A Weblog…Again

Nike Sensor + iPod

I was just about to pull the trigger and buy the Nike Sport Kit that works with the iPod as well as an armband to hold the iPod in.  Unfortunately, I have an old iPod Mini (2nd gen) and the Nike Sport Kit only works with the iPod Nano and Touch.  This is a real bummer as I have started to make jogging a part of my life.  Even though I am only jogging about 2.5 miles at a stretch, I have been fairly consistent for the past few months, averaging about 3 times a week.  My wife does have an iPod Nano (4th gen), so I could try to talk her into swapping with me, but that probably won’t work.  Guess I’ll either have to buy a Nano or just be content to listen to jogging podcasts on the Mini for a while.

Upcoming Projects

So, my wife and son will be going on a little vacation in April.  I will have 7 days to myself including one whole weekend.  This is the ideal time to spend some serious time on one of the many mini-projects I’ve been working on or have planned.  The projects include:

1. Configuring the home network correctly for the WDS (Wireless Distribution System) so that the main wireless access point in my office can communicate with the wireless access point in the basement where the XBox360 and home theatre are.  This is key for being able to watch Instant Movies via Netflix.
2. Instead of #1, run Cat 5e cable from my office to the basement.  The challenge with this is running the cabling itself.  Ideally, I would like to run it inside the house, but that may be beyond my skillset.  I am leaning towards doing this instead of #1, because it will be very reliable.  I have had a lot of issues with the WDS implementation by DD-WRT. 
3. Work on my little Contacts application on Google App Engine using Django.  I think I’ll probably start this over from scratch, since it has been so long since I worked on it.  Without having a concentrated, focused amount of time on this, I just don’t seem to be able to make much progress.
4. Work on creating some video-casts showing how to setup the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS).  I haven’t seen any video-casts that cover the basics of UCS, so I think it would be useful.
5. Create a presentation that summarizes the state of cloud computing focusing on the types, definitions, resource pointers, etc.  Though there are a lot of presentations already about cloud computing, this would be more an exercise in self-edification.

Amazon Cloud Hosting

I have been meaning to play around with creating a virtual machine instance on Amazon Web Services  for quite a while now, but I saw this guide from Dave Winer and decided to give it a whirl.  It took me about 30 minutes from start to finish to get a brand new Windows based image created and started on Amazon’s cloud using EC2 and S3.  This is just simply amazing and drop-dead simple.  Why anyone would want to host their web application on their own hardware is beyond me.  Amazon has made creating a virtual machine image almost as easy as ordering a book.  Because I had my virtual machine instance only turned on for a few minutes, this little exercise cost nothing.  I would strongly urge every technical person to try this out, just for the mere sake of seeing how simple. powerful and disruptive this technology is.  Using Amazon’s cloud services is still too expensive (about $90/month) for hosting a personal weblog or something like that, but it is an ideal candidate for a startup that needs hosting services with minimal operational management overhead. 

Application Requests in the Cloud and Load Balancing

MacVittie does make a very good point in this article, "Not all application requests are created equal".  She argues that by abstracting away the benefits of Layer 7 load balancing when moving applications into the cloud, we lose the ability to tweak how our applications perform.  One of the supposed benefits of the cloud is that it takes away all the tweaking and configuration of the network level and load-balancers falling erroneously into that category.  Load-balancers though have evolved into application delivery platforms so it seems like their functionality should be exposed on the cloud.  The cloud’s answer to this is that horizontal scalability will address any and all performance issues.  This may or may not be true and will likely depend on the individual implementation of the particular cloud.  I think that clouds are still in their infancy and that the current generation of clouds, i.e., "Cloud 1.0", will have a limited set of features that are exposed to its customers  As it matures, I am quite confident that customer demand for greater control will force clouds to expose functionality like this so that they can have greater granular control of their "mini-cloud".

Unified Computing System

Well, the cat is out of the bag and now "California", now called the Unified Computing System, is public knowledge.  I recently joined the professional services team that will be supporting UCS.  Services will be a key aspect of the success of UCS, so it will be pretty exciting and telling in the coming months.  More to come later.

Here is the announcement.

Developers Replacing Network Admins with Cloud Computing

Very interesting article, Why virtualization is shaking up IT data center, that begins to hint at how data centers will change as virtualization and more importantly unified computing gain predominance.  In particular, I was struck by one passage:

Those not finding such next-generation systems cost effective will likely migrate to external cloud environments that themselves use these concepts to deliver service. In fact, in terms of pure numbers, that may be the way a majority of companies choose to go. Many cloud experts note, however, that the technicians doing so will be developers, not system administrators, which again is a change in most data center cultures. More on that later.

By moving data and applications to the cloud, an organization will not need to maintain network admin skillsets, rather what will be more in demand will be the ability to interact with and extract data from the cloud using programmatic interfaces.  Increasingly, the choice of the interface is REST based as is witnessed by Amazon Web Services.  So the question arises, if an organization is 100% cloud-based for all of its IT services, is their a role for a network admin?  Increasingly, the answer appears to be "no".