Shravan Kumar’s Blog

Sun Virtual Data center demo introduces cloud tools that come with their cloud offering. Their approach (portable) of establishing relationships between machines, ability to save it and allocating a set of machines this way is really good for me because in most cases I will be starting a set of machines that are related and probably add or remove machines from this set. Their demo did not show how to remove/add more machines to this set but I am sure they thought about this and give appropriate tools to make this easy for users.

Other cloud providers (to be accurate I used only EC2, GoGrid and Azure so far) have tried to address this only at the granular level. This leaves manually establishing relationship between nodes as the only option. This could be simple but it is also very arbitrary because there is no standard way to communicate between nodes or convey that nodes are dependant on each other. For e.g. in case of EC2 there is an option to pass user data where you can send parameters to the instance (no standard)

I recently worked on a POC which involves simulation on EC2 cloud. I had to work with 3 different types of EC2 instances. To do this using command line tools, ElasticFox or Amazon Management Console was cumbersome and prone to errors. Instances were dependant on each other and when I create the instances I had to pass instance information of one of the machines to other nodes and some additional parameters

To make my demo presentable I had to come up with a user interface which captures different instance types and makes allocating machines painless

Based on what I see with Sun Virtual Data Center toolset, this task could be much simpler if I use Sun cloud

I am really looking forward to trying these tools. Go Sun Sky