Cloud and Virtualization Pragmatism

Super Computer 10, AWS SC10

2012-01-03T13:18:00.001+02:00

Amazon Web service super computer 10 (AWS SC10), is a nice service added by Amazon along with its long list of great features that it has to offer its clients, this feature has been built to fulfil the researchers and people needs for high performance computing resources.... For more information about SC10 visit: http://aws.amazon.com/sc10/

You can also have a look on this nice video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnOGzKP4Vdc

I didn't try it yet, but will give it a shot soon isA :) ...

Another Cloud Day on the road :)

2011-05-19T16:06:00.002+02:00

Last Saturday, we had another cloud day, it was amazing, I was so happy and satisfied with the level of awareness we are getting in Egypt about the cloud computing different topics and technologies.

We had different topics, presented by very knowledgeable speakers, who excelled in presenting and rallying their sessions in a very effective way, I was pleased to have them and work with them for this day.

What really disappointed us in the Egypt Cloud Forum Team, that we were trying our best managing attendees number since registration to the event was closed, and we tried to get more spaces, after all this, many of registered people did not show up, we felt bad as we knew others were waiting for any sign of spaces, we tried to call as many as we could from the waiting list, but generally this let us feel sad, why we don't really take a professional commitment in our life, we need this for better results, and better Egypt.

I hope we get to be better in all life aspects, we need this in the coming period, we really need to be sincere and committed, and work hard, each in his field.

My first visit to the Egyptian Cloud Computing Center in Assuit..An Experiment to our New Upper Egypt

2011-05-18T11:02:00.000+02:00

Last week, I had a great opportunity to lecture in the ITI cloud computing center in Assuit, it was an amazing experience, I met students studying the cloud computing track their Assuit branch, instructors, cloud engineers at the cloud center itself.

Well, the trip was for two days after an agreement between my company Intel, and the ITI in the context of the cooperation protocol and framework to exchange the cloud industry experience and the cloud development for the ITI graduates.

In the first day I’ve introduced to the students an overview about cloud computing and its related technologies and the second day I went through some aspects of the cloud security…

People were enthusiastic, thrilled and eager to know about the topic and honestly I didn’t hesitate to tell them all what I know about the topic and reply all of their questions …

I went to the cloud data center, though not yet complete or production-ready, but was impressed, they are on the right track, and the engineers who are working and operating the center are very good and young who are willing to know more about the technology behind this cloud data center.. i felt like i'm not in upper Egypt as we've always stereotyped.

I went through different sessions; with the whole team or on an individual-basis meeting to discuss each one issue individually… and was happy to see their responses and how well-educated and passionate about what they are doing, i missed this feeling lately, and after revolution i wanted so much to feel it out

Students at Assuit ITI are different, they are still featured or recognized with the virginity and purity of the country people … I liked talking with them all … I believe these people with some coaching and mentoring will rock it all around! :)

I left with great hope in our people, IT ones, and non-IT from all people I've met in this short visit, with promises to see them again, and hope to see many like them, I hope we sharpen the saw well, our minds are hungry for science and achievement, our hearts are awaiting for more happiness after our Great Egyptian revolution!

Database.com -- The cloud database service

2010-12-10T20:21:00.000+02:00

Salesforce.com has launched Database.com, an enterprise cloud database designed for building the next generation of cloud, mobile and social applications. Database.com is an open database that will offer numerous benefits to users by providing automatic scalability, backups and upgrades, along with some additional features such as prebuilt social data model.

This service will be available by 2011 and will be offered for free for three users with up to 100,000 records and 50,000 transactions per month. Beyond this, users will have to pay $10 a month for each set of 100,000 records, and an additional $10 a month for each set of $150,000 transactions. you can check the pricing here, http://www.database.com/pricing

One important thing related to this innovative service is the security concerns, and for this the company said that service has received ISO 27001, SAS 70 Type II and SysTrust as security certifications. It also offers SSL, single sign-on, identity confirmation, and anti-phishing tools. Secure access is also strengthened by the user and role-based security and row-level data security.

I'm looking forwards to try this service ...!

