thoughts on computing

I’m back.

In fact, not only am I back and tearing into things, I’m more excited about this industry in general and our company in particular than just about anytime.

Not only that, but am having an enormous amount of fun … getting into the flow of all of the myriad of conversations, customer implementations, arguments, and more that have developed in the past few months, and beyond that am developing a nearly insatiable appetite for moving forward.

That may be all well and good, but a fair question would be to wonder just what am I coming back from?

My Plan
Just before the middle of last year a set of discussions bore fruit, and I sat down to co-author the Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing with Eric Marks (CEO of Agile Path).  Everything lined up nicely – we had a publisher (Wiley), a clear need in the market, and something which we hoped would contribute to the development of our industry.

Through the course of the summer we made fine progress, with everything moving forward to a late fall / mid-winter publication date. My focus admittedly narrowed quite a bit (as anyone who has had the privilege to contribute to a book will readily attest) … but the end result was definitely worth the effort.

(I’ll talk more about this writing project at another time, but for now let me just say that I loved writing and hope to be doing quite a bit more in the future)

A Peculiar Turn of Events
Then something really odd happened. Without going through all the details (and some of them are strange indeed), I found myself literally lost.

<feel free to insert joke here – we certainly have!>

One moment I’m driving home from the airport, looking forward to seeing the family, catching up a bit on email etc., then working on the book some more … the next moment I’m driving down the road with no idea where I am, what I’m doing, how I got there, or perhaps most disconcerting of all, how to get home.

Then things got really strange.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks I was diagnosed with a macro pituitary adenoma – basically a good-sized non-malignant tumor right smack in the middle of my head, causing all sorts of havoc with vision, cognition, conversation, and much more.

At the advice of one of our daughter-in-laws (Rachel, a three time cancer survivor with an astonishing story of her own) we named the tumor, had a mini-celebration noting it’s arrival, and began coming up with some really bad jokes. One sample:

Man we’re really glad that all of these symptoms weren’t just in my mind … oh wait a minute, they are!

Right after that we figured out a course of treatment, made all sorts of obvious arrangements, and ran like mad to finish the book.

A New Start
Very early on Monday morning, November 23, Carol (my wife) and I headed down to Barnes-Jewish Medical Center for whatever would come next. By 7:30 I’d met more than a dozen of my newest best friends (believe me, when you meet someone whose job is to play around inside your head you’re pre-disposed towards being friendly), by 7:45 said goodbye to my family, and soon thereafter to consciousness.

The procedure itself was a real geek-fest (or so I’m told – I have only fleeting memories of the OR itself) – real-time location and targeting systems (able to track a wide variety of instruments within my head with astonishing accuracy) displaying everything on six 50″ plasma displays surrounding the operating table, a robotic inter-operative MRI that emerged from a garage part way through the procedure to see if any tumor remained to extract, and much, much more.

By 4:30 I’d come to, by 10 pm I realized that “I could see, think, & talk” (that left me so excited that I didn’t really sleep for a couple of days), and by Thursday morning (Thanksgiving in the US) I went home – tired, but deeply grateful.

happy to be home

Spinning Back Up
December was mostly about getting some rest, generally letting my body catch up with how good my mind felt, and enjoying all the family and friends that were coming in for the Christmas and New Year holidays. As a bonus I was unexpectedly able to travel to see one of our sons graduate from Marine Corp bootcamp (though by train rather than plane – another bonus in and of itself).

One funny and definitely unexpected “upside effect”: I felt so astonishingly great so quickly that I had a momentary flash of panic, wondering just what I’d written in the months preceding. Fortunately my fears were put to rest by re-reading the manuscript, which turned out to be in pretty good shape (needing only the usual late-stage edits).

With the new year – and a re-gifted ability to think clearly – comes much new opportunity, and I am definitely looking forward to helping our customers truly take advantage of all that this transition to cloud computing has to offer, re-joining industry-wide discussions in all forms, and (of course) helping Appistry continue to deliver the most complete, useful cloud application platform extant (yes I know I’m biased, but I’ll happily argue that is so with good reason … preferably over a couple of fine craft brews).

The timing with the book is pretty good – Wiley is planning on releasing it (both physically and electronically) on April 12 – and much of my upcoming work will include stuff related to Exec’s Guide.

So please forgive me if I’ve either been very obtuse, perhaps a bit contrary, or simply slow to respond … in many ways this is truly a new start, and both personally and professionally it would be hard to be more excited.

Here’s to a fantastic 2010 and beyond!

