Thinking Out Cloud

Thoughts on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

2009-12-18T09:28:52-08:00

The innovation just keeps on coming from the good folks at Amazon Web Services. This week they announced a new pricing model for Amazon EC2 instances: spot pricing. Spot pricing is the third pricing model Amazon is offering for EC2 instances -- with On-Demand and Reserved being the other two -- and it brings us closer to an efficient and commoditized IT infrastructure market, and it got my mind racing on the various possibilities of it, and where it goes if taken to its logical conclusion.

You can read explanations of what it is and how it works from Jeff Barr, Werner Vogels, RightScale, Reuven Cohen and James Urquhart.

James has a very succinct explanation of the key tenets of the new offering:

Each customer sets a maximum price he or she is willing to pay for "spot instances."
Amazon sets a "spot price" for instances hour-by-hour, based on available supply and demand.
Customers pay whatever the spot price is up to their maximum price. So, if someone bids $0.07/hour, and the spot price is $0.05/hour, the person pays $0.05/hour.
If the spot price exceeds the customer's maximum price, the customer's instances are terminated.

I had to open my old finance textbook from business school and think of all sorts of possibilities: call options, put options, futures, and other forms of derivatives and hedging techniques. It will be interesting to see if any of those evolve over time. By the way, there already is a real-time ticker for Amazon spot pricing, called Cloud Exchange. But here are some thoughts on issues that are relevant in the shorter term.

Workloads

At first glance it would seem that Spot Instances are only relevant to a limited set of workloads, namely those that are not time-sensitive and can be easily stopped and re-started. The examples given by Jeff Barr are web crawling, data processing (presumably of the batch, scientific type, as his Pfizer case study implies) and data transformation (the example Jeff gives is media transcoding -- such as changing video formats).

But requesting a spot instance is accessible via API, as are other types of instance provisioning in Amazon, which means that you can programmatically write very interesting logic around which types of instances you want provisioned under what circumstances. I think this means that over time people will realize that spot instances are feasible for a wide variety of workloads. It will require large scale apps to be worth the effort, but those are increasingly commonplace on AWS.

As I said in regards to Reserved Instances, there will be a psychological barrier for a while, but it will be overcome eventually.

Bidding

I posted a question on Twitter: "If I bid for EC2 spot instances at list price, doesn't it mean I'll always have a full-time instance at the lowest possible price?" That's all I could explain within the 140 character limit, but let me put it another way here.

If my objective is to have the longest possible running ec2 instance at the lowest possible price, I always want to bid at the then-current ec2 on-demand price. Here's the logic:

If the current Amazon spot price is lower than my bid, I will be charged the current price regardless of my bid (that's how the system works). I am making an assumption that the spot price will never go above the on-demand price. I am making this assumption for a very simple reason, which is that no one will ever bid equal to or more than the on-demand price because then they can simply provision an on-demand instance (which does not have some limitations that spot instances do).

No one has yet to come up with an argument (at least to me on Twitter) that contradicts this logic. Several people said that technically it's possible that spot prices will rise above the on-demand price, but as I already said, that doesn't make sense. On-demand prices are the ceiling for spot prices (except for the caveat below). If you have different thoughts on this, please leave them in the comments below.

Here are two possible issues with this logic as I see them:

On-Demand Instances are not always available: This was the argument made by Ezra Zygmuntowics (@ezmobius), co-founder of Engine Yard. This means that On-Demand is not a real ceiling for spot prices. Although I've seen some noise about this on Twitter, I don't think there is a real case to be made that there is a problem with getting On-Demand Instances "on-demand". If there is, please correct me in the comments. But more importantly, if there is, that's a big "whoa" moment. It is completely contradictory to the whole Amazon (and cloud computing) model of, er, on-demand computing. It would also raise the biggest fear possible about the cloud computing model of relying on an external provider for your basic computing needs (i.e., servers): that capacity is unavailable. It also contradicts the rationale that Amazon gave for spot pricing in the first place -- to take advantage of unused ec2 capacity. But I really don't think that it is an actual problem. I have not heard of anyone seriously complaining about lack of availability of on-demand Amazon instances. Finally, going back to theory, if there was such a problem, Amazon would simply raise prices for on-demand and we'd have a new ceiling for spot. We're actually seeing the opposite happening: Amazon keeps lowering prices for on-demand instances.
There is a hard cap on the desired cost for the job: This makes a lot more sense to me, but I think it is a rare real-life case. This use case assumes that I have a time-insensitive compute problem that is only worth for me to solve at X cents per hour/per instance. To make it easier to digest let's say that X equals 5 cents and the current price of an on-demand small instance (and we'll use that as the unit) is 9 cents per hour. If that's the case, then obviously I want my spot bid to be 5 cents and not the on-demand instance price.

Barring these two arguments, there is no reason to bid for a spot instance at less than the current on-demand instance price. That's it. I said it, now skewer me in the comments. :-)

Shlomo Swidler suggested on Twitter that someone run a competition to see who can create the logic that keeps the longest running spot instance. That would be cool, but I would add the condition: at the lowest possible price.

It's going to be fun to see where these innovations take us. Any thoughts? Please share in the comments.

UPDATE: there is a great comment thread to this post with interesting insights from James Watters, Guy Rosen and Shlomo Swidler.

Application Lifecycle in the Cloud: Update

2009-12-16T10:41:35-08:00

Back in November I posted Application Lifecycle in the Cloud, making the argument that more and more of the phases of the application lifecycle (dev, testing, monitoring, etc.) are moving to the cloud.

Yesterday, Daryl Taft at eWeek published a nice piece about Atlassian, which in many ways validates what I was saying in the blog post. I actually mentioned Atlassian as a "pioneer" in this area, and it looks like the hosted versions of their developer products -- JIRA and Bamboo -- are gaining significant traction.

Here's a quote from the article:

Development teams who were previously paranoid about having their source code hosted are moving increasingly towards SaaS, he said. Even large teams with 100-plus developers are now confident to put their "behind the firewall" tools and most critical intellectual property into SaaS-based applications. Github is a good example of this, allowing developers to host their code online, he said.

Atlassian has noticed this trend with its hosted development product, JIRA Studio. "When we started, there was no such thing as Github," said Michael Knighten, director of hosted services at Atlassian. "We thought the market would go in that direction, but it was an educated guess, at best. Now the idea of SaaS development collaboration is starting to gain traction."

“One of the interesting trends we have seen is that JIRA Studio is one of our fastest growing products, and we see this as an indication that a lot of development teams are looking to SaaS and hosted solutions,” Gibbs said.

New Overcast Podcast: Focus on PaaS

2009-12-16T10:20:46-08:00

After a very long break, James Urquhart and I finally got around to recording a new episode of the Overcast podcast. This time it's just the two of us shooting the breeze on some recent cloud computing developments with a focus on PaaS.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Behind the Smokescreen

2009-11-18T09:08:38-08:00

As some of you may know, Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's big conference, is going on this week in San Francisco. This morning I received an amusing email from Chris Harrick, VP marketing at SugarCRM. I'm assuming this was sent out to everyone who signed up as press to the event.

Funny stuff.

The full email is below (I added the link to Benioff's book). In any case, I'll see you at Dreamforce!

Hey Geva,

Marc Benioff has a few zingers for SugarCRM in his new book Behind the Cloud:

“We knew that we had truly emerged as the market leader in the eyes of the industry when we arrived at Dreamforce 2006 to find that a handful of employees from a small CRM company had set up a mock protest outside the convention center. I’m not really sure what they were protesting, and it was a small, low-budget, and poorly executed rip-off of the types of tactics we had invented, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that we knew not to get ruffled.”
                                                                        - Page 65 of “Behind the Cloud”

We are sorry we disappointed Marc during our previous visit to Dreamforce.

He even challenged us to “step up the innovation”:

“We did not want this company to get free PR on our coattails! Ignoring this escapade worked well. A blogger asked a Dreamforce attendee if she had seen what was going on outside when she arrived, and she replied that it must have been some kind of Salesforce.com stunt. (Note: if you are going to compete with someone at his or her own game, always remember to step up the innovatio
            - Page 65 of “Behind the Cloud” by Marc Benioff

If you insist Marc.

In continuing its long love affair with the industry’s most down-to-earth CEO and our commitment to staging “small, low-budget, and poorly executed rip-off [tactics]”, SugarCRM is currently distributing 1,000 copies of “Behind the Smokescreen: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Still Manages to Sell 1999 technology 10 years later” at Dreamforce today.

You can get your hard copy on the sidewalks outside Moscone (look for the people dressed as big books;).

Or you can read the eBook here: www.sugarcrm.com/smokescreen

With an endorsement from North Korean leader Kim Jong II (“A great guide for any entrepreneur, CEO, or Head of State looking to promote openness and freedom”), Behind the Smokescreen is a response to the magical Salesforce.com marketing that has transformed the company’s service from .com ASP to On-Demand SaaS to Cloud Computing without being apple to run its service on Amazon EC2 ,Microsoft Azure or other cloud services.

To celebrate the release of the book, SugarCRM is offering a free data migration for Salesforce.com users through the end of the year. Registrants will have a chance to win a free Motorola Droid.

SugarCRM hopes that the publication of this book “step[s] up the innovation”.

Please contact us if you would like more details. (510) 501-7333

Regards,

The Sugar Team

“There is a Japanese belief that business is temporal, whereas relationships are eternal. That’s true, One day you compete. The next day you partner. One day someone is your subordinate; the next day he or she may be your superior. At its finest, business is friendly competition, just like a game of tennis.”

                                                                                                       - Page 39 of “Behind the Cloud”

And I grabbed this picture from the CRMOutsiders blog:

Application Lifecycle in the Cloud

2009-11-10T23:52:48-08:00

Cloud computing is having a profound effect on the software application lifecycle.

Almost every phase of creating and rolling out software applications is now addressed by a growing number of cloud services: from prototyping, to development, testing & QA, continuous integration -- and all the way down to staging, deployment and post-production (monitoring and management). All of this can now be done in the cloud.

The vision is compelling. Imagine a world in which programmers can access their development environment from any computer without having to set up anything, collaborate with teams spread around the world, easily push the code to testing and QA, and then to production, where the apps will be automatically monitored and managed.

Although admittedly realizing this vision in full is several years away, we are already seeing many of the components emerging and gaining traction.

Here are some examples:

Development

Almost every area of the development phase is now supported by cloud services. Software-as-a-Service code repositories, version control and bug tracking services such as GitHub, Beanstalk (Subversion-as-a-service) and others are now commonly used in organizations large and small.

IDEs are another story. Until recently, IDEs were last bastion of local development work, but that seems to be changing (at least there are some early indications of it). A couple of example are the Mozilla Lab's Bespin project and HerokuGarden (which although it is no longer supported by Heroku, has a following and is featured in books such as O'Reilly's Learning Rails).

Another trend in IDEs are hybrids, which introduce the notion of developing on the local machine but deploying to the cloud from within the development environment, such as the g-Eclipse project and Aptana Cloud Connect.

