The CLOUD is upon you

In 2011 many were still wondering if the CLOUD really meant anything in terms of technology, dollars, and or cents. Looking back on 2011 all I can see is a whirl of nebulocity surrounding what-is with what-could-be. Here’s what I think might change significantly in the next 12 months or so:

The CLOUD is real… WHERE’S MINE?

Ok, so we’ve seen people make money off cloud… now I want one. Go build me my own thing that makes money too. Make it look like the King and maybe the King will be forced to buy it… I mean there can’t be 3 kings can there? So now that 2012 is almost here… people are realizing the cloud isn’t just a nebulous swirl of vapor-ware… now let’s start the ASP second chance foundation. Do I need a license for that? I think there will be a lot of opportunities to abstract licenses with SaaS deliveries. Some may exploit the gimmicks that should not have been codified into the licenses in the first place. What comes around goes around, but by now the only ISVs who are likely to be affected by it are the monolithicly most comprehensive solution providers who claim they invented everything. Invention by consolidation should be on the rise in 2012, by the way, I’m guessing.

ASP Second Life

Application service providers were right. Applications can often be served better warm, with human love. At minimum viability, a product contains at least one service component. Automation is great, but services contain humans and humans contain human error. Consumers love to cut out the middle-man, but once they’ve made all their man-in-the-middle attacks and all their paper dolls of sliced and diced middle-men they realize that they want service. So they go to http://asherbond.com/contact and ask for technical advice. Anyone who knows Second Life (or other virtual realities) knows that people like to design things and build things themselves. But if you’re going to build a cloud please ask yourself where the economies-of-scale exist. Now that the technology concepts have been proven in business practice many more customers are going to ask for cloud service, but what they’re really actually asking for is people (sometimes via a RESTful API).

The difference between application services and software-as-a-service is abstraction measured by a degree of multi-tenancy.

Compliance-and-Regulatory-Tunneling-and-Channeling-as-a-Service

They thought regulations and compliance “hurdles” created jobs… and they were right… in the short term… but what they might have missed is that it also creates jobs for service providers who can broker emerging technology as a service.

Business-Process-as-a-Service (#BPaaS)

What kinda cloud u talking bout? We got SaaS BPaaS and my personal favorite: GSaaS. GSaaS loves you brother. Now let me show you how to run your business. I expect to hear a lot of “what kinda PaaS” from developers and a lot of ooooo aaaah from business process practitioners… but the process consultants deserve a chance to really shine and this is it. I got my developer card revoked a couple times for saying “Cloud is SOA” but I got a new one from VeriSign and now I think developers are starting to be cool about it now that they realize that OASIS was right and that so was I since I said so too, neh. The first guy who raked my graphic depictions over the campfire did admit however, “yeah ok man.. i guess if you’re talking about REST.” So it turns out predictions in 2010 were accurate. I think service-component architecture and visual programming are going to play a role in RESTful integration as software components are service-oriented. I strongly expect scalability requirements and cloud-readiness motivators to stir the pot. Service-orientation is inevitable when technology is applied. Developers are empowered as decision makers and technical advisors, so maybe they would be interested in subscribing to business-process-as-a-service since they have more of a technical focus.

The most COMPREHENSIVE solution – brought to you by the Federated Association of Governing Consolidators

So what if you’re an investor and you buy and sell technology securities and you want some of that good old fashioned ROI. How can you make any money in this cloud biz now that the developers are taking over? Oh yeah there’s this little thing called the most COMPREHENSIVE solution. Big comprehensive, little solution. That’s right folks. The time is NOW. Buy everything. Your cloud portfolio is about to make it rain, but before you buy everything… you have to know how this stuff works and what it does. Haha just joking… now back to our regularly consolidated program… I think in 2012 we might continue to see enterprisey comprehensive solution providers trying to convince people that they are the box you can put your cloud into… or are they more of a comprehensive solution “cloud” that spans actual clouds with meaningful definitions which exist in actual physical datacenters? Who gives these large enterprisey comprehensive solution providers the authority to do this? The customer lets them get away with it because they sponsor industry events and they are often older companies who played a role in many of the technologies that end up as cloud. They equivocate between distribution models of cloud computing, for example… they might get behind the technology curve doing tons of non-emerging has-been-mature-for-a-decade-or-so SaaS business then pretend they are powering IaaS today on a public scale… when the emerging technologies are PaaS based.

