Awesome Cloud Demo: IBM Cloudburst.
I’ve been noisy about my chagrin at IBM’s cloud offerings, but secretly I hope I’m wrong. I want the world’s largest and oldest computing company has something amazing up their sleeve. I’m obsessed enough to watch all of their product demonstration video’s on YouTube.
My latest find is a series on using their new Cloudburst appliance. After reading this review I just had to see the thing in action. Gosh does the reviewer look happy! (Pay no attention to the fact that he is actually @WebSphereClouds, a paid IBM evangelist.)
The first video show’s you how to build the hypervisor to host Websphere. Its pretty boring, but worth a watch if you want to see the full process. The second video however is my favorite. The whole video amounts to a pre-packaged install of Websphere onto a hypervisor, but note how many clicks that still takes. The kicker for me is the “accept the license agreements” step at ~3:00 into the clip. I count a total of four to accept.
Am I being a grump here in saying this is nothing more than virtualization management technology (at best)? This is the same sort of packaging a good UNIX admin was doing in 1999. Did I miss the web service interface to the install here?
What I’d like to see if @WebSphereClouds is listening is a good demo of how their appliance can auto-scale an application to more deployments in the cloud as load increases. Cloud’s should have auto-scaling built in; if this appliance cannot do that please remove the cloud branding.
Can you imagine if Hadoop required 4 licensee agreement clicks for every node it used and took 13 minutes a node to install?
UPDATE:
Connected briefly with @websphereclouds who was responsive. There doesn’t appear to be any demo (or feature? ) focused on dynamic scaling up and scaling down within the appliance. It seems more for setting up and managing instances of Websphere in a hyper-visor cloud (albeit fairly manually) than scaling a workload in a cloud. I hope to get more input from IBM.
wattersjames@WebSphereClouds I watched all of them, I can check again, I didn’t see any dynamic auto-scaling across them demo’ed; have a pointer?
WebSphereClouds@wattersjames Nothing out there right now that points that out
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