Feel free to comment if there are providers and/or vendors missing from your point of view. If you need or want access to edit the list, just let me know. Looking forward to get feedback from you.

Bei der Wahl zum 17. Deutschen Bundestag am 27. September 2009 sind etwa 62 Millionen Deutsche wahlberechtigt. 3556 Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten bewerben sich am 27. September um einen Sitz im Bundestag. „Wen wählen?“ fragen sich heute noch viele Menschen, denn immer mehr Wähler entscheiden sich immer kurzfristiger. „Etwa 40 Prozent beschäftigen sich erst in den letzten zwei Wochen mit der Wahl und entscheiden dann, für welche Partei sie stimmen – oft auch erst am Wahltag“, sagt Prof. Dr. Frank Brettschneider, Politologe an der Universität Hohenheim.

Eine Analyse der Volz Innovation GmbH zeigt, dass 3050 Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten der Bundestagswahl 2009 (rund 85%) im Internet präsent sind und so die Meinungsbildung der Wähler zusätzlich zu den Internetpräsenzen ihrer Parteien unterstützen. Die „Online-Quote“ der Bewerber um die Mandate unterscheidet sich allerdings erheblich zwischen den Parteien selbst. Die CSU ist die einzige große Partei, bei der alle Kandidaten online zu finden sind. Unter den kleinen Parteien trifft dies nur für die PBC (Partei Bibeltreuer Christen), die Freie Union und die Freien Wähler Deutschland (FWD) in Brandenburg zu. Die Schlusslichter bilden die Kandidaten der Deutschen Kommunistischen Partei (DKP) und des Zentrums, von welchen weniger als ein Fünftel Informationen über sich im Internet bereitstellen.

Informationen über die Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten der kleinen Parteien können oft nur über Kandidatenverzeichnisse wie abgeordnetenwatch.de gefunden werden. Dies ist bei über 80% der Kandidaten der Bayernpartei (BP) und der FWD der Fall. Die besten Informationen zu rund 190 Kandidaten der im Parlament vertretenen Parteien finden sich bei wahl.de. Über 60% der zur Wahl stehenden Personen nehmen den Aufwand eines eigenen Internet-Angebotes in Kauf, welches dann entweder unter eigenen Internet-Adressen oder auf Unterseiten von Internet-Adressen ihrer Partei zu finden ist.

Die einzelnen Internetauftritte sind oft nur schwer zu finden. Dies zeigt auf, dass nur wenige Bundestagskandidaten eine Suchmaschinenoptimierung vornehmen, um bei den großen Suchmaschinen unter den ersten Suchergebnissen zu stehen. Zur Demonstration des neuen Internetdienst KNOXOS (www.knoxos.com), der sich auf die Suche in selbstdefinierten Teilen des Web konzentriert, hat die Volz Innovation GmbH die Liste der Kandidatenwebseiten zusammengetragen und deren Inhalte in KNOXOS durchsuchbar gemacht.

Damit steht eine präzise Suchmaschine für die Informationen auf den Startseiten der Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten zur Verfügung, welche die eigene Wahlentscheidung unterstützen kann. KNOXOS zeigt darüber hinaus immer aktuell auf, welche Anstrengungen die Kandidaten in dieser letzten „heißen“ Woche vor der Wahl auf sich nehmen. Viele Kandidaten berichten online über Ihre öffentlichen Auftritte und nehmen Stellung zu Fragen der Wähler.

KNOXOS (www.knoxos.com) ist ein neuer Internetdienst, der interessante Inhalte im Web für seine Nutzer beobachtet und durchsuchbar macht. KNOXOS zeigt gefundene Aktualisierungen in einer Änderungsansicht sofort an. KNOXOS hilft dabei, im Web nichts mehr zu verpassen und alles wieder zu finden.

KNOXOS ist ein Internet-Dienst der Volz Innovation GmbH (www.volzinnovation.com) und wurde im Frühjahr 2009 im Gründerwettbewerb Multimedia des Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie (BMWi) ausgezeichnet. Die neuartige Suchtechnologie in KNOXOS wurde zum Teil im Forschungsprogramm THESEUS entwickelt. THESEUS (www.theseus-programm.de) ist ein deutsches Forschungsprogramm mit dem Ziel, eine neue internetbasierte Wissensinfrastruktur zu entwickeln.

After Scalr was set up as described in my first post, some additional configurations have to be done to get in detailed touch with Scalr 1.1.0.
First log in as admin user to the Scalr frontend and create a new system user (“Client”) and activate it. After successful login with the new created and active user, you have to enter your AWS credentials and upload your public and private key from your AWS account.

The next screenshot show the configuration within my user.

Be aware to set this configuration right otherwise you will not be able to proceed.

If all settings are correct, you will be redirected to your dashboard view (which is known from the admin view).

In the next step we create a so called “Farm”. Within this option we assigne “Roles” – that means we will instance images (you can take a look for the available images under the option “Roles”).

A Server Farm is a logical group of EC2 machines that serve your application. It can include load balancers, databases, web severs, and other custom servers. Servers in these farms can be redundant, self curing, and auto-scaling.

