Demystifying The Cloud

Demystifying the Cloud
An introduction to Cloud Computing

Version 1.1 – August 2010
This guide explains the concepts of Cloud Computing in simple terms.

The first three chapters introduce the key concepts and the
terminologies of the Cloud. The remaining chapters cover the major
implementations of the Cloud Computing including Amazon Web
Services, Microsoft Windows Azure Platform and Google App Engine.
This is targeted towards to the beginners and intermediate developers
with a basic understanding of web technologies.
Janakiram MSV
Cloud Computing Strategist
www.janakiramm.net | mail@janakiramm.net
Chapter 1
Defining the Cloud
Evolution of Cloud Computing
Evolution of ISP
There are multiple factors that led to the evolution of Cloud Computing. One of
the key factors is the way Internet Service Providers (ISP) matured over a period of
time. I am borrowing this analogy from Forrester Research.
Evolution of ISP
From the initial days of offering basic internet connectivity to offering software as
a service, the ISPs have come a long way. ISP 1.0 was all about providing internet
access to their customers. ISP 2.0 was the phase where ISPs offered hosting
capabilities. The next step was co-location through which the ISPs started leasing
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© Janakiram MSV http://www.janakiramm.net

out the rack space and bandwidth. By this, companies could host their servers
running custom, Line of Business (LoB) applications that could be accessed over the
web by its employees, trading partners and customers. ISP 3.0 was offering
applications on subscription resulting in the Application Service Provider (ASP)
model. The latest Software as a Service or SaaS, is a mature ASP model. The next
logical step for ISPs would to embrace the Cloud.
1.2 The Programmable Web

Web Services made the web programmable. They enabled the developers to look at
the internet a class library or an object model. Protocols like Simple Object Access
Protocol (SOAP), Representational State Transfer (REST), JavaScript Object
Notation (JSON) and Plain Old XML (POX) fueled the growth of APIs on the web.
Today every popular search engine, social networking site and syndication portal
has APIs offered to developers.
Virtualization
Virtualization is the most discussed term among CIOs and IT decision makers.
Through Virtualization, the data center infrastructure can be consolidated from
hundreds of servers to just tens of servers. All the physical server roles like Web
Servers, Database Servers and Messaging Servers run as virtualized instances. This
results in lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and brings substantial savings on the
power bills and reduced cost of cooling equipment.
Though the evolution of ISP, programmable web and virtualization are independent
trends, they contribute to the evolution of Cloud Computing.
Understanding Cloud Computing
If you are wondering what is so special about the „Cloud‟ in Cloud Computing, here
is the explanation. Traditionally, developers and architects used a picture of cloud
to illustrate a remote resource connected via the web. Eventually cloud became
the logical connector between the local and remote resources on the internet.
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Most of the developers get confused when they encounter the term Cloud
Computing. According to them, their Web Services are already hosted on the Cloud
and that can be potentially called as Cloud Services. While there is some truth in
this argument, it is a not very accurate way of describing Cloud Computing. Let‟s
look at Cloud Computing through the eyes of a developer.
Think Web Services

Most of the developers are familiar with Web Services. Web Services are based on a
few simple concepts. Every Web Service accepts a request and returns a response
(even if there is no explicit return value, a HTTP 200 OK return value is considered
as a response). They are units of code that can be invoked over the web. Typically,
Web Services accept one or more input parameters and invoke processing logic
which will result in an output. Web Services are a part of web applications that run
on a typical stack that has hardware, a Server OS, application development
platform. For a while, think how you can expose every layer that is powering your
web application as a Web Service.
Web Services Stack
Cloud OS
Visualize a scenario where the hardware and the Operating System (OS) are
exposed as a Web Service over the public internet. Based on the principles of Web
Services, we could send a request to this service along with a few parameters.
Since the OS is expected to act as an interface to the CPU and the devices, we can
potentially invoke a service that accepts a „job‟ that will be processed by the OS
and the underlying hardware. Technically, this Web Service has just turned the OS
+ H/W combination into a „Service‟. We can start consuming this service by
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submitting CPU intensive tasks to this new breed of Web Service. What do you call
an OS that is exposed on the web as a service? May be a Cloud OS? We will answer
this in the coming sections.
Exposing the hardware and the OS as a Service
Cloud FX
Developers always develop and deploy their applications on the application
development platforms. Some of the most popular application development
platforms are .NET and Java. In the last scenario, we have seen how the OS + H/W
combination is offered as a service. Now, imagine a scenario where the application
development platform is offered to you as a service. Through this, you will be able
to develop and test your applications on a low end, inexpensive notebook PC but
will able to „submit‟ my code to run on the most powerful hardware infrastructure.
It is the same programming language, SDK and the runtime that runs on your
development environment. If the hardware, OS, the language runtime and the SDK
are offered to you as a service, what would you call this? A Cloud Platform or may
be Cloud FX? We will address this in the next section.
Exposing the Runtime + SDK as a Service
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Cloud Application
Today, most of the traditional desktop applications like word processors and
spreadsheet packages are available over the web. These new breed of applications
just need a browser and offer high fidelity with the desktop software. This
fundamentally changes the way software is deployed and licensed. You need not
double click setup.exe to install an Office suite on your desktop. Just subscribe to
the applications and the features that you need and only pay for what you use. This
is almost equivalent to exposing the application as a service.These applications
may be called as Cloud Applications. We will take a relook at this later.
Web App as a Service
Welcome to the World of Services
Infrastructure as a Service
In the previous section we discussed the Cloud OS. All that the Cloud OS offers is
the infrastructure services. You may choose to use REST API to manage this OS or
use SSH or Remote Desktop console. Technically, when you are able to delegate a
program to execute on a remote OS running on the Web, you are leveraging
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This is different from classic web hosting. Web
hosting only hosts web pages and cannot execute code that needs low level access
to the OS API. Web hosting cannot dynamically scale on demand. IaaS enables you
to run your computing task on virtually unlimited number of machines. Remember
that through IaaS, you have just moved a server running in your backyard into the
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Cloud. You pretty much own the managing, patching, securing and the health of
the remote servers. Amazon EC2 is an example of commercial IaaS offering.
Cloud OS = Infrastructure as a Service
Platform as a Service
Platform as a Service or PaaS goes one level above the Cloud OS. Through this,
developers can leverage a scalable platform to run their applications. The
advantage of PaaS is that the developers need not worry about installing,
maintaining, securing and patching the server. The PaaS provider takes the
responsibility of the infrastructure and exposes the platform alone as a service.
Through this, the developers can achieve higher level of scalability, reliability and
availability of their applications. Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine are
examples of PaaS.
Cloud FX = Platform as a Service
Software as a Service
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a silent revolution in the world of traditional
software products. With the availability of Intel Atom based Netbooks and
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abundant bandwidth, most of the applications are moving to the Cloud to be
offered as services. Consumers can now use inexpensive devices that are capable
of connecting to the web to get their work done. This reduces the upfront
investment in software and brings the Pay-as-you-go model. Google Apps,
Salesforce.com and Microsoft Online Services are examples of SaaS.
Cloud App = Software as a Service
What does Cloud Computing mean to you?
IT Professionals and System Administrators

