CommunityOne West General Session: What's New in the Sun Cloud and OpenSolaris

It's difficult to see much light in these tough economic times. But as they say, every cloud has a silver lining. And for a lot of developers, startup companies, and even established enterprises, that silver lining is cloud computing. Underscoring that growing importance, David Douglas, Sun's senior vice president of cloud computing, and Lew Tucker, Sun's CTO for cloud computing and developer platforms, discussed what makes cloud computing so appealing in these times.

Dave Douglas

Lew Tucker

Douglas said, "Two things that keep coming up about why people are so excited about cloud computing are the speed and agility of it and its economics." Tucker responded, "Yes, with just a credit card, you can now get online and bring up a computer center in a matter of minutes." Tucker went on to say that those in the audience who are planning to visit venture capitalists (VCs) for funding will find VCs to be big supporters of the cloud computing approach.

"They are not going to be very receptive to you ordering a large data center. Instead, they will urge you to take advantage of cloud computing because that way you can just pay as you go. If you've got a successful business, you'll grow very large. If it's not so successful, you haven't invested a lot of capital."

With that dialogue, Douglas and Tucker kicked off CommunityOne West, an event that preceded the 2009 JavaOne conference and set the tone for what will be a full week of presentations, demonstrations, and knowledge sharing by and for the open-source community.

CommunityOne West is a three-day event that brings together a large and diverse gathering of many of the leading-edge open-source communities. It also makes available a rich array of sessions. Following the general session, the conference offered more than 70 technical sessions and hands-on labs on a wide variety of topics, from "Adding Ajax Push" to "Your Code, Your Community... Your Cloud: Project Kenai." In addition, the event offered a full-afternoon Cloud Camp "unconference" where early adapters of cloud computing technologies could exchange ideas and share experiences in an open, participatory, community-driven style.

Days 2 and 3 of the event will be devoted to Deep Dives, one- or two-day tutorials on technologies in areas as diverse as web development, system administration, and database development.

The focus of the opening CommunityOne West general session was the Sun Cloud and one of its key underpinnings, the OpenSolaris operating system. The Sun Cloud and OpenSolaris OS bring together technologies and innovations fostered by the open-source community.

At CommunityOne East, held in New York City in March 2009, Sun announced its strategy and road map for the Sun Cloud, a public cloud computing service designed to provide easy and affordable access to proven, open, flexible, and scalable compute and storage resources. That strategy included services such as a compute service, a storage service, and an open RESTful API.

For developers, cloud computing means that they no longer need to build applications for fixed hardware. Rather, they can develop and deliver content, services, and applications in a "cloud" of virtual and interconnected hardware that is accessible through cloud services. This approach gives developers seemingly unlimited compute power and storage capacity on demand.

In the months since CommunityOne East, Sun engineers have been working to make the Sun Cloud a reality. Douglas said that "we've been doing tons of work internally using Sun employees, Sun projects, and more importantly, our partners to make this happen."

At CommunityOne East, Tucker gave an intriguing demonstration that previewed the Virtual Data Center (VDC) tool -- a part of the Sun Cloud powered by Sun's Q-layer software. The VDC enables users to build the virtual analog of a real data center. More specifically, it allows users to create a collection of virtual machine images that can be provisioned with resources for any operating system, including OpenSolaris, Linux, and Windows. Tucker showed how a user can use the VDC's drag-and-drop facilities to build a simple virtual data center in just a few minutes.

That capability has now gone from preview to reality. This morning, Tucker gave an impressive demonstration that showed how easy it is to create even a complex virtual data center that includes a public network, a switch, a firewall, and a variety of servers -- in this case, servers running operating environments such as OpenSolaris, Ubuntu, and Fedora, and databases such as Drizzle and MySQL. Users can now build a virtual data center of any degree of complexity in the same easy way.

As Douglas mentioned, partners are a big part of the Sun Cloud story. To show off some of the great applications that Sun partners have already developed for the Sun Cloud, Tucker called a succession of partner representatives to the stage.

The first partner representative was Mike Harvey, vice president of business development for Moonwalk. Moonwalk is an enterprise data management technology with a difference: Moonwalk's data movement policies are built into it. This makes it possible for data to automatically migrate to and from the cloud. Users can then access their data seamlessly from their environment, no matter where the data actually resides. This makes Moonwalk particularly valuable as a disaster recovery tool. Harvey said, "If there's a site disaster, we can recover from the cloud."

