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Articles :
www.makeuseof.com | Manage Your Files & Collaborate Across Different Cloud Apps With HojokiPage 1 www.makeuseof.com | Linux Distros For The Paranoid: What Are The Most Secure Distros? www.makeuseof.com | 10 Famous Geeks Who Changed The World (Not Who You Think) www.h-online.com | Leap second: Linux can freeze www.phoronix.com | [Phoronix] Old X Drivers Get Updated, GPU Hot-Plug Refreshed techblog.netflix.com | Asgard: Web-based Cloud Management and Deployment www.zdnet.com | IBM: Open source is not winning the war in virtualization, cloud ... yet www.theregister.co.uk|RedHat:Keepcloudsopen,likeLinuxTheRegister

www.informationweek.com | Red Hat Shifts Into Gear With OpenShift - Cloud-computing - Platform as a Service Page 26

makeuseof.com

July 3, 2012
By Simon Slangen

Manage Your Files & Collaborate Across Different Cloud Apps With Hojoki
ther player to the field. Rather, it caters to users of a wide variety of cloud apps, and allows collaboration across different services. When you create an account on Hojoki, you can connect with a wide variety of other cloud services including (but not limited to), Dropbox, Evernote, Twitter, GitHub, Cloud App, Google Drive, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and BaseCamp. In fact, Hojoki has announced they will try to add compatibility with three new apps each month, and you can vote on your favorites.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/manage-files-collaborate-cloud-apps-hojoki/

eplacing local files and software with online applications can be a smart move. It makes your files available on the go, preserves them if your computer decides to go haywire, and makes it easier to share and to collaborate. One of the most important downsides of relying on the cloud is that your data and your online relations can become fragmented across different services. Once youve accumulated a handful or so of these cloud-based services, it becomes increasingly easy to lose sight of important files and connections. Here to save the day is Hojoki, your friendly robot secretary in the cloud. The irony of using a cloud service to manage an overflow of cloud services is not lost on me, but Hojokis plan is not to add ano-

Once Hojoki is set up, a newsfeed will be created based on your different cloud apps, where updates are posted whenever anything is added or updated in your cloud. Text and images can often be viewed inline. If not, Hojoki usually adds a direct link to the original. While this chronological overview is very useful, especially for collaborating with other people, Hojokis true potential becomes obvious when managing specific bits of your data in the cloud.

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makeuseof.com

July 3, 2012

Manage Your Files & Collaborate Across Different Cloud Apps With Hojoki

Workspaces
Workspaces are used in Hojoki to centralize connected data thats spread across different services. For example, you could group your work calendar, a folder from your Dropbox, and your professional contacts in an office workspace, and bundle kitchen recipes from Evernote and Google Docs in another.

As was mentioned above, comments can be added to any file in the stream. If the file was not previously in a workspace, a separate one will be created upon commenting. These comments will only be visible to other users sharing the same workspace, though.

If a file was not previously in any workspace, but you think its relevant, you can add a file specifically without having to add a new feed to the workspace. You can do this by clicking the share button below a file, and selecting one or multiple workspaces. These workspaces can be used to centralize and manage your personal data, but also to collaborate with other people that are using Hojoki. If youre sharing a workspace with your friends or coworkers, others can manually add relevant files to the stream, and add comments to the content. How do you manage your files on the cloud and keep track of your online presence across cloud applications?

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/manage-files-collaborate-cloud-apps-hojoki/

Search, Share & Communicate


Since Hojoki connects with all those different services, you can use it to search across all of your data in the cloud. Hojokis search is remarkably responsive, with search-as-you-type results. This is an invaluable feature for me, personally.

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makeuseof.com

July 3, 2012
By Danny Stieben

Linux Distros For The Paranoid: What Are The Most Secure Distros?
plenty that focus specifically on hardcore security. But which are the most secure Linux distribution?

Tails

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-distros-paranoid-secure-distros-si/

f youre a Linux user, security was probably one of the benefits that made you switch from whatever operating system you were using before. Linux has a great reputation for being one tough nut to crack, and it lives up to that reputation daily. Users dont have to worry about viruses or other malware to the point where anti-virus tools made for Linux actually sniff out Windows viruses to help fight their spread. None of those viruses can affect Linux, and barely any are actually made for Linux. Even then, they will have a very tough time doing any damage. However, when secure isnt good enough, you will want the best of the best. With so many distributions out there in the world to choose from, there are

One distribution I can immediately recommend is Tails. Short for The Amnesic Incognito Live System, Tails is great because it remains extremely usable despite its focus on security. It also doesnt just focus on a secure operating system, but it makes sure that everything you do on it is as secure as reasonably possible. The distribution is based on Debians stable branch, which is known for its great stability and security (although somewhat old software). It shouldnt matter though if the software is older, as it should still do what you need it to do, safely. Tails only runs in a live environment, which is another good security feature because it completely wipes any traces on the computer you used once you shut down or restart.

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makeuseof.com
Linux Distros For The Paranoid: What Are The Most Secure Distros?

July 3, 2012

Tails comes with a load of software to cater to every need you may have. This includes a customized Firefox browser (branded as Iceweasel because Tails is Debian-based) which uses the Tor network out-ofthe-box. Firefox in Tails also includes other extensions to make browsing as secure as possible with HTTPS Everywhere and NoScript. Tails also comes with Claws Mail with OpenPGP support, Pidgin with OTR encryption support, and editing tools like GIMP and OpenOffice.

to use Encryption Wizard which can aid you in your quest for privacy and security. Since this is a brainchild of the US Air Force, I would trust using it. Like Tails, it runs only in a live environment, and disappears along with any traces as soon as you shut down or reboot.