DevOps as more of a cultural paradigm shift and movement and less of a title

People are going to start either killing each other based on their choice of configuration management / automation framework or they are going to start getting along more and not putting DevOps in their title unless it has Engineer at the end of it and Lead in the the front of it. Designers are going to be constrained by tighter iterations and Ops are going to punch developers just because they haven’t been punched before and everyone goes through it.

Developer-as-a-customer

In the old days, developers could be divided and conquered by business managers much more easily. The days of developers having a great idea that no one understands are not over… but “I don’t understand how this stuff works” is no longer an excuse now that we have so many services available. If you don’t know how something works… just ask… only now… you don’t even have to ask how to do it, you can ask for service. If you don’t know how something works, that something might be new and valuable. Dustin said it already, but I think public offerers are going to focus more on influencing the decisions of software developers. Software developers represent change in the direction of requirements and demands… not just whatever seems wanted right now… I think developers often try to guess (like Steve Jobs R.I.P.) what people need since they’re probably going to want that eventually. I could probably guess that a pregnant mom is going to be in the market for diapers sooner or later. Hopefully sooner rather than later. Developers are in the early stages from cradle to grave. They iterate through software development and application life cycles and deliver features based on requirements. Those features become part of a common framework that can be offered more publicly. It’s not new, but software vendors love to put developers on their platforms. What’s new is that developers are not-so-divided and not-so-conquered… so they probably demand a higher degree of ubiquity in their distribution channels… so they probably demand a higher degree of interoperability in their language frameworks.

Applications are most portable when the target distribution platform is based on open-standards.

Public Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Top Doggery

Not everyone can be King of the Hill, but I think there’s room for a whole circle of winners in the market segment of public PaaS. We have seen 3 generations of public platform service offerings to developers:

Totally Rigidly Arcane PaaS

The first platform services with public offerings forced the developer to conform to a proprietary framework. The back end was a confidential operation delivered as a multi-tenant service to subscribers who learned how to conform to the proprietary framework. The framework may have been based on python or java, but constrained the developer to the platform of implementation rather than the standards of the enabling technologies within.

Still-exploiting-the-constraint PaaS

This type of platform is built secretly and operates as a proprietary service, but relies on open-source components to deliver services which are mostly compliant with open-standards. A true language is always an open-standard.

Open PaaS – as it should be

Third generation platform services are completely portable. This type of middle-ware essentially replaces the role of the “operating system” as a software component with “systems-in-operation” instantiated as objects by a framework of classes delivered as a platform of services for developers to build things on top of. The distribution model allows for services to be delivered with scalability, flexibility, interoperability, high availability and the distribution model also allows for platform portability and application interoperability by default. The evolution of service-component architecture (SCA) and visual programming may also influence the adoption of visual programming in the cloud as practical users are abstracted by service and frictionless design becomes the practice.

Next Generation PaaS+

I think of PaaS+ as a value-added platform-as-a-service which may include business processes as a service or may include additional DevOps tooling or methodologies-as-a-service (MaaS?) whatever… The framework (tool) teaches you the process. In a toolcloud you might experience something like a toolbox… for example when you’re using Gmail, you realize that Gmail is a Google approach to email… it’s not just an “email program” … so you get some agility along with the nebulocity of the cloudy SaaSfulness. So I think that the next generation PaaS+ will need to put their pluses on by adding some kind of business or other practical high level value. Some of this high level value can be delivered in the form of integration. Cloudbees has moved forward with their initiative to add continuous integration via Jenkins/Hudson integrated service components in their PaaS offering. I think DevOps toolclouds will emerge via the PaaS delivery model and that like Cloudbees other cloud service providers who have a PaaS offering may choose to offer a chocolate or strawberry new flavor of PaaS for Dev and possibly a vanilla PaaS for their long term support in production interoperability and highly available portability PaaSes. I guess Leiloo Dallas could call that one a multi-PaaS just in time to kiss Korbin and save the world before New Years.