For IT Professionals, Cloud Computing is all about consolidation and outsourcing the
infrastructure. They are typically focused on the Infrastructure as a Service. IT
Pros will move away from managing individual servers in their Data Centers to using
a unified console to manage, track and monitor the health of the remote server
instances running on the Cloud.
IaaS is the focus area of IT Pros and system administrators
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Developers and Architects
Platform as a Service is an offering meant for developers and architects. They
need to design applications keeping the statelessness of the Cloud. Architects
should start thinking about the patterns that will make the applications seamlessly
scale on-the-fly across hundreds of servers.
PaaS is the focus area of developers and architects
Consumers
Consumers will experience the Cloud through a variety of applications that they
will use in their day to day life. If you have ever used Google Docs or Microsoft Live
Mesh, you have already leveraging the Cloud. Consumers will subscribe to Software
as a Service offerings.
SaaS delivers software through a subscription for the consumers
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Chapter 2
The Tenets of the Cloud
The 4 Key Tenets
I want to quickly recap the definition of Cloud Computing. It is all about

outsourcing your infrastructure and applications to run on a remote resource. The
„remote resource‟ phrase in the definition can be misleading and creates an illusion
that running your web app on a server hosted abroad is Cloud Computing. So, what
qualifies the „remote resource‟ to be called as the Cloud?
Here are the 4 key capabilities that the Cloud Computing offers:
Elasticity
This is the most important attribute of the Cloud. You might start running your
application on just a single server. But in no time, Cloud Computing enables
you to scale your application to run on 100‟s of servers. Once the traffic and
usage of your application decreases, you can scale down to 10‟s of servers. All
this happens almost instantly and the best thing is your application and your
customers don‟t even realize that. This dynamic capability to scale up and
scale down is called Elasticity. Elasticity brings an „illusion of Infinity‟. Though
nothing is infinite in this world, your application can get any number of
resources as it demands. This is the biggest unique selling point of the Cloud.
Now, think of web hosting. When you want to add another server to your web
application, your hoster has to manually provision that for you. Adding
additional servers and configuring the network topology introduces additional
time lag that your business cannot afford. Most of the Cloud Computing vendors
offer an intuitive way of manipulating your server configuration and topology.
Elasticity is the single most important attribute of the Cloud.
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Elasticity of Cloud Computing
Pay-By-Use
Elasticity and Pay-By-Use attributes go hand in hand. When you are scaling up
your application by adding more resources, you know how much it is going to
cost you. Pay-By-Use is a boon for the startups. As an entrepreneur, you got to
balance your investment between human resources and IT resources. The
biggest benefit of Pay-By-Use is that it reduces the CAPEX and turns your IT
investment into OPEX. The analogy that I typically use is that of Cable or DTH
TV subscription. During the season of Cricket World Cup or NBA, you would
want to subscribe to the sports channels and unsubscribe that moment the
event is over. With Pay-By-Use, you can subscribe and unsubscribe to the IT
infrastructure based on your needs and you only pay for what you use. This is
the most optimal way of spending your IT budget.
Self Service
When you are able to enjoy the capability of scaling up and scaling down and
only pay for what you use, you never want to wait for someone in the
datacenter to add an additional server to your application. Cloud can deliver its
promise only when there is Self Service. Through this, you can control the
resources all by yourself without an intermediary. When you add a new CPU
core, a server instance or add extra storage, you do it by yourself by using the
Console offered by the Cloud provider. This results in reduction in IT support
and maintenance. Today most of the organizations have dedicated IT teams to
provision a new machine, storage, collaboration portal and mailboxes as a part
of on-boarding the new employees. Through Self Service, a fairly non-technical
person can achieve these tasks and you don‟t need certified system
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administrators to do this. For example, when you sign up with Google Apps, it is
very simple and intuitive to configure the mailboxes for the employees. With
more and more applications moving the Cloud, Self Service becomes the
preferred way of configuring and managing the IT infrastructure.
Server Configuration @ ElasticHosts.com
ElasticFox for managing Amazon Web Web Services
Programmability
This is a critical parameter of the Cloud. The Cloud makes the developers
extremely important. Developers are familiar with the concepts of
multithreading where they spawn new threads to achieve scalability and the
responsiveness of the application. They incorporate logic to create additional
threads on demand. The programmability aspect of the Cloud adds a new
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dimension to the development. Developers can now create additional machines
and add it to the applications on demand. They can treat the entire data
center, servers and machines as an object model that be programmed. They
can now do a For-Each loop on every server instance and decide what do with
each instance. Amazon Web Services have the most mature API for
programmatically controlling the Cloud based resources. Azure started
supporting the management API that lets developers programmatically deploy
and manage Azure applications. By leveraging these APIs, developers are
building applications to manage the infrastructure and some of these frontends
run on iPhone and Windows Mobile. Now, imagine clicking a button on your
mobile phone to add a dozen servers to your application. Thanks to the Cloud!
Developers are important more than ever!
AWS SDK for .NET
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Azure Tools for Eclipse
iPhone App to manage AWS
So, let‟s summarize what we just discussed. Cloud Computing has 4 key tenets –
1) Elasticity, 2) Pay-By-Use, 3) Self Service, and 4) Programmability.
Hosting vs. Cloud Computing

Revisiting the on-going debate of hosting vs. Cloud Computing, let‟s see what
attributes hosting model exposes. Hosting can never meet the promise of
elasticity. Even if it does, it won‟t match the economics of the Cloud. Hosting does
offer some level of Self Service but not to an extent of manipulating the server
configuration on the fly! Pay-By-Use attribute is emulated by some hosting
companies. But, it is not a norm in the hosting business. Programmability is too
expensive to be supported by hosters as they cannot invest in the SDK and tools to
manage the infrastructure. So, it is clearly evident that hosting is not the same as
Cloud Computing.
Having understood the key attributes of the Cloud, you might start wondering how
you can bring these capabilities to your data center in the enterprise. The reality is
that these capabilities can be applied to your data center and officially that is
called as the Private Cloud. It is time for us to discuss various implementations of
the Cloud. We will look at 4 different mechanisms the way Cloud can be
implemented.
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Hosting vs. the Cloud
The 4 Implementations of the Cloud

Public Cloud
This is the most popular incarnation of the Cloud. Many businesses and individuals
realize Cloud through the Public Cloud implementation. It needs a huge investment
and only well established companies with deep pockets like Microsoft, Amazon and
Google can afford to set them up. Public Cloud is implemented on thousands of
servers running across hundreds of data centers deployed across tens of locations
around the world. The best thing about Public Cloud is that the customers can
choose a location for his application to be deployed. This will reduce the latency
when the consumers access the application. For example, a London based business
can choose to deploy their app at the Europe data center and an American
company prefers a data center in North America. With the geographical spread,
Public Clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure also offer
Content Delivery Network (CDN) features. Through this, static content will be
automatically replicated across all the data centers around the globe thus
increasing the scalability and availability of the applications.
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Public Cloud
Private Cloud
Simply put, Private Clouds are normal data centers within an enterprise with all
the 4 attributes of the Cloud – Elasticity, Self Service, Pay-By-Use and
Programmability. By setting up a Private Cloud, enterprises can consolidate their IT
infrastructure. They will need fewer IT staff to manage the data center. They will
also realize reduced power bills because of the low electricity consumption and
lesser cooling equipment needs. Private Cloud empowers employees within an
organization through Self Service of their IT needs. It becomes easy to provision
new machines and quickly assign them to project teams. Private Cloud borrows
some of the best practices of Public Cloud but limited to an organizational
boundary. Private Cloud can be setup using a variety of offerings from vmWare,
Microsoft, IBM, SUN and others. There are also some of the Open Source
implementations like Eucalyptus and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. We will discuss more
of Private Cloud in the coming episodes.
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Private Cloud
Hybrid Cloud
There are scenarios where you need a combination of Private Cloud and Public
Cloud. Due to the regulations and compliance issues in few countries, sensitive
data like citizen information, patient medical history, and financial transactions
cannot be stored in servers that physically not located within the political
boundaries of a country. In some scenarios, the enterprise customers want to get
best of the both worlds by logically connecting their Private Cloud and the Public
Cloud. Through this, they can offer seamless scalability by moving some of the on-
premise and Private Cloud based applications to the Public Cloud. Security plays a
critical role in connecting the Private Cloud to the Public Cloud. Realizing its
importance, Amazon Web Services has recently announced Virtual Private Cloud
(VPC) that securely bridges Private Cloud and Amazon Web Services. It is almost
like extending your infrastructure beyond the organizational boundary and the
firewall in a secure way. Microsoft‟s recent announcement of Windows AppFabric
brings the concept of Hybrid Cloud to Microsoft‟s future customers.
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Hybrid Cloud
Community Cloud
Community Cloud is implemented when a set of businesses have a similar
requirement and share the same context. This would be made available to a set of
select organizations. For example, the Federal government in US may decide to
setup a government specific Community Cloud that can leveraged by all the states.
Through this, individual local bodies like state governments will be freed from
investing, maintaining and managing their local data centers. Similarly, the
Reserve Bank of India (RBI) may setup a Community Cloud for all the financial
institutions that share common goals and requirements. So, a Community Cloud is a
sort of Private Cloud but goes beyond just one organization.
Community Cloud
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Chapter 3
The Anatomy of the Cloud
Introduction to Virtualization
Virtualization is abstracting the hardware to run virtual instances of multiple guest
operating systems on a single host operating system. You can see Virtualization in
action by installing Microsoft Virtual PC, VMware Player or Sun VirtualBox. These
are desktop virtualization solutions that let you install and run an OS within the
host OS. The virtualized guest OS images are called Virtual Machines. The benefit
of virtualization is realized more on the servers than on the desktops.
Server Virtualization
There are many reasons for running Virtualization on the servers running in a
traditional data center. Here are a few:
Mean Time To Restore
It is far more flexible and faster to restore a failed web server, app server or a
database server that is running as a virtualized instance. Since these instances are
physical files on the hard disk for the host operating system, just copying over a
replica of the failed server image is faster than restoring a failed physical server.
Administrators can maintain multiple versions of the VMs that come handy during
the restoration. The best thing about this is that whole copy and restore process
can be automated as a part of disaster recovery plan.
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Maximizing the server utilization
It is very common that certain servers in the data center are less utilized while
some servers are maxed out. Through virtualization, the load can be evenly spread
across all the servers. There are management software offerings that will
automatically move VMs to idle servers to dynamically manage the load across the
data center.
Reduction in maintenance cost
Virtualization has a direct impact on the bottom line. First, by consolidating the
data center to run on fewer but powerful servers, there is a significant cost
reduction. The power consumed by the data center and the maintenance cost of
the cooling equipment comes down drastically. The other problem that
virtualization solves is the migration of servers. When the hardware reaches the
end of the lifecycle, the physical servers need to be replaced. Backing up and
restoring the data and the installation of software on a production server is very
complex and expensive. Virtualization makes this process extremely simple and
cost effective. The physical servers will be replaced and the VMs just get restarted
without any change in the configuration. This has a lot of impact on the IT budgets.
Efficient management
All major virtualization software have a centralized console to manage, maintain,

track and monitor the health of physical servers and the VMs running on these
servers. Because of the simplicity and the dynamic capabilities, IT administrators
will spend less time in managing the infrastructure. This results in better
management and cost savings for the company.
Virtualization on the Server

Let‟s understand more about the server virtualization. Typically the OS is designed
to act as an interface between the applications and the hardware. It is not
specifically designed to run the guest OS instances on top of it.
OS manages the applications
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In fact, in the server virtualization scenario, the host OS is not very significant. It is
just confined to booting up and running the VMs. Given the fact that the OS is not
ideal for running multiple VMs and has a little role to play, there is a new breed of
software called Hypervisor that takes over the OS. Hypervisor is an efficient Virtual
Machine Manager (VMM) that is designed from the ground up to run multiple high
performant VMs. So, a Hypervisor is to VMs what an OS is to processes.
A Hypervisor can potentially replace the OS and can even boot directly from a VM.
This is called bare metal approach to virtualization. These Hypervisors have low
footprint of few megabytes (vmWare ESXi is just 32MB in size!) and have an
embedded OS with them. Hypervisors are assisted by the hardware virtualization
features built into the latest Intel and AMD CPUs. This combination of hardware
and Hypervisor turns the server into a lean and mean machine to host multiple
VMs. The VM that is used by the Hypervisor to boot as a host is called a
paravirtualized VM. This concept makes virtualization absolutely powerful. Imagine
a server booting in few seconds and the required paravirtualized (host) VM gets
copied over a gigabit Ethernet to run multiple guest VMs. This turns the datacenter
to be very dynamic and agile. The Hypervisor can be controlled by a central
console and can be instructed about the host VM to boot and the guest VMs to be
run on it.
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Bare Metal Virtualization
A look at the Hypervisor market

