development environment we don’t want to be paying $1 / hour for the Amazon SQL Server instance, given that we are entitled to use our development licenses for this purpose.

One serious note about EC2 Drives

Hard drives on EC2 are split into three different categories:

• (C:) is the system drive, and is automatically attached when an EC2 instances. It should be noted that ONLY data on the C: is persisted when an instance is bundled!
• (D:) is a temporal storage drive, and should be used strictly for short term storage, as this does not get persisted when an instance is bundled.
• Additional Elastic Storage Blocks (ESB) may be added. ESBs are treated as additional hard drives, but they are stored within S3 and therefore will (usually) remain intact beyond the life of an EC2 server instance. As the capacity of the EC2 system drive is so low (10GB for a small instance) it is necessary to store all programs and data that need to be persisted within ESB drives.

I make this distinction right at the start of my post – because I got caught out by the fact that the D: drive does not get bundled … and had to start all over again

Initial Setup

For this configuration we’re going to need the following setup on EC2

• 1 x 10GB ESB for storing installers and ISOs
• 1 x 5GB ESB for database
• 1 x EC2 instance for downloading files
• 1 x EC2 instance for Application installation

I’m working on the assumption that everything is installed on the same instance today – though obviously one could separate the various components of the installation, and use Amazon security groups as a way to restrict access and provide layers of security.

Preparation – Download the Installers

Maybe I’m being overly cautious, but I tend to setup a specific instance just for downloading the application installers and copying them to an Elastic Storage Block drive. This way any bloat that the download causes does not affect the size of the installed application AMI when we go to bundle it later.

To get started download installers for the following applications:

• MagicDisc (or your favourite ISO mounting tool)
• Microsoft SQL Server.
• Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Copy each of these installers to an ESB drive, and then shut down the current EC2 instance.

Setup the Base AMI image

I decided to base my build on the “Amazon Public Images – Basic Microsoft Windows Server 2003″ image, though in theory any of the Windows based images could be used. One note of caution though – if the author of the image is not Amazon, then ask yourself whether you trust the author not to have built in any rogue elements to the image.

Once the image is fully booted, add the new ESB drive (for storing the application database files) to the instance first, followed by the ESB containing the installers. The timing and order of adding these drives is important. If you load the new ESB drive before the instance is fully booted then the instance gets a little confused and loads the ESB as D: rather than E: – causing inconsistencies later when we create new instances from the bundled AMI.

After formatting and installing the new ESBs, the instance setup should look something like this:

• (C:) System drive containing the OS
• (D:) 160GB Blank instance drive
• (E:) 10GB+ Blank ESB drive for storing data
• (G:) 10GB ESB drive containing our installation media

Other components that need to be installed before going any further are:

• IIS
• ASP.NET

In order to install the additional windows components, it is necessary to mount the Windows 2003 media. The following article contains a list of snapshots that can be used to create Elastic Storage Block volumes containing the windows installation disks:

• http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1802

Note: At this stage I’d recommend changing the Administrator password to something that you will remember next time … I had to restart my installation after finding that a bundled AMI does not seem to regenerate new passwords for instances

Installing SQL Server

On our new EC2 instance install MagicDisc (or some other ISO mounting tool) and mount the SQL Server installers.

The key configuration variations from the defaults were as follows:

• Setup the data directories for the SQL Server Instance to be stored on the E: drive.
• Ensure that all SQL Server features you require are installed. Since this particular install is for TFS 2010, I’ve enabled Full Text Search, Analysis Services and Reporting Services.
• Ensure that the SQL Server management studio is installed.

After the installation is complete, it pays to double check that all of the SQL Server folders on the E: drive have been assigned the correct permissions. I found with my install that I had to give the Network Service account some additional privileges in order to get the SQL Server services to start.

Installing Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 (Pre-Configuration)

Installing Team Foundation Server 2010 has been described in many blog posts before, so I’m limiting the description in this post to the specifics of getting the install working on EC2.

Installation of TFS2010 is done in two steps; firstly the installer is run to setup the base application files, then the configuration tool is used to setup Team Foundation Server for use.

