As a start up doing big things, when we first heard about “Under the Radar” event, we figured how are we going to get on the radar for these folks ? We sent in our application, talked with Debbie and Jasmine to pitch our product, the now so popular BoomBox. At the end of the day, among an ocean of applications and good ideas surrounding the cloud space, LayerBoom has been chosen to present at “Under the Radar” on April 16, 2010 in Mountain View, California. So if you’re around the Bay area in mid April, we look forward to seeing you there.
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13
Feb 10
Layerboom to present at Under the Radar
4
Feb 10
Layerboom hangs with Barracuda Networks
So the Layerboom team is in the Bay area this week, Bootup Labs once again came through in spades and hooked us up with Barracuda Networks, one of the founders of Barracuda is Michael Perone who decided to treat us to a hockey game between the San Jose Sharks and the Detroit Red Wings, we were picked up in the Barracuda bus and talked hockey, shop and a great time with the Barracuda crew. Thanks a lot, Michael !!
30
Jan 10
Guy Kawasaki drops by…
It’s no secret that Layerboom is part of Bootup Labs, a “seed accelerator” helping starts ups spawn locally. As part of the Bootup family, meeting awesome people is one of the best perks that comes with this. One such awesome person arrived this week, Guy Kawasaki, the awesome guru to us in the startup world because of his great advice and feedback from listening to our start up ideas.
Guy actually spent a full day at Bootup with us, going through every company with us on a one on one basis, providing honest and sometimes brutally honest feedback. Despite all the bruised egos he left behind the office, I’m sure we’re all a little bit better and clearer on our message. Here is a picture of Guy with the Layerboom team.
19
Jan 10
CloudCamp Vancouver 2010
CloudCamp is finally coming to Vancouver this year on March 13th, 2010. CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.
If you or anyone else you know is interested in attending then please head over to the CloudCamp Vancouver page and register for the event.
Interested in helping sponsor CloudCamp Vancouver? Get in touch with one of our organizers.
See you there!
14
Jan 10
BoomBox-virtualization appliance
Well, if you’ve been a loyal reader to this blog, you probably expect a quarterly blog from us. 2009 was a big year for LayerBoom as we got started and put our heads down into development and rarely came up for air.
Now we are in the final stages of tweaking our product, the first Virtualization/Cloud appliance product to hit the market place. So far, the responses we received from enterprises and hosting companies around the world is nothing short of amazing, with inquiries from Asia, Europe and North America. So what is the our virtualization appliance, appropriately labeled as “The BoomBox” going to do ?
Our idea was simple, how to make cloud affordable, accesible and in general, less cloudy for everyone. The BoomBox transforms your existing infrastructure investments into a cloud computing platform. Customers get an easy to use web dashboard, billing and invoicing functionality, and the ability to manage physical and virtual infrastructure with the click of a button. Provision new servers in minutes, and integrate with your existing infrastructure management solutions with a comprehensive API.
We’re shipping da BoomBoxes in February so let us know if you’re in need of a cloud solution.
10
Oct 09
BoingBoing Circumvents DMCA – Because they’re in Canada
BoingBoing was recently issued a DMCA takedown notice over hosting a copy of a widely criticized Ralph Lauren ad. They didn’t have to comply. Why? Because their servers are hosted in Canada.
Jump to 3:30
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
While this is a pretty small example, it highlights the importance of considering the geopolitics of where you host your website, which is a component rarely considered in the hosting world.
14
Oct 08
LayerBoom Survey – You can Help
Hi everyone!
I’m looking for some help answering some questions to help LayerBoom and some associated projects determine what companies and individuals really want in their own “Cloud Computing” environment.
I know the Term has been getting worn out, so to summarize, LayerBoom is providing software that helps companies build utility computing environments using existing hardware and network infrastructure. The idea is to provide software as a common platform, then provision resources across many distributed environments, and enable companies and academic environments to rent/share unused resources for extra revenue.
There’s a survey posted up at http://survey.layerboom.com
I’d appreciate your help and time!
-Trevor
(Also posted on http://trevoro.ca)
3
Oct 08
How to move Servers Between Xen and Amazon
I’ve been working on a project that lets you quickly move systems between your private Xen implementation and Amazon’s EC2 service. There are a lot of hurdles to get this to work, and most of them are surrounding how Amazon doesn’t let you download a Kernel or Ramdisk image out of S3 unless you’re the owner. You can download someone elses image if you’ve saved it as your own but you still can’t download the kernel and ramdisk. Also, EC2 has specific requirements for how the image is built. Here’s how you can get your image out of Amazon and run it locally on your own Xen hypervisor. I will assume you are already using Amazon Web Services and have created an account. If you haven’t then sign up.
