Today, the PaaS offering is an early-stage pilot designed to meet a request from the Air Force, but a broader pilot is forthcoming. “The Air Force came to us and said, we not only want you to manage the infrastructure, but also the middleware,” Alfred Rivera, DISA’s director of computing services, said in a speech Wednesday at DISA’s Customer and Industry Forum in Washington, D.C.

As part of the PaaS offering, DISA would not just provide the servers themselves, but also the operating system stack and all support services below the application layer, including patching and managing the IT infrastructure.

More broadly, this new PaaS pilot is only one of several cloud computing and shared service projects DISA has in the works. There’s also a planned Microsoft SharePoint 2010 deployment, virtualized web-based versions of Microsoft Office apps hosted in DISA’s cloud, and a number of other services on the way. For example, Rivera said that DISA is also considering ways that it could potentially manage applications that don’t even necessarily reside in DISA data centers — IT service management as a service, he called it.

DISA’s VOffice pilot, disclosed earlier this summer, is now up to 1,000 users who have access to web-based versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote hosted in DISA’s cloud. It’s an effort that’s drawn the interest of the office of the Secretary of Defense, and will go into production in January, Rivera said.

The agency also plans to offer SharePoint as a service to other military agencies, with deployment of SharePoint 2010 slated to begin in January 2011.

RACE is also due for some upgrades and improvements, Rivera said. Deployment on the Department of Defense’s classified SIPRNet — which has seen a lot of demand, according to Rivera — is slated to begin by the end of September. Also coming are refinements to the RACE portal, integration with DISA’s configuration management system, and some automated security accreditation processes.

Eventually, DISA could even begin offering its services outside the Department of Defense. According to Rivera, DISA has had related discussions with the inter-agency Cloud Computing Advisory Council and agencies like the Department of State to discuss the possibilities, but for now, RACE’s access-control mechanism, which requires a military smartcard, remains a barrier.

DISA’s cloud push isn’t over, by a long shot. “We’re in the beginning stages, but this certainly allows you to move toward leveraging technology and processing speed without having to build the network and the infrastructure yourself,” DISA director Lt. Gen. Carroll Pollett said in an interview.

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As a result, this CTO’s company, which had deployed its applications on top of Amazon’s Web service offering, is bugging out of the public cloud and into a private co-location facility. While he believes his team can configure the Amazon service to be just as secure as the on-site option, and the cloud’s low startup costs and rapid deployment benefits are attractive, he had to ask: Could the model cost us business?
No matter how many times public cloud providers assert–often correctly–that data is well-protected on their servers, they just can’t shake the insecurity rap. And that means CIOs need to ask not just whether the cloud makes business sense, but whether their customers will see it that way. They may not: Security tops the list of cloud worries in every InformationWeek Analytics cloud survey we’ve deployed. In our 2010 Cloud GRC Survey of 518 business technology professionals, for example, respondents who use or plan to use these services are more worried about the cloud leaking information than they are about performance, maturity, vendor lock-in, provider viability, or any other concern.

That doesn’t mean businesses are shunning the cloud. Of those respondents who do use or plan to use these providers, within the next two years, 20% say up to half of their IT services will come from the cloud; an additional 45% say a quarter of their IT services could be delivered that way. The benefits, such as lower deployment costs and faster time to market, are just too attractive, particularly in today’s business climate of stagnant budgets and staffing uncertainty. Still, your customers have legitimate questions about running applications in the cloud, whether on infrastructure-as-a service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments. IT must help the business be prepared with good answers to the two main questions we raise, and others specific to the product. It may make the difference between winning business and losing confidence.

First, customers will look for assurance that an application that runs on PaaS is as secure as an application that runs behind an on-premises firewall. The answer will normally be “No–unless it is.” It’s an irritating response, but that’s because cloud security is frustrating. Here’s the breakdown.

