Cloud 2020: A Whole New Stack for Cloud Computing

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Last week I attended the Cloud2020 Summit in Las Vegas and came away with an entirely new perspective on Cloud Computing that I wanted to share. Before I do that, a quick note on the event; all sessions were videotaped and should be available on the event site shortly. Also, thanks to Ben Kepes and Krishnan Subramanian for putting together such an exclusive group of speakers and Mark Thiele for hosting us at the Switch site in Las Vegas.

The event spent the morning focusing on the most overlooked portions of cloud computing; the physical data center and the storage tools behind the scenes. Most people think of the cloud stack as simply the server, hypervisor, virtual machine/operating system, and secure connection or access via the web to that virtual machine. You could even argue that most people take a complete software view of the cloud stack and simply think about the hypervisor, virtual machine, and management layer; see CloudStack, OpenStack, vCloud, etc.  This event opened my “eyes” to the substantial impact that a physical datacenter and storage solution offer to the cloud.

The physical datacenter is really the driving force behind cloud computing to realize its full potential. Without the ability to have a secure facility to locate massive amounts of computing power and storage at a reasonable cost and have the power redundancy to ensure 99.9999% uptime, cloud computing would simply not be possible. The complexity and innovation at the Switch datacenter was breathtaking as that single datacenter was more efficient in power usage, temperature control, and computing power availability than 3 typical datacenters. Thus, the Switch datacenter alone provided economies of scale for environmental factors and raw computing than could possibly have been achieved with all the users of that site running their equipment independently.

The second focus of the morning was on the changes coming in cloud storage. The consensus at the event was the complete dominance coming to cloud storage via solid state devices with the exception of long term Write Once Read Never (WORN) storage. More and more information needs to be stored for the long term with little to no chance of ever being used again; thus the return of tape. The return of tape storage was not something I considered and was surprised at the potential size of this market. In fact, I have begun looking into companies making tape storage devices as well as the tape itself as potential long term investments (NOTE: I am not a financial advisor and you probably don’t want to invest on my ideas).

As for the rest of the day, there were some excellent debates about who will dominate cloud platforms in the near future and the impact of the various technologies and players. There are several other blogs that have focused on these points so I will leave that for you to spend more time on. Finally, there was an excellent talk by Joe Weinman, author of Cloudonomics that I highly recommend viewing. Ben and Krishnan are planning to host this event again next year and I cannot emphasize enough the high quality of the event, speakers and participants.

Cloud 2020 Summit – Agenda Announced

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Next week I am going to everyone’s favorite city, Las Vegas (really?) to attend the first joint cloud event from @krishnan and @benkepes (Krishnan Subramanian and Ben Kepes) called Cloud 2020 Summit. The event is billed as:

From chips to servers to data centers to infrastructure software, we are seeing tremendous transformation in the name of cloud computing. The shift in the landscape is occurring at a rapid pace leading to large scale confusion on where the industry is headed. At Cloud 2020 Summit, we plan to decipher where infrastructure services are headed in the year 2020.

The event is held at the SuperNAP in Las Vegas (Video Tour) and has an excellent collection of speakers during the day including Mark Thiele, George Reese, Randy Bias, Duncan Johnston-Watt, and others. I would also like to point out that this is my first technology event ever with a scheduled Tea Time at 2:45; perhaps I need to look into the proper wardrobe. 

The event is limited to 60 people and I believe a few spots still remain so be sure to apply if you are interested and can attend. Otherwise, watch this blog for my report and some videos from the event. 

Thoughts on OpenStack Summit in Portland

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I have been busy this week catching up from being out last week for the OpenStack Summit in Portland and am a bit delayed in getting out my post-event blog.  For those of you who wait breathlessly for this post I apologize and hope you can forgive me for being so tardy.

