The enStratus Blog

Cross-Cloud Management Today

Over the past few months, more and more organizations have moved toward leveraging multiple cloud providers.  Whether it’s a private/public hybrid model or multiple public providers, this is definitely a trend.

Our vision has always been that organizations will use multiple cloud providers and need one management, governance and automation solution for all of them. 

Security, Provisioning and Financial Controls

Many of our customers have been starting VMs in multiple cloud providers like AWS, Rackspace, Eucalyptus and Cloud.com.  With our granular access controls, enStratus provides you the ability to grant access to each person or group with the access they require for the appropriate clouds.

In addition our financial controls allow you to track spending across clouds including soft and hard spending caps across all the clouds you manage with enStratus.

Cross-cloud dependencies, cloud-bursting, cross-cloud DR, and cross-cloud auto-scaling

Though managing multiple independent clouds from inside enStratus is cool, enStratus also enables you to create managed applications that operate across multiple clouds. For example, you can configure an application to operate entirely within your private data center up to a certain capacity threshold and have enStratus burst part, or all of it, into a public cloud beyond that capacity. The image below shows an example of how to set the bursting to the secondary cloud after 5 servers.

For truly distributed application architectures, enStratus has the capability to automate cross-cloud auto-scaling. enStratus will make sure traffic for your distributed application is balanced evenly across multiple clouds and provide you redundancy even in the face of the complete failure of one of your cloud providers. Even if you don’t want the redundancy, enStratus will optionally backup to a DR cloud.

  

Manage Your Private/Hybrid Clouds from Your Own Data Center

Most companies got their first exposure to cloud computing through public cloud options such as any of the many public clouds supported by enStratus.  When operating a public cloud, it makes a lot of sense to leverage a SaaS tool like the enStratus SaaS solution. You simply visit https://cloud.enstratus.com/page/1/register.jsp, sign up, and immediately begin using enStratus to manage your cloud. No software installation needed.

Running a private cloud? Leverage enStratus on-premise!

Most enterprises these days are looking beyond the public cloud to hybrid and private cloud computing. While our SaaS solution is perfectly capable of managing private and hybrid clouds, we think it makes sense to have an on-premise management tool when managing on-premise clouds. The systems you are deploying in a private cloud are obviously important enough to keep within your data center, so it makes no sense to allow a third-party control that infrastructure from beyond your firewalls.

Same Features, On-premise. The enStratus on-premise solution provides the same exact features as our SaaS offerings, operating in your data center instead of ours. It’s a simple installation and you can plug it into your SSO infrastructure (including SAML 2.0 and OpenID). You can then point enStratus at your private and public clouds.

enStratus is simply the only enterprise cloud infrastructure capable of on-premise deployment for managing public and private clouds.

Most Cloud Platforms, including VMware vCloud. No other cloud management offering provides the same freedom of choice among a cloud platforms and public clouds as enStratus. We natively support vCloud, Nimbula, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, and Cloud.com. In addition, you can leverage all of the public compute clouds we support (AWS, Bluelock, CloudSigma, GoGrid, Rackspace, Terremark) and all of the public storage clouds (AWS, AT&T, Azure, Google, Rackspace) from within your data center.

Operate across clouds: Cross-cloud dependencies, cloud-bursting, cross-cloud DR, and cross-cloud auto-scaling

Though managing multiple independent clouds from inside enStratus is cool, enStratus also enables you to create managed applications that operate across multiple clouds. For example, you can configure an application to operate entirely within your private data center up to a certain capacity threshold and have enStratus burst part or all of it into a public cloud beyond that capacity.

For truly distributed application architectures, enStratus has the capability to automate cross-cloud auto-scaling. enStratus will make sure traffic for your distributed application is balanced evenly across multiple clouds and provide you redundancy even in the face of the complete failure of one of your cloud providers. Even if you don’t want the redundancy, enStratus will optionally backup to a DR cloud.

 

Deploying a Redundant Cloud Infrastructure

If the latest events in the AWS EC2 cloud east region have taught cloud architects and administrators anything, it is that the requirement for redundancy and disaster recovery cannot be overstated. enStratus enables cloud architects to span architecture across different regions in the same cloud and even across clouds altogether.

Since the AWS East region is the most widely used cloud region, many companies found themselves in a situation where their entire infrastructure was provisioned in that region. Even with redundancy across availability zones, the outage was devastating enough to bring down multiple availability zones, taking with it large portions of applications running there.

