Ideas

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.

Ideas / plants — No Comments
27
Jan 09

Another CD Spindle Idea

There have been some posts on recycling used CD spindles lately. By the miracle of physics, when turned upside down a CD spindle becomes a water-tight container! I like to use mine as bases for my plants. These plants grow very quickly when they have very moist soil, so I fill these up every few days.

These plants are both grown from seeds I got from the fruit. The one on the left is a Grapefruit, and the one on the right is Avocado. The Grapefruit is actually 1.5 years old and grows in spurts. At this rate, it will only be 20 years until I can eat a Grapefruit from the tree.

Ideas — 1 Comment
10
Sep 08

SOHO Cloud Cache

There have been a lot of startups entering the cloud storage space lately, and quite frankly not too many of them are doing anything interesting. Most business plans revolve around backing up data in S3, building a nice client and doing some version control on files. I know how difficult it is to do that well, but something that can and has been repeated over and over is going to have to really blow the doors off to make any kind of impact – the margins are too thin. There are exceptions. I really like JungleDIsk, and the way its setup. I’m also appreciative of Mozy and their ability to get acquired by one of the larger companies who like to get their chequebook out. Om Malik has written about it and hes not impressed, and I appreciate it when respected peoples opinions mirror my own.

So does anyone in the storage space want to make some extra cash? Here’s a free idea.

All those SOHO storage platforms that exist out there, like Drobo and Buffalo – Integrate some cloud computing backup into your system. It goes a little something like this.

I have a terabyte of storage locally for all my music, movies and some other important documents, and its mounted from my computer over the network using regular AFS or CIFS sharing. All you do is setup the storage systems default layout so that it has a ‘protected’ folder. The protected folder will automatically sync and version all the files to the storage cloud of your choice (probably S3 or Nirvanix). Of course things get tricky as you wouldn’t want to drop in a 4gig movie, and have that eat up your network – so there would have to be format and size filters to setup as well. Depending on the % of free space you can also move unused files into the cloud only, but still display their availability locally.

There are a lot of companies and individuals that have these systems in their office for sharing files between users, and the more you synchronize, the more they effectively become SOHO caches.

Update: Jim Pick has told me there’s a company named Wua.la that does something similar to this. Wuala’s model seems more like a P2P distributed storage system – Similar to AllMyData‘s Tahoe storage system.

Brainstorming / cloud / Geekness / Ideas / sysadmin — No Comments
15
Jul 08

Feature as a Service

Websites have gone from hand-typed static pages, to massive applications with every feature under the moon. Most applications have some secret sauce that does magical things in the background – whether that be the ability to handle massive amounts of volume, reduce the barrier to entry into a market, or just keep users engaged by providing endless amounts of quick short updates.

Take Amazon as an example. Amazon operates their environment as a bunch of different groups, each running different services within the same company. S3, EC2, Payment Services. They’re all independent, highly scalable functions, tied together in the application we call Amazon.com.

Companies and startups are starting to break this operational model open, and putting those individual functions online for everyone. They’re building services that do something really well – or rather that do one thing really really well. They’re companies that focus on a specific function or feature and are open enough so creative people can say “I’m going to take this, this, and this – mix it in a pot and voila!”.

Do you want to build your own Twitter? Find an SMS gateway, Cloud Computing Host and XMPP service provider.

Do you want to build an interesting RSS/ATOM service? Find an RSS aggregator service and pour on some glue – see what sticks.

It’s Feature as a Service world (to use an already overused description). Eventually cloud companies will realize that doing one thing really *really* well is tremendously valuable. Why does everyone have to build their own DNS service? Why does everyone have to build their own hosting system? What about Enterprise Storage, Authentication, SMS Gateways, Massively scalable XMPP services? How come I have to do that myself? Can 10,000 messages sent through a jabber server be worth a dollar? I think it can (maybe the math needs adjusting but you get my point). We’re all really just building a massive computer called the internet, only with each big trend we replace ‘The Internet’ with something else. First it was ‘The Web’, then it was ‘Web 2.0′, and now its ‘The Cloud’. The fact of the matter remains – the further along we go the more tightly knit the internet becomes, and that means that theres opportunity for programmable white label services to propel us further and faster.

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