Anyway, there have been a few excellent post-event blog posts that do a great job of highlighting some key takeaways and I want to make sure that you read these as well:

The main issues for OpenStack at this time are centered on these themes:

  • What is an OpenStack cloud? The foundation is asserting itself to ensure that cloud to cloud compatibility is guaranteed from all the various vendors developing OpenStack distributions. This is tricky as APIs change b/w releases and distributions are free to choose from the different projects within OpenStack to create a cloud; thus I expect this debate to get substantial press over the next 6 months of so.
  • Upgrades and Releases.  The current process for a new OpenStack release is every 6 months with little to no guarantee that any API will be backward compatible and that individual projects will work with anything other than the latest version; e.g.  Grizzly Keystone and Havana Glance. Rob Hirschfeld is leading an effort to ensure that developers understand how this compatibility issues are a detriment for enterprise customers, I hope the community is listening.
  • Customers.  Several large companies presented their OpenStack solutions at the Summit giving more credibility to the question – are people really using OpenStack? While this is good, the projects are still in early stages and many of the prospective customers I spoke with at the event are comfortable deploying Swift in production but are not sold on Nova. They are not prepared to put anything of value on Nova at this time and OpenStack needs to put more emphasis on Nova in the Enterprise.

As for my efforts at the OpenStack Summit, I worked with Rafael Knuth (@rafaelknuth) from Dell in Poland to interview as many OpenStack leaders as possible to create a broad prospective on the community. Those videos are all available on a YouTube Playlist, OpenStack Summit Portland, for you to watch. Here are a few videos that were great highlights:

Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Canonical and Ubuntu

Chris Kemp, Founder of Nebula

 

I also had a chance to catch up with some old friends from my Xen.org days including Thomas Goirand (video interview) who does great work for Debian packaging OpenStack and Xen. From my recent days, I got the chance to meet the infamous @koolhead17 [Atul Jha] (video interview) who is a must know for anyone in the OpenStack community interested in the India market, that is us below (I was sporting my SUSE gear to win a fabulous prize that day):

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Finally, all the OpenStack sessions are now available on-line in video format, be sure to check out the great content.

Google Talks Massive Scale at App Engine Meetup

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Once again I took advantage of the amazing meetups in Austin to listen to Wesley Chun from Google discuss their App Engine PaaS as well as details on other cloud products. The session did get very technical as the meetup was for the Google Developers Group however I will present the information at a bit higher level since I am not a Django programmer and I “tuned” out that part. Also, I want to thank Spanning for hosting the event in their downtown offices which are impressive.

The event focused on the Google Cloud solutions with an emphasis on their App Engine but the overall theme of the night was the constant reminder that Google does thing at a massive scale. Here are some data points from late 2011 they presented to give you an idea of what scale means to Google:

  • Size of Google search index – 100 Million Gigabytes
  • Number of YouTube video hours uploaded per minute – 72 hours
  • Google App Engine # of active developers per month – 150,000+
  • Google App Engine # of active applications per month – 200,000+
  • Google App Engine applications generate 2 billion page views per day  

Wesley also presented the basic philosophy of Google around their cloud solutions – take their internal solutions and open them up to the world. In the SaaS space they offer Google Apps and in the PaaS space they offer Google App Engine with a recent announcement a few months back of Google Compute Engine for IaaS. More on Google Compute Engine later in this post.

As for App Engine, the focus is on three criteria delivering “true elasticity”:

  • Easy Build
  • Easy Manage
  • Easy Scale

I am skipping the PaaS overview portion of the discussion and send you off to Wesley’s post on the cloud segment. App Engine places your application in its own Sandbox where it cannot interfere or be interfered with from other applications on the platform. A set of APIs/Services are available for developers to leverage when writing applications for App Engine to ensure your application operates properly within the infrastructure. Some of the API/Services presented were Memcache, Mail, XMPP, Datastore, Images, User Services,…

An interesting comment from Wesley on performance of applications in Google App Engine is worth repeating, applications must respond to a customer in less than 60 seconds or that instance will be immediately shut down. In fact, the faster your application responds to the users, the better your application will perform in terms of getting faster scale-up, etc. The longer your application takes, the less likely your application will receive additional infrastructure to support it. The message is pretty clear that your application needs to be incredibly responsive and run efficiently to take advantage of the scaling capabilities of App Engine.

