"Follow the Law" Meme Hits the Big Time

A few days ago, I checked in to my w3counter dashboard to see who was linking to my blog, and I discovered an very intelligent continuation of the "Follow the Law Computing" meme written by Greg Ness (also found on his blog). Greg's addition of the "spice trails" analogy was something new to me, and raised some interesting thoughts about what the historical significance of the cloud will be to world wide wealth distribution. There certainly has been a limited but significant wealth effect created by the Internet itself, but will the ability to physically move data and/or compute loads accelerate these trends?

Noting that I should blog about this on the plane at some point during my trip to Austin this week, I dutifully bookmarked the article for later. I had no chance to look at traffic on Monday, so it was with great shock that when I got on line this morning I saw a hockey stick graph. I investigated, and then my heart skipped a beat.

As of now, today, quotes from my "Follow the Law" post make up Nick Carr's latest post. Nick weaves together the work of Bill Thompson (which I also reference), myself and Greg to provide a clear, concise discussion of the concept of what he calls "itinerant computing". (Damn, he's good at coining these terms, isn't he?)

Ever since I discovered Nick's blog early in my career at Cassatt, I've wanted to get his attention. The Big Switch was an eye opening read--if only it served as a good counterpoint to Bill Coleman's optimistic vision. He made me look at utility computing and cloud computing with a more critical eye, and I wanted to add to his body of knowledge. I am honored to have done so in a small way.

Surprisingly, though, that wasn't whole the hockey stick trigger. Greg's post was picked up by a site called Seeking Alpha, a site I must admit I had never heard of before. Apparently a high traffic investment site (connected to Jim Cramer?), Seeking Alpha drove a record traffic load to my humble blog through a rebroadcast of Greg's post. Rereading that, I noticed that there is a very strong business message there that may in fact be actual historical significance of "itinerant computing": the flow of data and computing is simply an enabler of new business models and competitive advantages that change the face of global wealth. Being a resident of what is essentially a suburb of the Silicon Valley, I can't help but think there is more downside than upside to that story.

Finally, as I looked at the other referrers to this blog, I found an excellent summary of all of the "Follow" computing options: Follow the Sun, Follow the Moon and Follow the Law. Kevin Kelly gives very good basic definitions of each concept, and then makes the following observation:

"Most likely different industries adopt a different scenario. Maybe financial follows the moon, while commerce follows the sun, and entertainment follows the law. A single computing environment (One Machine) should not suggest homogeneity. A meadow is not homogeneous, but its does act as a coherent ecological system.

Another way to dissect the daily rhythm of the One Machine is to trace the three distinct waves of energy, data, and computation as they flow through the planetary "cloud." Each probably has its own pathways."

Amen, brother. I'll go even further. Maybe the customer server systems of a financial company follows the sun, the analytics systems follow the moon, and the trading systems follow the law. I do not mean to suggest at all that every distributed compute task will benefit from follow the law concepts. In fact, I would suggest that there are other "Follow" options that will be created over the coming decades.

All of this leads to the question of software fluidity...

Off Topic: Introducing "Mining Alfresco"

I didn't want to sully this blog by introducing a whole bunch of ECM/Alfresco stuff here, so I created a second blog for that content. Mining Alfresco will cover my experiences in learning the ECM market, Alfresco (look for a lot of technical postings), and how all of that relates to the topic of this blog, Cloud Computing. If you have an interest in ECM or "Content in the Cloud", you may want to check it out and subscribe.

I also want to apologize for the "dead time" in my posting, but as you can imagine spinning up a new job takes a lot of focus. I'll try to fit in several new posts in the coming days.

Blog Title Change: Leveraging the Wisdom of Clouds

As I discussed in my last post, the change of jobs gives me the opportunity to broaden the coverage of this blog somewhat beyond the basic topic of delivering SLAuto to enterprise data centers. To more completely reflect this, and (quite frankly) to increase visibility to those searching for information about cloud computing and utility computing, I have changed the title and description of this blog.

Now titled "The Wisdom of Clouds" (with absolute apologies to James Surowiecki and his great book, The Wisdom of Crowds) this blog will discuss cloud computing, utility computing, SaaS, PaaS and Haas as they relate to both the enterprise and individual users. This really isn't much of a departure from the topics covered in the last year or so--in fact, I considered sub-titling the blog "Covering your *aaSes since 2006"--but the explicit description allows more people to more readily discover my ramblings.

