Many of you have met Mike Masterson, Product Manager for Notes/Domino application development, over the last 18 months or so. Today, Mike would like to talk about the formal unveiling of Lotus Domino on the Amazon EC2 cloud. --Ed
Domino, we have ignition.
It should come as no surprise that bringing up Domino as an application server in the cloud was, more or less, a non-event. Domino has always embraced technology revolutions and with its long-standing support for Linux and remote administration, installing it in the cloud is fairly simple as some of you have already found out. The promise of cloud is, of course, much more than just virtualizing a server; its about delivering a flexible and demand-driven infrastructure, paying only for what you use, and simplifying as many administration aspects as possible.
The Domino 8.5.1 image that we just released (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/ls/lsds/cloud.html) on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is also another step forward in elevating Domino and XPage development for the masses and compliments the freely available Designer tool (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/ls/dominodesigner/index.html). The core Domino data directory leverages Elastic Block Storage so that it can be quickly assigned, and even reconfigure, Domino server instances. A simple administration interface was prototyped (watch for an OpenNTF project coming soon) so that developers could perform a few routine admin tasks, like changing server name/ip address and adding or removing users, with ease.
Anyone that would like to test or develop a “commercially available application”, including open source and OpenNTF projects, is welcome to use this Domino instance without any software license charge (Amazon base machine hour rates do still apply). We are also working on a development image for the IBM Development and Test Cloud (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/29685.wss) and are exploring opportunities with partners to provide similar offerings for their hosted infrastructures. While the image is not yet intended for production deployments or support, it delivers a great milestone in our launch sequence for the cloud.
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Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 4/13/2010 7:08:03 AM
If the licensing rule is Domino Designer + EC2 *cannot* be used to develop a commercial product, please reconsider. The cost to IBM for someone to do this is, at the margin, zero. The benefit to IBM when the Notes/Domino ecosystem expands is immeasurable.
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Carl Tyler http://www.epilio.com | 4/13/2010 7:26:09 AM
Good stuff!
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Mark t Hughes http://hughesconnect.com | 4/13/2010 7:34:36 AM
So what exactly can we do and not do? Can you dumb it down for me?
Can you create a commercial application for free?
Can you use it to demo a commercial application for free?
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Adam Foster http://adfos.com | 4/13/2010 8:21:49 AM
There are no prices for Domino on the amazon site:
{ Link }
Amazon price for small linux server
US: $0.085 per hour = $744.5 pa
Ireland: $0.095 per hour =$832.2 pa
Amazon with IBM DB2
US: $0.365 per hour = $3197.4
Ireland: $0.375 per hour = $3285 pa
Is the Amazon with IBM Domino price going to be similar or less than the DB2 price?
Does this include all licences?
-Adam
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Mark Barton http://www.markbarton.com | 4/13/2010 8:50:02 AM
The way I read it is there is currently no charge for development / test instances of the domino server from IBM. The only charges are from Amazon.
So for a EC2 small linux instance used for 30 Hours in a month + 1Gb of S3 storage + 5Gb data in / out + 500 Posts + 20,000 GETs = a Grand Total of $3.48
Rereading the text above it does state developing a commercially available application is allowed. You just cant host a production instance (yet!).
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Mark t Hughes http://hughesconnect.com | 4/13/2010 9:08:28 AM
So all we need now is the image for Domino 8.5.2 beta cd4 ;-)
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Michael Masterson http://www.ibm.com/lotus | 4/13/2010 9:24:15 AM
@Daniele Designer "free" may be used with the Development AMI available on Amazon - we have a statement in the Getting Started Guide to help reinforce this and will also add a similar statement to the DeveloperWorks Cloud tab for Domino. The "commercially available" clause doesn't allow its use for customers building their own internal applications nor does it allow an ISV application to be hosted for production use / deployment... Yet :)
@Mark H Build a commercial app / opensource app: Yes. Demo a commercial application: Yes. Deploy into production / revenue generating / XaaS : Not yet.
@Adam We haven't finalized pricing and licensing yet for the production images, however I can tell you that we are exploring Domino Utility Express as one of the offerings available. Interested to hear feedback from the community on their preferences...
