There was a question from the audience: “Gee, Steve, what’s the difference between what you’re proposing and straight up virtualization?”
Good question. Glad you asked. Good enough question in fact to insert part 1.5 inbetween parts 1 and 2.
The definition of cloud computing remains nebulous at best. We’re entering a phase where everything is claiming to be a cloud — if you offer something hosted, it’s a cloud. By such a loose definition, the tech biz has been selling clouds since we’ve been renting mainframe time. To offer a little contrast, Amazon EC2 is a huge cluster of virtual machines that you rent a-la cheap dedicated virtual servers. [Read more]
I was hassled by Alistair last year about the infrastructure choices at my company because I chose not to leverage the capacity and cost benefits of EC2. The reason, I explained, had everything to do with SLAs. My servers dish up content and application flow for phone calls. Jitter and delay are everything in that scenario because unlike web browsers that give visual cues to show they’re working, a phone call just gives dead air. And dead air is dangerous. [Read more]
You’ve seen bad metaphors for the Internet. Pop culture is filled with films where special effects show computer networks as highways, with towering servers encroaching on light-filled roads. These scenes try to represent the Internet as, well, a series of tubes (Play this clip from Hackers to jog your memory.)*
This happens a lot in Hollywood, and in too many cyberpunk novels (like one I’m finishing now just to spite myself.) I forgive William Gibson’s “collective hallucination” and Neil Stephenson’s Metaverse because, well, they’re good books.
But maybe the UI of the future will look like this after all, at least for certain applications. Check out Britain from Above by way of the folks at Flowing Data. Warning: clicking this video may make your browser lock up for a minute for some reason. Be patient, or go to the Youtube playlist.
I’m a huge believer in visualizing information and making the world more understandable, and the convergence of things like geomapping and GPS are making understanding even easier. These clips resemble nothing if not an RTS for the real world. It makes me want to click and drag routes for cars and boats.
I used to think Tron was a great movie, but not really a UI. Now I’m starting to wonder how these flying-through-data approaches, first conceived as a network metaphor for the non nerd, can become user interfaces.
This is how the prescient visuals of Minority Report slowly become reality.
We’re about to drink from a firehose of positional data as location-aware personal devices replace traditional cellphones and we move towards a sensor-driven world. We have the cloud computing infrastructure to handle massive computing and fast data retrieval. How long until Britain From Above becomes a live Google Earth overlay?
Oh, wait. It already is. Here’s the site’s Google Earth layer. When will web analytics catch up with this?
(*For real fun, check out the eighties-era Mac copy dialog at 8:18 in that Hackers clip. Anachronisms, FTW!)
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.
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. [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]
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.
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.
[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.)
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.
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.
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