Archive for March 10th, 2010
Cloud Religion: Do’s, Do Not’s, and a Glimpse of Nirvana
As the cloud is getting more players and interfaces, best and worst practices are emerging. As the market grows and more companies try to plug in, the cloud may benefit from guiding principles. Similar to new technology movements in the past, a natural process is underway to define “what is good”, which, for some in the industry, equates to “what is open”. Like religion itself, open can be defined in ways that are uplifting, or on the other side of the coin, restricting. Also, we learn again, nothing is free. Sponsor Cloud APIs Must Walk on Water If you’ve been part of a software development project, you know that sometimes it’s hard to get the team to all agree on best practices for interface design, database optimization, or even what technology to use. In this analysis, we take a look at some of the movements in cloud computing that start to lay a framework of good as it relates to this technology. In this context, API designers for cloud applications need to think ahead and avoid common pitfalls. For several reasons, more than ever before. First, because many people will be accessing your one piece of code. Second, is that in this world of open APIs, it’s easy to compare your code against another. We notice that data management practices are at the core, and details matter when provisioning in platforms. At the same time that groups are forming to align practices and forms of virtualization and cloud standards, a voice whispers that perhaps this is a free-market problem. People who benefit at solving it, will; others will ignore it or compete directly. We enjoyed this post from Joyent on where standards matter in a practical sense. In essence, the question raised: If a vendor makes it easy and bakes in the ability to “just do it”, do you know or care about the standards? This seems to mirror an iPhone development paradigm, which is to expect work from the vendor SDK or libraries. The SDK wraps standards implementations, which is done in the way best understood by that vendor. Do Unto Others as You Would Have Done To You We know the cloud is big – perhaps it will inevitably be bigger than the Internet itself as it usurps our conception of location, space and time. Where power forms, rules, groups, and organizations do as well. In information technology there is always tension between open standards and defacto standards. The former are crafted through agreements, the latter through leadership and market dominance. We asked in a prior series ” Will a single company become the dominant provider in the cloud? ” Today we look at the more practical side of “who is winning now” – who is setting the rules and who is in the trenches. Quite a number of the responses to our earlier posts emphasized that “the cloud should be free”, meaning that it should have governing principles to avoid one vendor from owning the landscape. Here are a few groups that have emerged to provide some context in how this may come together, both philosophically and practically. In both, the devil is in the details. A good summary of some of the current combining of forces is by the Open Grid Forum . (In our opinion, grids have given way to clouds as the dominant concept in this technology makeover). A resource directory of initiatives is located at the Cloud Standards Wiki , which in itself was formed by a handful of organizations and movements working to align around setting rules and patterns for cloud computing. The Open Cloud Consortium is organized around developing practices around sharing resources and has recently focused on a developing a test bed. The DMTF is working at the core definition of virtualization. It recently focused on the 1.1 version of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification that focuses on packaging virtualization instances and creating a portable mechanic distribution by defining envelope and collection parameters around the virtual machine and its services. The organization, which contains members of IBM, Microsoft, Dell, VMware, XENSource, Sun, and NEC, has submitted 1.1 for consideration as an ANSI and ISO standard. The efforts by the federal government in its data.gov initiative shows that there’s a market that’s starting to see the value of raw government data formats . Soon, we would expect this to be powered by a mesh of computer resources that allow all sorts of jobs – integrated jobs – to work with these data sets. It would comprising an active government cloud. Do Not Covet Thy Neighbors Network Resource When looking for things to avoid, we found a lot of philosophical questions around data ownership, logging and portability. These discussions are alive and well and seem to be being absorbed into vendor solutions and consortiums like the ones mentioned earlier. For a more practical view, we turned to a friend of ReadWriteWeb, Thorsten von Eicken , and have summarized his thoughts from a recent post, ” Top Cloud API Sins . Bold items are our (loose) mapping to biblical terms. Do not covet your neighbors