The Wisdom of Clouds

While cloud-computing news this spring has been dominated by the antics of individuals and small groups, a new class of services to support a new class of applications, and today the future of Java, there has been much less excitement about the advances being made in the world of data center hardware to support cloud computing.

Rackable CloudRack C2

(Credit: Rackable Systems)

This may be, quite possibly, for a very good reason: if you are a consumer of cloud-based resources, the mantra has long been that you can simply deploy or consume your applications/services without any regard to the infrastructure on which they are being hosted. A very cool concept for an application developer, to be sure, but I think it's a mistake to ignore what lies under the hood.

At the very least, the future of hardware ought to touch the inner geek in all of us.

What is happening in data center infrastructure is a complete rethinking of the architectures utilized to deliver online services, from the overall data center architectures all the way down to the very components that serve the "big four" elements of the data center: facilities, servers, storage, and networking.

Here's a quick breakdown of my favorites:

• My employer, Cisco Systems, released one of the more visible examples of this, its Unified Computing System product set, which converges compute, network and virtualization into a single integrated infrastructure. I won't go into depth on UCS here--CNET has covered it in depth, as have others. However, the industry is rethinking the practice of buying each component in isolation, assembling systems in a custom fashion each time, and (most importantly) managing them independently. This converged infrastructure is probably the most disruptive change to infrastructure since the commodity x86 server platform itself.

• Another company doing amazing things in this space is Rackable Systems, which is taking a wholly different tack. Rather than focusing on the management aspects of the infrastructure, it is focusing on maximum density for minimal energy consumption. Their new platform, the CloudRack C2, is targeted at cloud-computing providers, and is based on lessons learned from some of their largest customers--who in turn are some of the largest cloud providers in the world.
  A couple of weeks ago, I spent some time talking to George Skaff, vice president of marketing at Rackable. He talked me through what differentiates C2, and I have to say I was impressed. A tray-based architecture with isolated, temperature controlled, variable speed fans, no power supplies (12V throughout the cabinet, redundant rectifiers for AC-DC conversion) and all wiring on the front of the systems make C2 a truly dense, cloud-ready drop-in server infrastructure.


Google server design
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

• Google added to the fun by revealing its own server architecture. The one thing that stood out here was the placement of a 12V battery right on the motherboard, supporting two processors and two drives per board. However, it is also interesting to note that the entire board is juiced with 12V (not the 12V/5V combination of most commodity boards), and that any power conversion happens on the motherboard.
  

  According to CNET News' Stephen Shankland, "Google's data centers now have reached efficiency levels that the Environmental Protection Agency hopes will be attainable in 2011 using advanced technology." That is extremely cool (no pun intended).

Now, why should you care (besides the aforementioned "geekness" factor)? In part, because these are the systems that your future depends on, whether you are a technologist or a business manager. Yeah, the chip sets are familiar and virtualization hides the vagrancies, but this is where your bread and butter lies as you move to data centers architected for the cloud.

Note that there are minor deviances from "traditional" server design here. What I wonder is if (when?) the large cloud vendors will begin to fork their infrastructure designs as they gain more and more control over the data centers that host global IT. When will it become more advantageous to take their custom server design in a direction that supports their custom management and virtualization software--and will that increase the risk to application payloads that should be portable between vendor platforms?

The need for interoperability standards remains great, in part due to this risk. The good news is we have time. I certainly don't think such a fork will happen soon. However, I do believe that it is important that those responsible for IT service level agreements keep track of what their cloud vendors (or their IT internal cloud infrastructure teams) are up to when it comes to hardware.

Whether you agree with me, you have to admit the disruption that cloud computing is having on the data center has made infrastructure somewhat fun to follow again.

Updated to include links to Opencloudmanifesto.org.

As widely discussed since Wednesday night's leak of its existence, the Open Cloud Manifesto--originally authored by IBM--has been released for public consumption.

This had been a difficult weekend for the document, first outed by Microsoft's Steven Martin and then leaked in its entirety by my Overcast co-host, Geva Perry, the next day.

The discussion of the document has been muted, in part because the document is not a standards declaration or contract attached to any action or entity. Instead, it serves as a simple statement of principles that almost any cloud participant would agree with--at least publicly. However, the process in which it was brought into existence has been debated ferociously and may signify a changing of the guard in the standards world.