Amazon and Wikileaks

2010-12-08T16:26:00.002+02:00

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is on longer hosting WikiLeaks (250,000+ classified State Department documents and cables that include disclosures about the nuclear ambitions of Iran, candid comments from world leaders and numerous other revelations of confidential matters. Amazon states that it terms of use ... and this is raises a flag about cloud vendors and their governance of users data hosted at their infrastructure!

I've found and interesting article about Amazon kicking off wikileaks site from EC2 cloud instances, and liked to share it with you ...

Skills needed to shift to the cloud

2010-11-10T14:20:00.005+02:00

Many people asked me about the skills needed when they want to shift to the cloud computing ?!

Interesting question actually, and I'll try to write down my thoughts about this ...

Well, Cloud computing won’t run without people. IT experts will still need to supply core business functions and applications ..

As most companies will run some of their technology inside the cloud (adopt to the cloud) and others will run outside the cloud (on premises or I'll call it in their private cloud setup). Such models will require strong service management between these internal and external setups.

Example for this is some organizations will still need to use networked systems and some integration services and network engineers will still have to solve routing and management problems and challenges. All of these skills of an IT person and IT needs won't disappear by adopting to the cloud.

A new mindset will be needed to adapt to the change as well, by learning new cloud management tools (hypervisor and infrastructure management tools), the deployment models, the development platforms and the way the application is being deployed to any cloud provider.

This is on the technical side of the issue.

On the management side the manager who manages a project or business deployed into the cloud will need to learn some skills like:

Negotiation skills, in order to negotiate on service SLA with his/her clients and also to resolve conflicts.
Process management, every manager will need to have some skills related to the process management, configuration management, change management, release management etc.
Cloud market is rapidly changing and evolving ... so business owners and managers should cope with the market needs with the agility and velocity needed to cope with these changes.
Innovation, as the cloud market is full of new opportunities.

So, generally speaking, shifting to cloud needs a very flexible and open-minded kind of personality ...

Hope this can help in answering this frequent question ...

A new rootkit-detection system for Virtualized environment

2010-10-20T15:13:00.003+02:00

A new rootkit-detection system has been developed by IBM, and it has been implemented facilitate the detection of malicious attacks on virtualized environment.

IBM call it 'IBM Virtual Protection System', and it operates outside the virtual machine and it is able to identify malicious software when it is installed in any of the guest virtual machines hosted on the physical server.

Being outside of the virtual machine's operating system it can detect hard-to-identify problems such as rootkits.

It also gives the administrators a single security product to run across virtual machines, said JR Rao, a senior manager with IBM security research. "I don't want to have 10 copies of antivirus running there," he said. "If one firewall can protect 10 of these virtual machines, that's what I want to do."

The big blue put a nice efforts towards cloud and virtualization security by this system.

EMC targets FISMA compliance in the Cloud

2010-09-01T15:04:00.002+02:00

EMC is developing technology to track and verify the location of virtual machines in cloud networks, potentially solving one of the key sticking points preventing customers from using the cloud.

Because of FISMA(Federal Information Security Management Act), customers who put sensitive data in cloud services need guarantees that VMs stay within the country, says Chad Sakac, vice president of the VMware technology alliance at EMC. This is a problem for a cloud provider like Terremark, an EMC partner, which operates data centers in multiple continents and uses live migration technology to move virtual machines, potentially from one country to another, he says.

I think this is a very good step and initiative towards cloud compliances' concerns!

You can read more here

Cloud Security Alliance - Start of Egypt Chapter

2010-08-02T17:03:00.001+03:00

Clo ud Security Alliance is a non-profit organization formed to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing.

And I'm happy that I reached an agreement with CSA to develop CSA Egypt chapter, and Egypt Cloud Forum will be an official affiliate partner of CSA to do joint activities (ECF and CSA Egypt Chapter).

You are invited and welcome to join the chapter activities!

If you are interested, please contact me at the following email: mohamed@egyptcloudforum.com

Looking forward to contribute together and do our best to work on the cloud security activities.

