Category Archives: amazon

amazon, cloud computing, java, professional, salesforce.com, software development

Fit for business? Google updates App Engine with the Enterprise in mind

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Google has updated App Engine to 1.4.3. The new version adds:

Prospective Search API for Python – this lets you register a large set of queries which are executed against a flow of data so you can create notifications or other actions whenever a match is found.

Testbed Unit Test Framework for Python – this lets you create stubs for Google services for lightweight unit tests.

Concurrent requests for Java – a single application instance can now serve multiple requests provided it is marked threadsafe. An important feature.

Java Remote API – the remote API lets you access an App Engine datastore from your local machine.

I have had the sense that Google App Engine is more attractive to start-ups and small organisations than to enterprise customers. It is interesting to see Google working on bringing the Java and Python runtimes closer to parity, as Java is more widely used for enterprise development.

Another initiative aimed at enterprise customers is App Engine for Business, currently in preview. What you get is:

An Enterprise Administration Console console for managing all apps built by your company, with access control lists.

99.9% service level agreement

Hosted SQL:

While many applications can be built on the App Engine Datastore (which uses Google’s BigTable database system), we know SQL is the industry standard for the enterprise, so we’ve got you covered. SQL database support on App Engine gives enterprise developers access to the full capabilities of a dedicated relational database, without the headache of managing it.

SSL to an URL that uses your domain, such as https://myapp.apps.example.com.

Pricing – $8 per user up to a maximum of $1000 per month. In other words, if you have more than 125 users the cost per user starts coming down; if you have 1000 users it is a bargain.

Has Google done enough to make App Engine attractive to enterprise customers? This post from a frustrated developer back in November 2010 complained about stability issues and other annoyances that do not really exist on Amazon or Microsoft Azure; the Salesforce.com platform does have some throttling limitations. But it does seem that Google is determined to address the issues and App Engine for Business looks promising.

amazon, cloud computing, java, oracle, professional, software development, web authoring

Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk auto-scales your cloud application

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Amazon has announced Elastic Beanstalk, which lets you deploy an application to Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and have it scale up or down, by launching or terminating server instances, according to demand. There is no additional cost for using Elastic Beanstalk; you are charged for the instances you use.

Here is a dialog from the control console that says a lot about how the new service works:

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As you can see, you can specify both a minimum and a maximum instance count, where the number is between 1 and 10,000. You can also control the “Trigger”, the metric that makes Elastic Beanstalk create or terminate instances.

Currently Elastic Beanstalk is for Java applications running on the Apache Tomcat application server, on a standard Amazon Linux virtual machine. However, the following comment in the FAQ indicates that Amazon is investigating other platforms:

Yes. Elastic Beanstalk is designed so that it can be extended to support multiple development stacks and programming languages in the future.

The innovation here is not so much in the technology, which stiches together a number of existing services, but rather in how easy and cheap it is to get started. The cost of entry is almost nothing; in fact, Amazon says you can run Elastic Beanstalk on its free usage tier, for a low-use application. Even I you expect it to remain low-use Elastic Beanstalk provides some other useful features like health monitoring.

It seems to me that this new service is cloud deployment as it should be: removing the administrative burden of scaling your application according to demand. Other platforms like Google App Engine also do this, but with more restrictions on how you design your application. Platforms like Microsoft Windows Azure let you scale your application, but you have to log into the console and spin instances up or down yourself.

One final observation: despite considerable unhappiness in the Java community about the way Oracle is managing the platform, there are still excellent reasons to use it, and Amazon has just provided one more.

adobe, amazon, professional, sharepoint, web authoring

What next for application help and documentation? First thoughts on Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite 3

Adobe has launched Technical Communication Suite 3, which bundles FrameMaker 10, RoboHelp 9, Captivate 5, Photoshop CS5 and Acrobat X. FrameMaker and RoboHelp are Windows-only, so the suite is the same.

I had a brief briefing on the product today, which by coincidence came after my bad experience with SharePoint Designer and its help system. Please note: I do not hold Adobe responsible for the shortcomings of Microsoft’s online help, but it helped me to put the subject into context. I was trying to figure out how to get SharePoint to display file extensions in document lists. The supplied help looks pretty:

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but I found it disappointing. I wanted to know, for example, what are the implications of converting a web part to XSLT, which is on one of the designer context menus:

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Same story when I wanted to know what the @LinkFileName formula was meant to return. And when I looked for a SharePoint formula reference I got one useless result, an article on creating a workflow initiation form.