A new tool that was recently released and caught my attention is Mike - a service for adding and managing builds in Java for continuous integration.

Testing and QA

This is a particularly active area in the cloud, and for good reason: testing seems to be one of the earliest applications for cloud computing. Some interesting companies in this space include Sauce Labs' Sauce On-Demand, which provides functional web testing in the cloud and is based on the popular open source framework Selenium, and Skytap which provides a full-featured "QA Lab".

Mercury (now part of HP), the 800 lbs. gorilla in testing also has quite a few SaaS offerings, which are increasingly gaining traction. And IBM has launched a development and testing cloud service, which allows using various Rational products in its cloud on a pay-per-use basis.

As a "bursty" workload, and with the growing trends of continuous integration and agile development, it's not surprising that cloud testing is doing well. Developers can run massive tests on-demand and in parallel, saving significant time and shortening the development cycle.

Deployment

Then, of course, there is deployment to production. This is where PaaS players such as Google AppEngine, Force.com, Stax, Heroku, Engine Yard and others come in. All of them significantly reduce the deployment of the app by pre-building and pre-configuring a stack of application infrastructure (data tier, middleware and so on).

Production

In production, applications need to be monitored and managed. New Relic is an application performance management service running entirely in the cloud, and it can serve both applications that run in a cloud environment such as Engine Yard or AWS, as well as applications deployed in the data center. Originally, the company supported only Rails apps, but has now expanded its product to support Java as well.

RightScale is another cloud-based service that allows for a variety of management and monitoring capabilities (and in fact integrates New Relic into it).

The Future of App Development

Last week I received a call from a friend at one of the largest vendors in the technology industry. He told me they were trying to figure out the "future of application development" and asked to meet the team so they could "pick my brain". Whoa, big topic.

I spoke about a number of areas and the topic of this blog was one of them. Although this is merely a story about "tools", there is a bigger picture here. After all, in the eyes of many, the number one benefit of cloud computing is increased business agility. And a key part of business is application development.

If we take all this to its logical conclusion, we can envision a web-based environment (i.e., cloud) which developers go to and can -- with a click of a button -- streamline the entire development process on-demand, accessing the myriad of tools that today require installation and configuration on local hardware.

If you are a developer and use any of these tools, or would like to mention other tools, or have any other thoughts about the experience of development in the cloud, please leave a comment.

Amazon Reserved Instances Update

2009-10-16T11:26:54-07:00

Back in March, when Amazon first came out with reserved instances for EC2 (instances you can pre-pay at a discount for a period of 1 or 3 years) I posted Amazon Reserved Instances: Do They Make Business Sense? In that post I also made available a public Zoho spreadsheet with a simple calculator that allows figuring out whether reserved instances make sense for you or not.

In August, Amazon announced lower pricing for Amazon EC2 reserved instances, so I created an updated spreadsheet (if this cuts off in your browser click here):

I also created a version for the European prices (full, editable version here):

The break-even point for 1-year instances is 3,250 hours, or about 4.5 months (assuming you are running the instances 24/7). The break-even point for 3-year reserved instances is 5,000 hours, or about 7 months (assuming you are running the instances 24/7).

Several of the companies I have been working with have a substantial pool of instances constantly running. And although they are accounting for reserved instances in their business plans to demonstrate the long-term benefits of the gross margins they allow, they seem hesitant to actually pay for reserved instances. These calculations demonstrate that they are probably being too risk averse as in their case, the platforms/apps are sure to be running for at least 7 months and there are substantial cost-savings involved.

Are you considering or already running reserved instances? What is the use case and what are the pros and cons? Please share in the comments.

CloudCamp in the Cloud - Oct 22

2009-10-16T08:35:57-07:00

The organizers of the very successful CloudCamp events have put together a new virtual event called CloudCamp in the Cloud, which takes place next week. I've been to a few physical CloudCamps and they are great events, so I expect this online one to be good as well. Worth attending.

Here are the details:

CloudCamp, organizer of the community-based cloud computing unconference series, today announced that it’s
taking its popular event series virtual with the forthcoming “CloudCamp in the Cloud CloudCamp in the Cloud, to be held Thursday, October 22, 2009 from 12 noon to 3 pm Eastern Standard Time, builds upon the original live CloudCamp format providing a free and open place for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing. Using an online meeting format, attendees will exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative and supporting environment, advancing the current state of cloud computing and related technologies.

There are a number of opportunities to get involved with CloudCamp in the Cloud:

ATTEND – Attending CloudCamp in the Cloud is free, fun and informative. Register now at http://bit.ly/UKbc1.
PRESENT – CloudCamp in the Cloud encourages community presentations. If you have a cloud-related topic to discuss, visit the http://bit.ly/2NNh5l page to submit a proposal.
SPONSOR – CloudCamp depends on corporate sponsors who provide financial assistance and other valuable donations. Current CloudCamp in the Cloud sponsors include Citrix, Enomaly and Appistry. If you would like to sponsor CloudCamp in the Cloud, please contact Reuven Cohen.
ORGANIZE – CloudCamp is a non-profit, volunteer-driven organization. If you'd like to help facilitate CloudCamp in the Cloud, letting us know about your interest by emailing cloudcamp@googlegroups.com.
SPREAD THE WORD – Help share the news about CloudCamp in the Cloud, by retweeting this announcement (hashtag: #cloudcamp), blogging about the event, and linking to the main information page at http://bit.ly/3wBgyI.

