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.

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Reading the buzz coming from VMWorld in Vegas toay, it’s clear that VMWare is finally embracing management tools. This has been an interesting road for the company, and I believe Microsoft is forcing their hand — something CEO Paul Maritz is painfully aware of.

A major problem with virtual machines is sprawl. They’re so easy to create, anyone can do it. And they do — leaving hundreds of orphaned virtual machines and thousands of license dollars in VMWare’s pockets. David Lynch of Embotics alluded to this when I spoke with him last week. Why would a company that sells licenses want to help people manage that sprawl?

The short answer is Microsoft. If you’re building a cloud, you’re going to use something that’s free and open for you to hack around with. In other words, Xen. And if you’re an enterprise, you’re going to use a VM that includes machine, OS, and application licensing. In other words, triple-threat Microsoft.
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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.
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Google’s new Insights feature, which shows statistics on search terms, yields some interesting results when it comes to Cloud Computing.

There’s no doubt that it’s a hot topic; Insights shows important events related to that topic over time, which is fascinating: Like a stock ticker but for ideas.

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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.

Here’s the message:

Here’s what I got:

Anyone else?

Matthew Ingram wrote a great piece that sums up Apple’s crisis of conscience when it comes to open software development. It’s worth a bit of discussion.

[Update: Apple is able to remotely deactivate software. I don't remember Nokia needing to do this with Symbian.]

As a disclaimer, I now have a Mac notebook. I like it, but it’s been a learning experience. For a Mac to work, you need to give yourself over to it completely. You don’t save pictures; you use iPhoto. You don’t save MP3s; you use iTunes. You don’t install Acrobat; you use Preview. And so on. Apple’s built these things itself because there were a limited number of options for the Mac, and because it can integrate them better.

For a long time, Microsoft won the desktop wars because they were “open” to applications. You could write whatever you wanted. Everyone chose a PC because that’s where all the games were, that’s where all the apps worked. Developers shunned the Mac.

Then two things happened.

• The Mac switched to Intel chipsets, allowing things like Parallels and dual booting to support Windows. Add a few networking drivers and support for Windows networking, and you had a respectable corporate citizen, at least for the marketing iconoclasts.
• Desktop variety became irrelevant with the Internet and SaaS.

These days, the desktop is arguably less good at everything — an aging jack-of-all-trades that can’t compete with consoles, tablets, PDAs, and so on. Desktops are good for workstation tasks like graphic design, but not much else.

Most of the world’s Internet devices aren’t computers. We live in a bit of a bubble in North America but the rest of the world already knows this. (I crunched population and cellphone ownership from the latest data I could find, because I’m a nerd, and the results are at right. Canada and the US are near the bottom.)

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Many of us have love/hate relationships with quotes, cliches, platitudes and aphorisms. When they’re clever and spot-on, we love them. When they’re trite and overused we roll our eyes and wish we could turn back time j-u-u-u-s-s-t a wee bit and forget the whole thing never happened. So what to do when there are some oldies but goodies out there which aren’t a perfect fit? I don’t know about you, but I’m going to use them and see how it goes:

“Things are more like they are now than they have ever been.”
– Gerald R. Ford

“Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it EVER was.”
– The Talking Heads

“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”
– Otto von Bismarck

“Where is he going with this?” you may be asking yourself.  I’ve been reading and speaking/emailing with people a LOT about virtualization, and now there’s “the cloud.” Many thanks to Alistair for covering some interesting new analogies of cloud computing in his write up from Structure08; the idea of “fluffy little clouds” will help me sleep better at night.

I keep seeing analysts and pundits opine about how new policies and ways of thinking are necessary in this brave new world of virtualization.  They say traditional operational methodologies and policies don’t apply.  I disagree.  I’ll further go on to say that not much has changed at all, nor will it in the world of the almighty cloud, which is really nothing more than virtualization taken to the next degree.

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I just finished watching a presentation on Eucalyptus, an open source layer for cloud computing that emulates Amazon’s EC2.

The Eucalyptus team replicated nearly all of EC2. They know this because they pulled down Amazon’s Web Services Description Language (WSDL), which describes the various function calls someone can make to Amazon, and made sure Eucalyptus could do the same thing. It’s not a secret; in fact, you can check it out here.