For those who have been following this blog for some time, as well as those who have just discovered it, I thank you. I hope you will join me in creating and shaping "the wisdom of clouds".

Important new blog: cloudsecurity.org

I was hunting around Data Center Knowledge today trying to find the link to my favorite news story of the day (the theft of Peter Gabriel's servers from his hosting company--more on that later), when I came across a small item on today's Roundup about Craig Balding's new blog, Cloud Security. I don't know Craig from Adam, but I will say that the few posts he has put up to date are timely, thoughtful, and covers a topic near and dear to many of our hearts. Not to mention the fact that he got a gig on NPR about 10 posts into the blog's existence. Lucky bastard.

My only beef to date with Craig is his definition of cloud computing (definitively grid centric), but given the fact that there is no agreed upon definition to date, I'll let my comment on his post speak for itself. In the meantime, he has been added to the reading list.

Greg Linden on the Cloud

Greg Linden, of Geeking with Greg fame, was interviewed on Mix about his work in search personalization, recommendation engines and cloud computing. Most of the interview is only sort of interesting, but what really perked my ears up was Greg's observation that anyone scaling a software environment to thousands or tens of thousands of servers will likely continue to run their own data centers, if only because they will want to tweak the hardware to meet their specific needs.

Initially, I thought of this as just another example of a class of data center that will not be quickly (if ever) moved to a third party capacity vendor. Based on examples like Kevin Burton's fine tuning of Spinn3r's infrastructure using Solid State Drives (SSD) instead of RAID and traditional disks, it even seems like there would be many such applications. Ta da! It is proven that there will always be private data centers!

Yet, the more I think about it, I wonder if I wouldn't pay Google's staff to run my Map/Reduce infrastructure, even if it used tens of thousands of servers. I mean, where is the economic boundary between when it is cheaper to purchase your computing from clouds that already have your needed expertise versus hiring staff with specialized skills to meet those same needs?

Alternatively, is this kind of thing a business opportunity for a "boutique" cloud vendor? "Come to Bob's MapReduce Heaven. We'll keep your Hadoop systems running for $99.95, or my name isn't Bob Smith!"

I'll just leave it at that. I'm tired tonight, and coherence has left the building.

An amazing resource for scalable systems architectures

I don't know why I hadn't heard of these guys before, but I'm in love with the content at highscalability.com. In post after post, feature after feature, there is more to learn here about everything from architecting software to optimize Amazon Web Services costs, to possibly the greatest collection of articles on real-life scalable architectures ever assembled. I have a feeling I will lose a few hours of sleep in the next few nights trying to read everything I can here.

I noted the inevitability of architecting specifically for utility (or cloud) computing some months ago.

Off Topic: Just added Snap to site...let me know if its annoying

I just added Snap Shots to my blog, which will bring up previews of the target site/page when you roll over a external link. Let me know if you think its annoying. I'm really just experimenting, as I have both loved and hated this feature on other sites. Feel free to email me or comment below.

I have a client install that will take the next couple of days, so blogging is way down. In the meantime, keep track of what I am reading, Twittering, scheduling, etc at http://friendfeed.com/jamesurquhart.

Fun with Simon

Simon Wardley created a couple of posts this week that make for good smiles. The first is his maturity model for cloud computing:



This one I agree with. Very funny, but funny because it reflects truth.

The second is a post on open source computing. I completely disagree with the concept that open source can keep up with closed source in terms of innovation (Anne Zelenka makes a great argument here), and that closed source is bad for ducks (see Simon's post).

However, I do believe that standardization spreads faster with open source than with closed source. For what its worth, I would also like to see a major utility computing platform release its technology to open source. (Well, at least the components that are required for portability.) I just wonder why any of them would without pressure from the market.

My equations would reflect the "Schrodinger's Cat" aspects of closed source products prior to the introduction of accepted standards,

open source == kindness to ducks

closed source == ambivolence towards ducks; could go either way

:-)

Analyzing the Green opportunity

I just want to quickly bring Ken Oestreich's analysis of the Green Grid meeting in San Francisco (Day 1 and Day 2), and its aftermath to your attention. Pay special attention to the aftermath post, as it is one of the most well thought out statements of the status and opportunity for the Green Grid organization I have seen.

Ken really knows his stuff with respect to the Green Data Center movement, so if you have any interest in the subject at all, subscribe to his blog. His earlier analysis of DC energy efficiency metrics is an all time classic on the subject.