resources. : Listing of resources without the details, e.g., a list-servers call that doesn’t return all the details for each server. This makes it very expensive to poll for server state changes … Do not make cast idols : Not returning a resource id on creation. Some APIs don’t give you a server i.d. when you request a server … Labor six days, rest on the seventh : Providing a task queue. Several APIs I’ve seen have a task queue that is supposed to provide updates on tasks that are in progress E.g., you launch a server and you get a handle onto a task descriptor. For us that’s just overhead … Though shall not bear false witness : Not returning deleted resources in a “list resource” call. In particular, terminated servers must be returned in a list servers call for a certain duration, probably at least for an hour. Ouch! … Shall not covet his neighbor (or force me to repaginate) : Pagination that goes page-wise instead of using a marker, e.g. where you get page one or the first 100 resources and then issue a query for “page 2″ or “from 100 on”. Explain to me how a client can get a consistent resource listing when resources can be added and removed concurrently … Randy Bias added to Torsten’s post: Treat others as you want to be treated Your UI MUST use your API so you understand how to be a consumer of your own API … We plan on keeping up with this list and seeing how it intersects with implementations and standards that evolve. Please let us know your thoughts below. Nirvana: Smells Like Services Orientation Torsten goes on to describe a picture of the future. “Now here’s what I’d really like to see. This is what we’re working on for internal purposes and it’s not easy, which is an event based interface instead of a request-reply based interface… ” This sounds like a vision where we all win. Smart services in the cloud, rather than resources alone. This starts to get us closer and closer to an object-orientated network. Maybe that’s what the cloud will be for platforms, infrastructure and software. The industry has been quick to identify the layers. But perhaps the point is piecing them together in a smart transactional framework. A way to engineer highly reliable systems around these architecture challenges may sound familiar to those who monitor existing data centers today. Torsten continues, “We run a good number of machines that do nothing but chew up 100% cpu polling EC2 to detect changes. Fortunately cpu cycles are cheap 
”. This is practical intervention between vision and get it done. We find it refreshing to hear this type of dialog in the industry and see a fresh opportunity for defining efficient patterns for this next generation of the cloud infrastructure. Perhaps a new concept is forming: “Divine Computing”. Where do you sit in the “just do it” spectrum? Photo credit: tsarkasim , Amsterdam Esogna Discuss
Insights: Three Reasons Why Zoho Joined the Google Apps Marketplace
Since the announcement went live yesterday about the Google Marketplace , we’ve had a number of companies come to us about how its applications will fit with the service. We’ll do a fuller look at these companies this week but for some immediate perspective we decided to take a look at Zoho , a service that competes with Google Apps. So it is it interesting that the company joined Google Apps Marketplace in its launch. Sponsor Buy why would Zoho offer its applications to integrate with Google? Yes, the companies compete. But Raju Vegesna of Zoho says that it is far more important to complement Google Apps. Over the past few years the company has worked to make it simple for Zoho customers to use its services in tandem with Google Apps. Zoho offers Google Sign-in, Google Apps Sign-in and recently it integrated with Google Docs. Vegesna gave us three reasons why Zoho decided to be part of the launch. His perspectives should provide some insights about the symbiotic relationship Google Apps Marketplace will foster. Extending The Relationship For many developers, integrating with Google Apps represents a significant business opportunity. Google announced at its launch that it passed the 25 million customer mark over the weekend. Vegesna: “First, we have 50% more apps than Google, especially on the business side (CRM, Project Management, Web Conferencing etc). This means, these additional apps can really complement Google Apps. Google has over 20 million users on G Apps and our Business apps can be sold to those customers. ” Google Dominates The Landscape To play in this era, you have to play with Google. They dominate as much as any company has in the past 30 years. The domination in large part is now solidified by its investment in its cloud infrastructure. Vegesna: “Second, we understand that this is going to be a Google dominated eco-system (IBM dominated Mainframe era, Microsoft dominated PC era and Google will dominate the web era) and we wanted to be an important player in this web era. We talked more about this here and here .” A Platform Built On Email, Not CRM Yesterday, we touched on why the marketplace makes sense for companies standardized on Google Apps. With all the contacts in one place, people can add applications to fine tune Google Apps. Does a company start with the same foundation if the platform is built on CRM? Vegesna: “Third, when someone builds a platform, email is a great app to build the platform around, rather than CRM (which salesforce did). We think it’ll be a good and succesful platform for online apps which will move the web app momentum forward and we want to be a key player (the same way Adobe was a key player in PC era).” For more about the Zoho integration: Discuss
