cloud

Brainstorming / Business / cloud / Geek / General — 2 Comments
30
Apr 10

Clouds and The Fate of the Help Desk

As an efficiency nut there’s one thing that makes me really happy about Tablets:

The Help Desk will be going away.

It’s important to understand the meaning of the term “Help Desk”. I don’t just mean people who sit around all day with headsets, answering phone calls. It turns out there are a *lot* of people employed in IT whose job it is to just keep the lights on. Vendors, Integration specialists, Sysadmins, and the guy whose entire job it is to  click the right button to clear the printer queue. Entire countries have devoted a lot of resources to greasing the gears of computers. They all work in a Helpdesk somehow.

CTO’s and CIO’s are starting to appreciate that their function at a company isn’t about technology implementation – it’s about how technology can help their business. Who cares if your OS is running Windows or Linux if all you need is a Word processor (and Solitaire). It’s become totally irrelevant.

What matters is the applications that are delivered to the end user; everything else is just implementation dogma. The people doing these implementations are Help Desks too, they’re just a few degrees removed from the end-user and prefer snazzier titles like ‘Application Services Engineer.’

It’s gonna take awhile. The PC will be around for a long time and people still need to type. But as we shift to tiny, integrated, crash-proof devices we need help desks less and less. The intuitive nature of the computer will suggest that it’s no longer important to be adept at using them. Not only that, but as we cycle through generations of people, the technical citizens will supplant the technical immigrants

Analysis / Brainstorming / cloud / Geek / General / Ideas — No Comments
18
Feb 10

Carbon Computing

Being able to outsource all of your computing needs to an external provider is absolutely fantastic for developers and some businesses. While not running your own infrastructure is much cheaper, it also makes the amount of energy and associated ‘costs’ of computing very opaque.

There are quite a few issues with the transparency of costs in the cloud computing space. This includes no transparency into the cost of electricity, and where that electricity is coming from. To date, there is no public database of electricity markets, datacenters, and hosting providers which lists how much carbon per kWh of electricity is being output. In ICT this is a massive issue, because of the sheer amount of energy our industry consumes.

“Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is both a problem and a potential solution in the war against climate change. Currently, computers are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than airlines. Greenhouse gas is growing exponentially and we expect that ICT will produce double the emissions of the airline industry within five years with no end in site. ICT can provide a solution to climate change by reducing carbon emmission in the world through telecommuting and other means.”

Here in British Columbia we get most of our electricity from renewable hydro-electric power. Hydro-Electric is one of the lowest forms of reliable low carbon output electricity generation available. It goes without saying that providing computing services using energy generated this way would mean less CO2 / kWh but also less CO2 per compute cycle.

We need several things to make this happen

1) Start measuring how much power ICT is using on a per server / component basis
2) Develop resources that track carbon output per kWh in different states & provinces and provide that information as a service
3) Determine where your computing resources are located and track on a per machine level the amount of carbon being output
4) Calculate how much carbon you’re using.

Those are pretty audacious goals, but I think we really need to start keeping track of carbon output for power. By tying that into the different services we use on a regular basis, we can make carbon part of the social and actual cost of using services. Hopefully that will help buy us enough time and money to develop the carbon neutral power solutions we desperately need.

Business / cloud / General — No Comments
29
Jan 10

The Efficiency Paradox

I’m a pretty firm believer in Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and I spend a lot of time thinking about better ways to squeeze more efficiency out of data centers and IT operations. A lot of the lower hanging fruit involves savings in power utilization, reducing cooling costs, and virtualizing hardware;  getting less to do more. Economies of scale, and automated controls mean you can be extremely price competitive, and for end users that can lead to greater savings.

Popular wisdom suggests that this would mean we get to save something; We conserve energy because were powering less servers.

It turns out the opposite is true.

Jevons Paradox explains the effect that technological progress has on reducing prices of a resource, only to increase the actual consumption of that resource. Typically this applied a lot to the Oil industry, and its a rather well understood phenomenon, but the same thing applies to Network and Computing infrastructure.