1. Mount the Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 ISO image
2. Set the install location for the Features to the E: drive

Configuring Team Foundation Server

1. Create a local service account to run the Team Foundation Service. I’ve called mine TFSServiceAccount.
2. Start the Team Foundation Server Administration Console
3. Enter the local user account setup in step 1 (TFS Service Account) to run the Team Foundation Server services.
4. Select whether you are after a Basic or a Standard configuration scenario. Either way, all the defaults should be sufficient to get the installation working – though I did find I had to spend a bit of time sorting out IIS and the Reporting Server (since I’d make the mistake of installing SQL Server before IIS).

Setting up SQL Server Backups

Even though the SQL Server databases are being stored on Elastic Storage Block drives – there is still a chance that the ESB itself will fail. Don’t get me wrong … ESB is much safer than storing the data directly on the instance storage – but there is still a risk that it can be irretrievably lost. The following article by Michael Friss discusses the different backup strategies for SQL Server on an EC2 instance – and also includes a good PowerShell script for performing the backup and saving it to S3.

• http://friism.com/ec2-sql-server-backup-strategies-and-tactics

Any Comments …

I have to admit; I hit a number of issues performing this setup and had to restart the overall process three times. I’m sure there may be better ways to setup some of these features … especially the SQL Server components. I’d like to hear any feedback you’ve got, or what works well – so please leave a comment if you have any thoughts.

By Jo Maitland 16 Nov 2009 | SearchCloudComputing.com

“Amazon might have stolen the lead on the cloud computing market, but AT&T plans to give the online retail giant a run for its money.

This week AT&T will launch Synaptic Compute, a service that allows users to rent servers on demand in a pay-as-you-go way, with no up-front fee or termination charges. It’s a shot across the bow to EC2, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service, but is the telco serious?

The Compute as a Service offering is part of AT&T’s managed hosting business, which is shifting toward a more cloudlike model of flexible provisioning and billing as compared with its traditional, fully managed hosting services. AT&T launched Synaptic Storage in August, an on-demand storage service.”

Read the full article here on searchcloudcomputing.com

ITWeb
 
Pacote de ferramentas inclui versão gratuita de banco de dados da companhia 

Fornecedora de data warehouse, a Teradata mira o emergente mercado de cloud computing.

A companhia disponibilizou um pacote de ferramenta para construção de data marts em nuvens públicas e privadas.

De acordo com a empresa, a solução garante agilidade na análise de dados e permite desenvolvimento de sistemas nas plataformas da fabricante em questões de minutos.

O pacote inclui, ainda, uma versão gratuita do banco de dados Teradata, integrado a ambientes Amazon EC2 e VMware.

I don’t have much server background, and probably its a lot easier to set up your servers with amazon EC2 than setting them up yourself or at other hosting solutions. I don’t care, it really annoys me that everybody claims how easy it is, showing you how to launch an instance in a minute. Yes, thats really easy, but you quit too abruptly. Nobody wants to set up an instance, then terminate it and lose everything you did on that instance. I say, never press terminate, you will lose every change from the last ami save. You are warned, be prepared or waste a lot of time.

Read on for links an tips for the whole cycle of launching, changing, saving and registering AMI. Everybody deploying to EC2 really have to do all this as a part of setting everything up, being prepared to launch more instances of the same kind.

If you launch an instance without knowing how to save and register AMIs, save yourself a lot of time (and a few pennies), by not doing a lot of work you might lose. If you do a lot of work, don’t press terminate, it’s not the same as a shutdown of your computer. You have to look at it as an ISO image of files, if you read it, work with the content, you’ll have to create a new ISO image to burn on your CD to keep the changes. At page 26 in the ElasticFox it says “Bundling a Linux/UNIX instance requires the use of the AMI tools”. OK, as you probably understand, I’m burn.

I am now successfully using both ec2-api-command-line-tools, elasticfox and amazons web console.

Ok, so what is the minimum need to get a small server running ubuntu and a mysql database?

• EC2 for your server and database
• S3 for storing your AMIs and register them
• EBS is optional, but you should set one up as a safety-net, replicating your data.
• both the ec2 and ami command line tools.

My links, tips and references.

