i have unfortunatelly lost the mommentum of where my thoughts were going since the last time
i had a propper chance to sit down. so forgive me if my catch up is a bit sloppy when i attempt
to reply to the several threads that i have missed over the last four weeks.
@Arithma, as it was in the 90s, turn of the millenium and today. back int he days when there
was geocities and tripod and all similar, many speculated on what they realy served. some
were ahead of their times, others just lame copy of others. the "disruption" was that such
free service based solutions competed with ISP based expensive services. a few ads here and
there didnt bother most bloggers back then if they got it for free instead of paying to the
likes of 20$/month for just hosting a basic HTML website. i remember back in mid 90s, coders
were charging an average of 400$ for an html page with several paragraphs and two pictures.
yes, those were the days. the point here is, when there is something conventional and at the
same time, something new, the charge is horrific. this phenomena has time over time been
followed by a "disruption". the disruption in this case is the act of rebranding, and providing
different means to acheive the same goal. this brakes the market monopoly, branding and how
solutions are delivered and served. back then, sites such as tripod and the likes offered
free generators that rendered basic sites. this later lead to the development of many
horrific WYSIWYG apps to achieve the same. so market shifted from coders who got to charge
big money, to companies that developed generators or WYSIWYG apps to achieve the same end
goal.
so in todays topic, the cloud and what it means, in short, it is a phenomena followed by a
disription, a shift that will make things once again different to what we are accutomed to.
for example, you no longer own or host a physical server, which you labor to maintain and
operate. instead of having to rely on conventional services and operations, you can concentrate
on the actual part of just having the app with worrying less of the underlying moving parts.
when that staged is reached, it is less of an essence whether it is operating in with your
own tidious labor and more of multiplying the benefit of the single app in question. because
of such, the shift is changing to an age old concept of xAAS, i start from some point and
concentrate on the above and not the bellow. xAAS is based on policies, compliance and SLA.
should the app/solution in question require more strict compliance, then you have a set
of service/products that you can use. if it is more lineant, then something else.
for example, a company can host its public websites on amazon. it can host its intranet
at the local ISP and email at google. its distributed pere where you have brokered the
deal and service that services you best. at that point, you dont care much is it centos
or ubuntu just as long as it is running. or then again, why be dependent on custom made
legacy apps, by your app as a service, for example setup your own bank or insurrance
company, do the paper work with your local authorities, and purchase the application
that does the internet banking and insurance for you. dont buy it, rent it as you use
it, have that app suite run against your selective bank or rates. your local dekkeene
can become your next local bank...
so the opportunities here with the cloud is to come up for example with the equivelent
of html generators or WYSIWYG apps. it is such things to which every coder today should
be prepared and embrace or find themselves to be just as archeic and legacy to the likes
of many old programs that dominated in the 80s and 90s.
@ALL,
defining the cloud, it is next to imposible to give a definite definition of what the
cloud is for the cloud in truth is a generic term that applies and reflects to different
parts of IT. for a CIO, its more to the likes of standardization, concolidation, metrics,
processes and the works. to a coder it more of new areas, new programing languages new
application/solution architectures, etc. to an admin, its more of devops type of work,
no more working as silos where the admin would be a subject matter expert in one field,
for example DB, the applicable knoweldge needs to be extended to other domains such as
frontend apps, auditing logs, resilience and replication, etc.
in short, cloud is realy a generic term. for one it means and applies to a set of disciplines
and to another, another set. the basic idea is that all are revamped to a form that
would make them more compatible and streamline work end-to-end. for example to be able
to deploy a full fledged datacenter in less than a month, or deploy your own branded
netflix equivelent service in just about the same time or less with lost cost.
such simplifcation and standardization enables you to repurpose your set of data.
multipurpose your data. just as with your car, you can go on a sunday drive or use
it to deliver stuff or use it to race, you need to do the same with your data. this
is what the idea of the big data is, the ability to repurpose your data. GE for example
registers about 20tb worth of data from different sensors on a single cross atlantic
flight. over the years, the amount of data has accumulated to a point of saturation.
they took that data, refined and enriched it ending up with new producs and services
that they can sell!
http://www.zdnet.com/general-electric-launches-data-lake-service-to-streamline-industry-big-data-7000032489/
https://www.gesoftware.com/industrial-data-lake
one of the main initiatives of the cloud is to cut down on TCO, improve on OPEX and
cut out on unecessary CAPEX.
Rahmus example of digitalocean is one good example comparable to the tripod and geocities
of the 90s.
look at netflix, they do not own a single datacenter or much of any hardware, its all
on the "cloud", amazon and the likes!
