Wiley Executive's Guide to Cloud Computing
Contents
1. and that this will double every 18 months The simple truth is that very few if any of the people involved in these developments had much of an idea of the consequences of their creations of the impact on our personal lives our culture even the society in which we live from how we interact with our families to how we conduct business Whether you are technologically modest or are either by age or temperament not ashamed to let it be known at least in certain circles that you are a bit of a geek either way it is pretty much a given that developments in computing are having a big impact on our society and more to the point an even bigger impact on how we conduct our business And bigger changes tectonic shift scale changes will have at least commensurate impact on our lives in every dimension includ ing the fields of commerce One example perhaps a seemingly sim ple one yet central to many of the changes now underway will suffice to illustrate this point Consider for a moment newspapers We now face the very real prospect actually the near certainty of at least one and probably many major metropolitan area in the United States without a E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 3 The Sound of Inevitability 3 traditional local general purpose print widely circulated newspa per While this eventuality may be stayed perhaps for quite some time via government intervention the fact that this will eventua2. Throw more hardware at it and hope it would go away In late 2004 Intel announced that they were largely abandoning their push to increase the clock speed of individual processing elements and going for ward would instead be increasing the number of individual process ing units or cores While at least in theory this drive for increased core counts can deliver the same raw computing capacity in prac tice it is much more difficult to write application software that can make use of all of these cores This is in essence the parallelization problem which in many ways is the same no matter whether you are writing software for multiple cores within a single piece of silicon multiple cores on multiple processors within a single computing system or multiple cores on multiple processors on multiple computing systems within a single grid cluster fabric cloud Sound complex To be honest it is successfully writing a paral lelizable application can be enormously complex difficult to do well even more difficult to do reliably and more difficult still to make it also easy to operate In other words the silicon and systems designers had punted shifting the burden for scaling to the applica tion software and operational communities Drive for Cheap Of course one drive that remains true in every age and in every domain is the drive to reduce costs cost to acquire cost to deploy cost to operate cost here cost the
3. by mice bit mapped displays and early networked games Mazewars being a great example While both of these trace their earliest roots at least in forms that we would largely recognize today to the mid 1970s they each took 15 to 20 years to gestate sufficiently to have broad impact Overall the biggest technical contribution of the second age was perhaps the network itself Forced to deal with the possibility of massive network failures caused by a nuclear attack researchers E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 10 10 The Sound of Inevitability endowed their invention with the ability to self organize to seek out alternate routes for traffic to adapt to all sorts of unforeseen circumstances In doing so perhaps with only partial intent these researchers removed the single point of failure that was typical of mainframe inspired networks and as a consequence in one fell swoop they removed the biggest technological barrier to scaling the mainframe centric network itself Even more telling foreshadowing changes that would usher in the third age when they enabled the networks to take care of themselves these researchers also removed the big gest obstacle to growth they made these new networks much easier to operate It is hard to overestimate the importance of two fundamental realities 1 with the Internet it was now true that everyone was con nected to everyone else anytime anywhere and 2 with the ubiq uity of visually attra
4. concept would simply fizzle out for any of a number of reasons within the first nine months Apple was able to sell more than one billion individual applications the second billion came in about six months the third in just over three months From zero to a billion in less than a year then six months then three then well regardless of what is next that is a nearly incomprehensible rate of growth a reality worth pondering for a moment Culture We have become conditioned by the expectation quite often the reality as well that everything is available all the time that Google and others will be able to tell you where any place is and that you can then reach your friends no mat ter the time or place to tell them about it Perhaps all that seems too obvious to think about much anymore but take a moment and ponder what this assumption this daily reality has wrought on society While an in depth study of this phe nomenon is outside the scope of this book it is such an impor tant factor that it must be considered After all in some sense culture is a measure of how mem bers of a society interact with each other and the transition to the era of cloud computing is bringing incalculable changes to this very arena That in our culture for that matter nearly any culture around the world today this means of communication is sim ply a given The fact that we all take it for granted is a pro found enabler for future ser
