Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

A fragile and tenuous relationship has often existed between application and development and IT operations. One wants speed and the other wants control. Control is usually the winner in this battle. Previously, waiting on IT has just been considered to be one of the costs of doing business. In the past, IT’s watchword has been “no.”

Information regarding the new Amazon Private Cloud Service has been previous posted.  Yet another web-scaling cloud service that enhances the Internet’s capabilities by allowing secure communication across non-secure public networks is OpenVPN Cloud.  This solution resembles a VPN, but because OpenVPN Cloud is unified in nature, it permits application developers and internet service providers a mechanism through which data can be safely and securely exchanged through corporate firewalls, consistent with corporate security policies. 

The infrastructure of OpenVPN Cloud is comprised of connected OpenVPN servers that are hosted on machines that are located in various locations.  The machines are clustered and redundant, which renders the network resistant to individual node failures, because a self-healing feature is utilized.  This provides the user with the least amount of downtime and unavailability.  OpenVPN is an award-winning VPN open source product, and as a result of its reliability and functionality, it has established itself as a gold standard in the open source networking arena, with over 2.5 million downloads since it was made available.  To obtain more information about the innovative OpenVPN Cloud solution, please refer to the OpenVPN Cloud Platform White Paper.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has built its network to protect against most usual network security problems, and users are allowed and encouraged to provide their own protective measures.  A few examples are provided Amazon’s Security Whitepaper:

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks

To protect against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, the AWS API endpoints are on the same infrastructure as Amazon’s world-famous retail site.  Syn cookies and connection limits are used for protection, as with most networks.  Amazon also maintains internal bandwidth even greater than its provider-supplied bandwidth on the Internet, making DDoS attacks even less damaging.

Man In the Middle (MITM) Attacks

MITM attack is the type of attack where attackers intrude into an existing connection to intercept the exchanged data and inject false information. It involves eavesdropping on a connection, intruding into a connection, intercepting messages, and selectively modifying data. In this way, an attacker can fool a victim into disclosing confidential information by “spoofing”

Amazon Web Services has just made Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) available for a limited beta release.  Amazon VPC provides a smooth link between the Amazon Web Services cloud and your current IT hardware.  You can now connect your present infrastructure to AWS resources protected by the Virtual Firewall Network, and can extend security, firewalls, and intruder detection to work with your AWS resources.  Amazon VPC is already designed to interface with the resources of Amazon EC2, and will soon be able to work with other suites from Amazon Web Services.

Today the virtual and cloud resource manager DataSynapse was bought by Tibco for $28m. This is in accordance with its new Tibco Silver cloud application delivery platform, as DataSynapse is expected to be an integral part of that particular software.

The heart of Tibco’s software is still integration, specifically with respect to financial services companies and telcos. In June, the vendor laid out plans for a cloud application delivery platform, Tibco Silver designed to support the allocation of cloud resources as a reaction to the ups and downs of application needs. Tibco’s complex event processing (CEP) engine powers the software and manages highs and lows in the applications’ infrastructure needs by invoking or retracting resources such that service level agreements are satisfied.

DataSynapse’s software should couple conveniently with this directive. GridServer, FabricServer and Federator are three products developed by DataSynapse, a company founded in the year 2000. DataSynapse has dedicated itself to creating specialized software for scheduling resources and moving workloads between the grid, virtual servers and public cloud environments. The company has also developed VersaVision: a dashboard for metering, chargeback and service utilization reporting.

TurboTax from Intuit was used by 18.76 million taxpayers in 2008, including both the online and desktop versions, with the online version about twice as popular as the desktop version.  This is a record, and up 11% from 2008.  The IRS has sought to raise the proportion of online tax filings, and long before the April 15 tax deadline, Intuit searched for possible performance and reliability issues that might be concealed within its software.

The nature of Intuit’s product required them to set quality and performance goals to test steadily increasing user loads with a peak on tax day, April 15.  The ultimate testing goal was 200% of their anticipated peak of concurrent users.  Due to the cost prohibitive nature of quickly building the required infrastructure, Intuit turned to Amazon Web Services and Amazon EC2.  By engaging with AWS and utilizing their powerful toolset, Intuit instantly had access to a reliable and scalable test environment that allowed them to exceed their testing goals.

