Tag: cloud

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Microsoft offering Linux VMs on it’s Azure service? What?! Did Hell Freeze Over?

When a company as large as Microsoft makes a u-turn on it’s product strategy, you know trends are changing, and Microsoft realized it was heading off in the wrong direction. Last week they announced that their Azure cloud service will now offer support for Linux VMs, offering an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud offering running your choice of OpenSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ubuntu or CentOS Linux flavors.

Given Microsoft’s past efforts to squash the rising popularity of Linux, with the millions of dollars it pumped into SCO’s legal actions against Linux backers, and Ballmer’s memorable ‘Linux is a cancer’ statements describing with no uncertainty his deep hatred for Linux, last week’s announcement seems rather startling. What? Microsoft are offering  a commercial service to host Linux for paying customers? If there isn’t a single action that shows you how successful Linux is in our current world, then Microsoft making a u-turn of this degree is surely it.

If Microsoft’s Azure service is going to be successful, it makes complete sense that they have to offer Linux options for an IaaS offering, especially if they’re aiming to get a slice of Amazon’s AWS popularity.

I wonder what it was like to be in the meetings at Microsoft when they were planning this move?

“Steve – about this Linux thing. You know, if we’re going to stay alive and keep competitive, we really need to stop being an ass about Linux. It’s time to admit that it’s stomping all over our turf. Windows just doesn’t cut it any more in comparison to running systems on Linux. To stay in the game we need to start embracing this thing – let’s start by offering support in Azure and hosting Linux VMs…”

🙂

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Troubleshooting your app on Red Hat’s OpenShift

My hosted server seems to not be responding or I’m getting a blank page instead of seeing my app:

  • Try tailing your server log and then hit your app to see if you’re getting errors:
rhc-tail-files -l your_account_id -a your_app_name
  • Give your account password and/or ssh passphrase when prompted

If you’re seeing exceptions from your app, this should give you a clue what’g going wrong.
If you’re seeing a a line in the log like this:

2012/04/03 13:08:59,601 INFO  [org.jboss.as.jpa] (MSC service thread 1-2) JBAS011403: Stopping Persistence Unit Service 'ROOT.war#persistenceUnit'
2012/04/03 13:09:00,152 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server.deployment] (MSC service thread 1-1) JBAS015877: Stopped deployment ROOT.war in 20354ms

… then for some reason your app was stopped, and needs to be restarted manually. There are some ongoing issues in the OpenShift environment currently that Red Hat is investigating where apps are left in a stopped state (possibly related t your deployment taking too long and timing out).

Can I browse through my log files on the server?

ssh://long_string_here@your_app_name-your_domain_name.rhcloud.com/~/git/your_app_name.git/

… then the url to ssh to your server is this part:

long_string_here@your_app_name-your_domain_name.rhcloud.com

Ssh like this:

ssh long_string_here@your_app_name-your_domain_name.rhcloud.com

… enter your ssh passphrase when prompted. Your log files are in your_app_name/logs/ – the current log is server.log and there are copies of each log for each previous day. You can use common utils like vi/less/more/cat etc to view your files.

How do I check on the status of my app?

  • rhc-ctl-app -l your_acount_id -a your_app_name -c status

… this will show the status, either RUNNING, STOPPED, or if there is maintenance currently in progress you may see this message:

MESSAGES:
OpenShift is currently being upgraded, some services may be unavailable.

 

How do I manually restart or start my app?

  • rhc-ctl-app -l your_acount_id -a your_app_name -c restart | start

 

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Interesting point of view on Amazon’s business model

The fact that Amazon exists as an online retailer but also offers cloud based hosting services has always interested me. I always wondered if the hosting business was based on technology they had developed in house to support their online retailer business and so decided to set themselves up as a hosting provider based on their own technology, but it appears from some history on wikipedia that they later migrated their online store to the AWS platform, so AWS was developed at a later point.

Kas Thomas has an interesting post about the broad diversification of Amazon’s business.

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Apple’s Mobile-Me-too?

There really wasn’t anything revolutionary about this weeks iCloud announcement from Apple, and left me feeling that this was a ‘me-too’ catch up from Apple to give it’s devote iOS users some equivalent features to what Android and Google users have been enjoying for the past few years already.

Android is clearly still ahead of the game with it’s cloud-based solution which seamlessly syncs your Android device address book and calendar with Google’s online web-based address book and calendar both which already have a great online web-based interface too – something which was not included in this version of Apple’s iCloud, and both cleanly integrated with Google’s killer web-based email, GMail. Cnet gave the nod to Google and Android in this regard, but listed many other features that said put iCloud ahead of the competition, but I still don’t see it. Other than the ability to sync music to the cloud without actually performing an upload (put only songs’ you’ve already purchased via iTunes, which for some users will be less than useful), this was very much a catch-up release just to keep Apple in the game. It’s interesting really since MobileMe could have been everything that Google’s cloud based services already is, but maybe the timing wasn’t right, and at the time the $99 price definitely was not right – Apple acknowledged this and dropped the price for iCloud.

So is there anything compelling that would make me move from using Google’s cloud-based services with Android to using iOS with iCloud? In summary, no.

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