If you receive an error while loading the site – “Error Type: LoadXML Description: Incorrect XML”, you will get a solution here in this blog post by Octavian Neacsu. You have to modify your apache settings as mentioned in Octavian’s post.

When the farm is configured and set up, scalr build it when you click the save button (I decided to launch the instances manually). In the farm overview you can now launch the instances you need. For that you only have to click under “Farms” on “Roles -view”. Under the drop down “Options” button it is possible to launch instances manually.

If launching instances throws an exception as “… \nFatal error: Class \’HttpRequest\’ not found …” this post in Scalr discussion group will help you out of that problem.

When instances are launched successful it should look like this screenshot.

As the screenshot above shows, within my workflow, I launched 2 instances.

Details are available under “Intances>View”. In my case I launched for the start one base www and one app“Farm role”.

As best know from connecting to EC2 instances, you can download under “Farms” your private key and login via ssh with the command:

ssh -i <nameofyourfarm.pm> <public IP>

Don’t forget to chmod your private key, otherwise you will get an error like this: "It is recommended that your private key files are NOT accessible by others. This private key will be ignored."

At this point I want to warn you about a possible issue (I reported to the mailinglist): launched instances are not shown in the AWS console under “Instances”. You will only see them at the frontpage of the AWS console dashboard. But you can terminate the launched instances within the Sclar interface under “Instances » View” > “Options” > “Terminate” (you can enable the option “Decrease ‘Mininimum instances’ setting” – the detailed instances settings you can modify under “Edit Farm” > “Shared Roles” > “Scaling options”).

At this point Scalr is installed and configured with an another system user as the admin user. It is possible to add Farms and launch instances through EC2.

In the next step I will deploy a grails application in my Scalr environment and will do some loadbalancing and performance configurations and tests – Iwill post my results in my blog under the title “Scalr 1.1.0 – getting in touch – Part III”.

Feel free to comment …

What’s about the Dasein Coud API?

Dasein Cloud provides a cloud-independent interface in Java for accessing cloud resources. If you are writing an application to manage your cloud infrastructure, you write the calls against the Dasein Cloud API without having to learn the specifics of the web services calls from different providers like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Cloud providers can then provide cloud-specific implementations of the API that simply plug in to your application without any need for changing your code. The model is very much like JDBC.

This approach sounds very intersting, but is from my point of view on the providers and players of cloud computing services. Georg mantoined that also in his article.

enStratus has made available its Amazon Web Services implementation both as a reference implementation and a working system for Dasein Cloud + AWS. enStratus will be releasing implementations for other providers, and hopefully providers will begin providing their own implementations.

I think about the motivation for providers to contribute to the Dasein Cloud API. Is it not likely that a provider focus on its own API sets first? I think only with a large distribution and from a certain awareness, a provider will be motivated to provide his own implementations. I’m excited about the Dasein Cloud API future progress and which providers would provide their own implementations.

It’s clear that a common standard for a independent Cloud API in general would have a positive impact for all players in Cloud Computing…

The following independent “Cloud API approaches” I have researched so far amongst others for my Master Thesis:

• libcloud (standard client library for cloud management)
• Dasein Cloud API (cloud-independent interface in Java for accessing cloud resources)
• Open Cloud Computing Interface OCCI (deliver an API specification for remote management)

What are other promising projects of this kind?

To build your own URL shortener within minutes you only need:

• a fancy URL
• Google App Engine
• wmshorty

wmshorty is an Url Shortener for Google App Engine. You only have to follow the fews steps described on the project site, to set up wmshorty with Google App Engine. I used my own domain within Google Apps as described here. You have to configure your own domain within Google Apps. There is no other possibility to do that – for me a, at that point, disadvantage of Google App Engine – the PaaS of Google. Maybe in the future there will be other ways to configure own domains within Google App Engine…

If you are using WordPress you might be interested in this related article “WP.me — shorten your links“. This article is about WordPress own url shortener “wp.me”. I will use my own url shortener http://1.abe.nu , built like desrcibed above to get some performance results within Google App Engine which results (if these are meaningful) will be used in my Master Thesis research.

If you ask yourself, is Larry Ellison really anti-cloud computing? This good post by William Hurley gives you a possible answer:

… Larry’s comments about cloud computing remind me of the times he bashed virtualisation back in the day. Everyone spread similar rumours then, and the transition from hatin’ to embracin’ looked almost identical.

In other words, Larry didn’t have an informed opinion the first time he was asked about virtualisation. Once he did, his story quickly changed from disparaging virtualisation to announcing Oracle VM, and eventually acquiring companies like Virtual Iron. So far my sources say the alleged cloud computing reversal is the same situation…

Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment using Amazon’s EC2.

It allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI’s for load balancers (pound, nginx, or Amazon’s load balancing service), app servers (apache, rails, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of.

The health of the farm is continuously monitored and maintained. When the Load Average on a type of node goes above a configurable threshold a new node is inserted into the farm to spread the load and the cluster is reconfigured. When a node crashes a new machine of that type is inserted into the farm to replace it.