Amazon calls their instance images Amazon Machine Images or AMI’s. If you want to be able to grab one of the many images from Amazon you can use download the Amazon AMI tools and AWS tools then do the following. You can download the tools here
Find and Download the AMI
$: ec2-describe-images IMAGE ami-cc6386a5 ubuntu-hardy-ruby/image.manifest.xml 848278689040 available private i386 machine IMAGE ami-386c8951 ubuntu-ruby-lapack/image.manifest.xml 848278689040 available private i386 machine $:
Fields 3 and 4 contain important information. For this example I’m listing the images that I own. Optionally you can provide a switch that will list all Amazon images by including ‘-a’ to the end of the ec2-describe-images command.
Field 3 is the unique identifier for the AMI, and field 4 is the bucket and AMI “manifest” – or a file that describes the AMI. Because users can specify the name of the manifest, you should pay attention to this value when trying to run the next set of commands.
The AMI tools from Amazon include a utility called ‘ec2-download-bundle’. This will download the manifest file from the bucket, parse through to see what other files it needs to download, then it will reassemble the AMI image locally, and check its signature. The AMI’s are encrypted in small (usually 10 meg) chunks. The signatures for those chunks are also included in the manifest.
To download the first AMI listed above, run the following commands
mkdir 'image-to-download' cd 'image-to-download' ec2-download-bundle --bucket ubuntu-ruby-lapack -m image.manifest.xml --access-key $AWS_ACCESS_KEY --secret-key $AWS_SECRET --privatekey $EC2_PRIVATE_KEY
That will start downloading the bundle to your local system.
Rebuild the AMI
Now we have to unbundle the files
ec2-unbundle -m image.manifest.xml -k $EC2_PRIVATE_KEY
This will decrypt and reassemble the image from all the individual components in the list
Now you have an image named ‘image’ in your directory. You can take a look at this file by mounting it
mkdir /mnt/image mount -t ext3 -o loop image /mnt/image cd /mnt/image
If you’re lucky there will be copies of the kernel and perhaps the ramdisk in the /boot partition. Otherwise you’ve got to do something really tricky : You have to guess as to what kernel will work the best. Thankfully we have a good understanding of what’s required to boot one of these images.
If you’ve created an image for Xen already then chances are your kernel will work just fine, but your ramdisk might need some adjusting. A trick you can use is to chroot to the /mnt/image folder, specify which modules you want loaded and rebuild the ramdisk – then exit the chroot, copy the kernel and ramdisk out of /mnt/image and you’ll have all the components you’ll need.
I know what you’re thinking: That’s a lot of work / guessing
You’re in luck. While there are a couple sites for sharing pre-built Xen images, the community is nowhere near as large as the Parallels or VMware ‘appliance’ sites. Jailtime.org has a hanful of images but they don’t follow any sort of standard, and the disk layouts / configurations aren’t compatible with Amazon’s EC2.
LayerBoom has a Xen image that is completely compatible with Amazons AMI format, and it can run in your own environment. This means you can copy a system into Amazon from your test environment without any hassle. It also works with the Eucalyptus project, and can be booted in xVM server as well (Instructions are coming)
Download the Xen package
url: http://layerboom.com/files/xen/images/centos52-20080930.tar.gz
md5: d54a83fc22f1ec052db6ebe3c258ee45
u/l :root/password
23
Sep 08
Wiki is Online
Wiki.layerboom.com is up for anyone interested in reading or contributing to documenting the installation and administration of the Eucalyptus Cloud Computing platform. Rather than replace the UCSB documentation, the Wiki is an attempt to supplement that resource, as well as collect common issues in one place.
Check it out at wiki.layerboom.com
15
Sep 08
VMware launches vCloud
At VMWorld today in Las Vegas, VMware announed their newest initiative, vCloud “to Federate Resources Between Internal IT and External Clouds and Enable Broad Application Compatibility for Cloud Computing.”
The vCloud will be one of the many enablers of the Federated Computing environment that people like Tim O’reilly have written about in the past. It’s really the only logical way forward for the general computing environment. As we enable people to run, manage and price these computing environments, we get closer and closer to a utility market that mirrors something like the electricity market. Different companies will be able to set prices based on how expensive or highly availble their operation / computing environment is to run, and it also gives vertical hosting companies the ability to align themselves with different tiers of hosting providers.
When this model becomes widely adopted we’ll see a parallel widespread adoption of technologies that make deploying and managing dense computing more cost effective. This means a lot more containers, and efficient data centers.
VMware is definitely on the right track, but there still needs to be an open source provider for these types of services and directories. At the end of the day the tradtional hosting providers, and even companies that claim to be “cloudy” will have to find a way to integrate into the new utility market.
