JanWiersma.com – Page 2 – Cloudy strategies…

The new normal – Cloud & developer enablement.

According to AWS CTO Werner Vogels “Cloud is now the new normal.”

Where the first day keynote at AWS’s ReInvent 2015 conference was all about enabling companies to migrate their current services to the cloud, the second day keynote by Vogels was all about the ‘new normal’ – developer enablement.

With new services like AWS Snowball , AWS Database Migration Service and AWS Schema Conversion Tool , AWS tries to smoothen the migration path from old on-premise infrastructure & application deployments, to using AWS’s Infrastructure As A Service offering (EC2, RDS, VPC, S3, ..).

While these new services help companies to move to a consumption model for compute, storage and networking, it is still very infrastructure focused. Design decisions around (virtual)network layout, load balancers and the build & management of the operating systems (Windows/Linux) are still the customer’s responsibility.

Needing to still deal with all these elements, holds developers back from moving fast as they go from idea to the launch of a new service. It slows the creation of real value to the company down.

In the real ‘new normal’ world, the developer is enabled to deploy a new service by building & releasing something fast, without needing to worry about the infrastructure behind it. By stitching external managed capabilities/services together in a smart way the developer can move even faster.

Where in the past a developer would try to speed releases up by code-reuse with, for example, software libraries, the availability of developer ready services like a fully managed message queuing service (AWS SQS) or a push messaging service (AWS SNS) have enabled developers to move even faster without worrying about the manageability of the solution.

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The future of datacenter build & co-lo (or CIO’s are getting out of the datacenter business – Part2)

Last year my friend Tim Crawford wrote an excellent article on why CIOs should get out of the datacenter business. Tim focused on how current big cooperates are moving away from building, owning or renting datacenter facilities in favour of consuming IT at higher levels of the stack.

DataCenterCloudSpectrum

As he focused on the migration of leading big companies, it leaves the question; what about the future Fortune 500 companies?

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Code of Conduct

As a ‘code of conduct’ seems to be needed now a days for interactions between people, especially at tech conferences, I releasing my own ‘code of conduct’.

The following applies when you interact with me, listen to my talks or see any of my rants on social media;

1. Respect & integrity. I will treat you with respect by default, please extend the same courtesy to me. I have a strong views on certain issues that maybe completely the opposite of your view.

2. Acknowledge my culture. I’m Dutch. I’m direct, blunt and we founded ‘going Dutch‘. I acknowledge the fact that you may have an other cultural background and therefore a different view of the world around us.

3. If you don’t like what I’m saying or how I’m acting, let me know. Or walk away. If you don’t confront me and just complain behind my back, you take away my ability to learn. There some good guidelines for delivering feedback to someone. You may want to read it someday, if you want your feedback to resonate.

4. Confidentiality ; by default I will keep any information you provide to me confidential. You can share anything I told you with anyone, unless I specifically tell you the information I’m sharing is confidential.

5. I’m even more blunt on social media en during delivering keynotes. Just unfollow me, if you can’t handle that. See the disclaimer: https://www.janwiersma.com/?page_id=160

The problem with the Docker hype

Remember when the Cloud hype kicked off and we all looked mesmerised at the Cloud Unicorn companies (like Netflix) that got great benefit from Cloud usage? We all wanted that so badly. We wanted to get out of the pain of high maintenance cost and the lack of agility. Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure all seemed to provide that. Just by the click of a button.

In 2012 I did a short whitepaper on what it takes to move an application the cloud, based on my painful experience with some Enterprise IT moves to the cloud. I stated, “The idea that one can just move applications without change is flawed.” There was not enough benefit in moving the monolithic, 10 year old, application on the cloud. That type of move may deliver small cost savings, but that is actually a hosting exercise. It could even be dangerous to move in that way because the application may not be suitable for the cloud providers’ reference architecture. That could for example lead to availability and performance issues. The unicorn benefits could only be gained if you changed your way of working and thinking.

The same goes for the Docker hype now;

I agree with all the potential that Docker unlocks; portability & abstraction. It is a game changer and some even say ‘Docker changes everything’

Hearing people talk at large conferences (like AWS ReInvent) about Docker seems like the first phase of the Cloud hype all over again. They state ‘Just docker-ize your app’ and all will be great. Sureal conversations with people that try to put anything and everything in a container. ‘Yes, just put that big monolithic app in a container’

People seem to forget that Docker is an enabler for architecture elements like portability and micro-services (that leads to scalability).

