The move to turnkey computing

The move to turnkey computingWhy everything as a service is inevitable.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Good morning. Today weʼre going to look at the evolution of clouds, and why I think the inevitable long-term consequences of cloud computing are third-party platforms, rather than the infrastructure-centric, public/private deployments we see today.

Some background@acroll

[email protected]


I write, organize, and analyze emerging IT trends at Bitcurrent; work on running clouds at CloudOps; and try to share some of these thoughts with enterprises and startups.

Within five years, we won’t care about virtual machines.(Start with a big statement. At least you’ll pay attention.)


Hereʼs what I want to try and convince you of.

One caveat.I don’t mean big tech firms. Twitter stopped using clouds for a reason. I mean businesses whose core job isn’t the delivery of technology services. Less than 10K machines.


Thereʼ

Five years is a long time.



(Remember, Apple once named its computers after fruit.)


Overshare

h)p://su.pr/1keiym

There was no Twitter.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011ere was no Twitter

h)p://www.flickr.com/photos/st3f4n/3951143570/

wasn’t a verb.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011Once, we couldn’t look stuff up

So at least hear me out.



http://www.flickr.com/photos/harshlight/3235469361Wednesday, April 13, 2011

First, I want to talk about what cloud computing really represents: the end of a monopoly on IT.

Two reasons why monopolies were OK.


Monopoly isn’t necessarily a bad word. They serve their purposes. There were a couple of reasons IT was a monopoly for so long.

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First, the machines were expensive. That meant they were a scarce resource, and someone had to control what we could do with them.

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Second, they were complicated. It took a very strange sect of experts to understand them. AVIDAC, Argonne's first digital computer, began operation in January 1953. It was built by the Physics Division for $250,000. Pictured is pioneer Argonne computer scientist Jean F. Hall.AVIDAC stands for "Argonne Version of the Institute's Digital Automatic Computer" and was based on the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebeam/3586287989/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

This was also a result of scarcity. When computers and humans interact, they need to meet each other halfway. But it takes a lot of computing power to make something that’s easy to use;

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebeam/3586287989/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebeam/3586287989/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecastro/3053916892/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

in the early days of computing, humans were cheap and machines weren’t

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/binaryape/458758810/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

So we used punched cards,

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http://50ans.imag.fr/images/galerie/Source/IBM-1130-1.jpgWednesday, April 13, 2011

and switches,

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and esoteric programming languages like assembler.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/flem007_uk/4211743886/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Think about what a monopoly means.

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A monopoly was once awarded for a big project beyond the scope of any one organization, but needed for the public good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bell_System_hires_1900_logo.PNGWednesday, April 13, 2011

Sometimes, we form a company with a monopoly, or allow one to operate, in order to build something or allow an inventor to recoup investment. This is how we got the telephone system, or railways.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bell_System_hires_1900_logo.PNG

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bell_System_hires_1900_logo.PNG

For much of its history, AT&T and its Bell System functioned as a legally sanctioned, regulated monopoly.

The US accepted this principle, initially in a 1913 agreement known as the Kingsbury Commitment.

Anti-trust suit filed in 1949 led in 1956 to a consent decree whereby AT&T agreed to restrict its activities to the regulated business of the national telephone system and government work.

Changes in telecommunications led to a U.S. government antitrust suit in 1974.

In 1982 when AT&T agreed to divest itself of the wholly owned Bell operating companies that provided local exchange service.

In 1984 Bell was dead. In its place was a new AT&T and seven regional Bell operating companies (collectively, the RBOCs.)

http://www.corp.att.com/history/history3.html


When monopolies are created with a specific purpose, that’s good. But when they start to stagnate and restrict competition, we break them apart.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ktylerconk/4096965228/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

In fact, there’s a lot of antitrust regulation that prevents companies from controlling too much of something because they can stifle innovation and charge whatever they want. That’s one of the things the DOJ does.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ktylerconk/4096965228/

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/leokoivulehto/2257818167/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

(IT’s been handed many of these thankless tasks over the years, and the business has never complained.)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leokoivulehto/2257818167/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leokoivulehto/2257818167/

First: Monopoly good.


