For years, the press and industry analysts have been telling us that cloud is mainstream, but the reality is that Enterprises must shift their workloads to the cloud in an orderly, low risk manner. While there are many applications already built and running in the cloud, there are many new (or underutilized and, perhaps, misunderstood) technologies like Docker, Chef and object storage that are changing the way cloud applications are implemented.
At RICON 2014, Riak worked with Citrix to host “Build a Cloud Day.” Build a Cloud day sessions explore new technologies and show how to bring some order to the chaos of moving workloads to the cloud. The attendees learn the concepts and best practices to deploy a cloud computing environment using Apache CloudStack and other cloud infrastructure tools, including those from XenServer, Docker, RiakCS, Chef, Zenoss, Puppet and many others that automate server and network configuration for building highly available cloud computing environments.
Cloud Architecture: Virtualization, Orchestration and Storage
“Build a Cloud Day” started with an excellent presentation by Mark Hinkle. Many of us know him as @mrhinkle. Mark is the Senior Director of Open Source Solutions at Citrix Systems where he helps support the Apache CloudStack and Xen.org projects.
Mark has an excellent grasp of cloud computing and provides an overview of cloud computing architecture and the open source software that can be used to deploy and manage a cloud-computing environment. He looks at virtualization and containers and provides a brief description of Docker and how it is being used in today’s applications.
He also provides an overview of OpenStack. Mark closes the presentation with insights into how to deliver Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and what technologies can be used to compliment this evolving cloud computing paradigm.
Crash Course on Open Source Cloud Computing by Mark Hinkle (Slides | Video)
Software is Eating Infrastructure
Other presenters at “Build a Cloud Day” included Riak’s own John Burwell (@john_burwell). John is a Senior Software Engineer at Riak Technologies. He also serves as an Apache CloudStack PMC member and committer focused on storage architecture and security integration. John’s talk explores cloud design strategies to achieve high availability and reliability using commodity components and how to apply these strategies using Apache CloudStack and Riak CS.
By migrating reliability and scalability responsibilities up the stack from specialized hardware to software, cloud orchestration platforms such as Apache CloudStack (ACS) and object stores such as Riak CS increase the utilization and density of compute and storage resources by dynamically shifting workloads based on demand.
John describes two workloads predominately managed in cloud environments — traditional virtualization and cloud — and how to use Apache CloudStack to efficiently manage both simultaneously. He then explores storage design to support this dual workload model, including the use of Riak CS with Apache CloudStack to reduce infrastructure costs without sacrificing reliability.
Riak CS provides software-defined, fault-tolerant object storage uniquely built to handle a variety of unstructured and big data needs using commodity hardware.
Better, Faster, Cheaper Infrastructure using Apache CloudStack and Riak CS by John Burwell, Consulting Engineer at Riak (Slides | Video)
Apache CloudStack, Apache Brooklyn and more…
There were many great presentations at “Build a Cloud Day” including:
- Primary Storage in CloudStack by Mike Tutkowski (Slides | Video)
- Introduction to Apache CloudStack by David Nalley (Slides | Video)
- Hypervisor Selection in the Cloud by Tim Mackey (Slides | Video)
- Cloud Application Blueprints with Apache Brooklyn by Alex Henevald (Slides | Video). Alex also did a Riak-specific presentation at RICON 2014, Running Riak in a Docker Cloud using Apache Brooklyn.
You can find out more about RICON 2014 in our blog post. /wrapping-up-ricon-2014/.
The videos of the presentations at RICON 2014 can be found on our RICON Archive site. The Keynote by Peter Alvaro – Outwards from the Middle of the Maze is very popular.
