Presenter:
Mike Repass, Product Manager (reminder: Product Managers at Google are technical folks and not marketing folks like other companies, his words not mine, ex-MSFT dude).
You can follow him on http://twitter.com/mdrcode/
Websites:
http://appengine.google.com/
http://code.google.com/appengine/
Highlights
- Cloud computing based platform is in the managed platforms (non-machine) space, more on this later.
- Free Trial for ever.
- Buddy Poke ( http://www.buddypoke.com/ ) and www.whitehouse.gov/OpenForQuestions are examples of site using it
- Billing and Quota just released (This pay as you go is the secret source of cloud computing in my opinion )
- Support only for Python runtime 2.5 modified no other language is supported
- Uses same Google infrastructure
- Data export tool available in case you don’t like the service and want to take your stuff somewhere else (remember: Google does no evil!)
- Approach is very Developer centric, which is great! No assemblies required
Lowlights
- No IDE for Development, SDK + Documentation can be downloaded from the site. Last company that did this almost lost the runtime war somewhat at least, Java SDK released with no IDE back in the day. Everyday Developers (not hardcore, command line switching guys/gals love IDE, it’s a productivity issue.
- Support for only one language
- No message queuing support, so your website cannot do transactions, at least none that is meaningful
- No support for large files, this is on the roadmap though, there is a limit to the size of document you can upload.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Cloud Computing Google World View Notes
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Cloud Computing: Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Early March I attended a presentation on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS), it was the second in a series of presentations on cloud computing put together by the washing technology industry association. The first event in the series provided an overview of cloud computing, while subsequent events focused on vendor specific take/implementations.
AWS combines various aspects of cloud computing, the EC2 service is largely a virtual environment, S3 provides storage while Cloud Front, SimpleDB and Simple Queue Service are web services that have been used by Amazon for its own internal development now made available to outside developers. Mechanical Turk, is an interesting addition to the AWS suite, provides people in the cloud that can get pretty much any tasks completed for you from research restaurants in your area, to development (coding). According to Andy Jassy (VP, Web Services), there are about four hundred thousand developers using AWS today and the presentation included customer evidence from two companies leveraging AWS and on-premises deployment. I don’t recall the break-down of the figure though and I wonder if Mechanical Turks coders are part of this number.
Also interesting is a comment by Andy that only about 20% of computing resources deployed by companies is utilized, not sure where this number came from but I can understand the low utilization figures considering the fact that most capacity planning exercise basically consider the maximum load expected plus a growth rate factor in determining what resource needs to be provided to accomplish the desired performance metric. This maximum load however may only ever be reached a few times during the day but the resources have to be available throughout the day since computing resource could not be acquired on-demand for this peak period. Hence the value of cloud computing, pay for only what you use.
With the ability to pay per use (this is the gem on cloud computing) AWS offers potential huge saving when compared to the on-premises model. In addition, it offers the ability to scale as necessary by simply requesting more resource as your application’s user base grows. In addition, a number of vendors e.g. IBM now allow customer to take existing license and use it in the cloud or purchase per usage licenses for their products in the cloud. EC2 now offers Windows on a pay per use basis.
Tood Fasullo of SmartSheet (S3/CloudFront/MT) and Mike Harrington of Picnik (EC2) both discussed their use of AWS. They both combine AWS with on-premises/hosted deployments.
There were no real surprises at this event mainly because I’ve followed AWS development since Wall Street dogged Jeff Bezos for spending too much money on it.
AWS combines various aspects of cloud computing, the EC2 service is largely a virtual environment, S3 provides storage while Cloud Front, SimpleDB and Simple Queue Service are web services that have been used by Amazon for its own internal development now made available to outside developers. Mechanical Turk, is an interesting addition to the AWS suite, provides people in the cloud that can get pretty much any tasks completed for you from research restaurants in your area, to development (coding). According to Andy Jassy (VP, Web Services), there are about four hundred thousand developers using AWS today and the presentation included customer evidence from two companies leveraging AWS and on-premises deployment. I don’t recall the break-down of the figure though and I wonder if Mechanical Turks coders are part of this number.