Surprise!

LPS

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-distros-paranoid-secure-distros-si/

Another good distribution is Lightweight Portable Security, or LPS for short. This distribution is maintained by the US Air Force, and is as far as I know the only distribution coming from the American government (or in this case, military). Its not uncommon for countries to produce their own Linux distributions, as China has Red Flag Linux and Turkey has Pardus. This distribution is special because it takes a more minimalistic approach. Aside from the usual hardened code, it uses a lightweight desktop environment that resembles Windows XP, and only includes Firefox and a few additional tools. It also has an easy

Last but not least, your common run-of-the-mill distribution is also among the most secure. Surprised? You shouldnt be. Although Ubuntu, Fedora, and the like arent equipped out-of-the-box to give you a secure experience like Tails is, the operating system itself is secure enough to satisfy most peoples needs. All you really need to do is keep it updated with available patches via the distributions Update Manager, and add some programs like Tor or OpenPGP that will make your usage a little more secure. However, in terms of systems being compromised through attacks, your favorite distribution will do the job just fine. In fact, in a hacking competition, Windows and Mac OS X machines were defeated while an Ubuntu machine was still chugging away.

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makeuseof.com
Linux Distros For The Paranoid: What Are The Most Secure Distros?

July 3, 2012

Conclusion
Of course there are plenty of other distributions that are worthy of a mention, but there are simply too many to name specifically. I might have also forgotten a few that definitely should be mentioned, but Im sure you can remind me in the comments below. Just be aware that there is a difference between security distributions and secure distributions. Backtrack Linux is an example of a security distribution while the ones I mentioned above are secure distributions. Do you regularly use secure distributions or software such as Tor? What have you been using so far? Let us know in the comments!

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-distros-paranoid-secure-distros-si/

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makeuseof.com

July 3, 2012
By Saikat Basu

10 Famous Geeks Who Changed The World (Not Who You Think)
Alan Turing

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-famous-geeks-changed-world/

f I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants. So, said the genius called Isaac Newton. What was true of one of the most brilliant minds of history should be true of every one of the esteemed people on this list. The number ten is just a minuscule figure for a lineup that is supposed to be of famous geeks who changed the world, but so it is here for the sake of keeping this list brief. The only underlying logic I can offer in my defense is that this geek list is of people whom you might not recognize if you bumped into them at the neighborhood mall. No Page 3 names here. And so no Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, or Mark Zuckerberg.

Famous Geekiness: The Turing Machine in second place. His effect on the outcome of The Second World War in the first. (Wikipedia) The day I wrote this article was Alan Turings birthday and Google honored him with a special doodle. Why? Because the famous cipher breaker is regarded as the Father of Computer Science. He also made a lasting contribution to the ideas about artificial intelligence. The Turing Machine was the forefather of the modern computer algorithm. It

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makeuseof.com
10 Famous Geeks Who Changed The World (Not Who You Think)

July 3, 2012

is a hypothetical model that explains the logic of computational logic or can be even used to explain a CPU. Think of it as the simplest computer of its kind. Interesting fact: He was criminally prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952. He committed suicide in 1954. Gordon Brown issued a public apology in 2009.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf

Famous Geekiness: Proposed and gave form to the Internet we know today in a paper titled A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection.(Wikipedia Link1 & Link2) From the father of computer science, to the men considered to be one of the Fathers of The Internet. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, thought of and created the TCP/IP suite of communication protocols that is the virtual backbone of the Internet. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol for the first time enabled diverse range of computers and networks to talk with one another, truly creating a global connection.

Famous Geekiness: Invented the World Wide Web. (Wikipedia) While working at CERN he proposed the idea of hypertext that would allow researchers to share information across the Internet in the form of hypertext documents. What was meant to be a way for information interchange between scientists, became a global interconnected network, the Web we know today. Tim Berners-Lee also created the first browser, the first web editor, and the first website at CERN. Interesting Fact: His father Conway Berners-Lee and mother Mary Lee Woods both worked on the development of Ferranti Mark 1, the worlds first commercial electronic computer.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-famous-geeks-changed-world/

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makeuseof.com
10 Famous Geeks Who Changed The World (Not Who You Think)

July 3, 2012

Ralph H. Baer

letter writing. The email had humble beginnings when it was sent from one machine to another that was next to it. Later other mail handling protocols were established and email rapidly evolved as a form of communication. Interesting fact: The @ symbol was used by Ray Tomlinson to tell which user was at what computer in the building they were all in.

Dennis Ritchie

Famous Geekiness: Video games pioneer, considered to be the Father of Video Games for his contributions. (Wikipedia) Ralph H. Baer developed the Brown Box (later the Magnavox Odyssey), the first home video game console. He also created the first light gun and brought in cartridges as part of console games. He almost single-handedly gave birth to what today is a multi-billion dollar industry. Interesting fact: Ralph H. Baer was a television engineer by profession and later also created the classic Simon for Mattel.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-famous-geeks-changed-world/

Ray Tomlinson
Famous Geekiness: Creator of email. (Wikipedia) Just when Internet was coming into being via its predecessor, the ARPANET in 1971, Ray Tomlinson created something that in time made postmen worry about their future and us forget about the art of

Famous Geekiness: Created the C programming language and the UNIX operating system (with Ken Thompson). (Wikipedia) How significant was the development of C? Let me quote a magazine article that said the shoulders Steve Jobs stood on. Unlike Steve Jobs he died almost

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makeuseof.com
10 Famous Geeks Who Changed The World (Not Who You Think)

July 3, 2012

unnoticed and unsung. The importance of C is that it can be used to code without worrying about the hardware platform. It is the core of many operating systems from Mac OS X to iOS and Android. Many hardware drivers are written in C. As the geeky saying goes real men code in C. Interesting fact: Dennis Ritchie along with Brian Kernighan authored the The C Programming Language, the most definitive book on the topic. They were the first to introduce the Hello World program which continues to be used as an example first program by everyone.

