Hyperic CloudStatus
Back in May, I posted my take on Cloud computing. Since that time, I've spoken to quite a number of suppliers who are focused on supporting cloud computing, managing cloud computing, and even using cloud computing as a way to provide either a desktop or a server experience without the organization having to have desktop or server systems.
I've been meaning to post something about Hyperic's CloudStatus and haven't been able to turn to the task. As with other suppliers of management technology for virtualized environments, Hyperic sees an opportunity floating overhead in the clouds. Like the others, Hyperic is just starting down this path, but has developed tools that could be quite useful.
What does it do?
CloudStatus is a tool that allows an organization using Amazon Web services to get an independent view of the health and performance of the service. At this point, the tool offers a view into what the following Amazon Web Services are doing:- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Simple Storage Service (S3)
- SimpleDB (SDB)
- Simple Queue Service (SQS)
- Flexible Payment Service (FPS)
It is pretty clear that this is only the beginning and more cloud services will be added in the near future.
How does it work?
CloudStatus start's with Hyper's Hyperic HQ. Hyperic has developed technology to gather information from various sources both inside and outside of the cloud. This information is then fed into Hyper HQ and the results then made available to subscribers.This should allow organizations depending upon the performance and health of one or more cloud services to really know what's going on.
Snapshot Analysis
Distributed, remote or local, "always on" computing services appear to offer an enticing mix of power, performance and low cost computing. While interesting, this approach still hasn't matured to a point that some would like. The tools to manage this environment have been limited and each supplier of cloud services has been developing their own tools.Organizations almost always need to be able to monitor actual performance figures and be able to determine the health of the components they rely on. Cloud services are no exception.
Hyperic's approach appears to offer a good start. Since CloudStatus only looks at Amazon's services at this time, it's clear that only those using those services would be interested. Organizations using other cloud services ought to visit the CloudStatus site and see what Hyperic is doing. It's likely that Hyperic will eventually expand its offering to cover more cloud services.