 

Using Multiple Regions

enStratus automation features offer an elegant and intuitive process to plan for eventualities such as region failure in a cloud. Using the deployment manager, architects can add another region as needed or balance their application across regions as a matter of procedure. 

When the EC2 East region outage hit, many companies found themselves scrambling to bring up applications in the EC2 West or other region.

The prospect of trying to move data that was "locked" in the East region was very problematic for administrators because in many cases backups were stored in S3 in that same region. enStratus allows for disaster recovery storage in multiple regions and/or multiple clouds. 

 

Backup Management

enStratus disaster recovery options automate the process of exporting backups off-site. What off-site means to the architect is open to a number of configurable options
including private storage such as swift or walrus.

Backups can be encrypted and moved at predetermined intervals, ensuring data is secure in transit and there when you need it.

Also, the enStratus application is hosted outside the cloud by enStratus or on-premise by our customers to ensure cloud governance and reliability.

This past week was a trying week for cloud workers, but tools like enStratus exist to plan for and maintain continuity of operations independent of the cloud used.

Check out our Webinar that we hosted May 4th to learn more: How To Deliver Cloud Infrastructure Redundancy.

 

 

It's Official: enStratus Rolls Out vCloud Express Support

 A few months ago, we quietly mentioned in this blog how enStratus uses Dasein Cloudas a cloud abstraction layer and, thanks to Dasein Cloud + jclouds, that enStratus would support Terremark's vCloud Express through Dasein Cloud + jclouds + vCloud. Today, we formally announced vCloud Express support with Terremark as our launch partner for this support.  

enStratus supports all of the core features of Terremark vCloud Express, including the provisioning and de-provisioning of virtual machines and allocation IP addresses with the ability to setup IP forwarding rules. 

With enStratus, however, you expect more than simply being able to access the core Terremark functionality. enStratus provides all of the governance elements for the Terremark cloud that you expect, including:

• Cross-account user management
• Role-based access controls for managing your Terremark infrastructure
• Financial controls to enable you to track spending
• The ability to manage Unix shell and Windows RDP users from the enStratus console
• The ability to setup modjk, haproxy, and Zeus load balancers.

In our Efreet release scheduled for early June, we will add even more capabilities to our Terremark support:

• Cross-cloud clustering with auto-scaling and auto-recovery (burst from a private cloud into Terremark or balance load equally across two clouds)
• Automated disaster recovery execution into a backup cloud
• Auto-scaling and auto-recovery with automatic load balancer configuration in Terremark
• Mix Terremark compute resources with cloud storage from another cloud to create a single logic cloud
• Support for Terremark volume configuration

Finally, we'd like to take a moment to thank everyone at VMware, Terremark, and jclouds who have all been very suppportive of bringing this effort to market.

enStratus, Amazon, and the Asia/Pacific Region

Amazon Web Services today rolled out their fourth region, the Asia/Pacific Southeast 1 (ap-southeast-1) in Singapore. You can leverage all of the AWS services in this new region. And, as with all new regions, enStratus provides full support for this region immediately.  

Full support means you have direct access to all AMIs, the ability to install the enStratus agent on your AMIs, setup clusters with auto-scaling, auto-recovery, encryption, and key management. Of course, it also means you have the general set of enStratus tools like user management, financial controls, and direct provisioning and de-provisioning of AWS resources in the Asia/Pacific region.

In May, we will be rolling out our cross-region and cross-cloud auto-scaling and cloud bursting. Using this new feature, you will be able to split a single application across multiple regions. You can push application logic near the client requesting it, split processing evenly across zones for redundancy, or even auto-recover from widespread failures in one region into another region. Finally, with our support for Eucalyptus and VMware, you can setup baseline operations in a private cloud and have enStratus manage cloud-bursting into the new AWS Singapore region or any other region in which you would like to operate.

enStratus and Azure

enStratus is the only cloud infrastructure management platform that provides full and equal functionality for Windows environments in the cloud as well as Unix systems. We have supported complete Windows infrastructure management in the Amazon cloud for nearly a year and we will soon be introducing Windows support in the Rackspace Cloud and RelaCloud as well as Windows 2008 support.

With the December update of enStratus, we've rolled out our initial support for the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. The first part of Azure we are supporting is the Azure cloud storage system for blob stores.