In other words, early on monopolies are good because they let us undertake hugely beneficial, but largely unbillable, tasks.

Then: Monopoly bad.


Later, however, they’re bad because they reduce the level of creativity and experimentation.

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/04_01/tornadoDM3030a_800x533.jpgWednesday, April 13, 2011

Today, the same thing is happening to enterprise IT, both on the server-side (what we think of as cloud platforms) and on the client side (with the consumerization of technology through tablets, domestic Wifi and broadband, the use of personal messaging, and so on.)

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/04_01/tornadoDM3030a_800x533.jpg

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/04_01/tornadoDM3030a_800x533.jpg

Infrastructure as a ServiceAmazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, Joyent, Terremark, Gogrid, VMWare, and nearly every automated collection of virtual machines.


The most common kind of cloud is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS.)

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

This is what most IT people think of when you say “clouds” – virtual machines I can use for just an hour. Here’s Amazon’s “menu” of machines.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

Web server

Machine instance

MachineImage


In an IaaS model, you’re getting computers as a utility. The unit of the transaction is a virtual machine. It’s still up to you to install an operating system, and software, or at least to choose it from a list. You don’t really have a machine -- you have an image of one, and when you stop the machine, it vanishes.

App Server

Machine instance

Web server

Machine instance

DBserver

Machine instance

Storage

MachineImage

MachineImage

MachineImage


Most applications consist of several machines -- web, app, and database, for example. Each is created from an image, and some, like databases, may use other services from the cloud to store and retrieve data from a disk

App Server

Machine instance

Web server

Machine instance

DBserver

Machine instance

StorageDB

server

Biggermachineinstance


If you run out of capacity, you can upgrade to a bigger machine (which is called “scaling vertically.”)

App Server

Machine instance

Web server

Machine instance

DBserver

Machine instance

Storage

App Server

Machine instance

Web server

Machine instance

DBserver

Machine instance

LoadbalancerMachine instance


Or you can create several machines at each tier, and use a load balancer to share traffic between them. These kinds of scalable, redundant architectures are common -- nay, recommended -- in a cloud computing world where everything is uncertain.

Platform as a ServiceGoogle App Engine, Salesforce Force.com, Heroku, Springsource, (and nearly every enterprise mainframe.)


The second kind of cloud is called Platform as a Service. In this model, you don’t think about the individual machines—instead, you just copy your code to a cloud, and run it. You never see the machines. In a PaaS cloud, things are very different.

Processing platformData API

Storage

Yourcode

Others’code

Others’code

Others’code

Others’code

Others’code

Auth API

Userdatabase

Image API

Image functions

Blob API

Big objects

...

Governor Console Schedule

Shared components


- You write your code; often it needs some customization.- That code runs on a share processing platform- Along with other people’s code- The code calls certain functions to do things like authenticate a user, handle a payment, store an object, or move something to a CDN- To keep everything running smoothly (and bill you) the platform has a scheduler (figuring out what to do next) and a governor (ensuring one program doesn’t use up all the resources) as well as a console.

IaaS and PaaS differences

IaaS

Any operating system you want

Limited by capacity of virtual machine

Scale by adding more machines

Many storage options (file system, object, key-value, RDBMS)

PaaS

Use only selected languages and built-in APIs

Limited by governors to avoid overloading

Scaling is automatic

Use built-in storage (Bigtable, etc.)


To summarize: two kinds of cloud platforms I call “clouds”

Software as a Service(AKA web apps with logins)


The term “clouds” is a broader one, however. Many people consider Software as a Service a “cloud” approach, and while it’s not offering platform or infrastructure, it does represent an on-demand utility that’s priced in a fairly elastic way (though usually by time period, not by consumption, so not a pure utility.)


You probably know some of these companies, and others like them.


