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In podcast #3 of Overcast, James Urquhart and I join forces with John WIllis, a thought leader in cloud computing, to talk about some of the most fundmaental questions about cloud computing, such as "what is it?"
In the various cloud computing events and discussions I participate in, gaming is often given as an example of what types of applications cloud computing is not suitable for. That never sat right with me. Although games such as World of Warcraft having very thick clients you need to install (I think 2 or 3 GBs), and much of their processsing is done in the local machine, even more of it is done in the remote servers run by Blizzard (the company that makes WoW). As I have written, however, WoW is in no way a cloud, unlike what some have argued.
Om Malik posted a great blog about Yahoo following Jerry Yang's resignation and the search for a new CEO. Among other things, Om lists some of the things Yahoo should and shouldn't do now. Some of the items in Om's "should do" list are:
Next week is shaping up to be a big week for cloud computing (again).
Just thought it would be useful to list some of the folks I follow in Twitter who write about, talk about or practice cloud computing (in no particular order):
James Urquhart (jamesurquhart) - my fellow podcaster on Overcast and author of Wisdom of Clouds, now at the Cisco office of CTO doing cloud related stuff (congrats again, James!)
John Willis (botchagalupe)
Randy Bias (randybias)
Duncan Johnston Watt (duncanjw) - founder of Enigmatec and now CloudSoft
David Berlind (dberlind)
Alistair Croll (acroll)
Jian Zhen (onsaas) - stream of cloud computing related news
Michael Sheehan (hightechdad) - Evangelist for GoGrid
Lance Wicks (lancew)
Alexis Richardson (monadic) - Cohesive FT guy
Kent Langley (kentlangley) - Joyent guy and cloud blogger
Sam Charrington (samcharrington) - Appistry guy
Christine Gupta (mrsboogie) - marketing person at Flexiscale
Jeff Barr (jeffbarr) - Amazon web Services evangelist
Deepak Singh (mndoci) - Amazon Web Services BD guy
Werner Vogels (werner) - Amazon CTO
Simone Brunozzi (simon) - Amazon Web Services evangelist in Europe
Martin Buhr (tallmartin) - Amazon Web Services Biz dev guy in Europe
Paul Retherford (paulretherford)
Bob Lozano (boblozano) - Appistry founder
Rich Miller (datacenter) - Tech journalist from Data Center Knowledge
Christofer Hoff (beaker) - Security expert
Dekel Tankel (dekt) - Cloud guy at GigaSpaces
Ynema Mangum (ymangum) - Cloud Computing Product Line Manager at Sun
Paul Lancaster (paullancaster) - GoGrid guy
Daryl Plummer (darylplummer) - Gartner analyst
Cohesive FT (elasticserver)
GoGrid (gogrid)
GigaSpaces (gigaspaces)
Joyent (joyent)
Appistry (appistry)
On Demand (ondemand) -- SaaS news
Cloud Camp (cloudcamp)
And of course, please follow me.
Please recommend anyone that's not on the list in the comments to this post.
Shay Hassidim, deputy CTO at GigaSpaces, posted an impressive write-up of a benchmark the team ran on Amazon EC2. What's nice about it is that they took a standard web app, in this case the Spring PetClinic, and dropped it into the GigaSpaces container, achieving instant low-latency and scalability, with out-of-the-box load-balancing and fail-over. Extremely cool.
The other components in the app include standard and open source components: Jetty, MySQL, Apache load-balancer, JMeter and Ant.
Also, Shay posts a screen shot (I think it's the first-ever public one) of the new GigaSpaces cloud framework. Check it out:
See the full benchmark numbers on Shay's post. And you can sign up for a GigaSpaces pay-per-use EC2 license here.
James and I released show #2 of Overcast. Here are the show notes with the topics discussed:
In this podcast we discuss two main cloud computing related announcements from recent days:
Go to the show page to listen in your browser, download the MP3 or:
I saw a LinkedIn network update today that Duncan Johnston-Watt is now Founder & CEO at Cloudsoft Corporation. I was intrigued as I've known Duncan for several years as founder & CTO of Enigmatec. According to Duncan's blog he is leaving his operational role at Enigmatec to lead a spin-off that leverages Enigmatec technology to provide "cloud services". The details are sketchy as the company is in stealth mode. Here's an excerpt from the Enigmatec press release:
“The goal of Cloudsoft will be to deliver enterprise class Cloud Services orchestrated by Enigmatec software,” explained Duncan Johnston-Watt, Founder and CEO, Cloudsoft Corporation. “The first of these will leverage IP acquired from Enigmatec to host electronic marketplaces in the Cloud.”
Enigmatec will continue to build on the success of its data center automation solutions such as Enigmatec Virtual Orchestrator (EVO) and Automated Disaster Recovery (ADR), which enable the dynamic allocation of IT resources in response to minute-by-minute operational changes.
“Having established our technological leadership, we felt that the timing was right for Enigmatec to create this spin out and that Duncan was the ideal person to lead this initiative,” added Kevin Lomax, Chairman, Enigmatec Corporation. “We are delighted that as Founder he has agreed to remain on the Board of Enigmatec and we look forward to working closely with Cloudsoft in 2009.”
Good luck, Duncan!
Congratulations to the RightScale and EUCALYPTUS teams for joining forces. Both teams have extremely cool technology and smart people. It is going to be interesting to see how both technologies evolve with the cloud computing landscape so rapidly evolving and maturing.
Last week we made a very exciting announcement about Miwok Airways selecting GigaSpaces as the application server for running their reservation and pricing engine which will run on EC2. This is a great case study for cloud computing.
For one thing, you have to love the fact that it is cloud computing used for a business that literally runs in the clouds (the actual meteorological kind). Second, it is an on-demand compute infrastructure for a business that has an on-demand business model in the real world. A perfect fit.
There is a great piece in the LA Times that describes Miwok, but let me give you a brief description from the software application angle.
The idea is that for so-called ultra-short flights (typically, less than 250 miles), as a traveler you have a terrible dilemma: use commercial airlines or drive your car. I don't need to tell you the hassle and costs involved in both options these days.
Miwok overcomes the hassles of these options by providing you with an on-demand "air taxi" service. You book your flight when you need it. So, say, you want to fly from Santa Monica to Orange County or Palm Springs. You go to the Miwok web site and say when and where, you get pricing and you can book the flight on the spot. The flight you are booking is for a private Cirrus SR22. You can park 100 feet from the airplane itself (at a local airport, not just the major ones) and you don't need to go through security (imagine that!). All of this at the same cost of a commercial flight.
But here's the part I really like:You can connect to other people via Miwok's own social network, or through a Facebook app (and others to come). As the Cirrus can seat 3 passengers, you can split the costs with other passengers who need to make the same trip. So the flight could end up significantly cheaper than a commercial airline.
Think about it: This is the exact opposite pricing model of big airliners, where the more people go on a flight, the price goes up. From a marketing point of view, this has tremendous viral potential.
One of the biggest technology (technology as in software, not aviation) challenges Miwok was facing was developing an extremely sophisticated real-time pricing engine. It needs to take many parameters into account to offer you a price on the spot, including location, path, season, date, time of booking, number of passengers and several other criteria. It needs to be able to grow and shrink on-demand, especially because of the social networking and viral effect.
The architecture Miwok selected uses MySQL and Hibernate for the persistence layer, but the database is not used as the system of record for calculation and reservations. Instead they use GigaSpaces' in-memory data grid, which gives you in-memory speeds and can also grow and shrink dynamically in the EC2 environment. The benefit for Miwok is that having very little advance knowledge on the traffic they will get, and expecting extreme peaks and troughs in activity, they don't need to pre-plan and invest upfront in the infrastructure. They use GigaSpaces and EC2 and will only pay for hardware and software on a per-use basis -- when and if they actually need it.
They also use GigaSpaces XAP (which includes the in-memory data grid) as the container for the business logic, written in Java, and as a bus for integrating the various underlying services involved in generating pricing and booking reservations.
In short, on-demand application scalability for an on-demand air travel service.
Check out Miwok's web site.
Sign up for the GigaSpaces pay-per-use license for Amazon EC2.
The Eucalyptus project from Dr. Rich Wolski and his team at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) is one of the most interesting open source projects in cloud computing. Although it is a research project, I can't help but think about potential commercial applications for it.
James Urquhart (Wisdom of Clouds blog) and I are starting a new podcast series on cloud computing and related topics (virtualization, software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, utility and on-demand computing, etc.).
The series is entitled Overcast.
We plan to do it at least on a weekly basis, discussing topics and news
of the day. We're also planning on having guests join us -- namely
notable executives, techies, analysts and bloggers active in the cloud
computing space.
Check out the Overcast blog and listen to the first podcast: Show #1
Here are some of the topics we discuss in it:
We also discuss:
Please listen in and let James and me know what you think.
Also, you can:
As Dekel has already written on his blog, we are releasing our cloud framework for private beta. This was intended as a very "soft launch" sent to about 30 customers and partners already using GigaSpaces on public clouds (such as EC2, GoGrid, Joyent and Flexiscale) to help us test it out and provide feedback on how we can improve it.
On-Demand Enterprise just published a piece I wrote about some of the lessons learned from the current financial crisis and cloud computing. Although there is of course no direct connection, there are some interesting conclusions.
Although I'm not suggesting that it was the crux of the current crisis, one of the questions that has come up recently is why Wall Street's massive investments in value-at-risk analysis system did not curb the downfall. We have not heard (at least not yet) that these risk analyses were blinking with red lights and were ignored. In an HPCwire piece entitled "The Quantitative Models Tanked Too," editor Michael Feldman tackles this issue. Although not the only explanation, one of the issues raised in the article is the fact that the models used were over-simplified. Feldman explains that "in some cases, limits in computational power made these simplifications necessary so that the valuation models could be run."