There is much more to this story. In particular faith is very important to us. As one of the uber-intellects in human history (St. Thomas Aquinas) was fond of saying “grace builds on nature”. In other words, everything was all of one piece – the great doctors at the top of their game, a fine medical institution providing them the context in which to work, and the prayerful support of family and friends. I’ll post more on this stuff (someday, someday) at my personal blog www.hopeitis.com.

Update: The WSJ posted a more detailed article elaborating on concerns among analysts over whether RIM was in over their head, and how the repeated outages would affect their reputation with business customers. While interesting, note that the analysts quoted focus on the possibility that “RIM has inadequate backup systems”. I think the problem is more fundamental than that … read on for some thoughts as to the real culprit(s).

As has been widely reported (Another Black Eye for Blackberry – WSJ, Blackberry Network Recovering After Major Outage – DataCenter Knowledge, New Delay Hits Blackberrys – NY Times, …) Blackberry users (I am not one) appear to have suffered an extended outage (8 hours+) yesterday, perhaps extending through the evening. Reports of the locations affected varies, but appear to have included the US and possibly other areas around the world.

What I thought was interesting was a tidbit in an official statement from RIM (emphasis mine):

(The) root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure,” the company said.

So reading between the lines, a new version of a mobile app was released that started putting additional pressure on one or more key databases inside the core service. That problem continued unabated through another release of the mobile app, while the key database(s) continued to be affected, each and every day, until finally outages began to appear (again).

Thoughts
On the positive side RIM has, in many ways, operated one of the first SaaS offerings for many years – the Blackberry messaging service – in a way that is curiously low-profile, yet crucial to many all at the same time. Low profile in the sense that when people talk about SaaS almost no one mentions RIM, crucial in the sense that so many subscribers rely on them to deliver their basic messaging.

It’ll be interesting to follow this a little further, but given the age of the Blackberry software infrastructure it wouldn’t be surprising at all to find relational databases (or perhaps some other centralized data store) here and there throughout the message flow. Perhaps in only some sort of meta role, yet apparently still crucial enough that their failure can take out the entire service.

In any case, when all is said and done my guess is that this will simply be another case of traditional databases defining the scaling horizon of a service, limiting it in ways that are (these days) entirely unnecessary.

While the details on how traditional databases limit the scaling horizon of cloud-based systems require much more discussion than is reasonable for this post, just keep one thought in mind: any dependency that is not intrinsic to the actual problem, to the data itself, must be eliminated.

As much as I’d like to think that this will be the last Mad Kitty of 2009, experience indicates that this will probably not be so … unfortunately.

About this time last year we had a bit of fun with putting together a “2009 Predictions Webinar” … enough so that today we are repeating the event for 2010.

I should probably elaborate on the “we” … all colleagues of mine at Appistry, Sam Charrington pulled this together and moderates, while Kevin Haar (CEO), Michael Groner (our Founder and Chief Architect), and myself  are the panelists.

Sam posted a bit more about today’s webinar here, and you can register here. – we start at 2 pm EST and promise to be done within an hour.

We’ll start by looking at our predictions from last year, so that should be entertaining all by itself … Sam has already posted a more detailed analysis as well – you may want to check it out and see if you agree with his evaluations.

In any case, we will be taking questions so hopefully you can join us today and fire away. I think that we’ll also post the recorded webinar relatively soon as well. Hope to “see” you soon.

Just for a little more logistical enjoyment I’ll be participating today from San Diego, where I am preparing to witness my son graduate from bootcamp at MCRD San Diego. More on that another day!

While this has nothing to do with cloud computing, it is just some cool news … it’ll be great to see the prelude to the Lord of the Rings receive some lavish attention … finally.

Cover of the 1st Edition

After about a billion twists and turns, it looks like the last lawsuit standing in the way of Jackson, del Toro et al filming The Hobbit has now been cleared. From the WSJ:

Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. will be able to film “The Hobbit” on his fabled journey after reaching a settlement with the heirs of J.R.R. Tolkien, who sued its New Line Cinema movie studio over who owns the rights to the late author’s work … scheduled to begin shooting some time next year … terms of the deal are being kept confidential”

There are about a billion reasons why I like the whole Lord of the Rings world, from The Silmarillion to the fourth age. But The Hobbit was my introduction, so I will always have a particular fondness for this one.

Besides, the whole business of Bilbo Baggins and his unlikely adventure bear an uncanny resemblance to just about any successful startup … but that is most certainly a discussion for another day, perhaps over fine ale at a nearby pub.

More info in this story from the BBC.

Last week’s introduction of Virtual Private Clouds by Amazon provoked, as you might expect, quite a bit of discussion in many places where the cloudisti congregate.

