Thinking Out Cloud

A Silver Lining for the Tech Business

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on the dismal holiday retail sales, and the numbers are pretty much as bad as expected or worse:

Despite a flurry of last-minute shoppers lured by the deep discounts, total retail sales, excluding automobiles, fell over the year-earlier period by 5.5% in November and 8% in December through Christmas Eve, according to MasterCard Inc.'s SpendingPulse unit.

When gasoline sales are excluded, the fall in overall retail sales is more modest: a 2.5% drop in November and a 4% decline in December. A 40% drop in gasoline prices over the year-earlier period contributed to the sharp decline in total sales.

The Journal goes on to report that some sectors were hit particularly hard, including luxury goods - down 35% - and electronics/appliances - down 27%.

Amid all this doom and gloom, however, there is a silver lining for the IT industry. Online sales were down only 2%, meaning a lot of people have shifted their holiday buying to the Internet. Hopefully, companies will continue to invest in hardware and software for their web applications to better compete for online business.

Auto-Scaling and Self-Healing on Amazon EC2 Using GigaSpaces

Dekel Tankel sent me a link to a recorded demo of the GigaSpaces CloudTools that he and Owen Taylor prepared. The demo shows a stock ticker application updated in real-time running on Amazon EC2 (using dummy data). In the demo, Owen shows how the application can auto-scale based on increased load and how it can heal itself in case any of the Amazon instances fail.

Watch the demo here

First, Owen shows how the application can be deplyed on EC2 with essentially a single click.

The application then starts running with 3 web containers and 4 processing service containers (2 partitions  - or "shards" - each with a synchronous backup). As Owen simulates more concurrent users, the system reaches a pre-set SLA threshold on CPU utilization and automagically launches two additional instances on EC2. All of this happens with the application continuously running so that the end user is unaware of this happening in the background. Owen then kills ones of the partitions and shows how the backup becomes the new primary and another backup is launched to take its place. Again, in a way that is unnoticeable by the user.

Owen also demonstrates how you can move services to different EC2 instances by literally dragging and dropping them in the GigaSpaces UI.

Very impressive stuff and a very rich UI to give you an exact picture of what's going on.

Watch the demo here. (it's only a few minutes long)

Here's a screenshot of the GigaSpaces Manager UI (click image to enlarge):

Vendor "Vision Lock-In" in the Cloud

James Urquhart, my co-host of the Overcast podcast, and whose blog The Wisdom of Clouds is now syndicated on CNET, wrote a thoughtful piece entitled Can Sun rise to the cloud-computing challenge? This, of course, follows on the heals of the recent podcast interview James and I conducted with Lew Tucker, CTO of Cloud Computing at Sun Microsystems.

Sun has been making it quite clear that it has big plans for the cloud. In his piece James points out an event he attended in which Tucker and Dave Douglas (head of cloud at Sun) talked about their intentions to go all-in. And the two have been interviewing in the press lately (see additional links in my previous post).

But as James points out:

This was more of a "placeholder" presentation--certainly not a major announcement--but Douglas and Tucker laid out a foundation of concepts, and then outlined how Sun can work to address the opportunities this market creates.
This, of course, is a little disappointing, though completely understandable. Disappointing because we are seeing the dawn of cloud-computing giants, some created from the elegant artistry of the entrepreneurial engine, some crafted by the brute force from the clay of existing IT giants.

Sun isn't alone in taking this approach. In the last few months we've seen almost every major vendor --  Microsoft, IBM, HP, VMWare, Google, Amazon and Sun to name a few  -- make announcements of future products, services and features and lay-out their vision in broad strokes. And for the most part, that's what it is -- announcements. In many cases, the actual release dates of products have not yet been disclosed (e.g., Microsoft Azure or VMWare vCloud). In other cases, it has not been actual products or servvices announced but "roadmaps".

I already pointed this out in Overcast Show #1: this is a phenomenon I call "vision lock-in". Cloud computing is hot, and with the combination of a the poor economy, many CIOs are now examining their options. The large vendors are facing a dilemma. On the one hand, they have big ships to steer and it takes time to turn them around if you want to do it right. On the other hand, they need to make it clear to the marketplace that they are going to be a player in the space. So they make big announcements and lay out roadmaps. At the very least, this makes potential customers pause to think "maybe I should wait just a little longer to see what these guys come up with before I make any major decisions."

Overcast Show #5 with Lew Tucker, Cloud CTO at Sun

Last week, James Urquhart and I recorded the show #5 in our series of podcasts on cloud computing, Overcast. In this show we host Lew Tucker, CTO of Cloud Computing at Sun Microsystems. Sun recently reorganized under three main business units that report into CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Cloud is one of the three, headed by Dave Douglas.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Here are links to a couple of recent articles regarding Sun and Cloud Computing:

Sun Discloses Plans to Enter Cloud Computing  - InformationWeek

Sun Takes Another Swing at Cloud Computing - PC World

How the Recession Saved Cloud Computing

Some people have expressed surprise to me that in this economic environment RightScale was able to raise $13 million from Benchmark and Index Ventures, as they announced today. I wasn't surprised at all. First off, RightScale has a great team and good market traction. But more importantly, I've had the opportunity to help several top-tier Sand Hill firms lately with their due diligence efforts, as they are all, without exception, looking to make investments in cloud computing now.

