Agathon Group - "The Good Stuff"

What's cool in systems, part 2

by Peter Green on August 15, 2008 11:45 AM.

In my last blog post, I talked a little about some current problems in systems engineering, namely:

• New systems technology is usually either pretty boring or pretty difficult to get a hold of.

• Grid computing, or IaaS, is a new systems technology that is neither boring nor difficult to get a hold of. Quite the contrary, it’s a readily-available, exciting way of approaching infrastructure.

• Not all grid (or cloud) computing solutions are created equal. Amazon’s EC2, while the biggest name in the market, is not necessarily the best, having key deficiencies stemming from certain design decisions.

The post ended with a hint of a solution to those problems, as well as the other problems grid computing generally intends to solve. Enter AppLogic by 3tera.

What is it?

Conceptually, AppLogic is very similar to EC2 — you can take a number of physical servers and turn them into one virtual “grid”, at which point you essentially have your own private version of EC2. You can create an application, analogous to a blank canvas, within your grid. You can begin to paint a picture of your application, adding appliances (which are just virtual machines) of all shapes and sizes.

Why is it so cool?

At that point, the comparisons to EC2 start to fade. With AppLogic, adding appliances to an application consists of dragging an icon from the catalog onto your canvas: done. Configuring the appliance consists of right-clicking the icon and entering system details into a simple form: done. Networking appliances to each other is just pointing to an interface on one icon, pointing to an interface on another icon, and the appliances are connected. AppLogic does grid computing as it’s supposed to be: most things are trivial and the hardest things are possible, even easy.

Never mind EC2, comparing traditional system architecture and grid computing with AppLogic is right out. Instead of provisioning another physical server — gathering quotes, paying for hardware and shipping, waiting a week for it to arrive, going into the colocation facility, plugging it all in, configuring the software to match your current environment — with AppLogic, you just drag another web appliance onto your site application. Restart your application (a matter of minutes), and you just upgraded your site infrastructure to include another web server. Grid computing makes the resource virtualization possible; AppLogic makes it elegant and simple.

I get it… I think.

See, that’s cool. But wait: “That’s all fine and good,” you might be saying. “How does that work for my organization?!” In the final blog post in the series, I’ll present a few ways organizations can use grid computing to build their infrastructure with fewer engineering headaches and doing so for pennies (or, at least, dimes!) on the dollar.