Cloud Computing

Webian Shell: Prototype Web-Based Shell

Michael Reed — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Webian Shell is a web-based shell that is designed to run full-screen and function as the primary user interface for your computer. At the moment, it's still at the proof of concept stage, but 0.1 is runnable without making any modifications to your system. As it features some interesting ideas, it's worth having a play around with.

The Linux version of Webian is, for the moment, supplied as a tar.gz archive containing the executable and the supporting files. Builds are available for Windows and Mac.

Under the hood, this project makes use of Mozilla Chromeless, a project that eschews the standard web browser user interface. By the way, the “chrome” in the name refers not to Google Chrome but rather the user interface portion of Mozilla web browsers. As it consists of only a rendering engine, the idea is that the navigation interface can be implemented using web standards within the browser itself. Indeed, the Chromeless website lists Webian as one of the first projects to run with the idea.

The task switcher.

When run, Webian takes over the entire screen. The idea is that a stripped down web browser becomes the interface to the computer on a setup that relies entirely on cloud-based rather than locally installed applications. The tabs themselves are iconified and run along the bottom of the screen, aping the user interface style of other popular desktops.

The Webian start page. It doesn't do much yet.

For the moment, Webian is incomplete. For example, some sites don't render properly and apparently Google's cloud applications don't work due to a bug. Web navigation doesn't seem to be very usable as there are no forward and back controls and there was no bookmarking that I could find. The start page that exists does not yet really do anything.

Using Webian to browse some web content.

Shortcomings due to the incomplete nature of the project aside, it is possible to get an idea of how how setup like this could work. Once things are a little bit further along, one thing I'd like to see is a bootable ISO image that makes use of Webian. This would be particularly good if it were partnered with some sort of remote storage for configuration and customization. So far this project looks intriguing and it's fairly close to being a usable product already. If you have some ideas about how it should work, there's a forum for such discussions on the website.

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Open Source Cloud Computing with Hadoop

Bernardo David — Tue, 17 May 2011 15:11:23 +0000

by Bernardo David

Have you ever wondered how Google, Facebook and other Internet giants process their massive workloads? Billions of requests are served every day by the biggest players on the Internet, resulting in background processing involving datasets in the petabyte scale. Of course they rely on Linux and cloud computing for obtaining the necessary scalability and performance. The flexibility of Linux combined with the seamless scalability of cloud environments provide the perfect framework for processing huge datasets, while eliminating the need for expensive infrastructure and custom proprietary software. Nowadays, Hadoop is one of the best choices in open source cloud computing, offering a platform for large scale data crunching.

Introduction

In this article we introduce and analyze the Hadoop project, which has been embraced by many commercial and scientific initiatives that need to process huge datasets. It provides a full platform for large-scale dataset processing in cloud environments, being easily scalable since it can be deployed on heterogeneous cluster infrastructure and regular hardware. As of April 2011, Amazon, AOL, Adobe, Ebay, Google, IBM, Twitter, Yahoo and several universities are listed as users in the project's wiki. Being maintained by the Apache Foundation, Hadoop comprises a full suite for seamless distributed scalable computing on huge datasets. It provides base components on top of which new distributed computing sub projects can be implemented. Among its main components is an open source implementation of the MapReduce framework (for distributed data processing) together with a data storage solution composed by a distributed filesystem and a data warehouse.

The MapReduce Framework

The MapReduce framework was created and patented by Google in order to process their own page rank algorithm and other applications that support their search engine. The idea behind it was actually introduced many years ago by the first functional programming languages such as LISP, and basically consists of partitioning a large problem into several "smaller" problems that can be solved separately. The partitioning and finally the main problem's result are computed by two functions: Map and Reduce. In terms of data processing, the Map function takes a large dataset and partitions it into several smaller intermediate datasets that can be processed in parallel by different nodes in a cluster. The reduce function then takes the separate results of each computation and aggregates them to form the final output. The power of MapReduce can be leveraged by different applications to perform operations such as sorting and statistical analysis on large datasets, which may be mapped into smaller partitions and processed in parallel.

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Behind the Cloud It's Still Just Computers

Shawn Powers — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 14:33:07 +0000

by Shawn Powers

I had the pleasure of joining a video conference with our local Drupal expert, Katherine Druckman, and Barry Jaspan, one of the system architects from Acquia. Acquia is a company that specializes in Drupal. While their company does many things for clients interested in using Drupal, we were specifically talking about cloud computing. Acquia offers a highly available, fully scalable, and managed Drupal environment. For the end user, it means you pay a set amount every month, and your website is always there. It's always updated, it's always backed up, and it's always available. For that magic to happen, however, the folks at Acquia have to play the man behind the curtain and become the Wizard of Oz. That's where the focus of our talk was, and it was fascinating to hear some inside info on running a cloud service. The folks at Acquia actually use Amazon's cloud services to make their own cloud platform. Perhaps that's a cloud within a cloud, but nonetheless it's an economical way to leverage other people's datacenters in order to provide a service of your own. Using Amazon's EC2 service to spin up servers as you need them is great. It does come with some frustrating hinderances too though.

