Category Archives: Google AppEngine

To avoid echo chamber, OpenStack must embrace competitive cloud ecosystem

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Japanese Bullet Train View

I was in Japan before the Tokyo summit on a bullet train to Kyoto watching the mix of heavy industry and bucolic mountains pass by. That scene reflects an OpenStack duality: we want to be both a dominant platform delivering core cloud services and an open source values driven collective.

First, I fundamentally believe in the success of OpenStack as the open virtual infrastructure management platform.

I believe that we have solved the virtual compute/storage/network problem sufficiently to become the de facto open IaaS platform. While not perfect, the technologies are sufficient assuming we continue to improve ease of use and operational hardening. Pursing that base capability is my primary motivation for DefCore work.

I don’t believe that the OpenStack community is, or should try to become, the authority on “all things cloud.”

In the presence of Amazon, VMware, Microsoft and Google, we cannot make that claim with any degree of self-respect. Even newcomers like DigitalOcean have an undeniable footprint and influence. Those vendor platforms drive cloud ecosystems and technologies which foster fast innovation because there is no friction to joining their ecosystems and they are sufficiently large and stable enough to represent a target market. We’ve seen clear signs from Rackspace, HP and others that platform diversity improves cloud strength.

I continue to think we (OpenStack) spend too much time evaluating what is “in” or “out” of the project and too little time talking about what’s “on,” “under” and “with” the project like Kubernetes, Mesos, Docker, SDN, Hadoop and Ceph. That type of thinking creates distance between OpenStack efforts and the majority of the market.

What motivates the drive to an all open captive community? It’s the reasonable concern that critical parts of the infrastructure will become pay-to-play. For example, what if a non-OpenStack alternative to Heat Orchestration gained popularity for OpenStack implementers. Perhaps something that ran on Amazon also. That would create external pressure that would drive internal priorities. These “non-OpenStack” products would then have influence without having to contribute back to upstream.

Can we afford to have external entities driving internal priorities? Hell yes, that’s what customer adoption looks like.

OpenStack does not own the market sufficiently to create cloud echo chamber. The next wave of cloud innovation (my money is on container platforms) will follow the path of least resistance and widest adoption. We need to embrace that these innovations will not all be inside our community so that we can welcome them as part of our ecosystem. The community needs to find peace with that.

The Upstream Imperative: paving the way for content creators is required for platform success

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Since content is king, platform companies (like Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and Amazon) win by attracting developers to build on their services.  Open source tooling and frameworks are the critical interfaces for these adopters; consequently, they must invest in building communities around those platforms even if it means open sourcing previously internal only tools.

This post expands on one of my OSCON observations: companies who write lots of code have discovered an imperative to upstream their internal projects.   For background, review my thoughts about open source and supply chain management.

Huh?  What is an “upstream imperative?”  It sounds like what salmon do during spawning then read the post-script!

Historically, companies with a lot of internal development tools had no inventive to open those projects.  In fact, the “collaboration tax” of open source discouraged companies from sharing code for essential operations.   Historically, open source was considered less featured and slower than commercial or internal projects; however, this perception has been totally shattered.  So companies are faced with a balance between the overhead of supporting external needs (aka collaboration) and the innovation those users bring into the effort.

Until recently, this balance usually tipped towards opening a project but under-investing in the community to keep the collaboration costs low.  The change I saw at OSCON is that companies understand that making open projects successful bring communities closer to their products and services.

That’s a huge boon to the overall technology community.

Being able to leverage and extend tools that have been proven by these internal teams strengthens and accelerates everyone. These communities act as free laboratories that breed new platforms and build deep relationships with critical influencers.  The upstream savvy companies see returns from both innovation around their tools and more content that’s well matched to their platforms.

Oh, and companies that fail to upstream will find it increasingly hard to attract critical mind share.  Thinking the alternatives gives us a Windows into how open source impacts past incumbents.

That leads to a future post about how XaaS dog fooding and “pure-play” aaS projects like OpenStack and CloudFoundry.

Post Script about Upstreaming:

Continue reading →

Why cloud compute will be free

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Today at Dell, I was presenting to our storage teams about cloud storage (aka the “storage banana”) and Dave “Data Gravity” McCrory reminded me that I had not yet posted my epiphany explaining “why cloud compute will be free.”  This realization derives from other topics that he and I have blogged but not stated so simply.

