The enStratus Blog

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.

 

What Is Autoscaling...And Why Does It Matter?

‘Autoscaling,’ as the name implies, is the ability to have an application dynamically take advantage of additional compute resources as required and then release those resources when they are not required. 

Some examples include:

• A consumer facing web application might “scale out” (i.e. add extra servers) the web tier (and maybe even the local balancing tier) of an application architecture during periods of high traffic and then scale back for quieter periods.
• An analytical application might scale out the servers performing in calculation process – using 20 machines for 1 hour, rather than 1 machine for 20 hours.

This concept of ‘autoscaling’ has become the poster child for cloud adoption because it actively illustrates the power and flexibility offered by cloud infrastructure. At an individual application level, a good part of the business case for cloud rests on only paying for the compute resource actually required.

Without autoscaling, an application deployed in the cloud is no more effective in its utilization of resources than in a traditional, physical, or virtualized environment and will have the same ‘over provisioning’ required to meet peak demand.

With autoscaling, an application can reduce its consumption to match actual demand and increase efficiency dramatically, particularly for an application with a high variance between peak and off-peak demand.

The only public or private cloud platform that provides any application autoscaling function is AWS ….and that is a command line tool.

If you want to autoscale an application, you need a cloud management tool like enStratus that understands the application architecture and can automatically request additional resources and connect them into the target architecture according to your defined scaling rules.

For example, enStratus allows you to scale the different tiers of an application based on basic metrics such as CPU utilization, or on custom business function such as transaction per second or concurrent active users. Additionally, you can define autoscaling across regions or even across clouds; so for example, you could scale your web tier up to 10 instances within your cloud.com private cloud, but then add further web instance, in EC2, while maintaining the database tier within your private cloud.

And enStratus can autoscale within any of the public or private clouds that we support -- Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Cloud.com, CloudSigma, EMC Atmos, Eucalyptus, Google Storage, GoGrid, OpenStack, Rackspace, ReliaCloud, ServerExpress, Terremark, VMware and Windows Azure.

We have found autoscaling adds value to a surprising number of application deployments, not just the highly volatile applications that are so often discussed. A little bit of attention can often reduce your cloud bill by a significant sum.

enStratus On-Premise Deployments

enStratus supports an on-premise deployment model as well as the better known SaaS deployment model. Customers pursuing the on-premise deployment model typically have private cloud deployments that they would prefer to manage from inside their firewall. The on-premise functionality is the same as the functionality in the SaaS product (including multi-tenancy) except that you manage the on-premise deployment in your data center.

Private clouds are often the driving force behind a decision to deploy enStratus on-premise because of the communication channels that enStratus needs with some cloud virtual machines. With our SaaS product, enStratus requires either a VPN between our data center and yours or a server running an enStratus proxy that enables communication between enStratus and your private cloud. Both architectures work, but they often fail to fit the IT infrastructure model that organizations deploying private clouds are trying to achieve.

With the on-premise option, you can install a fully functional version of the enStratus software behind your firewall and it will manage your infrastructure just like the SaaS product. Instead of going to https://cloud.enstratus.com, you visit a URL hosted in your data center that may or may not be accessible from the public Internet. Everything else looks and acts just like the SaaS version of enStratus.

You will need to contact us to get an on-premise deployment license. We offer trial installations for qualified prospects, but we recommend leveraging the enStratus SaaS trial accounts if you are simply trying to get a feel for enStratus. For those doing an on-premise install, we will provide you with the software and a license key for your setup.

enStratus supports the following cloud platforms:

• Cloud.com
• Eucalyptus
• OpenStack
• vCloud Service Director

In addition, we provide cloud-like support for traditional vSphere environments with support for XenServer and Nimbula coming soon.

You will want enStratus to run in a separate network from the management components of your cloud platform with a network channel to the management layer and to the VMs enStratus will be managing. enStratus requires at least two servers (virtual or physical). The two server configuration is good for testing, but probably not appropriate for production. How many servers you will need depends on the number of virtual machines you expect to have running in your cloud.

enStratus has four main components:

• The console
• The provisioning system
• The monitoring system
• The credentials system

Each system except the monitoring system has a database with the console having two databases. enStratus should run against any SQL-92 database, though only MySQL is fully tested. Please contact us if you would like explicit support for another database engine.

In addition to a SQL database, you will need to install RabbitMQ and an SMTP service that enStratus can optionally route emails through. Finally, if you want support for SMS, you will need to install an SMS service and write an SMS service plug-in (or use the enStratus Twilio plug-in if you are using Twilio).

enStratus comes with installation instructions for setting up all of these components. We expect soon to have Chef recipes ready to enable easy installation via Chef.

 

Announcing OpenStack with enStratus Support

This past week, enStratus was invited to participate in the inaugural design summit for a new and exciting open source cloud computing platform called OpenStack.  I was fortunate enough to attend and thought I would share my observations.

What is OpenStack?

OpenStack, in its current form, is the result of a shared vision between Rackspace (the main corporate sponsor of the effort so far) and several NASA engineers.  Right out of the gate it offers a comprehensive cloud object storage technology based on Rackspace’s CloudFiles product, which will now be open-source under the name “swift” as part of the OpenStack effort.  Couple that with key technology developed internally at NASA as part of their Nebula project and you can see that there’s already a comprehensive base of tech represented.  

Further, the point of the design summit was to get major industry participants on board early, set the basic direction of the project, and kick development off with a concerted few days of collaborative coding effort.  So this is just the beginning.  Over 25 companies were represented with approximately 100 individuals participating, and I’ve heard that the code base already evolved over the course of the last week beyond what the sponsors were expecting.

Where is OpenStack going?

This, to me, is the really exciting part.  Nobody can ever fully predict where open source movements will take a project, and there is certainly momentum behind this one, but where will it lead?  Are we building just another cloud stack to “compete” with several others already in existence?  

I would argue we can hope for something better here... I think this is the opportunity (and has the combined cerebral weight) to offer a fundamentally more sound and well-thought-out approach to dozens of individually daunting technical issues.  The goal is audacious enough... to provide a best-of-breed solution for the entire cloud computing stack from consumer API all the way down to hypervisor management.  Rackspace has started well in throwing the doors open to experts from all over the cloud computing world, and the targeted September initial release will tell us much about how this will ultimately play out.

enStratus support for OpenStack

Because the initial reference API for OpenStack is essentially the Rackspace API, enStratus supports OpenStack from day one.  You can download the early code today and use enStratus to provide a mature, proven, full-featured layer of automation and governance on top.  Obviously we’ll give you the web-based management UI you’d expect, but do you want to do OpenStack auto-scaling with auto-recovery?  Want full user management or comprehensive financial management and tracking?  enStratus on top of OpenStack offers some intriguing options.  Best of all, thanks to easy multiple-account management, you can use enStratus to integrate OpenStack testing with your existing infrastructure on Rackspace, Amazon, and many other supported environments. 

Of course, as the OpenStack project progresses and new features are implemented, enStratus’ support will adapt and grow. For more information on what enStratus already provides, check out our website.   Follow OpenStack on twitter at @openstack.  Follow enStratus at @enstratus.