Putting the E in EC2

Amazon has been heavily promoting its elastic cloud computing (EC2) offering as of late.  EC2 allows you to upload an image (operating system and pre-installed applications) into the “cloud” and specify memory and CPU requirements. While the solution has some “elasticity” around memory and CPU requirements, it’s not elastic in the sense that application stacks need to have commensurate elasticity (automated horizontal scale) in order to fully leverage this offering. Just because you can have more images (think more machines), doesn’t mean your application can scale.

DataSynapse has been working with a number of customers that want us to help them create a “grid in the cloud”, where they can utilize outsourced computing on demand.  We would provide the application-aware, policy-based infrastructure layer to enable seamless horizontal scaling (or application elasticity) so that the entire stack – from OS to the business workload can scale on demand.

Here’s an example…

Let’s say company X has a new initiative to create a set of products that require a fair amount of computing in the design phase (modeling and simulation). They don’t want to buy dedicated hardware and are eager to use an outsourced compute vendor.  So they have analytics, they want to use EC2 or the equivalent… now what? You can’t take analytics libraries and put them on EC2 and expect magic to happen. You need a software infrastructure layer to provide queuing, load balancing, resilience, app provisioning, etc. into those images.

That’s where GridServer comes in. It’s scalable (elastic) on the workload/software middleware layer to enable you to change the number of images on EC2 and see commensurate improvements in performance. This way, Company X can scale its application horizontally on-demand natively on the EC2 cloud.

In a future post, I’ll discuss how application stacks like IIS, Sharepoint, BEA (WebLogic and Aqualogic), IBM WebSphere, Informatica, Oracle Apps, etc. can leverage something like EC2 using FabricServer as the elastic infrastructure component.

Comments

[Aiwu]

That is definitely further steps for Grid computing, like dedicatedly-owned applications to SaaS.

[Joe Schmo]

This is what 3Tera is doing.