I highly recommend reading James Lewis & Martin Fowler ‘s article on microservices first: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html

Then See this:

Because The problem with the Docker hype currently? It makes it about the tool. And only the tool will not fix your problem.

Other things to consider around Docker: Docker Misconceptions

Our Trust issue with Cloud Computing

Recently SDL (my employer) did a survey on customer ‘trust’ for the marketer.

Being in the IT space I tend to deal a lot with ‘trust’ the last few years. Being responsible for the Cloud services delivery for my companies SAAS & hosted products we deal with clients evaluating and buying our services. My teams also evaluate & consume IAAS/PAAS/SAAS services in the market, on which we build our services.

The ‘trust’ issue in consuming Cloud services is an interesting one. IAAS platforms like Amazon abstract complexity away from its user. It is easy to consume. The same goes for SAAS services like Box.com of Gmail; the user has no clue what happens behind the scenes. Most business users don’t care about the abstraction of that complexity. It just works….

It’s the IT people that seems to have the biggest issue with gracefully losing control and surrendering data, applications, etc., to someone else. Control is often an emotional issue we are often unprepared to deal with. It leaves us with a feeling ‘they can’t take care of it as good as I can…’ Specifically IT people know how complex IT can be, and how hard it can be to deliver the guarantees that the business is looking for. For many years we have tried to manage the rising complexity of IT within the business with tools and processes, never completely able to satisfy the business as we where either to expensive or not hitting our SLA’s. Continue with reading

German companies ask for Internet border patrol.

In the last year multiple companies started serving German customers out of Germany based datacenter locations.

There seems to be a specifically strong sentiment around security & privacy with German companies after the Edward Sonwden leaks. The kneejerk reaction is to mandate that servers should sit within German borders, as that would take any security & privacy concern away. Cloud providers are now starting to follow this customer demand.

Interestingly this reaction is more sentiment driven as there is no legal ground to request this. Especially as more and more German companies are putting this in place as a default policy, regardless of what type of data (privacy sensitive or not…)

Looking at the Federal Data Protection Act (Bundesdatenschutzgesetz in German) (“BDSG”) it states that certain transfer of data (like personal data) outside of the EU needs to be reported and approved and Data controllers must take appropriate technical and organizational measures against unauthorized or unlawful processing and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data. Nothing says servers need to be in Germany.

Looking at other EU countries, Germany seems to be the only country where organizations express such behavior. The only next inline could be Switzerland.

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My move to SDL…

It’s the weekend before the holiday season and just like last year I find my self at an US airport making my way home… just in time for Christmas.

Sitting at the airport lobby, listing Christmas songs, I can’t help to reflect on the past year.

A lot has happened and things changed a lot. I have left OCOM (LeaseWeb/EvoSwitch/Dataxenter) after 2 years in September this year. Something that some of my peers in the market didn’t expect, but was long overdue. For too long I couldn’t identify myself with the way the company was run and its strategy. No good or bad here… just a big difference of opinion on vision and execution.

The last 2 months I have been able to talk to lots of different organizations in an effort to see what my next career step should be. I needed some time to recuperate from my little USA adventure with LeaseWeb & EvoSwitch. It was a great project to participate in but all the travel took a big toll on my personal life and me.

I also learned how passion for your work can be killed and what it takes to be sparked again. And how people are motivated by the Why in their jobs.

I had some good conversations with DCP board members Mark and Tim about my frustration in the lack of progress in the datacenter industry. It felt like I have been doing the same datacenter and cloud talks for the last 3 years, and things still didn’t move. I wanted to have the opportunity to really make a difference.

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CIO’s plukken vruchten van server innovaties

Op de afgelopen CIO dag (Nov 25&26) in Amsterdam werd ook ‘The big data center book’ uitgereikt. Hier in werden de Data center & cloud trends voor 2013 & 2014 toegelicht.

