Alexey Bokov’s weblog

Short how-to about configuring Ubuntu to work with EC2 API

Continue reading ‘Configuring Ubuntu ( 9.10 ) to work with Amazon EC2’ »

Update in Amazon Web Services:

If anyone interested in it – here’s new update for Sun Grid Engine 6.2 – update 4. It almost about bug fixing and man’s changes – list of changes is here. Sources’ tag for CVS is V62u4_TAG (make sense for Grid Engine, ARCo, SGE Inspect ), by the way as I know Hedeby is still 1.0u3.

Public cloud providers : hybrid cloud vs instance types, API logging vs stability – comparing goGrid and Amazon EC2 .GoGrid is officially out of beta, so now it’s time to compare GoGrid with the public cloud market leader, Amazon EC2. Both vendors have relatively stable performance metrics and they both implement the basic functionality of a cloud provider:

• Programmatic control via REST API
• Scalable data storage solution: Elastic Block Storage in Amazon AWS and CloudStorage in GoGrid
• Ability to assign external IP addresses
• Ability to grant root/administrator credentials
• Many options to configure the cloud cluster
• Windows and Linux support
• Web console for monitoring and management

So far, as cloud providers GoGrid and Amazon EC2 look very similar, but practical experience of using them in real-life projects helps us identify some unique features that can be important for specific applications – for highlighed features and bad points for both providers look onto GoGrid is out of beta on Grid Designer’s Blog

• Performance Check – EC2 Instance Types vs Virtual Server
• 10 reasons why cloud computing is bad idea
• Dulance returns back and Google’s Special Snippets for Price Comparison Sites
• Running Terracotta on Amazon EC2 ( terracotta.org )
• Using amazon EC2 security groups as tags for instances
• Cloud Hosting Performance – comparing popular cloud providers in real time for last 48 hours
• GoGrid Management Tools and Library – by the way today goGrid officially out of beta

Here’s some steps which I frequently use to configure Ubuntu to work as EC2 manager
Continue reading ‘Quick steps to configure Ubuntu for with EC2 API’ »

Sun Grid Engine’s top engineer Richard Hierlmeier wrote article ( and some bash scripts which implements it – btw why you not to put it them onto your cvs? ) about using SDM in compute cloud ( here’s EC2 as example, I suppose that GoGrid can be used also without too many changes ) – Using SDM Cloud Adapter to Manage Solaris Zones.

Sun released new version of Sun Grid Engine – 6.2 Update 3. That’s new:

• Amazon EC2 adapter – SDM Cloud Service Adapter now is avaialable to scale SGE cluster in EC2 – they only need to have OpenVPN installed on instances, and special configuration for IP addresses ( SGE is still very picky about DNS ) – more about restriction is here and here’s bash scripts which used for EC2 deployment. By the way I see that OpenSolaris is still only one OS which available for SGE on EC2, if you’re looking for some SGE/EC2 solutions you may check out Convergence proejct which deal with SGE/GemFire cluster installation on EC2 – see Installing SGE on EC2, or Hedeby installation on EC2.
• Now only one JVM can be runned on master or managed host – in previous version SGE ran 3 JVM on every host – one for cs_vm ( configuration service ), executor_vm ( executor component ) and rp_vm ( resource provider ). In SGE terminology it called SDM simple install.
• Now SGE have Exclusive Scheduling – this helps to guarantee predictable performance and to avoid interference when a job is not using all of the slots that are available on a host
• Sun declared that now SGE have Microsoft Vista Support ( don’t think that there’s too much SGE installations on Vista ) and also some usual marking speech about  Power Saving features

upd. Also there’s new Sun Studio 12 Update 1 is available too.

