It would be nice, but cloud doesn’t have to be “interoperable”
Disclosure: If you’re coming straight here you may not know work for Rackspace Hosting and I’ve been involved with OpenStack since the inception of the project. The opinions on this blog are my personal ones, not those of my employer.
This post is an assessment, a thought. I don’t really explore the meaning or outcomes completely. I may do that in a future rambling… on to the thought…
For the first decade of networking or more we had many competing technologies that didn’t interoperate: SNA, IPX/SPX, TCP/IP, AppleTalk, DECnet, NetBEUI, and more. The lack of a consistent and unified standard didn’t stop networking from succeeding anymore than it will stop cloud computing. Cloud is a fundamental shift that dramatically increases productivity just like networking did — businesses love increases in productivity and will adopt anything that yields one – often the first one presented to them and they’ll run it for a refresh cycle before switching to the “interoperable” platform. Ok, so I’m a networking geek but this isn’t the only analogy that holds true…
We have many programming languages.. compiled, interpreted, functional, object oriented.. all with major differences.
We have many types of processors from low energy mobile chips to super fast server chips all with different instruction sets.
We have a variety of operating systems all with a loyal following and a vastly different set of capabilities.
I believe cloud could see wider and more rapid adoption if interoperability is figured out but looking back at history, and even history specifically in the technology world, we have many successful markets without true interoperability as a fundamental capability.
Over time most of these markets have achieved the guise interoperability through consolidation and it looks like cloud computing is headed the same way. Networking is predominately IP; programming is C/C++/C# for OS/infrastructure, Java for enterprise applications, and PHP for web applications; processors are x86 in desktops and servers, and ARM in mobile devices; Operating Systems are generally Windows for consumer and SMB/departmental large business IT, and Linux for web and larger business core IT.
With the pace of innovation and the foundation laid down by previous generational shifts the cloud market will grow and reach a critical mass market share much more rapidly as technology companies that are involved know the path to follow. Microprocessors, operating systems, and networking took many decades. Java swept through the enterprise software development market in a decade as did PHP across the web. The cloud market really started to emerge around the start of the decade and by the current look of things by middle we’ll have a clear picture of interoperability for clouds.
How to tell the difference between “cloud” and “virtualization”
Many people seem to think “cloud” is just off-premise “virtualization”. Cloud comes in a few flavors and I’ll argue that you can have “private cloud” either hosted off-premise in a provider’s facility or in your own. The fundamental difference between cloud and virtualization is the goal of cloud is to automate provisioning (this applies to IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) and the goal of virtualization is resource utilization optimization. You can (and many providers do) use virtualization as the basis for building a cloud but it is not required.
If we take a look at the Reductive Labs presentation from OpsCamp slide 3 illustrates the primary benefit of cloud. Cloud helps companies even if their minimum unit of work is larger than a single host machine where virtualization just adds overhead in that case. The difference between “cloud” and “grid computing” or HPC is that grid/HPC process jobs in a batch manner rather than serve interactive applications. You can build a compute grid on top of a cloud but not vice versa.
Other folks are saying “private clouds can’t exist because you can’t have rapid elasticity and pay for what you use”. For a small company you may not be able to have a private cloud but for a large enterprise with many business units you certainly can. An IT infrastructure BU can provide other organizations in the company all of the requirements of a cloud.
For public cloud to succeed they need to provide all three
Depending on the current utilization across an enterprises infrastructure they may be able to defer spending for a number of years by moving to a fully cloud enabled business. Right now many departments cling to servers they don’t need because they’re afraid if they release it they’ll never get it back. With cloud removing that fear resource hoarding ends and many enterprises will have a significant increase in available computing power.
Over the long term if the public computing clouds continue to grow, increase their transparency, and optimize their delivery models it will no longer make financial sense for enterprises to build their own infrastructure. Public cloud providers will need to prove over the next decade they can deliver on all three corners of the “impossible triangle”.