But this got me thinking about a bigger issue. If in this environment VCs are making investments in cloud, imagine what would have taken place without a recession: a massive wave of investment from every third and fourth tier VC in every half-baked cloud-related idea, many of them overlapping. In other words, a bubble. And bubbles pop, bringing about the infamous "trough of disillusionment"  -- which does no one any good, because that's when we reach the "throw the baby with the bathwater" mentality.

As things are now, investments will be made, but they will be made prudently in only the best teams, ideas and technologies. Thanks, recession, for saving cloud computing.

Infrastructure is Sexy

A few days ago we recorded and posted Show #4 of the Overcast podcast. In it, James Urquhart and I interview Greg Ness, a senior director at Infoblox and someone who has been blogging about IT infrastructure, often in the context of cloud computing. Greg is one of the people promoting the notion of Infrastructure 2.0.

Many areas that fall under the "infrastrcture" category are experiencing a rennaisance lately, and I expect much innovation in this area. Jeremy Geelan, chair of the Cloud Computing Conference at Sys-Con asked me to send in my cloud-related predcitions for 2009. One of the predictions I sent was this:

System Administration & Configuration and Network Management Will Become a Sexy Field Bursting with Innovation
After years of stagnation, system administration, configuration and network management will thrive with innovation. New standards will emerge and people will come up with new forms of innovation in the field. Open source projects such as Puppet will experience incredible momentum. In a sense, for cloud computing to succeed, system administration needs to be eliminated. Or more accurately, automated and simplified, which creates tremendous potential for innovation.

As Greg points out in the podcast, many of these infrastrcuture areas were ripe for a major change even before the advent of cloud computing. The arrival of cloud computing on the scene will accelerate this trend. A reporter working on a cloud computing story (about Miwok Airways use of GigaSpaces and EC2) asked me why is this the case. Why does cloud computing accelrate the need for innovation in the infrastrcuture space?

Greg discusses some of the issues in great detail and intelligence on his blog, so I'll direct you there. But from my perspective here are a few points that I think answer the reporter's question:

Self-Service: One of the key tenets of cloud computing, at least as I view it, is the notion of self-service (after all, we do call it Infrastrcuture-as-a-Service). That is one of the key pieces that Amazon Web Services broguht to the table. Provisioning servers, a task that used to involve heavy involvement and expertise by the IT ops folks or you hosting service people, is now a realtively simple technical task that pretty much any developer can get done on their own within minutes. But as the use of cloud computing grows and becomes more sophisticated, there will be a need to enable self-service for increasingly more complex IT tasks: various config tasks, networking, security and so on. To enable these as self-service function new layers that create a dynamic, autonomic, automatic and user-friendly experience will need to be created.

Portability: One of the barriers that still exist to cloud computing is the issue of vendor lock-in. There's a nice piece in the December 1 print edition of InformationWeek about Harrah's Entertainment (the big hotel  and casino company) and their adoption of cloud computing, entitled "Real Money on the Cloud". Harrah's is an early adopter of Salesforce.com's Force.com platform-as-a-service. Here's a little excerpt:

"There's a learning curve and a bit of a lock-in," [Harrah's CIO Tim] Stanley said in a recent interview, because he doesn't see an easy way to port anything developed on Force.com to a non-Salesforce platform. So he's been careful where Harrah's uses Force.com. So far, the "merits are outpacing the detriments."

not everyone is willing to be an early adopter like Stanley and even he is extremely caution about the use of a highly proprietary platform. And to emphasize the lst sentence in the quote -- as Homer Simpson says to Bart when the boy says "this is the worst day of my life" -- "This is the worst day of your life SO FAR".

To enable portability, new standards will emerge in infrastructure (I mentioned Puppet above), and new abstraction layers that hide the specifics if various infrastructure implementations.

Speed and Cost Savings: Much of the drive towards cloud computing is based on time-to-market and costs-savings benefits. The competittion among cloud providers will, therefore, increasingly be on who provides a faster more efficient system. This will be another major driver for new forms of infrastrcture automation and improvements.

UPDATES: 

• In Infrastructure Investments and the Value of Service Providers, Chip Childers refers to this post and writes about seeing the innovation wave in infrastructure taking place and the need for more innovation.
• On Dec 10, Greg Ness, who James and I interviewed in Overcast Show #4, posted a recommended reading list for Infrastructure 2.0, which includes this post.