Although Amazon Web Services might be able to handle the infrastructure, it was still imperative for Intuit to have an enterprise-class load testing solution which would handle the terabytes of the test data which was going to be generated–something which could leverage Cloud to meet the anticipated surges in traffic, especially considering the vital mission factor of online filing.  Intuit went with SOASTA since its CloudTest-EC2 On-Demand Service would be able to precisely and rapidly replicate the expected user load on the TurboTax site.  This testing service authentically simulates many kinds of unconstrained user scenarios, measures site performance accurately from the load that is generated through Amazon EC2, and also gives real time, granular reporting in order to help identify and then manage possible issues.  SOASTA’s cloud testing authorities leverage Amazon EC2 so as to affordably and rapidly simulate the true web environment.

Intuit used SOASTA’s service for testing the previously unreachable number of virtual users. SOASTA employed an iterative approach which starting with a 1,000-user’s test. Generating load from Amazon EC2, Intuit ramped the volume with each subsequent test. Finally, while real customers accessed the production site at the same time the test goal of 200% reached at anticipated peak all. The site performed perfectly on tax day the problems were tackled before they impacted any users. Reliability and scalability of Amazon EC2 are capable of thanks because they combined with on-demand web load testing.

Reserved Virtual EC2 Server Instances offered by Amazon Web Services, has significantly reduced the one-time fee by 30%. This allows customers to guarantee capacity for each instance during a 1 or 3 year period for a much lower initial investment. Customers then have the option to run that instance whenever they want, at a greatly reduced hourly rate. Compared to EC2 On-Demand rates, Reserved Instances can save you up to 56%. More detailed information regarding Reserved Instances may be found at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances.

Gartner believes that cloud service brokerages will become a common place service. This brokerage is necessary because as cloud computing expands; it will become more complex. Brokerages will help users to combine and manage the different areas of service. The main function of these brokerages will be to manage the cloud service customer-service provider relationship. Locations of where the brokerages can be found will either be at the cloud’s service provider or end-user’s location or within the cloud as a service.

L. Frank Kenney, the analyst from Gartner state that intermediaries will play an important role in making cloud computing popular by connecting the two parties – provider of cloud computing service and users of this service. The role of such intermediary can be played not only by human beings but also by a piece of software, hardware elements, a platform and a group of technologies which adds to the basic service provided by cloud computing. These additions can be providing a way to manage these services, make cloud services more secured or giving rise to a wholly new service.

Gartner outlined three categories of opportunities for cloud brokers:

1. Cloud Service Intermediation Brokers: Building services atop an existing cloud platform, such as additional security or management capabilities.
2. Aggregation Brokers: Deploying customer services over multiple cloud platforms.
3. Cloud Service Arbitrage: Brokers supply flexibility and "opportunistic choices" – and foster competition between clouds.

Cloud service providers must begin to partner with cloud brokerages to ensure that they can deliver the services they promote.

Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said in a statement that What sits between you and the cloud will become a critical success factor in cloud computing. Cloud services are expected to grow more rapidly than consumers’ ability to manage the cloud. Service brokers will make it easier for consumers to trust and properly employ cloud services. These brokers and cloud service providers will need to cooperate to ensure that users get the services that have been advertised. The total of all global cloud service revenue in 2008 was $46.4 billion, which is projected to rise to $56.3 billion in 2009 and to $150 billion by 2013.

Even though companies are concerned with Security, Availability and Integration, they are still making significant plans to invest in Cloud Computing. Forrester Research collected data on the types of Cloud Computing environments that clients prefer. One in four respondents responded that they are spending or anticipate expenditures on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). The perceived benefits of efficiency and cost reduction outweigh the perceived costs of the issues like security and availability.

Forrester Findings:

1. One in four respondents indicate that their firms anticipate spending or are already spending on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) through an external service provider.
2. External IaaS is slightly more attractive to firms than internal clouds.
3. Firms tend to express interest in either an external cloud or an internal cloud, but not both.
4. Larger firms express greater interest in capitalizing on IaaS capability than smaller firms do.
5. The interest in using external clouds for production app placement is nearly as high as interest in using these clouds for test/dev.

Companies are embracing external clouds as a means of production app deployment just as quickly as they are moving to a cloud-based model of testing and development. This enthusiasm for cloud computing demonstrates that companies understand that cloud computing is safe and secure route to cost savings.

Top chalanges with cloud computing model according to IDC survey: