Nimbula—Roll Your Own Private EC

Silicon Valley-based Nimbula (www.nimbula.com) was in stealth mode for over a year but emerged in June 2010. It’s headed by Chris Pinkham and Willem van Bijon, a couple of Amazon developers credited with leading the development of EC2. The purpose of Nimbula is to “blend EC2-like scale, agility and efficiency with private infrastructure customization and control.” Nimbula brought in $5.75 million in Series A funding from venture capitalist Sequoia Capital and strategic partner VMware.

The Nimbula Cloud Operating System is an automated cloud manage- ment system delivering Amazon EC2-like services behind the firewall. Nim- bula’s technology allows customers to easily repurpose their existing infrastructure and build a computing cloud in the trusted environment of their own data center. Using simple and rapid deployment technologies, The Nimbula Cloud OS transforms underutilized private data centers into muscular, easily configurable computing capacity, quickly and cost effec- tively. With access to both on- and off-premise cloud services available via a common API, the Nimbula Cloud OS combines the benefits of capitalizing on internal resource capacity and controlled access to additional external compute capacity.

The Nimbula Cloud OS technology has been designed to respond to the following key requirements of an enterprise cloud solution:

Scalability—The Nimbula Cloud OS is designed for linear scaling from a small cluster up to hundreds of thousands of computers. This allows an organization to grow and grow quickly.

Ease of use—A highly automated, hands-off install requiring mini- mal configuration or interaction dramatically reduces the complex- ity of deploying an on-premise cloud. Racks come online

automatically in under 15 minutes. Management of cloud services is largely automated, significantly improving operational efficiency.

Ease of migration—The Nimbula Cloud OS facilitates easy migra- tion of existing applications into the cloud through its support for multiplatform environments and flexible networking and storage. It aims to avoid the dreaded lock-in problem discussed at length in Chapter 4.

Flexibility—The Nimbula technology supports controlled federa- tion to external private and public clouds like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as needed by the customer: during peak times or for specific applications.

Reliability—With no single points of failure, the Nimbula Cloud OS employs sophisticated fail-over mechanisms to ensure system integrity and resilience.

Security—A robust and flexible policy based Authorization System supporting multitenancy provides mature and reliable security and sophisticated cloud management control.

Nimbula says it is in beta with a half-dozen international customers in financial services, tech and healthcare. More technical details are available at

http://nimbula.com/technology. Interesting “use cases” from their beta cus- tomers are at http://nimbula.com/products/usecases.

CEO Chris Pinkham, who used to be VP of engineering at Amazon, said Nimbula wants “to help customers see beyond the false dichotomy of public versus private clouds” and let them feel all warm and secure about cloud computing.

Nimbula’s other co-founder—and now its VP of products—Willem van Biljon wrote EC2s business plan and led its product development.

VMware co-founder and former CEO Diane Greene has just joined Nimbula’s board.

The start-up’s also got AWS’s ex-biz dev and sales chief Martin Buhr as its VP of sales and ex-VMware exec Reza Malekzadeh as VP of marketing.

Summary

In this chapter, we looked briefly at Amazon’s Web Services. We started with basic storage and used Gladinet to create a Z disk that appears local but connects to the cloud. We then used S3Fox Organizer to move our static content from our own computer to the Amazon cloud. We created a custom instance of a virtual server on EC2, configured just the way we

wanted it. We can use CloudWatch to monitor EC2 instances and then Elastic Load Balancers in real time or Auto Scaling to dynamically add or remove Amazon EC2 instances based on Amazon CloudWatch metrics. Nimsoft’s Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) for AWS is one tool for monitoring and controlling Amazon-hosted cloud solutions. Nimbula, a well-pedigreed start-up, aims to let enterprises create their own EC2 behind their own firewall.

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Chapter 7

Virtualization: Open Source and VMware

Overview

In this chapter we discuss virtualization, the main ingredient of cloud com- puting, as well as the leading offerings. We shall see that while it’s an old idea, it is modern, fast, low-cost, mass-produced hardware that has made virtual- ization cost-effective. Many powerful hypervisors, including Xen, KVM, and QEMU are open source. VMware is the commercial leader, but its products are based on open source. Citrix is a form of virtual desktop, but today it often rides on VMware. Amazon uses a modified version of Xen.

Monitoring is essential to managing the performance of virtual systems. Microsoft has its own patented approach to virtualization, which it deploys in Microsoft Azure. EMC’s VPLEX is an important new technology for moving blocks of storage across the cloud. Interesting partnerships have been announced among VMware, Google, Salesforce.com, Eucalyptus, and Amazon that will help grow the entire industry and prevent lock-in to a sin- gle vendor.

OpenStack.org is open source that is compatible with Rackspace [see Chapter 13] and Amazon EC2 [see Chapter 6]. The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capa- bilities using open source software running on standard hardware. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and manag- ing large groups of virtual private servers. OpenStack Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commod- ity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data.1

148 Implementing and Developing Cloud Computing Applications

Virtualization Is an Old Story

At the heart of cloud computing is virtualization. As we noted in Chapter 2, virtualization’s roots go back a long time, to the IBM 360 Model 67 and the CP operating system, which provided each user with a virtual “image” of an IBM 360 computer.

It’s the virtual machine that makes cloud computing work.

In the years from 1995 to 2005, as PCs and client/server solutions took center stage, virtualization was relegated to the backwaters of computing.

Now, its time has come .. . . again.