Off Topic: Blog domain change

With increased interest in Service Level Automation in the Datacenter, I decided to take the advice of many a more successful blogger than me, and register my own domain name for the blog. I debated quite a bit about which name to select, but in the end I wanted a domain that would travel with me regardless of where my career might take me in the future. (No plans to leave Cassatt, but you never know where the future might take you...)

To that end, this blog will now officially reside at http://blog.jamesurquhart.com. The original URL, http://servicelevelautomation.blogspot.com will continue to operate, but will redirect you to the new site. All feeds should also continue to work unchanged.

Please let me know if you have problems by emailing me at james dot urquhart at cassatt dot com.

"Web 3.0" and Infrastructure

In "What is Web 3.0?" Nicholas Carr breaks down various early definitions of Web 3.0 for the reader. In the end, he offers the following:

Web 3.0 involves the disintegration of digital data and software into modular components that, through the use of simple tools, can be reintegrated into new applications or functions on the fly by either machines or people.

Great definition, but again leaves out the importance of infrastructure on the equation. (Wait, wasn't Carr the one who pointed out that it all starts with infrastructure? What happened, Nicholas?) I would modify his statement to read

Web 3.0 involves the disintegration of digital data, software and infrastructure into modular components that, through the use of simple tools, can be reintegrated into new applications or functions on the fly by either machines or people.

To get a sense of how this technology would affect infrastructure, picture a world in which every aspect of the infrastructure stack, from application server to operating system to bare metal server to network fabric to shared storage, etc., can be assembled as necessary to meet the service level needs of an application (or even an application function). Need a J2EE service to run at 4 9's up time? Choose from a smorgasbord of app server vendors running on a selection of Hardware as a Service vendors with access to any number of supporting services from a variety of Software as a Service vendors--or let a service level automation tool (whether an appliance, a software product or a SaaS offering) do it for you. Ideally, let the SLAuto determine the most cost-effective way to deliver your service at the SL's you require.

To be fair, this is a ways down the road, but then so is anything Web 3.0.

Where's the standard, bub?

Simon Wardley's Bits and Pieces blog has an interesting post breaking down what he thinks are the three key markets for utility computing:

• Saas: Software as a Service


• FaaS: Frameworks as a Service


• HaaS: Hardware as a Service

Such as it goes, this is OK, but I think his most interesting comments surrounded the need for Common Service Providers in each of these areas, and the need for portability across those providers, and the mechanisms that he thinks will drive the standards that will enable portability. To quote:

The issues and the needs of a competitive utility computing market are also the same at each level - portability, multi-providers and agreed standards and solves the same class of problems - disaster recovery, scalability, efficiency and exist costs.

In today's world the fastest way to achieve a standard is not through committee, conversation or whitepapers but through the release and adoption of not only a standard but also an operational means of achieving a standard.

Hence such utility computing standards will only be achieved through the use of open source, without any one CSP being strategically disadvantaged to any owner of the standard.

To be sure, this is controversial, but it aligns nicely with an observation that I and others have had about Xen, and why it may struggle to supersede VMWare, despite being freely distributed by just about every major OS vendor out there.

One of my colleagues put it best in an email:

As to the larger question of why Xen is failing miserably, I would like to profess this opinion -- Storage. The Xen / KVM / Linux / RedHat community botched storage. Hence, they are failing in the marketplace.

To elaborate:

Virtualization brings two important benefits:

1. Seperates the OS+App stack from the underlying hardware


2. Enables you to package the OS+App stack into a VM that you can fling around with ease....this is the storage angle.

Xen accomplished (1) reasonably well.

Xen failed miserably with (2), i.e Storage. VMware solved the storage issues admirably well. So long as Xen solutions do not work well in the "copy virtual disk files around and run them anywhere" model, Xen will not succeed.

In other words, Xen has issues with portability by not providing a file representation of virtual machine storage that can be moved between disparate physical systems with ease. I know there are some virtual appliance vendors out there that do Xen, so maybe the problem is solved with their technologies. However, there is no standard proposed by Xen, and thus there is no portable standard for Xen VMs as files.

Alas, VMWare has a nice portable file representation of a VM. Granted, there are portability issues there, as well, but by and large VMWare has a much better solution to portability--within VMWare hosts. Unfortunately, there is still no solution (that I know of) that will run the same file system on both VMWare and Xen. Thus, no universal portability is coming soon from the VM space.