With enStratus + Azure, enStratus customers get multi-user access to manage cloud storage assets in the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud. Organize web, media assets, documents, and other content through a hierarchical structure that you can leverage from applications deployed in enStratus-managed compute clouds or other environments, including Microsoft Windows Azure.

In January, we will release even more Azure functionality including support for SQL Azure and "off-site" backups from other clouds into Azure.

 

 

enStratus and ReliaCloud

For many organizations, one of the scary parts of cloud computing is the idea of trusting your computing infrastructure to a faceless entity with little or no local presence. VISI, one of the largest managed services providers in the Upper Midwest, has a solution for that problem with the introduction of the beta of their Infrastructure as a Service offering, ReliaCloud. enStratus has been actively working with ReliaCloud on the launch of their new service, and we'd like to tell you about our support for the platform.

ReliaCloud supports the core elements of a compute cloud:

• On-demand, persistent pay-per hour servers with standard high availability
• Static IP assignment
• Private IP space
• Load balancing

In addition, ReliaCloud offers NAT-based networking that you can leverage to create a kind of private network in the cloud.

Through enStratus, ReliaCloud customers can manage all aspects of their ReliaCloud infrastructure and gain access to enhanced features such as:

• User management (including control of shell access to servers) with roles
• Extended meta-data, including custom names and labels
• Audit controls, including access to server stopping/termination reasons
• Logging of server events to the enStratus console
• Integration with intrusion detection systems (IDS)
• Multiple levels of server monitoring
• Alerting on critical cloud events

That's just our initial support for the ReliaCloud platform. 

Early in the new year, we will introduce auto-scaling, recovery, and backup management through our Cluster Manager. Once this effort is complete, ReliaCloud customers will be able to leverage enStratus to:

• Define auto-scaling criteria and have your infrastructure scale up and down automatically based on load metrics (with governors in place)
• Define auto-recovery procedures and have your infrastructure automatically recover to replacement servers in the event of server failure
• Encryption management so you can have full in-transit and at-rest encryption of cloud data while keeping your encryption and access credentials securely outside of ReliaCloud
• Automated backups of your systems, including the ability to have backups regularly copied to a secondary cloud
• The ability to use ReliaCloud as a DR tool for your existing infrastructure
• Analytics and reporting on the performance of your individual servers or your infrastructure as whole

We're really excited about what VISI's been working on and believe we have a lot of value to add for ReliaCloud customers.

New AWS Features: US West Region + EBS Boot Volumes

enStratus customers using the Amazon cloud woke up this morning to discover the new AWS Region in Northern California, us-west-1. AWS exposed this new region and its two availability zones overnight and launched a new feature, EBS boot volumes.

The New Region

Let's start with the new region. The Northern California region joins Northern Virginia (us-east-1) and Ireland (eu-west-1) to become the third region in the AWS cloud. Regions are distinct infrastructures with almost no common points of failure. If you deploy an application across two regions, you have essentially set yourself up to survive anything but the failure of Amazon as a company.

enStratus customers had access to this new region the moment Amazon made it public. As of this afternoon, the region had about 25 public AMIs (compared to 3,000+ in us-east-1). enStratus is working on pre-bundling images with the enStratus agent for the us-west-1 region. We expect to have the first images ready for Fedora tomorrow. You can always launch your own Windows or Fedora instances from the public images that currently exist in the region.

It's important to keep in mind that the us-west-1 region costs slightly more than the us-east-1 (but the same as the eu-west-1). The best use of the new region is for any application where compute latency to the east coast is an issue or where cross-region redundancy is important. You can also use enStratus + the new region to setup a DR solution within AWS that still resides in the United States.

EBS Boot Volumes

While the launch of the us-west-1 region is great news, the most important development last night was the introduction of EBS boot volumes. In short, you can use EBS volumes to boot up EC2 instances instead of using an AMI. In other words, AWS now provides the benefits of persistent compute instances without the complexity normally associated with persistent compute instances. 

Later this month, enStratus will add support for EBS boot volumes. We'll make it more interesting, however, early in 2010 when we incorporate EBS boot volumes in the Cluster Manager. We'll enable you to associate boot snapshots with server groups and then—with a click of a button—scale a server vertically to a larger RAM or more powerful CPU instance without bringing your system down.

Update: Actually, enStratus already supports boot from EBS. When you select an EBS AMI, the new instance will launch with an EBS volume as the root. What we will add in the near future is the ability to pause these servers without terminating them and restart them at a later time.