Automatic elastic cloud scaling – even across different platforms? Zimory seems to make this easy. This morning I had a chance to speak with Ruediger “Rudy” Baumann, Zimory CEO to learn more about what they offer, and where they fit in. From what I learned they have something that is unique.

From a high level the solution provides the ability to scale an Oracle database across cloud based MySQL instances. By this I mean that you can now automate replicating your Oracle data across MySQL instances – and have a layer that will sort which queries need to continue to hit the master (complex triggers and such) and which ones (60% average on current deployments) can now go directly to the new MySQL instances. Even better is when the load goes up new satellite servers are spun up automatically.

I will post more after I have an opportunity to play with it more.

» Continue reading “Interesting take on elastic cloud: Zimory”

Avi Kapuya, from xEround, has posted a great article that helps with the decision process, well part of it, of moving your MySQL database to the cloud. Now with that said I am sure that this article will clear some of the smoke away and many will truly see the complexity of moving your database to the cloud, which is a good thing in my mind. All to often people I talk with oversimplify ”moving to the cloud”, and talk of it like it is just a matter of moving your servers around.

What Avi’s article does is to present the value of looking at a database as a service. The reason that we move to the cloud is to keep thing simple, keep costs down, and to ease complexity. These are exactly the points that I feel a database as a service reaches.

Move Your MySQL Database to the Cloud: DYI or Database Service? | Xeround MySQL Cloud Database Blog http://bit.ly/fwoCOr

I received this email from Amazon this morning.

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We’re excited to introduce AWS CloudFormation, a new service that gives developers and businesses an easy way to create a collection of AWS resources and provision them in an orderly and predictable fashion. Customers can use AWS CloudFormation sample templates or create their own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run their application. CloudFormation takes care of provisioning your resources for you. AWS CloudFormation can be accessed via the AWS Management Console, CloudFormation command line tools or APIs. The service is available at no additional charge and customers pay only for the AWS resources required to run the application. To get started using AWS CloudFormation, visit http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/.

AWS CloudFormation templates can be used to repeatedly create identical copies of the same AWS infrastructure stack, removing the need for developers to manually recreate an applications stack for each deployment. With AWS CloudFormation, users describe “what” resources are needed and AWS CloudFormation takes care of “how” and in what order those resources are provisioned. For example, AWS CloudFormation templates concisely capture resource relationships, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that must be associated with an Elastic Load Balancer, or an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume that must be in the same Amazon EC2 Availability Zone.

AWS CloudFormation can be used across multiple AWS Availability Zones to configure a wide range of AWS resources including Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics.

To learn more about AWS CloudFormation, visit the AWS CloudFormation detail page or the Getting Started Guide.

Sincerely,

The Amazon Web Services Team

Yves Trudeau has written a great 5 part article on setting up a high availability MySQL environment on Amazon’s EC2 platform. Here are the break downs for the 5 parts:

1. Part 1 – Intro (this post)
2. Part 2 – Setting up the initial instances
3. Part 3 – Configuring the HA resources
4. Part 4 – The instance restart script
5. Part 5 – The instance monitoring script
6. Part 6 – Publishing the MySQL server location
7. Part 7 – Pitfalls to avoid

SkySQL is now open for business (www.skysql.com). There are no officially posted plans for cloud based offerings as of yet, but there seem to be many rumors, and articles about this.

For full discloser: I am part of SkySQL. I have joined the team, which is made up of several of the original co-founders of MySQL as well as several former MySQL employees.

I think the big play here is that SkySQL is bringing MySQL back to where the company was when organizations first made the choice to use MySQL as the foundation for their applications. Over the past two changing of the guards for MySQL (Sun then Oracle) there has been some concern heard, and felt, from the user base. These concerns have mostly been around what does the future hold for MySQL: drastic price changes, changes in community version roll-outs, availability? This is where SkySQL can ease these concerns. With a team who all have a background in Open Source, and more than understand the value of the community, I think this new entity is well suited to step in and be a major player in the space.

Next week Kaj Arno will be hosting a webcast on the State of the MySQL Community.  If you are at all interested in this I highly suggest that you attend: http://bit.ly/aP5DP9

Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL, has just been appointed the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. I have a feeling that this means that many more people will become familiar with this company in a hurry.

I has been so long since my last post I read it and it seemed like something that someone else had written. I quite enjoyed that. What really resonated for me was that just this morning I had a meeting about how we can work to have a cloud based product leverage the existing value that a CDN delivers. This meeting seemed like we were talking about something all new…that was until I read the article that I had posted on April, 09 of last year talking about just that.

This gave me mixed feelings on whether I was just ahead of myself last year, or were things just moving one year slower that I had expected. I think the latter is the most plausible.

All of that said I am making a commitment to keep more engaged in the cloud, and to be more active in the community.

Again in my hunt for data about the cost of using cloud over being in-house, or using traditional hosting, I found what appears to be a very cool tool that will help you calculate the ROI of moving to the cloud. Now this application is specific to Amazon AWS it should provide solid ball parks for other vendors as well.

Check it out here: Aptio

I found this concise posting about the pros and cons of cloud computing, while I have been working on a posting that will cover some of the same issues in detail.

Have a look: http://www.techsailor.com

I my day to day work I am solely focused on providing solutions to my customers that will increase the performance of their web applications. Most people don’t need to see much data to understand that the better your application performs the better received/used/sales will be. Most organizations now have done about as much as they can, or know what needs to be done, to get top performance from their applications, and one item that is left to be addressed is latency. And this is where the CDNs can be the knights on white horses.

The combonation of CDN and Cloud just makes sense. You have all of the inherent value of moving to the cloud (scale, price, capacity at hand..) and the ability to move your content closer to your users. Well Mosso has really raised the bar in this space with their partnership with Limeight Networks with their Cloud Files offering. This is a huge leap in this space because it combines the leaders in two spaces; Mosso in Cloud, and Limelight in CDN. While other cloud offerings have been trying to simulate, or recreate CDNs, they have mostly failed due to the lack of proper infrastructure. Amazon for instance has one of the slowest time to first-byte times of any “CDN” out there.

This shows that Mosso understands that to offer solution to customers that in some cases you must partner with the best in the space. This also shows how, in my view, to use the cloud. There is not one vendor who makes ALL the needed tools, but there can be a vendor who ties them all together, and makes it easy to use every tool in the box!

This morning I read an interesting post on how to connect Cloud Files with the PHP API.