Shawn Fanning

Jarkko Oikarinen
Famous Geekiness: Created IRC, the oldest multichat protocol in the world. (Wikipedia) Nokia isnt the only thing Finland should be famous for. In 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen created the Internet Relay Chat. IRC was the worlds first real-time chat protocol. It is still going strong with thousands of networks and IRC servers around the world. IRC clients are available for every operating system and todays IRC clients unlike their text-only predecessors also allow file sharing.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-famous-geeks-changed-world/

Famous Geekiness: Started Napster and possibly the digital music sharing revolution. (Wikipedia) What started as a peer-to-peer file sharing service in 1998 arguably set off the digital music revolution and popularity of MP3 songs. Napster was shut down in 2001 after a series of lawsuits by music majors. Napster popularized the P2P model and it was one of the first platforms where indie singers and underground music could make its name. Shawn Fanning is a college dropout and he set up Napster along with John Fanning and Sean Parker. Interesting fact: Napster was named after Shawn Fannings frizzy haircut (nappy).

Interesting fact: Both during the Gulf War and the 1991 Soviet coup dtat attempt, IRC was the one tool that managed to defeat the media blackouts and report from the ground.

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makeuseof.com
10 Famous Geeks Who Changed The World (Not Who You Think)

July 3, 2012

Bram Cohen

Michael Hart

Famous Geekiness: Created BitTorrent. (Wikipedia) You might have heard about BitTorrent but not about Bram Cohen. The American computer programmer wrote the peer-to-peer protocol which enables us to share files of any type simultaneously with other users around the world. He also programmed the BitTorrent client. Interesting fact: Bram Cohen suffers from Aspergers Syndrome which affects the physical and social abilities of a person. Famous Geekiness: Creator of the electronic book (eBook). (Wikipedia) Michael Hart is probably the least geeky person on this list, but his contribution is profound and could be more so as knowledge expands and spreads. Thanks to eBooks. He is also the founder of Project Gutenberg that makes available books out of copyright (Public Domain) and some copyrighted works that are available with express permission. Project Gutenberg can also be thought of as the worlds first online public library. Interesting fact: He typed in by hand the first 300+ books made available on Project Gutenberg. Though he made knowledge freely available, he died in poverty. Here, you might shout about the usual suspects. No Jack Dorsey (creator of Twitter), no Jeff Bezos (Ama-

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-famous-geeks-changed-world/

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makeuseof.com
10 Famous Geeks Who Changed The World (Not Who You Think)

July 3, 2012

zon), and no Linus Torvalds (Linux). Its almost as if I pulled out random names from a hat. Probably thats why I didnt get an Ada Lovelace or an Al Gore either. But thats the problem with lists. It has to end somewhere and you cant put everyone on it. I really wanted to put Matt Mullenweg here because he is one of the reasons you are reading this post here. He developed WordPress after all. So, whos your name on the list? We are listening. Image Credit: VIP in silver letters via Shutterstock

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-famous-geeks-changed-world/

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h-online.com

2 July 2012, 11:42

Leap second: Linux can freeze


In view of the recurring leap second disruptions in its own server farms, Google took the motto prevention is better than cure to heart and established a leap smear process: using modified NTP servers, Google ensures that every NTP update on the day of the leap second inserts a few milliseconds that add up to a second by the time the leap second is actually inserted. Such minor system time differences are usually tolerated by operating systems. (fab)

he leap second that was inserted on Saturday night can cause permanent high CPU loads on Linux computers. Among other examples, the behaviour is documented in the blog of the Mozilla Foundation, where strange peak loads on one Mozilla server were observed from the time the leap second was added. The developers said that the problem is easily solved by resetting the date or rebooting the system. The root of the behaviour is located in the Linux kernel, where a leap second that is triggered by the NTP subsystem results in a deadlock situation. The problem appears to affect all kernel versions from 2.6.26 up to and including 3.3. The current release of the Debian Linux distribution (Squeeze) seems to be affected by the problem in a similar way to the Mozilla servers. In a post mortem analysis at serverfault.com, the authors write that several computers at a data centre no longer responded to pings and displayed a blank screen after the leap second was inserted. System administrators were reported to have saved the day by stopping the NTP daemon and executing a Perl script that reset the leap second bit in the kernel. Initially it was believed that this problem was related to a similar leap second bug that occurred in the Linux kernel in 2009; that is not the case, however. A developer by the name of John Stultz, who is involved with the development of the timer functions in the Linux kernel has now analysed the problem and is working on two patches.