5. historic business hysteria the Internet Bubble Truth be told if not for macro level economic problems that started in late 2008 the onset of cloud computing may have trig gered Internet Bubble 2 0 But as the dust settled and all calmed down it was clear that the world had shifted Any enterprise intending to prosper now had to consider how best to reach their customers and their ecosystem of suppliers and where to look for their newest competitors all in the face of the newest reality ubiquitous connectivity Likewise the ubiquity of visually rich devices at first stationary then evolving to include the handheld slabs of glass iPhone an droid phones Palm pre and their successors made it possible for the non geek to care While command lines and text terminals were enough for many of the early adopters the simple reality is that au dience is by definition limited There were people including one of the authors who went from cards to command line to modern bit mapped displays along with a mouse laser printer and local area network all part of the experimental Alto workstations from Xerox PARC all well within the span of a single year 1979 At the beginning of that year most work was done on a mainframe via cards printers and batch jobs halfway through 1979 work moved to interactive command line ac cess via dumb terminals and by the end of the year you could sit in front of a Xerox Altos mesmerized
6. really the story of the rise of the Internet Sun Cisco Mosaic which became Netscape web 1 0 eBay Yahoo baby com and the first Internet Bubble all of it good and bad all of the tumultuous commotion of the first Internet land rush While many advances contributed to the beginning of the sec ond age the two most crucial were the development of the Internet itself and the development and near ubiquity of easy to use visually attractive devices that could be used by nearly everyone The story of the development of the Internet is well known starting from a research question Can we build a more resilient network one that can survive a nuclear attack to a more loosely coupled set of higher level communications protocols e g ftp for E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 9 Three Ages of Computing 9 file transfers smtp for e mail http for web content built on top of this newly resilient foundation then to a whole ecosystem of new software From browsers to web servers among many others the Internet quickly went from who cares to must have By the early 1990s this new sort of crazy idea began to dominate even mainstream business thought to the point that normally sane ratio nal people predicted such improbably outcomes as the elimination of all brick and mortar stores the irrelevance of a nation s manufac turing base and in some cases the irrelevance of nations themselves This in turn led to truly
7. the complex strategic elements political economic cultural of the conflict itself As a result a certain stasis had been reached in which newspapers carved out what appeared to be a sustainable role in the delivery of news Then came the Internet In particular the effectively free and ubiquitous and yes near instantaneous delivery of all sorts of information mortally wounded the newspaper business As the first round of the web ecosystem grew the only remaining stronghold of the traditional newspapers their ad based revenue model was made largely irrelevant eBay Craigslist and freecycle among others replaced the classifieds and online ads took out most of what was left Some newspapers will undoubtedly manage the transition in some manner or another perhaps even emerging as something E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 4 4 The Sound of Inevitability fairly recognizable particularly national international properties such as the Wall Street Journal and the previously mentioned USA Today and perhaps even financially sound But those that do will likely largely do so without their original distribution technologies and more important many will not make the transition at all All of this upheaval in news delivery the enormous changes that have already occurred and that which is yet to come have been enabled by developments in computing technologies with the widespread adoption of everything from the Internet to the
8. the nemesis of some it is quite literally a prime mover behind the developments that have together come to be known as cloud computing What does this mean and how can it be possible A Persistent Vision Better faster cheaper is often heard in technology circles More than a policy more than a philosophy this is literally a way of life within technology communities In an ideal world imagine that Computing computation storage communication is relatively free scales up or down as needed scales as much as needed operates itself and always works To one degree or another this is the persistent vision that drives many of those who are developing cloud computing Is all of this presently possible Of course not yet we are inexorably on this path Achieving this vision is of course a complex endeavor with far more to it than may meet the eye at first glance That is why there is the rest of this book for starters Before we go further let us elaborate a bit on the dimensions of this vision Engineers and mathematicians talk about something being within epsilon of zero This is a term that comes from calculus It E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 6 6 The Sound of Inevitability simply means the process of approaching a particular limit from wherever you started to the limit itself In the case of the cost of computing infrastructure that limit is zero For most of computing history the costs of infrastructure have dominat
9. these alternative architectures were difficult to develop software for cranky to operate and enormously expensive Even though most of those efforts eventually evaporated they did at least make one very important contribution They showed that it was indeed possible particularly for certain applications to build very large computing facilities out of very modest components This drive for scale went mainstream along with the Internet This was true in many dimensions but for one easy example just think of the indexing problem itself whereas an early circa 1994 Yahoo index might have had less than a hundred or at most a few hundred entries and could be manually created by the beginning of 1995 the number of web sites was doubling every 53 days and was passing anyone s ability to manually index This growth then created the need for computing infrastructures that could scale at the same rates or faster as well as application and data storage archi tectures that could also scale apace Yet there was one fly in the ointment that occurred about this same time the silicon companies Intel competitors and friends E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 12 12 The Sound of Inevitability began to reach their practical limit for scaling individual execution units which came to be known as cores In fact this problem had been looming for some time but the processor designers tended to solve the problem the way they had always done