Predictive Monitoring and SLAs

Predictive monitoring tools will leverage Hadoop and other big data / analytics. The abstraction of data itself may become an abstract business-process-as-a-service and drive innovation in system performance as SLA’s are enforced and predictive deep monitoring tools allow autonomous and dynamic autoscaling of instances in resource pools.

Resource Pool Expansion and Utility Computing Commodotitization

I think the price of public cloud will start to look like a true utility and come down quite a bit. Companies like Amazon Web Services probably would lower their prices is the demand wasn’t way too high. When more IaaS vendors such as Rackspace, Opsource, Datapipe, et al.. enter the space (they’re already here) and start to compete for customers, the price of raw x86 compatible IaaS should come down quite a bit and make people re-think their hybrid strategies. For now, many organizations may benefit from a flexible hybrid cloud strategy that (for example) may leverage their existing infrastructure to orchestrate public cloud services.

Security implications of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing lowers the barriers to entry by people who ordinarily could not access high performance clusters of nodes to do complex brute-force math research on your “encrypted” password… or just fire up an array of nodes and aim it at the ssh port. Nothing they couldn’t do in the old days of dark matter / botnet clouds. What IP address did that come from? A leased one in a classy datacenter. I think public cloud providers are going to become very security-savvy (actually they really are top notch in most cases). It will be interesting to see how they empower themselves from the big data + hypervisor perspective.

Rinse that CLOUD out ‘cha mouth boy!

At some point… analysts are saying that there is a “hype cycle” in which cloud word sentiment shall become stale. The word cloud will either become ultra-ubiquitous like industry insiders are saying… or it may become a bit blase.. numb from the excessive nebulocity of smoke and mirrors becoming clouds too. I think if we can refrain from partying too hard it might help. Happy new years eve. Be responsible and make backups.

Summary

11,969 http requests handled @ 84 nanoseconds across 100 concurrent connections? Yeah. Here’s what happened:

root@ip-10-161-82-11:/var/www/nginx-default# ab -n 1000000 -c100 http://localhost:80/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking localhost (be patient)
Completed 100000 requests
Completed 200000 requests
Completed 300000 requests
Completed 400000 requests
Completed 500000 requests
Completed 600000 requests
Completed 700000 requests
Completed 800000 requests
Completed 900000 requests
Completed 1000000 requests
Finished 1000000 requests

Server Software:        nginx/0.7.65
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        34989 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   83.544 seconds
Complete requests:      1000000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      35202867880 bytes
HTML transferred:       34989862555 bytes
Requests per second:    11969.72 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       8.354 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.084 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          411492.58 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    2   0.2      2       5
Processing:     2    7   0.7      6      15
Waiting:        1    2   0.5      2      12
Total:          5    8   0.7      8      17
WARNING: The median and mean for the processing time are not within a normal deviation
        These results are probably not that reliable.

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%      8
  66%      9
  75%      9
  80%      9
  90%      9
  95%      9
  98%      9
  99%     10
 100%     17 (longest request)
root@ip-10-161-82-11:/var/www/nginx-default# w
 08:28:26 up 25 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.63, 0.23, 0.08
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
root     pts/0    c-69-181-58-125. 08:21    0.00s  0.01s  0.00s w
root@ip-10-161-82-11:/var/www/nginx-default# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor	: 0
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 23
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5430  @ 2.66GHz
stepping	: 10
cpu MHz		: 2659.998
cache size	: 6144 KB
physical id	: 0
siblings	: 1
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 1
apicid		: 0
initial apicid	: 3
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 13
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm dca sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority
bogomips	: 5322.20
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 38 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor	: 1
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 23
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5430  @ 2.66GHz
stepping	: 10
cpu MHz		: 2659.998
cache size	: 6144 KB
physical id	: 1
siblings	: 1
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 1
apicid		: 1
initial apicid	: 0
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 13
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm dca sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority
bogomips	: 5322.20
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 38 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor	: 2
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 23
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5430  @ 2.66GHz
stepping	: 10
cpu MHz		: 2659.998
cache size	: 6144 KB
physical id	: 2
siblings	: 1
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 1
apicid		: 2
initial apicid	: 2
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 13
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm dca sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority
bogomips	: 5322.20
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 38 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor	: 3
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 23
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5430  @ 2.66GHz
stepping	: 10
cpu MHz		: 2659.998
cache size	: 6144 KB
physical id	: 3
siblings	: 1
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 1
apicid		: 3
initial apicid	: 1
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 13
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm dca sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority
bogomips	: 5322.20
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 38 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

