First Review for Executive’s Guide!
Kevin Jackson (Cloud Musings)
Kevin Jackson posted the first review of Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing on his Cloud Musing’s blog this past Tuesday.
Here are a couple of samples:
… this excellent book is an insightful description of how cloud computing can quickly sharpen the focus of information technology and line executives onto the delivery of real value.
… will soon become a leading industry reference.
Thanks for the kind comments, Kevin.
We’re reviewing the final page proofs now and creating the indices … after that, the book passes on to production (both physical and ebook). Very much looking forward to taking that last step.
This has been very interesting to join the publishing world (in a certain sense) precisely when it is in the midst of the greatest upheaval since, well probably since the invention of the printing press. More on that later.
iPad, Android, & Cloud Computing
Palm Treo 700p
A hopeless mess … has it really only been less than three years since mobile devices seemed like a hopeless, stale, torpid kill-zone?
Think back to the spring of 2007, when the best choices were either aging PalmOS, messaging-centric Blackberries, and the occasional Windows Mobile devices, with absolutely none able to render a decent web page.
On the off-chance that you could get a readable webpage, chances are the device itself would – particularly the PalmOS devices – would crash at really handy moments.
The whole situation was frustrating enough that there were many who wondered whether we’d ever get to a stage where any functions of these so-called “smart phones” were reliable enough to count upon … without even hoping for them to be capable enough to actually want to use.
Fortunately, those fears were soon to pass.
Mobile Web (most) Real Now
Where do we stand today?
A few months after the original iPhone announcement – say in the misty, far off ages of late ’07 – the leading edge of the change was already most readily apparent. With only a handful of devices on the market, it was already very clear that – in many ways – mobile web was just now becoming real.
A critical mass of factors – display, user interface, network speed, ubiquitous access, and extensibility, among others – made the iPhone fundamentally different than what had come before. Enough different that the web traffic was nearly always way disproportionate to device population.
In other words, the iPhone was the first mobile device on which “the web didn’t suck”.
Within two years the rapid emergence of the whole Android ecosystem (including the very interesting Nexus One) along with a number of other interesting competitors (if only Palm can get critical mass for WebOS), along with newly-resurgent RIM and the huge (but seemingly wandering – see update below) Nokia have utterly transformed the mobile device markets.
Mobile Without Web
But wait, there’s more … in perhaps a trend that not too many people outside of the true-believers anticipated, ebook readers have actually caught on. Between various Kindles, the Nook, and even a few new entries from Sony there is now real energy in this market.
Yes publishers have been scratching their heads and trying to figure out how best to participate, but not nearly so many people are laughing now. Ebooks are not only real, but the outlines of a path to mainstream acceptance are now beginning to be visible.
Apple iPad
Mobile Web x 10?
Earlier today Apple released the iPad, and as is often their habit have probably pushed the mobile web into warp 9, maybe 10.
True enough that tablets of one kind or another have been out for some time – I owned an HP 1100 five or six years ago, for example, and this is not even Apple’s first attempt (think Newton) – but for one reason or another tablets have never really caught on. Whether the iPad offers enough to change that or not remains to be seen – my betting is yes – but I’ll mostly leave that debate to others for now.
Yet there are many betting that this device really portends a new class of devices. For example, MC Siegler posted today on TechCrunch:
[the iPad is] the best way to browse the web in a style that is likely your preferred method: by touching it
Siegler is making the case that for anyone who already owns an iPhone or iPod Touch (now more than 75 million and counting) this is rapidly becoming a very familiar, even the preferred means for using the web. Of course, the same can be said for the owners of all of the Android, WebOS, and other advanced handsets.
Siegler made these comments after some time using one, and in doing so reflected similar comments from others who also spent time driving one today.
His bottom line: this is the first of a class of devices that are entirely optimized for content consumption (which also implies a degree of interaction, of course).
The Impact on Cloud Computing
In many ways the rise of the iPhone / Android class of handheld computers has been a real driver for the growth of cloud computing. By enabling interaction with every manner of web-delivered services at nearly any time, these devices contribute mightily to the very meaning of “web-scale”.
And has been seen in case after case after case, the only real systems architectures that have much of a hope of dealing with web-scale are, in fact, cloud computing architectures.