Reinventing elementary education for the 21st century
I’ll come right out and give my theory up front and then explain why… We need to stop teaching young children “facts” and we need to start teaching them how to learn. The only reason we teach young children “facts” is to shape their world view into what we want it to be while their minds are easily influenced because they haven’t learned logic, critical/deductive reasoning, and other associated fundamentals required to think independently.
Elementary education in the US is typically half “learning to learn” and half “learning facts”. You can search and look through many online class schedules across the country and see this. The “learning to learn” — reading, music, math, art make up part of the day. The rest of the day — spelling, science, social studies, history is filled with teaching children “facts” and shaping their world view. Even a fundamental like reading is focused on content over skills to increase speed and comprehension. Almost none of the public schools offer foreign language even though a number of studies show significant benefits.
Is standardized testing to blame? Perhaps as it is hard to test for the ability to learn especially in a multiple choice format. Tests make sure you know “facts”. Because of these tests and constant measuring we’re afraid to spend time building a foundation so children can learn faster as they age. Linear progression is “safe” and teaching the ability to answer a question (often through memorization) is favored over teaching the understanding of how to figure out the answer. Laws like the No Child Left Behind Act focus dollars on ensuring everyone can reach “average” rather than allowing most of the class to move at an accelerated pace (if the effort is spent on getting students below SD -1 to average 80%+ of the students in the class are effectively held back).
My call to action — get social studies and fact memorization science out of elementary schools. Use social studies to stimulate debate allowing children to discuss issues and form their own opinions. Use science as a chance to teach critical thinking and problem solving skills. Resist the temptation to tell children what to believe — make them understand how to formulate an opinion. This applies to math as well as social studies. We typically wait until the second hear of high school to teach proofs in geometry. One example is instead of having children memorize their times tables with no understanding as to why have them figure out multiplication as a better way to do some addition problems.
At some point it is important to learn facts — history, geography, etc. — but by waiting to teach these facts they can be learned in a fraction of the time. You could spend an hour a day teaching a middle school child all of the facts they’d learn in 5 years of elementary school. Stop wasting an hour a day on spelling, teach latin and children will learn to spell naturally.
Imagine the following schedule for your child instead of what they have today…
7:50-8:25: Arrival – Pledge, announcements, and a critical thinking logic problem we’ll discuss as a group.
8:25-9:00: Latin – Replace spelling memorization with fundamentals that enable good spelling and a foreign language
9:00-9:40: Math – Teach problem solving, proofs, word problems
9:40-10:50: Reading – Teach concepts to increase speed and comprehension
10:50-11:20: Lunch
11:30-12:00: Recess
12:10-12:40: Music (M, W, F) / Art (Tu, Th) – Encourage creativity and original thinking
12:40-1:20: Science (M, W, F) / Social Studies (Tu, Th) – Lessons focused on problem solving and critical thinking
1:25-1:55: P.E. (M, W, F) / Library (Tu, Th) – Focus on teamwork and leadership skills
2:00: Dismissal
Our education system isn’t an abysmal train wreck like some people will scream. It does a good job but it could be better. Like compound interest builds wealth over time a 10% increase annually in the amount of learning a child does more than doubles the amount they learn by the time they graduate from high school. Also by continuing to teach kids how to learn you’ll lower drop out rates — at some point when a child falls too far behind in memorizing facts they give up or start to cheat to fake their way until they reach 16 (or 18, whatever the minimum age in your state) and can stop going.
Local papers die first, local radio to follow
The local paper is coming to an end...
The Internet and the plethora of news sources it contains gives you better and more timely information than reading your local paper. “The paper” still had a chance when we could only use “The Internet” on big fixed location desktop computers. Now that I can read the WSJ content on a mobile application on my BlackBerry I no longer need to have “a paper” if I’m out and want access to news. It isn’t just about the better content on the Internet, it is about ease of consumption of that content as well. What we all see happening right now to the newspapers will hit radio next.