Early conception of brownian motion

While much of the energy expended was more or less Brownian in nature (in the sense of lots of movement in all sorts of directions, not necessarily all that useful), there were a couple of points that were made by a few that are worth mentioning, if only because they are so persistently mentioned.

Haven’t We Heard This Before?
Some folks have a view that cloud computing = public cloud computing. For some “if you own it, it’s not cloud”. While ownership is a significant consideration, and the idea of instant access to at least the possibility of vast infrastructure with only a modest credit card is a cool option, to then conclude that all clouds must be public is simply a non sequitur.

Even less defensible is the related notion that “if it’s on your premise, it’s not cloud”. While that may seem obvious to the startup, with everything that you own (or hope to own!) within arm’s reach, it doesn’t even begin to make sense in the case of a global enterprise, with facilities scattered – well, all over the globe – here and there, even everywhere. Of course, some stuff is bought, some leased, some fully out-sourced and so forth.

Those who are in this “all clouds are public” camp often say that nothing on premise could ever compete economically. Unfortunately, this is usually an emotional argument, almost never backed up with any meaningful analysis. Look no farther than the McKinsey study earlier this year which did look at the numbers and concluded that cloud computing didn’t really make economic sense (I don’t agree with that conclusion either, but that will have to be a post for another day).

In any case, to say that an on premise cloud will a priori always result in less economic benefits is simply not true – it may or may not be true, depending upon the total cost of operations (power, facilities, salaries, etc.) vs. the total cost of the public (or virtual private cloud).

Private Clouds are Real
Of course, while there are many more considerations than simply cost, it is enough for taking a look at what is happening in cloud computing.

While public clouds providers (in many respects, though not all) have made many notable innovations (some technical, some biz models, some cultural, etc.), for the past couple of years there has been tremendous innovation in private clouds as well … those innovations are now beginning to deliver some real benefits.

While it is true that some so-called private cloud offerings may be nothing more than re-branded legacy products, after a bit of market confusion they’ll simply be forgotten as the market develops.

Real private clouds that offer the desirable characteristics of a public cloud – scalability, elasticity, commodity infrastructure, cheap operations – are certainly possible now. Possible and a reality for real enterprises. Real production instances exist today, with many more are in progress.

Yet even the most ardent private cloud advocates absolutely know that these are not the only solution for all cases. That just wouldn’t make sense.

What Will Happen
In reality, what is happening is the development of hybrid clouds – that is, clouds that are a mix of public, private, and everything in between.

Hybrid clouds are the reality that most enterprises will go to by default. That is, they’ll take a look at all their options, including public, private (on premise), and “virtual private” (off premise, but segmented in some manner) from a variety of vendors, and pick the right mix for them.

Of course, that mix will change over time, perhaps even moment to moment.

This is where the cloud application platforms come in, particularly those that enable hybrid clouds. That is, a software, operations, and architectural approach that allows all of these options to be selected precisely for when they make the most sense, in any combination that makes the most sense for that enterprise. at that particular point in time, and  for that particular set of work; it is that approach that truly enables hybrid clouds for the enterprise.

It’s about giving control over these costs and capabilities back to the enterprise customers, and letting them decide.

That is a hybrid cloud, and that is the future of cloud computing.

Amazon VPC (image courtesy of AWS)

After midnight last night I was just quietly working away on one monitor (turned vertical – some habits sure die hard, and I picked that one up way back in Xerox Altos days in graduate school). At any rate I had twitter quietly going just outside my field of view – you know, where you can sort of pickup a rhythm from the edges of your peripheral vision – when all of sudden there was a big spike in tweet traffic.

Well that broke me out of my focused alter-world, so I went ahead and scrolled back through the timeline to figure out what might have happened to cause this late night excitement. Sure enough, it was Werner Vogel’s post announcing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.

As I flipped through his post, followed by Jeff Barr’s post with a few more details, then the spike made sense – Amazon was causing some commotion by using the “P word”.

A Few Observations
The “P word” – private – is one that is near and dear to hearts of enterprise executives everywhere. Sure they want the scale, elasticity, and cost reductions that seem to accompany every discussion of cloud, BUT …

Every executive has their own fears that haunt them, fears of data loss, service outages, news of which spreads from website to blog to twitter to facebook before they even have heard what happenned, then if all heck breaks loose ending up as an unwelcome front page storie in the WSJ (complete with those sort of hand-drawn sketches of the suddenly well know).

No amount of therapy can remove those fears.