Stallman dismisses cloud computing as industry bluster. “It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he said – huh, i agree that anything which contain “cloud” keyword have too much marketing stuff , but it’s not really stupid. There’s too much marketing stuff in this area ( and goGrid’s guys are the very first for this ‘too much marketing’ ), but let’s look on amazon ec2 – it’s really great amazing thing – last 7 years my work related with various size cluster’s, and last year my “server provider” is amazon – and I may say that amazon is much convenient than any company-owned-datacenter. For my it’s big deal when I can get 100 servers for 10 mins and run some job on them. There’s too much marketing noise in cloud industry, but it works and it works almost fine.
ps. Another point for cloud computing – it’s Steve Ballmer on defining the cloud.

Recently I found another strange thing in EC2 – if I use “shutdown now” on ec2 instance for AWS this node will be still alive and in marked as “running” in ec2-describe-instances host list. For those who want to have simple way to shutdown ec2 instances from script I recommend to use this code ( I use it in our Convergence – Data-Aware routing on EC2 project ) :

ec2-describe-instances | grep `hostname` | awk "{ print \"ec2-terminate-instances \" \$2; }" >> /root/tools/stop_it.sh

You may just run stop_it.sh or schedule it via at

at -f /root/tools/stop_it.sh "now + $TIMEOUT minutes"

just not forget to replace $TIMEOUT with something usefull

• cloud platforms
• cloud verndors
• Amazon EC2 vs GoGrid vs Mosso
• How LinkedIn grew Bumpersticker to be the “Biggest Ruby on Rails app in the World? and Web Scalability Practices: Bumper Sticker on Rails
• The Private Cloud: Enterprise-ready on and off premise by Stephen Herrod
• Defining private clouds – Part 1, Part 2 – by Bernard Golden

As base AMI i used ami-7db75014 – it’s OpenSolaris supported by Sun, common informartion about installing and using OpenSolaris in EC2 also available in Sun’s Amazon EC2 Getting started guide – in this post I will focus almost in SGE using in Amazon EC2. As SGE distributive i use all-in-one tar package – i choosed “All supported platform” in Grid Engige download page – it takes about 350 Mb, but I don’t worry about platform architecture – if sun support it – it will be in this package. This ge62u2_1.tar.gz contains bunch of other tar.gz’s ( and even hedeby’s core package ) and can be unpacked by :

So I just go inside ge6.2u2_1 and unpack them all using something like this

One important thing – hedeby-1.0u2-core.tar.gz contains old versions of some files from ge-6.2u2_1-common.tar.gz – there’s conflicts in files common/util/arch  and common/util/arch_variables – here’s diff for them – may be sometimes it can be usefull, but for my configuration it causes very strange errors when I try to install executor host :

When I replace this files from ge-6.2u2_1-common.tar.gz installation works as expected. Next point it’s DNS configuration – SGE is very picky to DNS and it will cause some problems in running SGE Amazon EC2 instances with SGE, this stuff can be fixed using host_aliases file in SGE, or other way it’s to use /etc/hosts file for it – some kind of this technique used in Hedeby-SGE on Amazon EC2 demo, for example if we have master this name and 2 executor hosts I put this lines into /etc/hosts :

#internal_ip external_full_name external_short_name internal_full_name internal_short_name
10.yyy.xyz.zzz ec2-RRR-TTT-ZZZ-YYY.compute-1.amazonaws.com ec2-RRR-TTT-ZZZ-YYY domU-mm-ww-PPP-WWW-FFF-GGG.compute-1.internal domU-mm-ww-PPP-WWW-FFF-GGG
10.yyy.qwe.ttt ec2-aaa-bbb-ccc-ddd.compute-1.amazonaws.com ec2-aaa-bbb-ccc-ddd domU-mm-ww-JJJ-HHH-DDD-SSS.compute-1.internal domU-mm-ww-JJJ-HHH-DDD-SSS
10.yyy.pre.ppp ec2-yyy-rrr-eee-qqq.compute-1.amazonaws.com ec2-yyy-rrr-eee-qqq domU-mm-ww-UUU-III-OOO-PPP.compute-1.internal domU-mm-ww-UUU-III-OOO-PPP

Also I use hostname ec2-RRR-TTT-ZZZ-YYY ( external_short_name )  to set instance hostname – this names I use as hostnames when I configure SGE.