Also interesting is a comment by Andy that only about 20% of computing resources deployed by companies is utilized, not sure where this number came from but I can understand the low utilization figures considering the fact that most capacity planning exercise basically consider the maximum load expected plus a growth rate factor in determining what resource needs to be provided to accomplish the desired performance metric. This maximum load however may only ever be reached a few times during the day but the resources have to be available throughout the day since computing resource could not be acquired on-demand for this peak period. Hence the value of cloud computing, pay for only what you use.
With the ability to pay per use (this is the gem on cloud computing) AWS offers potential huge saving when compared to the on-premises model. In addition, it offers the ability to scale as necessary by simply requesting more resource as your application’s user base grows. In addition, a number of vendors e.g. IBM now allow customer to take existing license and use it in the cloud or purchase per usage licenses for their products in the cloud. EC2 now offers Windows on a pay per use basis.
Tood Fasullo of SmartSheet (S3/CloudFront/MT) and Mike Harrington of Picnik (EC2) both discussed their use of AWS. They both combine AWS with on-premises/hosted deployments.
There were no real surprises at this event mainly because I’ve followed AWS development since Wall Street dogged Jeff Bezos for spending too much money on it.
Monday, January 19, 2009
MLK Day 2009 Thoughts
Today is MLK day, I spent it catching up on my African American history, overdosing on the Inauguration broadcasts, the rhetoric on the significance of the inauguration of the first Black President and something about what Michelle Obama will wear to inaugural balls. In all of these, I kept searching for why is this really significant to blacks in America, why do blacks talk about this inauguration as the realization of the dream? Why does the rest of the world care about an historic moment in America? The latter question is somewhat easier to answer (I said somewhat), "I have a dream" is a well recognized phrase across the world as is its author and I want to believe that for years the world watched to see if the dream will ever be realized in America and by electing the first black president the dream is fulfilled and the American dream lives on.
The former question was a little harder to crack. Understanding segregation and recognizing racism is tough if you haven't lived through. Yes I have seen the pictures and I've spoken to enough black people who have told me the stories of the time, eventually my answer came from the following text in Dr. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in response to a statement issued by the Alabama Clergymen.
"When you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; ..... when your first name becomes "nigger", your middle name becomes "boy" .......... when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."
It's true the signs have come down, the N-word became politically incorrect (unless of course you are black then it’s ok) and Lyndon Johnson signed The Voting Rights Acts but that degenerating sense of “nobodiness” lingered on for the most part until November 4th, 2008.
On January 20th, 2009 blacks in America will undoubtedly be celebrating the historic event of the inauguration of the first black president with a reassured sense of being somebody.
Happy MLK Day!!!
The former question was a little harder to crack. Understanding segregation and recognizing racism is tough if you haven't lived through. Yes I have seen the pictures and I've spoken to enough black people who have told me the stories of the time, eventually my answer came from the following text in Dr. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in response to a statement issued by the Alabama Clergymen.
"When you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; ..... when your first name becomes "nigger", your middle name becomes "boy" .......... when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."
It's true the signs have come down, the N-word became politically incorrect (unless of course you are black then it’s ok) and Lyndon Johnson signed The Voting Rights Acts but that degenerating sense of “nobodiness” lingered on for the most part until November 4th, 2008.
On January 20th, 2009 blacks in America will undoubtedly be celebrating the historic event of the inauguration of the first black president with a reassured sense of being somebody.
Happy MLK Day!!!
Sunday, January 4, 2009
The Longest Night
One Easter Sunday, the Alaska Ranger—a fishing boat out of Dutch Harbor—went down in the Bering Sea, 6,000 feet deep and thirty-two degrees cold. Forty-seven people were on board, and nearly half of them would spend hours floating alone in the darkness, in water so frigid it can kill a man in minutes. Forty-two of them would be rescued. Here’s how http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_7619
I was drawn to Sean Flynn's incredible story of rescue in the Bering Sea partly because my company shares an office building with a fishing company and the Alaska Ranger is owned by a fishing company based in Seattle. Sean Flynn did a great job in this article, I was reading the story on a plane ride back to Seattle but Sean's style put me smack in the middle of the action, I felt the cold and darkness experienced by the survivors and the adrenaline rush experienced by the coast guard.