What is perhaps more interesting, however, is the list of signatories to the document. The list below is official as of Monday morning, according to my contact at IBM:

IBM
Sun Microsystems
VMWare
AT&T
Telefonica
Cisco Systems
EMC
SAP
Advanced Micro Devices
Elastra
rPath
Juniper Networks
Red Hat
Hyperic
Akamai
Novell
Sogeti
Rackspace
RightScale
GoGrid
Aptana
CastIron
EngineYard
Eclipse
SOASTA
F5
LongJump
NC State
Enomaly
Nirvanix
OMG
Computer Science Corp.
Boomi
Reservoir
Appistry
Heroku

Note that the "big four" of cloud computing, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com, are not signatories. However, several major players are on it, including my employer, Cisco--as well as EMC, Sun, VMware, and a host of key start-ups and established vendors throughout the industry.

There is a Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum meeting scheduled to be held Monday night in conjunction with Cloud Expo in New York City in which many, if not all of the signatories, and several that refused to sign (including Microsoft) will gather to talk about the future of cloud standards.

This could either be a historic meeting--or the final nail in the Manifestogate coffin.

The document itself is available on Scribd, or as a PDF from the official Opencloudmanifesto.org site or Perry's Thinking Out Cloud blog.

Cloud computing is the first major IT market disruption that has taken place in the world of open source software, "the wisdom of crowds" and the community collaboration revolution of Web 2.0. The concept of the cloud is trying to grow and evolve in an atmosphere in which technologists expect input on the technology they are being asked to rely on, and IT management expects input on the strategies they are being asked to adopt.

Never has that fact been more evident then in the events that have taken place over the last two days. The leaking of the Open Cloud Manifesto is a life lesson in the way that things will never be the same again.

To recap, the buzz began Wednesday night when Microsoft's Steve Martin intentionally leaked the existence of a diatribe created originally by IBM--an Open Cloud Manifesto. The industry proclamation is being supported by a laundry list of cloud service providers and members of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum. You can read the document on my Overcast co-host's Geva Perry's Thinking Out Cloud blog.

Since that leak, there has been a steady flow of news, retorts and excited commentary. Remember, the manifesto hasn't even been officially announced yet (look for that news to break on Monday morning)--so everything you've read so far has been pretty much who isn't participating and why.

Let me disclose right now that I was not involved in the creation of the document, nor in planning for its release, but I have been fully briefed through my employer, Cisco Systems, and the CCIF and have read the document. I planned to post my thoughts along with the others on Monday morning, and I'll still cover it in some depth at that time. For now, though, I just want to explore what I learned the last two days. (Just a quick reminder that the opinions expressed here are entirely my own, and not my employers.)

1. It's an opinion piece, not a standards proposal.

   As several people have noted, this is a big deal about something that doesn't set anything in stone, either technically or legally.

2. Those who have publicly stated that they won't sign have the most to lose.

   Microsoft and Amazon are the two cloud powerhouses that have publicly declared they will not sign the document at this time. Amazon has a huge existing install base that most other IaaS providers would like a piece of, and Microsoft is trying to hold on to an exceedingly large customer base of its own. Why should either agree to work on top-down standards to threaten that?

3. It's probably a bad idea to release even an industry opinion piece without public commentary.

   IBM, et al, left the door open for Microsoft to label the entire effort as "closed" by trying to rush to a declaration of success without allowing any public community or industry input whatsoever. Big mistake, in my opinion, because open source software has changed the game forever for technical initiatives.

   If the drivers of this initiative had simply announced that the Manifiesto draft was agreed to by the same list of companies, but was open for public commentary before being finalized, the Microsoft post would have looked silly. In fact, there is still time to declare exactly that.

4. It's what follows that is important here.

   The most important quote from the day, for me, is the following from one of the CNET reports:

   That said, Martin said Microsoft would like to be a part of the dialogue. He noted that the company was subsequently invited to a meeting of some cloud-computing participants to take place on Monday as part of a cloud-computing conference.

   "We have accepted that invitation and we will participate," Martin said. "If there is meaningful dialogue, it is something we will want to play a role in. Hopefully we will use that as a chance to restart that conversation."