Of course, there are the necessary exceptions of the startups who first need to succeed so that they can have something to protect! But beyond startup phase, enterprises everywhere need assurance that their operations are safe in the cloud.

Hence, the move towards private clouds of all kinds, and in this announcement a particular flavor of virtual private cloud.

In any case here are a few initial day-of thoughts:

• This is a beta of a basic service. Look at what is provided – raw VMs, accessible across a VPN, with billing a bit more. That’s great, useful, and fine so far as it goes, but …
• Enterprises will demand much more. As my colleague Sam Charrington points out in a very interesting post, Amazon has not addressed many of the issues – such as security, control, and compliance – that will be absolutely essential for so many enterprise deployments. Imagine deploying a public company’s core finacial systems across the service as it stands today, and well you know how that’d go.
• Private clouds are here to stay. The simple truth is that Amazon, a leader in public clouds, has seen the opportunity (some would say were driven to, but that’s neither here nor there) that is the essence of private clouds – that is, some enterprises need / desire / demand some level of “privateness” in their clouds. Yes I know that Werner makes his normal argument that an enterprise can’t do private clouds, but he does so by equating private clouds with virtualization. Well that’s why a real private cloud strategy just doesn’t, in fact cannot rely solely on virtualization, but …
• Private clouds absolutely need a capable cloud application platform. Along with some operational practices (a post for another day) the reality is that most of the benefits normally associated with a cloud – elasticity, scalability, lower costs, and so on – are actually enabled by the cloud application platform.

Bottom Line
This was a great announcement for dialing up the energy levels in the industry-wide arguments over what sort of clouds are needed by the enterprise. More than that, this certainly extends EC2 in some great ways, so that now it can be a contender for an expanded role in an enterprise’s hybrid cloud strategy.

That so much of that conversation has been done in the abstract – with only the hope of an enterprise customer – leads to some peculiar conclusions by some, ideas that will never go over with a real enterprise – but that whole topic is certainly a post for another day.

In the meantime, let’s look at the bottom line on this announcement - this is a very good day for all those who have been busy building the world in which any enterprise can choose from the mix of clouds that best suit them, and do what they want to have done, when they want it done, cheaper and more reliably that it’s been done before.

Even more importantly is the true bottom line- this is a very good day for enterprises who are driving to gain more control over their technology operations, see the promise of cloud computing, and know that whatever is used needs to meet their enterprise-grade needs.

Their needs are being heard, and more importantly being acted upon.

And that is a very good thing.

A month or two back I put together a new description for Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing, and last week it seems to have migrated to the Amazon entry for the book. In any case, just wanted to share it with you:

Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing

Tap into the power of cloud computing and learn the strategic implications for your organization.

In less than a decade Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com went from unknown ideas to powerhouse fixtures in the economic landscape; in even less time offerings such as Linkedin, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and many others also carved out important roles; in less than five years Apple’s iTunes became the largest music retailer in North America.

They all share one key strategic decision – each of these organizations chose to harness the power of cloud computing to power their drives to dominance. With roots in supercomputing and many other technical disciplines, cloud computing is ushering in an entirely new economic reality – technology-enabled enterprises built on low cost, flexible, and limitless technical infrastructures.

The Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing reveals how you can apply the power of cloud computing throughout your enterprise, giving members of the C-suite a detailed look at:

• Why cloud computing must be a top priority on your company’s IT roadmaps
• How the drive for scale, lower costs and greater agility is making cloud computing a fiscal and technological imperative;
• The relationship between cloud computing and other relevant IT initiatives;
• The strategic implications of cloud computing for the enterprise;
• Where to begin and how to get started integrating cloud computing into your existing operations.

Now you can harness cloud computing’s potential for your organization. Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing shows you how.

Well there it is … hope that this sounds interesting to you, and that it will make a contribution to our collective push into the next age of computing.

Now that the bulk of the writing is winding down on the cloud book, I’m really happy to turn some attention to this blog (among many other things, most – like this – neglected far too much for far too long).

For all sorts of reasons we (Appistry) decided to move individual blogs away from the company umbrella. Sam Charrington will explain things fairly soon (though not yet), and I’ll point to that once posted.

But I guess the whole self-organizational roots run very deep in our collective culture, so most of us have already gotten started.

all the boxes are here

Moving In
As  you may have surmised this is my new blogging home, and more or less like moving into a new home there’s a lot of excitement, most of my stuff is in the new place, but with one practical problem …

… it’s mostly all still in boxes.

Oh well, enough is unpacked to get started

What’s Next
In the weeks and months to come I intend to be far more active in this space, covering a wide range of topics – from the latest in cloud computing technologies, competition, and most importantly to all of us in the business, real use cases, to speculation on what’s possible and perhaps what’s slowing progress.