Some customers using App Engine included Best Buy, Evite, Direct TV, Forbes, MTV, Buddy Poke, Pulse mobile app, and Gigya. Here are some amazing stats from these customers to give you perspective on what scale means to Google.

  • Buddy Poke – More than 62 million users; ~ 10% of user base runs the application daily; App Engine Datastore holds at least 62 million data objects
  • Gigya – Create applications for one-off events that have huge instant scale potential; royal wedding in UK saw spike from 0 page requests per second to 1,600 page requests per second in a 3 hour period
  • Pulse – serves 100 million requests per day

Finally, I wanted to comment on Google’s statements about their Google Compute Engine which was launched to a private beta in May 2012. The target for this IaaS is not simple web applications or random VMs but rather significantly large (hard-core) compute intensive applications requiring thousands of cores and super-fast inter-VM communication. Google has created a private network for the VMs that are separated from other users on the system to give high performance VM communication a priority. This focus on a public IaaS cloud is different than what I have seen from vendors such as Amazon, VMware, etc. My take is that they are building a high performance computing (HPC) public cloud to handle the truly big, massive computationally intensive processing.

Google also talked about other cloud solutions they offer including Cloud Store, Cloud SQL, Big Query, Google Prediction, Fusion Tables, and Course Builder MOOC. I was not aware of some of these products and suggest you spend some time on Google’s cloud sites to learn more about some interesting products. 

Death of the 10 Page WhitePaper – Intelligence Driven Marketing

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I attended an interesting ½ day event from TechTarget today, Online ROI Summit: How intelligence driven marketers survive and thrive in a tough economy. The event was held downtown in Austin with a nice breakfast taco selection and lunch which I missed as I had other meetings to attend. I have organized the notes from that meeting by speaker and topic below.

Introduction: Intelligence Driven Marketing with Mike Cotoia, COO TechTarget

  • Current issues facing marketers
    • Do more with less ; Sales wants more leads ;  Conflicting goals of quantity vs quality
    • Salaries now being tied to sales pipeline and revenue; Sales and Marketing are not always on the same page
  • Who is an Intelligence Driven Marketer?
    • Know the needs of the prospects, what they want
    • IT is now purchased by teams not individuals
    • Leverage right tools for engagement
    • Leads are Opportunities

“Walk a mile in their shoes” with Jon Brown, Publisher, CIO and Strategic Markets TechTarget

This talk was a discussion with two local IT decision makers from a large, global company and a small, fast growing startup.

  • Purchase cycle is rapidly shrinking (Marketing things takes 12 months and IT/Customer thinks 6 months)
  • Business users (BU) are driving IT solutions and need technology MUCH FASTER than IT likes
    • BU are technically savvy and will create the solution themselves if IT does not engage
    • Successful projects involve both IT and BU; however IT is no longer leading technology decisions
  • Technology research is being conducted by BU with or without IT assistance
    • IT Consumers want simple materials to quickly determine if solution fits their needs
    • IMAGES are more important than text and no 10 page whitepapers!
  • BU and IT customers are not interested in being contacted until they are ready to reach out; research stage is not the time to collect info as they are turned off by sales outreach before they are ready

Audience engagement best practices with Heather Berggren, Sr. Marketing Program Manager Dell and Jeff Ramminger, Sr VP Field Marketing TechTarget

  • Paradigm Shift : Seller Control is shifting to Buyer Control
    • 2/3 of buying process is completed before sales is contacted
    • Nurtured leads increase sales pipeline 20% and make 47% larger purchase
    • More and more sales functions are now moving into the job of a marketer
  • Marketing Content
    • Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
    • Target messages to various prospects in their medium of choice (social media – Facebook, Twitter, Video)
    • Consumption – how and where are people getting their information
    • Sales – critical that sales teams consume the marketing content as prospects do to better understand what the marketing message is
    • Take notice of unintended customer reaction to marketing message; may hit unrelated solutions (e.g. Cloud message may lead to a security sale)
  • Don’t assume customers fit into your buckets; meet the customer on their terms