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Leap-second-Linux-can-freeze-1629805.html

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phoronix.com

03/07/2012 14:12

[Phoronix] Old X Drivers Get Updated, GPU Hot-Plug Refreshed


Posted by Michael Larabel on July 02, 2012
David Airlie has started out the week by putting out new releases for several of the vintage X.Org graphics drivers as well as publishing his very latest GPU hot-plug / PRIME stack, which is now 36 patches against the X.Org Server. The driver updates to kick off Monday morning include: - xf86-video-cirrus 1.5.0 - xf86-video-ast 0.96.0 - xf86-video-mga 1.6.0 - xf86-video-mach64 6.9.2 - xf86-video-r128 6.8.3 The changes for these vintage DDX drivers mostly come down to porting them to use the new X.Org Server compatibility API so that they will build and function against the to-be-released X.Org Server 1.13. These old drivers wont benefit from the GPU hot-plugging / PRIME support and other features, but they will continue to function on the latest X.Org Server. The DDX driver updates for Cirrus, AST, and MGA also make them not bind to the hardware when their new KMS drivers are loaded. The Cirrus/AST/ MGA DDX drivers will not be made compatible with their new basic KMS driver alternatives that are now mainline in the Linux kernel, but the generic xf86-video-modesetting driver is whats intended to be used for kernel mode-setting on these old server GPU chips. With those drivers not binding to the hardware, the system wont go awry when the DRM/KMS drivers are loaded and have already mode-set the hardware. The Cirrus/AST/MGA X.Org drivers are likely on their last leg now having been succeeded by the KMS alternative and these drivers werent even actively developed in recent years. David Airlie has also posted the gpu hotplug stack refresh. This is 36 patches against the X.Org Server that hes hoping to mainline soon -- ideally in time for X.Org Server 1.13. Right now Airlie is waiting for more developers to review these changes, particularly when it comes to the API. The 36 patches add DDX GPU screen support, udev/ DRM hot-plug call-backs, an autoAddGPU option for the xorg.conf, RandR provider property support, auto-loading xf86-video-modesetting on hot-plug event, support for linking output slave GPUs to the current main GPU, pixmap sharing infrastructure, offload slave tracking, and the initial PRIME support for DRI2 off-loading. For more information on that recent work, see the Phoronix articles about RandR 1.5 and PRIME for GPU offloading within the X.Org Server.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEzMTU

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techblog.netflix.com

Monday, June 25, 2012


Joe Sondow

Asgard: Web-based Cloud Management and Deployment


By Joe Sondow, Engineering Tools For the past several years Netflix developers have been using self-service tools to build and deploy hundreds of applications and services to the Amazon cloud. One of those tools is Asgard, a web interface for application deployments and cloud management. Asgard is named for the home of the Norse god of thunder and lightning, because Asgard is where Netflix developers go to control the clouds. Im happy to announce that Asgard has now been open sourced on github and is available for download and use by anyone. All youll need is an Amazon Web Services account. Like other open source Netflix projects, Asgard is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Please feel free to fork the project and make improvements to it. Some of the information in this blog post is also published in the following presentations. Note that Asgard was originally named the Netflix Application Console, or NAC.

Cloud Model
The Netflix cloud model includes concepts that AWS does not support directly: Applications and Clusters.

Application
Below is a diagram of some of the Amazon objects required to run a single front-end application such as Netflixs autocomplete service.

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/06/asgard-web-based-cloud-management-and.html

Visual Language for the Cloud


To help people identify various types of cloud entities, Asgard uses the Tango open source icon set, with a few additions. These icons help establish a visual language to help people understand what they are looking at as they navigate. Tango icons look familiar because they are also used by Jenkins, Ubuntu, Mediawiki, Filezilla, and Gimp. Here is a sampling of Asgards cloud icons.

Heres a quick summary of the relationships of these cloud objects.

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techblog.netflix.com
Asgard: Web-based Cloud Management and Deployment

Monday, June 25, 2012

An Auto Scaling Group (ASG) can attach zero or more Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) to new instances. An ELB can send user traffic to instances. An ASG can launch and terminate instances. For each instance launch, an ASG uses a Launch Configuration. The Launch Configuration specifies which Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and which Security Groups to use when launching an instance. The AMI contains all the bits that will be on each instance, including the operating system, common infrastructure such as Apache and Tomcat, and a specific version of a specific Application. Security Groups can restrict the traffic sources and ports to the instances. Thats a lot of stuff to keep track of for one application. When there are large numbers of those cloud objects in a service-oriented architecture (like Netflix has), its important for a user to be able to find all the relevant objects for their particular application. Asgard uses an application registry in SimpleDB and naming conventions to associate multiple cloud objects with a single application. Each application has an owner and an email address to establish who is responsible for the existence and state of the applications associated cloud objects. Asgard limits the set of permitted characters in the application name so that the names of other cloud objects can be parsed to determine their association with an application. Here is a screenshot of Asgard showing a filtered subset of the applications running in our production account in the Amazon cloud in the us-east-1

region:

Screenshot of a detail screen for a single application, with links to related cloud objects:

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/06/asgard-web-based-cloud-management-and.html

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techblog.netflix.com
Asgard: Web-based Cloud Management and Deployment

Monday, June 25, 2012

Cluster
On top of the Auto Scaling Group construct supplied by Amazon, Asgard infers an object called a Cluster which contains one or more ASGs. The ASGs are associated by naming convention. When a new ASG is created within a cluster, an incremented version number is appended to the clusters base name to form the name of the new ASG. The Cluster provides Asgard users with the ability to perform a deployment that can be rolled back quickly. Example: During a deployment, cluster obiwan contains ASGs obiwan-v063 and obiwanv064. Here is a screenshot of a cluster in mid-deployment.