Citrix XenServer
This product is based on the proven, open source Hypervisor called Xen. Xen‟s
paravirtualization technology is widely acknowledged as the fastest and most
secure virtualization software in the industry and it is enhanced by taking full
advantage of the latest Intel® VT and AMD-V™ hardware virtualization assist
capabilities. This product is free and can be downloaded from Citrix.com.
VMware ESXi
This product is another bare metal Hypervisor from the virtualization leader,
VMware. This is one of the best Hypervisors with just 32MB footprint. ESXi ships
with Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) that provides basic UI required for
administering and managing the Hypervisor. Through its standard Common
Information Model (CIM) system, it also exposes the APIs to control the
infrastructure.
Microsoft Hyper-V Server
This is a free Hypervisor from Microsoft based on the same Hypervisor that ships
with Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V edition. This is best suited for Virtual
Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) because of its compatibility with Windows Vista and
Windows 7. Hyper-V does not have any local GUI but can be managed from System
Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).
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Virtualization and the Cloud
The architecture that we discussed forms the heart and soul of Cloud Computing.
Here is how –
Elasticity
We know that the key attribute of the Cloud is Elasticity, which is the ability to
scale up and scale down on the fly. This capability is achieved only through
virtualization. Scaling up is technically adding more server VMs to an application
and scaling down is detaching the VMs from the application.
Self Service
The next attribute is Self Service. The Hypervisor comes with an API and the
required agents to manage it remotely. This functionality can surface through the
Self Service portals that the Cloud vendor offers. So, when you move a slider to
increase the number of servers in your web tier, you are essentially talking to the
Hypervisor to action that request.
Pay-By-Use
Pay-By-Use is the next attribute of the Cloud. By leveraging the management and
monitoring capabilities of the Hypervisor, metering the usage of resources like the
CPUs, RAM and storage can be easily achieved.
Programmable Infrastructure
Programmable Infrastructure is the last key tenet of the Cloud. We already saw
how the API wired into Hypervisors can be leveraged. Developers can directly talk
to the Hypervisor through the native APIs or Web Services exposed by the Cloud
vendors. Through this, they can take the control of the VMs.
It is very obvious that the Cloud is heavily relying on virtualization and efficient
Hypervisors to achieve its goal.
Dissecting the Cloud
Now that we know how Virtualization forms the core of the Cloud, let‟s me put
things in perspective. Let‟s see what actually goes inside the Cloud.
Geographic location
We start deciding where to physically run our application. Most of the Cloud
providers give you an option to host your application at a specific location.
Depending on the customer base and the expected user location, you can choose a
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location. This will ensure that all your components like storage, compute and
database services are hosted within the same data center. This will reduce the
latency and makes the application more responsive.
Geographically spread Cloud data centers
Data Center
Though you do not have a direct choice in this, your app will be deployed at a data
center physically located at a place that you have chosen. These data centers
typically run thousands of powerful servers that offer a lot of storage and
computing power.
A Cloud data center runs hundreds of servers
Server
You never know which physical server is responsible for running your code and the
application. In most of the cases, the app that you deployed may be powered by
more than one server running within the same data center. You cannot assume that
the same physical server will run the next instances of your app. Servers are
treated as a commodity resource to host the VMs. There is no affinity between a
VM and a physical server. Each server in the data center is optimally utilized at any
given point.
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Each server runs the Hypervisor and the VM(s)
Virtual Machine
This is the layer that you will directly interact with. In Platform as a Service
(PaaS), you may not realize that you are dealing with a VM but in reality most of
the Cloud implementations will host your code or app on a VM. VMs are essential to
respect the 4 tenets of the Cloud. Your application runs on a VM that is managed by
the Hypervisor running across all the servers. These VMs are moved across servers
based on the server utilization. There is no guarantee that the VM that you launch
will run on the same physical server. There will be a load balancer which will
ensure that your applications are scalable by exploiting the power of all the VMs
associated with your application.
Under the hood of a server
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Chapter 4
Introducing Amazon Web Services
Overview of Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is one of the early and also the most successful
implementations of the Public Cloud. Many well known online properties leverage
AWS. Amazon initially started offering a Cloud based Message Queuing service
called Amazon Simple Queue Service or SQS. They eventually added services like
Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), A CDN
service called CloudFront, a flexible and distributed database service called
SimpleDB. Amazon recently announced the availability of MySQL in the Cloud
through a service called Relational Data Service (RDS).
Amazon Web Services
Given that Amazon offers the core capabilities to run a complete web application
or a Line of Business application, it is obvious that it is Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS). AWS is truly the platform of the platforms. You can choose an OS, App
server and the programming language of your choice. AWS SDK and API is available
for most of the popular languages including Java, .NET, Python and Ruby.
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Your Application
EC2
Amazon Physical
Infrastructure
SOAP or REST based API
AWS API Bindings
Let‟s take a closer look at some of the major Cloud service offerings from Amazon:
S3
Amazon‟s Simple Storage Service or S3 is a great way to store data on the Cloud
that can be accessed by any application with access to the internet. S3 can store
any arbitrary data as objects accompanied by metadata. These objects can be
organized into buckets. Every bucket and object has a set of permissions defined in
the Access Control List (ACL). The objects stored in S3 can be anything from a
document, a media file, serialized objects or even Virtual Machine images. Each
object can be 5GB in size while the metadata can be up to 2KB. All the objects can
be accessed using simple REST or SOAP calls. This makes S3 an ideal storage
solution to centrally store and retrieve data across multiple clients. S3 can also be
treated as a virtual file system to provide persistence storage capabilities to
applications.
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http://bucket.s3.amzonaws.com/object
Bucket
Object
Simple Storage Services
EC2
In simple terms, EC2 is hiring a server running at a remote location. These servers
are actually Virtual Machine images running on top of Amazon‟s powerful data
centers. Amazon calls these virtualized server instances as Amazon Machine Images
or AMI. These instances come in different sizes that you can choose from. Please
refer to http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance for more details on the instance
types. There are many pre-configured AMIs that you can choose from. The typical
workflow on EC2 is that you choose a pre-configured AMI, launch that AMI,
customize it by adding additional software and by loading an app and finally, save
that AMI as your custom AMI on S3. You can launch multiple instances of your AMI
and attach them to an IP called the Elastic IP. Because of the dynamic capability of
launching multiple instances of the same AMIs to scale up and terminating them to
scale down, it is called Elastic Compute Cloud.
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Elastic Compute Cloud
SQS
SQS is the message queue on the Cloud. It supports programmatic sending of
messages via web service applications as a way to communicate over the internet.
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) is a popular way of ensuring that the messages
are delivered once and only once. Moving that infrastructure to the web by
yourself is expensive and hard to maintain. SQS gives you this capability on-demand
and through the pay-by-use model. SQS is accessible through REST and SOAP based
API.
Simple Message Queue
CloudFront
When your web application is targeting the global users, it makes sense to serve
the static content through a server that is closer to the user. One of the solutions
based on this principle is called Content Delivery Network (CDN). But this
infrastructure of geographically spread servers to serve static content can be very
expensive. CloudFront is CDN as a service. Amazon is leveraging its data center
presence across the globe by serving content through these edge locations.
CloudFront utilizes S3 by replicating the buckets across multiple edge servers.
Amazon charges you only for the data that is served through CloudFront and there
is no requirement for upfront payment.
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Cloud Front
SimpleDB
If S3 offers storage for arbitrary binary data, SimpleDB is a flexible way to store
Name/Value pairs on the Cloud. This dramatically reduces the overhead of
maintaining a relational database continuously. SimpleDB is accessed through REST
and HTTP calls and can be easily consumed by any client that can parse a HTTP
response. Many Web 2.0 applications built using AJAX, Flash and Silverlight can
easily access data from SimpleDB. It is the only service from Amazon that is free up
to a specific threshold.
Simple DB
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RDS
Amazon RDS offers relational database on the Cloud. It is based on the popular
MySQL database. When you are moving a traditional Line of Business application to
the Cloud and want to maintain high fidelity with the existing systems, you can
choose RDS. The advantage of RDS is that you do not install, configure, manage and
maintain the DB server. You only consume it and Amazon takes care of the rest.
Routine operations like patching the server and backing up the databases are taken
care and you only consume the service. RDS is priced on Pay-as-you-go model and
there is no upfront investment required. It is accessible through the REST and SOAP
based API.
Relational Database Services
Scenarios
Scalable Web Application
If you are an aspiring entrepreneur and want to go-live with your app without an
upfront investment, Amazon is the place to go. By running your web app on
Amazon, you can dynamically scale you application on demand and only pay for
what you use. This can be the best playground for you to determine the server
capacity needs and asses the peak traffic patterns before the commercial launch of
your web app.
Line of Business Application
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If your enterprise has to open up an internal LOB application to its employees and
trading partners, it can extend the application to the Cloud by leveraging a
concept of AWS called Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This is achieving the Hybrid
Cloud capabilities by partially moving an application to the Cloud while still
running the sensitive and proprietary part of the LOB application secured behind
the firewall. VPC enables organizations to securely extend itself to the Cloud.
Data Archival
Data that is not very frequently accessed but may be required due to data
retention policies can be easily archived on Amazon S3. By building a simple,
searchable frontend, this data can be searched and retrieved on-demand. Moving
the data to the Cloud will ensure that is available from any where and any time.
High-Performance Computing On Demand