I'm a firm believer that if you enable smart people by providing clear goals and guidelines they will accomplish exceptional results and this story exemplified that. The decisions made by the coast guard personnels on the scene were sometimes against standard procedure but these decisions were critical in increasing the odds of survival of the distressed crewmen. There is definitely a place for not following the rule if you understand the ultimately objective which in this case was to save life.
I was drawn to Sean Flynn's incredible story of rescue in the Bering Sea partly because my company shares an office building with a fishing company and the Alaska Ranger is owned by a fishing company based in Seattle. Sean Flynn did a great job in this article, I was reading the story on a plane ride back to Seattle but Sean's style put me smack in the middle of the action, I felt the cold and darkness experienced by the survivors and the adrenaline rush experienced by the coast guard.
I'm a firm believer that if you enable smart people by providing clear goals and guidelines they will accomplish exceptional results and this story exemplified that. The decisions made by the coast guard personnels on the scene were sometimes against standard procedure but these decisions were critical in increasing the odds of survival of the distressed crewmen. There is definitely a place for not following the rule if you understand the ultimately objective which in this case was to save life.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Since the last time .....
Its' been a quite while since the last time I blogged and it's not because I didn't have anything to talk about. In fact, I had too many things I wanted to write, just could find the time because I was preoccupied with, well, life.
John McCain convinced me that the economy was fundamentally sound so I slept easy. Then I couldn't sleep for days, not because the economy happened and there was total meltdown on wall street, but because John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential candidate, I thought GWB was clueless but SP made GWB look like a genius.
Then the 2008 presidential election campaign happened, a guy better known for electing GWB and crafting some of the most divisive political campaigns I've ever experienced was among those predicting that Barack Hussein Obama (a Muslim, socialist/communist terrorist non-us citizen) would win the Presidential elections and become the First African American President of the United States of America. Why BHO is classified as African American rather than "half-cast" is a separate topic for discussion, but Black folks will certainly take it for all of what it is worth since by law BHO isn't White anyways.
Then Nov. 4th 2008 night happened. Work closed early (smart move by CEO!!!) so I went home to watch the election returns announced. Armed with my electoral college map (I simply stole Karl C. Rove's), my TVs tuned to CNN, MSNBC and FOX, my sister-in-law running results and making my predictions on the path the victory for BHO, the whole episode ended rather abruply. After two elections with hanging chad and other craziness in Florida, I was ready for a very long night. But then it didn't happen, it was over, BHO was President-Elect. To be honest I was partially disappointed that night, the good comeback that McCain promised me did not happen!!!. The day after I suddenly found that I had so much free time I didn't know what to do with myself. I had completely forgotten that the economy was still headed for recession.
Then the economy happened again and I finally realized the 2008 Presidential election was simply my distraction from the economy. I was a 2008 election junkie, my days (sssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh yes even at work I was pouring over those damn polls ) were mostly consumed by them damn polls and analysts on CNN, MSNBC, FOX News and any website that feed my election junkie head. I even had my own poll of polls and some of the things I was spewing will definitely make my parents proud :)
Then reality knocked (or rather slammed upon us), business climate became tougher and then it was back to dealing with business.
John McCain convinced me that the economy was fundamentally sound so I slept easy. Then I couldn't sleep for days, not because the economy happened and there was total meltdown on wall street, but because John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential candidate, I thought GWB was clueless but SP made GWB look like a genius.
Then the 2008 presidential election campaign happened, a guy better known for electing GWB and crafting some of the most divisive political campaigns I've ever experienced was among those predicting that Barack Hussein Obama (a Muslim, socialist/communist terrorist non-us citizen) would win the Presidential elections and become the First African American President of the United States of America. Why BHO is classified as African American rather than "half-cast" is a separate topic for discussion, but Black folks will certainly take it for all of what it is worth since by law BHO isn't White anyways.