A Web application you develop and deploy in a PaaS environment is no more–and no less–secure than a Web app you develop and deploy yourself. The basic principles of secure application development don’t change because of the cloud. “Cross-site scripting is still cross-site scripting. There’s not much difference whether it’s in-house or PaaS,” says Brian Chess, chief scientist and co-founder of Fortify Software, an application security testing company. The upshot? Developers must be trained to write secure software, regardless of where that software runs. Applications must be tested regularly to ensure that the inevitable vulnerabilities are found and remediated. Building and running an application on top of Windows Azure, Google App Engine, or Engine Yard doesn’t excuse an organization from following these principles.

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Rackspace convened a group of interested companies the week of July 12 and asked them if they would help build a stack of open source software that would power a more uniform, future cloud environment. This move had one target, Amazon Web Services EC2, which has run away with the cloud infrastructure market.

Isn’t there already open source code opening up EC2? There is, from Eucalyptus Systems, which did a sterling job of duplicating basic Amazon functionality in its set of compatible interfaces. The Eucalyptus interfaces duplicate basic Amazon functionality, such as ‘load this workload onto a virtual server,’ and then builds them out into cloud infrastructure — for the enterprise private cloud. Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition is a commercial product meant to capitalize on what Eucalyptus open source code created.

The Rackspace initiative is different, and Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos said as much when he responded to an InformationWeek query. It “aims at a cloud with a million nodes. It is an entirely non-commercial initiative,” he said. By “aimed at a million nodes,” he means OpenStack, unlike Eucalyptus, is a code project aimed at major cloud suppliers of the future (which, of course, will be commercial initiatives). The project itself isn’t aimed at producing code to be sold as a commercial product so much as providing a cloud infrastructure to be shared across many cloud suppliers.

I found Thorsten von Eicken, CTO of RightScale, which front ends both Rackspace and EC2, the most zeroed in on this new development. In a July 18 blog, he said: “RackSpace has committed itself to a true open source project, meaning that it’s not just source code thrown over the wall into the open, but also an open design process, an open development process and an open community.”

The Rackspace-sponsored meeting lead to a session on OpenStack requirements, with Rick Clark, senior manager of software product development at Rackspace, “managing the requirements gathering very openly,” wrote von Eicken. “I expect we will see a good number of companies contributing code to this project.”

The companies participating at what Rackspace termed its Design Summit were: AMD, Intel, Dell, Citrix Systems, NTT Data, RightScale, Zenoss, Autonomic Resources, SoftLayer, Opscode, CloudSwitch, Cloudscaling, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, enStratus, FathomDB, iomart Group, Limelight, Nicira, Peer 1, Puppet Labs, Riptano, Scalr, Sonian, Spiceworks and Zuora.

The strength of this group is that it has the expertise to cover many bases. The weakness is that it may or may not have the ability to keep a strict focus, keep members engaged, keep code coming over a long period of time. Even if it meets those goals, it may not appeal to all cloud suppliers, who for reasons of their own may adopt a more Amazon-like approach or simply their own approach.

This is open source by and for the benefit of a group of vendors, who wish to supply components to the future cloud and know they will not be able to do so if Amazon’s EC2 is the only player. That’s a little different from the wide open Linux project, which attracted skilled developers whose efforts were then adopted by thousands of other skilled developers on an independent basis. Whatever OpenStack produces, there’s no guarantee that a majority of open source developers, nevermind a majority of cloud suppliers, will adopt it.

But we need the OpenStack project. The open source projects keep Amazon honest, keep it innovating and pushing the cloud frontier forward rather than letting others get there first. We need an alternative to Amazon as well, lest the dominant supplier become so dominant that it can dictate the market. We need more than one alternative.

We now have Eucalyptus and OpenStack injecting code directly to the future cloud market, with different target users in mind. One way to insure we don’t end up in a cloud era that resembles the age of IBM mainframe domination or Microsoft desktop domination is to create and sustain these alternatives.

“Having many fragmented cloud efforts doesn’t really help build a compelling alternative to Amazon,” warns von Eicken.