Overlooking that fact that compute is already free at Google and Amazon, you must understand that it’s a cloud eat cloud world out there where losing a customer places your cloud in jeopardy.  Speaking of Jeopardy…

Answer: Something sought by cloud hosts to make profits (and further the agenda of our AI overlords).

Question: What is lock-in?

Hopefully, it’s already obvious to you that clouds are all about data.  Cloud data takes three primary forms:

  1. Data in transformation (compute)
  2. Data in motion (network)
  3. Data at rest (storage)

These three forms combine to create cloud architecture applications (service oriented, externalized state).

The challenge is to find a compelling charge model that both:

  1. Makes it hard to leave your cloud AND
  2. Encourages customers to use your resources effectively (see #1 in Azure Top 20 post)

While compute demands are relatively elastic, storage demand is very consistent, predictable and constantly grows.  Data is easily measured and difficult to move.  In this way, data represents the perfect anchor for cloud customers (model rule #1).  A host with a growing data consumption foot print will have a long-term predictable revenue base.

However, storage consumption along does not encourage model rule #2.  Since storage is the foundation for the cloud, hosts can fairly judge resource use by measuring data egress, ingress and sidegress (attrib @mccrory 2/20/11).  This means tracking not only data in and out of the cloud, but also data transacted between the providers own cloud services.  For example, Azure changes for both data at rest ($0.15/GB/mo) and data in motion ($0.01/10K).

Consequently, the financially healthiest providers are the ones with most customer data.

If hosting success is all about building a larger, persistent storage footprint then service providers will give away services that drive data at rest and/or in motion.  Giving away compute means eliminating the barrier for customers to set up web sites, develop applications, and build their business.  As these accounts grow, they will deposit data in the cloud’s data bank and ultimately deposit dollars in their piggy bank.

However, there is a no-free-lunch caveat:  free compute will not have a meaningful service level agreement (SLA).  The host will continue to charge for customers who need their applications to operate consistently.  I expect that we’ll see free compute (or “spare compute” from the cloud providers perspective) highly used for early life-cycle (development, test, proof-of-concept) and background analytic applications.

The market is starting to wake up to the idea that cloud is not about IaaS – it’s about who has the data and the networks.

Oh, dem golden spindles!  Oh, dem golden spindles!

Seattle Cloud Camp, Dec 2010

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While I was in Seattle for Azure training preparing for Dell’s Azure Appliance , Dave @McCrory suggested that we also attend the Seattle Cloud Camp (SCC Tweets).  This event was very well attended (200 people!).  With heavy attendance by Amazon (at their HQ), Microsoft (in the ‘hood), and Google, there was a substantial cloud vendor presence (>25% from those vendors alone).  Notable omission: VMware.

My reflection about the event by segment.

Opening Sessions:

  • Most of the opening sessions were too light for the audience.  I thought we were past the “what is cloud” level, sigh.
  • Of note, the Amazon security presentation by Steve Rileywas fun and entertaining.
  • Picking on a Dell competitor specifically: calling your cloud solution “WAS” is a branding #fail (not that DCSWA much is better).

Unpanel of self-appointed cloud extroverts experts:

  • The unpanel covered some decent topics (@adronbh captured them on twitter), unfortunately none of the answers really stood out to me.  Except for NoSQL.
  • The unpanel discussion about NoSQL drew 2 answers.  1) It’s not NoSQL, it’s eventually consistent instead of strictly consistent.  (note: I’ve been calling it “Storage++”) 2) We’ll see more and more choices in this area as we tune the models for utility then we’ll see some consolidation.  The suggestion was that NoSQL would follow the same explosion/contraction pattern of SQL databases.