The ec2 api command line tool:

• http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-getting-started-with-amazon-ec2 EU? Important addition, put this in you bashrc or bash_profile too

export EC2_URL='https://eu-west-1.ec2.amazonaws.com/'

• AWSEC2 Command Line Reference

ElasticFox

• Amazon ElasticFox pdf tutorial
• If you’re using the alestic ubuntu images below, remember to change “SSH user” to ‘ubuntu’, from the Tools menu in ElasticFox (icon top-right)

EBS to replicate your data

• MySQL database server, including snapshot backup and restore.

Finding ubuntu EC2 AMIs:

• http://alestic.com/

SAVING AMIs

First, make sure you have a bucket in S3 for storing the your new ami. I use S3 Firefox Organizer

• I suppose you have launched an instance
• then partly follow this http://robrohan.com/2009/01/30/saving-a-customised-linux-amazon-instance-ec2-and-s3/
• with the exception if your using alestic ubuntu AMIs (they don’t use root, but user=ubuntu). Run this on your EC2 instance:

mirror=http://us.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
printf "%s\n%s\n" "deb ${mirror} karmic multiverse" \
"deb-src ${mirror} karmic main" |
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/multiverse.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ec2-ami-tools

I struggled a lot with sudo, but found the solution mentioned above, at here at google groups

Now you should be all set to launch a new instance based on that new AMI of yours! Break a leg!

It looks like Amazon is marching towards IaaS-domination with the release of an SDK for .NET.

It’s interesting that they only support C# and not VB.NET. You would think that since there are more VB developers they could more bang for their buck by offering both languages. Perhaps VB.NET is on the roadmap.

“The AWS SDK for .NET makes it even easier for Windows developers to build .NET applications that tap into the cost-effective, scalable, and reliable AWS cloud. Using the SDK, developers will be able to build solutions for AWS infrastructure services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon SimpleDB. With the AWS SDK for .NET, developers get started in minutes with a single, downloadable package complete with Visual Studio project templates, the AWS .NET library, C# code samples, and documentation.”

The SDK requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or later only supports the following editions:

1. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition or later
2. Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition
3. Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition

During last years of developement, Canonical and The Ubuntu Team are deploying not only a wonderful desktop/laptop Operating System, but they are focussing their efforts on The Ubuntu Server Edition… They are trying to conquer a big slice in the Enterprise Business.
One, in my opinion, unbelivable step forward is the complete and reliable support for the Cloud Computing Technology. Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth are deeply concentrate on this topic, and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is the answer to their efforts.

Cloud Computing enables you to increase or decrease your computing capacity within minutes… And with cheap prices… Without make hard money investments, you can resize your server environment to meet your needs for that exact situation.

With Ubuntu Server Edition you can make your choice between 2 type of Clud Systems:

• Private Cloud: private cloud offers an unbelievable elasticity to your environment, you can deploy workload behind your infrastructure’s firewall. You can grow or shrink your computing capacity to meet the needs of your applications. How can you set up your personal cloud environment.
• Public Cloud: this type of configuration enables you to use Ubuntu Server on Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud). So that, this feature allows you to build your on-demand virtual systems on any scale with a minimal in-house required hardware. Amazon EC2 fits perfecly with Ubuntu Server Edition’ modularity, vitualization, capabilities range of applications and optimised performance. How can I use Amazon EC2 with your environment.

To close this post, my opinion is that Ubuntu is growing fast and great. These that follows are the Mark Shuttleworth’s words about the topic:

Ubuntu is the most popular base OS for people building workloads to deploy in the cloud. Whether on Amazon EC2 or VMWare infrastructure, there is more action around Ubuntu-based virtual cloud appliances than any other OS. Ubuntu is the most popular Linux platform for developers, and those developers are now focused on delivering solutions for the cloud. The combination of Ubuntu’s huge selection of pre-packaged software solutions, a modular architecture, and the enormous Ubuntu developer community make it a perfect complement for the rapid move of innovation to the cloud.

Mark Shuttleworth (Canonical & Ubuntu)

I just came across a piece that Bernard Golden wrote in his CIO blog entitled Dev/Test in the Cloud: Rules for Getting it Right.   He makes a lot of good points including what we see the most successful enterprise development shops doing with the cloud; “Treat the cloud as an extension, not a separation.” 