What we all do in these situations is to hit Google. The snag: whereas the little online help (which is also meant to search Office online) had high authority but no results, Google has the opposite problem: many results but little authority. I did eventually find the formula reference I wanted but finding correct information on the web as a whole is a matter of luck and judgment.

I found it interesting therefore to talk to Adobe about its Technical Communication Suite. How is online help changing? Do we even need it, when people hit Google rather than F1? Maybe it is better just to make sure your help articles and reference are easy to find on the web, rather than packaging them up and calling it a help document? In which case, we should be thinking in terms of a content management system, rather than online help as such.

The answer I guess is “all of these”. The key concept in Adobe Technical Communication Suite is “single-source authoring”, and you can use the same content for web pages as well as for print and traditional packaged online help.

It is still a bit old-school for my taste. For example, you can now include External content search in RoboHelp documents; but this only lets you add external URLS to the document along with search keywords. It does not let you search external content, but restricted to specified web sites, which would be a nice feature.

That said, if you use RoboHelp Server 9 – not included with the suite itself – in conjunction with an Adobe AIR help client, you can get user topic rating and commenting, so there is some concession to user-generated content.

There are also plenty of scenarios where you do still need a blow-by-blow documentation and reference for an application. In fact, if the SharePoint help mentioned above had provided this, I would have been happy.

This is not a review of the Technical Communication Suite, though I hope to get a look at the actual product shortly. In the meantime, a few points of interest. FrameMaker has considerable feature overlap with InDesign; but Adobe says there is still a place for a desktop publishing tool aimed at long technical documents with strong support for structured documents, cross-references and indexes. RoboHelp now supports collobaration workflows using Acrobat.com and PDF review. There is also new support for ePub, the eBook format for everything but Amazon Kindle, in FrameMaker and Kindle. I asked about Kindle support; the Adobe spokesperson was sniffy about Amazon’s proprietary MOBI format but said it might be added eventually if Amazon do not add ePub compatibility to the Kindle.

.net, adobe, amazon, apple, cloud computing, flash, intel, iphone, java, microsoft, mobile, nokia, open source, oracle, professional, silverlight, software development, Sun, visual studio, Web, web authoring, windows, windows 7

Ten big tech trends from 2010

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This was an amazing year for tech. Here are some of the things that struck me as significant.

Sun Java became Oracle Java

Oracle acquired Sun and set about imposing its authority on Java. Java is still Java, but Oracle lacks Sun’s commitment to open source and community – though even in Sun days there was tension in this area. That was nothing to the fireworks we saw in 2010, with Java Community Process members resigning, IBM switching from its commitment to the Apache Harmony project to the official OpenJDK, and the Apache foundation waging a war of words against Oracle that was impassioned but, it seems, futile.

Microsoft got cloud religion

Only up to a point, of course. This is the Windows and Office company, after all. However – and this is a little subjective – this was the year when Microsoft convinced me it is serious about Windows Azure for hosting our applications and data. In addition, it seems to me that the company is willing to upset its partners if necessary for the sake of its hosted Exchange and SharePoint – BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), soon to become Office 365.

This is a profound change for Microsoft, bearing in mind its business model. I spoke to a few partners when researching this article for the Register and was interested by the level of unease that was expressed.

Microsoft also announced some impressive customer wins for BPOS, especially in government, though the price the customers pay for these is never mentioned in the press releases.

Microsoft Silverlight shrank towards Windows-only

Silverlight is Microsoft’s browser plug-in which delivers multimedia and the .NET Framework to Windows and Mac; it is also the development platform for Windows Phone 7. It still works on a Mac, but in 2010 Microsoft made it clear that cross-platform Silverlight is no longer its strategy (if it ever was), and undermined the Mac version by adding Windows-specific features that interoperate with the local operating system. Silverlight is still an excellent runtime, powerful, relatively lightweight, easy to deploy, and supported by strong tools in Visual Studio 2010. If you have users who do not run Windows though, it now looks a brave choice.