Deployment Methods

Fast Rollback
One of the primary features of Asgard is the ability to use the cluster screen shown above to deploy a new version of an application in a way that can be reversed at the first sign of trouble. This method requires more instances to be in use during deployment, but it can greatly reduce the duration of service outages caused by bad deployments. This animated diagram shows a simplified process of using the Cluster interface to try out a deployment and roll it back quickly when there is a problem:

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/06/asgard-web-based-cloud-management-and.html

The old ASG is disabled meaning it is not taking traffic but remains available in case a problem occurs with the new ASG. Traffic comes from ELBs and/or from Discovery, an internal Netflix service that is not yet open sourced.

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techblog.netflix.com
Asgard: Web-based Cloud Management and Deployment

Monday, June 25, 2012

cluster. Downsides to a rolling push: 1. Replacing instances in small batches can take a long time. 2. Reversing a bad deployment can take a long time.

Task Automation
Several common tasks are built into Asgard to automate the deployment process. Here is an animation showing a time-compressed view of a 14-minute automated rolling push in action:

The animation illustrates the following deployment use case: 1. Create the new ASG obiwan-v064 2. Enable traffic to obiwan-v064 3. Disable traffic on obiwan-v063 4. Monitor results and notice that things are going badly 5. Re-enable traffic on obiwan-v063 6. Disable traffic on obiwan-v064 7. Analyze logs on bad servers to diagnose problems 8. Delete obiwan-v064

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/06/asgard-web-based-cloud-management-and.html

Rolling Push
Asgard also provides an alternative deployment system called a rolling push. This is similar to a conventional data center deployment of a cluster on application servers. Only one ASG is needed. Old instances get gracefully deleted and replaced by new instances one or two at a time until all the instances in the ASG have been replaced. Rolling pushes are useful: 1. If an ASGs instances are sharded so each instance has a distinct purpose that should not be duplicated by another instance. 2. If the clustering mechanisms of the application (such as Cassandra) cannot support sudden increases in instance count for the

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techblog.netflix.com
Asgard: Web-based Cloud Management and Deployment

Monday, June 25, 2012

Auto Scaling
Netflix focuses on the ASG as the primary unit of deployment, so Asgard also provides a variety of graphical controls for modifying an ASG and setting up metrics-driven auto scaling when desired.

Hide the Amazon keys


Netflix grants its employees a lot of freedom and responsibility, including the rights and duties of enhancing and repairing production systems. Most of those systems run in the Amazon cloud. Although we want to enable hundreds of engineers to manage their own cloud apps, we prefer not to give all of them the secret keys to access the companys Amazon accounts directly. Providing an internal console allows us to grant Asgard users access to our Amazon accounts without telling too many employees the shared cloud passwords. This strategy also saves us from needing to assign and revoke hundreds of Identity and Access Management (IAM) cloud accounts for employees.

Auto Scaling Groups


http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/06/asgard-web-based-cloud-management-and.html

CloudWatch metrics can be selected from the default provided by Amazon such as CPUUtilization, or can be custom metrics published by your application using a library like Servo for Java.

As of this writing the AWS Management Console lacks support for Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs). Netflix relies on ASGs as the basic unit of deployment and management for instances of our applications. One of our goals in open sourcing Asgard is to help other Amazon customers make greater use of Amazons sophisticated auto scaling features. ASGs are a big part of the Netflix formula to provide reliability, redundancy, cost savings, clustering, discoverability, ease of deployment, and the ability to roll back a bad deployment quickly.

Why not the AWS Management Console?


The AWS Management Console has its uses for someone with your Amazon account password who needs to configure something Asgard does not provide. However, for everyday large-scale operations, the AWS Management Console has not yet met the needs of the Netflix cloud usage model, so we built Asgard instead. Here are some of the reasons.

Enforce Conventions
Like any growing collection of things users are allowed to create, the cloud can easily become a confusing place full of expensive, unlabeled clutter. Part of the Netflix Cloud Architecture is the use of registered services associated with cloud objects by naming convention. Asgard enforces these naming

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techblog.netflix.com
Asgard: Web-based Cloud Management and Deployment

Monday, June 25, 2012

conventions in order to keep the cloud a saner place that is possible to audit and clean up regularly as things get stale, messy, or forgotten.

Costs
Starting up Asgard does not initially cause you to incur any Amazon charges, because Amazon has a free tier for SimpleDB usage and no charges for creating Security Groups, Launch Configurations, or empty Auto Scaling Groups. However, as soon as you increase the size of an ASG above zero Amazon will begin charging you for instance usage, depending on your status for Amazons Free Usage Tier. Creating ELBs, RDS instances, and other cloud objects can also cause you to incur charges. Become familiar with the costs before creating too many things in the cloud, and remember to delete your experiments as soon as you no longer need them. Your Amazon costs are your own responsibility, so run your cloud operations wisely.

Logging
So far the AWS console does not expose a log of recent user actions on an account. This makes it difficult to determine whom to call when a problem starts, and what recent changes might relate to the problem. Lack of logging is also a non-starter for any sensitive subsystems that legally require auditability.

Integrate Systems
Having our own console empowers us to decide when we want to add integration points with our other engineering systems such as Jenkins and our internal Discovery service.

Feature Films Conclusion


Asgard has been one of the primary tools for application deployment and cloud management at Netflix for years. By releasing Asgard to the open source community we hope more people will find the Amazon cloud and Auto Scaling easier to work with, even at large scale like Netflix. More Asgard features will be released regularly, and we welcome participation by users on GitHub. If youre interested in working with us to solve more of these interesting problems, have a look at the Netflix jobs page to see if something might suit you. Were hiring!

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/06/asgard-web-based-cloud-management-and.html

Automate Workflow
Multiple steps go into a safe, intelligent deployment process. By knowing certain use cases in advance Asgard can perform all the necessary steps for a deployment based on one form submission.