Related Links
[1] http://bit.ly/UKbc1 [CloudCamp in the Cloud Registration]
[2] http://twitter.com/cloudcamp [CloudCamp on Twitter]
[3] http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10128776220 [CloudCamp on Facebook]

Contacts
Program

Dave Nielsen, (415) 531-6674, dave -at- platformd -dot- com

Sponsorships:

Reuven Cohen, (212) 203 4734 x102, ruv -at- enomaly -dot- com

Media:

Sam Charrington, (415) 727-1850, sam -at- appistry -dot- com

About CloudCamp
CloudCamp was formed in 2008 in order to provide a common ground for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing. Through a series of local CloudCamp events, attendees can exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative and supporting environment, advancing the current state of cloud computing and related technologies. CloudCamp has served over 5,000 CloudCampers in more than 50 events all over world, in cities like Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bangalore, Berlin, London, New York, San Francisco, Stockholm and Singapore.

Yahoo and Cloudera Discuss Hadoop Next Week

2009-10-15T22:28:40-07:00

My friend Dekel Tankel sent me some information about the next Hadoop user group, which takes place at the Yahoo campus in Santa Clara on Wednesday, October 21, 2009. Sounds like an interesting line up and agenda:

6-6:15 - Socializing and Beers

6:15-6:45 - Mumak - Using Simulation for Large-scale Distributed System Verification and Debugging
Hong Tang - Yahoo!

Large-scale distributed systems such as MapReduce are notoriously hard to verify & debug. An effective approach to address many of these challenges is through simulation. In this talk, I am going to present Mumak, a MapReduce simulator, including its design and implementation, early experience how it is useful, and point out some future work.

6:45-7:15 - Cloudera Desktop in Detail
Philip Zeyliger, Cloudera

7:15-7:45 - Karmasphere Studio: A graphical IDE for Hadoop

7:45-8:00 Q&A and Open Discussion

RSVP here.

The Purpose-Driven Cloud: Part 3 - Domain-Specific Clouds

2009-10-06T03:01:20-07:00

This is the third post in the series I described in The Purpose-Driven Cloud. the series is an attempt to categorize the various cloud platforms available today (and that may be available in the future). Each installment examines one of the dimensions that differentiates various cloud platforms. Previous posts discussed the Usability-Driven Cloud and Framework-Based Clouds. This post is about: -

Domain-Specific Clouds

Unlike general purpose clouds, such as IaaS clouds (for example, Amazon Web Services) and PaaS clouds (e.g., Google App Engine), domain-specific clouds are cloud platforms intended for developing apps (or components of apps) with a particular kind of functionality.

The example that epitomizes this concept is Twilio -- a cloud platform focused entirely on telephony and voice applications, as I described in detail in What's Really Exciting About Cloud Computing.

Other examples include testing clouds (SOASTA, SkyTap) and ITStructures' PoC, Demo and Training Cloud.

The rumor is that OpsCode is working on an IT automation domain-specific cloud using Chef, the domain-specific programming language the company is promoting.

Other domain-specific clouds are sure to follow, as well as industry-specific clouds, which will be the topic of the next post in this series.

The Clouderati on Twitter

2009-09-21T00:55:09-07:00

I did not follow the Twitter stream on this in real time, but I understand that James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart) proposed creating a list of people who tweet about Cloud Computing and Sam Johnston (@samj) implemented it using TweepML.org. It's a convenient way to find out who tweets about cloud and follow them in bulk.

I created a list like this a while ago, but haven't had time to update it properly, so a community driven list makes a lot of sense. The list is relatively short right now, but seems to be growing quickly via recommendations.

You can check it out here. And follow @clouderati.

(And don't forget to follow me on Twitter: @gevaperry...)

The Purpose-Driven Cloud: Part 2 - Technology Frameworks

2009-09-14T22:43:20-07:00

This is the second post in the series I described in The Purpose-Driven Cloud. the series is an attempt to categorize the various cloud platforms available today (and that may be available in the future). Each installment examines one of the dimensions that differentiates different cloud platforms. The first in the series discussed the Usability-Driven Cloud. This post is about: --

The Framework-Based Cloud

Framework-based cloud platforms are designed to be used with a specific programming language, product or technology stack. They enable developers who subscribe to that particular programing model to focus on the innovative aspect of their application and let the platform handle the plumbing problems of scalability, reliability and performance (and in some cases, integration).

So, as you would expect, there are clouds focused on different frameworks:

Heroku and Engine Yard provide a platform-as-a-service for Ruby.

Google App Engine supports Python and Java (or more accurately, languages that run on the Java Virtual Machine, which may include JRuby, Jython, etc.).

GigaSpaces has launched a beta cloud service, which leverages its product and the Spring Framework for creating scalable apps in the cloud.

And speaking of Spring, very notable is the recent VMWare acquisition of SpringSource, which in turn acquired Cloud Foundry, with the announced intent to create a Java cloud (or more accurately, enable Java clouds, as VMWare itself does not intend to host the platform, but sell it to third-party providers).

Stax offers another platform-as-a-service specifically focused on Java Enterprise Edition (aka J2EE).

Microsoft Azure, of course, is a .Net cloud platform.

Adobe has released a beta version of a Flash PaaS back in November of last year code-named Cocomo and then renamed it Adobe Flash Collaboration Service.

PHP does not yet have a full-blown cloud service, but not surprisingly, Zend Technologies, the company behind PHP, seems to be thinking about it, and already offering Amazon Machine Images.

Stack-Support, Proprietary Models and Trade-Offs

Modern applications are of course built from many components that form a "stack". One of the key areas of differentiation among platform-as-a-service providers who support the same programming language is going to be the stack they support and the approach they've taken to support them.