For many enterprises, there is an occasional requirement of high performance
computing. Investing in high-end servers is not an optimal solution because they
may not be utilized after the task is done. With AWS, companies can virtually „hire‟
as much computing power as they need and pay only for what they used. This will
eliminate the expensive proposition of investing in the infrastructure.
Scalable Media Delivery

A TV channel might want to start delivering the recorded shows to its global
audience. Since most of the content is static, they can leverage the CDN
capabilities. Signing up with services like Akamai and LimeLight can be expensive.
Because the media content is already stored on S3, it is very easy and cost
effective to leverage Amazon‟s CloudFront to deliver the media content through
the geographically spread edge locations.
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Chapter 5
Introduction to Microsoft
Windows Azure Platform
Overview of Windows Azure Platform
At a high level, Windows Azure Platform has 4 key services in it. The first one is
Windows Azure which is the Cloud OS from Microsoft. The second service is the
AppFabric which enables the integration of on-premise services with the Cloud.
The third service is a Database on the Cloud called SQL Azure which is based on
Microsoft SQL Server. The latest addition to the platform is a service Codenamed
“Dallas” which is a marketplace to publish, discover, consume and analyze premier
content.
Though Windows Azure Platform is designed for the developers building

applications on the Microsoft platform, this can also be leveraged by developers
building applications on Java and PHP environments. Microsoft is investing in the
right set of tools and plug-ins for Eclipse and other popular developer
environments.
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Windows Azure Platform
I will first explain each of the components of Windows Azure Platform and then
walk you through the scenarios for deploying applications on this platform.
Windows Azure
Windows Azure is the heart & soul of the Azure Platform. It is the OS that runs on
each and every server running in the data centers across multiple geographic
locations. It is interesting to note that Windows Azure OS is not available as a retail
OS. It is a homegrown version exclusively designed to power Microsoft‟s Cloud
infrastructure. Windows Azure abstracts the underlying hardware and brings an
illusion that it is just one instance of OS. Because this OS runs across multiple
physical servers, there is a layer on the top that coordinates the execution of
processes. This layer is called the Fabric. In between the Fabric and the Windows
Azure OS, there are hundreds of Virtual Machines (VM) that actually run the code
and the applications. As a developer, you will only see two services at the top of
this stack. They are 1) Compute and, 2) Storage.
Windows Azure architecture
You interact with the Compute service when you deploy your applications on
Windows Azure. Applications are expected to run within one of the two roles called
Web Role or Worker Role. Web Role is meant to host typical ASP.NET web
applications or any other CGI web applications. Worker Role is to host long running
processes that do not have any UI. Think of the Web Role as an IIS container and
the Worker Role as the Windows Services container. Web Role and Worker Role can
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talk to each other in multiple ways. The Web Role can also host WCF Services that
expose a HTTP endpoint. The code within Worker Role will run independent of the
Web Role. Through the Worker Role, you can port either .NET applications or
native COM applications to Windows Azure.
When you run an application, you definitely need storage to either store the simple
configuration data or more complex binary data. Windows Azure Storage comes in
three flavors. 1) Blobs, 2) Tables and, 3) Queues.
Blobs can store large binary objects like media files, documents and even serialized
objects. Table offers flexible name/value based storage. Finally, Queues are used
to deliver reliable messages between applications. Queues are the best mechanism
to communicate between Web Role and Worker Role. The data stored in Azure
Storage can be accessed through HTTP and REST calls.
Figure 3. Compute & Storage Service
So, we just discussed that Windows Azure offers a Compute and Storage service.
Compute service is consumed by deploying a Web Application in a Web Role and
long running process in the Worker Role. Storage can be consumed through Blobs,
Tables and Queues.
AppFabric
Windows Azure platform AppFabric was earlier called the .NET Services. This
service enables seamless integration of services that run within an organization
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behind a firewall with those services that are hosted on the Cloud. It forms a
secure bridge between the legacy applications and the Cloud services. AppFabric
also brings the federated identity to the Cloud based applications. The two key
components of AppFabric are 1) Service Bus and, 2) Access Control.
AppFabric connecting on-premise to the Cloud
Service Bus provides a secure connectivity between on-premise and Cloud services.
It can be used to register, discover and consume services irrespective of their
location. Services hosted behind firewalls and NAT can be registered with the
Service Bus and these services can be then invoked by the Cloud Services. The
Service Bus abstracts the physical location of the Service by providing a URI that
can be invoked by any potential consumer.
Access Control is a mechanism to secure your Cloud services and applications. It

