Every once in a while you see this crop up in discussions about the cloud. It’s easy to see why. It
At the risk of being thrown into the hype bucket I’m going to take the stance that it’s also revolutionary. Whoa! Why?
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2 comments November 20th, 2008 at 08:33am
It’s been busy here. I’ll announce why soon, but one thing that caught my eye recently that just can’t go by is the imminent open sourcing of DRBD+. DRBD+ is the commercial version of DRBD. This has serious implications for anyone who is serious about building real world cloud applications.
DRBD can be thought of as network-based disk drive mirroring (aka ‘RAID-1′). Essentially, you make sure that all writes to a local disk happen to a remote disk simultaneously or near-simultaneously. Combined with today’s modern journaling filesystems and you have pretty a pretty bullet-proof solution. In the past I’ve used DRBD to build very robust HA clustered appliances and the like. I was also one of the first folks to test it on EC2, although I did not publish results at the time.[1]
DRBD worked extremely well on EC2, but there was always one key drawback: It only mirrors disks between two hosts. Dual redundancy, in this case, isn’t sufficient on EC2. It is quite possible you could lose two hosts; however, the odds of losing three of three are extremely small. That’s where DRBD+ comes in.
One of the most compelling features of DRBD+ is that it allows 3-way or 4-way replication. So, now if you need to build a redundant HA cluster that can not fail on a cloud computing system it’s much much easier than before.
Many kudos to the Linbit team for taking this direction. I think they have opened up an opportunity for cloud solution providers to do some very interesting things.
2 comments November 19th, 2008 at 10:41am
There was a flurry of EC2 announcements from Amazon today including:
Perhaps most interesting is this pre-announcement of 2009 functionality, which will squarely put them in direct competition with many of the startups depending on them, such as RightScale and Ylastic.
This is really quite amazing to me. I was under the impression that Amazon would continue to foster more solution providers rather than attempt to move up the stack on their own, but this is clearly a first move in the general direction of providing solutions above and beyond the basics of servers and storage.
This is going to up the ante for up and coming cloud providers such as GoGrid and FlexiScale as well as decrease the value of solution providers such as RightScale. The pressure is now on to innovate quickly or be left behind.
Amazon’s ability to innovate quickly as a large business has been truly staggering. The only other large organization I’ve seen act this quickly is Apple.
Update: Be sure to check out the new Elastic Fox Getting Started Guide, which is clearly geared for a Windows user audience. New functionality in the Elastic Fox FireFox plugin includes one button click rebuilding of a running Windows instance into a new Windows AMI. This is another strong indication of Amazon’s commitment to make EC2 easier to use and creating an even larger threat to competitors. Historically this was a non-trivial and manual process when creating Linux AMIs. Expect this functionality to make it to Linux land as well.
Update 2: Thorsten provides more details on the Windows capabilities on the RightScale blog.
6 comments October 23rd, 2008 at 10:21pm
We were recently added to the excellent list of Cloud Computing blogs at Alltop. Alltop is an “online magazine rack” co-founded by Guy Kawasaki (see sidebar for a link).
Add comment October 22nd, 2008 at 01:00am
A thoughtful blog posting from Khoi Vinh asks whether we can trust clouds given the current financial climate.
It’s good to be cautious about trusting all of your data to ‘the cloud’, but you should already be evaluating your cloud providers based on their ability to give you a backup option. Most providers already have such mechanisms.
Regardless of the state of the economy this is always a risk and being prudent and careful about the cloud services you pick is a requirement for any business owner or IT decision maker.
Trust, but verify (and backup).
Add comment October 17th, 2008 at 06:24am