Right now I think I’ll pay particular attention to the profound business implications of this whole transformation. Of course, along those lines I’ll also explore certain topics covered in the cloud book in more detail, perhaps examining topics from angles not yet considered, or considering developments in light of the principles laid down in the book.

I think I’ll go ahead and host the microsite for the book in this domain as well, but that’s still a month or so out.

One Last Thing
If you like what you see and it’s worth your time, please pass it along. If you think I’m “on crack” and would be better off doing … well just about anything else, as long as it doesn’t involve computers … then let’s buy a beer and begin arguing.

But no matter where you come down on my particular point of view, one thing is really beyond debate – cloud computing is real, it is probably the most significant technological shift in at least a decade, and it is beginning to happen fairly broadly right now, even as we sit here and cogitate.

So to paraphrase one of my all-time favorite ad tag-lines, let’s stop talking and just do it.

Photo of the first day of moving into the new house courtesy of Maria Neels, © 2008. “Just Do It” a registered trademark of Nike.

This is the new home for Thoughts on Computing, the professional blog of Bob Lozano (Appistry co-founder). All of the previous contents should be ported by this weekend, after which I will begin blogging anew.

In addition, this domain will host microsites for my professional writing projects, of which Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing is the first.

Stay tuned!

i have been heads down on a writing project that we hope to be able to announce soon, but every once in awhile I’ll pop my head up (sort of Punxsutawney Phil style, but that may be insulting the groundhog) and look around …

I’ll admit to not being much of a Kindle fan, in either it’s first or second iterations. Probably because I just like books. There – I’ll admit it. I like books. Physical books. Paper, stuff like that. Yes, an inordinate amount of my house is devoted to books … books on shelves, books in piles, books strewn here and there … (I’m going to mercifully spare you the Dr. Suess allusion!).

Having said that, my biggest heartburn with the first two Kindles has been the ratio of useful (viewable) screen to other stuff – be it the sort of Soviet-style industrial “design” in the first edition, or the as yet sizable, though clearly better looking case in the second.

So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’m warming up with the Kindle DX. Yes it’s pricey, I’m still concerned about the seizure-inducing etch-o-sketch erase flashes, and I still like physical books. Still, I am intrigued, somewhat for the device itself but probably more for the implications for electronic distribution of even more content.

Check out this short video that covers some of both of these points:

This video is from of an interesting startup called Newsy.com, which produces short video reports combining multiple perspectives into a single burst. It’s one of the new forms of journalism that I like, but more on that later.

Clark Kent, Reporter

What Happened to Newspapers?
Most of us in the geek world long ago shifted to getting most of our news via the net in one for or another. That trend has clearly spread out to a much broader percentage of the population, enough that newspapers are really struggling.

Not struggling as in trim here, trim there, invest a bit and everything will be ok, but struggling as in mortally wounded, say your goodbyes, and if you work there start thinking about what’s next.

This happened for a fairly simple reason – advances in computing technology made it possible.

Some of it was the basic stuff (servers, decent storage, and all that), some of it was ubiquitous net-based distribution, some of it was more usable devices (I do love doing the web on my well-used, not so much better for the wear iphone), and some of it was what people did with it (blogging, aggregation sites, and the like).

Yes a few of the newspapers will make a transition to digital in a form that’ll be sort of recognizable, but not too many. The reasons are really complex and outside the bounds of this post (or my expertise, really), but in essence too many of them for too long have thought that they were in a technology-enabled distribution business (typewriters, printing presses, newsprint, kids on bicycles), while in reality they were in the content business (think Clark Kent).

Clouds Enable the Next Big Bang
The funny thing is all of that shifting has been mostly before cloud computing. Most of what has happened to date in the newspaper business has been because the distribution technology shifted, and the new distribution model enabled a bunch of new competitors. It also opened up a bunch of new customers, but that’s been harder to realize.

But with the basics of distribution in place over the net, and with devices like the iPhone, Kindle DX & competitors, netbooks and more that make the physical presentation of content better and more ubiquitous, the big race will be on to slice and dice the content that’s available in better and better ways.

All of this sifting and sorting and searching is going to take far more computing, storage, and network capacity than anything our industry has done to date.

And I know a perfect platform for all that cool stuff.

By happy circumstance I had an opportunity to speak on a panel this week at the Reynolds Institute of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. The panel was focused on entrepreneurial opportunities, particularly those revolving around content. These guys get that the rules of their business are changing, and are definitely doing some cool stuff.