10. E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 1 CHAPTER The Sound of Inevitability here have been very few fundamental changes in computing On the surface that may sound like the statement of a madman or perhaps at least someone from an alternate universe Nonethe less it is true Sure there have been are and will likely continue to be a nearly incomprehensible fire hose of particular changes some rather fla shy in and of themselves Simple things like pocket sized flash drives that store more than the corporate mainframes of 30 years ago or perhaps ubiquitous mobile devices for everything from the mun danely practical e mail calendars and contacts to the cheerfully sublime Much more complex developments such as the open source movement the advent of relational databases and the rise and fall of whole operating systems and their surrounding ecosys tems even those whose perpetual dominance once seemed assured how many desktop machines are running CP M these days These have come and gone perhaps lingering in some niche for gotten by all but a few fanatical devotees But truly fundamental change the tectonic shift that literally changes our landscape happens only once in a long while per haps every ten or more years even in the computing business Fun damental change of this magnitude requires a number of smaller innovations to pile up until a true nexus is reached and we all start marching down a different road Of course
11. Page 16 The Sound of Inevitability e Commodity Hardware In the three basic areas of computing components chips processors memory etc storage mostly disc drives and network both within a datacenter wide area and wireless there have been large strides made in the capabilities of what is by historical standards throw away equipment For example a client of one of the authors was able to match a competitor s industry leading mainframe based performance in processing high volume customer trans action with less than a dozen cheap commodity boxes sitting on a repurposed kitchen rack Total bill Less than 10 000 Yes it works and it works very well The key of course was in how the applications were constructed and how that set of ma chines is reliably managed In any case there will be more on this example as well as others later in the book Network Speed While network performance has not increased at the same rate as either processor or storage performance which will lead to interesting problems as clouds develop we will cover the details of this in depth in Chapter 8 All Things Data huge strides have been made in both the connections within a datacenter and those outside For example by the time you are reading this a gigE network card for use by a commodity computer within a data center will be less than 10 each in small quantities To put that in perspective that is about 400 faster th
12. ad to change At the same time in order to build customer and vendor sticki ness Amazon had begun exposing individual services even select customer data as callable services one of the key application les sons that is leading to the third age and so had accelerated decom posing many of their applications into dozens or sometimes hundreds of individually callable services About that time 2001 2003 Amazon began to adopt many of the same principles as Google had done early on but then they took things a step further Instead of simply offering entire services such as search e mail maps photo and so forth with various E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 15 Broad Enablers 15 services exposed for calling from outside in 2006 Amazon began to offer basic computing resources computing storage and network bandwidth in highly flexible easily provisioned services all of which could be paid for by the drink Others offered public cloud services that made certain unique contributions including Salesforce com which was probably the first public cloud service that was targeted at the enterprise cus tomer and required those customers to store very sensitive data out side of their own facilities While many thought that sale was not doable that no enterprise large or small would risk their customer data on something so unproven the allure of an easy pay as you go CRM customer relationship management implementation led to the ri
13. an the internal bus connections the key internal connectivity within server com puters of the typical big servers of the early 1980s Also as you are reading this a 10 Mbps wired connection for the home or office will average less than 50 per month in the United States and even less than that in many parts of the world Mainstream mobile wireless for those ubiquitous slab of glass mobile devices that make accessing all these services so pleasant speeds will be closer to 7 Mbps at the cost of only a modest part of the typical monthly cell phone budget The point is simple Whether within the datacenter at fixed loca tions throughout the world or on mobile devices cheap fast reliable and ubiquitous network connections are a fact of life Virtualization Virtualization started as a way to share the use of very expensive mainframes among otherwise incompatible operating systems then flowered in the later similar trend to consolidate large numbers of small servers each typically E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 17 Broad Enablers 17 dedicated to one or two specific applications It is the ability to operate particular resources such as computers networks and so forth largely independent of the physical infra structure upon which they are deployed This can be a tremen dous boon for operations For example the initial configuration of the operating sys tem for a server along with the applications to run on that ser