Advantages

As client needs grow or shrink, adding or removing servers takes literally seconds.
Hardware maintenance is "farmed out" to Amazon. No more failed hard drives, faulty network cards, or power concerns.
As a vendor, you only pay for the server power you need. No need to over-buy servers in case you need them.

Disadvantages

While spinning up new servers is instant, you're limited (mostly) to spinning up servers. There is no SAN, which can be a real problem.
Creating failover support must be done completely with software. Not having actual hardware is an advantage, until you wish you had specialized hardware.
Scaling can be challenging. Granted Amazon offers different size hardware, but load balancing and scaling still aren't magic. MySQL for instance still runs on a single server.

That's Where the Magic Happens

At Acquia, they've created a complex backend. Clients don't see anything other than a working service, but they've solved some complicated issues rather nicely. For example:

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Jolicloud: Cloud enabled and not just for netbooks

Michael Reed — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 15:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

There’s a Linux distribution for every occasion and the main purpose of Jolicloud is to present a web enabled GUI for netbooks and similar devices. I’m going to take a look at a preview release of the forthcoming 1.1 version. Under the hood, it’s based on the Ubuntu long term service release (10.04), and the front end is handled by a combination of the Chromium web browser and a full screen user interface that eschews overlapping windows.

Netbooks are the obvious target of this distribution, and by default, it’s setup as a browser for website and cloud based applications. However, it’s easy to expand, and I think this could be a distribution with a lot of uses. It’s possible to add applications, and it can also be installed on any hardware that standard Ubuntu can including desktop PCs. Even better, as well as focussing on convenience, it’s easy to use, meaning that it might be a good platform for people who aren’t very good at using computers.

So, what does Jolicloud offer once it’s up and running?

Following an install procedure that reveals the Ubuntu roots of the distro, the first screen that you will see is the home screen, with a set of large icons for launching the installed applications. Bear in mind, on Jolicloud, an application might not be software as such, but rather, a service that you access through the browser such as social networking site. The default set of applications are: the Chromium web browser, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Docs, Skimmer and a couple of games. There is a also an application built into the status bar called Social Stream that collates the output of multiple social networking sites.

When launched, an application takes up the full screen, apart from a status bar, and most people will find this arrangement superior to overlapping windows, given the type of device that this distribution is targeting. The aforementioned statusbar contains some smaller icons for getting you back to home screen, accessing the settings and accessing files on the local storage or a flash drive.

Clicking on the Chromium icon launches the browser as expected. If you’ve used this browser before, you’ll recall that its interface is, fittingly given the target hardware, rather compact, lacking a pull-down menu. The other default icons are effectively bookmarks for the web browser. There’s also a configuration icon, and from here, you can access some more technical, expert level settings and tools.

Adding applications to Jolicloud is a breeze as it makes use of the built in “application store" style package manger. The applications are a combination of actual software applications and links to online services.

Adding applications.

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Observation: Cloud computing is nothing new

Michael Reed — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 14:12:19 +0000

by Michael Reed

Cloud computing is not only the latest buzz term, it might well be the model of computing that powers the 21st century. However, it’s easy to forget that personal computing, in which each user has a standalone system that can operate without a network, is itself a relatively new approach.

The first practical computers were enormous behemoths composed of clicking relays and vacuum tubes. Much of the early development of these multi-ton monsters had been spurred by the allied code-breaking effort during World War II. For the first thirty years of the history of general purpose computers, computer time was the exclusive privilege of large institutions and governments.

One of the first breakthroughs in bringing down the cost of computer access was the concept of a time-sharing system. In such a system, multiple operators can access the resources of the computer through the use of remote terminals. Here, in the form of early Teletype terminals, and later, video terminals, we see the emergence of a network topology in which computing horsepower is located in a central computer, away from the user.

It was the era of the mainframe and the dumb-terminal. Typically, these dumb terminals would lack storage or computation capability, as they were simply a display with a keyboard. By the 1970s, an operator (usually wearing flared trousers, if the textbooks I’ve seen are accurate), would sit in front of an amber or green screened terminal, thankful that he no longer needed to wait in line in to hand in a box of carefully arranged punch-cards.

Fast forward to the late 70s and a new paradigm was beginning to gain favour. If you’ve seen the film The Pirates of Silicon Valley, a dramatisation of the early years of Apple Computers, you may remember a scene in which the young Steve Wozniak is compelled to show his prototype personal computer to his employer, Hewlett Packard. In the scene that I’m talking about, Steve fears that his bosses will take his idea from him. The exchange goes something like this:

HP exec
Steve, it is Steve isn’t it?

Steve Wozniak
(nods)

HP exec
Steve, you say that this... gadget... of yours is for ordinary people. What on earth would ordinary people want with computers?

(long pause)

The idea that was being mooted was that of a personal computer, that is, a self-contained computer that only requires an electrical power supply in order to operate. Singular computers that did not need to be connected to a larger computer in order to run went on to become the popular face of computing for the remainder of the 20th century.

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