This week I am presenting at the International DB2 User Group (IDUG) conference in Denver Colorado. I am presenting sessions on DB2 and Cloud Computing and sessions on building Ruby on Rails applications with DB2. I am also meeting with a number of customers. Yesterday during a meeting with one of the customers I wanted to demonstrate how DB2 customers can leverage Cloud Computing to quickly create development and test environments.
In this demo I have a production application that comprises an application server and a DB2 database server. The entire “deployment” (this is what RightScale call this collection of servers) running on Amazon EC2 and it is managed by RightScale. Using RightScale Control Panel I am able with just a few mouse clicks create a complete replica of my production environment. This includes web and application servers as well as the DB2 database server and all of the data.
Click to see the Deployment view in RightScale
The demo is very simple but extremely effective at demonstrating the benefits of cloud computing. In takes about about 10-15 minutes and at the end I have a fully working dev and QA environment that is an exact replica of my production application. For most large enterprises this would take weeks if not months do and would require very significant capital expenditure to get the equipment. People love the self-service aspect of it. Not having to go to follow the seemingly never ending cycle of justification and approvals and then spending countless hours in project meetings is a huge draw for many.
Having done this demo just the day before in my session and then a few times after that, I am very confident. So, we sit down and I show my production application working. Then the moment of truth, I click on the “Clone” button to create a new Dev and QA deployment and in about a minute I get both the application server and DB2 database server provisioned for me. Great, no Purchase Orders, no finance approvals, no “we can’t get you your servers till July” from the hardware procurement people. Now I need to make a copy of my data. No problem, I just take an EBS volume snapshot. One more minute and I have a copy of my production data saved. Next, I need to get some storage (disk space) for my test database. So, I click on “Create and Attach a Volume” button. Typically, this operation takes a couple of minutes as RightScale submits a request to Amazon to allocate an EBS volume and then fill this volume with data from the snapshot I’ve taken earlier. Amazon has supposedly an endless supply of storage to provision my EBS volumes from. After all, “virtually unlimited capacity on demand” is the key promise of Cloud Computing. Well, this time I am in for a surprise. It seems that the availability zone my servers are in (us-east-1a) has run out of storage capacity and I can’t get the disk space that I need. I guess I should have paid more attention to “virtually” in “virtually unlimited capacity”. Now, there is a saving grace to this. I could have relocated my servers to another zone that still has resources but that is not something that you want to do during a 15 minute demonstration.
To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement but, in a way, I am glad that I got this dose of reality. There hype guage on Cloud Computing has been off-scale for the last few months. I will be the first one to admit that I have been taken by some of that hype and have done my share to propagate some of it as well. This experience resets my “hype gauge”. Don’t take me wrong, I am still very excited about the promise of the cloud but I think that there are going to be a few bumps on the way to cloud nirvana.
Leon, nice write-up! I totally agree with you that there is just too much hype. Regarding the issue you’ve encountered, I assume you are aware of the fact that AWS suffered some major equipment failure which caused the EBS issues in one availability zone. They provided updates on that on their status page.
In the end we do have to be careful about keeping the right perspective. Glass half full vs half empty. As you mention, you could have relaunched in a different zone. So it would have taken 30 minutes instead of 15. Doesn’t work well if you’re giving a public demo. But whether you compare 15 minutes or 30 minutes to “it’s gonna take 4 months at best” then that’s totally in the noise. What makes me sad is that with all the hype we sometimes forget how much of an improvement we already got.
One thing this outage highlights is that AWS is still lacking a mechanism to deal with resource constraints. In a way, they should have come back and said “you can get a volume in this zone, but it’ll cost you 10x”. You might have decided that your demo was worth that price, or you might have opted for the 30 minute demo.
BTW, thanks for using RightScale. I assume you’re using the free edition: enjoy!
Thorsten, appreciate your comment and kind words. I did become aware of the equipment failure at the Amazon east-1a zone but only after I finished the meeting with the customer.
I completely agree with you that this is a minor hiccup at best. What we are doing with the cloud and your Rightscale services is like reading books on Kindle as opposed to using ancient scrolls by candle light. There is no comparison and no argument that the progress has been staggering. I do wish that Amazon had the kind of resiliency that you suggest and I am sure they will soon enough.
As far as using RightScale, I would not dream of showing cloud computing to our enterprise customers without Rightscale. Amazon is great at providing raw hardware resource but our customers demand sophisticated provisioning, administration and automation environment that Rightscale delivers. They would not be satisfied with just bare metal hardware capacity. Kudos to your team for delivering enterprise-class provisioning, administration and automation capabilities for the Cloud.
Leon,
Thanks for the positive feedback and ongoing work with RightScale. For those in your audience that want to play around with the Free Edition it can be found here http://www.rightscale.com/products/free_edition.php
Elise @ RightScale
Good Site on Cloud Computing and SaaS – We are periodically looking for good blog articles
related to Cloud Computing. Will be back to review more information on your blog.
Keep up the great work!
Thanks