Shravan Kumar share with me a Lew Tucker ( Sun’s CTO ) demo where he demonstates Virtual Data Center – it’s not a usual marketing speech, it’s quite interesting. As I understand Lew Tucker talks about this one -The APIs for the Sun Cloud – a RESTful API for creating and managing cloud resources, including compute, storage, and networking components – it looks very attractive and interesting so I’m goin’ to check it out shortly in time

Here’s another Lew Tucker demos – cloud APIs and how to create and deploy My SQL Virtual Machine

Lew Tucker and Dave Douglas demonstrate web developer application for cloud storage service

All of this videos ( and other sun’s cloud-related info ) is available at Sun’s Community OneEast web event home page, also you may check out sun’s A Guide to Getting Started with Cloud Computing.

Comparing grid and cloud computing services : EGEE grid and Amazon Web Services

There’s very good erlang library with email services – erlmail. Unfortunately there’s no support to authorization in it – you can easy add this feature to library by this patch ( erlmail with authorization )
Here’s an example of using erlmail to send e-mail:

send_mail(UserEmail, Data) ->
    {ok, Pid} = smtpc:connect(”smtp.server.com”, ?SMTP_PORT),
    smtpc:ehlo(Pid, ?SMTP_SERVER),
    smtpc:auth(Pid, ?MAIL_LOGIN, ?MAIL_PASSWORD),
    smtpc:mail(Pid, ?MAIL_FROM),
    smtpc:rcpt(Pid, UserEmail),
    smtpc:data(Pid, Data),
    smtpc:quit(Pid).

send_mail(UserEmail, MessageSubject, MessageBody) ->
    Data = “From:” ++ ?MAIL_FROM ++ “\r\n” ++ “To:” ++ UserEmail ++ “\r\n” ++ “Subject:” ++
MessageSubject ++ “\r\n\r\n” ++ MessageBody,
    send_mail(UserEmail, Data ).

test() ->
    send_mail(”user@bokov.net”, “this is subject”, “this is message body!”).

Amazon announced that Windows Server ( 32 and 64 bit ) will be available as host OS for Amazon EC2 instances. Running instances can be accessed via Remote Desktop. Currently this feature available for private beta ( Windows Server and SQL Server ) only – and public release sheduled before the end of 2008. You may provide your contancs to Amazon to be notified when this product will be available.

Guys from Amazon posts in Amazon Web Services Blog interesting document – AWS Security White Paper.
Main points -

• there’s no backup for data ( EBS, S3, anything), but all data redundantly stored in multiple physical locations
• for EC2 they have four security levels – host OS ( access : only AWS administrators ),  guest OS ( access : only customers, AWS admins can’t log onto guest OS ),  Firewall ( indirectly configured by customers, AWS admins also have access ) , Amazon EC2 API ( access : only customers ).
• all guest OS running by hypervisor XEN – so instances have no direct access to hardware resources, and can’t read-write any data which owned another instances – including network packets, disk devices and memory.
• network traffic ( for different instances ) can not be sniffed, external DDoS secured by firewal, port scanning inside network prohibited by Acceptable Use Policy ( customer will be blocked for this, I suppose ), instances can’t use IP spoofing ( because of hypervisor Xen . Anyway, Amazon reccomend to use SSL for network connections.
• Security in S3 and SimpleDB based in ACL ( access control list ) – only data owner may edit access permission.
• All data in S3 and SimpleDB stored ‘as is’ without any encryption. If you want to be more secure – you should store encrypted data – “Encrypting before sending to SimpleDB guarantees that no party, including AWS, has access to sensitive customer data”.  Once you delete data from S3 or SimpleDB all external links to them will be unaccessible – “area is then made available only for write operations and the data is overwritten by newly stored data”.  S3 and SimpleDB nodes use SSL for network connection, so there’s no chances for Man-In-The-Middle attack.