The Apple iPad was a hit

I still have to pinch myself when thinking about how Microsoft now needs to catch up with Apple in tablet computing. I got my first tablet in 2003, yes seven years ago, and it ran Windows. Now despite seven years of product refinement it is obvious that Windows tablets miss the mark that Apple has hit with its first attempt – though drawing heavily on what it learnt with the equally successful iPhone. I see iPads all over the place, in business as well as elsewhere, and it seems to me that the success of a touch interface on this larger screen signifies a transition in personal computing that will have a big impact.

Google Android was a hit

Just when Apple seemed to have the future of mobile computing in its hands, Google’s Android alternative took off, benefiting from mass adoption by everyone-but-Apple among hardware manufacturers. Android is not as elegantly designed or as usable as Apple’s iOS, but it is close enough; and it is a relatively open platform that runs Adobe Flash and other apps that do not meet Apple’s approval. There are other contenders: Microsoft Windows Phone 7; RIM’s QNX-based OS in the PlayBook; HP’s Palm WebOS; Nokia Symbian and Intel/Nokia MeeGo – but how many mobile operating systems can succeed? Right now, all we can safely say is that Apple has real competition from Android.

HP fell out with Microsoft

Here is an interesting one. The year kicked off with a press release announcing that HP and Microsoft love each other to the extent of $250 million over three years – but if you looked closely, that turned out to be less than a similar deal in 2006. After that, the signs were even less friendly. HP acquired Palm in April, signalling its intent to compete with Windows Mobile rather than adopting it; and later this year HP announced that it was discontinuing its Windows Home Server range. Of course HP remains a strong partner for Windows servers, desktops and laptops; but these are obvious signs of strain.

The truth though is that these two companies need one another. I think they should kiss and make up.

eBook readers were a hit

I guess this is less developer-oriented; but 2010 was the year when electronic book publishing seemed to hit the mainstream. Like any book lover I have mixed feelings about this and its implications for bookshops. I doubt we will see books disappear to the same extent as records and CDs; but I do think that book downloads will grow rapidly over the next few years and that paper-and-ink sales will diminish. It is a fascinating tech battle too: Amazon Kindle vs Apple iPad vs the rest (Sony Reader, Barnes and Noble Nook, and others which share their EPUB format). I have a suspicion that converged devices like the iPad may win this one, but displays that are readable in sunlight have special requirements so I am not sure.

HTML 5 got real

2010 was a huge year for HTML 5 – partly because Microsoft announced its support in Internet Explorer 9, currently in beta; and partly because the continued growth of browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, and the WebKit-based Google Chrome, Apple Safari and numerous mobile browsers showed that HTML 5 would be an important platform with or without Microsoft. Yes, it is fragmented and unfinished; but more and more of HTML 5 is usable now or in the near future.

Adobe Flash survived Apple and HTML 5

2010 was the year of Steve Jobs’ notorious Thoughts on Flash as well as a big year for HTML 5, which encroaches on territory that used to require the services of a browser plug-in. Many people declared Adobe Flash dead, but the reality was different and the company had a great year. Apple’s focus on design and usability helps Adobe’s design-centric approach even while Apple’s refusal to allow Flash on its mobile computers opposes it.

Windows 7 was a hit

Huge relief in Redmond as Windows 7 sold and sold. The future belongs to mobile and cloud; but Windows is not going away soon, and version 7 is driving lots of upgrades as even XP diehards move over. I’m guessing that we will get first sight of Windows 8 in 2011. Another triumph, or another Vista?

amazon, azure, cloud computing, internet, microsoft, professional, ruby, salesforce.com, software development

Salesforce.com acquires Heroku, wants your Enterprise apps

The big news today is that Salesforce.com has agreed to acquire Heroku, a company which hosts Ruby applications using an architecture that enables seamless scalability. Heroku apps run on “dynos”, each of which is a single process running Ruby code on the Heroku “grid” – an abstraction which runs on instances of Amazon EC2 virtual machines. To scale your app, you simply add more dynos.

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Why is Salesforce.com acquiring Heroku? Well, for some years an interesting question about Salesforce.com has been how it can escape its cloud CRM niche. The obvious approach is to add further applications, which it has done to some extent with FinancialForce, but it seems the strategy now is to become a platform for custom business applications. We already knew about VMForce, a partnership with VMWare currently in beta that lets you host Java applications that are integrated with Force.com, but it is with the announcements here at Dreamforce that the pieces are falling into place. Database.com for data access and storage; now Heroku for Ruby applications.

