Sun Open Cloud - Detailed Review

Sun Microsystems unveiled its combined open cloud computing infrastructure at the CommunityOne developer event in New York in March. Though some may say that for a company like Sun, this may be a bit late into the game of clouds but nevertheless they came powered by industry-leading software technologies from Sun, including Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris and Open Storage. Sun also aims to serve developers, students as well as start-ups by their new Open cloud system. Let us have a close look at all the details that are associated with Sun Open Cloud.

How ‘open’ is Open cloud?

This is perhaps the most obvious question that will come to your mind. However, Sun being always very liberal about open source movement, have justified the name Open Cloud. Sun envisions a world of many clouds - public and private - that are open and interoperable. In their quest to make it offer an Open Cloud system, Sun also announced the release of a core set of Open APIs.

What you will immediately observe is that they’ve taken an open, extensible approach towards developing a cloud computing API. There are two important points I will like to mentions so it clears your doubts without much hassles

1. Sun has opened its cloud APIs for public review and comment, so that others building public and private clouds can easily design them for compatibility with the Sun Cloud
2. Sun’s Cloud API specifications are published under the Creative Commons license, which essentially allows anyone to use them in any way. Developers will be able to deploy applications to the Sun Cloud immediately, by leveraging pre-packaged VMIs (virtual machine images) of Sun’s open source software, eliminating the need to download, install and configure infrastructure software.If you are a developer, then here is your chance to join the movement.

Core Components

Now that you are sure that it is really something where you can act and participate and be directly linked to, here are the core components of Sun’s Open Cloud.

• Sun Cloud Storage Service: Supports WebDAV protocols for easy file access and object store APIs that are compatible with Amazon’s S3 APIs.

• The Sun Cloud Compute Service: Centers around the Virtual Data Center (VDC) capabilities  which provides everything developers need to build and operate a data center in the cloud.

The Sun Cloud Storage Service

The Sun Cloud Storage Service is a set of web service APIs and WebDAV protocols that provide open standard based, on-demand, programmatic access to highly scalable storage infrastructure via the Internet, (” the cloud “). With the Sun Cloud Storage Service you will get:

• Ability to store and retrieve data in multiple data formats
• Programmatic web services API operations and administration control, using industry standard that don’t lock you in
• Ability to clone and snapshot volumes
• Ability to mount cloud drives via multiple WebDAV clients including DavFS
• AWS S3 compatibility

One of the most important notes we saw at the CommunityOne conference was the declaration of Amanda Enterprise (AE) and Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB) integration with Sun Cloud API. That means, even if you are in Sun’s Cloud, you get a cloud backup of your data. It also comes with fast installation, simplified management, enterprise-class functionality - as Alka Gupta from blogs.sun.com is found discussing.

The Sun Cloud Compute Service with VDC

What is a VDC?

The VDC provides a unified, integrated interface to stage an application running on any operating system within a cloud, including OpenSolaris, Linux or Windows. It features a drag-and-drop method, in addition to APIs and a command line interface for provisioning compute, storage and networking resources via any Web browser.

Working with VDC

If you see the image just above, which is a Facebook modeled Cloud System architecture, you see there are two panels.

1. In the left panel you can list different sorts of gear/virtual machine images (VMIs) that you might put into your data center as drag-and-dropp’able objects. The objects can be Linux servers, Windows servers, Solaris servers, firewalls, Web servers, load balancers, caching servers, databases, networking switches and so on.
2. On the right panel you get a blank pane representing an empty cloud that’s waiting for you to drop your personalized virtual data center into. You start picking up servers, switches, firewalls, etc., and you just drop them into the cloud. Then, you connect them. That’s it.

The first virtual model of VDC was really impressive and easy to use. Again, you can specify the information with the devices. For example, you can describe a server’s processor attributes (GHz rating, core count, memory, etc.)