Simplify REST API


For common operations that other systems need to perform, we can expose and publish our own REST API to do exactly what we want in a way that hides some of the complex steps from the user.

Related Resources
Asgard Netflix Cloud Platform Amazon Web Services

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03/07/2012 14:12

IBM: Open source is not winning the war in virtualization, cloud ... yet

O
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/ibm-open-source-is-not-winning-the-war-in-virtualization-cloud-yet/11347

pen source is driving much of the innovation in the tech sector but there are key challenges in virtualization, cloud and big data, one IBM exec observed during his keynote at the Red Hat Summit tonight. We have to get to open virtualization. There is still a lot of churn in this world and when it comes back to virtualization and the cloud, too many people are trying to control the pieces. A VM is not a VM is not a VM. There are too many variations and clients are struggling with that. KVM here is very important, said IBM Vice President Robert LeBlanc, about the open source hypervisor incorporated in Linux and backed by Red Hat. Open virtualization is not winning the war of virtualization. Other innovations are pushing the envelope faster than KVM and we need to bring it to the next level, he said, noting that IBM helped Dutch Cloud move from VMware to a KVM-based infrastructure and the ROI is impressive. An open cloud is also paramount, he added, noting that the value of cloud computing is clear but the winning technology is not yet decided. OpenStack is really important, LeBlanc said, noting that Red Hat and IBM are among 178 corporate supporters of OpenStack today. Well see more and more client demand for an open world as it relates to the cloud. Were just at the cusp of the power of the cloud, LeBlanc said, noting that IBM surveys revealed that only three percent of virtualized servers in a typical data center routinely move virtual machines from one server to another depending on computing needs. The CEO doesnt know the cloud from an

anthill but they know technology is the difference maker. Open source, namely Hadoop, is the driving technology in the big data front but there are still big challenges in the volume, variety and veracity of that data, he noted. Topics: Virtualization, CIO, Hardware, IBM, Open Source, Storage

About Paula Rooney


Paula Rooney is a Boston-based writer who has followed the tech industry for almost two decades. Kick off your day with ZDNets daily email newsletter. Its the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

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03/07/2012 14:12

IBM: Open source is not winning the war in virtualization, cloud ... yet

Facebook Activity Events Calendar

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theregister.co.uk

Posted in Infrastructure, 27th June 2012 21:35 GMT

Red Hat: Keep clouds open, like Linux The Register

ed Hat Summit At last years Red Hat Summit, it was CEO Jim Whitehurst who preached to the open source choir about the need to keep virtualization and the cloudy extensions of it open. And at this years event in Boston, it was Paul Cormier, president of products at the billion-dollar commercial open source software powerhouse, who banged on the open drum as he and the Red Hat team fleshed out the latest cloudy tools, launched this week. In the opening keynote, Cormier talked a bit about open, hybrid clouds, and that doesnt mean just mashing up anything and everything and putting a price tag on it. Well, maybe a little.

tion (RHEV) to slice up physical hardware, the new clustered Storage Server (based on Gluster) to feed VMs and physical machines, and the CloudForms cloud fabric and the OpenShift platform cloud. Red Hat has been talking about the latter two for years now, and they are beginning to come to market. Open also means supporting VMwares ESXi hypervisor, by far the dominant server slicer in the enterprise, with CloudForms management tools as well as being able to run the entire Red Hat cloud stack and the OpenShift platform cloud on Amazon Web Services EC2 compute cloud. And dont forget JBoss middleware, please, thats in there, too, in some cases. And of course, it all starts with Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as the guest operating system and the underpinning of clouds. Apps run in OSes, despite what some people would have you believe, quipped Cormier. And it is not a coincidence that VMware does not have one of those. Open means having this stack of Red Hat cloudy code all open source, and it means adopting as many open standards as exist as well as driving them when they dont. VMware can do the latter, but like Microsoft and IBM and Hewlett-Packard and unlike Oracle (ironically enough), VMware will never do the former. All this talk of openness also means that Red Hat is finally open for business and feels ready to compete with VMware, Microsoft, and any other company that wants to hitch their fortunes to the clouds. And in typical Linux fashion, Cormier explained that Red Hat was going to be able to do cloud and clustered, scalable storage at the fraction of the cost of other suppliers of similar and often closed source and

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/27/redhat_open_cloud_summit_keynote/

Red Hat products prez Paul Cormier When Red Hat talks about clouds, open means using its open source tools: Enterprise Virtualiza-

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theregister.co.uk
Red Hat: Keep clouds open, like Linux The Register

Posted in Infrastructure, 27th

vendor-developed software. But money is not the only issue. The complexity is a biggie, which turns into money one way or the other. We need to make it simple for our customers to get to the cloud, explained Cormier, stating the obvious but also something that is not trivial given the differences among server hypervisors, cloud fabrics, and other layers in a cloud like their management APIs. To keep it simple, or at least as simple as is reasonably possible, Red Hat has done a number of acquisitions and also rolled new code to create its OpenShift platform cloud, which rolled out this week with pricing and what looks like its final commercial packaging after a year of beta testing. The CloudForms cloud orchestration and self-service portal is also now generally available, Cormier announced. This years Summit is also the big coming out party for the Red Hatted version of the Gluster open source clustered file system, which begins shipping now as Red Hat Storage Server 2.0. In the past decade, Linux and x86 servers really transformed the server market, said Cormier, and now open source clustered file systems running on x86 server iron would do the same thing for the storage racket. In both cases, customers get more choice, more open, and more capability. Not so fast, there. Linux servers represent about 20-ish per cent of revenues, with Windows comprising north of 50 per cent and the remaining 30-ish coming from mainframes, proprietary boxes, and Unix iron. Linux is by no means dominant, but it has become the safe alternative to Unix and the only credible alternative to the ascended Windows, which is about as closed as any operating system has ever been. The open source community has not taken over the server market by any stretch, and VMware, again proprietary to the core (excepting that Linux kernel