root@ip-10-161-82-11:/var/www/nginx-default# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:       15752364 kB
MemFree:        14964352 kB
Buffers:           22708 kB
Cached:           216504 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:           134052 kB
Inactive:         110996 kB
Active(anon):       6000 kB
Inactive(anon):        0 kB
Active(file):     128052 kB
Inactive(file):   110996 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:             0 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB
Dirty:                36 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:          5860 kB
Mapped:             5052 kB
Shmem:               164 kB
Slab:              28876 kB
SReclaimable:      12480 kB
SUnreclaim:        16396 kB
KernelStack:         872 kB
PageTables:            0 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:     7876180 kB
Committed_AS:      47812 kB
VmallocTotal:   34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed:        5988 kB
VmallocChunk:   34359732359 kB
DirectMap4k:    15728640 kB
DirectMap2M:           0 kB

Here’s a larger configuration running the latest stable version of nginx:

root@ip-10-166-162-224:/var/www# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor	: 0
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 26
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X5550  @ 2.67GHz
stepping	: 5
cpu MHz		: 2666.760
cache size	: 8192 KB
physical id	: 0
siblings	: 1
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 1
apicid		: 0
initial apicid	: 17
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 11
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm dca sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid
bogomips	: 5335.92
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor	: 1
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 26
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X5550  @ 2.67GHz
stepping	: 5
cpu MHz		: 2666.760
cache size	: 8192 KB
physical id	: 1
siblings	: 1
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 1
apicid		: 1
initial apicid	: 1
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 11
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm dca sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid
bogomips	: 5335.92
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor	: 2
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 26
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X5550  @ 2.67GHz
stepping	: 5
cpu MHz		: 2666.760
cache size	: 8192 KB
physical id	: 2
siblings	: 1
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 1
apicid		: 2
initial apicid	: 1
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 11
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm dca sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid
bogomips	: 5335.92
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor	: 3
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 26
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X5550  @ 2.67GHz
stepping	: 5
cpu MHz		: 2666.760
cache size	: 8192 KB
physical id	: 3
siblings	: 1
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 1
apicid		: 3
initial apicid	: 1
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 11
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm dca sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid
bogomips	: 5335.92
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor	: 4
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 26
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X5550  @ 2.67GHz
stepping	: 5
cpu MHz		: 2666.760
cache size	: 8192 KB
physical id	: 4
siblings	: 1
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 1
apicid		: 4
initial apicid	: 1
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 11
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm dca sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid
bogomips	: 5335.92
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor	: 5
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 26
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X5550  @ 2.67GHz
stepping	: 5
cpu MHz		: 2666.760
cache size	: 8192 KB
physical id	: 5
siblings	: 1
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 1
apicid		: 5
initial apicid	: 1
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 11
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm dca sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid
bogomips	: 5335.92
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor	: 6
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 26
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X5550  @ 2.67GHz
stepping	: 5
cpu MHz		: 2666.760
cache size	: 8192 KB
physical id	: 6
siblings	: 1
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 1
apicid		: 6
initial apicid	: 1
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 11
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm dca sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid
bogomips	: 5335.92
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor	: 7
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 26
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X5550  @ 2.67GHz
stepping	: 5
cpu MHz		: 2666.760
cache size	: 8192 KB
physical id	: 7
siblings	: 1
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 1
apicid		: 7
initial apicid	: 1
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 11
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm dca sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid
bogomips	: 5335.92
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

root@ip-10-166-162-224:/var/www# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:       71700024 kB
MemFree:        69213656 kB
Buffers:            9736 kB
Cached:           214992 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:           116788 kB
Inactive:         116540 kB
Active(anon):       8628 kB
Inactive(anon):      152 kB
Active(file):     108160 kB
Inactive(file):   116388 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:             0 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB
Dirty:                 0 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:          8628 kB
Mapped:             5756 kB
Shmem:               172 kB
Slab:              31148 kB
SReclaimable:      21044 kB
SUnreclaim:        10104 kB
KernelStack:        1480 kB
PageTables:            0 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:    35850012 kB
Committed_AS:      62120 kB
VmallocTotal:   34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed:        6100 kB
VmallocChunk:   34359732247 kB
DirectMap4k:    71680000 kB
DirectMap2M:           0 kB

