SAM OF 76

This is great a video about how to Visualize your Business Model. Since there are many startups mushrooming with burst of Clouds all around. It necessary for these startups to visualize their Business Model. And Tom Hulme gives us a great insight into it. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/15395662]

Finally, Redhat has managed to jump the bandwagon and provide a PaaS platform that promises much, Openshift. OpenShift provides PaaS in three flavours, OpenShift Express, OpenShift Flex and OpenShift Power. Each othen read like this.

OpenShift Express Free and easy cloud deployments PHP, Python, Ruby Git push and leave the rest to us

OpenShift Flex Auto-scale new and existing apps in the cloud PHP, Java EE, MySQL, MongoDB, Memcache, DFS Full control over configuration & Built-in monitoring

OpenShift Power* Complete control over cloud deployments Custom topologies, root access, multi-tier dependencies Turn any application into a cloud deployment template

* Coming soon.

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Part of my job involves inducting people to Cloud or Cloud Computing. Though most my work specifically revolves around the Amazon Web Services and other IaaS stuff, there is one question that is constantly asked , "What is Cloud?". This has recurred too many times that I have tried to answer it too many ways. Every time I answer it I actually end up answering, "How do YOU define Cloud?" rather than, "What is Cloud?". And I am convinced that "What is Cloud?" cannot actually be answered, just like "Whats is Divinity". Though Cloud is more accessible than Divinity; today on the technological horizon Cloud demands the same status.

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After many years of committing the same crime of SVN I have come to realize the world is moving toward more robust and distributed version control systems like git, mercurial, bazaar or fossil. The primary reason for me to switch was the inability to turn around branches or merges quickly. Anyone who has used SVN will agree with me that its as painful to do branches and merges as it is define Cloud. So I had to many choices in front of me I could either move to github, an extremely popular code hosting service around git or bitbucket which is also equally popular code hosting service around mercurial. But I saved either for later and chose to just migrate from SVN to mercurial on Google Code.

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Well. I guess from time to time everyone forgets somethings and I hope you will not forget passwords. But if you are like me wishing to pass through the hell of forgetting passwords, you are welcome. The down-sides of system that hardly crashes or performs without any issues is that hardly visit it and hence you forget all the access credentials to that system. We run our issue tracking systems on one such machine and it performs so well that we hardly have to fix anything on that box. But the other day we figured out it too is a computer system and it crashed. The hell broke loose and all those people connected to this dashboard filled my inbox with "Whats happening?" queries. There were two lessons learnt.

• The need for proactive monitoring
• The need to central key management for logins

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NOTE: This is post that I had already posted here. Since we use a shared account of AWS to work. It becomes incredibly painful to manage it. So I thought it would be good to have a mechanism write or export the list to of instances to a CSV so we could send a claim mail to see who claims these instances. So I wrote this [sourcecode lang="python"] #!/usr/bin/env python from boto.ec2 import EC2Connection csv_file = open('instances.csv','w+') def process_instance_list(connection): map(build_instance_list,connection.get_all_instances()) def build_instance_list(reservation): map(write_instances,reservation.instances) def write_instances(instance): if (instance.virtualizationType == 'hvm'): platform = 'Windows' else: platform = 'Linux' csv_file.write("%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s\n"%(instance.id,instance.public_dns_name, instance.state,instance.placement,instance.architecture, platform)) csv_file.flush() if __name__=="__main__": connection = EC2Connection(aws_access_key_id='XXXXXXX',aws_secret_access_key='XXXXXXXX') process_instance_list(connection) csv_file.close() [/sourcecode] This piece of code is pretty straight and any EC2 noop could understand it. What I do is, get list of instances and layout their details line-wise and comma separated into a csv file. Now this file could be easily imported into excel sheet. I need to get a better mechanism, I know. But, for now this works.

Since we use a shared account of AWS to work. It becomes incredibly painful to manage it. So I thought it would be good to have a mechanism write or export the list to of instances to a CSV so we could send a claim mail to see who claims these instances. So I wrote this

#!/usr/bin/env python
from boto.ec2 import EC2Connection

csv_file = open('instances.csv','w+')

def process_instance_list(connection):
    map(build_instance_list,connection.get_all_instances())

def build_instance_list(reservation):
    map(write_instances,reservation.instances)

def write_instances(instance):
    if (instance.virtualizationType == 'hvm'):
        platform = 'Windows'
    else:
        platform = 'Linux'
    csv_file.write("%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s\n"%(instance.id,instance.public_dns_name,
                                                                  instance.state,instance.placement,instance.architecture, platform))
    csv_file.flush()


if __name__=="__main__":
    connection = EC2Connection(aws_access_key_id='XXXXXXX',aws_secret_access_key='XXXXXXXX')
    process_instance_list(connection)
    csv_file.close()

This piece of code is pretty straight and any EC2 noop could understand it. What I do is, get list of instances and layout their details line-wise and comma separated into a csv file. Now this file could be easily imported into excel sheet. I need to get a better mechanism, I know. But, for now this works.

Aha, this is 1st of Feb 2011. I thought there will be some changes done 1st Jan 2011 but I thought I better put it out by a month and here I am sitting telling all of you that this is only a blog of hope and not of resurrection.

Now, at my desk in office, juggling a couple of things. First up is gonna be review of an architecture for which the a DR needs to be provided on the Amazon Cloud. Well many of you might think this kids stuff but I guess it is not, because every component of the existing architecture is insanely proprietary to make your life difficult. To make it worse the client wants to see almost all the apples on AWS  EC2 to compare with the existing apples on the current site. Grrrrr..... thats going to be hard. Well lets see I will update you soon on this.

Then there is a sales meet happening and technology presentations need to up. I am ok with doing presentations as long as they do not push me to use the templates that corporates come with. That  really is a bummer as you will agree with me that its difficult to fit every idea into the same frame and expect it to look beautiful.

Well the other project that I am with, unamed and closed(at the moment). I have kind of completed the Logic in my mind for this, but its sad that too many things have to be cleared up, before I sit to do some interesting coding on this mini sized project with a great potential. I have made the choice of programming language(Python), framework(Flask) and database backend(Riak).

On the domestic front, Grandfather is admitted in the hospital with an enlarged prostrate. This requires surgery, which is due tomorrow. He is 87 but healthy, and i guess the latter will take him through the surgery well. My daughter is battling her cough and cold, son is handling quite some changes and wife trying to get busy at something while sitting at home on maternity.

Been about two months since I have done any serious blogging. Got a little too busy I guess, both at work and at home. Yes doing many things and nothing really exceptionally fruitful personally though. For a project requirement I was exploring some distributed filesystems. And hit upon GlusterFS, for which the installation documentation said it will work just by doing apt-get on Ubuntu 10.04, and well jumped in my seat. And just did that. [sourcecode] # apt-get install glusterfs-* [/sourcecode]

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I hope some of you who have been following me are as anxious to know what happened, than I was to find the solution to this euca-bundle-vol issue. Well it has worked eventually thanks to this forum post. I know there is enough information there but I will still write what I did, in more detail. And I was suprised that it wasn't documented by now. At least I did not find it till now. So here we go.

I have done this an Karmic server instance, running on the Karmic UEC. There must be similar steps for CentOS and Fedora which I guess someone will leave a comment on.

The catch it seems is to download the latest euca2ools, and it worked magic, thanks Kiran for pointing me to the forum post and I hope this post will help you in you manual preparation for UEC.

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