Today, I’m going to write about an equation. I’ll try to make it easy to follow, but it’s still stats and graphs. Stay tuned and I’m convinced it will be worth your while, because in my opinion, it’s the most important equation in cloud computing. It’s what drives your market, your customers, and your burn rate.
If you build a traditional data center platform for your application, you worry about three variables: The amount of traffic to your site, your capacity to handle that traffic, and the user experience they get, such as latency. The equation looks like this:
User experience = Traffic / Capacity
As traffic increases, user experience gets worse and delay goes up. This is because each visit to your site consumes resources on your infrastructure, and some users wind up waiting for the app to respond. Networks get full; databases encounter record locking; message queues back up; and so on. Ultimately, some of your visitors have a lousy experience.
On-demand computing platforms fundamentally change how you deal with this, because as far as you’re concerned, they have infinite capacity.
My favorite thing on the Internets today (aside from Stallman’s tinfoil-hat rant about cloud computing being evil, which I’ll get to later) is this video of the Mythbusters crew researching sobering-up techniques.
When you’re done laughing, think about the first part of that. A member of the media (admittedly, a pretty irreverent one,) showed a roomful of people the illegal content on his hard drive. And they cracked up.
Jennifer Bell and the folks at Visible Government took the covers off their much-needed I Believe In Open project. If you’re a Canadian, you should go sign up. Simply put: any elected official who isn’t willing to be transparent and accountable to their electorate has something to hide, and we now have the technology to track their record.
Which makes me wonder what Bitcurrent’s record is. Once upon a time, many of the folks behind Bitcurrent were part of Networkshop, a consulting firm that became Coradiant, a web performance company that helped create the end user experience management space.
Back then, Networkshop talked a lot of trash. We blew the whistle on SSL performance issues, and wrote a huge (250+ page) study on load balancing. We also prognosticated a lot.
Within hours of Chrome’s release, many companies were reporting operational issues. This might seem strange: Chrome is supposed to be leaner, faster, and better. But some of those improvements meant headaches for people running websites — and for those monitoring them. We sat down with Gomez CTO Imad Mouline to look at his company’s experience with the Chrome rollout.
Following its launch, Chrome rocketed to roughly 1% market share practically overnight, according to somesources, and although its use is tailing off a bit, this was a significant enough change in traffic to cause problems. “Small differences under the hood of the browser can lead to big issues in application delivery,” said Mouline. “For example, Chrome has a different connection profile with up to 6 connections per host” which increases TCP session concurrency. “The use of millisecond timing for the Javascript setinterval function also causes issues.”
Splunk, the San Francisco-based startup that makes software to search through huge volumes of IT log data, has named Godfrey Sullivan as CEO. Sullivan, who revamped business intelligence software heavyweight Hyperion before selling it to Oracle for $3.3 billion, is quick to point out that Splunk isn’t, however, another turnaround. “The gorillas have aggregated or acquired the mid-caps they need,” he said. “Life is too short to spend it rescuing the chumps that the gorillas left behind.” [Read more]
Amazon has publicly released a new Amazon web service called Elastic Block Store providing up to a terabyte per volume of persistent storage and allowing you to run your database in their cloud with the advantages of snapshots and flexible attachment to servers.
Rightscale, who offers a management and automation system based on AWS, has an excellent article explaining how Amazon’s Elastic Block Store works. In testing they report over 70 MB/s (that’s over half a gigabit per second) and over 1000 IOPS or input/output operations per second which is the ballpark equivalent of a dozen 7200rpm hard drives serving your data in tandem. They also report “it is possible to mount multiple volumes on the same instance such that file systems of 10TB are practical.” No doubt much more detailed performance and feature analysis will ensue shortly. [Read more]
As Alistair pointed out recently, interest in cloud computing is skyrocketing. All of IT seems to be reframing the industry around the term “cloud computing.” Google’s cloud computing group is a veritable inbox-denial-of-service-machine, and offers more philosophy than practical grist for those of us in the trenches engineering or operating applications in the wol. Reading the threads, I was reminded of this classic exchange between Hamlet and Polonius:
Ham. Do you see yonder cloud that ’s almost in shape of a camel?
Pol. By the mass, and ’t is like a camel, indeed.
Ham. Methinks it is like a weasel.
Pol. It is backed like a weasel.
Ham. Or like a whale?
Pol. Very like a whale.
Companies are scrambling to rebrand their services as cloud based, many of them without substantially changing their offerings. In an intensely speculative industry, overpopulated with caffeine riddled ADD sufferers (it takes one to know one), it is easy to get swept away with the new semantics. But something real is driving the use of the amorphous term, and as this blog has pointed out we have witnessed a seismic transition refocusing the IT industry on a new style of utility computing. [Read more]
I love you. I learn about news from you first. And you’re popular. I get it. I understand that scaling is a challenge. I’ll forgive you that — and the Fail Whale seems to be less and less common.
But being popular isn’t an excuse for getting your SSL certificates wrong. If you’ve got a site (say, twitter.com) and you want to support other sites (say, explore.twitter.com) you need a wildcard certificate. You’re a social site, and a promiscuous one at that, which means a lot of people with bad intentions exploit you. You need every bit of security you can handle, without teaching your users to ignore bad certificate warnings.
This is the second time in a week that I’ve come across a big company messing up their certificates. I think the Internet needs a remedial class in SSL configuration.
As I think I’ve written before, Werner Vogels is a very sharp guy. His take on Twitter, after a few beers, was: “This is a hard problem. All the people who are smaller than them are telling them how to fix it. And all the people bigger than them are staying quiet, because they’ve been there before.”
The always-incisive Register opined about this beautifully, and it’s a great read. Hadoop is Real Software By Real Programmers. I try not to post about what other people write, because there’s enough copying on blogs. But this one’s worth the pointer.
“those who [use Hadoop in practice] don’t write about it. Why? Because they’re adults who don’t care about getting on the front page of Digg.”
Imagine my surprise when I logged into Facebook this morning, read Mark Zuckerberg’s note on the new Facebook UI (which is considerably cleaned up, and eliminates the towers of ignored invitations that plagued the current versions,) and clicked on the link to take me to the new Facebook. Ooops.
Bitcurrent is part blog, part analyst firm, and part resource site for web operations. We're a loose federation of pundits and entrepreneurs with experience in networking and technology.
Today, I’m going to write about an equation. I’ll try to make it easy to follow, but it’s still stats and graphs. Stay tuned and I’m convinced it will be worth your while, because in my opinion, it’s the most important equation in cloud computing. It’s what drives your market, your customers, and your burn rate.
