I was lucky enough to catch a lecture by Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, yesterday at RIT. He was a very energetic speaker and I enjoyed his talk very much. Below are some of the highlights:
“IP version 4 only has a 32 bit address space and that is my fault.”
Dr. Cerf wants our mobile phones to be viewed as controllers to all devices around us that will eventually be on the internet (home stereo, lights, projectors, etc.)
Dr. Cerf uses Arch Rock products in his home to monitor temperature and humidity in every room of his house.
There are multiple cloud vendors/networks available today however they are all different and have different interfaces. He views this the same as how in the days of the ArpaNet when networks were different and he helped to create TCP/IP and gateways and therefore believes it is an excellent area for research today.
Bit Rot was stated to be another huge problem that we will face in future years and generations
I was also lucky enough to be able to ask a question to Dr. Cerf directly in the Q&A part of the lecture. My question was how to innovate and create a common interface between the cloud platforms when the internet has become so commercialized as opposed to back when Dr. Cerf worked on the ArpaNet and it was basically a military experiment. His response was that in academia the comercial and political boundaries are not always present and leveraging organic growth and the open source community support is the best way to accomplish the task.
If Dr. Cerf comes to a institution near your area, I highly suggest hearing him speak.
The Cloud Computing Expo was quite the event and extremely tiring. Long days and lots of knowledge was shared. Below are some highlights from my notes and experiences.
Dave had a great presentation, he opened with a top 10 list of “Things You Didn’t Know About Cloud Computing” of which I would like to highlight three:
1) Al Gore invented cloud computing in 1989
2) Amazon only has three customers: Animoto, SmugMug, and the NY Times
3) IBM blank blank Cloud Computing blank blank JCL blank blank fully punch card compatible
Dave showed a prototype UI for assembling services in the cloud. Concept is you want a scalable/reliable database, no need to set it up and configure it, just drag a DB icon into your diagram.
The Sun Cloud API is definitely worth checking it out. It is a REST / JSON API licensed under Creative Commons and some cool new attributes like being completely self discovering after initial request
OpenOffice will soon have a “Save to Cloud…” option. The goal Sun has is to bring the notion of the cloud up to the end user level.
Reuven gave a brief overview Enomaly and his involvement with cloud computing
Talked about how in the talks he had with the various players in the industry during forming the Cloud Manifesto, companies did not want to be open in their discussions; hence the core problem.
The majority of his session was open discussion by everyone there and it was proposed that a Customer Council was needed to a unified voice of the community can be presented.
I found this session to be quite enjoyable due to the open discussion nature and hearing everyone’s remarks
As software is developed to run in the cloud and use cloud services, using SCA is more important than ever
Doug had a twitter feed up during his presentation and encouraged the audience to leave tweets and he checked it throughout the presentation. It was quite interesting.
Other items and areas that are worth mentioning:
Majority of folks representing large enterprises are still waiting for the following two items before moving to the cloud
1) Better security and certifications
2) Ability to run 50% in one cloud and 50% in another cloud so they can handle disaster situations where one cloud experiences trouble or goes bankrupt
We have reached the peak of hype with cloud computing and are now in a disillusionment stage
RightScale is working on integration with Eucalyptus and will be announcing full details and services end of April!
When in the cloud, software load balancers are really your only option and therefore become crucial, as hardware load balancers are not an option. Zeus was there touting their products.
Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform looks very impressive. I am looking forward to digging into it deeper and hopefully breaking it down on here.
I sat down this evening and looked at the schedule of sessions at the Cloud Expo next week. I’m looking forward to it all as well as meeting up with some colleagues in Thomson Reuters at the Times Square office.
I’ll be attending the Cloud Computing Expo in NYC at the end of the month. I’ll be there all three days thanks to a complimentary VIP Gold Pass from ParaScale. I’m looking forward to hearing great presentations, meeting lots of people, and partaking in engaging discussions.
If you are in NYC for this event, send me an email.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has long been the forerunner of the cloud computing industry. The people who research, follow, and use AWS are usually an enthusiastic group and love to talk about it and how it can be applied to applications and architectures. There are various AWS User Groups out there and I was lucky enough to find out there was one in my area (Rochester, NY).
