Elephant in the Datacenter

I hear conversations at eateries discussing virtual wires to move packets between software endpoints. I believe the problem of moving  packets or making a remote procedural call  (across administrative domains) is already solved. What is not solved is the policy around the movement and invocations. We need to solve this problem if we are to tackle the elephant in the room.  When I listen to end users of technology, their discuss their pressing problem and that is phishing, robocalls, invasion of privacy and at extreme fear of constant surveillance because of AI. The intrusion they are concerned about is not from rogue states but rogue software that runs within our trusted perimeter. This is not going to be solved at the lower levels of the compute stack. This needs a Layer 8 security solution whose enforcement takes place at all seven (or five) layers below.

I spent the last year trying to understand the appeal of blockchain as a data structure and now I am convinced that is how we should look at blockchain. It is a data structure like a class in Java or struct in C. We should use it when we want to store data with access permissions of the owner of the data. When that happens, we will be uploading our photos and storing our documents with a checkbox which says private and that would cause the platform's software to store the datum in a blockchain that is personal to the person who uploads. It is like a vault in the bank where not even the banker can access the contents without your private key.

This massive misallocation of capital to copy cat ideas only happened because of ridiculously low  cost of money. In a rising rate environment, hopefully we will see capital being allocated on issues to which society is waiting for resolution.

Happy Holidays

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.  

Cloud Storage

I ran into the letter to stockholders for AMZN. http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9OTA4ODB8Q2hpbGRJRD0tMXxUeXBlPTM=&t=1

It does not read like a letter that a retailer sends out to its stockholder. It reads more like a conversation between two technologists. AMZN realizes that if it only gets to store/manage 2% of the 500 Billion Gigabytes of data that exists in the world, it could earn at the rate of $1.2M/Petabyte/year enough to more than double ths stock price from its current (often considered lofty) levels.

Java CE (Cloud Edition)

Virtualization and its live migration is becoming an innovation blocker. Recall that the original problem that we are trying to solve is "How does an application get access to resources on demand?" In other words, how do we get an operating system that scales to an entire datacenter. Even with virtualization my application is contrained to an operating system.

What we need is a language run-time like JVM that talks to a hypervisor directly. What we need is a hypervisor that abstracts resource for an application at a level that the application understands i.e. tables, databases, files, serversockets and clientsockets, IO etc.

JeOS (Just enough OS) is a slow-start in a wrong direction. What we need is JNOS (Just No OS!).

Cloud needs Resource Reservation & Broker

A key element of the infrastructure that will form the cloud is resource reservation and a protocol that enables applications to reserve the resources. Without this element we can't have a credible SLA offering. But this reservation system has to be integrated into the billing system as well as the customer entitlement system.

Today's oversubscription systems allow contending processes to carry entitlements, however those entitlements have no basis in economic value of the user who initiated the process. For example, in VI, one can allocate shares to compute elements but those shares do take into account the customer's SLA entitlements. Neither did I see anything in the recently released vCloud API anything that says someone is thinking about it.

Since the days of Cluster/Grid, we have been making pretty powerpoint slides showing the business value of IT to customers. Cloud is supposed to provide the mechanisms for the customer to harness/govern the business value.

Cloud Application Programming Model

Most of the definition(s) of cloud computing highlight just one of its dimension i.e. scale of the application delivery. Cloud computing, they say, is about internet scale (millions of simultaneous connections)application access that is hosted at a WAN latency distance. While remote hosting is an important characteristic of the cloud, it is not really, IMHO, the most important one. Back in late 1990s, we experimented with hosting applications remotely. That failed. It failed because the programming model did not evolve to accomodate distribution of functionality across WAN latent connections.

In today's Web 2.0 world, we have new page elements which can be dropped into a page which invoke remotely resident applications. This document management inspired model needs to evolve into a programmatic model for real cloud computing to happen. Document management paradigm is not an evolution from object oriented paradigm that is dominant today. The efforts that went into discovering the most efficient way to migrate object oriented programming to the web got lost in the endless debates on SOAP vs REST, Sync vs. Async, Language vs. Description etc. etc.

What a programmer aiming to write to cloud really wants is a way to import a library (java package for me) which is resident in a SDK that is installed somewhere on the web. This way I can import any java package that is somewhere in the world and access any database that is hosted anywhere in the world and have a class object sitting in my local directory that I load into any JVM on any device.

May be it is time for Sun to create a J2CE (Cloud Edition). J2CE should not require me to download anything other than a Netbeans IDE that has built in well know SDK locations that are resident around the world.