There is an inherent trade-off between the level of flexibility the platform provides for developers, and its ability to transparently handle issues such as scale, performance, reliability and integration.

Google App Engine, for example, although it supports Java, requires specific threading and data models. These are non-standard development practices, if not outright proprietary. The implications of this are that existing apps require significant changes to be made in order to run on GAE, and applications written for GAE will require significant changes to be ported to other platforms. A phenomenon also known as vendor lock-in.

Heroku, on the other hand, takes a different approach. They do require applications to be written in a certain way to run on the platform. But what they require are standard best practices. In other words, while porting a pre-existing app to Heroku might require some code and architecture changes, the opposite is not true: an application written to run on Heroku would be able to easily run on other platforms and in other (including non-cloud) environments.

Also, as I pointed out in Ruby Developers: The Cloud Generation, Heroku allows interchanging different components in the stack, such as the choice to use Rails or Sinatra.

Product-Specific Cloud Frameworks

In some cases, the "framework" is a specific (usually commercial) product that is now being offered as a cloud service. A good example of this is Tibco Silver, which leverages ActiveMatrix and other Tibco products.

Final Thoughts

An argument has been made that in the end there will be a handful of mega-clouds - no more than five. This may or may not be true in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service space, due to the fact that at the end of the day IaaS is a commodity service and economies-of-scale will win the day. But is certainly not true when it comes to PaaS. As long as different development platforms, programming models and frameworks are around (forever?), their will be cloud platforms to support them (even if those platforms are eventually acquired by a few large players).

Read the next installment in this series: Domain-Specific Clouds.

The Best Cloud Computing Podcasts

2009-08-18T02:59:28-07:00

There are very few but very excellent cloud computing focused podcasts that I listen to fairly regularly and I thought I'd share:

We'll start with John Willis, the godfather of cloud podcasting. John's actually involved in three podcasts:
- Cloud Cafe, John's lengthier interview pieces with a range of people active in the cloud space (I was a guest a couple of times: 1 , 2)
- Cloud Droplets, John's brief, almost daily recordings of his musings and some interviews at conferences
- IT Management & Cloud Podcast, which John co-hosts with Redmonk analyst Michael Cote
Gary Orenstein's The Cloud Computing Show
- I was recently a guest on Gary's show together with Jeff Lawson of Twilio as previously mentioned
An excellent new-comer is the Cloud Security Podcast hosted by Chriss Hoff (Rational Survivability blog) and Craig Balding (CloudSecurity.org blog). Only one episode is up so far, but I hope they'll follow it up with many more
Dave Linthicum's Cloud Computing Podcast (I'm not sure if it's still active)
- I was a guest on Dave's show in January: listen here
Then, of course, there is Overcast, the podcast I co-host with James Urquhart (of the Wisdom of Clouds blog), but we've somewhat neglected recently

If you know, or host, any other interesting cloud-related podcasts, please share in the comments.

The Purpose-Driven Cloud: Part 1 - Usability

2009-08-17T23:13:39-07:00

As I explained in the previous post The Purpose-Driven Cloud: Introduction, this is the first in a series of blog posts on the different cloud platform offerings available today and how they focus on different dimensions to serve different purposes. This post discusses --

The Usability-Driven Cloud

Usability-driven clouds are a concept similar to the idea of programming language generations. Lower-level generations give the developer complete access to the computing infrastructure, but are extremely complex as the developer is required to build every aspect of the application from scratch. Higher-level generations are much easier and intuitive to use by humans, and come built-in with many common tasks and functions. But this usability comes with a price: the developer cannot access the underlying resources, or "plumbing", at a fine-grained level.

In programming languages, 1GL (1st generation language) would be machine language, 2GL is Assembler, 3GL are high-level languages such as C and Java, 4GL are mostly niche programming languages designed for specific business purposes (such as scientific analysis) and 5GL are visual programming tools (think "drag & drop"), which in their original vision were intended to allow non-programmers create software applications. For the most part, 4GL and 5GL never became mainstream (although the corpses of many attempts lay on the wayside of Silicon Valley roads).

We're seeing similar "usability generations" evolve in cloud computing. However, they come in two main flavors: deployment usability and programming usability.

Deployment Usability -- Platforms of higher deployment usability generations focus on easing and abstracting the process of deploying and configuring the application, not necessarily on writing the code for it. In modern development, this is as big an aspect of application development, if not bigger, than actual programming. See James Lindenbaum's Why Instant Deployment Matters for more on this topic on the Heroku blog.

At the moment, all of the IaaS players can be generally categorized as lower generation deployment platforms. This includes Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Terremark, GoGrid, etc.

PaaS offerings such as Heroku are a higher level generation deployment platform and eliminate the vast majority of infrastructure setup and configuration required to get an app running (hence James's use of the term "instant deployment").

I further discuss Heroku's role as an application platform in Ruby Developers: The Cloud Generation.

Programming Usability -- This dimension is similar to classic programming language generations. So while Heroku is high-level in terms of deployment, it is relatively low level (in modern day terminology) in terms of programming. You have to develop your apps in straight Ruby (which in classic terms would be a 3GL). This is the same generation programming language you would use on an AWS or Rackspace (on either of which you can use pretty much any 3GL language - e.g., Java and C++ - but more on that later).

But although 4GL and 5GL languages failed to become mainstream, we are seeing a revival of them in the cloud. A few examples of such platforms, which generally enable non-programmers to develop apps, include Intuit's Quickbase, WorkXpress (who in a conversation with me explicitly called themselves 5GL PaaS) and even Salesforce.com.