SaaS and PaaS are blurring, too, with the advent of scripting languages. Nobody would argue that Google Apps is a SaaS offering; but now that you can write code for it -- as in this example of a script that sends custom driving directions to everyone in a spreadsheet -- the distinction is less and less clear.

Cloud Web= Internet= Useless=

My mom’s definition


(Personally, I think this makes the term “cloud” synonymous with “web” or “Internet”, and therefore a bit useless.)

Startup

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We’ve done a bunch of research on this subject; most recently, we surveyed over a hundred IT professionals from a wide range of industries to understand their cloud adoption preferences. Here’s where adoption of these different technologies is today.

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We’ve done a bunch of research on this subject; most recently, we surveyed over a hundred IT professionals from a wide range of industries to understand their cloud adoption preferences. Here’s where adoption of these different technologies is today.

Ten arguments for clouds as a third-party, turnkey utility.


So now hopefully we’re all talking about the same thing. And here’s my big prediction, which I hope to argue in the remainder of the time I have: we’re all going to buy our computing in a turnkey fashion, much more like SaaS and PaaS, and nearly none of us will know anything about the underlying machines.

The economic argument


The first argument is an economic one.

Photo by Alan Cleaver from his Flicker Freestock set. Thanks, Alan!http://www.flickr.com/photos/alancleaver/2638883650/


A true assessment of internal IT costs is a painful thing. Not only are power, cooling, and other recurring costs spiralling out of control, but companies don’t properly understand how much they spend on fixing things. They don’t know what poor performance or outdated technology does to productivity. Most analysts say it costs about five times as much to run an application as it does to buy it in the first place.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alancleaver/2638883650/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alancleaver/2638883650/

http://www.oncloudcomputing.com/en/2009/07/fronde-back-to-profit-by-cloud-computing/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Cloud providers can leverage sharing and economies of scale keep costs down. Cloud providers are poised to make the most of these economies of scale. Consider that in July 2008, Microsoft revealed that it had 96,000 servers at the Quincy facility, consuming "about 11 megawatts"More than 80% dedicated to Microsoft's Live Search and the remaining for HotmailIn August, a really good discovery was posted to a blog called "istartedsomething.com": a screen shot of a software dashboard that illustrates power consumption and server count at each of Microsoft's fifteen data centers, caught in a Microsoft video posted to their web site.

http://www.oncloudcomputing.com/en/2009/07/fronde-back-to-profit-by-cloud-computing/

http://www.oncloudcomputing.com/en/2009/07/fronde-back-to-profit-by-cloud-computing/

Idle capacity, lack of

automation, etc.

Ping, power, pipe,

efficiencies

IT server costs

Private cloud costs Public

cloud costs


Sure, cloud computing will make you more efficient if it’s in-house. But these are short-term gains; even an efficiently run private cloud in downtown Manhattan is still in downtown Manhattan—not near a dam somewhere. And unless you’re in the business of providing IT services, it’s unlikely you can hire the best in the world.


It’s in the cloud providers’ best interests to make this as apparent as possible as soon as possible. So they’re introducing things like spot markets, which undermine any chance you have of looking cheap. Computers are pennies an hour, when you need them.


Cloud providers are thinking at a scale that nearly every enterprise can’t compete with. That’s because operating efficiency, and accounting for everything, are core to their business; whereas making widgets is core to yours.

The parallelism-drives-spikes argument


Okay, so that proves there’s an incentive to move to public clouds economically, right? But maybe you have enough capacity for existing, predictable workloads. Well, that will change too, because of how developers will build their apps.


Most of the time, people think spikes come from sudden fluctuations in demand. That’s true; but parallelism and new ways of coding are changing that.