So in that context the introduction of the iPad most likely portends another front in the inexorable growth of web-scale itself, and in doing so will only accelerate the need for adoption of true cloud-computing architectures throughout.
Update: A few hours after I wrote this post Nokia announced strong Q4 results, growing their marketshare to 40% worldwide for smartphones. This result “marked an end to a steady stream of market share losses for Nokia’s smartphones”. So perhaps Nokia will remain a strong factor going forward – if so, great! The real point is that – whoever the leaders are – the new standard for mobile devices is to fully utilize and participate in the web, period. That is what has profound implications for cloud computing.
It is too early to tell the precise nature of this increased demand due to these tablet-class devices, but that it will occur is nearly inevitable. Some time it would be interesting to examine demand metrics as a function of the power of the handheld devices – my guess is that would be very revealing indeed.
Google & the Map-Reduce Patent
To say that I was surprised to hear about the USPTO granting Google a patent on Map-Reduce this week would be a significant understatement. From a solid overview of the situation by ArsTechnica:
The USPTO awarded search giant Google a software method patent that covers the principle of distributed MapReduce, a strategy for parallel processing that is used by the search giant. If Google chooses to aggressively enforce the patent, it could have significant implications for some open source software projects that use the technique, including the Apache Foundation’s popular Hadoop software framework.
Here are my initial thoughts (I plan on a more thorough post upon further reflection):
- This has potentially very profound implications for the rapidly developing world of “big data” application architectures.
- These “big data” problems are some of the key use cases for cloud computing adoption, public, private, or anywhere. One need look no farther than the rapid uptake of Hadoop and the growth of its community and ecosystem.
- Google has definitely done the most to popularize the notion of applying map and reduce operations to processing large sets of data.
- Having said that, the roots of this approach to data manipulation are very old in the history of computer science, from the earliest days of AI / Lisp / etc.
- Map-reduce is not the last word on big data algorithms, but it is an important one.
In short, big data problems are important to cloud computing, map-reduce are an important class of algorithms for some of these big data problems, and many people have put 2 and 2 together.
As for the patent and other implications,
- I have tended to favor some level of software patents – we have a couple ourselves – so I do think that there is a time and a place for patents, yet I also understand how easily abused software patents can be in the hands of … well, people who can abuse them.
- I have absolutely no idea how enforceable this patent could be … that is a much more complex question far better suited for those interested legal scholars and fine patent counsel out there.
- I have even less of an idea what Google intends to do with this patent. Will they benignly gift it back to the community, or twirl it around like some stealthy Sword of Damocles, always there but just outside of the ability of everyone else to perceive it’s precise power?
- As anyone who has ever participated (or even been near) a patent dispute understands, in most cases the value of the patent is directly proportional to the amount of cash to either prosecute alleged infringements or defend against said prosecutions, and
- Google has lots of cash (yes, yes, I realize that this is quite a revelation).
One more thing, and the importance of this is non-trivial- Google loves to portray themselves as “more open than thou”, with a very fine-sounding “do no evil” ethos that is repeated as a litany.
That is all and well so far as it goes, but what does that mean for absolutely everyone else who ever has or ever will use a promising set of basic techniques for a serious cloud app, or perhaps wants to innovate far beyond, but who happens to be outside of Fort Google?
One More Thing
I have been really surprised at the relatively low-key response to this patent award from the community.
When Dell famously received a trademark from the very same USPTO for “cloud computing” in April 2008 the hue and cry of the bereaved was astonishing … and effective. Within a week Dell had politely withdrawn the application, and returned the name to the community.
That was only a name.
This is far more significant, impacting the bounds and capabilities of real applications, and what do we hear so far … not much.
It’d be great to hear from others who care about the future of cloud computing in some way. There are so many aspects to this – legal, technical, operational, even psychological – all wrapped up into the idea of competitive positions, markets, and the future of cloud computing. So yes it’s a complex topic, but there may be some relatively simple answers.
Maybe Google needs look no further than Dell for some guidance on this one.
Thoughts?
These are quick thoughts about a complex topic. Hopefully next week I’ll have a chance to reflect more deeply on this situation, see what develops a bit more, and then post further. This should be interesting.
I’m Back … and Where I’ve Been
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.
RIM Outage: “…database issue”
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.
2010 Cloud Predictions Webinar
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!
The Hobbit’s Adventure Now Begins
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.
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