a journey to the darker side
Cloud Computing
of
by Matthew McCullough

Matthew
McCu llough

?
20 mi n
? mi n
15 min
? min
10 min
min

➊
A brief History

1960

“computation may
someday be organized as a
public utility”
-John McCarthy

Shared Time

circa 2006

“It starts with the premise that the data services
and architecture should be on servers. We call it
cloud computing – they should be in a
“cloud” somewhere.”
-Eric Schmidt

SaaS

Virtualized Servers
with an API

➋
What is the Cloud?

“
A style of computing in which
dynamically scalable and
often virtualized resources are
provided as a service over the
Internet.
-NIST (draft)

“
[Developers] need not have
knowledge of, expertise in, or
control over the technology
infrastructure in the cloud
that supports them.
-Aggregate of Tim O’Reilly, Luis M.Vaquero

Scalable

Dynamic

Pay-per-use

Minimal state

Affinity-less

Scale up

Scale down

Grid?

➌
Why the Cloud?

Cost of startup

Experimentation

Transition to
Production

No licensing fees

Instant availability

What’s the most
expensive item on a
startup’s balance sheet?

You!

Time savings

Hardware setup time

OS setup time

Database setup time

Web container setup time

Server setup

Server destruction

❹
Cloud Players

From most open to
most constrained

Rackspace Cloud Sites
Rackspace Cloud Servers

Amazon EC2

Google App Engine

Levels of
Abstraction

Operating System
Images

Predetermined

or abstracted away

Programming
languages?

Anything?

PHP?

Python?

Java?

File Systems

Rackspace Cloud
Traditional File System

Amazon EC2
Elastic Block Storage

Mor.ph
Traditional File System

Google App Engine
None

Datastores

Amazon EC2
Simple DB

Google App Engine
Big Table

Operating
Systems

Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu
on Rackspace Cloud

Windows Server
on Amazon EC2

1000 variants of Linux
on Amazon EC2

CentOS Linux
on Mor.ph

Custom Linux
on Google App Engine

Pricing

Rackspace Cloud

1.5¢ per hour

Amazon EC2

Google App Engine

We’ll give it away free
and make up for it in
volume!

Google
❺
App Engine

April 8th, 2008

Google AppEngine

Python

April 7th, 2009

Java!

But more like

Banned
⅘
Java

Getting Started with
GAE

Free to start

Cell Phone #

Regular Google
Account

10,000: first wave

95 minutes

25,000: second wave

Everyone: third wave

Technology Stack

SDK

Shell scripts to manage
apps

Source code included

SDK-version-locked
by the SDK JARs you
include

Subset of JDK 1.6

Custom Class Loaders

Sandbox

Whitelist of Classes

Caution!

Might work on desktop,
but not on GAE

Application ID

Globally Unique

required for
deployment

___.appspot.com

Servlet API

Jetty

JSPs

Java Mail API

Google Web Toolkit

Authentication
(2 options)

Integration with
Google Accounts

Admin & User Level
Permissions

Roll your own
(hint: use SpringSecurity)

Memcache
(as an alternative to persistent disk storage)

Low level API

JSR-107 / JCache
(javax.cache)

BigTable

Relational Database?

Relational Database

Can import from
existing DB

JDO

JPA

Low level BigTable API

Limited GORM-JPA

DataNucleus

Logging

java.util.logging

System.out == info
System.err == warning

Log4j

❻
Dark Clouds

a few GAE NOs

No Hibernate

No file writing

No threads

No server affinity

Even for sequential
requests

No sockets

But... you can use URLFetch
for HTTP/HTTPS resources

No JNI

No more than 30s

common Concerns

Large Setups more
economical to self-host

Out of your hands

Uptime?

Do you trust the
vendor?

Databases without
foreign keys is a new
frontier

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that
we’ve redefined cloud computing to include
everything that we already do... Maybe I’m an
idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about...
It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is
this idiocy going to stop?
-Larry Ellison

a journey to the darker side of
Cloud Computing

Code Examples
http://github.com/matthewmccullough
Twitter
@matthewmccull
Email
matthewm@ambientideas.com
Blog
http://www.ambientideas.com/blog
sidebar has my social networking profile links

Resources
• http://mor.ph
• http://appengine.google.com
• http://www.rackspacecloud.com/
cloud_hosting_products/servers
(formerly http://mosso.com)
• http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Resources
• http://www.browsermob.com
• http://highscalability.com/
• http://highscalability.com/useful-cloud-computing-
blogs
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=ri796Hx8las&feature=channel

Photo Credits
• www.ambientideasphotography.com [clouds]
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scientist)
• http://www.nga.org/Images/AM07SAT09HIRES.JPG
• All others purchased through iStockPhoto.com