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Michael Masterson http://www.ibm.com/lotus | 4/13/2010 9:43:24 AM
@ Daniele For the second part of your question, we (IBM) know that many of our larger customers are taking their first step towards the cloud with their development and test environments. Our IBM Dev/Test Cloud has been in Beta and Pilot for months, and in March we announced a production instance targeted for a 2Q launch. We are planning to make pre-built Domino instances available here as well.
In short, we're working hard to ensure our customers have their choice of Cloud providers, be it IBM, Amazon, or our business partners. Many of the details are still in flux but feedback is always appreciated. @mlmasterson or masterson <at us ibm com>
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Howard http://www.tlcc.com | 4/13/2010 10:03:44 AM
Mike, I saw that this was limited to business partners somewhere... was this limitation removed? Can both customers and partners use this image?
thanks,
Howard
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Michael Masterson http://www.ibm.com/lotus | 4/13/2010 10:23:42 AM
@Howard Amazon is not tied directly to PartnerWorld and anyone building "commercially available" software (which would include open source / OpenNTF projects) can use the "development AMI" for dev and test.
Customers (or partners) building internal applications as well as applications put into "production" will need to wait for a (future) "production AMI", or alternatively they can "bring their own license" and build their own Domino instance on a base OS AMI assuming they have entitlement to the Domino server license.
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Darren Duke http://blog.darrenduke.net | 4/13/2010 12:13:31 PM
If I have amazon prime, can I get my cloud shipped free? ;)
- 14
James Derry | 4/13/2010 12:17:47 PM
Congratulations Ed and Mike (and the teams in which you take part)!
Last fall, in a purely skunkworks type of effort, I manually installed Domino 8.5.1 on a CentOS 5.3 Linux baseline 32bit Amazon EC2 image. This was to test AWS (Amazon Web Services) capabilities and Domino capabilities on AWS. Actually I've done it twice now, tearing down, building and testing various configurations of Domino. The most recent configuration has been running rock solid 24/7 on AWS since december. Admittedly there's no production usage, but I consider the pilot a success and look forward to the upcoming production AMI's for real-world usage.
<Enthusiasm>
I don't mean to sound like a commercial, but Domino's remote management and replication abilities (among others) make Domino a no-brainer for cloud usage. Turn on Domino's port encryption and there's a private vpn, without having to implement a secondary solution like Amazon VPC. Store the data directory on an Amazon EBS block and the data persists between EC2 instance starts and stops. EBS blocks + domino replication = instant offsite disaster recovery solution.
</Enthusiasm>
Keep up the great work,
James
- 15
Darren Duke http://blog.darrenduke.net | 4/13/2010 1:22:03 PM
@14, I think port encryption is way past due for an "upgrade". There were rumors a while back that port encryption is 64bit RC4 but I don't think I've ever seen an official IBM answer to this.
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John Vaughan http://jonvon.net | 4/13/2010 1:29:44 PM
this is a HUGE step in the right direction. bravo!
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Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 4/13/2010 1:58:19 PM
@15 Darren,
If both sides are R6 or higher, port encryption will use RC4 with a 128 bit key.
Details can be found here:
{ Link }
RC4 isn't ideal, I agree. It's fairly vulnerable to attack - but it's also very fast, so reduces loads on servers that would use it. (Such as passthru servers.)
Given that few people would be watching for traffic on 1352 anyway, and that even when they've recognised it and decrypted it they may still have to decipher the NRPC traffic in order to make head or tail of what's going on... Well, I'm not overly concerned about it, basically. It's not good, but it's not must-fix bad either.
IBM have three options - leave it (and advise clients use VPNs instead), replace it, or remove it.
As currently implemented, the documentation suggests that removing it might stop access to servers (or from clients) that have port encryption enabled. So that won't happen, as it would be backwards-incompatible.
Leaving it seems likely.
Replacing it wouldn't be difficult, but it would take engineering effort away from other areas. AES is the most obvious candidate to replace RC4, and the fact that IBM probably already has it in the libraries they license (from RSA still?) would make it easier, but it still takes resources from somewhere else.
