The rants and raves of a technogeek
Posts tagged Cloud computing
GreenfieldTech announces the general availability of app_cashmaker for Asterisk
Apr 1st
Udim, Israel. April 1, 2009 -GreenfieldTech Ltd., a leading provider of Asterisk solutions and Asterisk training services in Israel, today announced the availability of it’s patented app_cashmaker application for the Asterisk Open Source PBX system. The CashMaker application is intended to be used by various content suppliers, wishing to distribute Audio and Video based content, utilizing their Asterisk server.
The application is built to accept an inbound call into it, then, according to various information gathered in correlation to the callers caller ID and/or inbound DID number, will correlate a relevant content stream directly to the caller. The content distributor doesn’t even have to care about what content to distribute, as the application will connect directly, via the Internet, to a remotely available RTBSP streaming server at GreenfieldTech data center.
“The app_cashmaker application is the result of the cumulative work of over 3 years in the making, testing various content business models and applications. The main problems most content distributors have is how to gather the content and manage it, with app_cashmaker, this requirement is negated, thus allowing the distributor to concentrate on what they do best – flooding the newpapers with ads and marketing material to promote their content delivery service”, says Nir Simionovich, CEO and Founder of GreenfieldTech.
Simionovich indicated that the central content distribution facility is managed via a GTBS cluster environment, implemented partially utilizing Amazon’s EC2 and S3 structures, while utilizing GreenfieldTech’s proprietary streaming and clustering technologies. Currently, GreenfieldTech had submitted 10 different provisional patents, relating to the technologies comprising the app_cashmaker application and service. GreenfieldTech marketing team had indicated that initial beta trials had showed an increase in content availability, via the GreenfieldTech BSC Cloud facilityof over 40% with an increase of almost 80% in content delivery success.
Simionovich estimates that by the year 2010, over 20,000,000 will use the GreenfieldTech app_cashmaker facility, disrupting completely the way mobile, audio and video content is distributed around the world.
Asterisk is the world’s leading open source PBX telephony engine, and telephony applications solution. It offers unmatched flexibility in a world previously dominated by expensive proprietary communications systems. The Asterisk solution offers a rich and flexible voice infrastructure that integrates seamlessly with both traditional and advanced VoIP telephony systems. For more information on Asterisk visit http://www.asterisk.org
For more information, please refer to the GreenfieldTech website at http://www.greenfieldtech.net.
Why will proprietary software will eventually die?
Mar 25th
Last night I met with a friend of mine, Mr. Doron Ofek. For those of you not familiar with the Open Source market in Israel, Doron is the one person most affiliated with RedHat in Israel, as Doron championed the adaptation of RedHat Linux servers in various enterprises and government offices in Israel. Doron is currently heavily involved in the OpenMoko project and its adaptation and promotion in Israel.
We spent a great deal of time last night, talking about the various aspects of Open Source training in Israel – as both us provide various training services to this market sector. While I’m mostly focused on Asterisk Training, Doron is focused on Linux and XEN training. Both of us have some our training routes knee deep in Israel’s computer/IT training companies, namely Matrix, Hi-Tech College and John Bryce. We both talked about our discontent with their inability to promote and market Open Source training courses, simply because they have no idea what these are.
For example, while Hi-Tech college were incapable of signing up a single person for an Asterisk Bootcamp course, I had signed up 10 people to a my first bootcamp – without any marketing or sales budget, simply by putting out the word in the right places. Now, Hi-Tech college has a list of over 5000 people who studied Linux and other Open Source and networking subjects in their college – should have they been able to gather up at least 10 people as well (less then 0.5% of their entire customer base)? the answer is a definite yes, why were they unable to do so? simply because they have no idea what Asterisk is, how it can be marketed, how it can sold and how the customer should be approached.
