(Some familiarity with Amazon AWS is assumed.)

Drupal is widely recognized as a great content management system, but we strongly believe that Drupal offers a lot more than that – a framework, a platform, and a set of technology – to build and run enterprise applications, specifically on the cloud. This post is an attempt to explore the benefits and potential of Drupal on the cloud.

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You are probably familiar with the movie renting and now movie streaming site Netflix. If you are a subscriber, you might have noticed that Netflix is transitioning to a movie streaming site and is probably the leader in that space. However, with the move in this business direction also came massive technical challenges for Netflix.

Their existing data centers were simply not sufficient to meet the spikes in growing demand, storage and computing requirements. Netflix published a very informative paper illustrating their problems and how they are addressing the needs by leveraging the cloud (especially Amazon AWS).

The paper talks about two very interesting aspects:

1. How they are using the cloud as a infrastructure (Amazon EC2) and a platform (Amazon Simple DB).

2. How they manage to sync the data between on premise and on the cloud storage.

At large companies like SAP there are similar challenges to address where the customers have large amounts of data and want to migrate gradually to the cloud. Netflix achieved this with their in house bi directional data replication system called IR (Item replication). Data replicators like the one from Sybase are a good fit for such a use case.

The data would have to be modeled to sit as key value instead of highly normalized RDBMS data sets.

Netflix paper also covers some fundamentals which are important for any cloud architect. Specially the application of the CAP theorem.

So if you are thinking about how to leverage the cloud for the next generation architecture, this paper is a good starting point with enough technical architecture pointers as well as a great use case.

There is a certain awe associated with the term cloud. It could be because clouds are so nebulous themselves. But more so because it is used more as a euphemism for resources outside the traditional data centers. They denote almost mythical data centers of companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.

However, there are very concrete ways to describe what is cloud computing. But instead of getting to a definition right away, lets look at a few analogies and different types of offerings from cloud providers. Read more »

Its a known fact that all the cloud offerings are different from each other. Weather they are big or small players, everyone is innovating at break neck speed and there is no point in comparing feature by feature because such a comparison could be obsolete before it is useful. I have a personal bias towards Amazon's EC2 because I have spent most time on it, and it seems to be far ahead of rest of the herd. However, I don't find everything easier and nicer in Amazon. Some use cases can be very simple and EC2 would be an overkill or insufficient. One example is if I want to host a website in the cloud. Sure, I could go with a traditional web hosting company, but if my requirements needed me to look at IaaS providers then there are a couple of things to consider. Read more »

Scalability can be a confusing topic, because it is usually not defined in easy terms. If I were to characterize scalable system,

1. The system should be able to accommodate increase in data
2. The system should be able to accommodate increase in usage
3. As the load increases on the system, the system still remains relatively accessible and maintainable.

Three are at least three categories of service providers in the cloud : 1. IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service (e.g. GoGrid, Amazon EC2) 2. PaaS - Platform as a Service (e.g. Force.com, Google App Engine) 3. SaaS - Software as a Service (e.g. Salesforce, SAP Business By design, ...) The details of these different providers is not in the scope of this post. I will write about how to manage security on these platforms and who is responsible for which part of the security. there are two main parties involved - service providers and customers. Read more »

If you have had to deal with SLA (service level agreements) from your internal IT or an external vendor, the availability (uptime) is one of the first questions. This is a number usually presented as a percentage (usually 99.9%. Adding or removing a few 9 after decimal might not seem to matter much, but in reality it could. The table depicts the points: Total downtime (HH:MM:SS)

I saw the Gartner report on Cloud providers recently. Having worked on EC2 a bit, I am more familiar with EC2 API and features. But I have colleagues who are currently struggling with Terramark integration. Terramark is using vCloud API from VMWare. But given how nascent vCloud APIs are currently, they are mostly scripts that one has to download and consume. EC2 API on the other hand are far more polished and they have been quicker to respond to customer demands and requirements. I am not necessarily advocating EC2, but I find it more favorable than some of the other cloud providers so far. Based on the instance definition of EC2 and their pricing model, they seem to be cheaper than GoGrid pricing Sample pricing from some of the options from both providers is listed as under (as of this post): Read more »