Not my usual blog topic, but hey, it’s Friday and I had a brutal week. But, I just had to relay a retail experience I had a week or so ago. I went into a local hardware store. It’s a pretty good one but I’ve always thought they were a bit pricey. But, I needed a new vanity mirror and I needed it now. On the display they had one I immediately liked and was willing to pay the premium. Once I found a salesperson I actually started w/ a question about some sconce lights I liked all so. He looks at me. Looks me up and down and says, “your not going to like it.” I said, “hit me.” He did, I didn’t. Whatever. Bad start for sure. In any event, I say, I’d like to get this mirror you have over here on the wall. I took him to it, I said I’d like one of these please. Here are the two things he said to me:
1. We don’t have those in stock.
2. But, I bought one and it’s still in the box at home. Want to make me an offer I might sell it.
Ohhhhkay... I said, alright, I think I’ll stick to the store here. How long to get one.... Turns out it’s 7-10 business days. Keep in mind this is a premium price. Apparently there are six with their nearby suppliers. At this point I had already snapped a picture with my phone and sent it to my wife for approval. She says... LOVE IT... in response. So, I take the product #. I tap it into a google search. I find it on Amazon.com from an affiliate for 30% less, 5-7 days delivered, and a bit of tax. Net savings over store of around 20%. I decide to just show they guy and I said the following things:
1. I’d prefer to buy local. Can you sell it to me for this price and get it here in about the same time frame.
2. I can just order it from here an it’ll come to my doorstep by pushing this buy button now.
The response floored me. No. He mentioned the one he had at home again. I said okay. I hit the buy button and went home.
Here’s the crazy part. This is an employee owned store!
I’ve tested the I’d like to buy this at several other stores recently. Most of them simply have NO stock. They are just display stores. You cannot buy what they have and go home w/ it.
Astounding. Physical retail has absolutely no chance with me using this kind of approach. I’ll just order from home. Shame, I wanted to buy local. Either way mirror will be here in a couple of days along w/ the sconce lights, towel rack, and TP holder to match. *sigh*
Building for the Cloud is Building for Scalability
Even today with all the hoorah about cloud computing there are very few applications that can really call themselves cloud computing applications outside of the sciences and even there, I suspect there aren't that many. So, I began trying to piece together a list of the features that I think a cloud computing application must have. Otherwise, it's not really a cloud computing application at all but perhaps on its way to being one or not at all. What I realized quickly was that being a cloud application is often about three things.
- Scalability
- Availability
- Costs
Part of what prompted me to write this is that I have installed and scaled countless websites and applications over the years. I've done Drupal, Wordpress, Clearspace, ModX, Expression Engine, Custom CMS applications, X Cart, Magento, Django, and every language you can think of from ruby to PHP to java to python. Thing is, they all have a very serious problem and it baffels me that it doesn't appear to be addressed well yet. Every single one of these applications was NOT built for the cloud. They just do not scale well without serious work and complexity to make them scale. I did not say they do not scale as in most cases, one way or another, they almost certainly can be made to scale. For example, I've built Drupal sites that could handle 1.5 to 2.0 billion page views per month for example. But, it was forced and very complex all in all.
But, what is important to understand is that very, very few applications can natively and easily scale to what we call cloud scale or web scale as they are out of the box. They simply cannot. But, if you do want you application to be able to utilize all the benefits of cloud computing such as:
- Automated provisioning and scale - Using tools like Chef and Puppet to code your infrastructure
- Rapid Deployment - You should be able to deploy fast and often
- Lower Cost to Market - You should be able to get up and running for less money in infrastructure than ever before (less capital expenditures on your balance sheet)
- High server to admin ratios and reduced operational costs over time - You can do more with less and it's all about quality over quantity
- Client satisfaction - Happy clients are clients that never even know your service grew 10x last quarter, they just know it works
- Shareholder/Partner Satisfaction - sleep better, make more money, run a better business
Here are some items that I think are must-haves if you are going to build a true cloud computing application. They are in no particular order but all are important. The take away from all this for me is that building something to scale is very much about building something for the cloud.
- Be Distributed - It must be able to do whatever it does over a dispersed network of nodes(servers/services) nearly as easily as it does on a single server
- Be Asynchronous - Think message based event driven frameworks
- Be Monitorable (aka Be Instrumented) - Just like your developers should implement unit tests they should implement monitoring instrumentation at the application level
- Be Self healing and Resiliant - The system should be able to handle faults and route around it when needed. A degraded state is often just fine so long as transaction can keep flowing to some degree.
- Be multi-provider - Do not put all your eggs in one basket (see my post on configuration management and deployment automation w/ Chef for example)
- Be multi-site - your site should be active-active to some degree across mutiple geographic locations. There is no reason any longer not to do this.
- Be able to Scale Out - Designing a distributed, stateless and asynchronous application will go a long way here
- Be Stateless - This one is not always possible for many reasons it is worth doing or at least minimizing in clever ways, think hard about this one and don't abuse state.
- Use the Cloud for your Infrasturucture - (note that I did not say virtualize only) - 'Nuff Said.
- Be able to rollback anything - If you deploy it, you should be able to un-deploy it just as easy. Oh database schema changes how I love thee.
- Test, test, test - Make sure your test process is solid.