•60 seconds per page

•200 machine instances

•1,407 hours of virtual machine time

•Searchable database available 26 hours later

•$144.62 total cost

Desktop EC2

Pages 17,481 17,481

Minutes/page 1 1

# of machines 1 200

Total minutes 17,481

Total hours 291.4 26.0

Total days 12.1 1.1


A great example of these clouds in action is what the Washington Post did with Hillarly Clinton’s diaries during her campaign. They needed to get all 17,481 pages of Hillary Clinton’s White House schedule scanned and searchable quickly. Using 200 machines, the Post was able to get the data to reporters in only 26 hours. In fact, the experiment is even more compelling: Desktop OCR took about 30 minutes per page to properly scan, read, resize, and format each page – which means that it would have taken nearly a year, and cost $123 in power, to do the work on a single machine.

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What that means is that applications will be written to solve for time. A Hadoop cloud will use as many resources as possible, for as short a time as possible. This will dramatically amplify spikiness, even for existing applications. And companies that can’t burst up parallel machines will get results—building plans, traffic congestion, feedback on a marketing campaign, terror threats—slower than their competitors.

The everyone-hates-making-sausage argument


So economics are better—and get better the longer out we project—and the next generation of applications will make things spikier than ever, requiring access to a pool of machines larger than any one company.But why not public IaaS?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gezellig-girl/4351078755/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

To understand this, we need to talk for a minute about “composed designs.”

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/gezellig-girl/4351078755/

Storage media

Computer hardware

Operating system

Software

Query languageLet’s just call

this a database, ‘mmkay?


When IT architects want to build something, they have a set of proven designs for doing so. A database is an example of this—it’s a combination of storage (disk) and a particular way of arranging things (tables and indexes) and language (structured query language, or SQL). We’ve learned that a database is a good prefab building block, so we use it. The alternative is to build it all, from scratch, writing to the disk itself.

Pork, now in a convenient cube format.


Often, we don’t want to know what’s happening under the covers.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/avlxyz/4560146695

Blood sausage, anyone?


Making sausage is no fun. It’s messy, and the underlying parts aren’t very nice to look at.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/avlxyz/4560146695Wednesday, April 13, 2011

There are some companies that should focus on the making of sausage. UPS, for example, defined the market and made new things possible by applying IT to shipping logistics. It needed to invent new sausage recipes.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mynameisharsha/4092086880/

Theglassis a lie.


We like the idea of virtual machines. They’re convenient ways to think about compuGng in easy, universally understood ways.

The British pint.


They’re like the British pint.


Know what this map is? It’s the countries in the world that don’t use the Metric system. Liberia, Burma, and the US.(I’ll set aside the irony that the imperial system is named after the empire you celebrate leaving.)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/prosto/367231552


Europe loves the Metric system. But the British love their pints. It’s no fun to day, “I’ll have 0.63 liters of beer, please.” This became a massive sticking point with British merger into the Euro.


In the end, the European union had to capitulate, letting the British sell pints as an official measure. We’re the same way: virtual machines are a convenient unit of measure, left over from an old system that we should shed for efficiency.

Providers love separation.


Cloud providers do better the less their customers know about the underlying infrastructure. The more clouds resemble data centers, the more the provider has to expose.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mac-ash/4534203626/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

At its most simple, this is all about a “stack” of services. Stacks are a common idea in computing and networking. Basically, they’re a separation of different tasks.

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We’re familiar with the idea of a stack. There’s a stack in the postal service.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/easternblot/126112823/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/easternblot/126112823/

Your virtual platform

Their physical infrastructure

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You worry about the address, and the stamp. The postal service handles the rest—it doesn’t care what’s inside your envelope; and you don’t care what route your letter takes to its destination, as long as it gets there.

Cell towers.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/serdal/5099121696Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Do you choose which cell tower to use when you make a call?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/serdal/5099121696


Kettles.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leehaywood/4141300920/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Do you insist on choosing a generator when you boil a kettle? Nope. Imagine how much less efficient the phone company or power company would be if they let you. In the same way, the more the cloud provider lets you play with the sausage—because you’re addicted to metaphors like computers—the worse things are.



The data-has-surface-tension argument


There’s more. There are good reasons that the world will be more centralized, with a few big providers, than it was in the past.