Note that I am not referring here to the Salesforce.com CRM SaaS application, which is a packaged app; nor am I referring to the company Salesforce.com Inc.'s PaaS offering Force.com (which is a high-level deployment platform but low-level programming platform). I am referring to the fact that a business user can quite easily create a custom app using Salesforce.com by creating new objects, fields, tabs, workflows, etc. without any programming skills.

Another thing to keep in mind is that high-level programming clouds will invariably be high-level deployment clouds, as they appeal to non-programmers.

Finally, it's important to emphasize that a higher generation platform in either usability dimension -- programming or deployment -- is not necessarily better or worse than a lower generation platform. It depends on what you are trying to achieve and the skills and resources available.

If the purpose is to develop a unique app that requires a high degree of optimization, a lower generation platform is better. If the task at hand involves building an app that uses typical services and functionality, and a general-purpose infrastructure will serve it well, then a high-generation platform is in order. It's a trade-off.

In the next installment in the series I'll be discussing The Framework-Specific Cloud.

Stay tuned.

The Purpose-Driven Cloud: Introduction

2009-08-17T22:57:14-07:00

Nearly a year ago I posted Thoughts on Platform-as-a-Service, in which I reviewed the state of cloud platforms at the time. A lot has happened since then, and it's time to revisit the latest and greatest in PaaS and specialized cloud platforms.

I've been asked several times by companies I advise or just talk to, as well as by journalists, how should companies select a cloud provider? The answer is, as it almost always is, "it depends." Similarly to what we had already seen in programming languages and traditional application platforms (i.e., installed on-premise), different platforms have been designed to serve different purposes.

I am planning on publishing a series of posts with the general title of "The Purpose-Driven Cloud", which cover the different dimensions that differentiate cloud platforms and make them more suitable for different purposes.

The dimensions I am going to cover are:

Usability-Driven Clouds [UPDATE: Post is live here]
Framework-Based Clouds [UPDATE: Post is live here]
Domain-Specific Clouds [UPDATE: Post is live here]
Data-Driven Clouds
Industry-Focused Clouds
Geographically-Centric Clouds

Simultaneous to this intro, I am publishing the first in the series: The Usability-Driven Cloud.

The Cloud Computing Show with Gary Orenstein

2009-08-06T09:07:26-07:00

Last week I joined Gary Orenstein, host of the The Cloud Computing Show podcast, and Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio for a podcast recording of Gary's show. It's worth a listen (if I do say so myself). We discuss some of the latest news around cloud computing (OSCON, Rackspace API, Microsoft Azure pricing and more) and of course talk about Twilio, which I have written about in the past as What's Really Exciting About Cloud Computing.

At the end of each show, Gary does this thing where he asks eah of his guests to recommend a cloud service they like, and he contributes one as well.

Here's what we each recommended (I cheated and recommended two):

Gary: http://bit.ly/ (URL shortening and tracking)
Jeff: Get Achievements http://www.getachievements.com/ (instant recognition programs)
Geva:New Relic http://www.newrelic.com/ (performance monitoring) and Good Data http://www.gooddata.com/

(easy analytics)
Listen to the podcast here.

Yahoo-Xoopit Acquisition: A Missed Opportunity?

2009-07-22T23:26:11-07:00

Earlier today I published a blog post on GigaOm about the Yahoo-Xoopit acquisition and what I think is an overlooked aspect of the deal, especially as it related to Xoopit's CloudQuery service. Check it out: Will Yahoo Use Xoopit's CloudQuery to Help Usher in the Real-Time Web?

What's Really Exciting About Cloud Computing

2009-07-07T15:57:16-07:00

Last week I attended an event in New York organized by Tibco as part of their launch tour for their new cloud offering, Tibco Silver. It was a really fun panel to do with Mike Culver from Amazon Web Services, Mike DiPetrillo from VMWare, Ed Simmons from Deutsche Bank and Sreedhar Kajeepeta from CSC.

As the panel was about to wrap-up, Farrell McManus, moderator of the panel and the publisher of Waters Magazine, asked the panelists something to the effect of what makes us excited about the future of the cloud. My response was that most of our conversations on cloud computing now focus on how the cloud will enable us to do the same things but cheaper, faster and easier, what's really interesting to me is how the cloud will enable us to do things we couldn't before. And as an example I gave Twilio.

Twilio is a remarkably simple concept, but very difficult to implement in an elegant way, as the Twilio folks have done. It is a cloud platform that enables developers with basic web programming skills to develop complex voice applications.

Under the hood -- but completely transparent to the developer or the end user -- Twilio is hosted on Amazon EC2, uses a multi-tenant architecture and has implemented a fully functional telephony infrastructure based on the open source framework Asterisk.

But again, the developer is shielded from the complexity of the telephony infrastructure, something that used to require specialized engineering skills that involved things like ports, trunking and SIP servers. Instead, all the developer needs to do is call the Twilio service from his or her web app via a simple API that consists of five verbs: Play, Say, Gather, Record and Dial.

The other interesting aspect of Twilio is the pricing model. It is a simple pay-by-the-minute model, and a cheap one at that: 3 cents per minute, inbound or outbound. No upfront or monthly fees, no contracts.

Lastly, Twilio is highly scalable on demand. If a customer is now running some huge marketing campaign -- and some of Twilio's customers have done just that -- the system can scale without warning as needed.

These last two aspects of Twilio -- pay-per-use pricing and on-demand scalability -- are a direct consequence of the fact that the service itself runs on Amazon's cloud platform with a multi-tenant architecture.