This is where Pandora comes in to threaten local FM music radio. I’ve recently acquired a new car that happens to have an AUX jack. With that AUX jack I can hook up my BlackBerry Bold with Pandora and play music, music relevant to me, music without commercials (I’m sure this will change over time), and it is easy to use. As smartphones continue their proliferation and cars with AUX jacks (thank you Apple for the iPod success and it pushing automakers to add AUX jacks) do the same we’ll see more and more people doing what I’m doing now — listening to Internet streamed radio in their car for free.
This not only kills off local radio, it nukes satellite radio long before the local radio dies. My new car came with a free 6 month Sirius/XM subscription and I’m not even going to activate it. I’m a fan of the concept and I was actually an early subscriber to XM during my days commuting in the Bay Area during “the bubble”. Sirius/XM is doing the right thing in coming out with smartphone based applications to consume their service. This not only lowers their customer acquisition costs (I suspect they had to subsidize the hardware deployment in autos) but increases the ease in which I can use their offering. They need to get all of their content over to the smartphone version yesterday and they need to start pushing this as their primary marketing effort.
Clear Channel, owner of over 1,200 local radio stations, is another player in the mix — and probably the player with the most to lose. They’re experimenting in the smartphone space with iheartradio that currently supports both BlackBerry and iPhone with content from over 350 of their stations. I haven’t tried this out yet personally so after I do I’ll come back and add more detailed thoughts.
Olympic golf: skill games + tournament = spectacle
August 13th, 2009 the Olympics made their best decision so far this century, adding golf as a sport in 2016. The PGA Tour needs to work with the IOC so golf can go for two full weeks of the games, here’s why….
We watch the players week in and week out play in stroke play tournaments. Sometimes they play match play now thanks to the WGC, and every once in a while they have a team event with the President’s Cup and Ryder Cups. The Olympics has the opportunity to outshine all of these.
Here is my proposed schedule which I’ll follow by event descriptions:
Don't just have another stroke play tournament
Day 1 – Skill games qualifying round
Day 2 – Match play event practice round
Day 3 – Match play event seeding round
Day 4-7 – Match play medal tournament
Day 8 – Rest day
Day 9 – Skill games medal round
Day 10 – Stroke play event practice round
Day 11-14 – Stroke play medal tournament
For the skill games this will allow a much more wide variety of people to participate. The qualifying rounds will be used to narrow the field down to the top 16 so you can make a good hour long TV event from the medal round of each. Skill events descriptions:
Long Drive: This is pretty clear, many of you have probably seen the Long Drivers of America on ESPN, under the lights — with a gold medal on the line the finals will be epic.
Putting Challenge: We’ve all done this with our buddies out on the practice green, play “18 holes” of par 2. Cities build huge stadiums for the Olympics, the golf course they’re holding it at can build “the best practice green ever” with plateaus, ridges, bowls, and more.
Sand Saves: Tee off from 18 different bunkers around a green, up to 60 yards out, play each as a par 3 which should lead to very low scores (if you did it as a par 2 the scores would be high and that isn’t as good for the viewership). You can use the tournament course for this as each hole should have a fitting bunker.
Pin Seeker: Varied approach shots into flags on the driving range up to ~220 yards out. The score for this event is measured in total feet from the pin to where the first shot comes to rest.
For the match play tournament you play a seeding round of stroke play where the top 16 qualify to play in the match play tournament. This will be a high drama day even though a medal isn’t on the line — much like tournament week leading up to March Madness. With the cut to 16 you can have 4 days of 18 holes going 16->8, 8->4, 4->2, and then on the final day 1 vs. 2 and 3 vs. 4.
For the stroke play tournament let all of the players from each country participate, cut the field in half (or within 10 strokes of the lead) after two rounds are complete. This can have some added drama because we’ll also have “overall team medals” so we’ll need a point system for finishing positions in each event and with the stroke play tournament going last even if a player isn’t in position to medal in it, they may be in position to score enough points giving their team an overall medal.