provides a declarative way of defining rules and claims through which callers can
gain access to Cloud services. Access Control rules can be easily and flexibly
configured to cover a variety of security needs and different identity-management
infrastructures. Access Control enables enterprises to integrate their on-premise
security mechanisms like Active Directory with the Cloud based authentication.
Developers can program Access Control through simple WCF based services.
SQL Azure
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SQL Azure is Microsoft SQL Server on the Cloud. Unlike Azure Storage, which is
meant for unstructured data, SQL Azure is a full blown relational database engine.
It is based on the same DB engine of MS SQL Server and can be queried with T-SQL.
Because of it‟s fidelity with MS SQL, on-premise applications can quickly start
consuming this service. Developers can talk to SQL Azure using ADO.NET or ODBC
API. PHP developers can consume this through native PHP API. Through the
Microsoft SQL Azure Data Sync, data can be easily synchronized between on-
premise SQL Server and SQL Azure. This is a very powerful feature to build hubs of
data on the Cloud that always stay in sync with your local databases. For all
practical purposes, SQL Azure can be treated exactly like a DB server running in
your data center without the overhead of maintaining and managing it by your
teams. Because Microsoft is responsible for installation, maintenance and
availability of the DB service, business can only focus on manipulating and
accessing data as a service. With the Pay-as-you-go approach, there is no upfront
investment and you will only pay for what you use.
SQL Azure
Microsoft Codenamed “Dallas”

This service is an exchange setup by Microsoft for parties that can publish useful
data/content and parties that can consume this data in their applications. For
example, Public Sector can publish interesting and useful census data and some
company in the healthcare business might be just looking for this data. This
company can search and discover the census dataset and pay for what they
Page 37

consume. Data can be published in a variety of forms including BLOBS, CSV files,
Spreadsheets and RSS feeds. The dataset published on Dallas can be consumed
directly through tools like Microsoft Excel or can be integrated into custom
applications by calling the REST based API. So, this turns into a marketplace of
data publishers and data consumers. Through an add-in for Excel 2010 called
PowerPivot (previously known as Project “Gemini”), end users can directly
consume the data in Microsoft Excel.
Figure 5. Microsoft Codename “Dallas” service
To summarize what we just discussed, Windows Azure Platform Services consist of

Windows Azure, AppFabric, SQL Azure and a project Codenamed “Dallas”.
Scenarios for Microsoft Windows Azure Platform
Scalable Web Application

Because Windows Azure Platform is based on the familiar .NET platform, ASP.NET
developers can design and develop web applications on fairly inexpensive machines
and then deploy them on Azure. This will empower the developers to instantly
scale their web apps without worrying about the cost and the complexity of
infrastructure needs. Even PHP developers can enjoy the benefits of elasticity and
pay-by-use attributes of the platform.
Page 38

Compute Intensive Application
Windows Azure Platform can be used to run process intensive applications that
occasionally need high end computing resources. By leveraging the Worker Role,
developers can move code that can run across multiple instances in parallel. The
data generated by either Web Role or On-Premise applications can be fed to the
Worker Roles through Azure Storage.
Centralized Data Access

When data has to be made accessible to a variety of applications running across the
browser, desktop and mobile, it makes sense to store that in a central location.
Azure Cloud based storage can be great solution for persisting and maintaining data
that can be easily consumed by desktop applications, Silverlight, Flash and AJAX
based web applications or mobile applications. With the Pay-as-you-grow model,
there is no upfront investment and you will only pay for what you use.
Hybrid Applications (Cloud + On-Premise)

There may be a requirement for extending a part of an application to the Cloud or
building a Cloud façade for an existing application. By utilizing the AppFabric
services like Service Bus and Access Control, on-premise applications can be
seamlessly and securely extended to the Cloud. AppFabric can enable the Hybrid
Cloud scenario.
Cloud Based Data Hub

Through SQL Azure, companies can securely build data hubs that will be open to
trading partners and mobile employees. For example, the Inventory of a
manufacturing company can be securely hosted on the Cloud which is always in
sync with the local inventory database. The Cloud based DB will be opened up for
B2B partners to directly query and place orders. SQL Azure and the SQL Azure Data
Sync will enable interesting scenarios.
Page 39