The end result of all this is that the barriers to creating highly creative and sophisticated voice applications (or adding a "voice interface" to existing web apps) are extremely low. And it means that we won't just be able to create the same apps we did at a lower cost, but that a whole range of new applications will be developed. You can already see some of that happening on Twilio's blog.

In order to get people's imagination working on the types of apps they can create with Twilio, they have organized several developer contests, and you can check out the creative results on the above linked blog.

Their current contest is one of my favorites. It's aimed at Ruby developers who run an app on Heroku and use Twilio. If you read my post Ruby Developers: The Cloud Generation, you'll realize like me that this is some serious cloud-on-cloud action that really changes the game.

Check out this video Morten Bagai from Heroku that shows how easy it is to get a Ruby app running on Heroku and using Twilio:

How to create a Twilio app on Heroku from Morten Bagai on Vimeo.

Ruby Developers: The Cloud Generation

2009-06-30T12:48:27-07:00

In Evans Data Corp.'s first 2009 North American Development Trends Report, Joe McKendrick reports that Ruby usage has increased 40% during the past year. Darryl Taft of eWeek writes about the report:

According to Evans Data's biannual North American Development Survey, 14 percent of North American developers use Ruby some part of the time, up from 10 percent in 2008.

Moreover, the survey showed that 20 percent of developers expect to use Ruby in the coming year.

This trend is somewhat corroborated by the Framework Web Trends report from Built With.

To cloud computing there is a special significance in the increased adoption of Ruby, because Ruby developers are the cloud generation.

Back in early May I attended Oreilly Media's RailsConf 2009, the largest annual event for the Ruby-on-Rails community. It was an enlightening experience for me as for the past 10 years or so I had been deeply involved in the enterprise Java world.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story of Ruby, it is a dynamic programming language that has been around for more than 15 years but became "hot" circa 2006, particularly among the Web 2.0 crowd. It really took off when David Heinemeier Hansson developed the Rails web application framework as part of his work on 37Signal's Basecamp software-as-a-Service in 2005. It became especially famous by the fact that companies such as Twitter were using it and Ruby enjoyed an adoption explosion in 2006-07.

So essentially RoR is a programming language that is only now coming of age. And what struck me at Railsconf was that as a community they are taking cloud computing as a given. This is how you deploy apps. Period.

Before I explain further, an analogy I use for this is the telephone infrastructure in under-developed countries. Many countries in Africa and regions of China, for example, jumped straight to cell phone infrastructure. They simply skipped landlines for the most part.

In a similar fashion, the Ruby community is essentially skipping traditionally on-premise installed software. The dominant model for RoR application deployment is cloud, with platforms such as Slicehost (now part of Rackspace Cloud), Engine Yard and Heroku. Cloud services such as New Relic, FiveRuns and Scout provide the de facto standard monitoring and management frameworks, and cloud-based GitHub is the standard code version and developer collaboration tool for the RoR generation.

Moreover, training courses and educational books, such as Oreilly's Learning Rails , use cloud platform Heroku as their standard learning environment. Meaning that a new generation of developers, for whom Ruby is their first or early programming language, are growing up with cloud platforms as a natural part of life, just as my kids are growing up with Google Docs, Wikipedia and smartphones as a natural part of life. Imagine that.

What's also interesting about Ruby-land is that unlike Java, a programming language that made its big entrance a little over a decade ago, there are no dominant software vendors for Ruby infrastructure/framework/middleware/platform space. Instead -- and this is perhaps another area in which Ruby skipped a generation -- all of the application software components are pure open source plays, including Ruby and Rails themselves (and also including a long list of components such as Sinatra, Rack, Mongrel and Thin).

And the same goes for the various Virtual Machine implementations of Ruby, such as MRI (the original), JRuby (a JVM-based implementation) and IronRuby (an implementation for the Microsoft .Net Framework).

If you had gone to a Java conference in 1997, the vendors dominating the show would have been WebLogic and NetDynamics (and Sun, of course) -- the three leading app servers. At the 1999 JavaOne show, they would have been the vendors that acquired them - BEA and Sun.

In the 2009 RailsConf, the two dominant vendors were Heroku and Engine Yard. Unlike some perceive these companies, they are not merely Rails hosting services -- they are the application platforms for Ruby, and they are on the cloud.

Heroku has demonstrated a particularly deep understanding of this role. They have "curated" a complete tightly integrated platform out of the various components and deliver an extremely easy to use platform that takes care of all things infrastructure (scalability, reliability, configuration, database connections, etc.) and lets the developers focus on their unique logic -- not the plumbing. They are, in essence, the WebLogic of the cloud generation.

Full disclosure: I am advising Heroku on strategy and marketing.

Innovator's Dilemma and the Cloud

2009-06-30T06:18:10-07:00

In his seminal book The Innovator's Dilemma Clayton Christensen lays out the dynamics that allow start-ups to succeed. In short (and without doing justice to the depth of Prof. Christensen's ideas), the idea is that technological innovations initially represent too small of a market for large, established companies, which need to continue demonstrating a significant growth in percentages relative to their current revenues.

This, of course, creates an opportunities for new entrants, who often start with zero or very little revenues and therefore the emerging market represents a significant opportunity to demonstrate growth. One of the interesting concepts in Christensen's book -- and his later works that further develop the concept: The Innovator's Solution and Seeing What's Next -- is that in many cases the large incumbent vendors are well aware of what the technological future holds, but are unable to act appropriately because the dynamics of the business.

Cloud computing is now in that classic stage -- and the symptoms are everywhere. There seems to be little doubt in most observers' minds that cloud computing is a revolution and represents the future of IT, but turning this realization into a profitable business -- for both start-ups and established vendors -- is a different proposition altogether.