“Compared to the cost of moving bytes around, everything else is free.”

Microsoft technical fellow Dr. Jim Gray, 2003

http://www-users.cselabs.umn.edu/classes/Spring-2009/csci8980-ass/Jim%20Gray.pdfWednesday, April 13, 2011

This is the late Jim Gray, one of the smartest people ever to think about data. He’s the guy that famously said, “never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of tapes driving down the highway.”

Hairy, smoking golf balls.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/onigiri_chang/4791909127/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

He described the CPU of tomorrow as a “smoking, hairy golf ball” – a tiny computer bristling with wires and generating a lot of heat. He also said that, compared to the cost of moving bytes around, everything else is basically free.


Want proof? Look at the latest series of servers that big vendors are offering: they have a lot of storage, a backplane, and an army of processors. They look like mainframes.

Data in the middle.


Thatʼs why Amazon launched S3—their storage system—six months before they introduced the EC2 virtual machine offering. Because having all the data centralized is key. Once the data is somewhere, putting other computing around it is cheap.

The focus-on-why-you-rock argument


Okay, let’s review. Public clouds are cheaper, and spiky development patterns mean demand for more machines at once. Dealing with the underlying infrastructure isn’t fun, and we mostly want to because it’s familiar. The physics of networking mean it’ll all be centralized in a few places.But wait; there’s more. The business will insist on results.


Utility computing means you can focus on what matters. That means heightened expectations for IT. Already, many of the CIOs I speak with tell me they’re viewed as service bureaus by the line of business that has found Big Data religion.


Once we find new ways of doing things, we won’t want to do the crap work anyway.

The doctor’s-not-safe argument


But people don’t trust clouds, right? And the less visibility you give them into the sausage, the more they’ll care about where it came from.


This is my daughter, Riley. She’s nearly 8 months old. And since she arrived, I’ve learned about a lot of new things.


(she’s also a bit of a geek.)


One of the things I’ve learned is that we’re afraid of nearly everything.

Security is a...

http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/102309_IT_Firms_Skeptical_About_Cloud_PEER_1_Study

Reason to avoid clouds23%

No opinion34%

Reason to move to clouds43%


But security is both a reason to love—and a reason to hate—clouds.

http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/102309_IT_Firms_Skeptical_About_Cloud_PEER_1_Study

Quick survey.


How many of you use a SaaS-based email for all your personal communications?How many of the services you rely on include password recovery via that email?Why do you trust the cloud?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zeusandheraWednesday, April 13, 2011

I was at the doctor’s office last week. They had a wall full of files. They had 11 doctors and 5 support staff. None of them were particularly technical. As I waited in the lobby, I watched two cases of mis-placed or mis-filed data.How long before the government mandates that this information be stored in a secure environment?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zeusandhera

Explain why it doesn’t have to be in the cloud?


At some point in the future, the cloud will be the default. We’ll need to justify why we do things on-site. I’ll want federated access to those medical records, and whatever other services are out there.

The we-don’t-need-choice-anyway argument


Okay, let’s talk about the diversity of platforms.

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Henry Ford’s invention wasn’t the car—it was mass production. Giving people a much more limited set of choices, in return for which, they got a much better, more affordable, offering.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespotWednesday, April 13, 2011

Once, there was a huge variety of computers from which to choose. Acorn, Altair, Atari, Apple, Commodore, Sinclair, Apple, IBM. Not just vendors—entirely different architectures. Then that changed; a few won. There wasn’t any value in the variety of hardware.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot

http://www.flickr.com/photos/trekkyandy/345649669/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Then we moved up the stack. We could choose all kinds of devices: video cards, disks, audio drivers, network cards.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/trekkyandy/345649669/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/trekkyandy/345649669/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/presbyteer/243436122Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Then we chose an OS for its application variety. Wordstar, Wordperfect, Microsoft Word, and plenty of others lost to the recycle bin of history.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/presbyteer/243436122

http://www.flickr.com/photos/presbyteer/243436122

http://shravan15.wordpress.com/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The same thing is true of servers. A relatively small set of OS and machine options is good enough, because variety below the programming language isn’t particularly useful any more.

http://shravan15.wordpress.com/

http://shravan15.wordpress.com/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/avlxyz/1193082725/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

That means the cloud provider can offer a relatively limited menu of offerings, but a rich set of APIs, and people will be OK with it. Choice is overrated.