14. as historians are fond of lecturing the rest of us mere mortals these sort of fundamental changes are nearly impossible to E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 2 2 The Sound of Inevitability recognize while we are in the middle of them even as they loom imminently When researchers at the University of Pennsylvania were fever ishly working on ENIAC generally recognized as the first program mable general purpose electronic computer as the future of the world hung in the balance in the midst of World War II do you think they envisioned computers embedded in nearly everything from greeting cards to automobiles from microwaves to MRIs When researchers at the University of California Los Angeles and elsewhere in the midst of the Cold War strove to make computer networks more resilient in the face of nuclear attack do you think any of them envisioned the Internet as we see it today Likewise when Tim Berners Lee and other researchers at CERN were trying to come up with an easy way to create and display content over this new literally nuclear grade network do you think they envisioned the impact on everyday life both personal and professional their new creation would have or even the simple breadth and depth of stuff from the sublime to the silly that would be available on this new supercharged Internet One estimate is that there are more than Boe exabytes that s 500 billion gigabytes in this digital uni verse
15. ctive devices the data and services available over that pervasive network could actually be used by mere mortals Typical technologies included the J2EE application servers often in clusters along with relational databases themselves often in clusters Developers and researchers everywhere strove to stretch push pull morph everything but blowing them up and starting over to make these application architectures more flexible scal able more resilient to failure and so forth but were mostly un successful or at least not successful enough There were plenty of innovations in software architectures rang ing from improved data techniques to the first forays into what became service oriented architectures in the early part of the new millennia But what had not changed Far too much remained as it always had as things turned out For starters infrastructure remained expensive chunky siloed and by modern standards phenome nally overengineered after all the infrastructure really should not fail and consequently even more expensive Great strides were being made in distributed software architectures but outside of the foundational TCP IP networks themselves most applications and infrastructure software remained difficult to configure com plex to create and brittle when faced with failure As a result oper ations remained enormously difficult and therefore both costly and error prone which in the final analysis was the cru
16. e big wins For the most part the edges of each organization remained the same as they had always been At the beginning of the first age the focus was on big infrastructure mainframes big point to point networks centralized databases and big batch jobs Toward the end terminals evolved into personal computers networks went from hierarchical with the mainframes at the center of each network to decentralized with a broader gen erally more numerous collection of servers and storage scattered throughout an organization While batch work still existed many programs became interactive through this first age eventually gain ing much more visual interfaces along the way Infrastructure tended to be associated with particular applica tions a practice since pejoratively known as application silos and important applications generally demanded enterprise grade read expensive infrastructure mainframes or big servers and so forth Application architectures tended to follow the same evolution ary path with earlier applications being generally centralized large and heavy while client server and distributed application architec tures became mainstream toward the end This period also saw the rise of databases along with the begin nings of specialized storage infrastructure upon which those data bases relied E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 8 8 The Sound of Inevitability Technologies such as parallel computing art
17. e today How will we pay for hundreds and thousands perhaps even tens of thousands times more servers and storage than we have today almost unimaginable quantities of computing How will we operate them Write new software for them It is fair to wonder how we will even power all that gear Assuming that all of these concerns are resolved then we will face a larger question still one which we E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 5 A Persistent Vision 5 presume has many answers What sort of business models are enabled by all of this and how do we get there Before we leave this example it is probably worth considering our present circumstances just a bit more In particular most of the history of both economics and engineering can be understood by thinking about managing scarcity In other words how do I get the most done with the least stuff or within certain limits For example that underlying drive to dealing with scarcity at its core drives the startup team to work harder and pay less the Fortune 500 enter prise to optimize manufacturing processes and entire nations to set energy policies Allocating scarcity is just Economics 101 Of course it is also Engineering 101 Dealing with scarcity causes communica tions engineers to develop better video compression schemes im prove CPU designs to get more done in the same amount of time and even rethink server packaging to reduce power consumption and labor costs While scarcity may be
18. ed decisions about what to deploy when How much will those servers cost How about that storage farm That network Now however we can start think ing about those costs being within epsilon of zero that is over time the computing infrastructure comes closer and closer to being free That leaves other costs as the new more significant considera tions software licensing data acquisition for just two examples and this will be examined more closely later in the book A Little History In one sense the evolution of computing has been one long blur with change piling on change products that are long in the tooth in less than a year and virtually classic soon after and with new concepts Moore s Law for example created simply so that we can describe understand and effectively institutionalize this relent less rate of change But there are times when these changes pile up in such number in particular combinations of new capabilities and logical conse quences that the whole industry does head off in a new direction when the very conversations the underlying concepts even the pos sibilities themselves change To help understand the import of our current transition into a computing world dominated by cloud computing think a bit about where we have been where we are now at least just slightly before exactly right now and both how and why we have travelled these paths While there are clearly man