Unfortunately, he does not point out what dev/test tools should be put up in the cloud but simply states “dev/test tasks,” as if it is obvious which ones to migrate.  Let’s see if we can leverage his work to figure which dev/test tasks are cloud-ready in two steps:

 Step 1:   Figure out what is NOT GOOD for the cloud.  List your existing dev/test processes and cross things off that aren’t:

• Mostly independent, or have clean dependencies on stuff that’s in your network but externally accessible
• OK to upload (no security concerns or bandwidth constraints)
• Run on plain vanilla x86 systems (today the cloud is the world of Windows and Linux)
• Made with tools that you can run externally (watch for node-locked licenses, etc.)

Step 2:  Of what is left, figure out what will get the most benefit from the cloud.  In other words those that are slow, resource intensive, or bursty in compute demand.

Do you have anything left?  Good!  Most enterprises have critical development steps but not entire development workflows that can be wholesale lifted to the cloud.  Great examples are; compiling sources, testing on several different operating systems, and scalability and load testing.  This is why Mr. Golden was smart to point out that you should “Treat the cloud as an extension, not a separation.”

The remaining question is how can you effectively manage the process if it likely requires a combination of cloud, physical and virtual compute resources and the integration and orchestration of dozens of tools in your tool chain?  Certainly this is enough to make a traditional development process held together by home-grown scripts and a hard working release team break under the pressure.

Lab manager applications do a great job of determining “where” something should be run but does not handle “what” should be run or manage the process of “how” the steps are completed.  For this, check out ElectricCommander.   We are helping some of the largest development enterprises in the world migrate the right dev/test steps to the cloud.

Cloud computing is one of the most important elements in computing today.  It is essentially when a user can access  applications or store files on a server using the internet.  This is where the term ‘cloud’ comes from.  There are 3 different types of cloud computing, virtual, software and network storage.

Virtual cloud computing is when a user can access web applications or services via a third party who will share their resources with the user.  An example of this would be Amazon EC2.  This application would mainly be used by businesses or organisations.  The application provides the user with all resources needed to save software, libraries and data on their server.  A server can be created within minutes, allowing them to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as their requirements change.  This means that the company/organisation do not have to build their own network saving time and money.  This application also gives the user the same privileges they would have in a normal network.

Software cloud computing is when an application is hosted on the internet for businesses and organisations to use.  These can be designed and developed for some companies particular needs.  An example of this would be Google Apps.  Google have created applications for business use, school use and personal use.  In order to use an application, a user must create an account.  Once registered, he/she can then use all applications offered by Google.  This means the user will not have to download software in order to use the applications.  Another example of this is MSN Hotmail. The same steps are taken to create an account.  Once registered, the user can use MSN application to send and receive e-mails.  All e-mails will then be saved on the MSN web server.

Network storage is when a user can back-up their data using an internet provider. This allows the user to save files on an internet server as back-up.  The advantages to this service are that a user will not have to use CD’s, external hard drives, etc.  This will help save space and time.  Another advantage is that a user can log on to any PC and to access their files.  Businesses can also use this form of cloud computing to back-up particular documents they wish to store.

One advantage of cloud computing is that service providers are responsible for installing and maintaining applications used within the cloud.  This is preferred by some but a disadvantage of this is that a customer does not have direct control over the system and are highly dependant on the provider.  Cloud computing systems are often designed to only charge the customer for what resources they use.  This will be preferred by some as it can and often saves money from the conventional network system although other customers prefer a flat rate to help predict annual costs.  One disadvantage to cloud computing us that information and data is sent over the internet and stored on a third parties server.  This risks the privacy of particular material and they are reliant on the provider not to leek and information.

By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published October 27, 2009, 6:07 PM

“Come November 1, Amazon’s Web Services division will be lowering the per-hour prices for all of its current five instance types (AMIs), while adding two new AMI types on the high-end, according to a multitude of announcements from Amazon today. At the new high end of the scale will be a “quadruple extra-large” AMI with 68.4 GB of dedicated RAM, and the virtual computing power of a 1 GHz, 26-core Intel Xeon processor (albeit a 2007 model).”