Doron had indicated a similar issue with both John Bryce and Matrix – however, due to other reasons. However, Doron had managed to sell quite a few training courses for Linux on his own – without any help from the big boys – how did that happen? how is it possible that Doron and I succeeded where the other colleges had failed? how can that be? – then we both realized why eventually, proprietary software will die and the Open Source movement, over the course of time, will simply negate the presence of proprietary software – simply because Open Source people provide for better marketing strategies and methodologies.
Did we learn how to do marketing on school? are we marketing people by nature? the answer is NO – we learned how to market our belief in the Open Source initiative over the course of time. We championed Open Source in various enterprises, events, public speakings and other places. We were the “soap box” speaker at Hide Park’s Speakers Corner, we were that crazy man on the street screaming: “The world is coming to an end, repent!” (well, you know what I mean) – but all in all, as time progressed we learned how to market the Open Source initiative and our belief – the large enterprises are stuck in their own belief and stagnant marketing strategies and plans. As time progressed, the various “champions” left the large enterprises, simply because they got fed up with the wrongful methodology of these and followed their own path – and doing so with moderate success.
In my belief, as time will progress, the large enterprises will surely migrate to the Open Source, and I won’t be surprised if within a period of 5-6 years Microsoft will be shipping out a version of Windows that is based on the Linux Kernel – or another Open Source distibution methodology. Call me crazy, call me chaotic, call me a dreamer – but mark my words – this will happen.
Rock Solid Clouded Asterisk
Feb 9th
This post is somewhat a combination of posts from previous posts, mainly, the posts about virtualization and my latest posts about the utilization of Amazon EC2. As some of you may know, a part of what I do at GreenfieldTech is develop various API’s for the Asterisk Open Source PBX systems. Two of these API’s are the IVR API and the Dialer API. This post if called “Rock Solid Clouded Asterisk” as it will describe the latest production environment that I’ve implemented, using these API’s and Amazon EC2 virtualization framework.
The network diagram
Our implementation consisted of the following general schematic:
Network Diagram
The application logic was based upon a JAVA based web-service, implementing the XML-RPC server side of the IVR API, and a dialer management system that controlled the dialer API located on the remotely located dialers – hosted on Amazon EC2 instances. For simplicity, and we were very much aware this would reduce the overall capacity, we’ve located both the dialer framework and the IVR API execution on each of the servers, while allowing the server s to communicate internally.
Some constraints
As much as we wanted to run many Amazon AMI instances, we were limited to running 5 elastic IPs with a single Amazon AWS account. As a result, we’ve registered 5 accounts, and executed a total of 24 AMI instances with 24 elastic IP’s.
An additional constraint we had realised, but had no way of actually knowing its limitation was the actual number of concurrent calls per server. Initially, we’ve reached the following numbers and configuration on a physical server:
- Intel Quad Core XEON
- 2GB RAM
- 1GB Network Uplink
- CentOS 5.2 64bit
- Total capacity: 120 concurrent calls of Dialer+IVR on a single server
Per our theory, if we managed to reach a similar capacity using amazon c1.medium instances, we would be very happy.
The results
After conducting a test utilizing a single AMI instance, we’ve reached the following results:
- Dual Core instance (c1.medium)
- 180GB Disk Storage
- 8GB of RAM
- Fedora Core 8 32bit
- Total capacity: 80 concurrent calls of Dialer+IVR on a single instance
A decrease of 33% in comparison to the performance observed on a physical server. Ok, so we weren’t all that happy with these results, until we started doing the financial math, realising that using Amazon EC2 with that Dialer+IVR framework would yield a savings of almost 80% in operational costs.
Doing the math
The normal co-located option
Our aim was to reach a capacity of around 2800 concurrent channels. Per the normal physical setup, our hardware requirements would be to use at least 24 servers. At a price of 1500$ per server, that sums up to a total of 36,000$. Adding the time required to install 24 servers, the overall expense for 24 servers would be around the 42,000$ mark. To sustain a total of 2800 concurrent calls, using the g711 codec, we would be required to carry a total of 300Mbps internet uplink – basically talking about 10,000$ of bandwidth.
