Notes from Get Your Head in the Cloud Conference

Just got done with the morning session of the Get Your Head in the Cloud Conference here on the Iowa State University campus. Jeff Barr of Amazon presented as well ad Dennis Quan of IBM. This was a good intro into Cloud computing and good overview of where Amazon and IBM see cloud computing heading (or where they want to steer it).   But is was a blatant ripoff of the VMunderground t-shirt slogan:

Jeff Barr – Amazon

I got in a bit late, so I missed Jeff’s first half.  When I sat down he mentioned cloud use cases for AWS.  Intuit uses it for load testing their apps to ensure they have bugs caught before tax filing crunch time on April 14th.  Seasonal or as needed use of cloud is classic use case.  Then a slide about other Amazon cloud services came up, storage, VMs, web platform,,, but my favorite was on the far right:  mechanical turk!!  I had no idea mechanical turks existed.  I think I’ve found my new buzz word.  Any, Amazon’s mechanical turk is way to get human powered work done via the cloud or find work to do via the cloud.  I just did a quick search of this and highest pay rate was something like $2.07 an hour.   So I won’t be getting rich being a Turk, but might be able to find some cheap labor to knock out turk-like duties.

Overviewed other AWS advantages like: Offload heavy lifting when building out infrastructure for your app, lower costs (capital only, operating will still bite you butt, but it is all a trade off), and reduce time to market of your app (spin up resources when you need them).  Focus here was squarely on that of developers choosing a platform for their apps.  This is where I put together a tweet on battle for platform dominance, “Academia is the battleground for influencing cloud platform bias of next generation of app developers”

Jeff wrapped up by mentioning that cloud services like their SSS, start at home/individual level, then introduced to co-workers, then to departments and ultimately company wide.

Dennis Quan – IBM

Dennis was up next with the IBM perspective of cloud and what services they are offering.  Dennis started with the obligatory definition of what cloud services are:

1. Self Service
2. Delivered over the network
3. Elastic scalability (grow as big as you need, pay as you go..)

Probably one of the most concise, general ways to define cloud services.  Next slide was a good reminder for the x86 virtualization zealots in the house (not pointing any fingers), but he showed the layers of cloud services form apps, to platforms (apache, .NET, MySQL..), os (windows, linux, Unix..) to hardware (x86, mainframe)…….  WHAT?!? Mainframe??  Yes, Sean and other x86 pizza box server loving zealots, you can do cloud with good ole mainframes as well.  You won’t hear that from VMware, but mainframes are perfectly valid hardware platform to build an app on top of that can be: 1. self-service 2. network delivered and 3. Elastic scale.  This will feed another thought on cloud that I will drive home with some future posts is that the platform is where the battle for cloud will be fought.  You have to attract developers to write apps that people want for your platform otherwise you will lose market share.

IBM has run a private cloud infrastructure to service their 400K employee base since 2006.  It’s called the Innovation Portal and speeds products to market and allows greater efficiency in new product development and testing.

Dennis mentioned a joint effort with IBM, Google, and the NSF to provide academia access to a massive compute cloud based on Google’s MapReduce computing techniques for large data compute processes.  This runs on Apache Hadoop and users can leverage Java or scripting language of choice to accomplish their large processing task.

Dennis mentioned that everyone loves cloud benefits and efficiencies but can’t/won’t release their arms around their datacenter.  VMware used to call these folks server-huggers, I’m going to coin new term (i hope): cloud huggers.  The private cloud is here to stay, although hybrid cloud use will continue to grow and augment private cloud setups.

Q + A:

Dev-ministrator: A developer that has to learn to administrator cloud services as part of daily job in order to more properly design and debug app to work and scale for the cloud.

I think we should all be dev-ministrators or enginevelopers or architadmins….  Well roundedness in IT is huge skill and increasingly needed as we swing back hard and fast to centralized computing of the cloud.  If we aren’t all the renaissance IT man, then we MUST be able to communicate properly across disciplines, departments and organizations.

How do I back up and protect my data in the cloud?

Great question.  The $25K question.  How do I secure my information assets in the cloud?  See Christopher Hoff to follow the ongoing quest for this holy grail.  But the gentleman who asked this question pared down the scope a bit.  He stores his pics and core data on Amazon’s S3 storage service.  But how should he best protect this data?  Buy a European S3 account? Backup to local hard drives?  Get service from another cloud provider?  What about use of Twitter, Facebook, bit.ly and services like them?  What happens if they go belly up?  How do you get the data back.

There is no pat answer to that.  The most powerful take-away here is the questions themselves.  Individuals and businesses need to consider these questions when choosing to rely on cloud services.  Dennis Quan brought up good analogy.  When households first bought lightbulbs and signed up for electricity service from the utility, they still chose to keep some candles and matches around the house.  With cloud, common sense and basic risk management will determine how you protect cloud assets or if you go to the cloud at all.  If you are the next twitter, you’ll probably play fast and loose with the cloud.  If you are global financial firm worth $100 billion dollars, you’ll probably consume clouds of clouds AND a local private cloud backup.

That’s my quick brain dump from a cafe in Ames, Iowa.  Looks like I’m not getting any magical invites via email or twitter to attend the private cloud sessions this afternoon, so I’ll head back to work.  Give me a holler if you have any questions.  Comments welcome as are tweets to vSeanClark.  :)