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Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 4/13/2010 2:23:06 PM
Oh, and on getting Domino onto the cloud - looks good!
It's not quite the Community Edition that DB2 has, but it's a very close approximation. In some ways better, in some ways worse.
But I want to try it, which must be a good sign. :-)
- 19
Anthony Koukoullis http://www.certussolutions.com | 4/13/2010 8:09:52 PM
Hi, this is a bit of a hot topic for us at them moment, as we have recently deployed a number of prodcution Domino applications to Amazon's EC2 cloud.
A key one for us has been a Domino web based HR application for a customer in Melbourne, Australia, with around 1000 users. Due to the nature of the application, it would experience high usage, by most of the users, in April/May and also October/November, which coincide with the six monthly and Annual performance reviews. Outside of those times, usage would be much lighter, mainly limited to the HR department.
We have deployed this solution using a shared EBS volume for data and configuration, and have 2 compute instances with program files installed locally. One is a small Windows 2008 32bit and the other is a large Windows 2008 64bit. We only run one instance at a time with the small instance running 80% of the time, to keep the application available and the costs down. We then swap to the large instance during periods of heavy usage.
If anyone is considering moving applications to the cloud, or would like to know more about what we have done, I would be more than happy to discuss further.
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Sean Cull http://www.focul.net | 4/19/2010 12:26:38 PM
Ed, it would be good to be able to use existing Domino licences on EC2. There are IBM tables that convert instance types to PVUs for DB2. Can the same be done for Domino ?
Our sites and my blog are running on EC2. I wrote up the method <a href="{ Link }
- 22
Mike Brown http://www.browniesblog.com | 4/30/2010 3:25:52 AM
----------------------
Greetings from Amazon Payments,
IBM is changing the price of IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.1- Dev Use Only on May 14, 2010.
US East (Northern Virginia) Region:
Amazon EC2 running Linux/UNIX
* $0.085 per Small instance-hour (or partial hour) consumed
* $0.170 per High-CPU Medium instance-hour (or partial hour) consumed
$0.150 per GB of data transfer out
$0.100 per GB of regional data transfer in/out
Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region:
Amazon EC2 running Linux/UNIX
* $0.095 per Small instance-hour (or partial hour) consumed
* $0.190 per High-CPU Medium instance-hour (or partial hour) consumed
$0.190 per GB of data transfer out
$0.010 per GB of regional data transfer in/out
You will be charged the new price for this application starting May 14, 2010. You can cancel your subscription to the application at any time by visiting the following web page:
{ Link }
If you have any questions regarding this price change, please contact IBM directly at www.developer.lotus.com.
Sincerely,
Amazon Payments
-------------------
What's going on here? I thought IBM wasn't charging anything for this. So, surely this is Amazon changing *its* prices, if anything.
Cheers,
- Mike
- 23
Mike Brown http://www.browniesblog.com | 4/30/2010 3:27:13 AM
Not sure what happened to the start of my post above! It should have said "I've just received this email from Amazon".
(You probably worked that out though, didn't you.)
- 25
Andrejus Chaliapinas http://www.infosana.com | 5/31/2010 1:19:23 AM
Hi there,
Is it possible to increase that webcast's on June 9th participants number?
It tells me that "The maximum number of registrations for this event has been reached", so no way to participate...:(
That's great news Ed.
I've been an user of Amazon/WebSphere Portal instance for a long time and the experience was great. (and the savings too).
Now adding this to Domino is also great.
Still I see some things that needs to be clarified:
- Domino Designer Free + Amazon EC2/Domino:
Is this combination "ok" to develop opensource/commercially available products ? The "free" designer version is limited to "not connecting" do domino servers. I expect this still applies.
Are these scenarios correct:
Domino Designer Free: free development, no servers, no sales of your software.
Domino Designer (paid in Notes Enterprise CAL) + Amazon EC2: you can do whatever you want and resell the stuff you develop (without server costs).
Is this right ?
Also, do you expect end-users (customers) to move from in-house dev servers to in-the-cloud dev servers to save money ? I suspect it will continue to be mixed, many companies have interal dev servers to connect to other internal systems.
What's your expectation ?