Mijn artikel in dit boek beschreef de trends in server hardware innovaties;

Naarmate onze datacenters groter worden en de eisen van webscale- en cloudproviders de markt overnemen, worden servers meer en meer slechts een component van een grotere machine. Hoewel componenten waardevol kunnen zijn, zijn zij niet langer het hele systeem en als zodanig kan hun waarde niet los gezien worden van het datacenter waarin zij gehuisvest zijn. De efficientie van het component wordt daarmee belangrijker dan het bezitten van ‘coole features’. Wat zijn de actule ontwikkelingen die moeten zorgen voor een lager energieverbruik van servers ?

Het volledige artikel is hier te vinden.

EE-IAAS – call to join IAAS energy research

The cloud market is hot. The IAAS market sees a lot of growth and new IAAS providers seem to entering the market on a daily basis. Enterprise IT shops are exploring the usage of public cloud solutions and building their own private cloud environments.

IAAS distributions like OpenStack and CloudStack seem to have thriving communities.

Organizations that are successful in deploying IAAS solutions, either for customers or internal use, see rapid growth in demand for these services.

IAAS services still need IT equipment to run on and datacenters to be housed in. While there has been a strong focus on making the datacenter facility and IT equipment more energy efficient, not much is know about the energy efficiency of software running these IAAS services.

The Amsterdam University of Applied Science (HvA) lanced an energy consumption lab focused on energy efficient software called SefLab 1,5 years ago.

Several EU Datacenter Pulse (DCP) members donated time and equipment to the research during the launch.

During the start of the SefLab students and researchers got familiar with the research facility and its equipment. They did a webbrowser compare on energy usage. (results on the SefLab website)

Now that the lab is operational, its looking for new area’s of research. One of the focus areas is the development of IAAS distributions like CloudStack, OpenStack, etc.. and their energy efficiency; what are the effects of architecture choices?, is their a difference in energy efficiency between the distributions ?, what power-manager & reporting elements are missing from the distributions ?

The HvA and SefLab are looking for:

IAAS distribution users willing to participate in the research. This is possible in several ways ranging from active participation in formulating research questions, managing a subproject, and supervising student projects, to participating in workshops and events of the project.
IAAS distribution communities willing to participate in the research. Future development of IAAS energy management components can be tested and validated in the SefLab facilities.
Vendors willing to support the effort with knowledge transfer and hardware/software donation.
Industry groups willing to support the effort in knowledge transfer network.

The research done by SefLab is really end-user driven, so this is a natural fit with DCP’s strategy.
Details can be obtained by contacting jan.wiersma@datacenterpulse.org

DCP members will be updated on the projects progress using the LinkedIn DCP member group.

See full call for participation here.

The need for datacenter education in emerging countries.

<Cross-post with my DCP blog>

I recently had the privilege to travel to some of the emerging datacenter countries like Eastern Europe, Russia, Middle East, Africa and some of the Asian countries.

While I was impressed with the deployment of mobile bandwidth & devices the conversations with datacenter owners and operators scared me. With more and more people getting internet access in these countries, the need for local datacenters also rises. Taking the time to really talk and listen to the stories of some of the local datacenter owners, it reminded me of the way datacenters were build and operated 10 years ago in most western countries.

Zooming in to the way these local operators and owners gather their knowledge, two things stuck me:

Most of them aren’t connected to industry groups or communities like Datacenter Pulse, 7×24 Exchange, Uptime Institute, etc… Sometimes this is a cultural or language barrier but most of the time I found this to be an awareness issue.
There aren’t as many industry conferences in those locations. It’s hard for conference organizers to get something going from a sponsor & revenue perspective. So where do local operators go to learn?

I think the larger datacenter vendors need to step up and take responsibility.
I think western datacenter owners and operators have a moral responsibility to go out and educate.

We need to send our Dr-Bob’s out and educate them on the benefits of retrofits of old facilities.
We need to send the industry leaders (either vendor or DC-owners) out and educate the emerging countries on the technical opportunities they have for the many greenfield projects begin run in those countries.

This way they know what technology is available before some of the old-fashioned datacenter consultants step in and copy-past our 10-year-old datacenter designs.
This way we protect them from mistakes we already made and they can leapfrog in to a brighter datacenter future.

I know this sounds idealistic be we owe that to these emerging economies, especially from a resource (like energy) efficiency perspective.

So if you have the chance to travel to emerging datacenter countries, take it. Share, lecture, educate, and try to protect the local operators and owners from making the same mistakes we made 10 years ago. They deserve that chance.

Believe me… it will make the world a better place.