19. elest con stant reality of all E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 11 Three Ages of Computing 11 Before we continue in this narrative let us take a step back to consider two more constants in computing the drive for ever in creasing scale and the drive for ever lower expenditures i e the drive for cheap Drive for Scale Remember back to the middle of the first age in the 1970s and 1980s most computing was done on relatively mun dane large scale individual computers or perhaps in small clusters of relatively big machines Even then for the researchers scientists or perhaps intelligence agencies who were simply trying to solve the biggest problems possible this was never enough for that matter nothing was ever enough no matter how big and fast Those folks were the ones who were exploring the edges of parallel computing and distributed architectures who were thinking of highly pipe lined supercomputers and vector processors Yet in the mid 1980s another thread of investigation took root inspired by biological systems themselves which started by combin ing large numbers of relatively slow computers sometimes loosely coupled via a local area network these came to be often known as grids and sometimes linked internally via specialized connections such as the exotic Connection Machine 1 produced by Thinking Machines Inc which was the effort to commercialize the doctoral work of Daniel Hillis In all cases
20. ere remain substantive limita tions In particular much of the early thought leadership such as in The Big Switch a seminal cloud computing book by Nicholas Carr or in the ideas contained in Redshift Computing a set of concepts put forth by Greg Papadopolous then Chief Technology Officer of Sun prior to the acquisition of Sun by Oracle who claimed that all computing would eventually go into a small number of extremely large public clouds Papadopolous went so far as to initially predict that eventually there will only be in essence five computers Upon calming down a bit and thinking through the implica tions a little more clearly it began to become clear that while public clouds of various types will play very important roles as the cloud computing landscape develops they will not work alone Rather the public clouds will interoperate and work interchangeably E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 22 22 The Sound of Inevitability where appropriate with private clouds built and operated on the same cloud computing principles Some organizations will create their own clouds for any of a number of reasons including control privacy security and reliability among others or perhaps do so for data issues data retention reliability and access to computing re sources in order to enable even larger scales better efficiencies etc The realization of these concerns with the early Utopian vision of a small number of purely publ
21. hat increase in the rate of change is itself continuing to increase that whole critical mass notion all over again For example once actual clouds began to be deployed utilized liked and then as a result scaled up even more then the early ideas about cloud optimal application architectures needed to be ad vanced even further Likewise the very need to scale has pushed the innovative data models even further which enables more scale Yet in addition to this self fulfilling innovation there have been a few perhaps unexpected bonus advances In particular e Operational Models In order to deal with the scale there has been some significant development of novel operational mod els with a degree of automation far beyond any prior e Flexibility From the beginning these infrastructures needed to be able to scale up easily then it became clear that they also need to be able to scale down just as easily This led to auto mated mechanisms for requesting more and releasing unused infrastructure and in some cases going further and simply al lowing policy driven automated scale changes with no human intervention These capabilities are wrapped in APIs and avail able via the web of course e Consistent Infrastructure In order to facilitate the scale flexi bility and ease of operations most clouds have a relatively small number of physical building blocks from which they are constructed Rather than the hundred
22. he relationship between SOA and Cloud and industry adop tion trends for both is explored in detail in Chapter 5 In addition there have been significant advances in creat ing more resilient self organizing application platforms that are inherently at home on top of the very fluid commoditized infrastructure typical in cloud computing Finally the need to become more adept at parallelization in order to effectively use multi core processors is beginning to have an impact E1C01 02 21 2010 18 Page 18 The Sound of Inevitability e Data Storage Architectures The first two ages of computing were very much dominated for very good reasons by the database systems relational databases such as Oracle MySQL SQLServer Postgress and others Entire data man agement organizations exist in most enterprises to manage the structure of this relational data within these repositories with strict rules about how such data is accessed updated and so forth Unfortunately what we have learned from abundant experience is that at some point the block to scaling any given application will nearly always be the relational database itself As a result the whole approach to reliably storing process ing and managing data at large scale is being rethought re sulting in a number of innovative novel technologies that show significant promise We are also beginning to see some significant improve ments in the underlying storage infras