First Cloud Day in Egypt went successfully

2010-05-27T23:26:00.002+03:00

The event was really enjoying, meeting professionals with focused goal and passion made it a success, Clouders meetup was fruitful with many items on the list to be into actions the coming days.....volunteers, Fuel your engine, because we are about to speed now :)
My presentation agenda was about:
- Cloud Computing Overview
- Usage Scenarios
- Cloud from different perspectives [Client, Top Management, PM, Developer, Tester, Admin]
- Applications ready for cloud
- Applications are not ready yet …

After this, we had our first OST session (Open Space Technology)Session and everybody proactively participated and contributed with his opinion, it was the best part in the meeting, I liked our discussions in the panel session.

Cloud Computing Day in Egypt

2010-05-19T00:32:00.002+03:00

Come and Join us, we are ready now!

ECF (Egypt Cloud Forum, http://www.egyptcloudforum.com) invites you to attend the first Cloud Computing Day in Egypt, on Wednesday, 26th of May, 2010, from 6-9 PM

Follow the link for RSVP, See you there ...

Cloud Computing, On-Demand Computing Model -- JDC2010

2010-03-24T12:08:00.002+02:00

You can click here to download my presentation @ JDC2010.

Call for Volunteers

2010-03-10T00:23:00.000+02:00

Are you interested to make a difference!? Interested in being a volunteer in the first Cloud Computing Community in Egypt and Arab Region, if so, send an email to volunteers@xicloud.com expressing your passion and you will be contacted

How it went at JDC 2010

2010-02-28T23:06:00.010+02:00

Place: Sonesta Hotel, Cairo, Egypt.
Time: Sat, 27th of Feb, 9 am- 7pm

Sharing my experience about speech about cloud computing at the JDC 2010 conference

It was a nice event,
The start was simple and quick; a call from a previous co-worker who is a technical committee member, to participate and share the Cloud Computing Topic i've been living in for two years now :) to people attending JDC 2010, I sent the presentation proposal and i got instructions on what to do and after this is all preparation and preparation :)

Event Day, Sat, 27th of Feb, 9 am- 7pm
let me share with you my experience about giving a public speech to over 300 audience I don’t know ... I stood up the stage following my previous fellow speaker, I thought some noise or stepping in or out the room will happen, but it was not so, actually. People get more into the room, silent with quick moves.. The session moderator welcomed me with the audience to start on. The machine restarted, the mic was echoing my voice sometimes, which made it hard to follow much, besides time was very constrained, I got to finish a 50 minutes presentation in only 30 minutes :)

I got impressed with some of the audience who were concentrating and started asking smart questions! :) lucky me! “Someone- is-following” sign blinked in my head :) and I even rewarded one with a technology book given by the JDC organization board, and an Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud CD from many I’ve ordered specially for the event.

After my session ended and people greeted me, I wanted to run to the first water bottle, I was so dehydrated!, but while I was going off the stage, a few came to me with questions one following the other, I moved with the group surrounding me out of the room to give time to my next speaker and had a very happy 30 minutes of questions and answers with them, I felt relieved when I saw their faces expressed satisfaction to their concerns and open questions, it is really hard to communicate new-to-the-mind concepts, but what a victory to the oneself when it is digested properly

I told them about the coming cloud camp in Egypt, and some of them were interested to volunteer and some were interested to attend this event ...

Later on, I mingled with attendees, talking to them explaining what they missed from the session unpleasant mic situations :), and I was happy filling some of the gaps I saw happened.

In the lunch break, all speakers gathered in an open buffet lunch, when I had nice talks with Fred Sauer(from Google), Sang Shin(Sun), Amr ElAdawy(Itsalat Egypt) and Mike Keith(Oracle),…, It was really exciting to meet those guys from all over the world, and corporate, and really see Egypt in the Technology Track, never behind!

Well, the day came to an end, All in all, it was not that bad to me, but still learnt some public speaking experiences those we all as Egyptians hide or don’t really see them important till we face them :)

* As Organizer: Public Events organization and moderation is a very important Topic! And effort, and what makes an event goes up or down.. it is never getting the best speakers, it is never getting best catering service, or most prestigious booth, or promotional sponsors bags as we used to see in faculty days :)..it is all about as organizer, always be in service and duty every minute, responsive, and effective!

