Internet of Things

There isn't just one web. There are many webs, the one we call web is the information web that can be browsed. There is a web being built that is invisible to a browser, it is the web of machines - referred to sometimes as IoT. As usual it is being met with cynicism, because we are not able to see the potential of machine to machine communication. Machines don't have to be physical devices, they can software logic elements. The communication transport does not need to be heavy weight, it does not even need to run entirely over existing TCI/IP transport. Some of the possibilities of IoT are obvious i.e. call home feature, automated trading floors, intelligent surveillance etc. But some are not so obvious. Take for example, your TV prompting you to watch a program because it read a note on your blog or read your profile and "understood" that some program running now is important to you. (apple tv take hint please). Or it knows using face recognition using kinect who is watching the Tv and adjusts the shows according to preference.

I would like the kitchen not just the refrigerator to tell me that the dish on today's cooking list does need an ingredient that I don't have or will run out of soon.

How about my shingles on my roof detecting the leak and sending their location so I don't have to spend hours on the roof with a bucket of water to find it.

Or how about my favorite.. ,(being the only guy I know who had to lost two cars to engine blow out because the engine did not enough oil and broke down)  where my car simply decides that maintenance can no longer be postponed and using  the yet to be developed or perfected driverless technology drives itself to a oil changer get its maintenance after dropping me at work.

Increasingly the innovation is in removing the human element from processes which ultimately makes the human more productive.

Cloud Requires a Market Maker

The business model of cloud computing is boiling down to keeping marginal cost of providing capacity to a marginal demand from mostly corporate user. Even though the cloud enthusiasts continue to believe all corporate computing will move to the cloud, it is not happening and unlikely to happen. The marginal demand though is moving to the cloud and many corporations are designing an overflow capacity in the cloud (kind of like line of computing account). Serving this marginal demand with capacity at a marginal cost that covers the service provider margin requirements is becoming the biz model of the cloud. We have seen the ramification of this on data center site selection and facility design. Now the ramifcations are becoming apparent in the infrastructure that gets deployed in these data centers. Few standouts are ...

Fungible is perhpas the most important requirement for any infrastructure that will be deployed in a cloud. No bells and whistles is another requirement. Basic bare bones is winning over hardened and over engineered systems. The datacenter managers use software to fill the gap between the skeleton and skin. Another standout is virtualization is not a  key requirement. In fact, as more applications onboard it is becoming apparent that cloud based service has to be hybrid of virtual and physical. All of these put together still not enable datacenters to serve the marginal demand at the lowest cost in almost real time. I don't think this can be solved technically, it  is really not a technical initiative, it is a market initiate. Makes sense as demand and supply are really market forces.  Customers engaged in price discovery need a market to query and a market maker to take the order. You can look at airline industry or the securities industry to get a feel for how this might evolve. Consolidators buy blocks of tickets at steep discount in anticipation of demand. Market makers take position in stock with similar intentions. In both of these industries the market maker is a critical element without whom the industry would not function.

This is what we need in cloud industry as well. Something or entity that plays the role of a Goldman or Priceline. I am waiting for the day when AWS starts a program which uses the rack of computer in my garage as capacity to sell to their customers. Kind of like the smart grid or SETI program. We may after all realize the vision of grid computing. The missing link is the market maker.  

Industrial Internet

May be they should rename industrial internet as software defined manufacturing or at least smart manufacturing. There is lot of software in manufacturing already mainly driven by precision requirements. The name, Industrial Internet, conjures up notions of a network hardened against hackers and natural calamities. Moving to software defined everything SD-* is essentially accepting that most basic intelligence today can be codified and stored in data bases that can be queried at high speeds. But that does not mean there is no room for software learning.

Software learning is where software does not just query for data but also reasons with the results of a query and draws inferences and acts on them. This type of software should form the base platform of industrial internet or just plain old IoT. When the devices on you connect to one another not just at the bluetooth layer but at a application layer. For example, when a device playing music is in the vicinity of a speaker, it switches to the speaker (after asking of course) or when you suddenly brake your car to avoid an accident, the video and music playing devices inside the car stop to let the passengers focus on the road, or the same behavior when listening or watching movies in an airplane.

Solution is a state not a path

Networking is going through a identity crisis. Is it a special device or just a program on a commodity machine? The crux of the problem lies in a shift in the problem space where networkers spent all their time. The solution to a networking problem today is not the best path but the best state. In the early years this branch was taken by networkers because in those finding the best path in a graph was the solution to getting the applications (in those days printing, later email) to work. But today, a simple struts application has more action elements (routes) than a BGP table on internet. In other words, there are more paths a browser can take after it has landed on the web server than it had to take getting to the web server.

When state mangement and control is the problem, the solution is software. The paths are discovered and known what matters now is the learning on which ones for which application. This is what is causing the identity crisis for networkers which then manifests itself as SDN, Programmable Networks etc. Also the reason why the largest networking company flips flops between we are going to focus on networking to we want to be an IT company. Hope it does not do what freeport did - a copper company acquiring a O&G company.

State Description Language

After almost a decade after WSDL - the service interface description language - was introduced, I think it is time for industry to create a state description language. Just like WSDL enabled communication of interface between the two points engaged in a conversation (or any other MEP), we need two infrastructure components inside a data center to communicate their state among one another. The end goal is autonomic data center where a component "learns" about the fellow components and reflects and adjusts its own state.

Application integration is easy today. Everybody has an API on which default information (useless) can be communicated. But to use this new found connection we need to develop languages that enable communication about data, state, intention etc. The whole movement to cloud has commoditized compute, storage to a point where $5/month can buy me more IT infrastructure than my university had when I was studying engineering...

Biggest Bottleneck in Bigdata is the human

Today's WSJ carries an article on Bigdata being the brain behind hiring in companies. There are lots of Bigdata articles all around and each one points to a new bottleneck for the industry to overcome. There is one bottleneck that no one discusses. It is the ultimate consumer of Bigdata - the human. If we have trouble getting computers to deal with Bigdata, imagine presenting the analysis to a human. We are simply not wired to consume all this analysis. That is where visualization steps in.

So what is visualization of Bigdata? It is the rendering of insight in a data analysis using images, animations, selective disclosures, progressive disclosures or charts/figures/clouds/bubbles etc. The challenge here is not in rendering these visual elements, but in mapping these elements to the data that is sourced across the internet, parsed by multiple parsers, collated/curated and correlated with multiple streams and displayed on a canvas that is hosted in yet another place. Then there is the debate of HTML5 vs native too.

Visualization of Bigdata is a field actively targeted by research community and there is a strong business case for it as well: it solves the biggest bottleneck in the bigdata ecosystem i.e. the human.

IM is the Best Overlay Network

Under the moniker of Software Defined Network or SDN a flurry of new technical proposals are vying to become the next standards. The business case for them is very sound i.e service providers after failing in their first attempt in late 90s and early 2000s are now confident that there is a way to monetize services which run inside datacenters. The problem is of course the scale at which they need to operate requires that services run across traditional boundaries set up by networking. To cross these boundaries they are devicing clever ways of getting bits across a policy boundary using overlays (envelopes inside other envelopes). The debate is lately on which layer's envelope shall I use. Layer-2 or Layer-3.  Ok, so at the end of day what is needed is a mechanism that abstracts the underlying network and presents it to the applications over sockets in a programmer friendly fashion .

What the networking guys need to do is to look at how this problem was solved in application world over a decade ago. Hint: Use HTTP for control plane, XML for management plane and whatever you want for data plane. The best overlay network in the world continues to be IM (instant messaging)