Reader Play: Google Reader’s New Fast Flip Style Interface
Google just launched a new Google Labs product for Google Reader: Google Reader Play . Reader Play is a new, highly visual way to browse your Google Reader subscriptions that is somewhat reminiscent of Google’s Fast Flip . It replaces the busy Google Reader interface with an interface that focuses on a single story. Whenever a post includes videos or images, Play with highlight these and give you the option to read more of the text as well. This new interface allows you to browse through the feeds you already subscribe to, but Google Reader Play also emphasizes Google Reader’s ability to recommend items from around the web for you based on your preferences. Sponsor Big on Recommendations As Google notes, Play will learn from your preferences, based on the articles you read and “like.” You can also choose from a set of categories (tech, entertainment, arts, business, etc.) and Google Reader will create a personalized stream of items just for you. According to Google, Play uses the same algorithm as the Recommended Items feed in Google Reader. Play will even work if you don’t have a Google account. While you can’t star, like or share items, you can still browse interesting posts based on the categories you choose. This should make it a good tool for those users who don’t want to go through the effort of setting up a feed reader and subscribing to hundreds of different feeds. Get Started To use Google Reader Play, just head over here or look for “View in Reader Play” in the folder settings in Google Reader. You can switch stories by using your arrow keys or choose the slideshow mode that will automatically forward to the next story after a few second. Discuss
An Entrepreneur’s View On The Benefits of Coworking
We’ve all heard of the big company that started as two guys in their garage, but these days, with startup organizations and incubators, more and more success stories seem to feature companies that built their success from group collaboration. One excellent example of how startups can take advantage of collaboration is to work in a coworking environment with other companies and entrepreneurs. Sponsor Tuesday I had the opportunity to chat with Harry Lin, CEO of Lottay , an online gifting service that has spent a large portion of its short history coworking with outside developers and entrepreneurs. Starting in October of last year, the company spent six weeks working in the offices of San Francisco-based Ruby on Rails development house Pivotal Labs . In December they moved into a space at the Ventura Ventures Technology Center where they work alongside other consumer Internet startups, sharing ideas and resources. “The thing about a startup is that you’re always under resourced; you never have enough people,” Lin told ReadWriteWeb Tuesday. “So the more you can make out of less, the better off your are, the faster you can go, and a startup is all about speed.” Lin, formerly the Vice President of ABC.com and General Manager of Evite , was brought on board at Lottay after the company received Series A funding in the summer of 2009. Below are some highlights from my discussion with Lin on the benefits of coworking environments for startups. How did Lottay benefit from the Pivotal Labs experience? We camped out at the Pivotal Labs office for the entire six weeks. We were in San Francisco and sitting in their office everyday with the two developers that were on our contract. The reason this worked better is that it was very intense and very concentrated; you had no other distractions. The other reason it was fantastic is that its a room full of 25 top notch Ruby on Rails developers. We were only paying for two of them in our engagement, but there were the other 23 sitting in that room working on various things. We would come up with a problem or a hurdle we couldn’t get over and we would just shout out, “Hey has anyone ever done this with a library?” and some guy would jump up and say, “Yeah, I’ve done that!” Voila! Problem solved. And that would happen all the time. So we were getting the benefit of this very open, huge brain trust that Pivotal had even though, technically speaking, we were just paying for the two guys. The third other thing I’d say was great about the environment is that they had other clients in there. So we got to meet, talk to, and get to know some other Internet companies, and that was really cool.” What is the experience like now in Ventura? There are 12 of us in this incubator here