To promote diversity each country should only be able to enter 3 players per event. Yes, some countries will be leaving better players at home than others will enter but if those other countries don’t get to have an Olympic golfer how will that country ever get the “golf bug”? This already happens in spots like swimming where each country can only enter their top 2 per event even if their 3rd player is the 3rd fastest in the world.
If they add golf, invite the normal field, play a normal stroke play event I won’t be watching. Not because it doesn’t have the potential to be a great event but because it won’t have a chance of being what they could make it.
Exercise to “live longer” but not too much or you “live less”
“So much to do, so little time”, was once said by the very intelligent Willy Wonka. Each day we wake up and have to prioritize what we do — life throws a nearly infinite set of options at us. Because of this many people spend some of their time exercising so they can “have more time” by living longer to have the opportunity to do the things they’ve always wanted to do.
We all have to spend some time sleeping and eating — average of around 9 hours each day. This takes our 168 hour long week and cuts it down to 105. Now we have to commute to work taking away another 4 hours leaving 101. The BLS breaks down a number of things we spend time on, working, leisure activites, childcare, etc. Now that we’ve gone to work, taken care of our kids, and picked up around the house we have gone through another 57 hours of our week leaving 44.
Now we’re down to 44 hours on average, if you commute more than 46 minutes a day or work more than 7.9 hours you’ll have less — if you don’t have kids or you have some help to pickup around the house you’ll have more. I’ll continue to talk about the averages. Those 44 hours have to fit all of your leisure activities — any hobbies, reading the newspaper or your favorite blog, watching television, or exercising.
This could be you...
Fourty-four hours may sound like a lot but it goes quickly and here is where the exercise comes in. I’m suggesting you figure out how to do it in 15-30 minutes a day including the “start and stop” time of going to the gym and cleaning up afterwards — this means you probably need to figure out a way to workout at home. If you’re going to workout five days a week packing a gym bag, going to a gym, changing, taking a class (spin, step, yoga, pilates, etc.) doing weights, showering, changing, and heading home this can easily take 2 hours if not more.
Those 10 hours are 23% of your “flex” time. Unless exercise is a hobby that you get enjoyment from you’re committing too much time “just trying to live longer”. I understand that “quality of life” is important and having a moderate level of fitness can help that as well. With regard to length, most studies show that ones you reach the “healthy” zone of fitness your life isn’t significantly extended by being in “perfect” shape. The “healthy” level can be achieved in an hour a week, only 2.3% of your “flex time” by working out at home
Those exercise hours add up, over a 40 year period at 10 hours a week you’ll spend 20,800 hours exercising, that is 2.4 years of time so even if that exercise extends your life by 3 years (a number that seems to come up in many studies) you’re really only gaining a few months of “flex time” and you’re getting those at the end at the cost of having them available throughtout your life.
Will Technorati bring visitors?
Now that I have a somewhat decent amount of content I’m fiddling around with getting the site indexed by more sources. Right now almost all of my traffic comes from Twitter through the initial posts of the topics.
So Technorati I’m claiming this blog: 3s4h7akv62
Now we’ll see if you bring any visitors! I’ll share updates after a month or two of trying to find new ways to bring traffic to the site.
Cloud computing makes “blacklists” obsolete, now is the time for “digital identities”
A common security technique is to classify attackers by IP addresses or reverse DNS lookup and blacklist the bad ones. This technique has been falling in popularity with the increased usage of DHCP and NAT for Internet access and cloud computing will be its death knell.
Cloud computing allows attackers to rapidly switch IP addresses for as low as $0.015 per switch or per hour of using the address. Right now only a few clouds exist so it isn’t quite the wild west yet but over the next 2-5 years we’ll see the thousands of dedicated hosting providers all switching to offer cloud services.
So what this means to the IT security world is you have some time to think about this and get it right using the few clouds out there now. “Getting it right” may require more than just individual enterprises coming up with a way to solve it for them. We really need to get together as an Internet community and discuss this in the broader scope of entity identification. I use the term “entity” because we need a way to identify systems and individual users.