These services join several others which Salesforce.com is branding at Force.com 2:

Appforce – in effect the old Force.com, build departmental apps with visual tools and declarative code.

Siteforce – again an existing capability, build web sites on Force.com.

ISVForce – build your own multi-tenant application and sign up customers.

Salesforce.com is thoroughly corporate in its approach and its obvious competition is not so much Google AppEngine or Amazon EC2, but Microsoft Azure: too expensive for casual developers, but with strong Enterprise features.

Identity management is key to this battle. Microsoft’s identity system is Active Directory, with federation between local and cloud directories enabling single sign-on. Salesforce.com has its own user directory and developing on its platform will push you towards using it.

Today’s announcement makes sense of something that puzzled me: why we got a session on node.js at Monday’s Cloudstock event. It was a great session and I wrote it up here. Heroku has been experimenting with node.js support, with considerable success, and says it will introduce a new version next year.

Finally, the Heroku acquisition is great news for Enterprise use of Ruby. Today many potential new developers will be looking at it with interest.

amazon, cloud computing, google, professional, salesforce.com, web authoring

Database.com extends the salesforce.com platform

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At Dreamforce today Salesforce.com announced its latest platform venture: Database.com. Salesforce.com is built on an Oracle database with various custom optimizations; and database.com now exposes this as a generic cloud database which can be accessed from a variety of languages – Java, .NET, Ruby and PHP – and accessed from applications running on almost any platform: VMForce, Smartphones, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Excel, Adobe Flash/Flex and others. One way to use it would via JPA (Java Persistence API) in an VMForce Java application.

The Database.com console is a web application that has a console giving access to your databases and showing useful statistics and system information.

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You can also create new databases, specifying the schema and relationships.

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The details presented in the keynote today were sketchy – we saw applications that honestly could have been built just as easily with MySQL – but there is more information in the FAQ. The Database.com API is through SOAP or REST web services, not SQL. Third parties can create drivers so you can you use it with SQL APIs such as ODBC or JDBC. There is row level security, and built-in full text search.

According to the FAQ, Database.com “includes a native trigger and stored procedure language”.

Pricing starts from free – for up to 100,000 records, 50,000 transactions and 3 users per month. After than it is $10.00 per month per additional 100,000 records, $10.00 per month per additional 150,000 transactions, and $10.00 per user if you need the built-in authentication and security system – which as you would expect is based on the native force.com identity system.

As far as I can tell one of the goals of Database.com – and also the forthcoming chatter.com free public collaboration service – is to draw users towards the force.com platform.

Roger Jennings has analysed the pricing and reckons that Database.com is much more expensive than Microsoft’s SQL Azure – for 500 users and a 50GB database $15,000 per month for Database.com vs a little over $500 for the same thing on SQL Azure, though the two are difficult to compare directly and he has had to make a number of assumptions. Responding to a question at the press and analyst Q&A today, Benioff seemed to accept that the pricing is relatively high, but justified in his view by the range of services on offer. Of course the pricing could change if it proves uncompetitive.

Unlike SQL Azure, Database.com starts from free, which is a great attraction for developers interested in giving it a try. Trying out Azure is risky because if you leave a service running inadvertently you may run up a big bill.

In practice SQL Azure is likely to be more attractive than Database.com for its core market, existing Microsoft-platform developers. Microsoft experimented with a web services API for SQL Server Data Services in Azure, but ended up offering full SQL, enabling developers to continue working in familiar ways.

Equally, Force.com developers will like Database.com and its integration with the force.com platform.

Some of what Database.com can do is already available through force.com and I am not sure how the pricing looks for organizations that are already big salesforce.com users; I hope to find out more soon.

What is interesting here is the way salesforce.com is making its platform more generic. There will be more force.com announcements tomorrow and I expect to to see further efforts to broaden the platform then.

