If you've been following along, you have seen a story building around of public cloud performance (and scale) and today I'm pleased to announce one of the most interesting chapters.
First, we introduced a new cloud and mobile sample application called Acme Air. Next, at IBM Impact 2013, we showed how IBM WebSphere middleware and the IBM cloud could run this sample workload as a benchmark at impressive web scale levels of load and scale.
More recently, we have shown the same application adjusted to use the NetflixOSS cloud platform on top of the Amazon cloud (and AMI's). We did this as we admired Netlix's leadership in the industry in open cloud-native architectures for high availability, dev ops, and web scaling (among other things).
While the NetflixOSS platform has been negatively commented on, we knew some of the comments pertained to perceived issues that were momentary. Specifically one of the comments was around portability and how being tied to Amazon's cloud might affect resulting adopters of Netflix's approach. In this latest work we question that perception showing not only portability of the core NetflixOSS architecture, but also starting to demonstrate the ability of the architecture across multiple public IaaS clouds. Specifically we showcase the technology running on IBM SoftLayer along with RightScale application cluster management.
Likely now you can see the method to our madness here. We first wanted to have a workload that was known to demonstrate cloud and mobile modern implementation and architecture to reset how we looked at performance. Next we wanted to demonstrate that the workload could run at interesting levels of scale. Next we added operational aspects to how we worked with the workload (high availability, devops, scaling, etc.) based on an open public cloud-native IaaS architecture. Finally, we showed how we could make this architecture open across clouds. At IBM, we are all about open cloud architecture as demonstrated in our work across OpenStack and CloudFoundry.
We are now looking at applying what we have learned across our entire cloud portfolio as well as our multiple Software as a Service offerings. IBM needs to continue to provide industry leadership in both IBM provided public services and cloud solutions that our customers can use to stand up their own public applications and services. NetflixOSS technology and the Netflix approach will certainly have impact on our approach to delivering these solutions going forward.
If you want to read about what we did we have extensively documented the work on this wiki and have contributed back our code changes under the "EmergingTechnologyInstitute" on github. We did this work completely in the open as encouraged by the Netflix Cloud Prize and following IBM's approach to open cloud architectures.
Check out the below video if you want to watch Acme Air / Netflix OSS running on the IBM SoftLayer cloud:
Direct Link (HD Version)