This raises an interesting point. For a traditional desktop developer, if two interfaces are identical, then writing code to one means it will work on the other just fine. But there are two other things to consider if you’re choosing a cloud platform: Operational reliability, and network effects.

The first one’s pretty basic: Don’t use someone who can’t keep their cloud running.

The second one is less obvious: The value of a cloud service isn’t just what it does; it’s also how many people use it.

For example:

• A friend feed on Facebook is vastly more useful than one on Friendster
• Someone building a CRM application on Salesforce has a lot more contacts and partners to work with than someone using Sugar
• A communications application built atop Webex Connect can automatically invite more people to a meeting than someone using Acrobat.com

In other words, when considering a cloud’s services, we can’t just look at the richness of the APIs it offers. We have to also consider the network effects it enjoys.

Cloud computing is the hottest Internet insider buzzword since the technologies to which it owes its existence: Virtualization and Grid Computing.

In May’s Interop Unconference, we explored their intersection in an informal jam session with enthusiastic audience participation starring Jinesh Varia (Amazon), Kirill Sheynkman (Elastra), Rueven Cohen (Enomaly), Jacob Farmer (Cambridge Computer), and Louis DiMeglio (ScienceLogic).

It’s taken some time to fully digest the results.

To many of us, the cloud is that amorphous blob of semicircular squiggles the IT crowd has been using on whiteboards to represent the internet since the mid-nineties. Clouds mean we don’t care what’s in them.

Once upon a time, that cloud in the middle of the whiteboard used to just represent the network — how to get from here to there. All the interesting stuff happened outside its borders. More recently, however, we’ve started moving the rest of the shapes on the whiteboard into the cloud. Applications and infrastructure are now drawn within the borders of that formerly ill-defined and anarchic etherspace.

If you listen to some overzealous cloudnuts, you’ll will hear that pretty much everything is rushing headlong into the Internet’s troposphere. But the truth is much more complex, and rational opinions seem to favor a hybrid future of rich clients, hardware, and software. We’ll have a hugely diverse mix of private and public cloud-based services providing both a back-end and a matrix for device interaction.

Aside: I’ll leave defining cloud computing ad nauseam to other bloggers. For our purpose it is the trend of outsourcing what you would normally run in your datacenter to an indefinitely flexible computing platform which is billed to you as a utility. Traditional hosters don’t count (for me) as cloud providers, but newer managed service hosters might, depending on the level of automation and scalability they employ.

So what did the Interop crowd conclude?

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A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to moderate a panel on next-generation databases at Web2Expo. Having database greats Brian Aker, Dave Campbell, and Matt Domo in one place made for great dialogue. In addition to finding out whether RDBMS is dead, we looked at the big challenges of data storage (synchronization, working offline, and a shift towards specialized data models.)

We even found out how these three datascenti track their contacts (MySQL’s Aker uses scripts he wrote; Microsoft’s Campbell uses Outlook.)

Then last week at Interop, I had folks from platform companies like Google, Amazon, and Opsource together with a number of startups and virtualization tool makers. Again, great dialogue, even on the five-person panel that ran over. This time, the consensus seemed to be that on-demand computing was great for bursty capacity and highly parallel tasks, but lacked the controls, management tools, and SLAs to be a production platform for enterprises at the moment.

But Structure promises to be the most compressed discussion yet. Om Malik, the guy behind the event, says it’s about two things: Learning how the new web is built from the architects that built it; and networking with investors who “are looking to place their bets on cloud computing” and see it as a huge opportunity. “Structure 08 is about Getting Web Done,” says Malik.
I have two panels on the same day to moderate:

• Cloud Computing: Infrastructure for Entrepreneurs, featuring Geva Perry, CMO of GigaSpaces; Jason Hoffman, CTO of Joyent, Tony Lucas, CEO of XCalibre; Lew Moorman, SVP Strategy of Rackspace; Christophe Bisciglia, senior software engineer at Google; and Joseph Weinman, corporate development and strategy at AT&T.
• Scaling to Satiate Demand: Tactics from the pioneers, with Sandy Jen, co-founder and VP Engineering of Meebo; Akash Garg, CTO of Hi5, Jeremiah Robinson, CTO of Slide; and Jonathan Heiliger, VP Technical Operations of Facebook.

Each of these will be a fast-and-furious fifty-minute discussion around on-demand computing and the ability to scale. Time to come up with some pithy questions and awkward follow-ups.

Any sugggestions?