Update – I had a chat with Database.com General Manager Igor Tsyganskiy. He says Microsoft’s SQL Azure is the closest competitor to Database.com but argues that because Salesforce.com is extending its platform in an organic way it will do a better job than Microsoft which has built a cloud platform from scratch. We did not address the pricing comparison directly, but Tsyganskiy says that existing Force.com customers always have the option to “talk to their Account Executive” so there could be flexibility.

Since Database.com is in one sense the same as Force.com, the API is similar. The underlying query language is SOQL – the Salesforce Object Query Language which is based on SQL SELECT though with limitations. The language for stored procedures and triggers is Apex. SQL drivers from Progress Software are intended to address the demand for SQL access.

I mentioned that Microsoft came under pressure to replace its web services API for SQL Server Data Services with full SQL – might Database.com face similar pressure? We’ll see, said Tsyganskiy. The case is not entirely parallel. SQL Server is a cloud implementation of an existing SQL database with which developers are familiar. Database.com on the other hand abstracts the underlying data store – although Salesforce.com is an Oracle customer, Tsyganskiy said that the platform stores data in a variety of ways so should not be thought of as a wrapper for an Oracle database server.

Although Database.com is designed to be used from anywhere, I’d guess that Java running on VMForce with JPA, and following today’s announcement Heroku apps also hosted by Salesforce.com, will be the most common scenarios for complex applications.

amazon, cloud computing, software, software development

Now you can rent GPU computing from Amazon

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I wrote back in September about why programming the GPU is going mainstream. That’s even more the case today, with Amazon’s announcement of a Cluster GPU instance for the Elastic Compute Cloud. It is also a vote of confidence for NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture. Each Cluster GPU instance has two NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs installed and costs $2.10 per hour. If one GPU instance is not enough, you can use up to 8 by default, with more available on request.

GPU programming in the cloud makes sense in cases where you need the performance of a super-computer, but not very often. It could also enable some powerful mobile applications, maybe in financial analysis, or image manipulation, where you use a mobile device to input data and view the results, but cloud processing to do the heavy lifting.

One of the ideas I discussed with someone from Adobe at the NVIDIA GPU conference was to integrate a cloud processing service with PhotoShop, so you could send an image to the cloud, have some transformative magic done, and receive the processed image back.

The snag with this approach is that in many cases you have to shift a lot of data back and forth, which means you need a lot of bandwidth available before it makes sense. Still, Amazon has now provided the infrastructure to make processing as a service easy to offer. It is now over to the rest of us to find interesting ways to use it.

amazon, apple, microsoft, mobile, software development

Stats that matter: Android grows in mobile, IE stops declining, eBooks take off

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This should be three blog posts; but you’ve read this news elsewhere. Still, I can’t resist a brief comment on three recent trends.

Browsers

The first is that usage of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has levelled off after a long period of decline. Microsoft says it is increasing but the numbers are too small to say that with confidence. StatCounter global stats for May to July show slight decline for IE (52.83% –> 52.37%) and FireFox (31.54%->30.88%), with Google Chrome the main beneficiary (8.81%->10.32%).

On this blog Chrome has grown from 4.2% to 12.4% in the last year. IE is still declining: 44.9% in July 09, 39.6% in June 10, and 38.2% in July 10.

My guess is that the success of Windows 7 might have brought back a few FireFox users. The interesting story though is where Chrome will be when it stops growing its share. My second guess is that it will be ahead of FireFox, though that is speculative. It is WebKit though, and I think that will be bigger than Mozilla’s Gecko thanks to adoption by Google, Apple, Adobe and others.

Mobile

Next, Google Android. Nielsen reports that it has pulled ahead of Apple iPhone in the US SmartPhone market; both are behind RIM’s Blackberry though that is in steady decline. RIM is announcing Blackberry 9800, the first on OS 6, later today; but I doubt it will disrupt Android’s growth. The developer angle is that Android is now equal to Apple’s iPad/iPhone in strategic importance, which will be a relief to Adobe – Flash runs on Android but not iPhone.

Android owners lack the satisfaction of Apple iPhone owners. 21% of them are eyeing the iPhone for their next upgrade, whereas only 6% of iPhone owners want Android next. Only 42% of Blackberry owners intend to remain loyal. It is all tending to confirm my speculation back in April that Android is the new Windows.

