India Government Goes Cloud

Indian Government Goes "CLOUD"

Big news for Indian Cloud Geeks

Yesterday, the Economic Times stated that, Indian government has decided to place some critical Information on dedicated private clouds.

The government is planning to establish a national level cloud based network connecting the individual state level data centers. Indian IT department has sent proposals to national IT giants like Hewlett Packard (HP), IBM, Cisco (CSCO) and Dell to set up and maintain private clouds in each state.

Indian Government goes "CLOUD"

Here's what Economic Times have to say - 

"India’s Department of Information Technology is planning to set up a national cloud based network that connects all state data centers which would make that the backbone of national e-governance plan, which when completed would deliver many government to citizen and government business services via the internet. In effect, each of the 28 states and 7 union territories will now have a private cloud of their own. The Department of IT has invited proposals from IT companies like Hewlett Packard (HP), IBM, Cisco (CSCO) and Dell to set up and maintain private clouds in each state. The move may cost the government less than (around 100 million rupees), and will help the exchequer prevent waste of money on duplication of resources.”

Keep Clouding. 

Practical Steps to build a private Cloud - Worth a try.

Practical Steps to build a private Cloud

Try and see what it takes to build a private Cloud using Open Source Tools

It's time to build your own cloud!

I have tried many ways of building a private Cloud and deploying certain application in it.

There are many Open Source Technologies available to do it. (Remember, i am talking about Open Source SDK's available in the internet using which we can develop a private cloud, not some cloud based application available for free. We shall talk about some freely available cloud apps in future posts.)

Some of them are here. For each of them, i have included a User Experience Level/ Difficulty level/ Complexity Constraint involved -

• Eucalyptus - Eucalyptus enables the creation of on-premise Infrastructure as a Service clouds, with no requirements for retooling the organization's existing IT infrastructure or for introducing any specialized hardware. The Eucalyptus Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform maintains high fidelity with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API, allowing support for both on-premise and hybrid IaaS clouds.
  User Experience Level - 5/10
  
• OpenStack - OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.
  User Experience Level - 9/10
  
  
• Cloud Stack - CloudStack is an open source cloud operating system which delivers public cloud computing similar to Amazon EC2 but using your own hardware. CloudStack provides orchestration of your virtualized resources into one homogeneous environment where you can delegate the creation to users of the virtual machines using the self-service CloudStack portal. This package is available for use in Ubuntu 10.04 and RedHat Linux (Cent OS) platforms.
  User Experience Level - 8/10
  
  
• Xen Cloud Platform Project -The Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) is an open source enterprise-ready server virtualization and cloud computing platform, delivering the Xen Hypervisor with support for a range of guest operating systems including Windows® and Linux® network and storage support, management tools in a single, tested installable image, which is also called XCP appliance.
  User Experience Level - 10/10
  
• OpenNebula.org - OpenNebula.org is an open-source project developing the industry standard solution for building and managing virtualized enterprise data centers and cloud infrastructures.
  User Experience Level - 5/10
  

Out of all the above 5 technologies, Eucalyptus is the one you can go with if you are building a private cloud for the first time. Well, if you are done with it, then try using Open Stack. Since all the above software's are open source, their websites have very good documentation regarding the steps to create and deploy your own cloud. However, i have included 2 technical papers for starters - you can readily deploy your own private cloud - follow the steps.

1.  Deploying an Open Source Private Cloud using Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud(Eucalyptus Fork).
   Requirements -
   1 Machine(2gb RAM, 160 GM HDD), Virtualization Compatible Hardware, VM Hyper-visor like VMware, XEN, Sun Virtual Box.
   3 Virtual Machines to run(minimum) - 1 Cloud Controller, 1 Cluster Controller and 1 Node Controller.
   
2.  Deploying a Private Cloud using Eucalyptus and Xen Hyper-visor.
   Same Configuration.
   

Feel free to post your comments and queries. I am always open to interaction.

Keep Clouding,

Jade Nagaraja

NASA uses Cloud to land on Mars

NASA's Curiosity Mar's Mission uses Cloud Computing

Curiosity goes "Cloud" to land on Mars

Just Think how "NASA" is keeping up with Mar's Mission data - Cloud !

Few day ago, NASA sent one of the biggest services out there for the Mars Exploration Rover and Mars Science Laboratory missions. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory used cloud services to capture and store images and metadata collected during the trip to Mars.

Till now, Cloud Computing was used to send/transmit data packets across the world. Now NASA goes one-step beyond that and used Amazon Web Services to transmit data/Pictures across Solar System (From Mars to Earth). Believe it or not. It works. And the margin for Error is 0 %.

   

One step on Mar's , Giant Leap for Cloud Computing ?

What does Amazon Web Services have to say?

"Science data is growing at an exponential rate. Some upcoming instruments will produce terabytes of data every single day," Such a deluge would have left NASA "out of data center space," making the ability to provision cloud-based machines invaluable. As NASA uses the cloud to solve its own puzzles, opportunities for other applications naturally arise.

"We can provision a supercomputing cluster in the cloud that would qualify as one of the top 500 in the world" at a cost of "a couple hundred dollars an hour," AWS said. "Think of the possibilities."

More data, More Storage, More Cost, Difficult to manage --> Problemo ?
Solution --> Go Cloud !! :-)