Peter Christy

The Cloud / Performance / Velocity 2011

Velocity didn't disappoint. Given my inner geek it's not surprising that this geeky discussion fascinates me, but I think the impact is much broader. The center of the discussion here is and always has been the largest Web sites, but I think the topics are important topics for many just shifted forward in time.  With a move to public and private clouds, everyone needs to be more sensitive to issues of performance (it becomes more challenging with remote data centers) and operating complex systems (understanding why an application performs poorly is much more complicated on a virtual fabric because resources are shared). These large Web sites have been living that reality for years. The principals in the discussion are very smart. Perhaps more importantly, the Velocity meeting has been fundamentally built aroud the notion of a community of practitioners and the value of sharing. So the discussion is largely unvarnished and the spokespeople are the experts (not marketers).

Not only are these Web systems remarkably complex and performance sensitive, the development methods are as agile as you can get. Both Amazon and Facebook deploy 1,000 or more new significant pieces of functionality every day without the benefit of long and complete test cycles. An essential value of the Cloud is the ability to create shared, multi-tenant applications and then drive evolution as fast as possible. This is vastly superior to long development cycles in large part because the only way to really learn about what your customers want is to give them your best shot and iterate and the value is as great in enterprise B-to-B applications (it's how IT helps the business move agilely and ahead of competitors).  Functionally, Facebook and Amazon evolve at warp speed. They represent the ideal that every enterprise IT organization strives for: rapidly evolving, largely automated computing. What makes it all the more interesting is that they do this at gargantuan scale, so it's not an issue of academic speculation that may not scale to enterprise levels.

If there are high-level truths to be abstracted from this year's conference, they might be data and dev/ops.  The key to making this all work is having lots of data, watching what's going on, improving performance and cost performance, and sensing and reversing updates that go bad. Dev/Ops, a unified organization, captures the wisdom that you can't do this with functionally divided development and operations. In the good old days enterprise software was developed and tested, and then thrown over the wall to be deployed and operated why the dev team attacked the next 18 month cycle. For truly agile and high-performance Cloud operations there can't be walls. There is still important functionalization but it all happens as one big team, especially under duress (had lunch with an old friend in the middle of Facebook and believe me, it's interesting but non-stop).

So I think the content of this meeting is highly informative to many more than the high-performance Web operations. For anyone contemplating making serious use of the Cloud this is a great peak into the challenges and the opportunities to some. More importantly it's a great way to see how IT organization has to evolve over time, with enough time to do something about it.

My hat continues to be off for the Velocity program team!

The Facebook Cloud

I had a chance to catch up with our old friend Jay Parikh who was running the local Akamai engineering team when we first met, and now is one of the senior engineering dudes at Facebook. In addition to all the social and privacy facets of Facebook, it's a really interesting and challenging engineering task as well. Like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, Facebook runs a huge web property and supports hundreds of millions of users. But compared to the others Facebook is a much more intertwined application (I can "friend" any of the other half-billion users and then be connected to his activity) and it is a more extendable (and extended) application. This means that Facebook has had to lead the charge in some system design and implementation dimensions like shared persistent data management, and also means that Facebook has a more structured and variable internal computer fabric because different parts of the application require very different forms of server — disk/diskless, normal memory/very large memory ...). Of course Facebook is also a learn-a-you-go experience since the drive to change is high and because they're clearly exploring new territory every day (Jay said that FB does multiple significant application updates every day), and as with the Internet, you don't really know what is going to happen for sure until you try it. Managing a slowly changing application with 500M users would be challenging enough, I can only imagine what it's like if you're re-engineering on the fly every day. How exciting! Like Google the parking is tight but if you can find a spot the food is also good and free J . pchristy@irg-intl.com

Service in the Cloud

On the heels of VMworld, SalesForce held a delightfully upscale introduction luncheon to announce the Service Cloud 2. Sales force automation — SalesForce's primary offering — is a key pillar of CRM, but CRM is a much broader topic and customer service is another important pillar. To date, the customer service part has been typically done with in-house systems that organize problem/solution knowledge bases that are then used by call center agents. Enabling customer self-service is a less-expensive solution, and done well a fundamentally better solution, especially when augmented by community support where users help each other. But of course customer self service and community support are outward facing applications with scaling and distribution aspects that make them perfect Cloud candidates. About a year ago, SF acquired InStranet, a knowledgebase technology company (a key underpinning of all forms of customer service) and they have been integrating and extending that capability since. The SF Service offering is still only a small part of SF revenues but is growing much more rapidly that the core SFA business. This most recent announcement incorporated innovative Facebook and Twitter integration. For example, a vendor can set up a Facebook page and using the SF system, service questions can be posted entirely within Facebook, but fully integrated with the other service delivery channels. It's going to be interesting to watch how this catches on. It's fair to say that SF is way ahead of the traditional application vendors in offering a SaaS/Cloud service. For companies wanting to be on the innovative side of support (self-service and community-service early adopters) but not wanting to operate it themselves, the SF solution is pretty compelling.

Windows Azure

Windows Azure is breathtaking in vision and ambition: The idea is simple: create a version of Windows that runs Windows applications in the cloud at unbounded scale. Pioneers of successful Cloud applications and services (e.g. Facebook) all say that scalability is the critical design issue -- if your scalability model isn't right then success will literally kill you. Windows Azure has no less an ambition than enabling scalability while bringing forward the richness and tools in Windows programming. This isn't HotMail warmed over with a new face. Ozzie views the PC, the phone and the Cloud (all running Windows of course) as the three pillars of future applications, with Live Mesh keeping data synchronized among all the participants. Windows Azure builds on the success of Windows as an applications platform. The key question going forward is whether Microsoft can herd the huge and valuable Windows developer community toward Azure. PDC was a loud and strong beginning but only time will tell.