* As Speaker: You have to equally give time to your presentation and to your audience, and make sure you are giving attention to all audience all areas, not part of them who you think they look focused, you have to target all the room

* As Speaker: When talking about new concepts, don't assume that the attendees were living with you in your topic and know everything you know, you should go with their level of knowledge and respect that

* As Speaker: Manage your presentation time yourself, get a stop watch, mark your given time by organizer, and challenge yourself, the more you manage your time, the more engagement and communications with audience you can do :)

* As Speaker: In your presentation, don’t block your topic thread, if you see you want to talk outside the presentation as long as there is a value of what you are going to say, do it! And don’t narrate the slides when you don’t have much to say and take care of your audience, if they got bored, you are dead! And it is harder for your to get them awaken again

* As Speaker, Keep eye contact with your audience, feel their needs of your session, give them what they need, and never think you should be silent after session ends, the whole hall area is for talking and talking again :)

Nice experience huh :) ?! what do you think :)

Come and meet me at JDC2010 ...

2010-02-22T00:44:00.006+02:00

Next Saturday, 27th of February, 1:50 PM ISA, I'll be giving a session about cloud computing in JDC(Java Developer Conference) 2010, where I'm going to give an overview about cloud computing and its related technologies. See you there to have fruitful discussions.

Oracle Talks Cloud Computing

2010-02-12T19:12:00.003+02:00

Oracle started to change its tone about cloud computing and it's going on a 50-stop road show touting cloud computing the Oracle-style, you can check your stop over here

No plans for Sun to build compute cloud like EC2

2010-02-03T22:20:00.000+02:00

Edward Screven, Oracle's chief corporate architect, mentioned that Oracle would not be offering Sun's long-planned and highly-vaunted compute resource service.

They will just play the role of supplier to components and pieces that can be used in cloud services;

From the beginning and Larry Ellison hates Cloud, and it looks that this will be applied for Sun as well after the complete acquisition done recently ...

Cloud Computing Certifications

2010-01-22T00:23:00.001+02:00

Though am not that fond of certificates in general and believe in practical hands-on to the extremes, it looks that within two years I should be aware of the training kits and certificates exist for cloud computing and virtualization technology :) ...

3Tera (Cloud Computing Platform and services company) announced today their cloud computing certifications and education offerings ...

Mark Ortenzi, president of 3Tera partner CariNet, mentioned that "If you don't do it, in two years you won't have a business,"
According to these announcements there will be two tracks for these certificates:

The Certified Cloud Operator program which is targeted at service providers, enterprises, operations professionals and system integrators who deploy and operate cloud services. It covers installing, configuring and maintaining the computing fabric used for building cloud computing services. The certification has emphasis on hardware requirements, service configuration, hardware failure troubleshooting, provisioning of customers and configuration of virtual private data centers.
The the Certified Cloud Architect program, is aimed at systems architects, IT operations professionals, application developers and systems engineers who design, integrate, provision, deploy and manage distributed applications. That certification teaches the architectural concepts of 3Tera's AppLogic cloud computing platform, step-by-step deployment procedures, operating and managing applications in the cloud, best practices for security, testing and scaling applications and how to architect for business continuity.

It worth mentioning that Rackspace, Amazon (EC2) and Microsoft Windows Azure have training kits and education available, but yet they don't have cloud comuting certifications.

We should keep an eye on these vendors in their offerings in the near future ...

Ever thought about sharing your idle desktop ?!

2010-01-18T04:48:00.000+02:00

Never thought about sharing your desktop idle time with others ? ... NereusV enables idle time donation with a single click on a link in a webpage - there is no software to download and install. Indeed the software developer can remotely "push" new versions of application code to NereusV clients without any action required of the donor.

NereusV is a simple, secure, reliable open source for making computer idle time available for productive use.
fantastic! I wish I could have more time to test it out and write more about it ...

VMware to acquire SpringSource

2009-08-11T10:39:00.000+03:00

Steve Herrod (VMware CTO) announced today that VMware is intentending to acquire SpringSource, a 5 year-old company rapidly becoming a leader in enterprise and web application development and management.
http://blogs.vmware.com/console/2009/08/vmware-acquires-springsource.html
Seems interesting but we will wait till we see how they will complement each other, cloud/virtualization core vendor and enterprise level Java platform.