Recently, I have been telling anyone who will listen that this nascent utility computing market is still searching for a standard for server (VM/framework/application/whatever) portability across disparate utility computing service providers. I like the concept of a virtual appliance, but we need a (non-proprietary) standard, or we need another portability mechanism besides VMs. (As a side note to my new friends at eCloudM--this is definitely an opportunity, though it may not meet your criteria.)

Otherwise, utility computing will be "choose your vendor and build your software accordingly", not "build your software as you like and choose any vendor you want".

Please, if I am way off, correct me with a comment or a blog post. I would love to find out I am wrong about this...

Web 2.0, Utility Computing and Service Level Automation

Industry Girl has an interesting observation of what it is that is driving utility computing. She believes that it is the drive towards "Web 2.0 sites and applications, like the video on YouTube or the social networking pages on MySpace" is creating huge demand on backend server infrastructure--unpredictable demand, I may add--which, in turn, is creating the need for truly dynamic capacity allocation. Add to that the trend of Web 2.0 technologies being used by more and more commercial and public organizations, and you begin to see why it's time to turn your IT into a utility.

I have to say I agree with her, but I would like to observe that this is only a (large) piece of the overall picture. In reality, most of the sites she specifically mentions are actually "Software as a Service" sites targeted at consumers rather than businesses. Its the trend towards getting your computing technology over the Internet in general that is the real driving need.

For "utility computing" plays such as SaaS companies, managed hosting vendors, booksellers :), and others, the need for utility computing isn't just the need to find capacity, it is also the need to control capacity. This, in turn, means intelligent, policy-based systems, that can deliver capacity to where it is needed, share capacity among all compatible software systems and meter capacity usage in enough detail to allow the utility to constantly optimize "profit" (which may or may not be financial gain for the capacity provider itself).

Service Level Automation, anyone?

Web 2.0 drives utility computing, which in turn drives service level automation. So, Industry Girl, I welcome your interest in utility computing, and offer that the extent to which utility computing is successful is the extent by which such infrastructure delivers the functionality required at the service levels demanded. Welcome to our world...

5 things...

The latest blogosphere social phenomenon has reached me doubly this week. Both Ken Oesterich and Ken Wallich have tagged me in the ongoing "5 things tag" that has been sweeping the blogging community (especially the tech bloggers).

Here are five things most people do not know about me:

1. I was born in Reading, England.
2. I play pretty decent guitar. I don't know that many songs by other people (a problem when whipping out the guitar at parties), but I have several original works that I think hold their own very nicely against most pop drivel. Lately, however, I have been working on "Tears in Heaven" by Eric Clapton.
3. I played Mr Anthrobus in Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of our Teeth" in high school. I was a geeky, awkward teenager trying to play a 40 year old man, and was the only member of the primary cast not to win an award for my performance in that show. Now that I am 40, I wonder what the hell was so hard...
4. My computing career started in fifth grade in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I was lucky enough to get in a science focused program at a nearby elementary school, and one of the kids' moms was one of the first BASIC programmers at Rockwell Collins, the aviation electronics firm. She came to our school once a week and taught us the basics of variables, loops, conditional statements and subroutines. Very cool. I got caught a bunch of times programming on the teletype terminal in the back of the classroom while I should have been listening to the teacher. Later, my luck continued as the father of one of my close neighborhood friends bought the fifth (or something like it) Apple II computer in the state of Iowa. We would program in BASIC every day after school, and tried to get into writing games and such.
5. Later, in college, I was determined to be a Music/Computer Science double major...for all of one semester. I didn't practice the music stuff enough, so I got a low grade there, and I hated my systems organization class, so I lost interest in computer science. (Dumb reason, now that I look back, but it worked out.) Instead, I started taking every math and physics class that I could, and finished with a Mathematics/Physics double. The day of graduation, I swore to my friends "I will NEVER be a computer programmer for a living". Two and a half years later, I was coding C for a small manufacturing company. (Do not try to predict the future, even your own. Its pointless. Setting goals is OK, but be willing to float a bit with the breeze.)

Now, let me please introduce to you five more randomly selected from my blogosphere:

• My mom.
• Katie Tierney, a former collegue with excellent technical intuition who is proving herself to be a hell of a "head of household" as well.
• Rama Roberts, another former collegue whose blog never fails to entertain and enlighten.
• Management guru, Tom Peters, who reenforces my drive to amaze both my employers and customers by being a service professional first and foremost.
• Alessandro Perilli, author of the virtualization-focused virtualization.info blog.