The two real competitive advantages I see are the pricing points (lack of contract, quick setup) and more technically that it eliminates the need of an origin server.

That last point is key — you’ll hear things like: “Cloud front doesn’t have the ability to pull from an origin server, there for it is a big joke that can’t compete with Akamai, LimeLight…etc”.

This is bogus.

In most typical CDN setups that I know there is what is called an ‘origin’ server, the server where you continually host the content you want pushed out to the delivery network. As requests come in for specific assets most CDN providers will ‘pull’ the content off of your server by convention (specific URI/path) and publish to their cloud.

The problem with this setup?

It’s so not cloud.

You are forced to maintain a perpetually running server, with enough storage for all the assets, which sits there slurping up space, electric and maintenance (admin) fees

Since CloudFront is built on the S3 storage service — S3 is in essence the origin server. In fact CloudFront is merely an S3 bucket that has been blessed into a ‘distribution’ via a simple RESTful API call…

That’s the origin of cloudfronts competitive advantage.

Having worked with… less enlightened solutions… I’m thinking the ultimate CloudFront deployment scenario would be via an SVN or GIT hook. If you commit an asset to /static/css or /static/css a post-commit hook would automatically publish to CloudFront.

If I have time I’ll take a look at implementing something quick and dirty tomorrow.

Sun has announced it is partnering with Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service to offer (Open)Solaris on EC2 instances… I wonder if this will pave the way for BSD (Free, Open) derivatives to be officially supported by Amazon…

These two announcements from the GAE team have allayed some of my fears.

Getting your data on and off google address the issue of data portability, specifically importing and exporting large amounts of data.

The GAE Team has also released a Helper for Django that should smooth over some of the rough spots in the GAE/Django bridge.

Exciting times. My biggest remaining gripe with GAE is that one single Apps account can not host GAE instances on domains other than the main domain — but hopefully that will change sometime soon.

Persistent storage for Amazon EC2 will be offered in the form of storage volumes which you can mount into your EC2 instance as a raw block storage device. It basically looks like an unformatted hard disk. Once you have the volume mounted for the first time you can format it with any file system you want or if you have advanced applications such as high-end database engines, you could use it directly.

Reading the post, what the technology sounds like is some sort of home grown SAN — there are however some limitations — the storage device can only be mounted by one instance at a time, and more annoying is only available from one availability zone. However, one nice and unexpected feature is the ability to store snapshots of the volume to S3 and then create volumes in other Availability Zones from that snap shot.

I think it is an important step forward, and the pace of development at Amazon is impressive… but I’m really getting annoyed by features that are missing something, or have some constraints.  What gets to me the most is that only one instance and mount one volume at any given time — a truly distributed file system that allowed multiple running instances to use it concurrently would really blow me away.

I guess the context of this is really a database server, and you would only have one storage device per zone to correspond to each mysql-slave per zone… Another scenario would be an Apache SOLR master instance would use the volume as the persistent storage for the Lucene Index and replicate out to the Slaves that would just store on the transient EC2 drive.

If you want to host your app engine on it’s own vanity domain (myapp.com) you must have your google apps account registered exactly on that domain, you can host engines w/different domains than your main google apps account…

Lame…

Huge win for Django! It will be interesting to see how this plays out on one hand you have heroku the all in one IDE/Enviroment for Ruby On Rails that is backed by Amazon AWS and auto-deploys for you (to the Amazon cloud) and on the other hand you have Python, Django and Google App engine with a similar but different model.

I’m firmly on the Python side, and thrilled that my favorite framework is going to be run on Google’s cloud offering.

I’ve already gotten my account activation (see below) but there seems to be a glitch and it just forwards me to the waiting list. I’ve downloaded the App Engine SDK… but won’t play with it until the weekend.

Update One: After watching the introductory video, and reading through some documentation, I’m noticing some very clear patterns modeled after Django.  Particularly the Database models, and the “config” yaml file which is equivalent to settings.py (Django). See the intro video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfgO-LXGpTM

Hello,

Thanks for signing up to try Google App Engine! Your account has been activated, so you can begin building applications!

To start creating applications with Google App Engine, simply follow this link (you may need to sign in with your {{ removed }} Google Account):

http://appengine.google.com/

Thanks!
The Google App Engine Team

After some initial research I realized there was nothing special about so called “Appliances” they are just like the VMWare instances I was already used to creating — except that they are meant for other people.

