The project began two years ago when VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz recruited Derek Collison and Mark Lucovsky out of Google and set them to working on Cloud Foundry.  Collison and Lucovsky, who built and maintained Google’s API services, were brought into leverage their experience of working with hugely scaled out architectures.

The Cloud Foundry project has only been public for a matter of months and one question that I’m sure has popped into your mind is what if I want to pilot Cloud Foundry in my own environment, won’t installation and configuration be a total pain?

Enter the Crowbar

Crowbar is an open source software framework developed at Dell to speed up the installation and configuration of open source cloud software onto bare metal systems.  By automating the process, Crowbar can reduce the time needed for installation from days to hours.

The software is modular in design so while the basic functionality is in Crowbar itself, “barclamps” sit on top of it to allow it work with a variety of projects.  The first use for crowbar was for OpenStack and the barclamp for that has been donated to the community.  Next came The Dell | Cloudera solution for Apache Hadoop and, just recently, Dreamhost announced that they currently working on a Ceph barclamp.  And now…

Two great tastes that taste great together

Today’s big news is that VMware is working with Dell to release and maintain a Crowbar barclamp that, in conjunction with Crowbar, will install and configure Cloud Foundry.  This capability, which will include multi-node configs over time, will allow organizations and service providers the ability to quickly and easily get pilots of Cloud Foundry up and running.

Once the initial deployment is complete, Crowbar can be used to maintain, expand, and architect the instance, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting.

If you’d like to try out Crowbar for yourself, check out: https://github.com/DellCloudEdge

Press added after initial posting

• VMware Enlists Dell to Help Wage Cloud ‘Operating Systems War’ – Bloomberg, Bloomberg Businessweek
• Dell tunes Crowbar tool to Cloud Foundry – GigaOm
• Cloud Foundry PaaS to Get Automated Installation, Deployment Tools – Read Write Web

Extra-credit reading

• Collaboration between Dell Crowbar & VMware CloudFoundry – unleashes your inner cloud – Rob’s Blog
• THIS JUST IN: VMware and Dell Partner to Enable Cloud Foundry via #Crowbar – Joseph’s blog
• Introducing the Dell | Cloudera solution for Apache Hadoop — Harnessing the power of big data
• DreamHost uses Dell’s Crowbar as a lever to raise automation.
• Dell announces availability of OpenStack solution; Open sources “Crowbar” software framework
• OpenStack Installer Demo at SXSW
• VMware taps Google ethos with Cloud Foundry
• VMware Launches Open Source PaaS Cloud Foundry

Pau for now…

Some of the ground that Dave covers:

• What he covers in his blog Green Data Center
• How do you go about building a data center and who are the players in each phase e.g site selection -> architecture/engineering design -> construction…
• What are some of the key disruptions coming to this long standing industry e.g. cloud, Google

Pau for now…

Extra-credit reading

• Welcome to the Wild and Wacky World of Data Centers
• 48 hours at a Data Center Conference, Example Gartner DC LV 2010

I  was interested to get some more details so I reached out to Mark to find out his master Cloud plan, his thoughts on Cloud Computing today and where he thought it was going.  This is what he had to say:

My interview with Mark (9:51)  Listen (Mp3) Listen (ogg)

Mark and myself at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Boston at the end of ’07 (Mark’s the one without the “Barton” name tag.)

Some of the topics Mark Tackles:

• Ubuntu has picked two anchor points for its cloud strategy: Amazon EC2 and UCSB‘s (go Gauchos!) Eucalyptus.  Eucalyptus is for those looking to create “private clouds” on their own and on the Amazon side they are making it easy for users to plug into EC2 as well as offering folks the ability to run Ubuntu-based machines on their cloud.
• Why they went with EC2 and Eucalyptus.  On the Eucalyptus side it has to with it being Java-based, which meshes nicely with the work Ubuntu did with Sun to get the Java stack “straightened out” on Ubuntu for  app servers.
• The constraints that EC2 imposes actually make it more interesting by providing discipline, much in the same way that http applied the discipline of being completely connectionless.
• We haven’t yet seen the “definitive cloud” in  the way that Google came along and captured the spirit (and revenues) of the web.  It will still be 5 -10 years before the cloud computing is nailed.
• Portability in the Cloud is key if we want to avoid gross lock-in issues.  People are trying to tackle this in a variety of ways but it makes sense to look at the way http came to dominance.
• Any truth to the rumor that Google is planning on using Ubuntu as a Netbook OS? (listen how Mark deftly responds
• Last time we spoke, back in August, Mark said he was looking at profitability in 18 months to two years, is he still on track?

Pau for now…

Update: Here is the Register article based on the above podcast.

To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.

Some of the topics Kevin Tackles:

• Growing the Enterprise team from less than 20 to over 500.
• The evolution from Search -> Maps -> Earth -> Google Apps (Google’s thrust into the cloud for businesses)
• Python and App Engine, going with what’s familiar and plans to expand

Pau for now…

The video, which is in YouTube’s new 16:9 aspect ratio (the only way you want to watch Lawrence of Arabia or Blueprint demos), is part of a series of developer videos Google is doing to show the cool things that can be built using Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

What you’ll see (and what you’ll get)

In the video, which is only a minute and 16 seconds, Alex shows how business users can enter info in outline form which then generates corresponding boxes in an adjacent map view.  These boxes can be easily moved around via drag-and-drop.  Additionally, at the push of a button this high-level view is auto-magically converted into a process flow diagram.  As Alex points out, thanks to GWT, all of this happens completely within any browser without the user having to download any plug-ins like Flash etc.

Extra-Credit Reading

• Blueprint: Built of Java thanks to Google Web Toolkit
  
• How GWT is enabling Blueprint’s agility
• Blueprint and the Performance of the GWT 1.5 Hash Map
• Using GWT to Build a High Performance Collaborative Diagramming Tool (video from the presentation give at Google I/O)

Pau for now…

For those who prefer reading, here is a quick summary of Jeff’s talk:

He starts with two positives for Cloud Computing

1. From an IT perspective: He cites the Gartner statistic that only 20% of the total cost of ownership for software is the purchasing of the software while 80% of the cost comes from the ongoing maintenance.  He cites the centralized nature of the cloud as a way of reversing that trend and actually flipping the relationship.
2. From a user perspective, we are shifting from personal to group productivity and shifting towards a single instance of an application and collaboration which the cloud supports.

He then focuses on the Myths

1. It’s not secure: Jeff argues that an enterprise with the size and scale of an Amazon, Google or Salesforce.com is much more secure than most.  He also rightfully points out that you can’t assume that today’s in-house model is zero risk.  (This seems like an obvious point but one that people often miss when comparing the two models).
2. It’s not proven (no one’s done this before):  He talks about how cloud began with services like ADP payroll and then rolled out to other vertical apps like Webex and Salesforce.com and has continued from there.
3. It’s not for the enterprise:  He points to the large scale of Google support and infrastructure.

Pau for now…

According to Daya Baran’s blog “A GE spokesperson who did not want to be identified said their decision was based around issues of personal and corporate privacy, functionality, support, features and Zoho won hands down.”

Hmmm, GE might be a great candidate for Blueprint

Zoho landing page.  Look familiar?

Pau for now…