- Be highly available (N+1) - If you need 5 servers to provide the capacity you need then you should have at least 6 servers at any given time. This is a simpler version of more complex capacity planning that you can do on a per server/service basis that's very, very important
- Use the right technology for the job - If you need a relational database by all means use one. If you only need a key/value store then by all means do NOT use a relational database. If you need data persistence to disk and complete data durablility then don't use memcached (not picking on memcached of course.. great tech there) Use other technologies properly configured to give you what you need. Put in non-technical terms, don't use a spoon to dig the foundation for a house. That's just silly.
- Build in failsafes (aka circuit breakers) - When something breaks like access from the application server to the database then the application should be able to handle it gracefully. Build this in!
I'm sure this list can be tuned and improved. I'm sure I will do so. What I'm after is laying down the rules for building truly cloud native applications. There has been some phenomenal work in this area over the years but it's only just beginning to be better understood and move more into the mainstream. This is both frustrating and exciting!
Some Cloud Thoughts on a Clear and Sunny Day
Cloud Computing is a deployment model and cloud computing is a business model. Cloud computing is not some silver bullet magical thing. It's not even easy *gasp* sometimes.
As a deployment model cloud computing can it is simply summed up as on-demand, self-service, reliable, and low to no capital costs services for the consumer.
As a business model it is summed up as, again, low to no long term capital costs (and the associated depreciation) and pay as you go service provider pricing models. In reality these are mountains of micro transactions aggregated into monthly and yearly billing cycles. For example, I spent $0.015 for a small compute instance w/ a cloud infrastructure provider because I just needed an hour of an Ubuntu 10.04 linux machine to test a quick software install combination and update a piece of documentation. I'll get a bill for that at the end of the month. Get this...
An hour of compute time costs me 3.3 times LESS than a piece of hubba bubba chewing gum cost me at $0.05 (one time use only) over 30 years ago. #cloud
Enterprises and service providers are learning very quickly from the how the early public cloud vendors how to do things differently and often more efficiently. It was well summed up in the Federal CTO's announcement of the government application cloud. Basically, that we saw that consumers could get IT services for orders of magnitude less than we could. So, we're fixing that by emulating what the companies that service the consumers are doing. Smart. Bechtel did this exact same thing years ago when analyzing that the cost per GB of storage for Amazon was orders of magnitude less than Bechtel could and asked the very important question why and then answered it very well.
A couple of years ago now I helped found a company called nScaled. nScaled does, business continuity as a service. It is only possible with the resources, at the price, and at the speed we have moved because of following cloud computing deployment and business models. It would not have been possible for us to build this business when we did and the way we have without these models.
In March 2008 I called cloud computing a renaissance.
It is my opinion that Cloud Computing is a technology architecture evolution that, when properly applied to business problems, can enable a business revolution. I've been saying this for a while but in recent weeks I have actually come to prefer the term renaissance over revolution.
Today, two years into a startup that uses the raw power of cloud computing deployment and business models across the board to enable new ways for companies to consume disaster recovery and business continuity solutions I can say without a doubt that I believe that cloud computing is a renaissance more than ever before!
Augmented Reality Becoming Reality
I thought it was time for another off-topic post. If you know me, you know I have been following VR/AR for years and years. I blame TRON, Star Wars, and any number of science fiction authors. Someday, I don't know yet how or when I will get to work on this stuff full time. But, in any event here are a couple of recent updates that got my attention for various reasons.
Here is an AR business card that mashes up with Twitter.
http://artimes.rouli.net/2009/07/cool-augmented-business-card-from-toxin.html
and more...
As soon as you can see these augmented reality images easier without a phone, webcam and a computer, or other unwieldy device that isn’t supremely geeky the world is going to change a great deal very fast. Today those
http://www.vuzix.com/iwear/products_wrap920.html
devices still look kind of like this:
But, that's changing very fast. Here is a contact lens that was recently "installed" on an unsuspecting little bunny rabbit. It's a low resolution heads up display.
Then, of course, there is actually the concept of controlling things virtually and even in the physical world through a combination of AR and monitoring brain waves.
Neurosky is developing tools to translate feelings (brain waves) into actions. What if you were to:
- Hook it to your car cruise control
- Get the will it blend guy to wire this up to his blender, will it mind blend?
- An augmented reality enabled version of the little engine that could where the kid actually participates in getting the train up the hill
- An alarm clock you CAN'T turn off until you are awake and "think" the damn thing off
- Obvious implications for additional controls for video/console games
- A mind controlled vibrator (so obvious)
- A lawn mower. Lawn Mower man 2.0.
- A vacuum cleaner
- Bank Lock boxes that require you to be calm to open them
- Drunk/Sleepy driving accident/construction prevention (what are a drunks brain waves like anyway?) - Car says your asleep and calls you a cab.
Depending on how difficult it is to learn to use this device of future revisions of it, it clearly has many possible uses. Why just calm? Why not also allow it to do things based on other states of mind like rage, excitement, happiness, sadness. That could be interesting!
As is often the case porn, marketing, and gaming will lead the way. AR Strippers have arrived as well:
http://artimes.rouli.net/2009/08/ar-strippers-oh-my.html
Beyond Reality - AR Gaming is developing interesting AR games.
http://www.augmented-reality-games.com/
While the AR strippers are entertaining I suppose, the reason it is interesting is because if you imaging using a live feed in real time you see quickly that the future of video conferencing and phone calls in general could present a lot more of you than just your face and voice. In the future, it'll feel to the people that see you in their spaces real and virtual that you are there. Sometime well after that, it'll feel like you are there too. But, that's much further out probably becuase integrating senses other than vision and audio is quite a bit more challenging at the moment. We just don't understand the brain well enough yet.
Lastly, if you haven't picked up and read Rainbows End