Low Visibility

One of the problems is that there is so little visibility as to the actual rate of cloud adoption. The hype is undeniable, but how significant are the revenues, and more importantly, how fast are they growing? Amazon, whose cloud services are perhaps the most significant indicators of cloud adoption, is intentionally -- and quite effectively -- hiding the finances behind AWS. The same goes for Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure and other cloud operations within larger vendors. And there's little to be learned from leading start-ups such as RightScale, who are of course privately held and keep their cards close to the vest.

One interesting case is Rackspace, the only company in the space that I know of that actually discloses its revenues from cloud operations separately. For example, in its Q1 2009 financials, Rackspace reported revenues of $134 million from its traditional managed hosting business and about $11 million from its cloud business. This comes out to a 16.5% growth rate from Q1 2008 for the managed hosting business compared to 145% growth for the cloud business (and note that part of the cloud business growth was due to the acquisitions of Slicehost and JungleDisk).

We can see The Innovator's Dilemma in numbers. While cloud is clearly rapidly growing for Rackspace, the absolute numbers are still small, and the company faces a dilemma of what part of the business to invest in.

And we can see this dilemma with other large vendors. In a recent interview with TechTarget, Mike Repass, product manager for Google App Engine said:

...rather than one big enterprise poster child, we'd rather have a hundred small web poster children, the kid in Brazil or China that wants to build apps on the web. It's very hard to build the pipeline to extract money from the big guys.

And we all know that in the long run, the real money is the enterprise, not the hundred kids in Brazil and China, and even Santa Clara County.

But then again, the future of IT is in the cloud. So what's a company to do?

Different Perspectives

Depending on the size and business of the organization we can see different approaches to the dilemma.

Established Vendors

The largest of vendors, such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, have sufficient resources to invest strongly in cloud computing without compromising in any way their existing high revenue and profitability businesses targeting consumers and enterprises. Oracle is a different animal because of Ellison's declared disdain for cloud computing. But now many believe that Oracle's play in the cloud will be mostly through its recent acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which has been investing heavily in the cloud.

IBM and HP also both seem to be making noises in the cloud, the former more significantly than the latter. But much of their marketing and investment seems to be in a way that somehow tries to mitigate the Innovator's Dilemma, also known as internal and hybrid clouds.

But as we go down the food chain, we see that different vendors are responding differently. Yahoo has been mostly silent about its cloud strategy, despite some rumors and public job postings, which indicate that they are seriously considering it.

Today, I'm speaking at an event by Tibco about their new cloud offering, Tibco Silver. Tibco is introducing many of its existing middleware products as a hosted cloud service (btw, you can follow the event in real time on Twitter with the hashtag #NOWCloud).

But for many of the mid- to small-sized vendors strategies are all over the map and mostly amount to marketing. At most, they may have created AMIs, and some even back that up with pay-per-use pricing (such as RedHat/JBoss). Others such as SpringSource have remained fairly silent about cloud (although I hear insider rumors that there is something in the works).

For many of these vendors the solution seems to amount to trying to take advantage of the cloud buzz through symbolic marketing-oriented efforts, without having to make significant investments in a true cloud offering, and without disrupting existing business models.

Start-Ups

Theoretically, start-ups shouldn't have a dilemma. They should be going all out for the cloud with the hopes of either unseating existing vendors, or gaining enough traction quickly enough so that the large vendors will acquire them down the road. But in practice, things aren't that simple.

Some start-ups are pure-play cloud companies. In other words, the whole point about them is that they provide cloud offerings. For them it's of course a no-brainer. Examples of such companies include Twilio, Heroku and Rightscale.

But I am also talking to software start-ups that are having serious dilemmas about the cloud. Think of an application management software start-up that is ready to realease a next-generation product in the space, or think of Reductive Labs and OpsCode, the commercial efforts behind Puppet and Chef respectively. Clearly most of the business today is in traditional data centers -- but the future is in the cloud.

Transitions Are Hard

Now some have suggested that these companies should start selling to the traditional enterprise with the classic approach, and gradually make the transition to the cloud when the market is bigger. The problem is that such an approach is easier said then done. Several factors make it extremely difficult to make such a successful transition. Even if in some of these cases the actual products would require little investment to transition to a cloud-centric approach, these companies will have to battle market perceptions, company culture, customer concerns and re-forming the company's ecosystem of partners and channels. I will post a more detailed blog on this topic soon.

Bottom Line

At the end of the day, both large and small companies will have to make a gut feeling call. The considerations include what they believe the adoption lifecycle timeline of cloud is for their particular business and how much they have to lose (some companies' existing business is failing, so there's little risk in making s strategic transition -- but that's a very hard psychological pill to swallow). They also include company culture and ecosystem, and of course the level of ivestment required in the product. In some cases, the solution may be aquiring, merging or being acquired.

I'll discuss some of the topics raised in this blog in more detail in future posts.

Podcast: Cloud Computing and Open Source

2009-05-12T09:00:00-07:00

On Friday, James Urquhart and I recorded another episode of our podcast, Overcast, with Matt Asay on the topic of the relationship between cloud computing and open source. To me it was fascinating topic to discuss.

Matt is VP Business Development at open source CMS company Alfresco and authors the blog The Open Road on CNET.

It was a fascinating conversation. As cloud computing emerges there are many lessons to be learned from the open source movement. I also completely agree with Matt that perhaps finally cloud computing offers a way for many open source companies to monetize their technology.

You can listen to it here.