Bitcurrent

Networking, technology, and the web

The cloud’s most important equation

Picture by Kevin Trotmann on Flickr used under Creative Commons license. http://www.trotmanphoto.com/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.

[Read more]

Who runs Human 2.0 operations?

A few posts back, Alistair wrote about Human 2.0, focusing on sensory immersion, augmented reality. and bridging the gap between the human and the screen. These techniques are only half of the Human 2.0 equation -  they modify the environment - the inputs - not the human body itself.

Human 2.0 is about breaking human performance barriers, both mental and physical, by modifying the human body and environment. Think transhumanism. Biogerontology. Life extension. Brain hacking. Body hacking. Even baby hacking.

I’ve been interested in these fields for more than a decade, to the point that I have my own EEG at home so I can read my brain waves and learn to modify them at will. Some people have closets full of golf clubs they never use. Mine is full of soliton lasers, cerebro-electric stimulators, light/sound goggles, micro pulse generators, and FIR-LED neuron growth stimulators. I can’t wait to get my own Emotiv headset.

Smart drugs? Tried them all (and I won’t say if I take them now). I’m a board member of a non-profit called the Smart Life Forum that meets once a month in Palo Alto. (Third Thursday of the month - check it out; I’ll be there…) SmartLife’s advisors include leading anti-aging physicians and Steve Fowkes, author of “Smart Drugs II,” and head of the Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute. Hormone testing? Been there. SPECT scan? Done that. Ayahuasca? Check. You get the point. Ray Kurzweil definitely gets the point.

[Read more]

Cloud foundations presentation at Interop08

I’m presenting a free session tomorrow on the foundations of cloud computing. This probably loses something in the translation, because a lot of the content is in the speakers’ notes, but here goes.

Cloud Foundations
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Clouds and mirrors

Last night I attended and advisory board meeting for a local VC. About a dozen or so very smart people met around a polished table on Sand Hill Road, ate catered food from Chevy’s, and talked about the future of cloud computing.

The only problem is that we don’t really know what cloud computing is, since every one and their mother is rebranding to be a part of cloud computing. There were basically two camps that emerged in the discussion.

The first, which we’ll call the promiscuously cloud minded, (aka “marketing”) believe that anything with a SOAP API is a part of the cloud, and enthusiastically embrace the blurring of ASP/SaaS with cloud computing by including all of SalesForce, for example, as a part of cloud computing. On this slippery slope, the next logical step (when wearing a marketing hat) is that anything connected to the Internet is cloud computing, making it an even more meaningless term.

The second camp, know generally as “the guys who are right” believes that cloud computing is nothing more than a modification in the billing and provisioning software that web hosting companies have offered for years. We basically bill by the hour for various modern incarnations of HP’s Computon concept, or by ECU or whatever, and we make provisioning into a point and click operation using VMware, Citrix, KVM, cPanel, Virtuozzo, Parallels, or some other toolset. This isn’t different from what we were doing at Exodus Communications 10 years ago; it’s just easier because the supporting technologies are more developed.

It is a mistake to confuse application services hosted on top of cloud infrastructure with the cloud infrastructure itself. We all love the idea of build-your-own point-and-click apps running on cloud computing infrastructure, but they need to be called something besides cloud computing. It pisses me off to see articles like this, where some policy wonk says there are “huge challenges” as cloud computing becomes more popular, because lawmakers will need to think about who owns the data in the cloud. The esteemed people who make our byzantine and conflicting laws need to understand that cloud computing has been happening ever since the first web host came online (in about 1995 when Hotmail asked the Exodus founders to put their servers in a telco environment because it took too long to provision T1s to match growth in free email…)

Honestly, I’m not rambling here. If cloud computing is the same as it ever was, we avoid the need for even more legislation to cover “new” cloud computing. If cloud computing is something new and disruptive, we are in for another round of unhelpful privacy laws that will ultimately stifle cloud innovation, at least for clouds in the US. In any case, I’ll be that our lawmakers ignore the most important legal issue for cloud computing, which is the fact that the supreme court long ago ruled that our 4th amendment protection against unreasonable search was void if our data was hosted by a 3rd party, be it cloud computing or not.  This would be really destructive to consumer focused cloud-resident apps, if only consumers who aren’t EFF members paid attention to it

So that’s why you should care whether some marketing guy rebrands his online tire selling web site as cloud computing, and why we need to learn to think of infrastructure, apps, and data as separate entities. Mixing them into a big cloud only makes life hard for us all!

Cloud for the SMB - That ship has sailed…

I have been talking to a lot of prospective cloud management start-ups lately, and a theme I am hearing repeatedly is that SMB is the great untapped opportunity. Most are hoping to be the RightScale for the SMB market by providing them with super simple web-based interfaces to clouds like EC2. What I’ve been telling them, is that unless they define SMB the way IBM does (when I was last working at IBM in 2005, eBay was classified as SMB), Cloud for SMB is a ship that has already sailed… [Read more]

Bitcurrent and GigaOm introduce Briefings

At Structure08 last week, Bitcurrent and GigaOm introduced Briefings. These 20- to 30-page reports look at a particular industry or technology in detail, combining what we learn while reporting on the space with research and internal discussion.

The first briefing focuses on cloud computing, which was the topic of much of Structure08. It’s available from the Briefings website at an affordable $250 through Paypal. If you’re trying to come up to speed on cloud computing quickly — whether as an investor, an entrepreneur, or an IT professional — we hope this format of background, landscape, and industry direction will fit the bill.

We’ve got many of these planned — my next one will be on Application Delivery Networks, and we’re also doing one on mobility and telepresence.

The Business of Mobility is Broken

Some people are born beautiful.  Others become beautiful. The rest visit cosmetic surgeons as they wage a holy war against Father Time and their own genetic limitations.  And when those people eventually choose the wrong surgeon, they’re disfigured for life, turned into freakish mutants who are a strange and distracting parody of beauty.

That’s what’s happening now with mobile phones.

[Read more]

Get ready to manage Silverlight, as MS takes the gloves off

Want to see a great example of monopolistic practices? It’s playing out in Browser Wars 2.0.

Most of us have by now realized that much of the web’s innovation is happening within the browser, as part of the migration from desktops to in-the-cloud computers. Adobe’s Flash already has close to 100% installation on browsers. But with AIR, the desktop version of Flash, they’re really mowing Microsoft’s lawn.

So it’s war, and Microsoft is attacking Adobe’s Flash plug-in in return. Redmond needs to own the video and Rich Internet space, and to do that, it has to defeat Adobe, replacing Flash with Silverlight.

This is a three-pronged strategy, and folks predict it’ll work.

[Read more]

Time for MeshU - watching the web

We’re presenting at MeshU in a few hours. The subject is web monitoring — not just analytics, but things like synthetic testing, usability, and so on. The Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa technology community is here in force, and the lineup of presenters is impressive (and intimidating.)It’s a big deck, and Slideshare isn’t behaving well. But the presentation (in .pptx format) is available in Bitcurrent’s drop.io dropbox.

Update: Now Slideshare is working, so here’s the deck:

 

SlideShare | View | Upload your own

What if you’re the SaaS provider?

John Overton’s deck from Interop. John has 8 years’ experience running on-demand operations for ATG, and this deck has an amazingly concentrated amount of information on what tools and processes worked for him during that time.

 

 

SlideShare | View | Upload your own

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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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