Earlier this week I attended a Rochester Amazon Web Services User Group (RAWSUG) event hosted at RIT. Although the majority of what was covered was an overview presentation of AWS for those not familiar with it, it was great to see a room full of local AWS enthusiasts.
The presenters were Mitch Garnaat from Cloud Right and David Kavanagh from Direct Thought. They did a great job presenting and I enjoyed asking them questions and meeting them afterwards. Chris Moyer, from Cloud Right, also joined to support questions. Here are some of the items I noted that stood out from the session:
Ability to mount read only version of an EBS filesystem to more than one machine has been talked about Amazon and will potentially be on the radar for release in the future.
David has been working on a slick iPhone interface for AWS and gave a demo. I liked it, however wished effort would have been put towards a mobile web version instead so that it can benefit all mobile platforms.
Confirmation that Amazon will be providing a hardware load balancing solution; availability date was TBD
I enjoyed the event greatly and look forward to the next one and potentially working with David, Mitch, and Chris in the future. If you are looking to master the cloud, finding a group of other cloud enthusiastis that you can meet with and share news/ideas is a great approach. I highly recommend checking out the AWS User Group page and see and attend an event near you.
Ben Rockwood of Joyent was keynote speaker at the OpenSolaris Storage Summit, held on Sept 21, 2008. Below is a video of his speach which does a great job summarizing the cloud computing in general with a focus on storage in the cloud. Ben gives straight forward remarks on technologies and providers out in the industry.
Creating RESTful web services is a great paradigm that goes well with cloud computing models. Recently I started using a tool called Enunciate written by Ryan Heaton that does basically takes the pain out of writing web services. The user only needs to create Java beans, an interface, and an implementation for their interface and Enunciate takes care of the rest, creating SOAP, REST, and GWT-RPC end points, as well as others. I put together a small presentation on it which I also presented at work.
IBM has recently started to really crank out the documentation and material on their SOA development and best practices site. One of particular interested would be their Servers on demand with EC2 article which is what I feel a great introductive to Amazon EC2. Chaganti Prabhakar did a great job pulling the appropriate pieces of information together in a well presented manner. If you have been reading about Amazon EC2 but have not yet tried it out, the above referenced article is a great place to start.
One of the first steps essential to getting the most out of cloud computing is to ensure that your design, thoughts, and mind have the correct focus. It is not simply a matter of using Amazon AWS and integrating a few frameworks. In my experience some of the best parts of cloud computing are the different approaches taken when designing your application to run in the cloud or moving an existing application to the cloud.
It is important to ensure that not only do you have the proper mindset but the members of your team are clear on your vision and the direction needed to take your application to the cloud. This involves items such as:
think high loads and how to handle loads that spike during certain times of day or public events
does your application have configuration or maintenance items that can only be performed by development? if so, eliminate it and anything similar
avoid designs that have “special servers” or configurations of machines within the system. This will lead to cloud management nightmare and you won’t really see the full benefit
avoid designs that appear good from a software design standpoint, but when viewed as part of the big picture and from a maintenance standpoint, cause more pain then help
The above will be become apparent as you step deeper into cloud computing and scaling your sites.
Welcome to Mastering The Cloud. For approximately the past year I have been following cloud computing news, technologies, and architecture. This exciting and growing approach is opening up doors for developers and industry like never before. I have been researching and commenting on industry blogs for a while and decided it was time to contribute back to the community in an official manner; hence the start of Mastering The Cloud.
I will do my best to share news, views, ideas, and tools on cloud computing. Working for a private company, I am also interested in private clouds as well, and therefore will give focus to that controversial topic here as well. Software to facilitate private clouds will also be a focus of mine, please stay tuned for more on this area.
Once again welcome to Mastering The Cloud and please comment or email me with any comments, feedback, or discussion points.
I was lucky enough to catch a lecture by Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, yesterday at RIT. He was a very energetic speaker and I enjoyed his talk very much. Below are some of the highlights:
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