root@ip-10-166-162-224:/var/www# ls -la index.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 281180 2010-10-16 09:02 index.html

root@ip-10-166-162-224:/var/www# ab -n 1000000 -c100 http://localhost:80/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking localhost (be patient)
Completed 100000 requests
Completed 200000 requests
Completed 300000 requests
Completed 400000 requests
Completed 500000 requests
Completed 600000 requests
Completed 700000 requests
Completed 800000 requests
Completed 900000 requests
Completed 1000000 requests
Finished 1000000 requests

Server Software:        nginx/0.8.52
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        281180 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   232.069 seconds
Complete requests:      1000000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      281395406970 bytes
HTML transferred:       281181405900 bytes
Requests per second:    4309.07 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       23.207 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.232 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          1184132.86 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    1   0.2      1       3
Processing:     8   22   0.6     22      65
Waiting:        0    1   0.5      1      46
Total:          9   23   0.6     23      65

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     23
  66%     23
  75%     24
  80%     24
  90%     24
  95%     24
  98%     24
  99%     24
 100%     65 (longest request)

Here’s my smallest cloud instance running apache (tested from an m1.xlarge running in the same availability zone). The results are different because this is a network test involving two nodes. More latency is expected. Actually, there are a lot of differences in this next sample. 2 concurrent connections is much different than 100. The html page being distributed by the Apache http server here is similar to the one from the last sample.

This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking asherbond.com (be patient)
Completed 10000 requests
Completed 20000 requests
Completed 30000 requests
Completed 40000 requests
Completed 50000 requests
Completed 60000 requests
Completed 70000 requests
Completed 80000 requests
Completed 90000 requests
Completed 100000 requests
Finished 100000 requests

Server Software:        Apache
Server Hostname:        asherbond.com
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /blog
Document Length:        234 bytes

Concurrency Level:      2
Time taken for tests:   135.299 seconds
Complete requests:      100000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Non-2xx responses:      100000
Total transferred:      46700000 bytes
HTML transferred:       23400000 bytes
Requests per second:    739.11 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       2.706 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1.353 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          337.07 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
             min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        1    1   9.5      1    3002
Processing:     1    1   0.4      1      33
Waiting:        1    1   0.4      1      32
Total:          2    3   9.5      3    3003

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
 50%      3
 66%      3
 75%      3
 80%      3
 90%      3
 95%      4
 98%      4
 99%      5
100%   3003 (longest request)

Considerations

1. This is not a comparative analysis, but rather a generally uncontrolled experiment to collect system performance data from the cloud.
2. Service-oriented Architecture is volatile when the supporting service layers are volatile.
3. Compute infrastructure services (even EC2 m1.* and especially t1.micro) may be volatile depending on network health and demands at a given time.
4. Benchmarking a local loop-back may give understated performance results on computers with lower IO bandwidth.
5. Benchmarking a local loop-back may give overstated performance when service traverses networks suffering from high latency between client and server nodes.
6. Some networks, virtual, and paravirutal compute environments limit the amount of concurrent connections during high (or even moderate) utilization.
7. 100 concurrent connections isn’t very many, especially for Amazon Web Services.
8. It would be interesting to see how many requests could be handled with 1000 concurrent connections.

Conclusions

1. Bigger may have the potential of being better, but requires additional performance tuning for a specific application in order to take advantage of the compute capabilities of an 8 processor configuration.
2. Sometimes the purpose of data collection reveals itself after such data becomes information.
3. Sometimes it’s fun to show what a machine is capable of, whether you’re revving the engine on a dyno or just riding through some neighborhoods…