“The new high-end instances won’t come cheap — they’ll carry a premium of $2.40 per instance-hour for Linux editions, and $2.88 per instance-hour for Windows Server 2003. The previous high-end AMI, still called “extra large,” had been priced at nearly one-third that amount.”

“However, revenue from the new super-high-end will help drive down prices for everyone else, starting November 1. At that time, the per-hour price for the smallest and cheapest instance available, running generic Linux, will be reduced by 15% to $0.085 per hour. Windows Server instances will be trimmed a bit, but not by as much percentage-wise — the “extra large” price, for instance, will drop only 4¢ to $0.96 per hour.”

As part of our entry to the 2009 Billion Triple Challenge (BTC), we have been using two pieces of great infrastructure: Amazon Web Services and the quad store – 4store.  Today, we are making publicly available an Amazon Machine Image for 4store. Additionally, we are making an Elastic Block Storage snapshot of the BTC dataset for 4store. Thus, developers can easily get started using 4store with a billion triples on Amazon’s cloud.

Technical Notes:

• We assume you have used  Amazon EC2 before.
• The 4store AMI and the associated EBS snapshot are currently only available in the EU-West Amazon region.
• The id of the AMI is : ami-62547f16
• The id of the BTC snapshot is : snap-1a8c6073
• The 4store AMI is based on Debian Squeeze 64-bit. We use the AMI (ami-745b7000) provided by alestic.com as the starting point.

Using the 4store AMI:

• The AMI is 64-bit so you need to start it on a 64-bit EC2 instance
• Checkout 4store.org for documentation about using 4store.
• If you’re going to use 4store without the BTC dataset, you need to create the directory /mnt/4store once the instance has started.

Using the 4store AMI with the BTC dataset:

• Start the AMI as above.
• Make sure that the Security Group you use allows for HTTP traffic on the port range 4000-4060 as we start a 4store instance for roughly every 20 million triples.
• Create an EBS volume from the BTC snapshot and attach it to your EC2 instance.
• Mount the volume at /mnt/4store
• In the root home directory (~/), you’ll find a shell script called btc.sh. This will allow you to  start 4store for btc. Run “btc.sh start”. This will launch all the 4store backends and HTTP servers. This will take a bit of time to start around 30 minutes to an hour.
• Once this is complete, you’ll be able to access the billion triples over the 50 some sparql endpoints that have been started on ports 4000 – 4057.

Contact: pgroth@gmail.com

Have fun!
Paul Groth, Christophe Guéret, Stefan Schlobach

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Group

Department of Artificial Intelligence

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Le cloud coputinmg serait vulnérables contre les écoutes et les attaques malveillantes.

Il serait donc possible pour des pirates de cartographier précisément où les données d’une cible se trouve matériellement dans le «nuage» et ensuite d’utiliser différentes astuces pour recueillir des renseignements.

Selon l’étude de Eran Tromer, chercheur au MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Amazon EC2 serait donc pointé du doigt.

Il explique que les vulnérabilités d’EC2 sont génériques à la technologie de virtualisation actuelle et auront une incidence sur les autres fournisseurs.

La technologies du cloud computing fait appel à des machines virtuelles.

Le nombre de ces machines virtuelles peuvent être développées ou traitées à la volée pour satisfaire la demande.

Plusieurs machines virtuelles de différents clients sont donc sur les mêmes serveurs physiques.

Il est donc possible d’implanter une machine virtuelle malveillante parmi les autres machines virtuelles pour déployer une attaque ou surveiller une cible et de voler les données de celui-ci.

Ces faiblesses potentielles ont été trouvées dans les services d’infrastructure informatique de base qui sont fournis par Amazon et Rackspace qui sont largement utilisés dans de nombreux centres de données.

Oups!

(Continued from Part I) I started out with the Ubuntu 8.0.4 AMI, created an instance off it. Then I did three more things using Elasticfox (see manual for instructions):

1. Got an Elastic IP and associated with my instance. An Elastic IP is a static IP for your EC2 account that can be associated and deassociated with any instance in your account, at any time.
2. Configured the security group of the instance to only accept connections at port 80 from any machine, and port 22 (for SSH) from my own machine
3. I created an EBS and attached it to my instance. Be sure to create the EBS in the same availability zone as the instance, otherwise it cannot be attached.