The vertical-specialization argument


Today, clouds are fairly generic. But as the computing needs of specific industries become more clear—HIPPA for medical, PCI for finance—and with them the sets of APIs a cloud offers will change.


Salesforce’s Force.com is already specialized for front-office, CRM-centric apps.


Google is specialized for building startups, web-tier environments, and APIs like emailing, authentication, and payment.


Intuit is good for SMB and accounting applications, with products like its QuickBase.


This is all about targeting and focus for specific sets of customers. As providers get more focused—which they’ll have to do, to survive the coming consolidation—many of the objections raised by industries and compliance officers will be overcome.

The cellphone-builds-accounting-in argument


Because running environments is a full-time job for the providers, they have much better monitoring and tracking than enterprises will build themselves. Let me give you a quick tour of Google’s App Engine dashboards.

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/03/easy-performance-profiling-with.htmlWednesday, April 13, 2011

I can even find out what parts of my code are consuming the most CPU, across all machines.

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/03/easy-performance-profiling-with.html

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/03/easy-performance-profiling-with.html


And even their latency when served to people.

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It’s a true, pure utility because you pay for what you use. Remember this picture; we’ll come back to it.

http://www.computerhok.nl/JSPWiki/attach/GoogleAppEngine/GAEQuota.png

http://www.computerhok.nl/JSPWiki/attach/GoogleAppEngine/GAEQuota.png

http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/load_test_screenshot.jpgWednesday, April 13, 2011

Here’s a shot of some code running in Google App Engine. I only know that I’m paying by CPU-hour, or for units like bandwidth, email, or storage. This could be one machine whose CPU was used 8%, or a hundred, or a thousand. I don’t know.

http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/load_test_screenshot.jpg

http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/load_test_screenshot.jpg

http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/logs_admin.pngWednesday, April 13, 2011

I can see the logs for my application. But these aren’t for a single machine -- they’re for the application itself, everywhere.

http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/logs_admin.png

http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/logs_admin.png

That’s all free. Want some?


And those are free. FREE. Anyone here have that level of visibility into their application or infrastructure, from anyone, for any amount of money?

The genie’s-out-of-the-bottle argument


Okay,

Wiley GAAP 2010: Interpretation and Application of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (By Barry J. Epstein, Ralph Nach, Steven M. Bragg)

Expense reports can no longer enforce IT policy.


IT has enjoyed a high coefficient of friction that has helped slow the adoption of rogue applications. In the past, IT was a line item, and the cost of acquiring it at a high upfront cost stopped all sorts of internal initiatives.

Airfare

DNS

Cloud

Publictransit

Importantresearch

Hotel


These days, supercomputing is easier (and cheaper) than booking a flight.


PaaS isn’t common today, but it will catch on fast. Consider a recent hackathon we ran: 55 coders, 18 apps, 12 hours. Several are live now. I’m betting there are already a ton of rogue PaaS apps running on Force.com, being built for the front office without IT’s involvement.


This is the Microsoft rich text editor. Gates once fired someone for not including it in a build of Windows, apparently. He understood what that ill-fated program managed didn’t: give developers an easy way to edit a block of text, pick a color, print a document, move something to a clipboard, and they’ll use it. They’ll even inherit your fixes and improvements to it. The same is true of cloud providers.