So, taking all of the above into consideration, we will need a total of 52,000$ just to maintain the hardware installation and operational cost. Taking into consideration that the system would be used at full for no more than a period of 30 hours, we end up with a total of: 1733$ per hour.
The Amazon EC2 option
Now, let’s calculate for Amazon EC2:
2800 concurrent channels translates into 35 instances. Price per c1.medium instance per hour is 0.2$. So, rack that up and you get: 210$ for operating 35 instances for 30 hours.
Elastic IP costs are 0.01$ per hour per server – a total of 10.5$ for 30 hours.
Bandwidth costs are 0.17 per each GB, so according to 300Mbps for 30 hours, with each call duration at 1 minute sums up to be: 5M of data per call. Calculating 2800 concurrent channels for 30 hours gives: 25,200,00 MB, or 25TB of traffic. According to Amazon, first 10TB are at 0.17$ per GB, and then the price goes down. So, let’s take a worst case of 0.17$ per GB. A total of 4284$ for operating 30 hours.
A total of: 4,468 US Dollars, Price per hours calculated at: 148$.
The savings
Per the task at hand, the utilization of Amazon EC2 yielded a savings of 92%
So, is Amazon EC2 good for any usage?
The answer is a definite NO! If your requirement is for a system that works 24×7, like a PBX system or a call center, then your utilization of Amazon EC2 would be identical to leasing a co-located server at any of the world wide co-location providers. If your application is of sporadic nature, or is utilized for short bursts of time, Amazon EC2 is a wonderful tool for lowering your overall expenses. Sure, it will require some work to get running, but the overall savings is more than worth-while.
Thoughts of virtualization – Part III
Jan 21st
Ok, it’s been almost 24 hours since I started my serious playing around with Amazon EC2, and I can honestly say that I’m tired – however, I’m very pleased with my results. Like any other experiment, this one started with a requirement. The requirement was to install and operate one of the dialer frameworks I’ve written in the past year on an EC2 based instance. In order to evaluate the process, let’s start with our baseline installation, meaning, what am I using in the real-world:
Hardware and Software Specification
The original machine answered to the following specification: Quad Core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 250GB of Hard Drive. My original machine was running CentOS 5.2 with an x86_64 kernel installed. In terms of software installed, we had Asterisk 1.4.22.1, MySQL 5.X, PHP, FreePBX, Apache and my dialer framework.
Introducing Amazon EC2 AMI
An EC2 AMI is basically an image of a computer, contained with a single installation manifest on the Amazon cloud computing system. AMI’s provide for the simplest manner to start using EC2, as these usually include a pre-defined server installation, that usually has some stuff already installed.
Choosing your AMI
Amazon provides a multitude of AMI’s to work with, unfortunately, most of these are either out-dated and the sheer number of these makes the choice somewhat overwhelming. I decided to start working with a working AMI image of Fedora Core 8, that already had the LAMP stack installed – the one I used was:
LAMP Web Starter (AMI ID: ami-ba4eaad3)
Fedora Core 8, 32-bit architecture, PHP 5.0.4, Apache 2.0.54, and MySQL 4.1.20
Fedora Core 8, 32-bit architecture, PHP 5.0.4, Apache 2.0.54, and MySQL 4.1.20
The YUM Repository issue
For some strange reason, the AMI images contained in the Amazon repository are all unable to perform any updates to their installed RPM packages. It took me a while to understand what’s wrong, but in general, the fedora project had simply removed the old releases from their repository, so I had to go in and manually modify the /etc/yum.repos.d/ configuration files. For you convenience, here is the repos list that I’m using at this point:
YUM Repositories for Amazon EC2 Fedora images <- click this to download the file
[development] name=Fedora Core $releasever - Development Tree baseurl=http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/core/development/$basearch/ enabled=1 gpgcheck=0
[extras-development] name=Fedora Extras $releasever - Development Tree baseurl=http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/extras/development/$basearch/ enabled=1 gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-extras gpgcheck=0
[extras] name=Fedora Extras $releasever - $basearch baseurl=http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/extras/$releasever/$basearch/ enabled=1 gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-extras gpgcheck=1
[updates-testing] name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Test Updates baseurl=http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/core/updates/testing/$releasever/$basearch/ enabled=1 gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-test
[updates-released] name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Released Updates baseurl=http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/core/updates/$releasever/$basearch/ enabled=1 gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora
[base] name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base baseurl=http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/$basearch/os/ enabled=1 gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora
If you are trying to install an instance, you may use the above for any Fedora based AMI on EC2.