Session on Cloud APIs (my suggested topic)

  • The Cloud API topic was well attended (30+).  The vast overwhelming majority or the attendees were using Amazon.
  • There was some interest in having “standard” APIs for cloud functions was not well received because it was felt to stifle innovation.  We are still to early.
  • It was postulated but not generally agreed that cloud aggregation (DeltaCloud, RightScale, etc) is workable.  This was considered a reason to not require standard clouds.
  • CloudCamp sponsor, Skytap, has their own API.  These APIs are value added and provide extra abstraction levels.
  • It was said that there are a LOT (50 now, 500 soon) smaller hosts that want to enter the cloud space.  These hosts will need an API – some are inventing their own.
  • I brought up the concept discussed at OpenStack that the logical abstraction for cloud network APIs is a “vlan.”  This created confusion because some thought that I meant actual 802.1q tags.  NO!  I just meant that is was the ABSTRACTION of a VLAN connecting VMs together.
  • There was agreement from the clouderati in the room that cloud networking was f’ed up, but most people were not ready to discuss.
  • Cloud APIs have some basics that are working (semantics around VMs) but still have lots of wholes.  Notably: networking, application, services, and identity)

Session on Google App Engine (GAE)

  • GAE is got a lot going on, especially in the social/mobile space.
  • Do not think a lack of news about GAE means that they are going slow, it’s just the opposite.  It looks like they are totally kicking ass with a very focused strategy.  I suspect that they are just waiting for the market to catch-up.
  • GAE understands what a “platform” really is.  They talk about their platform as the SERVICES that they are offering.  The code is just code.  The services are impressive and include identity, mail, analysis, SQL (business only), map (as in Map-Reduce), prediction (yes, prediction!), storage, etc.  The total list was nearly 20 distinct services.
  • GAE compared them selves to Azure, not Amazon.

PaaS, much ado about network services

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There’s a surprising about of a hair pulling regarding IaaS vs PaaS.  People in the industry get into shouting matches about this topic as if it mattered more than Lindsay Lohan’s journey through rehab.

The cold hard reality is that while pundits are busy writing XaaS white papers, developers are off just writing software.  We are writing software that fits within cloud environments (weak SLA, small VMs), saves money (hosted data instead of data in VMs), and changes quickly (interpreted languages).  We’re doing using an expanding tool kit of networked components like databases, object stores, shared cache, message queue, etc.

Using network components in an application architecture is about as novel as building houses made of bricks.  So, what makes cloud architectures any better or different?

Nothing!  There is no difference if you buy VMs, install services, and wire together your application in its own little cloud bubble.  If I wanted to bait trolls, I’d call that an IaaS deployment.

However, there’s an emerging economic driver to leverage lower cost and more elastic infrastructure by using services provided by hosts rather than standing them up in a VM.  These services replace dedicated infrastructure with managed network attached services and they have become a key differentiator for all the cloud vendors

  • At Google App Engine, they include Big Tables, Queues, MemCache, etc
  • At Microsoft Azure, they include SQL Azure, Azure Storage, AppFabric, etc
  • At Amazon AWS, they include S3, SimpleDB, RDS (MySQL), Queue & Notify, etc

Using these services allows developers to focus on the business problems we are solving instead of building out infrastructure to run our applications.  We also save money because consuming an elastic managed network service is less expensive (and more consumption based) than standing up dedicated VMs to operate the services.

Ultimately, an application can be written as stateless code (really “externalized state” is more a accurate description) that relies on these services for persistence.  If a host were to dynamically instantiate instances of that code based on incoming requests then my application resource requirements would become strictly consumption based.   I would describe that as true cloud architecture. 

On a bold day, I would even consider an environment that enforced offered that architecture to be a platform.  Some may even dare to describe that as a PaaS; however, I think it’s a mistake to look to the service offering for the definition when it’s driven by the application designers’ decisions to use network services.

While we argue about PaaS vs IaaS, developers are just doing what they need.  Today they may stand-up their own services and tomorrow they incorporate 3rd party managed services.  The choice is not a binary switch, a layer cake, or a holy war.

The choice is about choosing the right most cost effective and scalable resource model.

Java makes stange bedfellows of VMware and Google

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I was thinking about Sci-Tech’s story about VMware and Google. I’ve been watching and wondering how giants VMware and Google will dance to the music of Java (now an Oracle asset). VMware’s Spring and Groovy seems like a natural fit with Google’s AppEngine. However, neither own the Java platform yet both are banking big on it becoming the major development language. It puts them into the interesting position of having the evangelize Java together.

If they can marshall their shared interests then this combination could be a potent counter point to Microsoft’s .NET. They could provide the corporate support and lift that Sun did not. Or they could just create more confusion and dilution for an already fragmented platform.

6/29 update: after the JBoss World show, I need to add RedHat to the list of java supporters. Starting to take on an AntiMS feeling.

Putting on my Dell hat, accelerating these platforms helps our customers and our industry.