That’s right, but in the long run, the cloud isn’t just one thing. There will be many variations to the sets of services that it offers and business models that it employs. These services will be built out more rapidly if providers can share infrastructure components and customers can move with ease from one cloud to another.

By putting its weight behind this stack, Rackspace at a stroke has generated a possible basis for competition with EC2 — a future environment shared across a wide range of providers. Whether that eventuality ever materializes remains to be seen, but I see no technical barrier standing in the way.

“The bottom line is, we believe this to be a potentially game changing event,” wrote von Eicken. If the desire to produce code by this set of vendors is matched by a desire to use the code by an even broader one, then, yes, we will have just witnessed a game changing event.

For more thoughts on open source in cloud computing, see Zenoss engineer Mark Hinkle’s presentation on Linux, Open Source and Socialized Software at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland, Ore.

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PORTLAND, OR – OSCON – July 19, 2010 – Puppet Labs, the leader in data center automation, today released Puppet 2.6, a major upgrade with a focus on improvements for enterprise environments. Puppet 2.6 includes new functionality and features that make managing servers even easier. To download Puppet 2.6, visit www.puppetlabs.com/.

“The 2.6 release places an even stronger emphasis on the enterprise while also opening up new opportunities for people with varied skill sets to use Puppet,” said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs. “Since our last release was 0.25.5, we say that it’s ‘eleventy times better.’ The changes are truly significant because Puppet is now even more capable of making traditionally painful, manual process easier for systems administrators. We’ve also dramatically improved the ability to integrate Puppet with existing systems, making it a platform for automating your infrastructure.”

New features include:

REST API, making it easier to integrate Puppet with other systems.
Preliminary Windows support for heterogeneous computing environments.
Language enhancements & an Internal DSL so administrators who know and want to use pure Ruby for infrastructure development, can easily do so.
Event model, which lays the foundation for powerful reporting and monitoring. It provides structure to data generated by the system and facilitates reporting and analysis, simplifying the identification of infrastructure problems.
Easy to deploy and maintain, Puppet simplifies many standard tasks for systems administrators, while ensuring consistent environments for application engineers. Puppet is cloud-ready, but can also be used with current infrastructure: internal or external clouds, virtual environments, or in physical infrastructure. Puppet is supported on a variety of operating systems: Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, BSD, Windows, and OS X.

Other additions with Puppet 2.6 include significant work in the core of Puppet to make it easier to work with configuration data, including enhancing how Puppet reports on what it does, adding more audit capabilities and helping export information about the infrastructure environment. The command line interface has also been completely redesigned to allow using a single executable to interact with all of Puppet’s functionality.

Today Puppet Labs also announced a $5 million Series B round of funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and Emerson St. Partners. With this new funding, Puppet Labs plans to accelerate the expansion of its engineering team.

For more information about Puppet, visit www.puppetlabs.com. For more information about the 2.6 release visit www.puppetlabs.com/2dot6.

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Today, we at Rackspace launched an ambitious project called OpenStack that aims to make this new world a reality.

I want to lay out the thinking that got us here and why we think this moment will change computing forever.

“The cloud” at its most fundamental level is all about a massive supply increase in computing power. The PC era was all about putting a computer on every desk. The cloud era goes a step further, putting the power of supercomputing at the literal fingertips of every individual at anytime. Whether it’s enabling a youth soccer coach to schedule practice across the online calendars of 18 families, or helping a scientist fold proteins to design new cancer drugs, or encouraging a frontline employee to instantly and cheaply test a new marketing campaign, the exponential growth in computing power and applications is changing every corner of our economy and society. And, this era is truly just beginning. We have seen only a tiny fraction of the potential gains that arise from cheap, ubiquitous computing power.

As this landscape has evolved, some have dismissed cloud computing as just a return to the mainframe era. This view is fundamentally wrong. Mainframes were available to only the smartest employees at the richest companies. The cloud is accessible to all, and usable by anyone, at low cost. Its ubiquity is the source of its power.

