The enStratus Blog

Common Goals of Cloud Management and Great User Experience

I had the opportunity to represent enStratus at two conferences recently. I didn't expect them to be anything alike, as they represented two divergent aspects of my role at enStratus.

The first was CloudCamp Boston—an unconference typically attended by tech-savvy early cloud adopters, or business people steeped in knowledge relating to the cloud. The second was An Event Apart Minneapolis—a two-day conference involving the various disciplines necessary to create great web experiences with today's technologies, including design, development, content and usability. Star Trek jokes got a few chuckles, don't get me wrong, but web fonts sparked more passionate responses from this crowd. 

Even if these events had taken place in the same city or venue I wouldn't have expected any cross-over attendance. That's why I'm surprised to realize, in retrospect, that they actually shared so much in common. The most striking similarity was the recurrent theme of the open web and standards.

Openness and standards

Both conferences placed a lot of value on the path to standardization, developed in accordance with business needs. Browser prefixes are providing the necessary flexibility as new CSS3 standards are reworked and refined in real time, and HTML5 (notably not XHTML) are being crafted with a heavy emphasis on what has and has not worked in the wild, and what's been sorely lacking.  

The path to standardization for cloud computing is less clear, but it's clearly similarly valued. The first conversation I joined in Boston covered things like how to improve the interoperability of cloud API's as well the separate conversation of how to standardize data for interoperability. It was noted that partnerships of Salesforce represent a successful example of business needs driving the development of API's. How can these efforts be truly open, collaborative, embraced AND future-proof as business needs evolve? Where do open source communities (as well as open source API's such as Dasein Cloud) fit into the equation? 

The second shared theme that I noticed between the two conferences was all about practicality.

What's available NOW?  What can we take advantage of in 2010?

HTML5 and CSS3 are technically still in spec mode. But anybody that sits around waiting for finalized standards is missing the boat. Conversations were focused on what is already available and what can be leveraged to improve the user experience of our websites and applications. enStratus has earned a reputation for the ease-of-use of it's console, and we're in the process of building on that success with these new technologies.

One conversation I joined in Boston focused on what's ready now in the cloud space. Most of the discussion related to software as a service (and what counts as such) but questions arose about what aspects of infrastructure as a service are really, truly ready for operation.

While the conversations at both conferences related to each other, they were also common with the value of enStratus. In terms of openness and standards, enStratus already supports about a dozen private and public cloud platforms, and has contributed the Dasein Cloud API to provide an abstraction for applications written independent of the clouds they are controlling. enStratus is also one of the original supporters of OpenStack. Perhaps even more exciting is that by addressing the concerns relating to cloud interoperability, security, reliability and backups, enStratus can be leveraged now, in 2010, by enterprises ready to see the benefits of cloud computing. 

Automated EBS RAID and Encryption with enStratus

We spend so much time talking about the governance features of enStratus that we often fail to talk about some of the simple operational advantages that enStratus provides. Perhaps the most overlooked operational feature in enStratus is the ability to automatically attach, format, and mount RAID volumes through the enStratus console with the option to have those volumes automatically encrypted.

When you launch an instance in enStratus in the Amazon cloud or any other cloud with an EBS-like concept, enStratus includes a tab that lets you define volumes to be created and attached upon launch. In defining those volumes, you can indicate that you would like to arrange multiple volumes into a RAID and optionally encrypt the file system built on the mounted volume. enStratus takes care of provisioning the block volumes, attaching them to the launched instances, constructing the RAID (if desired), encrypting the file system (if desired), formatting the file system, and mounting the volume(s).

You can customize the software RAID and file system encryption by extending the enStratus scripts on your machine image. By default, we use mdadm to handle software RAID and luks for file system encryption on Unix. We don’t currently provide default options on Windows, but you can extend the scripts to use whatever software RAID and encryption you’d like.

Configuring the RAID and encryption is just part of the story. enStratus manages your encryption keys and takes care of making consistent volume snapshots across your RAID.

On the encryption front, enStratus will generate a unique encryption key to use for encrypting your file system based on the number of bits required by the encryption system you are using. The key is then stored securely outside of the cloud in our credential management system. It only makes brief, well-orchestrated appearances in the cloud when your volumes need to be mounted.

enStratus tracks which volumes/RAID arrays were encrypted with which keys. It can therefore make snapshots of the encrypted volumes, create new volumes, and attach the new volumes automatically to other instances without you having to remember which volumes were encrypted with which keys. All you need are the proper access rights to the instance and volumes in question.

Finally, when it comes time to make backups of a RAID, enStratus enables you to snapshot all volumes attached to a given virtual machine together. In the Servers screen, you can elect to snapshot the server. enStratus will tell then agent on that server to lock all services running on it, lock its file systems, and then enStratus will execute a snapshot of all volumes. The resulting snapshots enable you to reconstruct the RAID in a consistent fashion at a later date.

Best Practice: The only reason to use RAID in the cloud is to get a performance boost in your disk I/O. You should thus only ever use RAID0. Other RAID levels are useless in the cloud. They provide greater resiliency over a RAID0, but erase all speed benefits.

Multi-currency Financial Controls

enStratus financial controls enable you to track your cloud spending across multiple accounts in multiple clouds down to the resource level and associate cloud resources with distinct cloud budgets. How do you handle a multi-cloud environment, however, that includes cloud providers who charge you in different currencies? Or what if you are using a single cloud provider who charges you in a currency different from your national currency? Today, enStratus announces multi-currency financial controls to enable you to maintain budgets in your company accounting currency across clouds billing in any number of different currencies.

As we continue to gain customers across the globe and expand our cloud support to clouds that bill in currencies other than US dollars, we made sure to extend our financial controls to operate in this environment. When configuring your account, you can now specify the company accounting currency to be whatever currency you commonly use internally. You establish all of your soft and hard budget quotas in your internal currency, and those are the values your team works with in enStratus. enStratus also displays reports using your accounting currency.

Behind the scenes, your cloud providers may be billing you in any number of different currencies. These currencies may not match at all to your internal accounting currency. enStratus will track your spending against budgets by translating the prices from the cloud provider currency into your accounting currency. We use either exchange rates updated daily or exchange rates you set for your organization. If your spending in Australian dollars in one cloud combined with your American dollars costs in another cloud exceed your budget defined in Euros, enStratus will alert you and/or prevent further resource allocation against that budget.