So in two years time, what will be the market share for RIM, Nokia Symbian/MeeGo, Windows Phone, HP Palm WebOS? It will not be easy for any of them.

eBooks

Finally, eBooks. The Kindle vs iPad vs Nook vs Sony is one story; but the bigger one is that the eBook is happening at last. David Carnoy’s recent articles on Amazon give the background. One is an interview with Amazon’s Ian Freed in which the retailer says eBook sales have tripled in the first quarter of 2010 vs that in 2009, and claims 70-80% of the market. Another looks at what Amazon didn’t say. However the market shares work out though, what matters is that screen, battery and wireless technology are now good enough, and publishers and authors willing enough, for eBooks to become mainstream, with huge implications for the media industry.

amazon, internet, mobile

New Amazon Kindle with WebKit browser and free 3G internet

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Never mind the books. Amazon’s new Kindle reader is offering as an “experimental feature” a web browser based on WebKit – the same engine as Apple Safari and Google Chrome – that is free to use over 3G networks:

New WebKit-Based Browser
Kindle’s new web browser is based on WebKit to provide a better web browsing experience. Now it’s easier than ever to find the information you’re looking for right from your Kindle. Experimental web browsing is free to use over 3G or Wi-Fi.

Amazon pays for the 3G coverage which is available globally. OK, it is monochrome, but since the Kindle also has a neat little keyboard is this now a great deal for blogging, checking Google maps, and so on?

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Maybe not. Here’s what the terms and conditions say:

Use of Wireless Connectivity. Your Kindle uses wireless connectivity to allow you to shop for and download Digital Content from the Kindle Store. In general, we do not charge you for this use of wireless connectivity … You may use the wireless connectivity provided by us only in connection with the Service. You may not use the wireless connectivity for any other purpose.

If you are like me you may feel there is some inconsistency between these two statements. Enough to say that from my point of view free global web browsing would be a big incentive to purchase a Kindle; but I suspect that if this is real and turns out to be a popular feature consuming significant data traffic, Amazon will soon find a way to charge for it or turn it off.

It is also interesting to see a smidgen of convergence between the Kindle and more general-purpose slate devices. I am not sure if the Kindle strictly counts as a slate since it has a keyboard, but it certainly has the slate look and feel.

 

amazon, cloud computing, professional

OpenStack takes on Amazon with open source cloud computing

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Today’s big open source announcement is OpenStack, an open source cloud platform that aims to be an non-proprietary alternative to Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).

There are nearly 30 companies currently signed up to support OpenStack, including NASA, Citrix, Dell, Intel, AMD and Right Scale, but the big mover here is Rackspace, which says:

On July 19, 2010, we announced that we are opening the code on our cloud infrastructure. That’s big news for us and for the hosting industry in general. The result? Cloud technology will never look back.

The full press release is here. The initial offering is a distributed object store and a virtual machine provisioning engine.

OpenStack is not itself a cloud provider. Rather, it is offering software that lets you build a cloud, either for public or private use. Therefore, it is of immediate use only to large organisations, though for smaller users it might make sense to purchase services from an OpenStack provider since you are protected against lock-in.

The OpenStack cloud is IAAS – infrastructure as a service – offering storage and virtual machine instances. Therefore it is going up against Amazon rather than, say, Salesforce.com or Google App Engine. It is also an open source alternative to Microsoft Azure, which is also available (or will be) for both public and private clouds.

Looking at Right Scale’s comment, it seems that concern about Amazon taking over this market is a key driver behind the initiative:

From the RightScale perspective we will of course continue to support a variety of public and private clouds. We already have basic support for RackSpace’s API, which OpenStack will start out with, and we have a number of implementations under way with Eucalyptus and Cloud.com which we’re looking forward to multiply. At the same time, having many fragmented cloud efforts doesn’t really help build a compelling alternative to Amazon which keep adding incredible new features at a blazing pace. And the industry needs an alternative to Amazon, not because of some problem with AWS, but because in the long run cloud computing cannot fulfill its promise to revolutionizing the way computing is consumed if there aren’t a multitude of vendors with offerings targeting different use-cases, different needs, different budgets, different customer segments, etc. OpenStack promises to build enough momentum to create an exciting cloud offering that is as feature rich as AWS, that is implemented by a number of service providers, like RackSpace, and that enterprises can also run internally, like NASA.

For more information see the OpenStack site.