However, there is one area where mainframe concepts are intruding into the cloud – the vertically integrated technology stack. As hardware and software merge into services, the danger of locked down proprietary software stacks are emerging in the cloud space. The cloud world changes everything, and that is not good to many entrenched interests of the old guard. Core technologies from operating systems to hypervisors to databases are being used to tie cloud customers into an integrated view of the world.

If the web has taught us anything, it is that open systems, portability, and choice drive innovation. The open Linux system brought us a mountain of software and tools to help accomplish almost any task. And, each component, whether a database or a widget could be moved in and out freely based on the job getting done.

We at Rackspace have long talked about an “open” cloud. And as a service provider built on our Fanatical Support difference, we have never had an interest in creating technical walls around our service. But, given that no standards tools have emerged to build massively scalable clouds, we too have had to build custom software that creates some level of wall around our cloud offerings. For months we have debated how to drive greater standards and increase the velocity of cloud technologies in general. We finally converged on the obvious answer: open source our cloud technology.

Today, we announced a new open source project that includes those core technologies: OpenStack. And, we are not alone. As we looked at all the projects that already existed to drive standards we saw that other efforts were underway that complemented what we have done. We saw a ton of promise in the Nebula computing project built by NASA and are making it a core part of the project. Taking the contributions of Rackspace and NASA as a starting point, OpenStack forms a powerful foundation of technologies including, a scalable compute provisioning engine – OpenStack Compute – and a fully distributed storage engine – OpenStack Object Storage.

The community, which we plan to actively support and drive, is live today at openstack.org with code available for download.

Last week we assembled a strong group of cloud community leaders and developers to meet and review the architecture, engage on technology direction and contribute code. The effort attracted more than 100 participants from 25 companies including hosting companies, telecom providers, hardware manufacturers, cloud ecosystem companies and beyond. This enthusiasm and collaboration around OpenStack has laid the foundation for a vibrant and innovative approach to building the core software to power the future cloud world.

What do we expect OpenStack to mean for the cloud community? Some pretty major things. One, anyone will be able to run this cloud and do it anywhere. Enterprises and governments will be able to build private clouds. Service providers will have the same technology used by Rackspace and NASA to build new offers. Choice and portability are inevitable in this world. Two, the whole tech ecosystem can build around this foundation. With wide adoption, there will be a market for new services all around this core engine. From storage systems to monitoring tools to management systems, there is no end to what can be attached to the core project. Three, the cloud will advance faster than ever. Between just NASA and Rackspace, an army of developers are committed to the continued advancement of OpenStack. With our emerging supporters in the project, we expect to dramatically expand that army. Finally, a core set of standards will be freely available and totally open. New technologies can be attached. Better solutions will be driven into the product. And, the use of this powerful technology will not tie you to the use of any other technologies.

For our customers, we think there are many benefits that flow from these community gains. Not only will this help our offers develop faster and more transparently, but our customers can run private editions of our core systems in house or in our managed hosting operation.

We could not be more excited about the launch of this project and the enthusiasm around it. As a company that has invested a great deal in the development of cloud technologies, we did not take the decision to open source lightly. We think this decision will serve our interests and those of our customers. While we at Rackspace hire top developers and engineers to make sure our technology is second to none, seeking a technology advantage has never been our approach. We have our own vision about how to deploy this technology and serve customers – by giving them seamless access to scalable computing with the trusting partnership that comes through Fanatical Support. But, there will be many approaches and winning formulas. We think by welcoming those approaches and driving standards and more rapid innovation we will all win.

We hope you join us in this cause. We know there are many parties who might want to join us in the effort, please reach out to us.

We look forward to updating you as we make progress.

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We have created a set of AKIs (Amazon Kernel Images) which contain the PV-Grub loader. This loader simply chain-boots the kernel provided in the associated AMI (Amazon Machine Image). Net-net, your instance ends up running the kernel in the AMI instead of the kernel specified in the boot process.