Done right, cloud computing offers nearly limitless computing power. Had they used a cloud service such as EC2, and software that is built to scale on the cloud, the quants on Wall Street could have easy, cheap and on-demand access to massive computation power.
Once again, in either complete self-unawareness or a calculated manipulation, Oracle comes out with a cynical statement. Ben Worthen reports that on the Oracle earnings call, Larry Ellison said the following:
The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.
Although, I agree that the term cloud computing has been hijacked by many vendors to become meaninless in some cases, that's missing the point of what Ellison is saying here. What he's saying, in no uncertain terms, is that other than using cloud computing in Oracle marketing, they are not going to change anything. You still think that makes sense?
To answer Larry's question, here are three things Oracle can do differently:
Oracle won't do this. Why?
As I and others have already pointed out several times, Oracle is the company of status quo. Things are very good for Oracle the way they are exactly now -- any change is unwelcome. They make money by having high-paid aggressive sales people shove big stacks of software down customers throat, forcing them to buy this software with up-front, fully paid-up prepetual licenses. They then continue to make profit from these customers by selling them annual maintenance fees, most of which customers don't need or use, as Safra Catz herself admits.
Oracle does not share in any way in the customer's risk. If the customers ends up canceling the project. Too bad. It's now shelfware. If the customers ends up not needing to scale up as much, too bad. If the customer hits bad times or any other reason where the software is no longer needed -- too bad. Oracle has already pocketed its profit and it's off to sucker in the next guy.
So take Larry at his word when he says Oracle is not going to change anything but marketing.
I really like the new "No Hardware" campaign from our friends at GoGrid, picking up on Salesforce.com's "no software" slogan. John is hilarious in the role of Dr. GoGrid.
Kent Lagley writes on the Joyent blog about the work he has done with Dekel and Owen running GugaSpaces on the Joyet Accelerators. It's a well-written detailed blog and in a post entitled Cloud Computing with Java, Kent adds some more info on his personal blog, ProductionScale.
Some other exciting things about this exercise in the lab was that it was, in general, easy. We added and removed nodes, scaled linearly, pulled nodes out, re-deployed the application in seconds to minutes, we processed large amounts of data, and we did all this in the cloud with really minimal efforts.
The announcement by Oracle this week that they are "on the cloud" was once again quite an amusing piece of public relations. I don't know if Oracle is serious when they make these announcements or if they are secretly smiling to themselves.
Another interesting comparison is revealed by this amusing press release from Oracle about a start-up customer named Qtrax. Look at the stack Oracle managed to sell them to build their application. I put in brackets the price per CPU for each Oracle product from the official price list, and I quote:
"Qtrax's implementation includes Oracle Database [$17.5k to $47.5k], Oracle Real Application Clusters [$23k], Oracle Enterprise Manager [$3.5 to $20k+] and components of Oracle Fusion Middleware [?], including Oracle Application Server [$10k to $30k] and Oracle Coherence [$4k to $25k]. With this software now in place, Qtrax will have the ability to support millions of concurrent users [they better!]."
On top of these numbers (which total in the range of $58k to $145.5k per CPU1)add a 22% annual support fee. As these are perpetual licenses, let's break the license numbers to an hourly rate by assuming 24/7 for 3 years: we get $2.20 to $5.54. Even if you decide to be generous and divide by 4 years, you get $1.65 to $4.15. Now, let's not forget that Oracle doesn't actually offer any special pricing for it's products on EC2 (i.e., an hourly rate)2 so you would have to buy the licenses upfront, as Qtrax apparently did.
This is a long overdue acknowledgment of my friend and colleague at GigaSpaces, Dekel Tankel's blog - Thoughts from the Clouds. A lot of people out there are talking about cloud computing, without truly understanding the issues, and without real-world experience -- and so we need more blogs such as Dekel's.
I just posted the following to the Cloud Computing discussion board on Google Group. Let's see what happens.
Folks,
Are we going to publicly discuss these posts:
http://samj.net/2008/09/enomalism-vapourware-lands-enomaly-in-c.html
http://blog.jamesurquhart.com/2008/09/what-hell-is-going-on-with-cloud.html
http://blog.jamesurquhart.com/2008/09/cloud-computing-on-google-groups-is.html
Or is this whole thing going to be ignored?
Geva
UPDATE: I was informed by Khazert that my message will not be posted on the list and the whole thing will indeed be ignored. He told me he was especially offended by the fact that James and Sam posted his and Reuven's photo (huh!?).
Even before this incident I heard quite a bit of frustration about the Google Group. Some interesting alternatives have been created -- they are mentioned in the comments to this post. I also found this one to be quite promising: http://www.cloudave.com/.
James Urquhart also suggests 9 cloud news sources you may not know about, but my advice is just read James's blog. He covers it all.
The Pew Research Center published an interesting report about cloud computing adoption. The report focuses on consumer use of Software-as-a-Service applications and basic services such as email, photo-sharing and so on. There are some mentions of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (e.g. Amazon Web Services), including a reference to my GigaOm post How Cloud & Utility Computing Are Different.