in the city of Ventura; it’s a very deliberate ecosystem the city is trying to push, and we’re part of that ecosystem. We all speak the same language, the same jargon, the same shorthand. If one of us comes up with a brilliant idea or an interesting strategic question, we’ll grab each other, white board it, sit in a room, chat in the hall way – the kind of random things that happen when you’re all physically located in the same place. The other thing that we benefit from is that because this is run by the city, we get a lot of support in the form of a fantastic rate on rent, free wifi, marketing and public relations, and they’ve helped us find recruits when we have openings to hire people. The city is more than just a landlord, they’re trying to jump-start this ecosystem. So you would suggest that early stage startups try to find coworking space? If possible, I would not do the “in your basement” or “in your garage by yourself”. Those are the legendary stories we like to hear about, but I think the majority of successful startups has had some kind of coworking environment. I worked for nine years in the Bay area and I know that while there are official incubators, there are also these offices where nine out of the ten companies there are high-tech companies. Being with other people who are doing the same thing is hugely beneficial. In the consumer Internet space, especially with how the Web has evolved over the last decade, everything is getting more social and more open, both in terms of the consumer behavior and in terms of the development and how things are produced. So it just stands to reason that in launching and trying to grow these types of businesses, you should be more social as well. I s there anything startups should avoid when in a coworking environment? It is tempting to do a lot of partnerships with other startups because you’re there, you know each other, you understand each other’s pains and trials and tribulations. Resist the temptation unless is makes a lot of sense. Usually what a startup needs by way of partnership is a large established company. What is your advice to the young startups out there looking to launch or grow their business? There will be 100 problems to solve every week. I can guarantee you that at least 75 of those problems have already been experienced and solved by someone else. That’s the problem with being in a garage or a bedroom by yourself; you’ll probably end up trying to solve those 75 problems yourself. When you’re colocated and coworking with other entrepreneurs, you can share. “Oh, you’ve got that problem? I’ve got that problem, and here’s the solution.” You can benefit from their learnings and not have to reinvent the wheel, which saves you a lot of time. Discuss
Sony Brings More Newspaper and Magazine Content to its E-Readers
Sony just announced that it is expanding its selection of newspapers and magazines in its e-book store. Starting today, users of Sony’s e-readers will be able to subscribe to 20 new newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury News, PC Magazine and Foreign Affairs. With the newspaper business in turmoil, it only makes sense for these papers to try to get a better foothold on more devices. Sponsor eInk vs. LCDs For users who don’t own an e-reader yet but are looking into getting one, the question right now is to either wait for the iPad and go with a regular LCD screen for reading books, or to choose a more traditional (and cheaper) e-reader like the Kindle or Sony Reader that feature electronic ink. While some users don’t mind the blacklit LCD screens of their phones to read, others can’t fathom reading any long-form content on these screens. Fighting Off the iPad For Sony, Amazon, B&N and others who are currently betting on electronic ink for their devices, one of the best ways to distinguish themselves from Apple is to offer more content over their free wireless connections and to play up the advantages of eInk. In this context, adding a newspaper like the New York Times (which is also a favorite of Steve Jobs and features heavily in Apple’s iPad ads and other promotional material ) makes a lot of sense. For the newspapers, getting on more devices and selling more subscriptions is simply good business. Sony charges up to $14.99 per month for these subscriptions. Given that all of these papers could sell their own apps and subscriptions on the iPad as well – and that some of them will be available for free – the availability of newspapers may not be a deciding factor for a lot of potential iPad and e-reader buyers. Hopefully, however, we will also see a lot of innovative newspaper and magazine apps on the iPad. Chances are that these new apps will make today’s traditional e-readers seem rather quaint in comparison. The availability of these apps could easily sway a lot of potential e-reader buyers to get an iPad instead. What is your experience? Do you think e-books and newspapers just look better on eInk? Or are you waiting for the innovative newspaper apps on the iPad that will include video and other interactive content? Discuss