Next to go onstage was Omer Trajman, senior director of Vertica. Trajan described Vertica as "a new kind of database management system. It's a standard SQL-based database, but it runs on a grid of shared nothing machines. This makes it perfect for deployment on the cloud." Trajman first demonstrated using the VDC tool to build a virtual data center that includes Vertica. Then he showed a browser-based dashboard that showed the status of all the nodes in the virtual data center. Trajman said it took him only five minutes to get the virtual data center up on the Sun Cloud.

The last partner representative to appear onstage was Issac Roth, CEO of webappVM. Roth said that webappVM is a special kind of virtual machine used for deploying and managing web applications. Roth showed how easy it is to migrate a web application from a laptop to the Sun Cloud. Once migrated to the cloud, the application can be fully monitored and managed through webappVM.

You can view demonstrations from Moonwalk, Vertica, and webappVM, as well as from other Sun Cloud partners, at the Cloud Zone booth (booth 515) at the CommunityOne-JavaOne Pavilion in Moscone Center.

The key message behind these demonstrations is that many people are already using Sun Cloud services to create innovative applications and solutions.

Although partners enrich the Sun Cloud ecosystem, underlying technologies are just as important. And certainly a very important technology that powers the Sun Cloud is OpenSolaris.

One of the great accmplishments of the open-source community is the collaborative development of a sophisticated operating system: OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris 2008.11, released in December 2008, includes a complete GNOME desktop environment and some great features such as IPS, a network-based package management system, Time Slider, and an intuitive user interface for doing data backups using ZFS filesystem snapshots. OpenSolaris 2008.11 is easy to get, install, and maintain: You can download and install it from the Internet or boot it up from a Live CD image.

To highlight what's new and cool in OpenSolaris, Douglas introduced John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president for systems. Fowler appeared on a talk-show set together with his guests, three key members of the OpenSolaris team at Sun: Greg Lavender, director of networking for OpenSolaris, Steven Hahn, technical lead for OpenSolaris, and Mike Shapiro, technical lead for OpenStorage.

Left to right: Greg Lavender, Steven Hahn, Mike Shapiro, and John Fowler

Fowler and his guests' main reason for taking the stage was to announce the next release of OpenSolaris, OpenSolaris 2009.06. With a wide array of new features, OpenSolaris 2009.06 has a lot to offer to a spectrum of users. Fowler described OpenSolaris 2009.06 as "the culmination of an enormous engineering effort at Sun and by community members, with dozens of enhancements through every element of the operating system -- from developers to deployers."

Fowler went on to talk about these new features: "With this release, we've made major enhancements across a broad range of technologies. Beginning with enhancements in networking, we've completely rearchitected the networking stack for new levels of scale and virtualization. In storage, we've brought together the latest technologies in flash acceleration and data services to provide a new level of capability for both Solarises and server operating systems as well as what we can do in building storage appliances."

And there are the "dozens of enhancements for developers all through the systems, whether it's observability, source management, language support, and others."

Simply put, OpenSolaris 2009.06 has got a lot of great features for a lot of users.

Fowler's guests went on to highlight a number of cool features in OpenSolaris 2009.06 in more depth. Many of these features were spawned by projects in the OpenSolaris community.

• Steven Hahn described SourceJuicer as a way for the community to contribute packages to a larger set of OpenSolaris users. SourceJuicer provides a service that automates the OpenSolaris IPS package build process. Essentially, SourceJuicer provides an easy way for community members to get their packages into the OpenSolaris repository.


• Crossbow provides the building blocks for network virtualization and resource control. Greg Lavender said that virtualization has opened up a Pandora's box of challenges for networking. And because of that, the Project CrossBow team, which provides a technology that provides network virtualization, has had to reconsider what networking means in a virtualized world. As Lavender sees it, "Project Crossbow completes the virtualization story just in time as we move to 10GB and 40GB boundaries."


• Speedway provides an application development environment that gives developers access to OpenSolaris and Solaris operating systems in the cloud. Using Speedway, a developer can access a virtual SPARC machine configured with a set of developer tools.

A good product begs a good demonstration. Steven Hahn presented one very interesting demonstration of OpenSolaris 2009.06. He first showed a picture of a mature frog. And then with the Time Slider feature, he was able to turn back time to show a picture of the frog as a tadpole, and even further back to the egg stage. This virtual time travel is enabled by ZFS capabilities in OpenSolaris, which takes periodic snapshots of files for backup and recovery.

All in all, this session was quite impressive, showing the reality of the Sun Cloud and the power and functional richness of OpenSolaris 2009.06.

» Sun Cloud
» OpenSolaris 2009.06

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