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Open vSwitch: production quality, multilayer open virtual switch

Open vSwitch is a production quality, multilayer virtual switch licensed under the open source Apache 2.0 license. It is designed to enable massive network automation through programmatic extension, while still supporting standard management interfaces and protocols (e.g. NetFlow, sFlow, RSPAN, ERSPAN, CLI, LACP, 802.1ag). In addition, it is designed to support distribution across multiple physical servers similar to VMware's vNetwork distributed vswitch or Cisco's Nexus 1000V.

Key Features

* Visibility into inter-VM communication via NetFlow, sFlow(R), SPAN, RSPAN, and ERSPAN
* LACP (IEEE 802.1AX-2008)
* Standard 802.1Q VLAN model with trunking
* 802.1ag link monitoring
* Fine-grained min/max rate QoS
* NIC bonding with source-MAC load balancing, active backup, and L4 hashing
* OpenFlow protocol support (including many extensions for virtualization)
* IPv6 support
* Multiple tunneling protocols (Ethernet over GRE, CAPWAP, IPsec, GRE over IPsec)

Supported Platforms

Open vSwitch can operate both as a soft switch running within the hypervisor, and as the control stack for switching silicon. It has been ported to multiple virtualization platforms and switching chipsets. It is the default switch in XenServer "Project Boston", the Xen Cloud Platform and also supports Xen, KVM, Proxmox VE and VirtualBox. It has also been integrated into many virtual management systems including OpenStack, openQRM, and OpenNebula.

 http://openvswitch.org/

Comparison of Amazon S3 filesystems

http://code.google.com/p/s3ql/wiki/other_s3_filesystems

Benchmarking in the cloud

CPU benchmarking
http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchmarking-in-cloud.html

Disk benchmarking
http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/06/disk-io-benchmarking-in-cloud.html

SimpleWorker: run and schedule jobs in the cloud

SimpleWorker is an easy way to run tasks in your application in the cloud. It's perfect for using as a worker queue to run background jobs for your app. You can also use it as a Ruby Compute Cloud for running large jobs or sets of parallel jobs in the cloud.

It's simple, transparent, and ready to go as soon as you sign up. Here's how it works. You create worker classes in your code and then you queue them up in your app to run immediately or schedule them to run later. The jobs get passed to SimpleWorker to run in the cloud. It's that simple.

A few of the key features and core benefits include:

Runs background jobs in the cloud
Easy to use, painless to setup, ready to go from the start
Flexible scheduling - one-time in the future, recurring schedule, very configurable
Massively scalable and parallel - queue up and run as many jobs as you want
Extremely cost effective - $0.05 per hour billed by the second so you really only pay for what you use. If you only use 1 minute per hour you only pay $0.0008 per hour.

5 hours are free.

http://www.simpleworker.com/

MySQL Replication between Amazon EC2 Instances

MySQL Replication between Amazon EC2 Instances - How To Setup Replication in The Cloud

http://www.nonhostile.com/howto-mysql-replication-amazon-ec2-aws.asp

Deploying WebApps in the Amazon Cloud

Some considerations on deploying a WebApp in the (Amazon) cloud.

http://www.iheavy.com/2010/12/14/introduction-to-ec2-cloud-deployments/

Building Highly Scalable Web Applications for the Cloud
http://www.iheavy.com/2010/12/30/how-to-build-highly-scalable-web-application...

Managing Security in Amazon Web Services
http://www.iheavy.com/2011/02/17/managing-security-in-amazon-web-services/

MySQL Databases in the Cloud - Best Practices
http://www.iheavy.com/2011/02/21/deploying-mysql-on-amazon-ec2-best-practices/

More to come (see first article):
Backup and Recovery in the Cloud - A Checklist
Cloud Deployments - Discipline Front and Center
Cloud Computing Use Cases
Miscellaneous Considerations for Success with Cloud Computing

Nanite: self assembling fabric of ruby daemons

Nanite is a new way of thinking about building cloud ready web applications. Having a scalable message queueing back-end with all the discovery and dynamic load based dispatch that Nanite has is a very scalable way to construct web application back-ends.

A Nanite system has two types of components. There are nanite agents, these are the daemons where you implement your code functionality as actors. And then there are mappers.

Mappers are the control nodes of the system. There can be any number of mappers, these typically run inside of your merb or rails app running on the thin webserver (eventmachine is needed) but you can also run command line mappers from the shell.

Each Nanite agent sends a ping to the mapper exchange every @ping_time seconds. All of the mappers are subscribed to this exchange and they all get a copy of the ping with your status update. If the mappers do not get a ping from a certain agent within a timeout @ping_time the mappers will remove that agent from any dispatch. When the agent comes back online or gets less busy it will re-advertise itself to the mapper exchange therefore adding itself back to the dispatch. This makes for a very nice self-healing cluster of worker processes and a cluster of front-end mapper processes.

In your Nanites you can have any number of actor classes. These actors are like controllers in Rails or Merb and this is where you implement your own custom functionality.

https://github.com/ezmobius/nanite

LinkedIn Glu: deployment automation platform

GLU is a deployment automation platform. It has been built and deployed at LinkedIn in early 2010 and then released as open source in November 2010. The goal is to be able to automate the deployment of any kind of applications accross many nodes. Although written in groovy/java, the type of applications that can be deployed through GLU is not limited to java applications. GLU is a platform and the way it was architected and designed allows you to pick and choose which part you want to use... Check the docs folder (and soon the wiki) for more documentation on GLU.

https://github.com/linkedin/glu/

AppScale: open source Google App Engine implementation

AppScale is an open-source implementation of the Google App Engine cloud computing interface. It is being developed by researchers in the UC Santa Barbara RACELab. AppScale enables execution of Google App Engine (GAE) applications on virtualized cluster systems. In particular, AppScale enables users to execute GAE applications using their own clusters with greater scalability and reliability than the GAE SDK provides. Moreover, AppScale executes automatically and transparently over cloud infrastructures such as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Eucalyptus, the open-source implementation of the AWS interfaces.

The goal of AppScale is to provide a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud infrastructure that enables users to deploy, test, debug, measure, and monitor their GAE applications prior to deployment on Google's proprietary resources. In addition, we would also like to facilitate investigation and extension of the PaaS implementation: services, runtime, interoperation with lower-level cloud fabric, etc.

http://appscale.cs.ucsb.edu/

http://code.google.com/p/appscale/

A Common API For All Cloud Providers: libcloud

libcloud is a standard client library, written in Python, to access popular cloud hosting providers.

Using cloud services without the need to learn APIs for each of them & building web applications that use multiple providers become much easier.

libcloud currently supports ~8 cloud hosting providers including Amazon EC2, Slicehost & Rackspace.

http://incubator.apache.org/libcloud/