The easiest way to get started is with the help of a website called “EasyVMX” is a simple web-application that creates the .vmx configuration file for your VMWare appliance. It’s fairly straight forward, and you can specify if you want the appliance to use an ISO image or physical CDROM (two of the most typical install sources).

Once you’ve filled out the form, you can then launch it with the free VMWare player. Make sure your installation source (ISO or CD) is in place (right path to file, media in drive…etc) — and there you have it, you’ve started creating your vmware appliance for free.

You could always sign up for a free 30 day trial of VMWare workstation, but unless you are ready to fork over $180 you would end up moving to VMWare player anyway — might as well start there.

The “Elastic IPs” come with a little “Amazon special sauce” and can be re-assigned to your EC2 instances programatically on the fly. There are some initial limits, currently you can only request up to 5 “Elastic IPs” per account.

“Availability Zones” allow you to specificy the (abstract) location of the physical machine that will host your virtual instance. You can for example specify that your two ec2 instances should be created in two separate datacenters, geographically separate enough to satisfy disaster recovery plans…etc

RightScale, a company that provides a management interface (written in Ruby on Rails) to Amazons infastructure has a good blog post on the new changes here: “Setting up a fault tolerant site using amazons availability zones“.

Ok, this comes not long after my gripes about desktop virtualization on linux. This won’t fix it either. The problem is not that parallels is hard to install — it’s really not (dpkg -i parallels.deb) — it’s that integration sucks with any open source desktop such as kde or gnome. It’s that parallels only releases 32 bit versions of its linux software rendering any system with more than 3 gigs of ram useless. Its that the “parallels workstaiton” for linux just in not as good as “parallels” for mac os x, here are some reasons.

1) Poor integration. The OS X version runs like a bat out of hell, and has one particular feature called “Unity” that allows OS X users to run windows applications almost as stand alone applications — no need for the clunky interface, just click on the IE logo and it starts and runs like a native application — behind the scenes parallels is starting a virtualized instance and all that jazz — but it is highly integrated.

2) Speed. Oh my god, having seen paralles and vmware fusion, no virtualization package for linux runs as fast, both VMWare and Parallels are clunky and slow. There are performance tweaks that provide a marginal boost (5%) — but OS X virtualization products take full advantage for the modern intel cpu’s in new macs that support VMT, intels virtualization optimizations and extensions, while for linux they seem to code to the lowest comment denominator.

3) Graphical Accelerations. OS X users can run games and graphic programs programmed towards the windows direct x 8.1 api. Why can’t they do this for linux as well?

Is anyone using this site? Seriously down for 12 hours? Do you people periodically check your own website to you know…make sure it is still up???

VMWare Desktop is slow, even on my q6600 quad core with 4gigs of ram. The integration blows, it’s only good for syncing my ipod at best. iTunes will play sound just fine, but if I try to watch a movie I’ve bought or a video cast the sound stops working after about 10 seconds, though the video continues to play.  It doesn’t look or feel as fast as the Mac OS X equivalents on the same or even better hardware.

Vmware server is a joke for desktop stuff, don’t even get me started. VMWare server 2.0, currently in beta is supposed to be bring improved performance and para-virtualization to but it only has a web-interface, not a desktop interface like vmware server 1.0 and vmware workstation.

I believe a large part of the recent apple revolution has to do with the ease of use of running windows applications at near native speeds. Why doesn’t this exist for GNU/Linux desktops — I would pay for this.   I still have to dual-boot for the occasional intensive app (Blackberry IDE for BB development).

The virtualization options alone are enough to have me seriously thinking about making the “switch” –

We left of having configuring the Windows side of the equation, having set up a separate hardware profile and installed the VMware SCSI drivers. All we have left to do is create a virtual machine that reads the already installed Windows XP, which is for the most part a simple process. There is are a few places that can be time sinks, so I’ve included screen shots and a step-by-step walk through to save you time.

I will not cover installing VMware workstation or server, has how you choose to do so depends on your system and what you want. I’ll leave that up to you.

To begin, make sure the user that will be running vmware is in the “disk” group (on my Ubuntu system) — which allows the user access to the raw disk.

I am using VMware workstation so these screen shots are geared towards that, but are mostly relevant to VMware server.

