Thinking Out Cloud

Linear Scalability Does Exist, Ted

I enjoyed reading Ted Dziuba's I'm Going to Scale My Foot Up Your Ass, I really did. I like the 'tude and I like the style of writing. Reminiscent of the BileBlog (RIP), which some of my colleagues think is juvenile, but I think is hilarious. I loved it all, except for one big problem: Ted is dead wrong on the facts.

Now, I agree with Ted that in many cases the problem is shitty code. But that's exactly the point. Developers should not have to code in a way that requires a degree in computational mathematics (did I get your degree right, Ted?) to get their application to scale.

And I also agree with Ted that memcached isn't the end-all to scalability problems. In fact, I will probably go on a memcached-related rant some other time. But I do think it is a move in the right direction.

Bottom line, Ted, linear scalability does exist and architecture is the problem. To get what I am saying check out this and then read through Nati's blog. If you disagree then, let's talk. Did I mention I work for GigaSpaces?

Is Cloud Computing on the Horizon for Enterprise Customers?

There is an ongoing debate in the industry, in the blogosphere, and frankly, internally at GigaSpaces, on whether or not cloud computing is anywhere near becoming a viable business offering for enterprise customers.

First, a general comment on these types of paradigm shifting technological developments (or for that matter social and other developments). We tend to either grossly under-estimate how quickly they will be adopted, or grossly over-estimate it. For example, as an industry, I believe the rapid adoption of the Internet was grossly under-estimated (I'm talking '95-'96). During the bubble period, we grossly over-estimated how rapidly things such as online B2B Exchanges will be adopted (I shudder even saying these words now: 'b2b exchanges'. ugh...).

Not in my lifetime

Another example from the social/political world is what we're seeing in the U.S. presidential race. I believe that if you asked Americans as recently as 2-3 years ago about a woman president or an African-American president, the great majority would have responded with "Not in my lifetime" or "America isn't ready". Today, you'd get a very different response, of course. And even if this election does not produce a woman or African-American president, the barrier has been crossed. The psychological barrier of the voters, and the psychological barrier of many other potential candidates who might run in future elections (including Asians, Hispanics, Jews and other minorities). It is clearly a viable option.

Sometimes change comes fast & furious

Cloud computing is one of those things that many people are under-estimating. Change is coming fast. It is inevitable and closer than many think. The reason: it just makes too much sense to ignore. The economics are so compelling, that all you need is one player in an industry to adopt it, and the rest will have no other choice but do the same, if they value their profits and their existence.

Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear

A few days ago Erick Schonfeld blogged a post on TechCrunch entitled: Who Are The Biggest Users of Amazon Web Services? It's Not Start-Ups. I highly recommend reading the full post and the ensuing comments. A couple of fascinating things come out of it. The first was that Amazon made $131 million in revenues in the last quarter from AWS. Tiny compared to the $5.7 billion in total revenues, but unbelievable for a business so young (meaning the AWS business). Imagine it was a start-up company with such quarterly revenues so soon. They'd be the next Google.

The second thing was this:

So who are using these services? A high-ranking Amazon executive told me there are 60,000 different customers across the various Amazon Web Services, and most of them are not the startups that are normally associated with on-demand computing. Rather the biggest customers in both number and amount of computing resources consumed are divisions of banks, pharmaceuticals companies and other large corporations who try AWS once for a temporary project, and then get hooked.

Like I said, the economics (including simplicity, time-to-value, etc.) are just to compelling. once the psychological barrier is crossed, it'll catch on like wildfire -- and you can't go back.

The skepticism we are seeing now from some people about security and other issues is reminiscent of the skepticism that Salesforce.com and other SaaS players faced. People said that companies will never let a "web site" keep enterprises' most valuable lead, customer and deal information for access through the public Internet. So much for that.

Personal Experience

Just from GigaSpaces' own activity in this area I can sense the tsunami fast-approaching. We started "playing around" with the idea of offering GigaSpaces -- middleware software, mind you --  as a service on Amazon EC2. It makes a lot of sense because GigaSpaces XAP is essentially application infrastructure software born for the cloud -- as I describe on this GigaOm post. We put up a GigaSpaces AMI (Amazon Machine Image), maybe wrote a couple of blog posts about it here and on the GigaSpaces Blog, and that's pretty much it. Within days, we had significant amounts of traffic leading to both our AMi and the GigaSpaces web site in Amazon EC2 related searches and inquiries. Pretty soon we started getting commercial interest. Today, only a few months after this quiet non-launch, we have approximately 16 companies in various stages of working towards running their application on GigaSpaces as the platform on the Amazon EC2 cloud. In addition, we're seeing a lot of partner interest with a couple of very concrete things to be announced shortly. Wait till we actually launch this thing!

Barriers remain

But I don't mean to be delusional. There are certainly barriers left to overcome before we see  mainstream adoption of cloud computing. However, I do expect them to be overcome quicker than expected because there is so much vested interest for a lot of people to do so.

I'll write about the remaining barriers and how they are being addressed in a future post.

Cloud Computing overtaking the term Grid Computing

With the term "cloud computing" rapidly being hyped everywhere, I did this little exercise on Google Trends to see how it fares against its predecessor "grid computing". Here's the result -- cloud is just about to overtake grid:

If we zoom in on cloud computing it looks like this:

We are at the very beginning of the hype-cycle, and not yet at the "peak of deflated expectations". If it were a stock, I'd say BUY for now.

Speaking at the Virtualization Conference

The folks at Syscon's Virtualization Conference accepted my speaking proposal for the conference (see abstract below). My session is on Monday, June 23, at 6:25 PM. It's at the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC. I will show a live demo of an application built on GigaSpaces running on Amazon EC2. Here's the abstract:

The Missing Piece in Cloud Computing: Middleware Virtualization — To achieve the full potential of 'cloud computing' we need a broader definition of virtualization, and that is the complete de-coupling of the logical components of an application (represented by the software stack) and the physical resources. In the case of middleware, whether it is data access, messaging or the business logic, the physical location of the resources should not matter to the developer and to the end user. This is not a trivial thing to do, especially when it comes to data-intensive, stateful (transactional or otherwise) applications and services. In this session we will explore the challenges and propose a solution, including a live demo.