These two steps allowed the instance to be accessible from the internet but securely. The third step created a storage for application data to reside. While the last step wasn’t absolutely necessary, because the applications would run fine with data on the same instance, it would be nice to have data in a separate storage area that was easily backed up and able to connect to multiple instances.

The next steps were to install MySQL, JDK, JBoss, and Apache. I did in that order because the first three worked OOB while Apache required some configuration to work with JBoss.

MySQL

I logged on to my instance using Putty, and followed step 4 and 5 of this blog verbatim without problems.

JDK

Follow step 2 of this blog – no problems. I used a newer update of JDK 6.

JBoss

JBoss download page is here. I downloaded the exact version (*.zip) I was using before, using wget. Copied it to /usr/local and unzip. Of course the server would say unzip wasn’t installed. So install unzip using

sudo apt-get install unzip

I created a soft link /usr/local/jboss to the installed jboss directory. Since it was a good practice to run JBoss not as root, I created a new user jboss, and changed the ownership of the JBoss installation:

sudo groupadd jboss
sudo useradd -g jboss jboss
chown -R jboss:jboss [JBOSS INSTALLATION DIRECTORY]

Now add Java to jboss user’s PATH by adding these lines to /home/jboss/.profile file (when installing JDK I already created the soft link /usr/local/java pointing to the JDK home directory):

#add java home in path
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/java
PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

To ensure JBoss to start on reboot, I installed found this simple script off the net and put it in file /etc/init.d/jboss

#! /bin/sh

start(){
 echo "Starting jboss.."
 su -l jboss -c '/usr/local/jboss/bin/run.sh > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &'
}

stop(){
 echo "Stopping jboss.."
 su -l jboss -c '/usr/local/jboss/bin/shutdown.sh -S &'
}

restart(){
 stop
# give stuff some time to stop before we restart
 sleep 60
# protect against any services that can't stop before we restart (warning this k
ills all Java instances running as 'jboss' user)
 su -l jboss -c 'killall java'
# if the 'su -l ...' command fails try:
 #   sudo -u jboss killall java
 start
}

case "$1" in
 start)
 start
 ;;
 stop)
 stop
 ;;
 restart)
 restart
 ;;
 *)
 echo "Usage: jboss {start|stop|restart}"
 exit 1
esac

exit 0

and installed the startup script:

update-rc.d jboss defaults

Now it was time to startup JBoss:

/etc/init.d/jboss start

Voila! The JBoss was up and running. I could verify that by

wget http://localhost:8080/

It downloaded the default JBoss index.html page into the current directory. Of course I could also verify it using a browser if I opened up port 8080 in the security group.

Apache

Installing Apache was easy

sudo apt-get install apache

I was previously using Apache 2.0.x and mod_jk to connect to JBoss. The new Apache installation was 2.2.x and came with mod_proxy_ajp, so it took me fair amount of time to find all the details on the web. But once it wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t that bad at all.

I could first verify Apache was working by pointing my browser to the IP address of my instance. “It Works!” That is reassuing.

To integrate with JBoss I enabled mod_proxy_ajp

sudo a2enmod proxy_ajp

Then I created a new configuration file for my instance:

sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite

In this file I added these lines:

ProxyPass / ajp://localhost:8009/
ProxyPassReverse / ajp://localhost:8009/

After restarting Apache I found a 403 error in my browser. It turned out the configuration for mod_proxy_ajp, /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/proxy.conf, the default is Deny From All

<Proxy *>
 AddDefaultCharset off
 Order deny,allow
 Deny from all
</Proxy>

It needed to be changed to allow connections to passed through. I simply changed it to “Allow from all” because I was using EC2’s security group to control the overall accessibility from the outside world.

After this change and restarting Apache, the browswer showed JBoss’s default web page. It worked!