1) Fire up VMware — you should see something like the Screen Shot Below — A standard VMWare splash screen

2) Start the process of creating a new virtual machine, either by going to File->New or right clicking inside the inventory pane (the far left pane). The key thing here is to select a “Custom” virtual machine, instead of the “Typical” virtual machine.

3) The Guest operating system to select is obviously Windows XP — I have not tried this out with Vista yet, but it should probably work.

4) Give your new Virtual Machine a name and configure where the configuration files will be stored on disk.

5) Select the number of processors you want to allocate to this virtual machine.

6) Configure the amount of RAM you want allocated to this virtual machine.

7) Configure the networking, I selected “bridged networking” which means the virtual machine gets its own IP, instead of using the Hosts via NAT.

8 ) Select the I/O Adapter type — this is critical, make sure to select the “Buslogic” option, which should be selected by default.

9) Next you will be prompted to “Select a Disk” — you obviously want to choose “Use a physical disk” (this is the premise of this article after all?)

10) You will then be prompted to configure which physical disk you want to use. I used /dev/sda, and that should be enough for you, the only time this becomes a problem is when you have your linux boot partition on another disk, but GRUB installed on the MBR of the first disk. In that case after the wizard is complete, simply had a second physical device to the virtual machine and you should be set.

11) Finish!

Have fun with your new Windows partition running under linux. This setup has allowed me the flexibility of booting into my favorite operating system most of the time, and only requiring a reboot when I need to use “Hardware Intensive” applications (Read: games).

Cheers!

This is part One, part Two is here: VMWare running native XP on SATA disk, part 2.

The trick is to use install VMwares SCSI disk drivers under a windows hardware profile. I assume you already have your GNU/Linux environment setup already as you’ll need it to unpack the SCSI driver. Here are the exact steps:

1) Download the VMware SCSI drivers (On your Linux box)

2) mount -o loop vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp /mnt/tmp (Do this as root via sudo or su)

3) cp /mnt/tmp /where/ever (This is the equivalent of unpacking a zip file). Ideally /where is the location where you mounted your windows partition read-write via something like ntfs3g, so you can just boot into windows and see your files. Otherwise see the next step.

4) Get the files from the floopy image onto Windows, copy them onto a CD, or over a network share. I’ll leave this up to you.

5) Create a Windows Hardware Profile by right clicking on “My Computer” -> Properties -> Hardware -> Hardware Profiles. You should see something like: “Profile 1 (Current)”. Copy that, and name the copy “Virtualized”. Rename the original “Physical” (or whatever you think you’ll remember). Also, on that same screen enable “Wait Until I select a hardware profile”.

6) Reboot your computer. When you start booting Windows you should be presented with a DOS-Like menu. Select the “Virtualized” profile. Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add Hardware -> Yes, I have already connected the hardware -> You’ll then be presented with a list, scroll to the bottom “Add a new hardware device” -> Install the hardware that I manually select from a list -> SCSI and RAID Controllers -> Have Disk -> Browse to where ever you copied the files we unpacked from the floppy image under Linux. Select the driver. After the driver is installed, you might get a warning message about the device not functioning properly — Ignore it, obviously the VMWare SCSI device will only be present when running the OS under VMWare.

7) You are Done!

Tomorrow I’ll cover the Linux portion of things, how to configure VMWare to use the installed Windows XP partition.

Hope this helps, and see you tomorrow.
Resources:

http://vmware.com/download/server/drivers_tools.html

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Running_a_Windows_Partition_in_VMware

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-246371-start-25.html?sid=ae86f6d7c87732ca4661ca0cf2731d35

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3642297

http://sanbarrow.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=930&start=0&sid=2bb0f1e76a0e57cf7d6a0547b3deaf20

Warnings:

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws4/doc/disks_dualboot_ws.html#1046312 “Caution: Running a Windows XP guest from a raw disk is not supported. You should not test a Windows XP raw disk configuration in a production environment.”

An interesting thing to note is that Solaris Zones were created in response to FreeBSD jails — which allow light weight virtualization of the FreeBSD host system.

What isn’t mentioned is that Solaris (proprietray) recently announced the capability to fully virtualize linux (Red Hat) and windows guest operating systems.

This is an interesting addition to the existing virtualization heavy weights like Xen and VMWare.