Service What it doesElastic Compute Cloud Virtual machines, by the hourElastic Mapreduce Massively parallel data processingVirtual Private Cloud On demand machines within internal ITElastic Load Balancing Traffic distributionCloudfront Content delivery accelerationFlexible Payments Service Funds transfer & paymentsSimpleDB Realtime structured data queriesSimple Storage Service Eleven nines redundant storageRelational Database Service On-demand RDBMSElastic Block Store Block-level storage (file system)Fulfillment Web Service Merchant delivery systemSimple Queue Service On-demand message busSimple Notification Service System for sending mass notificationsCloudwatch Monitoring of cloud resourcesMechanical turk Humans as an API


This division between PaaS and IaaS is a bit of a fiction. In fact, virtual machines are just one of around twenty “cloud services” Amazon offers – called EC2.

Service What it does

App Engine Executing Python or Java code

Bigtable datastore Store data for very fast retrieval

Calendar Data API Create and modify events

Inbox feed API Read a GMail inbox

Contact data API Interact with someone’s GMail contacts

Documents list API Manage a user’s Google Docs

OpenID single signon Use Google authentication to sign in

Secure data connector Link Google Apps to enterprise apps

Memcache Fast front-end for data

Image manipulation Resize, rotate, crop & flip images

Task queue Queue and dispatch tasks to code

Blobstore Serve large objects to visitors


The same is true of App Engine - though these are functions called from code, rather than services you pay for separately, they’re still more than just the code.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackol/133765382/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

These services let developers and the line of business stand on the shoulders of giants. The ecosystem surrounding the cloud environment provides a rich set of APIs—just as the windows ecosystem, years ago, gave developers a set of foundation classes.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackol/133765382/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackol/133765382/

The risks


There’s a downside to all this, of course. I firmly believe that we’ll use computing, not computers, in the future. But I remain concerned about one aspect of it, particularly in free-market environments where there’s no regulation.

http://jimvoorhies.com/?p=1942

The cloud neutrality problem.


It’s the same risk that we face from net neutrality. A small number of providers, whose users are dependent on them for their environments and charge a recurring fee, can significantly limit the choices—and competition—in the market.



The lesson of the answering machineMaking Steve Wozniak really angry


Iʼm going to finish with a story about monopolies and innovation, but with a different point this time. Itʼs a story Steve Wozniak used to illustrate the perils of an unregulated public Internet, and I believe it applies to a computing-as-a-utility world too.

Dial-a-joke.


Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak liked to dabble in a lot of things. In 1972, he wanted to set up a dial-a-joke service:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/deeleea/369701296


People would call his number, and get a “joke of the day” from a recorded message.

“This was 1972 and it was illegal in the U.S. to use your

own telephone. It was illegal in the U.S. to use your own

answering machine. Hence it also virtually impossible to buy

or own such devices.”


But there was a problem. The phone company—AT&T, again—was also the company you bought equipment from.

$700/monthWednesday, April 13, 2011

And this cost a lot of money.


While AT&T offered a service that was useful, it didn’t allow Woz to innovate by building something new atop its existing products. It was an example of a service gone too far.

The balance you have to strike.Leverage cloud models, but control your destiny.


And this is the downside of clouds. As IT professionals, you need to embrace the changes that computing as a service offer—but at the same time, keep control of your own destiny when it comes to differentiating your business. This is the balance you have to strike between public and private, dedicated and on-demand, proprietary and standards-based. It’s why you need to control what makes you special, and optimize everything else.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sparkys/3434382326/Wednesday, April 13, 2011

In the end, clouds will look like airlines. Every country has one (plus a second for government and the military.) They’re regulated for safety, pricing, and other things—though that varies by country. They have some standards, particularly when they connect to one another, for stuff like connecting passengers and forwarding luggage. But below the level of the individual flight, they’re free to do what they want, and passengers don’t have that much insight or say in how things are run. In big markets, there are several competitors. There are vertical offerings for things like medical evacuation, or rental, or private pilots, or densely populated urban areas.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sparkys/3434382326/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sparkys/3434382326/

Within five years, we won’t care about virtual machines.(Did I change any minds?)


Thatʼs my argument, in roughly 45 minutes. Howʼd I do?

Thanks!@[email protected]


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