Enterprise-oriented Cloud computing: Part 2nd

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Enterprise-oriented Cloud computing: Part 2nd: WebSphere SMash and DB2 on the Amazon EC2 public cloud Express-c

Brief introduction

In 3 types of cloud-public cloud, private cloud, and mixed cloud-the public cloud delivers the best and most sophisticated products. Accessibility and cheapness are the two key features that have led to the growing popularity of the public cloud. To achieve accessibility and cheapness, the Amazon elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure provides a common cloud hosting Amazon Machine Image instances, and the AMI delivers a variety of features to the user. To enable users to use EC2,IBM recently released Amazon Machine Images (AMI), it contains some popular software for the EC2 platform, which can be obtained free of charge under development licenses. In addition, IBM also supports specific IBM software running in the EC2 infrastructure.

This article outlines the public cloud and discusses how to deliver WEB applications hosted on the Images infrastructure using the IBM WebSphere SMash and IBM DB2 express-c Amazon Machine EC2.

Corporate and public Cloud

To understand how companies can leverage public cloud computing solutions, consider the following two things:

The enterprise uses the application provided by the public cloud. This application may be used to process employee payroll data, or it may be a customer relationship management system. By leveraging applications delivered in this way, organizations no longer need to install and maintain applications on private data centers. Businesses may also save some of the costs associated with licensing fees, since most of the services provided by the Cloud are billed on a per-usage basis.

Enterprises deliver applications to users using cloud-based hosting solutions. In this way, the enterprise no longer needs to maintain and update the product system, because the cloud vendor is responsible for providing the infrastructure resources to meet the needs of the user for the application. This model also facilitates the popularization of enterprise Services, since any network-connected computer can access solutions delivered through the public cloud anytime, anywhere.

No matter what the scenario, a common theme is the bottom line value of the business. Clearly, public clouds can help businesses reduce the costs associated with owning software and datacenter infrastructure components. While not intuitive, the use of public clouds enables enterprises to respond quickly to changes in service requirements, enabling services to enter new markets and to focus valuable human resources on business innovation rather than just delivering the technical infrastructure that supports the business.

IBM and the public cloud

IBM is a positive contributor to the public cloud, offering solutions that enable organizations to get applications from the cloud and deliver their own end-user applications through a public cloud. From the application provider's perspective, IBM offers IBM Lotus®live, IBM Lotus sametime®unyte®, and software development tools hosted on the public cloud. This set of tools enables users to communicate, discuss, collaborate, and innovate with the services provided by the cloud. In addition to providing these services, IBM's Global Business Services Department also helps organizations implement solutions that leverage public cloud products to achieve the desired cloud value.

The remainder of this article focuses on how IBM enables you to deliver efficient applications by leveraging the public cloud infrastructure. As mentioned earlier, IBM includes several enterprise-class products in the Amazon Machine Images, so it can be used in the popular Amazon EC2 infrastructure. IBM AMI includes:

IBM WebSphere Portal

IBM Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition

IBM WebSphere SMash

IBM informix®dynamic Server Developer Edition 11.5

IBM DB2 express-c 9.5

By offering these software free on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure, IBM has implemented an ecosystem that serves more than 400,000 users, and has attracted more than 80% developers who use cloud computing development services.

To learn more about IBM's information on developers and cloud computing, visit the DeveloperWorks Space Cloud computing site. This article describes the platform for WebSphere SMash and DB2 express-c AMI (Platform as a service, PaaS), and data as a Service,daas, respectively.

WebSphere SMash and DB2 express-c

Both WebSphere SMash and DB2 express-c are powerful tools for developers. With WebSphere SMash, you can create WEB 2.0-style applications using popular technologies and patterns such as Dojo, PHP, Groovy, and REST services. DB2 Express-c provides efficient, responsive, and reliable enterprise data, and contains pure XML processing capabilities. However, even greater value can be achieved by using these technologies to deliver responsive, data-oriented, rich WEB applications.

The sample application included in this article demonstrates a restaurant seating application that provides a rough display of the functionality provided by the WebSphere SMash Zero Resource Model (ZRM) and DB2 express-c databases. You can easily extend the patterns used by this application to handle more complex data and data relationships. The Zero Resource Model provides a rich front-end experience with DB2 EXPRESS-C integration, which is supported by lightweight, efficient, and highly responsive backend.

Set AMI

To use the IBM AMI, you must follow these steps, and the first step is prerequisites:

Set up an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. This account is used to manage EC2 use.

Gets and configures the WebSphere SMash Ami and the DB2 express-c ami. When you configure the DB2 express-c instance, use the default user name for demonstration purposes. No database has been created yet; these details are described in the next section.

Follow the instructions provided to deploy the AMI to your AWS account.

Creating and activating a database

After you deploy the DB2 express-c and WebSphere SMash AMI to EC2, configure the database of the running DB2 express-c instance. This database stores the tables that the application needs to use.

Use SSH to log in and verify your DB2 AMI instance. After you log on, use the SU-DB2INST1 command to switch to the Db2inst1 user.

Use the CreateDatabase command to create a database for your application. In the/home/db2inst1/bin directory, enter the./createdatabase rstdb command.

Figure 1. Creating a Database

Stop and restart the DB2 service to activate the new database. Use the SU command to switch back to the root user, and then run the RCDB2 stop and RCDB2 start commands.

Figure 2. Activating a Database

After the service is restarted, the RSTDB database is activated and the DB2 Express-c instance runs on port 50001. The configuration of the DB2 Express-c instance is now complete. The ZRM in the WebSphere SMash is used for integration with the background, so all tables are automatically configured.