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Here’s a video interview where Google CEO Eric Schmidt explains the company’s cloud computing philosophy. All businesses will adopt the cloud within the next 10-20 years.
I was reading the description for a cloud educational session sponsored by a local development company when I came across this copy:
IT Leaders: You’d prefer to focus on critical data and security issues without the hassle of servers, software licenses, installation, and maintenance; and ultimately you want to be able to scale your infrastructure dynamically as the need arises. The cloud can give you that freedom.
I have to believe this organization was referring to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds like Google Apps, Microsoft Azure and Salesforce Sites vs. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds like Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud servers. Because IaaS clouds require a certain level of software installation and system management knowledge. This begs the question: Will IT leaders eventually favor PaaS cloud solutions over IaaS because of perceived management efficiencies? I don’t think so and here’s why:
1. PaaS is the ultimate form of vendor lock-in. If I create a Google application I won’t be able to port it over to Salesforce or Microsoft. I will never be able to walk away from my cloud provider once I’m fully invested.
2. PaaS can’t run 99.999% of the existing software on the planet. My investments in legacy applications and custom code are negated by PaaS clouds. Why would my company rebuild perfectly reliable IT solutions just so that they can work the way a particular PaaS cloud provider wants them to work?
3. My IT resources and expertise will cease to be a competitive advantage if everything runs in a PaaS cloud. And I will only be able to utilize the capabilities that my PaaS platform vendor offers me.
4. PaaS cloud security will never be as transparent as IaaS cloud security. One minute Google is showing your secret documents to the whole world and the next minute they aren’t. All my data is one username and password away from being compromised.
You might get the impression that I don’t like PaaS cloud architectures. Nothing of the sort. I think the PaaS model makes an awful lot of sense for SaaS-based startups and social applications. I don’t think it makes sense for most enterprise IT applications. Tell me why I’m wrong. 
According to this article change management is a pretty interesting ride at Google.
Making changes to Google’s search infrastructure is akin to “changing the tires on a car while you’re going at 60 down the freeway.” –Urs Holzle, Google
Google’s Gmail service crashed earlier this morning impacting users around the world. It sounds like people were able to access their Gmail accounts through traditional mailbox protocols like POP and IMAP, but not via the web.
The sheer fact that this is national news just underscores the scale of Gmail and other global email services. I actually think that Gmail is pretty reliable for a free (or very cheap) email service. In my experience it has better uptime than most enterprise-class Microsoft Exchange email service providers.
I emitted an audible “uh oh” when I read the recent Times Online article regarding the environmental impact of Google searches. Time to make some popcorn and grab a good seat to watch the fight.
I consider myself to be an environmentalist. I participate in activities such as camping, hiking, and scuba diving that are enhanced by a unscathed environment. I want my children, and my children’s children to enjoy clean water, mature trees, and a bountiful ecosystem. At the same time I want my children to be able to enjoy the luxuries and efficiencies that technologies provide.
So here is the question I would ask the proponents of this environmental study: What was the environmental impact of knowledge acquisition before Google? My gut tells me that Google has significantly decreased the environmental impact of knowledge acquisition. In the past people may have traveled to multiple libraries or research institutions to find knowledge. Maybe they had to fly oversees to visit museums. Or they wrote messages to companies on dead wood using something called “a pen”. Okay, you get the point.
Information providers and the datacenters they live in will become big targets for the carbon-credit crowd. Those providers better start preparing for the coming battle.
Google apparently runs its datacenters hotter than most companies achieving millions in cost savings. Industry standard datacenter temperature ranges were recently adjusted upward to between 68 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit (20 to 25 degress Celsius). I’ve oftentimes had polite disagreements with customers that tour my datacenters and balk at the 70-72 degree average temperature reading. Most people don’t realize that datacenter operators have gradually been raising acceptable temperature limits over the past decade. And it’s with good reason: that 5 degree temperature difference could mean as much as 20% energy savings.
Every day a new vendor or service provider touts their new cloud computing technology and strategy. But what is cloud computing? It is quickly becoming one of those catch phrases which hosting marketing groups morph into every product pitch.
The origins of cloud computing stem from grid computing. You generally find grid computing in academic institutions and research laboratories. You’ve probably read articles about schools that build supercomputers using hundreds of off-the-shelf desktop machines. They use grid computing architectures and technologies to tie all those computers together. Think Borg. You can’t install Windows XP on this sort of massive cluster. These types of systems only support custom applications that are designed to take advantage of the distributed computing architecture.
Cloud computing incorporates the horizontal scalability of grid computing and packages it into a service that is delivered from a datacenter. The idea is that you can install your applications in a datacenter computing environment with little regard to the underlying infrastructure. Your applications live in the cloud. Cloud computing environments generally utilize virtual servers, networked storage, and significant software automation. Amazon’s EC2 is a good example of a modern cloud computing strategy. Their hosting service allows users to load applications on virtual servers and then scale those virtual servers — even across datacenters — to meet increased performance requirements. Google’s App Engine is another example of a cloud computing strategy. Do users really know where their applications live within Google’s infrastructure? No. And it doesn’t really matter. Google’s massively distributed infrastructure ensures that applications survive and thrive within the cloud.
The biggest challenge with cloud computing is that the specialized architecture requires specialized application development. It requires re-engineering time that most businesses don’t want to invest in. Many of Amazon’s bigger EC2 customers are companies that have strategically focused their application development on Amazon’s platform.
I believe that cloud computing will one day replace common hosting services such as shared websites, virtual private servers, and dedicated servers. But it will take a few more years before we see a standardized platform that both hosting providers and businesses can support.
The data storage business is amazing.
It sort of reminds me of Churchill’s quote… how did that go… “never was so much owed by so many to so few”. We keep giving our blood sweat and tears to a handful of enterprise storage vendors. We are served the same old commodity hardware and complicated software. Let’s face it. Almost everyone is selling the same disks on the same chassis and touting the same features.
The storage sales guys by-and-large are marketing droids that don’t understand a damn thing about what I need and probably wouldn’t care if they did. Oh, I’m not saying they are bad people. They have to earn a living like everyone else. My beef is that they always have an agenda that includes finding my wallet and removing my money. When they tell me that they want to meet to better understand my infrastructure it feels like they are just snooping around for more business. If I have a real storage project believe me — I’ll find you.
My company primarily buys netapp storage. Most of the netapp sales guys are okay — certainly a little better than some vendors I’ve dealt with. The gear works. That’s certainly a positive. On the other hand it is really expensive. It is a limiting factor for growth in our business. It harms our competitiveness. Netapp wants to license every cock-a-mamy protocol and service separately. Need iscsi? cha-ching. Dedup? cha-ching. Oh, now you need replication? cha-ching cha-ching. You won’t know the true cost of your netapp infrastructure until a year down the road when you need to start adding expensive features. And here’s the real rub. You end up paying about 20% annually for service and maintenance on the hardware. So basically over five years you have just paid 2X for your storage. It’s such a great scam I’m kicking myself for not inventing a storage company.
I want google storage. No, not some kind of remote data storage service like Amazon S3. I need more performance than those storage services can offer. I want storage that scales like building blocks. I want to be able to plug in storage blocks and gain more space and more performance. I want the storage scaling to be automatic and dummy-proof. I don’t want a solution that simply mirrors raid10 disk on vaultA to raid10 disk on vaultB. That’s trivial and a waste of resources. I want true distributed storage with outstanding performance. I want redundancy if building block nodes fail. I want to replicate data to multiple datacenters. I don’t want to license separate features. Give me the whole enchilada. Netapp, if someone else steps up to the plate and is able to provide me with this type of storage solution, it’s… buh-bye.
