Keeping the lights on

Having spent years running 24×7 internet-facing production systems, I find that the monitoring element of an application delivery environment is often the last item to be addressed and built outside of the application delivery architecture. As we continue to build our application delivery infrastructure in the cloud, having a good monitoring strategy will allow us to arm ourselves with the information we need to make intelligent decisions.

So exactly what should be monitored?

Availability

The first element in a monitoring strategy is to determine whether the application is accessible. The most simplistic form of determining availability is ping. However, as most applications are obscured behind a load balancer, a ping response doesn’t necessarily mean that the application is responding to requests. Use a monitoring system that can speak application-layer protocols to ensure that the application is indeed healthy and responding to user requests. It’s best to leverage a 3rd party solutions that can assess availability from multiple networks and provide an unbiased view on the availability of the application.

Resource Utilization / Load

Next element in a good monitoring strategy is to determine how healthy a system is. Tracking the load of various system components will enable us to uncover bottlenecks within the application delivery environment. Leverage SNMP to capture and record utilization statistics on CPU, memory, disk IO, network IO, threads, and so on. Graph these stats to establish baseline and find correlations between each monitored element. (more…)

How to get started in the Cloud

Here’s a presentation by the CEO of GoGrid at CloudWorld09. He discussed:

• What is Cloud Computing – The Cloud Pyramid
• The Benefits of Cloud Computing & Hybrid Hosting
• What can Cloud Computing do for me and my business
• The Competitive Landscape & Key Differentiators
• Cost Savings of Cloud Computing – pay only for what you need
• How to determine when to utilize Cloud Computing
• How should you get started using the Cloud?
• How to identify what to put in the cloud first (more…)

Dissecting Amazon Web Services

Just reading this article on AWS and thought I’d share some interesting numbers (in addition to the Quantcast data I shared earlier):

• 52 billion objects are stored in S3 and that S3 requests regularly peak at 80,000 requests per second.
• EC2 is experiencing monthly growth of “almost 10%.”
• Amazon has U.S. data centers in Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Palo Alto, Seattle, and St. Louis, and international data centers in Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. (more…)

Power your webapp with Cloudera, Hadoop, Hive, Pig, and EC2

Ever wonder how http://www.trendingtopics.org/ collects & process the visitor information from wikipedia? This Cloudera Post walks you through the steps of how to leverage various cloud tools to power a process-intensive web application. (more…)

State of the Cloud: Use of Infrastructure-As-A-Service

InfiBase researched top 500,000 websites (based on Quantcast metrics) and their usage of cloud services. While EC2 showed a 9% growth from July to August, less than 1% of all the sites use cloud for infrastructure services. (more…)

Making the case for a virtualized hardware appliance

As Data Center infrastructures become more virtualized, the desire for virtualized network services increases. We see 2 types of offerings:

1. virtual appliances delivered in a VM image, such as the Netscaler VPX from Citrix
2. hardware appliances that can be virtualized, such as Cisco ACE or ASA

(more…)

Another Amazon EC2 story

Looks like HotPads.com has abandoned traditional hosting and moved into Amazon’s elastic compute cloud (EC2). This is a trend that I’ve been following in the web space. (more…)

A video summary of Sever Virtualization

Came across this today and thought I’d pass it on. It’s a video of virtualization for novices posted on YouTube.