Posts tagged ubuntu

I’m happy that I decided to attend ubuntu developer day and I had few things to learn from the session. The slides which were used have been promised to be put up in this link(still waiting for them).

The most important point I learnt was that cloud computing is not the same as virtualization. Even though the underlying technology is same(cloud can be said as a massive cluster virtualized servers), there is a paradigm shift with how you view both of them. Nick@Canonical made a nice point when he said cloud instances are like objects in object oriented programming. So what exactly does it mean? in cloud computing, you can scale up or down the resources instantaneously so much so that it can be automated. No more manual intervention when you need to scale up the infrastructure. This also means that the website is now better prepared to withstand slashdot effects. And what’s more, you can scale down the infrastructure once the traffic cools down!! I think this is going to make a massive impact on hosting.

I guess the downside is that DoS attacks would prove more financially damaging. I’m not sure if there is a way to tackle it.

Advantages of cloud:
-> Dynamic scaling.
-> Introspection.
-> Storage. (expandibility of storage)

Ubuntu has a very nice feature called ubuntu-init which can be used to instantiate a ubuntu image on Amazon EC2. And puppet for package management and installation. Will explore these more in the near future to implement dynamic scaling and will probably have more to say then.

Another impressive feature of Ubuntu is UEC(Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud). You can use it to run your own private cloud on your own servers. Added advantage is that it offers same API as Amazon AWS so you can seamlessly deploy the same on both. This is a very nice feature for testing with our own testing servers without incurring charges of using AWS(for testing) and easily deploy it into AWS for production.

These were my main learnings from the developer day. Other things like UTouch, plans for the upcoming 11.04, Ubuntu One(App store for Ubuntu) were also touched upon. But my main concentration was on cloud computing.