A Weblog…Again

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".

New Weblog Theme

Found and installed a great new weblog theme called Statement.  It is minimalist but yet looks modern.  The only thing I didn’t like was that the header was a GIF, so I had to create a textual GIF.  In any case, this is an improvement from the last theme.  I’m pleased.

Bill Gates Releases Mosquitoes

Reported here.

At the TED conference, Bill Gates gave a talk about his efforts to eradicate mosquitoes.  During the talk, he opened a jar of full mosquitoes and set them free in the auditorium and said, "There is no reason only the poor should be infected."  Obviously, the mosquitoes were malaria-free.  Though this was a stunt, it did illustrate a point and it was a gutsy move on his part.  I don’t know all the details on what he is trying to do to help stop malaria, but I do give him credit that he isn’t just sitting back enjoying his wealth or trying to grow his business.  He is doing something meaningful and hat’s off to him.  Microsoft gets slammed way too hard for the products they put out, but in the future, Microsoft will probably be seen as the single most important company in the era of personal computing.  In fact, in my opinion, Google has yet to become as significant as Microsoft, which is something that most people overlook.

NYTimes APIs

For future reference:

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/announcing-the-best-sellers-api/

Updated:

They just opened up an Articles API.  Here is the main developer’s page:

http://developer.nytimes.com/

What It Takes to be a “Cloud Platform”

The cloud platform players are shaking out.  Obvioulsy, Google, Salesforce, Amazon are leading the pack and newer entrants like Microsoft are trying to stake their own claim.  This is a good article that describes some of the characteristics of a successfull cloud platform:

•  Easy to use, ’standards’ oriented development code
•  Reliable and secure development environment
• Automated and flexible procurement capabilities
• Name recognition and brand equity
• Customer base and channels to market
• Developer/Partner network

NAS & CD Collection

I successfully finished ripping my complete CD collection, which is probably only about 400 CDs.  Now, I can stream it using DAAP and have any iTunes client pick it up.  (Too bad that Songbird does not have solid, built-in support for DAAP.  I had only mild success with the DAAP plugin.)  What is really cool is that my complete CD collection only took up 1% on my NAS:

Virtualization & “Elastic Infrastructure”

In this post, Lori MacVittie seems to be stretching it in this post of her defense of F5 appliances as "elastic infrastructure".  Certainly, it is true that the virtualization hype is off the charts right now and there is a rush to virtualize all aspects of the network infrastructure and that this is an unwise move (see here).  But to state that "VIPRION essentially treats each blade like a virtual image" is simply untrue.  What about the hassle of procuring another blade, obtaining CapEx signoff, shipment, delivery, etc.  With a "virtual" appliance none of those concerns are there.  I’m not saying that she is wrong about advising the use of hardware for stability, reliability, security, it is just that she is trying to put a square in a circle by stating that a hardware appliance is like a virtual appliance. 

Cloud Computing in Plain English Video

An exceptionally well done video that effectively and concisely explains "cloud computing", its origins, the value proposition, etc.  Highly recommend to watch it a couple of times!!

Link

Update:

Another good video about cloud computing.

Link