My IEEE paper has been published

2009-07-22T18:58:00.000+03:00

My IEEE paper on workload characterization in virtualized system has been published in IEEE computer society. and it was introduced in the 1st international IEEE workshop on Collaboration and Cloud Computing held in Groningen (The Netherlands) June 29 - July 1, 2009.

http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/WETICE.2009.13

UCI Architecture

2009-03-04T16:51:00.000+02:00

I've been inspired by a discussion with PatWendorf and some folks on the cloud interoperability forum about UCI project and its value and I have created the illustrated architecture diagram.

This is an eye-bird view about the vision of the UCI project. The main goal of this project as described by Pat is to have an abstraction layer which is agnostic to any cloud API, platform or infrastructure.

The main driver of this architecture is to abstract the usage of any cloud API and unify them in one layer with the help of the semantic web and OWL in which you have a pool of resources semantically understood and described to enable you to use these resources regardless these resources are allocated from Amazon EC2 as a provider or Enomaly platform etc.

Once you have a unified interface with common definitions to these resources, you can allocate, de-allocate, provision virtual machines or manage them through the UCI layer using the Agent component.

This architecture is a mix of layers and components along with a use case described at the UCI project requirement page http://code.google.com/p/unifiedcloud/wiki/UCI_Requirements

This UCI layer (web browser or UCI cloud client) should provide a kind of a dashboard (the component on the left of the diagram) to show the state of all allocated resources and running VMs.

CloudCamp in Egypt

2009-02-16T13:22:00.000+02:00

I have added Cairo to the list of cities that can host the CloudCamp this year (2009).
Currently, I'm in the process of finding the place and prepare for this be a successful event.

http://www.cloudcamp.com/
http://groups.google.com/group/cloudcamp/web/cloudcamp-city-organizers?hl=en

Isolated Execution through virtualization

2008-12-12T16:54:00.000+02:00

Interesting initiative, a reference implementation of the Security through Isolation using Virtualization.

http://isolated-exec.sourceforge.net/?q=node/1

And here is a flash animation that illustrates the idea:
http://isolated-exec.sourceforge.net/?q=node/6

Business Benefits of Virtual Assets

2008-12-12T16:52:00.000+02:00

In the economy recession we currently live in, virtualization will take its place to cut costs and maximize the business profits in the long and short term.

Here is an interesting article about the business benefits of virtual assets:
http://virtualizationconversation.com/2008/12/11/business-benefits-of-virtual-assets/

2008-10-25T00:29:00.000+02:00


 I've created a new technology group at Google for cloud computing and virtualization technology
 Egypt Virtu-Cloud Technology
 Visit this group

High Availability (VM Live migration)

2008-09-19T17:34:00.000+02:00

Achieving High Performance and Availability through the Migration of Clustered Virtual Machines is the title of the study i did in high availability and presented a poster on the ACCACES 2008 summer school in Italy.

Cloud Operating System (COS)

2008-09-18T20:04:00.000+02:00

I've thoughts about what it can be called COS (Cloud Operating System). if
the cloud will provide storage, processing units, part of the memory,
scheduling tasks which can be considered the main functions/tasks of the
normal operating system to manage. So why not we describe any platform that
enable the cloud with all its components (storage, processing etc) with this
term and we do a kind of analogy with the normal operating system design as
reference implementation to what can be done in the cloud to have more and
more in the cloud services and its design?

I know that Google named its new browser Chrome with this term, but i don't
think that a web browser whatsoever it do can be called Cloud Operating
System, it can be just an app within the COS that deliver to the end user
the facility to browse the internet (or the cloud in our case).

Back from HiPEAC 2008 Summer School

2008-08-13T11:33:00.000+03:00

Just came back from HiPEAC summer school in L'Aquila, a city of central Italy Laid out within medieval walls on a hill in the wide valley of the Aterno river, and surrounded by the Apennine Mountains

It was a very good opportunity for me to attend HiPEAC 2008 Summer school this year

I've been into the "Virtualization Technology" course conducted by Leendert Van Dorn from AMD.

I've also attended other interesting course like "Multithreaded and multicore processors" course by Dean Tullsen, University of California (San Diego).

I've presented a poster about live migration of Virtual machine in a clustered virtualized environment.

In this picture: Leendert Van Dorn (Sr. Director System Manageability at AMD) reviewing and discussing my poster i presented in the summer school.