When Mark Shuttleworth announced the future Ubuntu 9.10 release, Karmic Koala, the goals he outlined for the server version were all to do with cloud computing but you might be asking ‘What is cloud computing ?’ I answer this question and investigate what it can do for Ubuntu?
The definition of the term cloud computing is actually about as clear as a cloud itself. Clouds were first used in network diagrams as an abstract of part of a network whose infrastructure the diagram was not concerned with showing.
This use of the cloud metaphor is now used in the term cloud computing to abstract the network infrastructure and server platforms of the datacentre. In this context, cloud computing describes the use of scalable computing resources and infrastructure, provided as a service for a user to run applications on with the user never needing to have any specific knowledge of the infrastructure their application runs on. Their application is run on ‘the cloud’.
Be your own Amazon
One of the best known cloud computing platforms is Amazon’s Web Services and in particular their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) platform. To run an application on EC2, you need to upload an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) file to the platform and execute it. An AMI contains the applications and a complete operating system in a file and you run this on the Amazon platform as a virtual machine.
Once on the EC2 platform, your virtual machine has access to the vast computing resources available but you only pay for the resources you use – cloud computing gives you scalability at an affordable cost.
The Amazon platform itself is built around the use of the Xen hypervisor, which the machine images are run on top of. Karmic will include Eucalyptus, a FOSS implementation of the EC2 interface that allows you to run AMIs on your own cluster of servers, effectively allowing you to create your own Amazon cloud. Given that Eucalyptus requires the Xen hypervisor, it would seem that work needs to be done on a Xen kernel image for Karmic’s release, something that has been missing from Ubuntu releases for nearly 18 months since the decision was made to drop Xen in favour of KVM as the supported virtualisation solution.
New Opportunities
When I recently built a high availability cluster, I used openSUSE because of the lack of Xen support in Ubuntu Server so this is a welcome move that gives Ubuntu server the opportunity to be implemented in situations where it couldn’t be before and this will lead to an increased install base.
Although there are some concerns over the alignment of Ubuntu with the proprietary EC2 platform – Canonical have also been working on official Ubuntu EC2 machine images. I see this only as a good thing. I haven’t read much about other OSes prioritising cloud functionality in this way. I think it has created a buzz around Ubuntu server that it can be run ‘on the cloud’ so if I were creating a system that I may want to scale out to the cloud I’m going to want to be running Ubuntu server.
And with the inclusion of Eucalyptus, we could see the appearance of low cost or even community cloud providers offering services based on a platform of Ubuntu servers.
Contributing blogger Guy Thouret is a software engineer for a wireless energy management system company. He has used various GNU/Linux distributions since 2002.
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Thanks, its now clear as mud
Jim C: Glad we could help to further muddy the water. Kidding aside, do you have questions about Ubuntu in the cloud? Do you even care about it?
-jp
Joe Panettieri
Editorial Director, WorksWithU
Yes- I care.
The ability to move servers into the cloud is highly significant. As businesses require more bang for their technology buck – the more that can be moved off premise the better.
Along with EC2 I’d like to see how an IT infrastructure can move office functions into the cloud (google apps/zoho, saas).
How much $$$ can be saved in licensing, hardware, software and support moving that way?
Correction,
The Eucalyptus project version, version 1.5, that ships with Jaunty supports kvm.
I can understand how you missed that as the Eucalyptus project has yet to release the final 1.5 version and in fact just released a release candidate a couple of weeks ago. Canonical received preferential access to the Eucalyptus project codebase well ahead of when the Eucalyptus project was prepared to make the 1.5 version public. In fact jaunty package building process leaked unofficial tarballs of the source code for several weeks even though the project lead at Eucalyptus desired to keep the code private until the upstream 1.5 release date.
It took about a week after I made a request for source code access for the project to open up its source code repository for the 1.5 branch to the public. A guess Canonical thinks its okay to leak pre-release materials against the stated interests of the upstream project to keep the code private. That’s interesting. It’s also interesting that they would seek preferential access to what is essentially a publicly funded work instead of requesting the code be made available to the public as part of the upstream project.
-jef
Cloud computing may be in trouble before it catches on.
Fox – Time Warner has completed its trial in FL of capping the monthly charge for internet access ( 5 GB for $30 per month). It has now imposed a broader trial on five cities (Rochester, NY, for one).
Looks like by charging for a commodity that they don’t own they will be trying to profit for the traffic between the user and the program that is running in the cloud.
Leave it to greedy industry moguls to impede progress.
They must be taking lessons from MS, eh?
@luigidk:
Personally I am skeptical about moving office functionality to the cloud, particularly trusting the storage of sensitive documents. I like having full control of these, but I do see the benefits otherwise.
@Jef:
“The Eucalyptus project version, version 1.5, that ships with Jaunty supports kvm.”
I did miss that and that is a very interesting point. Surely a machine image tuned to work on KVM can not be guaranteed to perform the same when deployed on a Xen platform. From past experience, certain compile options were required to get the best performance from a Xen guest.
@Walt:
The commodity that the ISPs charge for is bandwidth. Bandwidth is expensive and can be the single biggest expense of an ISP. Especially if you have a business model where the bandwidth usage of heavy internet users is subsidised by the light users. The increase in use of Video-On-Demand type high bandwidth applications by all users across the board is a big factor here.
I have a large network at home. I mostly do games and 3d animation stuff. would ubuntu’s cloud computing be any help to me?
@Guy:
The power of Eucalyptus and its use of libvirt is the fact that it abstracts Amazon’s API’s so that other services can be established..including kvm based clouds. You may not be able to use the exact same kernel images tuned for xen versus kvm for performance reasons..but you should be able to build comparable operating images that use the appropriately tuned kernel somewhat at the API level that Eucalyptus exposes…making it possible to move workloads across cloud services regardless if they are using xen or kvm.
-jef
@Chris:
Games in the cloud likely won’t work. The time it takes to request a computation from the cloud and get a response would likely ruin the interactive experience (if you’ll pardon the marketing-speak).
As for 3d-animation — yeah, there’s certainly possibilities there. It’s not hard to imagine a cloud-based animation program that renders all the frames of an animation in the time it takes your own machine to compute just one frame.