We're going to digital ID, the train is leaving the station
Identity and access management has always been viewed as an enterprise or site specific issue — this needs to change. The recent Twitter hack is an example of how out of control identity and access management has become. Understanding and documenting all of the application interactions around identity management in an enterprise is something few if any have a firm grasp on. We’ve finally reached the point that implementing an Internet wide “digital identity” with a centralized identity and access management architecture similar to the domain registration/SSL certificate heirarchy.
OAuth and OpenID are a good place to start the discussion as they have the proper frameworks but they lack a centrally managed authority or list of authorities to manage identification and authentication. Major “trust” providers on the Internet need to get together and solve this: VeriSign, Google, Microsoft, Ebay/Paypal, Banks, and major Internet Service Providers (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, etc.).
Major Web 2.0 players have large directories of people but they don’t have a real trust relationship — just because you have a Myspace/Facebook/Twitter account doesn’t mean I should trust the e-mail you send me but if Chase Bank says you have a bank account with them and you’re sending me an e-mail I’m much more likely to trust it. With the appropriate identity management if you’re sending spam I can flag that and Chase will tie it to your “digital identity” which is tied to your “real identiy” provided when you created that bank account. It will be much more difficult to create new identities than it is today and we’ll see a significant decrease in “wild wild west” type behavior on the Internet.
The secondary benefit is consumers will also start to take security more seriously as they won’t want to waste time getting the “spammer” flag removed from their digital identity because their system was hacked (similar to disputing things on your credit report if the system works out properly). They’ll also prioritize security in their buying decisions forcing system vendors to take it more seriously.
A tertiary benefit will be a reduction in misleading activities that lead to horrible events like the Myspace teen suicide because people won’t create fake identities to hide behind. Some may say this is part of the “fun” of the Internet as it allows them to escape from their day to day lives. That type of fun isn’t good for both parties involved — typically part of the fun is misleading other people such as the recent case of the lady that pretended to be a 15 year old kid with cancer. “Fake identity” activities like this should be restricted to a place like Second Life where everyone knows people are pretending.
As private industry and a world society I hope we can take care of this ourselves before it gets so out of control Congress tries to figure out how to do it and we end up with some horrible mess of a “National ID and Digital Identity Act” that looks at it only from the perspective of the USA and makes it very difficult for non-US citizens to do anything online (as most of the major Internet properties are US based) creating a whole new barrier for 3rd world citizens to overcome.
Why “Tier 1″ support is rarely excellent and how to prevent it
We’ve all been there….something we have is broken, we can’t fix it on our own and we dread picking up the phone to call technical support because we know it won’t be a good experience. Many of you think, “It’s tier 1 support, how hard can it be to learn this stuff?” The truth of the matter is that for many people it isn’t hard but those people are rarely the people you get on the phone.
A tier 1 role is by definition an entry level position. Based on the stats from Top Grading only 25% of the people hired into any role will excel at it. So at first glance you should have a 1 out of 4 chance of having an excellent tier 1 experience but the hiring only tells half the story. Some of the people hired in at a tier 1 level aren’t complacent and don’t want to stay at that level if they are excellent — they took the tier 1 job to get in the door and from there they want to move to other roles. Other people hired into a tier 1 role are only a C player even in that role and they aren’t qualified for anything else — they’ll be a tier 1 forever. This leads to eventually the tier 1 ranks of a given support center filled with B and C players (some C players will become B players in a role but very rarely do they turn into an A player) as the A players are promoted to other roles and the others remain.
Have agents identify themselves, anomymity promotes mediocrity
So how do you fix this if you’re a company with a support organization? A few options exist and the easiest to implement is hiring the right people in the first place. This will end up sounding like a promotional piece for Top Grading but if you hire A players 75% of the time instead of 25% you’ll always have a good amount of A players even in the tier 1 ranks. Another option is to hire for a tier 1.5 role that is customer facing and if people turn out to not be an A player in that role give them a lateral/demotion to a tier 1 role where they perform non-customer facing non-time sensitive tasks — your B/C player at the more difficult role will have a much better chance of being an A player at the easier job.