it used to have at the heart of the ESXi hypervisor), is by far the juggernaut of x86 server virtualization in the enterprise because it was the safe bet when Windows machines needed to be virtualized and the KVM-based RHEV was not ready for primetime. And not to pick too many bones, but the server racket has fewer choices today than it did a decade ago, and even fewer compared to two decades ago. There is not more choice, but less. The good news is, you have a couple of pretty decent choices these days, in Linux and Windows and a few Unixes and a few proprietary platforms that are still kicking. And, by the way, there is no reason to believe that there wont be multiple cloud environments, just like there are multiple operating systems and hypervisors today and there will likely continue to be. But on the whole, the number of options will be relatively small given the cost of building and supporting these software layers. And there will be incompatibilities, no matter how boldly Red Hat paints its bits with the words open and hybrid. What is really important is that Red Hat is more open than VMware or Microsoft, and that it continues to deliver enterprise-grade software and support, as it has done for the past decade. The world is open. Keep it open. Its up to us, Cormier admonished the crowd at the Summit. This is a good mantra for Red Hat and perhaps even a good thing for the IT industry to aspire to, but it only reflects a Red Hatters reality, not the market at large. The real world of virtualization and clouds is somewhat closed, often incompatible, usually complex, and always costly. It is hard to imagine that the tens of millions of organizations worldwide using

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/27/redhat_open_cloud_summit_keynote/

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theregister.co.uk
Red Hat: Keep clouds open, like Linux The Register

Posted in Infrastructure, 27th

Windows will suddenly convert to a Red Hat stack, any more than the reverse is any more likely. This lofty rhetoric is really aimed at jittery Unix shops, which have the money and the desire to move to cheaper wares, and proprietary systems users, who under normal circumstances might downshift to Unix iron but who might, if budgetary pressures are large enough, go straight to x86 iron and either Windows or Linux. The more Red Hat can convince customers that it is both more open and cheaper than Windows plus Hyper-V or Windows plus VMware vSphere, the more money it will make. And even then, Unix and mainframe shops are still going to be around a long, long time.

pile it, load it, and run it with autoscaling on OpenShift, and do the lather, rinse, and repeat cycle to iterate that application. Red Hat can take a new set up compiled code and stand it up in about 15 seconds and autoscale it for testing across the OpenShift development cloud. There will be three different tiers on the public OpenShift cloud, as we walked you through already, but what was not obvious is that in addition to an internally deployable variant of OpenShift, called OpenShift DevOps, which will allow companies to host their own variant of the platform cloud, there will be a variant that will run on a laptop as well so coders can work when they are disconnected from the Internet, called OpenShift Offline. OpenShift makes cloud consumable for developers, and Red Hat has conceded that its packaging and pricing for its various operating systems, hypervisors, and cloud management tools is too complex, and that is why the company has cooked up what it calls the Red Hat Hybrid IaaS.

Bundling up
During a press conference later in the day, Brian Stevens, Red Hats CTO, walk through the OpenShift platform cloud announcements that red Hat actually did this week before the Summit got going.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/27/redhat_open_cloud_summit_keynote/

The OpenShift platform cloud is a stack based on RHEL, RHEV, JBoss, and a bunch of other code (sometimes some components of CloudForms) that Red Hat runs on Amazons EC2 computer cloud, and its encouraging application developers to use as they create Java, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, Node.js, and other applications wacking MySQL or PostgreSQL databases or the MongoDB NoSQL data store. We have to get the developer just back to creating software, explains Stevens, referring to OpenShift, which will be available hosted on EC2 for free for a small setup and for a fee for larger setups, as El Reg already explained in detail. They dont even know what cloud their software will be deployed on. And they dont, said Stevens, have to care about what software image it is created in or what cloud it is deployed on. They just write their code, com-

Red Hats Hybrid IaaS bundle This takes RHEL, RHEV, and CloudForms and mashes them all up into a single product with a single order number and a single and simple price. RHEL is the guest operating system of choice, of course, and

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theregister.co.uk
Red Hat: Keep clouds open, like Linux The Register

Posted in Infrastructure, 27th

RHEV is the hypervisor layer and virtualization management tool; CloudForms provides a self-service portal for requesting virtual machines stacked with software, orchestrates the provisioning of capacity on private or public clouds, and manages the underlying systems and applications running on this heavenly setup. This bundle will be available in the summer. Pricing was not provided, but Red Hat will offer this on internal clouds as well as on public clouds, and presumably licenses will be portable in some fashion across the corporate firewall. Thats what makes this hybrid. For those just getting started internally on cloud projects, Red Hat has a simpler bundle called the Red Hat Cloud with Virtualization Bundle, which just packages up RHEV and CloudForms together and offers it on a per-VM price.

