Daniele Vistalli's Blog

Hi guys, after getting back from Lotusphere I wanted to prepare a good resume on what was new or improving on the WebSphere Portal/WCM/Accelerators side of IBM's offering.

But....
last week something got my attention: The announcement by IBM and Amazon that told us IBM is serious about cloud computing, so serious that they are offering today:

• Free licenses to run dev/demonstration instances of DB2, Infromix, Smash and WebSphere Portal+WCM into Amazon AMI (think of Virtual machines). This means you just pay for the power, traffic, storage you consume.
• A conversion table to map your PVU (Processor Value Unit) from Passport Advantage into EC2 computing units. This means you could start today moving some of your infrastructure to the cloud (from a licensing point of view) and still respect licence terms.
• IBM will soon extend is offering to include "production" AMI in the Amazon catalog and due to the model of Amazon DevPay I would expect you'll be able to buy Power & Licenses in a single click.

So this was the announcement from Amazon and this was from IBM but I could not stop at reading.

At Lotusphere Marshall Lamb in his session about Portal Virtualization told us about efforts they (IBM) has been doing to prepare Websphere portal to be "farming ready" (where by Farming we intend create a base image that can replicated thousands of times to service requests).

In his presentation he discussed cloning of portal instances and tips to decouple the actual portal profile from the base installation. That session was one of my favourites so I clearly got the match between his session at LS and the current announcement.

So what happened....

I headed up to http://aws.amazon.com/, signed up, give them my credit card details.... and started a new AMI based on the IBM WebSphere Portal + WCM offering. The process was straight forward and in about an hour my portal was ready.

At first it wasn't clear to me how Amazon EC2 worked and I couldn't figure out a couple of thing (when you terminate an AMI it gets destroyed, so your data gets destroyed if you haven't added an EBS, or elastic block store, filesystem).

If you want to understand Amazon EC2 "fast" you should absolutely read the great developer documentation on Amazon EC2.

The first time you log in to the AMI with your account you're guided trough an an autoyast process (the Suse linux install system) which lets you customize:

• The root password for the system
• The "virtuser" password for the system (virtuser is used in place of WPSAdmin)
• Allow you to connect (and eventually provision) an EBS volume where it will persist your database and Websphere Profile. (the system installs the WPS profile on /mnt/portalfs, when you buy/attach an EBS the actual persistent store is mounted at /mnt/portalfs)
• Copies the base image for DB2 and the WPS profile to the right place (/mnt/portalfs).

At this point your server is ready, just issue the commands to start IHS (the http server) and WebSphere Portal and you're done.

So far, so good, it's impressive.

What i begun to think ...

After playing with it for some hours I begun to work on some scenarios about how I could offer (in the future) EC2 based portal services to customers ... and ... believe me is going to be damn good for everybody.

I could tell a lot more but I prefer to get more experience with the system... for sure the next steps are:

• Securely connect the Websphere Portal instance to my domino LDAP directory (over SSL), thanks god IBM's guys used the federated repository when setting up the image. Adding an LDAP is going to be a breeze
• Customize the portal with new themes (the default Portal 6.1 theme is good but still a bit poor if you want to have the product sell itself)
• Add all my portal applications & scenarios (long lasting logins, extra portlets etc)

Once it's ready I'll move on and "open it for the public" so whoever can register/login play around and see a REAL portal environment that's not what customer are used  to get today (they get a lot of whitepapers and in general "paper").


A final note to everybody, the cloud "stateless" approach to systems is something new for everybody, it requires architects to separate "instance data" (whatever they are) from base software and to re-design all the operations around systems. The dynamic resource provisioning of Amazon Web Services is impressive. A web service can create machines, storage, disk snapshots. At some point we could get to a system that can instantiate new nodes as needed, pay the licenses for peak situations and go back to savings when time is due.

If you get it.... you're going to have a lot of fun in the coming years.

Let me know what you think, Daniele

Comments (9)
Daniele Vistalli February 15th, 2009 08:31:44