A third option is to provide training or teaming. Training is useful where somebody enjoys the tasks they’re being asked to do but they aren’t very good at them. Training is not going to make a person an A player at things they don’t enjoy doing — this is where teaming comes in. As a manager people on your teams will have different strengths and by teaming people with complimentary strengths together you can improve both of their performances. As an example assign the analytical person the task of building a score sheet to measure performance and ask the empathetic woo person to try and rebuild a relationship with a disgruntal customer.
At the end of the day though you have to be willing to have difficult conversations with people, especially difficult in an economy like today — that they may not be a fit for the role their in and that you need them to find another role in the company or looks elsewhere. While it may be hard for both parties to have the conversation in the long run it is better for everyone — people want to be an A player in the role they fill when they wake up each day — it isn’t fun waking up and knowing you’re headed to a job where you’ll struggle for the next 8-10 hours.
So next time you talk to that tier 1 support person don’t be so hard on them. They applied for a job, they were hired — somebody told them they could be successful and good at it. When you ask for a manager instead of yelling at the manager about how bad their tier 1 was ask them if they use a Top Grading style interview process, if they provide training or teaming, if they are doing anything to make that tier 1 successful — if they aren’t doing any of that feel bad for the tier 1 as they’re working for a management team that accepts mediocrity or doesn’t know enough to fix it.
Cloud Computing, “For Everyone, Not Everything”
Cloud computing is a broad term that covers Internet based services that provide SaaS (Software as a service), PaaS (Platform as a service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a service). SaaS services are the most commonly used cloud solutions — web based e-mail is the prime example. The most widely used PaaS offering is probably WordPress.org unless you consider customizing your Facebook profile a very restricted PaaS. IaaS is the newest of the cloud services with the most well known example of Amazon Web Services which includes EC2 (cloud servers) and S3 (cloud storage).
Until Hotmail launched in 1996 we all pretty much had an e-mail client on our own system and potentially had to run our own mail server if we didn’t want to have a mailbox tied to our college or ISP — now almost all of us use any number of SaaS e-mail services. Many of these e-mail services now include full features that businesses expect such as Rackspace E-mail or Google Apps Enterprise.
Before cloud based services if you wanted to have a website you had to run your own server until GeoCities launched in late 1995 — now PaaS providers from GoDaddy, for low price, to Mosso, for horizontal scale, provide very capable platforms to deploy a website without having your own server.
Now IaaS providers like Amazon, Terremark, and Rackspace are eliminating the need to always deploy and manage dedicated configurations for complex applications. Before these type of IaaS offerings companies like Twitter would end up with their own datacenters and dedicated infrastructure. Load testing services from companies like SOASTA would be cost prohibitive to offer.
So what about the title, “For everyone, not everything”? It sounds like cloud has the capability to do everything now doesn’t it? In a broad sense, yes, it can do a bit of everything but specific use cases in all service times aren’t a fit for cloud. In the e-mail world if you want to do offline messaging on an airplane you want a mail client. At the platform service level perhaps your application runs 10x faster if you can customize a couple of libraries or it just doesn’t work at all without those changes. The infrastructure offerings force you to re-architect for horizontal over vertical scale to use them effectively.
Many other use cases aren’t a fit for the cloud yet. Take video rendering as an example; it is much less expensive to buy a video card capable of performing rendering than it is to stream the rendered video over a network as 30 JPGs per second. Another example is a retail POS system, at least some of the functionality needs to be in the store — you don’t want to stop selling things if network connectivity is lost. Many more explanatory and reasonable examples abound.
Will cloud ever be the answer for all computing needs? I doubt it, but over time it will be used to solve more problems because a centrally managed pool of resources provides greater efficiency and flexibility. An example on this is utility power; we use it almost exclusively now but for a few use cases we still need generators. Cloud will succeed and it will be adopted for a wider set of use cases over time as it will address those use cases better than previous generation solutions.
