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Enomalism Elastic Computing Platform

The Enomalism Elastic Computing Module is mashup of several applications and services. Primarliy the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Virtual Workspaces Project by Globus.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud [Remote]

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.  Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire. Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.

Virtual WorkSpaces [Local]

A virtual workspace is an abstraction of an execution environment that can be made dynamically available to authorized clients by using well-defined protocols. The abstraction captures resource quota assigned to such execution environment on deployment (such as CPU or memory share) as well as software configuration aspects of the environment (such as operating system installation or provided services). The Workspace Service allows a Grid client to dynamically deploy and manage workspaces.

Workspaces can be implemented and deployed in many ways. Our current infrastructure focuses primarily on the deployment and management of virtual machines, but we also provide basic services for creating dynamic accounts. More information about the details of each implementation can be found by navigating to either the Virtual Machines page or the Dynamics Accounts page. At present, each set of services has its own set of services and protocols dedicated to it.

Simply explained, virtual workspaces provides the ability to take several local xen Domu's and turn them into a local grid capable of running as a single machine image with xen images deployed across many physical machines acting as one.

Methodology

Elastic Computing is an approach to application development and deloyment  that enables hardware, bandwidth and storage resource usage in a flexible and elastic  way. Each system can be scaled on the fly, without affecting other applications deployed on the grid. Typically Elastic Computing is achieved on a Virtualized Grid environment via a elastic hosting platform. A virtualized image is deployed to dozens (possibly hundreds or thousands) of servers acting as one. Traditionally you would deploy a single operating system to a single machine. Elastic Computing runs an virtualized operating system (Linux, Windows, *Nix) on many servers all at once.

An elastic platform is data-driven, which means that no human interaction is needed to add and reduce resources applied to a given application elastically adjusting to meet system demand / requirements and billed on a usage basis.

Enomalism Elastic hosting technology is designed to eliminate the problems inherent with typical shared hosting infrastructures. This technology provides customers with a "clustered" handling of security, load balancing, and necessary website resources.

Elastic hosting "virtualizes" the resources beyond the limits of one physical server, and as a result, a website is not limited to one server. They share the processing power of many servers and their applications are distributed in real-time. This means that they can purchase as much computing power as they want from a virtually inexhaustible source, since even the largest customer never consumes more than a fraction of a percent of the total server pool. Customer account changes (to add new resources or change settings) are propagated immediately to every server in the cluster. This is different from typical shared hosting architectures that usually require changes to a configuration file that becomes live after the server is rebooted during off hours, or are pushed on a cyclic basis every few hours.

Multiple tiers of security are integrated into the Enomalism Elastic hosting platform. In a typical hosting environment, the security layer is usually not integrated in the platform. The stock solutions used for shared hosting do not solve core issues around integrating security between the application and the operating system. At best, most typical hosts will implement a firewall solution, and weaknesses inherent with the operating system will remain exploitable to those that penetrate the firewall.

Elastic hosting network layer protections employ intelligent routing, redundant switching fabric and built in firewall and proxy technology. Elastic hosting provides considerable advantages over traditional hosting architectures in mitigating denial-of-service attacks and other network attacks because such attacks can be dispersed over a large pool of servers, and if individual hardware components are impacted by such attacks, they automatically fall out of traffic handling during the attack.

• Instant Provisioning
  Elastic hosting enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.
  
  
• Completely Controlled
  You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.
  
  
• Reliable
  Elastic hosting offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and reliably commissioned.
  
  
• Secure
  Elastic hosting provides web service interfaces to control network security. You define groups of instances and their desired accessibility.

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