We think our customers are going to go right through virtualization to the cloud, says Stevens, adding that only about 10 per cent of RHEL workloads have been virtualized to date because of the capital efficiency of RHEL compared to Windows, which is at around a 50 to 60 per cent virtualization rate in the data center, and mostly on VMwares ESXi hypervisor. You can get the cloud for the price of virtualization. To back up that claim, Red Hat says that a typical two-socket server can support around eight VMs and if you put VMwares vSphere Enterprise Plus bundle on the machine with three years of 24x7 premium support, that works out to $510 per VM. The cloud virtualization bundle will also be available this summer.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/27/redhat_open_cloud_summit_keynote/

Red Hats Cloud Virtualization bundle This bundle weaves together the RHEV hypervisor and virtualization management tools with the CloudForms cloud fabric and management tools, but does not include licenses to RHEL and does not have the ability to jump out to public clouds. And, it also has a price: $500 per guest VM on the machines you install it on. No counting licenses or cores or any of that.

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informationweek.com

03/07/2012 15:01

Red Hat Shifts Into Gear With OpenShift Cloud-computing - Platform as a Service

latform-as-a-service provides a development environment in the cloud. Both Google and Microsoft supply PaaS, and as heavyweights, they dominate a lot of the discussion.

But there have been two surprises over the past year. One is that VMware, a company that makes only proprietary products, could field a platformas-a-service, Cloud Foundry, declare it open source, and developers would flock to it. The other surprise is that Red Hat could supply its own OpenShift PaaS and make it competitive with Cloud Foundry.

soft PaaS are more restricted. In addition to Java, for example, OpenShift supports the languages named at the end of the LAMP stack: Perl, Python, and PHP. It supports the server side version of JavaScript, Node.js, and the interpretive language, Ruby. [ Want to learn how Red Hat built upon an acquisition, Makara, to produce OpenShift? See Red Hat Cloud Platform Challenges VMware, Microsoft. ] But Red Hat OpenShift is distinguished from Cloud Foundry in its ability to support Java Enterprise Edition 6. Cloud Foundry has focused more on the lightweight Java users connected to its Spring Framework, and Spring isnt a development environment that supports the more complex Enterprise Edition of Java. Consequently, OpenShift supports a feature of Java Enterprise Edition 6: context dependency injection (the selection of a component at runtime rather than in a pre-runtime, compile phase). Cloud Foundry does not. CDI allows developers to delay specifying which version of a plug-in runs with the program until the moment its needed, then the program automatically solicits the latest version from a secure website, loads it, and uses it. CDI is one of those complicated features for which Enterprise Edition is famous. Its also a feature that developers like. We were the first to put Java Enterprise Edition into the cloud, and people want EE, said Issac Roth, known as the PaaS master at Red Hat. During the Red Hat Summit going on this week in Boston, Red Hat announced Tuesday a business model where it

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More >> Both Cloud Foundry and OpenShift.com are open source code; Red Hat made OpenShift Origin an open source project in April. Both OpenShift and Cloud Foundry can serve as a hosting service for resulting applications. They can also be duplicated on premises--a boon to companies that wish to develop for both their own data centers and the public cloud. Both Cloud Foundry and OpenShift encourage the use of multiple languages, while Google and Micro-

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informationweek.com

03/07/2012 15:01

Red Hat Shifts Into Gear With OpenShift - Cloud-computing - Platform as a Service
will start charging for use of the advanced version, dubbed MegaShift, due out by the end of the year. Building out a private cloud has become a key initiative among Red Hat customers, and some of them will want the increased capacity of MegaShift to run up to 16 gears, or the combined server/disk/ networking units that Red Hat uses as a measure of an OpenShift implementation. There are both small and medium-sized gears, which may be scaled out in clusters of up to 16 gear nodes. Red Hat will charge a $42 per month subscription fee for MegaShift, plus a still unstated charge per gear hour. In addition, there will continue to be a free version, FreeShift, able to use up to three small gears, limited to 1 GB of storage each. The version is not supported by Red Hat, but users frequently turn to community support to resolve issues. In effect, existing users of OpenShift will become FreeShift users, with the same access to languages, language frameworks, and autoscaling of applications, according to Roth. Because a free version with three gears still exists, the first three gears of the upcoming MegaShift version are free. The pricing on MegaShift includes technical support from Red Hat, while FreeShift users will have to rely on forums and other forms of community support. FreeShift and MegaShift can be run on OpenShift.com, a Red Hat sponsored site running on Amazon Web Services EC2. An enterprise version of MegaShift for on-premises IT operations is coming soon, according to Roth. It will give IT the ability to run VMware or Red Hat KVM virtual machines as part of the OpenShift environment. It will be followed late this year by a DevOps version that will allow developers to selfprovision Megashift in those virtual environments as well. OpenShift was launched by Red Hat in May 2011 in a developer preview. The project that produces the code is OpenShift Origin. Origin code may be downloaded to run on-premises, but it is not supported by Red Hat. Roth said Red Hat does not give out figures on the number of users of OpenShift, but claimed they numbered in the tens of thousands. A chart accompanying one of his blogs about OpenShift climbs above four units of measure that are not delineated. By interpreting his comments in connection with the chart, it might indicate about 43,000 adopters. Roth allowed himself a parting shot at VMware and Cloud Foundry: A company whose business model relies on higher price points, proprietary code, closed APIs, and expensive sales engagements may have trouble adapting to an open cloud strategy. But VMware has stated it will keep its Cloud Foundry approach open as well. The fact that two competitors for developer loyalties are taking the open PaaS route should be encouraging to the growing body of developers who are turning to the cloud to produce software. Cloud Connect is expanding to the Windy City. Join 1,200+ IT professionals at Cloud Connect Chicago, where you will learn how to leverage new cloud technology solutions to increase productivity and improve your business agility. Join us in Chicago, Sept. 10-13. Register today!

http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/platform/240002786

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