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If you think Google is a superman and doesn’t need anyone, think twice. Yesterday in its Google I/O developer conference, it announced its Google App Engine for business. The notable features include centralized administration, a 99.9% uptime SLA and heightened security. It also announced the partnership with VMware on cloud portability.

Why does Google need VMware?

In short, it’s about Enterprise. As the “for business” in the name explains, the new service is targeted for enterprises which are not really Google’s strength. Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

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Most people who are interested in VMworld already know the public voting for the proposal is now open till 26th. If you would like to hear about specific topics, it’s high time to cast your votes.

For each track, all the presentation proposals are listed together in one page. To quickly locate a particular proposal, you can use find feature of your browser. Once you login, I would suggest to browse all the proposals and vote for those you find useful. Casting a vote is just two mouse clicks: one for voting and the other to close the confirmation message box.

Two of my proposals are there in two different tracks: public cloud and enterprise application. Please feel free to vote for them.

Title: Building Do-It-Yourself PaaS Platform

Session Id: PC7724

Abstract:

“More and more modern applications are built on top of various middleware for productivity and portability. With cloud computing, the service providers host these middleware and provide them as PaaS (Platform As A Service) services to application developers. PaaS has many benefits, for example no more investment on datacenter and operation, no worry about scalability. The disadvantage is also obvious ñ you are locked in with the PaaS vendor. This session presents a new way, DIY PaaS, to build your applications. It allows you to control the middleware and package them into virtual machines which be provisioned both at IaaS public cloud or inside enterprise. You will have a little more management work in so doing than using typical PaaS service, but you wonít be locked with any vendor with full control over your stack and flexibility to move your applications to and out the public cloud. A good DIY PaaS framework can mitigate the extra work to the minimum and automate the cloud bursting for the best of the application owners. The speaker will guide you through best practices in architecting and building the DIY PaaS and building applications on top of it. At the end, you see a demo showing how it can be done with a real project.”

Track: Hybrid and Public Cloud

http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/hapcloud

Title: Re-architecting Enterprise Applications for vSphere

Session Id: EA7723

Abstract:

“While legacy enterprise applications continue to run on VMware vSphere, they do not fully leverage the benefits of virtualization. For the best performance and scalability, enterprise application should be architected differently to run on vSphere. This represents new challenges and opportunities for enterprise application development. This session discusses in detail what these challenges and opportunities are. It introduces top 10 proven best practices in architecting enterprise applications in light of vSphere, and more importantly how to apply these best practices in real projects. In the end, it presents an architectural blueprint illustrating how different best practices work together for best enterprise applications running on vSphere. Top 10 Best Practices include: 1. Move Up to Higher Level Software Stack with Middleware and Framework 2. Donít Assume Anything 3. De-couple Your Application 4. Scale Application As Needed 5. Build With Failure In Mind 6. Secure Your Application 7. Leverage vApp 8. Streamline the Packaging & Deployment Cycle 9. Manage Your Applications 10. Keep It Simple”

Track: Enterprise Applications

http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/eapplications

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

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Today VMware and Salesforce.com announced vmforce.com finally after several weeks of speculations on what the joint project is about. The following diagram I captured from the live webcast of the event answered the question nicely.

The event attracted about 3,500 online viewers, not to mention the audience onsite. This was a very successful event, resulted in more media coverage than anyone can read. If you missed the live webcast, you can check out the recorded one from the website.

Among all the blogs and news coverage, I think you should read the one by Steve Herrod who has done a great job in explaining the joint adventure in a big picture. His blog also has links to other bloggers.

Looking beyond the exciting keynotes and demos, I think the key takeaways from the announcement are as follows: Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.

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Last week VMware released a news “VMware Expands VMware vCloud Developer Ecosystem With Open-Source Java and Python SDKs for VMware vCloud API”. It says,

VMware has also made a number of open-source contributions to the Cloud Tools project, which powers the SpringSource Cloud Foundry service, enabling Java developers to deploy, test, and manage applications for VMware environments via VMware vSphere(TM) and the VMware vCloud API.

The contributions are the two adapters I developed for the CloudTools project to run on both vSphere and vCloud Express. I wrote the following news on VI Java API project home, which was then quoted in a SpringSource blog by Charles Lee.

DIY PaaS made possible with VI Java API and CloudTools

Nov 23, 2009

As mentioned earlier, VI Java API was leveraged at VMWorld 2009 Keynote demos. Now I got legal approval and contributed the related adapters to CloudTools code hosted at Google.

The CloudTools/CloudFoudry was originally designed for EC2. The CloudTools is open source; the CloudFoudry is not. With our contributed code, you can run CloudTools with vSphere for deploying your Java (Groovy) based web applications to your internal cloud. It offers both Maven and Grails plugins so you can do all the deployment with one line of command. Even better, you can integrate the plugin command with Spring Tools Suite (STS) and have a context menu in the Eclispe based IDE. This is what I call DIY PaaS (Do It Yourself Platform as a Service): vSphere + VI Java API + adapter + CloudTools.

The vCloud adapter was designed with Terremark vCloudExpress platform for the SpringOne 2GX keynote demo. The adapter does not use the VI Java API, but leverages the vCloud REST API. Besides the basic part, the Terremark vCloud API provides extensions for managing the network like public IP, InternetService, and node.

Although you see two different adapters, the user experiences are the same. Both adapters implement the required interfaces defined by CloudTools. Technically it’s not a big deal, but business wise, it is a big deal — you can seamlessly deploy to private (vSphere) cloud and public (service providers like Terremark) cloud, whatever best suits your needs.

DIY PaaS has many advantages overal typical PaaS especially ultimate flexibility and no vendor lock-in, which are critical for enterprises. I will detail more on the DIY PaaS concept, stategies and architecture in a later blog.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.