Creating my own AMI
While going about and building a single server is fun, I needed a way to create my own installation AMI once I’ve completed my modifications. The Amazon EC2 resources website gives out a whole lot of information, which can be somewhat confusing for the first time reader. So, I searched for a better way to construct my own AMI image. I found the following web page, which was really really helpful: Azeez’s Notes.
Azeez’s blog gives a very concise and to the point, step by step, guide to building your own AMI image – it got me up and running in less than 10 minute – WAY TO GO AZEEZ.
So far, so good …
So far my installed instances are working just fine and I’m currently operating a cluster of a few of these dialer systems. I’m in the process of checking what kind of mileage I’ll get from the EC2 instances, in comparison to a real hardware server – which is really interesting.
My main objective here is to be able to build a dialer-on-demand framework, which will enable my customers to increase their capacity utilizing a simple web interface to initiate my AMI instances. I’ll report back with additional information once I have it.
Thoughts of virtualization – Part II
Nov 30th
I really like going to events at the GarageGeeks (www.garagegeeks.org) – apart from meeting with some friends, having a good laugh and enjoying the casual beer, the technical talks and the general subjects that are being attended at a gathering are always interesting.
This time, the Geeks had decided to focus on Cloud Computing, trying to introduce the somewhat highly evolving field of the IT/Computing industry to the visitors of Garage. Now, I have to admit that during the past few weeks I’ve been studying the various aspects of utilizing Amazon EC2 services, and I’ve come to the somewhat problematic conclusion: “Cloud computing is a wonderful solution, as long as you have clear and concise control over your computing cloud!”
The main problem with traditional cloud computing, as offered by Amazon and others, is that the physical boundaries of your system are somewhat unknown – not to you and in some cases, not to your provider either. Let us imagine a Tier based architecture platform, implemented utilizing Amazon EC2 technologies – our web front-end may be located in the US, the application server in the UK and the Database in Zimbabwe for all that matters – in accordance to EC2 and traditional cloud computing, that is fairly normal.While EC2 and some other providers had introduced the idea of a Zone, making sure that your virtual servers are all located in the same physical data center, other solutions are yet to follow.
The above design introduces an interesting “Critical Path” management problem, tied deep into the Tier based architecture design pattern. Companies such as GigaSpaces and others had made it their business to cash in on the problem, by providing a distributed, memory based, middle-ware – literally sweeping the “Critical Path” problem under the rug. However, as the platform will evolve, “Critical Path” issues have a tendency to re-appear, usually, a lot more serious than the original problem – due to new constraints and new operational paradigms within the operational construct of the cloud platform.
So, question be asked: “Is cloud computing good? Can you really build a full service based upon cloud computing services?” – The answer isn’t a straight forward yes or no. For example, while I have a couple of servers on EC2, serving me as development servers mainly, I’ve built my own little cloud environment on my own servers – used for production usage. I’ve used a mixture of OpenVZ servers tied together with my own provisional interface to create a seamless cloud, enabling me to replicate servers, control their operational structures at east and most important – expand my cloud rapidly by introducing new servers to my cloud.
Is my paradigm good for all purposes? I can’t really say – it works for me, it may not work for you. The thing is this, don’t expect cloud computing to come in and solve all your problems, you may run into new ones you are completely unfamiliar with.
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