@Link,
selling the cloud as a virtualization, or consolidation, neither suffice to cover on
what the cloud is. such sales pitch and attempts are lame and should be stopped.
everyone wants to be on the bandwagon causing a horrible distortion in relation to the
cloud hype. its to the likes when apple wanted to add an I- prefix to everything. or
then again companies wanted to add an E- prefix to point that companies and services
are "electronic" enabled. lame attempts with poor results of which nothing much remains
today (lets not reffer to Itunes ;). as i mentioned earlier, the cloud covers all aspects,
it doesnt suffice to use kvm or pyhton or whatever, you need to dust everything end-2-end
to be able to claim the virtue of a cloud.
there has been a shift in specifing SLA and criterias. for often the selected solution
has had to have the characteristics of fault taulerance and high availability. even thou
those still apply, there is a shift towards the acceptance of resiliency to be an equivelent.
the idea of selfhealing and resilient technologies enables more distributed architectures
and sourcing. i am keen to see how long it will be before we see more applications
and solutions that are based on resiliency instead of high availability or fault taulerance.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/06/application-resilience-in-a-service-oriented-architecture.html
http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/11/hystrix.html
https://www.open-mpi.org/projects/orcm/
http://www.macroresilience.com/category/artificial-intelligence/
an abundance of labor force is not a guarantee of delivering quality on time. this is
something that many companies are struggling with after having outsourced a lot to India.
its because of such that companies want simpler deliveries, on time and on budget. for
this to happen, there has been a change in approach. from a cathedral way of working
to adapting to the scrum and agile way of working.
there is lots of changes ahead, the reason for that is there no longer is an excuse
not to be able to materialize a vision, thought or a concept. today, you can already
scrap on paper what kind of mobile device you want, and what kind of custom os and
sensors on it to be used for a particular use. maybe for example a disposable tablet
to the likes of the disposable waterproof cameras? sold exclusively to traveling agencies.
imagination is the limit. all that we as kids used to dream of can be done today
and we will see lots of innovation. one of my personal interest to follow is on
mesh computing and automation. for example how can your car communicate with a redlight pole
and all individual cars at the same intersection. i think there will be many brainfarts
and many brakethru. in short many things.
in regards to quantum computing, that has been going on for a while. for example
the NSA and google, both are intensively researching on quantum computing. means to
crush numbers at astraunomical rate. the ability the dwell into complex research
at very short period. hell i would be surprised if in 20 years, your local pharmacy
has a quantum pc that would be crunching on ebola equivelent custom refined and personalized
medication to your own gene sequence. a tid bit of imagination ;)
as for eric schmidt, he realy hasnt stated something that has not been stated before. he
just got the spotlight for it. the communities and people with whom i have enjoyed
most of my time happened to be the ones that stereotype society would classify as outcasts,
rebels without a cause, etc. those people were more creative than those who i have seen
in suits and ties. more brave to selfexpress, more brave to question and rethink.
those people did not stop thinking, they did not stick to a deskjob.
@arhmu,
mangle the works slacerack, rackscale ;)
here is a short example or ellaboration
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/rackscale/
in short hardware that scales in different ways, small footprint, specific usage, grid integration, etc.
a few weeks ago i was checking an implementation where the customer had a heavy duty
storage array that was well loaded with activity. the fun part was that the activity came
from a box similar to this one:
http://exxactcorp.com/index.php/solution/solu_detail/126
such hardware is deployed with the concept of resilience and not fault taulerance.
tell me, how much can you do if you had 192 cores fitted in two 2u chassis, what about
when you have a 40u rack,20x192cpu, that takes hpc and resilient service to a new level.
there is a devils advocacy when it comes to openstack itself. but that is a discussion
of its own.
in regards to containers, mate, they have been arround for ages. starting from the mainframe
era, later seen as compute partitioning. solaris had zones, hpux has the equivelent.
for a long time we have had chroot. and for a number of years, openvz. docker continues
on the virtue of these predecessors, its just being simplified and rebranded. how big
is the fuss, a lot of hype if you ask me. a lot of improvement, the kind we wish for.
the biggest advantange is simplification for deployment. just imagine, instead of
untarin sourceoude and compiling, or installing rpm and configuring, just drop a container
and run. yes it is a big improvement. its been on tidious labor to maintain the rpm, the source code
the compilation. i wouldnt shutout the thought that inthe future we no longer compile,
its all scritpts. nothing new.
i remember some years ago, having a dialog with a friend, when it comes to virtualization, you
want to consume your cpu. you want to consume your ram. you want to do this in a smart way.
with virtualization, you are running multiple kernels on top of one with each capsulated having
its own private "eco-system". what about maximizing by eliminating the need to run useless
number of kernels if they are not required. containers are a must, are a need but do not
serve the whole plethora. they can function for given needs.
yes there is no future without a data plane and a controller plane, that is where we will be
seeing the abstraction of automation and orchestration.
as we have seen over the years, always when there is a new area, there are at least
a dozen upstarts that want to challenge and dominate. only a few survive. if you ask me,
there is one too many amongst, puppet, chef, fabric, salstack, ansible, serf, vipr, etc.
seriously, where to start? how to compare, how to measure? how to wheight?
the topic of PoC is also a topic that can spined off as a separte dialog. everyone wants
to proove something, to proove, those people want to do this the most conventional way,
present a live demo. others do it so by setting a price tag on top ready to signoff if
the targeted customer is keen.
now of to sleep, maybe more opinions and critics to quote tomorrow ;)