Bandwidth is perhaps the easiest example of Jevons Paradox. Back when a couple megs of throughput cost you $1500 a month, you would find ways to reduce and conserve that bandwidth as much as possible. Technology has progressed to the point where some lucky individuals can get a LAN quality connection for as little as $30 dollars. It’s obvious that the cost for bandwidth has dropped through the floor. While that kind of progress should lead to greater efficiencies, it simply doesn’t work out that way. We dont conserve those pipes – we just use more of them.

Elastic Demand for Work: A doubling of fuel efficiency more than doubles the amount of work demanded, increasing the amount of fuel used. Jevons Paradox occurs

The same thing is happening in utility computing.The cost of computing is quickly becoming too cheap for us to save any energy, or to force us to squeeze more out of a system. While at layerboom we build advanced systems that can generate more revenue per physical server, the end result for utility operators is that they will sell more units. For them, this is a totally acceptable solution (and I wont complain either!). However, it has some dire implications for energy usage and conservation. Most of this infrastructure is running 24×7. Idle or not.

In North America, the infrastruture required to run the internet consumes about 10% of our electricity. Do our Data Centers need to get bigger? Or do we really need to start figuring out how to not only make these pieces of infrastructure more efficient, but find a way to ensure those efficiencies at least counter the growth in the system?

cloud / General — 1 Comment
23
Feb 09

Cloud Computing is Easy. Period.

For a year and a half we’ve been hearing a lot about how Cloud Computing is going to save companies millions of dollars, make it cheap for Startups and small businesses to compete with the big guys, and solve other countless problems which I won’t even start to name. You’d think, considering all the hype, that it was the second coming of Christ, not a lofty marketing term which pretty much everyone has co-opted. At first glance it appears as though Cloud Computing is the next Internet, and who wouldn’t want to be involved in that? The problem is that because the whole industry has take this term and made it mean whatever they want, it now means nothing. More accurately, it means whatever the people who use the term “Cloud” want it to mean, and that’s extremely dangerous.

At a conference I attended awhile ago we broke off into several teams to discuss what we thought cloud computing was. This was doomed for failure, but what I noticed and what seemed to be lost on everyone in the crowd was that everyone came up with an answer that solved the problems they have to deal with in their profession, day after day. We didn’t come up with a magical definition, and this exercise has since become kind of a pastime at Cloudcamps / Conference, etc because nobody has ever come up with a good answer, and nobody ever will.

Until we stop thinking about the Cloud as a product, and start thinking about it as a concept, we’re all wasting precious time

It’s time for me to append my opinion to what is already a littered landscape of ontology. Honestly this is the best thing I’ve ever heard someone say about cloud computing, and it didn’t come from an engineer, the marketing department, a blogger, a techie, a social media consultant, or someone on twitter. It came from a Barista at my local Starbucks. She asked what I did, and I told her, and she was more curious about what it meant, so I begrudgingly went into a few details and she quickly replied back with “So it’s just easy”.

That’s it. It’s just Easy.
Cloud Computing is Easy.

Easy is why Joyent is great – You get a powerful system and signing up is quick, simple and Elegant.

Easy is why Amazon is kicking everyones ass. You can get 100′s of virtual machines crunching away at your data by running a single command.

Easy is why platforms and services that do Billing, Advertising, Customer Feedback, Authentication, Store your Data and Backup your Files are successful. Because it took the effort of a small group of people to build something that could be re-used over and over and over again by the masses, made so easy that having a credit card is the hardest part.

I recently asked people on Twitter “if they couldn’t call their magic “Cloud Computing” for one day, what would they call it”. The purpose was to make people think about it for one second. What do you ACTUALLY do. You don’t actually build cloud computing environments do you? No. Do you build hosting environments? Do you host software? Do you build or run platforms? Do you do anything like this? If you can tell me what you do without using the word “Cloud” then we can have a discussion, and if the power you provide can be made as easy as clicking a button or including a library, then maybe, MAYBE, you’ll have the right to wrestle it back.

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