One Last Problem

Now I got the basic configuration to work, I still faced one more problem. The Apache+JBoss configuration only worked if I restarted Apache after every JBoss restart. If I restarted JBoss without an Apache restart, I got “Service Temporarily Unavailable” error. That was not how it used to work on my hosted server.

Hoodbook has a few applications running on a dedicated server that is hosted for a couple of hundred dollars a month.  The server has nothing fancy, just a plain Apache+JBoss+MySQL configuration, with RAID and an offsite backup facility.  Applications were written using JBoss Seam + JSF applications. I have thought about migrating the apps to Amazon EC2 for a while. Now I finally got time to do it.

The main drives for the migration are two-folds: (1) Lower the cost. These applications do not have tons of traffic. The server is three years old, and severely under-utilized. We are paying way over what we get. (2) Step into the future. The future is cloud computing. It is scalable, on-demand, with low overhead. You probably cannot find a more scalable, more reliable hosting solution than Amazon’s EC2. If it is good enough for Twitter, it is good enough for any generic web application.

I have looked into EC2 on and off before but now I believe the time can’t be more ripe for a migration, because of large numbers of how-to documentation online and the availability of Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage). Amazon EBS has lower latency than Amazon S3, and is a natural storage extension of EC2 (for a tutorial on their differences, check out this) – best suited for MySQL data. EBS does not have reduncy, so some kind of reduncy has to be built by users. But a quick and dirty solution is to have snapshot of EBS stored to S3.

First, I followed the pre-requisite steps in this blog. I signed up for Amazon EC2 web service, and installed Firefox EC2 plugin Elasticfox. Elasticfox makes managing EC2 instances super easy. I configured Elasticfox with my EC2 account credentials, following Tutorial #1 in Elasticfox’s manual. The only hiccup I had is at Step 4 – Connecting to the Instance. I had trouble connecting to my EC2 instance from putty using the keypair I generated. Whenever I tried to connect, the instance prompted me for root password. It turned out I needed to run Puttygen to convert the generated keypair file (*.pem) into a Putty-recognized key file (*.ppk). Then everything was cool.

In the process I needed to select an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to launch my EC2 instance. Natually I searched for Apache+JBoss+MySQL images, and I found one: ami-4ea34727. Upon installing it, however, I found it was built on an older version if Ubuntu, 7.10 Gutsy, which was no longer supported. Installing Postfix on the instance, for example, generated errors of unfound urls. That makes the image not usable for my applications. I then investigated upgrading 7.10 to 8.0.4 Hardy which will be supported until 2013, but upgrading from Gutsy to Hardy seemed to have its own quirks.

Finally, I decided to start with an AMI of Ubuntu 8.0.4 (for all Ubuntu images, look here), and build everything from there. It should be an interesting learning experience.

Oct.7 – JBCC Holdings announced to launch the facilities to evaluate and detect cloud computing technologies for their customers and partners. The company will also leverage cloud computing businesses with their twelve subsidiaries.

In this plan, the company will open "Cloud Integration center" for VMware, vSphere, IBM CloudBrust, Windows Azure, Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Amazon EC2.

J <http://www.itmedia.co.jp/enterprise/articles/0910/07/news063.html>

I sat in on the Amazon SimpleDB webinar the other day and it was really interesting. They demo’d a PHP app that populates SimpleDB from a MySQL database. Very cool!

The presenter has a really cool site with a bunch of great tutorials and videos. If you are interested in the Amazon IaaS, you should really check out LearnAWS.

The Appirio CIO Blog has a great new post called, “Cloudsourcing: Where Cloud Computing Meets Outsourcing”. Some organizational changes have been to focus on this emerging segment of the cloud market. How do CIO move their IT assets to clouds like Salesforce, Amazon, and Google? What’s the roadmap look like? What are the risks? What are the benefits? The article helps to kickoff this conversation.

This is my favorite part of the announcement:

“Why are we so confident in the cloudsourcing approach? Because this is how we’ve run our own business from the beginning–as a serverless enterprise. We grew our business 400% last year, spent less than 2% of our revenue on IT, and have no capital tied up in IT infrastructure. We’ve experienced the benefits of running our entire business in the cloud, and work with customers every day who are taking steps in that same direction.”

You can read the rest of the announcement here.