You need to install an “EC2 compatible” kernel and create an initrd (initial RAM disk) as part of your AMI. You also need to create a menu (/boot/grub/menu.lst) for the Grub boot loader. Once you’ve done this you can create the AMI and then launch instances by using one of the PV-Grub “kernels” as described above. You may find this document to be helpful if you want to learn more about the Linux boot process.

To be compatible with EC2, a Linux kernel must support Xen’s pv_ops (paravirtual ops) infrastructure with XSAVE disabled or the Xen 3.0.2 interface. The following kernels have been tested and/or have vendor support:

Fedora 8-12 Xen kernels
SLES/openSUSE 10x, 11.0, and 11.1 Xen kernels
SLES/openSUSE 11.x EC2 Variant
Ubuntu EC2 Variant
RHEL 5.x
CentOS 5.x
Other kernels may not start reliably within EC2. We’re working with the providers of popular AMIs to make sure that they will start to use PV-Grub in the near future.

You can read more about this in our “Enabling User Provided Kernels in Amazon EC2″ document.

– Jeff;

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When and what AMI to start
Once started how to do you configure it from base to functional. Especially in a way that doesn’t become a vendor lock.
How do you manage the massive sprawl of instances, inventory them and track your assets
Monitoring and general life cycle management
When and how do you shut them, and what cleanup is needed. Being billed by the hour means this has to be a consideration
These are significant problems and just a tip of the ice berg. All of the traditional aspects of infrastructure management – like Asset Management, Monitoring, Procurement – are totally useless in the face of the cloud.

A lot of work is being done in this space by tools like Pool Party, Fog, Opscode and many other players like the countless companies launching control panels, clouds overlaying other clouds and so forth. As a keen believer in Open Source many of these options are not appealing.

I want to focus on the 2nd step above here today and show how I pulled together a number of my Open Source projects to automate that. I built a generic provisioner that hopefully is expandable and usable in your own environments. The provisioner deals with all the interactions between Puppet on nodes, the Puppet Master, the Puppet CA and the administrators.

Sadly the activity in the Puppet space is a bit lacking in the area of making it really easy to get going on a cloud. There are suggestions on the level of monitoring syslog files from a cronjob and signing certificates based on that. Really. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs when that’s the state of the art.

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Effective July 1st, 2010, your first 100,000 requests to SQS each month will incur no usage charges. We’ll also provide you with 1 GB per month of outbound data transfer at no charge.

We’ve made SQS more flexible by giving you more control of the maximum message size and the message retention time:

Maximum Message Size – Up until now, SQS messages were limited to 8 kB. This is now a user configurable limit, with a maximum value of 64 kB.

Message Retention Time – Up until now, the message retention time for all SQS queues was four days. This is now a user configurable value with valid values ranging from one hour to two weeks.

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“We are witnessing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make world-class IT infrastructure available to the masses,” said Sunil Dhaliwal a General Partner at Battery Ventures. “While legacy vendors have made billions solving discrete automation problems for very large organizations, the future belongs to those that can deliver simple, scalable automation to any IT user, regardless of their size or sophistication. As a founding investor in data center automation pioneer BladeLogic, we understand the enormity of this shift, and are tremendously excited to support Opscode in making it a reality. They have the team, the technology and the market momentum needed to truly democratize infrastructure management.”

Opscodeʼs technology enables companies of all sizes to build, scale, and manage world-class, fully automated infrastructures based on community best practices and expertise. In 2009, Opscode released “Chef”, an open source systems integration framework. Since this time, more than 150 individuals and 25 companies including Rackspace, RightScale and the Springsource division of VMware have signed on to contribute to the project, making it the worldʼs largest open source configuration management project based on the number contributors.

Using Chef, software developers and engineers are able to manage large-scale server and application deployments by writing code, rather than running commands by hand. Chef is currently in production at top websites, including 37Signals, Etsy, IGN Entertainment, Scribd, Wikia, and White Pages.