Then Nov. 4th 2008 night happened. Work closed early (smart move by CEO!!!) so I went home to watch the election returns announced. Armed with my electoral college map (I simply stole Karl C. Rove's), my TVs tuned to CNN, MSNBC and FOX, my sister-in-law running results and making my predictions on the path the victory for BHO, the whole episode ended rather abruply. After two elections with hanging chad and other craziness in Florida, I was ready for a very long night. But then it didn't happen, it was over, BHO was President-Elect. To be honest I was partially disappointed that night, the good comeback that McCain promised me did not happen!!!. The day after I suddenly found that I had so much free time I didn't know what to do with myself. I had completely forgotten that the economy was still headed for recession.
Then the economy happened again and I finally realized the 2008 Presidential election was simply my distraction from the economy. I was a 2008 election junkie, my days (sssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh yes even at work I was pouring over those damn polls ) were mostly consumed by them damn polls and analysts on CNN, MSNBC, FOX News and any website that feed my election junkie head. I even had my own poll of polls and some of the things I was spewing will definitely make my parents proud :)
Then reality knocked (or rather slammed upon us), business climate became tougher and then it was back to dealing with business.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Managing with Heart
"Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal" - Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Is that IP worth Protecting?
I attempted to watch the movie Hancock before its theater release. I say attempted because I was doing this online at one of the bootleg movie distribution sites, it wasn't exactly the entertaining experience I'd hoped for. The movie was distributed in three separate streams/downloads and the quality was very poor, but I got the gist of the movie and decided after watching the first stream that I should probably go see it at the theater.
The experience got me thinking though, why don't movies theaters release a low quality, multiple stream versions of the movies before release? Would the movie do better or worse at the box office as a result? Isn't this low quality version similar to giving away free samples of your product or content? If they are concerned about their brand why not just support the bootleg sites? My guess is that the main blocking issue is protecting the copyright.
These thoughts/questions led me to other question closer home; why don't we publish our product documentation online on the company's website? I asked a few folks here at work and the response I got was we didn't post the documentation to protect our intellectual property (IP) and maintain our competitive advantage. Does this really give us a competitive advantage or is the IP captured in our product documentation after the product is released really worth protecting? My personal opinion is that we stand to gain more from sharing the documentations than we stand to gain by not sharing. I believe it gives potential customers an opportunity to evaluate the product and be more prepared to ask questions based on an understanding of the literature. It is also a great complement to our scripted demo which covers the products only at a very high level and showcasing the features we consider most appealing.
In any case, it looks like the product documentation will make it online with the next revision of the company's website. I might even get luck and talk people into release portions of our source code as well. Doing that might encourage some rogue Developer to build SharePoint integration application using our source code as the foundation and we might be able to charge him/her good bucks if/when they get stuck ...... who knows.
The experience got me thinking though, why don't movies theaters release a low quality, multiple stream versions of the movies before release? Would the movie do better or worse at the box office as a result? Isn't this low quality version similar to giving away free samples of your product or content? If they are concerned about their brand why not just support the bootleg sites? My guess is that the main blocking issue is protecting the copyright.
These thoughts/questions led me to other question closer home; why don't we publish our product documentation online on the company's website? I asked a few folks here at work and the response I got was we didn't post the documentation to protect our intellectual property (IP) and maintain our competitive advantage. Does this really give us a competitive advantage or is the IP captured in our product documentation after the product is released really worth protecting? My personal opinion is that we stand to gain more from sharing the documentations than we stand to gain by not sharing. I believe it gives potential customers an opportunity to evaluate the product and be more prepared to ask questions based on an understanding of the literature. It is also a great complement to our scripted demo which covers the products only at a very high level and showcasing the features we consider most appealing.
In any case, it looks like the product documentation will make it online with the next revision of the company's website. I might even get luck and talk people into release portions of our source code as well. Doing that might encourage some rogue Developer to build SharePoint integration application using our source code as the foundation and we might be able to charge him/her good bucks if/when they get stuck ...... who knows.
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