Moving to the clouds

a cloud computing introduction

March 26 2009 Christian Mikalsen

Outline
Introduction and some background Cloud characteristics Infrastructure (Amazon EC2) Platforms (Azure, AppEngine, Scalr) Challenges Case study: Cloud search service
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Cloud computing

Cloud computing
Software as a Service Web 2.0 with Internet-centric services Gmail, SalesForce, Google Apps Infrastructure/Platform as a Service Access computational resources on
demand

My focus!
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Background

Grid computing
Often found in scientic environments. Motivation: high performance, improving
resource utilization.

Aims to create illusion of a simple, yet Jobs are submitted and distributed on
nodes in the grid.
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powerful computer out of a large number of heterogeneous systems.

Grid computing

Grid vs. cloud computing

Area Motivation Infrastructure Business model Virtualization Typical applications Advantages Disadvantages Grid
Performance, capacity Owned by participants Share costs In some cases Research, batch jobs Mature technology Initial investment, less exibility
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Cloud
Flexibility and scalability Provided by third party Pay-as-you-go Prevalent On-demand infrastructure, web applications Low entry barrier, exible Open issues, third-party dependence

Virtualization
Abstraction of computer resources Run multiple virtual machines on a physical
machine.

Controlled by a Virtual Machine Monitor

(VMM), often called a hypervisor.

HW/SW/hybrid implementations possible. Enabling technology for cloud computing.

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Virtualization
Provides... exibility to evolve underlying hardware exibility to dynamically provision VMs isolation (security and performance) improved hardware utilization (load balancing by migration)
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Virtualization
Paravirtualization OS is aware of and communicates with
hypervisor.

Allows for more efcient virtualization by

replacing slow mechanisms (such as HW interrupts).

Open source Xen hypervisor is commonly

used in cloud computing.
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Cloud computing

Motivation
Pay-as-you-go (utility computing) No initial investments Reduced operational costs Scalability Exploit variable load and bursts Scalable services provided Availability (replication, avail. zones)
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Cloud ontology
SaaS PaaS IaaS

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Toward a Unied Ontology of Cloud Computing. Youseff, Lamia, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Use cases
Scientic experiments Web services with bursts or variable load Black friday Slashdot-effect Temporary infrastructure Test environments Projects
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Cloud characteristics
Scale-out, not scale-up Horizontal scaling (add more servers) Requires different development approach Loose coupling Required for dynamic scaling Sandboxed environment Limits/constraints
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Cloud characteristics
Failures will occur Instances can crash/disappear/migrate Requires proper state management Unknown physical infrastructure/topology Variable bandwidth/latency/locality etc. Currently little support for QoS Development and platform constraints
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Infrastructure and platforms

Amazon EC2
Infrastructure as a Service provider, and
current market leader.

Data centers in USA and Europe Different regions and availability zones Uses Xen hypervisor Users provision instances in classes, with
different CPU, memory and I/O performance.
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Amazon EC2
Users provision instances with an Amazon
Machine Image (AMI), packaged virtual machines.

Instances ready in 10-20 seconds. Amazon provides a range of AMIs Users can upload and share custom AMIs,
precongured for different roles.

Supports Windows, OpenSolaris and Linux

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Amazon EC2
Flexible, but low-level (roll-your-own) No built-in load balancing or scaling (yet) Integrated with services: Simple Storage Service (S3) Scalable Queue Service (SQS) SimpleDB and more...
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Amazon EC2
Control interface HTTP REST/SOAP API Command line tools Eclipse plugin Able to implement external monitoring and
scaling using interface.
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Amazon EC2
Pricing based on instance hours + bandwidth charges + service charges (S3, SQS etc.) SLA w/ some availability guarantees
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Eucalyptus
Open source cloud implementation from
University of California, Santa Barbara. your hardware.

Makes it possible to host a private cloud on Compatible with EC2 interfaces. Intended for research and experimentation. Limited support for services like S3.
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Windows Azure
Platform as a Service (in pre-release) Cloud OS .NET libraries for managed code like C# Web and worker roles (w/queues) Topology described in metadata Live upgrades (w/upgrade zones)
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Google AppEngine
Platform as a Service Target: Web applications Provides custom Python runtime

environment, with a specialized version of the Django framework. (Bigtable), and other Internet-scale infrastucture.
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Integrated with Google data store

Challenges and case study

Cloud challenges
Bandwidth and latency Lack of standards and portability Black box-implementations Security and lack of control Immature tool and framework support Legal issues (ownership, auditing etc.) Limited Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
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Cloud search service

Case study in cooperation with FAST. Some customers have up to hundred
servers dedicated to FAST ESP.

Motivation Exploit variance in trafc and load Reduce operational costs

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Cloud search service

Can a search service feasibly be offered in a
cloud environment?

Develop architectural model and perform

benchmarks.

Requires acceptable response time Must be scalable (on and across servers)

Focus on search, not indexing etc.

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Cloud search service

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Response time
Perceived response time should be under
requests between client and cloud, and cloud and cloud storage service. from the cloud storage service? 400-500ms for end users, also under load.

Some latency is unavoidable due to HTTP What kind of response time can be expect
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Throughput
What kind of throughput can we expect in
our cloud search service? storage service?

How is the throughput limited by the cloud

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Cloud search service

Work in progress... Break down response time further, and
isolate bottlenecks. SimpleDB...)

Test alternative index locations (EBS, Suggest a reasonable architecture for a

cloud search service.
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Questions?

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