Innovate or fade away with Andy Briney, SVP Custom Media TechTarget

  • Brand recognition is no longer an issue; brand evolution is
    • Difficult for customers to see your company in a new way
    • Corporate branding may not do justice to your solution within the company
  • Innovation – Starts with Observation
    • Intersection of “desirable to users” – “viable in marketplace” – “possible with technology”
  • Twitter has altered fundamental way humans behave
    • Ignore information not instantly available in a form we want

Here are some interesting stats or ideas I picked up:

  • 80% of customers don’t engage with a company until they have selected the vendor to look at
  • Simplify product content on main page and point to more details for future follow-up after vendor is selected for proof of concept trial
  • 2/3 of buying process is completed before sales is contacted
  • Sales people are coin operated

Finally, this was a great event and I am pleased that I had time to spend a few hours listening to TechTarget as well as customers and marketing professionals.

Amplify Austin Starts in 6 Days – Please Join the Cause

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From March 4 -5 a group of local non-profit organizations in Austin are joining together to raise $1 million dollars to support these important local groups, Amplify Austin.

My daughter currently has weekly therapy as part of the Healing with Horses Ranch program for children with special needs and I am pleased to help promote their participation in the Amplify Austin initiative.

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Every dollar donated to Healing with Horses Ranch goes directly to providing Equine Assisted Activities to individuals with extraordinary challenges! Every client receives at least a 40% scholarship as our fees only cover about 60% of the cost to provide these Equine Assisted Activities. In addition, no student is turned away due to lack of funds so an additional scholarship will be provided.

Visit this website (AmplifyATX.org) during Amplify Austin Day, which starts at 7pm, March 4 and ends 7pm, March 5.

At that time, this website will be transformed into a giving site; you’ll be able to search by the name of the nonprofits you love like Healing with Horses Ranch or the causes you’re passionate about.

You will have a greater impact by giving through this website on Amplify Austin Day because our sponsors are matching your donations, and prizes of $1,000 will be given hourly to the nonprofits that garner the most dollars or donors.

Austin Cloud User Group – Encrypt, Encrypt, Encrypt,…

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Picture from Brad Knowles via Meetup.com

Last night, Dustin Kirkland, CTO of Gazzang spoke on the importance of security via data encryption in cloud solutions at the Austin Cloud Use Group.  His insight and experience in the encryption space is impressive and is definitely a go to person when it comes to understanding data encryption.

Here are some thoughts from his talks which stood out for me:

  • What’s Changed in Security in Cloud?
    • Automation and Orchestration – Non-interactive VM activity is driving security further away from administrators; e.g. spin up of a 1,000 VMs with auto authentication
    • Randomness – lack of entropy when starting mass amounts of VM; likely to be replication amongst the VMs in setting up security settings automatically
  • Sensitive Data Proliferation
    • Every VM contains a great deal of information that must be secured to protect your cloud solutions and the more VMs you spin up, the more changes there are for leaks
    • Private Keys, Config Files, Log Files, App Data, User Data, Password Hashtags, Machine DNA
  • Case Study in Why Encryption is Critical – Dept of Health and Human Services
    • From 11/09 – 11/12 480 Data breaches were reported
      • 72% of those incidents directly solved by having the data encrypted
      • Theft of a physical device, lost disks, bad disposal of media
  • What Should Yo Do?
    • Host/Guest/Network
      • Encrypt with SSH ; TLS/SSL should be used more
      • File Systems – eCrypts, TrueCrypt, ZNcrypt
      • Block Storage – dmcrypt
    • Overlayroot Tool
      • Encrypts all changes occurring within a VM
      • Demo of this tool was done and is very impressive piece of technology
      • Link above is to Dustin’s blog announcing this unique Linux solution

If you attended this event and want to add other thoughts from this meeting please feel free to add to this blog in the comments section to ensure that readers who were not able to attend the event can get the great information shared by Dustin.