Multiple AMI’s are provided for load balancers, mysql databases, application servers, and a generic base image to customize. Scalr allows you to further customize each image, bundle the image and use that for future nodes that are inserted into the farm. You can make changes to one machine and use that for a specific type of node. New machines of this type will be brought online to meet current levels and the old machines are terminated one by one.

Under http://www.scalr.net is also a pay service available, but i want to build my own environment.

If you want to install Scalr the wiki is a good starting point.
I droped some lines here in my blog to document my installation on a Ubuntu 9.04 Server.

Systemrequirements are definied on the project website as follows:

My server installation was build up with a LAMP. A good How-To for LAMP installation you can find here.

I had to customize my PHP5 installation for the required PHP extension listed in the project wiki. I searched for the plugins with following command
apt-cache search php5-*, and installed the required extensions manually.

Furthermore I created a database for scalr and a valid user for it.

# mysql -u -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 41
Server version: 5.0.75-0ubuntu10.2 (Ubuntu)
mysql> CREATE DATABASE ;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON .* TO ""@"localhost" IDENTIFIED BY "";
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> EXIT
Bye

MySQL Server is running in my environment on the same host. Choose a database-name, database-user and a password for database-user.
Now you can check if your environment is set up for Scalr. For that I downloaded a script from the project site to test it.

wget http://scalr.googlecode.com/files/testenvironment.php

Move this to your webserver directory e.g.:

mv testenvironment.php /var/www

Point your webserver to http:///testenvironment.php to check your environment.
I got an error “Cannot find SSH2 functions. Make sure that SSH2 Functions enabled.”
Searching for that error in google pointed to a blog entry.

Installed the following with apt-get.
apt-get install php-pear libssh2-1 libssh2-1-dev

The missing php extension can be installed with this command: pecl install ssh2 "channel://pecl.php.net/ssh2-0.10"

An error occured ERROR: `make' failed. I followed the blog entry from Octavian Neacsu, but I did not do all the same he documented.
I edited also the file /tmp/pear/download/ssh2-0.10/ssh2.c and replaced like mentoined the line containing:

#if LIBSSH2_APINO < 200412301450
with
#if false

Changed my directory with cd /tmp/pear/download/ssh2-0.10/ and compiled manually again with following commands:
./configure
make
make install
Be aware of errors at this point!

Check again if your environment is set up probably with pointing your browser to your webserver

If everything is set up correctly you can download the latest version of Scalr from here.
In my case I did this with wget http://scalr.googlecode.com/files/scalr-1.1.0.zip
Unzip the downloaded file and move it to your webserver directory.
Like it is mentoined in the wiki, Scalr will not work from the subfolder. For that i changed my Apache webserver environment a little. This is up to you do to this like you want. In my case nothing else run on my webserver, so Scalr was moved to the root directory of Apache.

Next i imported the sql script to the created database with following command
mysql -p < scalr/sql/database.sql
and configured the database connection details in /scalr_home_dir/etc/config.ini file.

Go ahead with the wiki install description and set the permissions 777 on the following folders:

The cron jobs were set up in my environment with the following command:

crontab -e
and pasted this modified to my paths:
* * * * * /usr/bin/php -q /scalr_home_dir/cron/cron.php --Poller
* * * * * /usr/bin/php -q /scalr_home_dir/cron/cron.php --Scaling
1 1 * * * /usr/bin/php -q /scalr_home_dir/cron/cron.php --RotateLogs
*/15 * * * * /usr/bin/php -q /scalr_home_dir/cron/cron.php --MySQLMaintenance
*/6 * * * * /usr/bin/php -q /scalr_home_dir/cron/cron.php --DNSMaintenance
*/10 * * * * /usr/bin/php -q /scalr_home_dir/cron/cron.php --EBSArraysMaintenance
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/php -q /scalr_home_dir/cron/cron.php --EBSMaintenance
*/3 * * * * /usr/bin/php -q /scalr_home_dir/cron/cron.php --DNSZoneListUpdate
*/2 * * * * /usr/bin/php -q /scalr_home_dir/cron/cron.php --DBQueueEvent
*/3 * * * * /usr/bin/php -q /scalr_home_dir/cron/cron.php --MessagingQueue
*/11 * * * * /usr/bin/php -q /scalr_home_dir/cron/cron.php --Cleaner
*/2 * * * * /usr/bin/php -q /scalr_home_dir/cron/cron.php --EBSQueue
*/3 * * * * /usr/bin/php -q /scalr_home_dir/cron/cron.php --UsageStatsPoller

Finally I had to set up my AWS cradentials as it is described on the wiki pages of Scalr.

1. Put your EC2 access certificate into /scalr_home_dir/etc/cert-XXXXXXXXXXXX.pem
2. Put your EC2 private key into /scalr_home_dir/etc/pk-XXXXXXXXXXXX.pem
Where XXXXXXXXXXXX is Your Access Key name, which you specify on “Settings->Core settings” page.

Now I was able to point my browser to http://mydomain.com/ and login in with admin and password admin. (Change this settings after login!)

Within the next days I will post Scalr 1.1.0 – getting in touch – Part II on my blog.