Since I joined VMware almost 1y ago, I had little time to update my blog on what 's going on. I have a whole lot more for this year and I hope you'll find it of interest.
For this come back, I'll start a whole series of posts all tagged USI2011.
Cloud... let's get concrete please!
We just helped launched a cloud scale application challenge with 2 partners around VMware: Steria for the hosting part and Octo driving the challenge - a major consulting boutique of high level yet real solid architecture skills especially when it comes to the topics at stake - applications and clouds.
The challenge is opened to dev/devops/architect skilled teams in France and is already oversubscribed and got good buzz (here, here, and twitter #USI2011).
See the complete flyer.
In few days and for about 4 months you'll have access to VMware vCloud Director over the internet to run and test drive your platform, running atop a nice set of blades operated by Steria (we'll disclose details later), and prefilled with empty linux or better the entire portfolio of vFabric cloud application platform (it 's all your choice to use it).
If we leave Zimbra and Desktop virtualization solutions we have a great combination of what VMware cooked in 2010 - following the SpringSource, GemStone, and RabbitMQ acquisitions - now called vFabric - and combining this with the vCloud Director who went publicly generally available in second half of 2010. Awesome combination of technologies, proven for years in the field from virtualization to Java runtimes and coming to you over the cloud through vCloud!
The whole goal is to write a scalable application - and we mean large scale.
We want to observe how you deal with few issues especially when running "in a cloud" - in the 2011+ years. We want to see the solution you bring to the table - use vCloud, use vFabric (or whatever you'd like if you can sustain a discussion to a CIO on why it's the best platform for his apps), and get back to us with real code and results.
There has been a number of discussion in the twitter and blogosphere (again in France) of small tweaks enabling key differences in raw performance (indeed there might be, going back to tuning an OS TCP stack) but be aware we'll also carefully look at your cloud capabilities:
- technologies being used are rather mainstream, digestible or plain darkness?
- how do you deal with provisioning and management at scale?
- are you elastic, from a compute and data perspective
- how fast can you scale, does your scale out mechanism integrates with "add VM" in vCloud and also reduces load from existing nodes and not simply add new capacity waiting for new requests
- are you HA and no-SPOF (it is an overkilled term but if you have elascticity you may have scale-down hence requirement for nodes being droped fairly often)
- and the list goes on...
If you want to read more (and read French) - go have a look at
- Octo' challenge announcement "Et si vous codiez une application qui supporte 1 milliard d’utilisateurs ?"
- Octo blog on the challenge and thoughts on how you will be judged
- Université du SI 2011 Octo' conference where we'll debrief and showcase about this challenge
- and of course the vFabric and vCloud Director from VMware directly
For the next post, I'll uncover a bit more with pics and videos what it looks like to run vFabric in the cloud with vCloud Director
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