In the future, computers will be more and more portable and the networks that connect computers together will be much faster. Data will be centralized for the purposes of logical integrity. This requires that networks be made fast, reliable, and distributed. Computing in the cloud could not come at a better time than now. Our now? IPV6 is our now and everybody’s now in everyone’s world, connected by our smart phones, laptops, desktops, and servers. E-commerce is going international and fully mobile. Hardware vendors are building systems smaller and faster than ever before. Open source software distribution models are transforming the commercial software model into a collective library… an understanding of technology at the programmatic level. People are freed and empowered to relate to each other by these advances. The commercial system now has a reduced load average and can focus on other processes, like buying, selling, and advertising online using mobile phones. Collective global positioning and mobile innovations have brought knowledge to freedom on foot. Supercomputing is here and we are distributing it to the world, empowering humans to spread ideas like nectar. Modularity, flexibility, convergence, and resilience are emerging in today’s software. What do you expect? – Asher Bond

Facebook is written mostly in PHP, which generally scales well for most sites. Large scale web sites can greatly reduce memory resource utilization as well as CPU resource utilization by eliminating unused and inefficient code instructions.

Although PHP is considered to be a scripting language, PHP’s parser does in fact compile code before it is processed by the Zend Engine. Opcode caching allows compiled PHP code to be shared and recycled in memory, rather than compiling the PHP source on the fly. Opcode caching is already available in Zend Server’s community edition and will be available when PHP6 is released.

HipHop takes a much more aggressive approach to performance optimization by translating the source code into C++ which can be compiled into more machine specific instructions. Not only does HipHop compile the source code into a more system friendly language, it also rewrites your code to be more efficient. Through static binding, scripty system calls and functions such as eval() are eliminated and loosely defined types are tightened up to meet specific runtime requirements. Here is an illustration of how HipHop optimizes PHP:

According to Facebook’s Senior Engineer Haiping Zhao, HipHop reduced Facebook’s CPU overhead by 50%!

HipHop will be released tonight under the open PHP license.

Are you getting this error during the installation of Magento?

Fatal error: Call to a member function children() on a non-object …

The most common reason for this error message is that the Magento Installation script is trying to access other scripts which are in a directory that is unreadable by your web server. You probably broke the file and directory permissions for these installation scripts.

You might have better luck with uncompressing the tar.gz archived version of Magento, which you can download from Magentocommerce.com. Tar archives generally are preset with the permissions of the person who archived them, which might be easier since the good folks at Magento probably have a better idea about how permissions need to be set for their software.

If you are using a Magento friendly hosting company like Host Monster, you should be able to simply upload the compressed tar.gz file and uncompress it on the server side with the permissions already set properly.

It’s still a good idea for you to know how to set permissions for web applications on a web server, especially if you run your own VPS or dedicated web server or people are paying you to install/set up Magento for them.

Here’s how to set the file and directory permissions for Magento Manually

Check that all directories inside your magento directory are readable and executable by your web server’s user. Normally the web server runs as either the user apache or nobody. As a side note, it’s more secure to run your web server as it’s own username instead of “nobody”.

For those of you running the lazy (less secure) installation of your web server… The lazy (less secure) way is to change permissions is:
chmod -r 777 /your/magento

Don’t set permissions using the lazy method, because anyone with access to your web server (shell, ftp, or even just web access through a script) can overwrite your magento files and heavily compromise your e-commerce site. It is very important to run an e-commerce web server securely because a compromised web server can send thousands of credit card numbers to thieves before the security breach is noticed. If you are unsure about security, it is recommended that you use a scalable e-commerce service such as Shopify or that you purchase a Magento installation from someone who is seasoned in e-commerce. I can set up the Magento software platform (which supports the hosting of multiple web stores) in about an hour or two depending on your hosting situation. However, if you prefer to and are comfortable setting up e-commerce sites yourself, read on.

Try to limit permissions to only your ftp/shell username and the web server. The way most people handle this is to change the owner of files to their ftp/shell username and set the group to the web server’s group.

For example (assuming your web server runs under the user name “apache”):
chown -r yourname:apache /your/magento

Make files (not directories) readable by your web server:
find /your/magento -type f -exec chmod 640 {} \;

The next thing you should do is set the file permissions for Magento directories to readable and executable:
find /your/magento -type d -exec chmod 750 {} \;

Now set the permissions for directories that need to be writable and executable:

chmod 770 /your/magento/app/etc
chmod 770 /your/magento/var
chmod 770 /your/magento/var/cache
chmod 770 /your/magento/media
chmod 770 /your/magento/media/downloadable

chmod 770 /your/magento/media/import