Chapter 6
Google App Engine
Google App Engine is a platform to deploy and run web applications on Google‟s
infrastructure. It comes with a dynamic web server with full support for common
web technologies. It offers a transactional data store for persisting data.
Developers can integrate their web application with Google Accounts through the
APIs. The biggest advantage of running web applications on GAE is the scalability
that it offers. Your web application will be as scalable as some of the popular
Google services like search.
Your web app running along with Google properties
Google App Engine currently supports Python and Java environments. Java
developers will be able to deploy and run JSPs and Servlets while Python
developers can use standard library. Since GAE runs in a sandbox, not all
operations are possible. For example, opening and listening on sockets is disabled.
The applications running on GAE live in a sandbox that provides multi-tenancy and
isolation across applications.
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Components of Google App Engine
The next logical layer is a set of APIs and Services to support the web application
developers. This layer has a persistent Datastore, User Authentication services,
Task Scheduler and Task Queue, URL Fetch, a Mail component, MemCache and
Image Manipulation. All these services are exposed through native API bindings. For
example, Java developers will be able to use JDO/JPA to talk to the datastore.
Let‟s take a closer look at some of the services provided by GAE.
Java Runtime – GAE is based on Java 6 VM and Servlet 2.5 Container. The datastore
can be accessed through the JDO/JPA API. It supports JSR 107 for MemCache API.
Mail can be accessed through javax.mail API. Javax.net.URLConnection provides
access to URLFetch service. Apart from core Java language, other dynamic
languages based on Java like JRuby and Scala.
Python Rumtime – GAE comes with a rich set of API and tools for developing web
applications based on Python. It supports Python 2.5.2 and Python 3 is being
considered for the future releases. You can also take advantage of a wide variety
of mature libraries and frameworks for Python web application development, such
as Django. The Python environment provides rich Python APIs for the datastore,
Google Accounts, URL fetch, and email services. App Engine also provides a simple
Python web application framework called webapp to make it easy to start building
applications.
Datastore – App Engine comes with a very powerful data storage that can scale
dynamically. It also features a query engine and support for transactions. The
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datastore is different from traditional relational databases. The objects stored in
datastore are called “Entities” which are “schemaless”. These entities have a set
of properties that can be queried using a SQL like grammar like GQL or Google
Query Language. The datastore is strongly consistent and supports optimistic
concurrency control.
User Authentication – One of the advantages of using GAE is its integration with
Google Accounts. This empowers the developers to leverage Google‟s secure
authentication engine for their custom applications. While a user is signed in to the
application, the app can access the user's email address, as well as a unique user
ID. The app can also detect whether the current user is an administrator, making it
easy to implement admin-only areas of the app.
Google Accounts integration with App Engine
URL Fetch – This service will fetch external web pages using the high bandwidth
that many other Google applications use.
Mail – This will enable developers to programmatically send email messages from
custom web applications.
MemCache – The Memcache service provides applications with a high performance

in-memory key-value cache that is accessible by multiple instances of the
application. Memcache is useful for data that does not need the persistence and
transactional features of the datastore, such as temporary data or data copied
from the datastore to the cache for high speed access.
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Image Manipulation – Through this service, developers can manipulate images. With
this API, you can resize, crop, rotate and flip images in JPEG and PNG formats.
Scheduled Tasks – Scheduled Tasks are also called “cron jobs”. Other than running
interactive web applications, GAE can also schedule tasks that can be invoked at a
specific time.
To get started on Google App Engine, download the Eclipse plug-in and the SDK.
The SDK emulates the GAE environment locally and enables you to design, develop
and test applications on your machine before finally deploying on GAE.
About the author -
Janakiram MSV works with Microsoft Corporation as the

Technical Architect. He is responsible for helping the
enterprise customers and Independent Software Vendors
migrate to the Microsoft Cloud Computing platform. He has
been with Microsoft Corporation for 10 years where he was
primarily selling, marketing and evangelizing the Microsoft Application Platform
and Tools to customers and partners in India. He is a renowned technologist and
regularly speaks at premier events like Microsoft TechEd, Microsoft Developer
Days, Great Indian Developer Summit, JAX India and Foss.in. He is an active
contributor to the Bangalore .NET User Group (B.NET). He is passionate about
Cloud Computing and focuses on industry’s leading Cloud Computing offerings
including Microsoft Windows Azure Platform. Janakiram’s blog can be found at
http://www.janakiramm.net
Page 43

Demystifying The Cloud

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Demystifying the Cloud

An introduction to Cloud Computing

This guide explains the concepts of Cloud Computing in simple terms.

© Janakiram MSV http://www.janakiramm.net

1.2 The Programmable Web

Understanding Cloud Computing

© Janakiram MSV http://www.janakiramm.net

Think Web Services

Web Services Stack

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Exposing the hardware and the OS as a Service

Exposing the Runtime + SDK as a Service

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Web App as a Service

Welcome to the World of Services

© Janakiram MSV http://www.janakiramm.net

Cloud OS = Infrastructure as a Service

Cloud FX = Platform as a Service

© Janakiram MSV http://www.janakiramm.net

Cloud App = Software as a Service

What does Cloud Computing mean to you?

IT Professionals and System Administrators

IaaS is the focus area of IT Pros and system administrators

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PaaS is the focus area of developers and architects

SaaS delivers software through a subscription for the consumers

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The 4 Key Tenets

I want to quickly recap the definition of Cloud Computing. It is all about

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Server Configuration @ ElasticHosts.com

ElasticFox for managing Amazon Web Web Services

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AWS SDK for .NET

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iPhone App to manage AWS

Hosting vs. Cloud Computing

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The 4 Implementations of the Cloud

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© Janakiram MSV http://www.janakiramm.net

© Janakiram MSV http://www.janakiramm.net

© Janakiram MSV http://www.janakiramm.net

Mean Time To Restore

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Reduction in maintenance cost

All major virtualization software have a centralized console to manage, maintain,

Virtualization on the Server

OS manages the applications

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A look at the Hypervisor market

Microsoft Hyper-V Server

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Dissecting the Cloud

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Geographically spread Cloud data centers

A Cloud data center runs hundreds of servers

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Under the hood of a server

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