   The productiveness of that meeting (and, I'm guessing, the civility) will say a lot about what will come of the manifesto. Its great that a large number of companies have (apparently) signed on to express their commitment to open cloud environments, but the actual actions initiated at that meeting--including organization, financial/people commitment, etc.--will go a long way to establishing what they can accomplished.

That being said, let me also note that I'm not convinced that a top-down formal standards approach will do anything other than repeat the mixed success of the WS-* efforts to date. Amazon's EC2 and S3 APIs are already defacto standards (see EUCALYPTUS and Sun's Cloud Compute Service), and Sun and GoGrid have also opened up their APIs in the hope they take some or all of the management standards pie. Already, businesses are out there figuring out some basic interoperability between cloud providers that matter to them: RightScale and their competitors are attacking server image portability in interesting ways, and Salesforce.com has full integration from Force.com to Amazon AWS and Facebook.

So, in the end, this declaration is a good thing in that it shows that the industry has learned that open is good. However, in the end it might not do much more than that, and we might have all gotten into a tizzy over yet another expression of what could be in cloud computing.

The original title of this post was going to be "Why isn't Google App Engine successful?" You see, I've been frustrated of late at the lack of followup press about the PaaS offering since Google's announcement about it last April. I was beginning to think that no one but a few Facebook application providers were using it, which makes it kind of irrelevant for the enterprise.

Compare Google's coverage to that of Amazon Web Services. Since its announcement in July 2002, the various services contained under the AWS umbrella have received a steady stream of press and accolades. Much of that is due to marketing (and the phenomenal technology evangelism program Amazon put into place), but part of it is also that successful start-ups are passing on their own success stories independent of Amazon.

Two quick examples of this are SmugMug and Animoto. Both are stories that were originally broadcast by the customers themselves, and then evangalized by Amazon. Almost everyone in the "cloud-o-sphere" knows about these guys as a result. In fact, Animoto's story is the most prevalent case study of the value of elasticity in Web applications today.

So, where is the Google equivalent? I've heard about a few Facebook widgets being developed on App Engine (and that is sort of cool), but I certainly haven't heard any other type of start-up trumpet the importance of App Engine to their success. Furthermore, there are zero examples of non-Web businesses using App Engine to change the nature of their IT processes. (See Eli Lilly's story for an AWS counterpoint.)

So, all of this might lead you to believe I'm anti-App Engine, or at least not confident that it is important except as a PaaS example. And until yesterday, you would be right. However, I spent the day yesterday at the Cloud Connect conference, hosted at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Google was much more visible here (in part because they were a "platinum sponsor"), and perhaps more importantly, the "how to" sessions they hosted Wednesday afternoon were packed by interested developers and technologists.

If you have an interest in the architectures that may very well come to dominate the world's most sophisticated data centers, you should take some time to check out an article in EETimes, entitled "Server makers get Goooogled."

The article, by Rick Merrit, describes new technologies being introduced by Rackable and other companies that are strongly influenced by Google's custom server designs over the last several years.

We're talking cool stuff here. As the article notes:

There has been significant discussion over the short life of the term "cloud computing" about how little it differs from concepts like managed hosting and ASPs. And there is some truth to these observations; if you really look closely, what are the key differences between EC2 and a more traditional managed hosting provider? Some would say multi-tenancy, self-service and pay-per-use (including billing and elastic capacity). With specific regard to EC2, I would tend to agree.

(I would also hasten to point out that Amazon provides some very PaaS-like services in conjunction with EC2, such as Simple Queuing Service (SQS) and SimpleDB.)

However, if this is the great "paradigm shift" of cloud computing, as offered by smart people like Krishnan Subramanian of CloudAve, then let me offer that these basic extensions to existing hosting models will be peanuts next to a shift that will create one of the most significant market opportunities since the explosive growth of the Internet itself. I'm not dealing in hyperbole here; I honestly believe that there is a clear evolutionary step to the cloud occurring well after stand-alone self-service clouds are mainstream (which they arguably are today) that will inspire massive innovation.

That game changing technology disruption will be the federation of disparate clouds, and the distribution of software, data and billing across commercial and private cloud boundaries. In other words, the introduction of secure, reliable workload mobility in an extension of the Internet itself--an "Intercloud", so to speak.