Sun’s Dream with VDC

We think everyone on the planet deserves to have their own virtual data center in the cloud. One thing that’s important is scalability. Conceptually, how I can bring components in, and manage them holistically, and then replicate the distributed architecture…

Lew Tucker, CTO of the Sun Cloud Group, said during the keynote.

Sun’s approach to cloud computing blends our expertise in developing open source software and communities with unique design innovation. Sun’s Open Cloud platform is the first step in delivering on our vision of a world that has many clouds that are both open and interoperable. Our cloud architecture empowers developers with the expanded interoperability and freedom of choice they need to easily take advantage of the agility, efficiency and cost benefits of cloud computing

said Dave Douglas, senior vice president, Cloud Computing, Sun.

The Sun Cloud API

While we have talked about the openness and ease of extensibility of Sun’s Open API, there is much left. While fully RESTful, the consumer of the service only needs to know the starting URI. Everything else is discoverable through retrieving the representations of the various entities.

Open API components

• Cloud: A top-level construct which groups all the Virtual Data Centers to which an API user has access.
• Virtual Data Center (VDC): An isolated container which is populated with Clusters, Private Virtual Networks, Public Addresses, Storage Volumes, Volume Snapshots.
• Cluster: An administrative grouping of Virtual Machines, useful for access control, copying or cloning, geographic isolation, and scripting automation.
• Virtual Machine (VM): A server.
• Private Virtual Network (VNet): A subnet, not connected to the Internet, which may be used to connect Virtual Machines within a VDC.
• Public Address: A connection to the Internet.
• Storage Volume: A storage resource which may be accessed via WebDAV and other storage protocols.
• Volume Snapshot: A snapshot of the state of a Storage Volume.

“Hello, Cloud”: An illustrative walk-through of the Sun Cloud API is a nice example if you are interested.

Developers’ Interests

When its Sun, developers have a lot to game for. Sun’s Open Cloud puts developers into cloud no. 9. Much has been discussed already, I will just sum them up for you in case you are only interested in that bit.

1. Sun is releasing the API specification itself under the Creative Commons with Attribution license. So if you have any input personally or want to share it with Sun, here is the destination: Sun Cloud APIs

2. Craig McClanahan, one of the core developers who were responsible for this flexible Cloud API clarified,

For those who do not wish to program low level HTTP calls themselves, we will also be providing higher level language bindings to this API, initially in Java, Ruby, and Python.

If you are apprehensive about how platform independent or robust this technology will be for you, here is a quick peek into one of the developers who managed to throw some light on a pretty serious issue (which is made easy)

Within a VDC, you can model anything from a simple firewall+webserver up to a large, complex, multitier web application … and deploy it with a single request. Need to add a new Apache HTTPD instance to your web tier? No problem — create a new virtual machine (VM) with the same characteristics as one of your existing instances, attach it to the appropriate virtual private networks (VNets), deploy, and start. That’s the way it should be … easy, manageable, and controlled via REST web service calls, using whatever client technology you like.

Conclusion

According to Sun, it was important to make it possible for people to build the equivalent of a physical datacenter in the cloud. That way customers are able to more effectively treat their cloud computing resources much as they would a traditional data center.

said Reuven Cohen, a member of the Sun Cloud Computing Strategic Advisory Council. That is exactly the point where Sun’s Open Cloud will grow interest in the industry and in the common mass. Sun’s API serves both the developers and a common man because it introduces abstractions for grouping machines, creating subnetworks, isolating resources, and support for teams in the virtual cloud environment that too at ease. Its amazingly simple and perhaps provides you with industry’s one of the most improved application management systems with your freedom of choice intact (as Rightscale CEO Michael Crandell said at CommunityOne).

As the time progresses, we will have more inputs and will be able to test the system thoroughly and come with more insights. Till then, its so far so good Sun. The Sun Open Cloud at least isn’t a meager effort like JavaFX though ofcourse in an altogether different domain. But just before I sign off, my ever so poking mind will like to ask you, is anyway the Sun buyout gonna affect/ effect Sun Open Cloud, esp when its IBM?