“In just a very short period of time, Opscode has attracted some of the brightest minds in infrastructure. These individuals have been responsible for managing some of the worldʼs largest and most complex computing environments and it is from this collective expertise that the idea for Opscode was born,” Jesse Robbins, co-founder and CEO of Opscode. “We count ourselves most fortunate to have partnered with firms like Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson who bring a great deal more than just capital to Opscode. Most importantly, closing a round of this size lets us focus our energies squarely on helping our customers – as well as the Chef community — get the most out of their infrastructure.”

About Opscode
Opscode provides world class infrastructure automation for servers, datacenters, desktops, & the cloud. Opscode makes Chef, the open source configuration management and integration framework used by thousands of organizations to manage and scale infrastructure. Founded in 2008, Opscodeʼs management team includes experts responsible for creating and operating some of the worldʼs largest websites and cloud computing platforms. The company is privately held and headquartered in Seattle. More information can be found at www.opscode.com.

About Battery Ventures
Since 1983, Battery has been investing in technology and innovation worldwide. The firm partners with entrepreneurs and management teams across technology sectors, geographies, and stages of a companyʼs life — from start-up and expansion financing to growth equity and buyouts.

Battery has supported many breakthrough companies around the world, including: Airespace (acquired by Cisco), Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM), BladeLogic (acquired by BMC Software), Netezza (NYSE Arca: NZ), Omniture (NASDAQ: OMTR), and ProfitLogic (acquired by Oracle). Battery currently manages more than $3B in committed capital and invests from offices in Boston, Silicon Valley and Israel. For more information, visit: www.battery.com.

Press Contact:
Robert Nachbar, Kismet Communications, 206-427-0389, rob@kismetcommunications.net
Karen Bommart, Battery Ventures, 781-478-6672, kbommart@battery.com

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According to industry experts, many enterprises are still grappling with concerns about data integrity, recovery and privacy, as well as regulatory compliance in a cloud environment.

Verizon Business offers key tips to keep their data and networks safe:

Evaluate your goals. Before deciding to move your IT services to the cloud, understand the business benefits you want to achieve. Typical benefits include: Reducing the time and effort to launch new applications, enabling IT to become more responsive to the needs of the business, and lowering capital expenditures.

After defining the business goals, perform a risk-benefit analysis to determine if a move into the cloud is appropriate for the business. A few questions to consider: What are the possible scenarios should the data be compromised? What processes would be jeopardized if the cloud service failed?

Perform due diligence. Once the business is committed to the cloud model, determine which deployment model – public, private or hybrid – best meets the business’ requirements.

Choose wisely. When selecting a partner to deliver services via the cloud, select a partner with a heritage in both IT and security services. Verify that risk mitigation is part of the provider’s security practice. Pick a service provider that can integrate IT, security and network services, as well as provide robust service-performance assurances.

Neutral third parties can provide guidance on picking a partner. The Cloud Security Alliance, which promotes the use of best practices for securing the cloud, offers a list of corporate members.

To protect your data, take a good look at your provider. According to the Cloud Security Alliance, the top security threat associated with the cloud is data loss and leakage. As such, how well the provider protects sensitive data is paramount.

When evaluating a provider, analyze the company’s ability to deliver the same types of controls that would usually be done in-house – physical security, logical security, encryption, change management and business continuity and disaster recovery. Also, verify that the provider engages in safe data handling with documented backup, availability and destruction procedures.

Consider a hybrid security model. Incorporate a mix of services delivered in-the-cloud and on premises. This can help allay data security and privacy concerns as well as leverage legacy investments.

Remember to comply! Investing in the cloud and focusing on security can all be for naught if compliance initiatives are not met. Additionally, many regulations, such as the PCI Data Security Standard, include best practices that enhance a company’s security posture. Communicate relevant regulations to your cloud provider, and work with the provider to facilitate compliance.

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