23. iPhone It is probably worth remembering that all of this has occurred largely without cloud computing and as a result we are probably less than 10 of the way through this transition in news delivery and this is only one industry One industry one example with entire economies yet to transform Even so some things have not changed much even in the deliv ery of news The computing infrastructures range from the stodgy server even mainframe based systems within many newspapers to circa 2009 state of the art which we might as well start referring to as legacy web web 2 0 old school web something like that By and large these systems still cost too much to acquire do not adapt to changes in demand nearly easily enough are not reliable enough and remain way too complex and costly to operate Even the few systems that do not suffer from all of these problems are not ideal to say the least Some are proprietary and most are either too complex to create new application software or simply do not scale well enough at least for the sort of software that researchers are hard at work developing In particular with the first generation of electronic news infrastructures focused on just delivering the news the next generation will be focused on sifting through all of that content looking for just the right stuff All of that sifting and sorting and searching will take orders of magnitude more computing capacity than we have anywher
24. ic clouds and nothing else is leading to the development of a much richer more textured cloud computing landscape with variations that can address these and other considerations as necessary sharing common foundations yet differing where necessary The best part Each organization has a wide range of choices from which to choose with the ability to pick and choose as each need dictates I Want One of Those As a result of all this the promise of reduced costs easier scale greater flexibility reduced deployment cycles and more much more over the past couple of years it has become very common almost a litany across many organizations to say in one form or another that We want what Google and Amazon have except that we want it inside our organization while at the same time interoper ating and in other ways working very closely with those very public clouds and we want to be able to use any of these clouds when WE choose as best suits OUR needs Back to the Future A few years ago a friend of ours was given a tour of a large technol ogy dependent Fortune 500 company that was trying to win her business She was taken to what was an extremely large for those days datacenter with row after row of large excelsior class main frames a figure of speech for very large and costly stuff but it works particularly here The salesperson obviously proud of the datacenter pointed to all of this b
25. ificial intelligence and even semantic processing remained exotic tools that were employed in only the most demanding problems where cost was no object at least in theory where the goal was simply to solve ever bigger ever thornier problems places like the nuclear weap ons laboratories national intelligence agencies scientific research institutions and the like Despite the rapid consistent improvements in individual hard ware and software technologies throughout this period the limita tions and complaints remained nearly constant In particular no matter how much was poured into the IT budget the foul nemesis of application backlog was heard in the hallways of nearly every enterprise Who did not constantly complain about how much IT was costing Still it was at least generally speaking possible to automate crucial operations within a company and as a result overall corpo rate efficiency steadily increased More autos were made with less labor more packages delivered with the same number of employ ees higher revenues per store per employee and so forth This period covered about four decades from the roots of enter prise computing in the 1950s until the rise of the Internet in the mid 1990s As with all major shifts in a society its culture and tech nology the roots of the end of the first age of computing were sown years before the second age began Second Age The second age of computing is
26. ig iron and went on and on about how they could meet her needs no matter what They even were double especially proud of the empty floor space in the datacenter with tape outlines stretching as far as the eye could see marking the places where E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 23 Notes 23 future planned excelsior class mainframes would be delivered early and often to handle growth See we can handle any need you might have Our friend was on the inside simply appalled Turns out that she already had a taste of what cloud computing could be so all she could see as she looked out across that floor was an enormous amount of fixed costs with high operational costs at least partially driven by the legions of highly skilled technicians hovering about each precious mainframe all these costs growing inexorably over time with no end in sight and very little ability to actually scale up fast if her business did anything like what she was hoping Sensing her distraction the salesperson reiterated that they could handle growth with this gargantuan facility that this Fortune 500 organization was most definitely futureproof No our still polite friend thought I am just not looking at the future this isa monument to the past It is just a matter of time Notes 1 Leiner Cerf et al A Brief History of the Internet last revised December 10 2003 Internet Society www isoc org internet history brief shtml 2 IDC Dig
27. ital Universe White Paper sponsored by EMC May 2009 3 Nexi is a slightly stylized plural of nexus those crucial points where every thing converges and fundamental change occurs 4 A good starting place to find more is the Histories of the Internet section of the Internet Society site www isoc org where you will find several excellent histories 5 Xerox Palo Alto Research Center research lab made famous by luminaries such as Alan Kay and John Warnock Adobe as the home of such innovations as the bit mapped display highly visual user interfaces for normal computing mice local area networks WISIWYG editing Smalltalk and more all rou tinely used everyday now 6 See A 30 Year Mazewar Retrospective at www digibarn com collections games xerox maze war index html 7 Kill the 53 Day Meme Jakob Nielsen s Alertbox for September 1995 8 Inspired by and with apologies to that famous FedEx tagline When it abso lutely positively has to be there 9 A Vax 11 780 had 1200 nanosecond memory with a synchronous 32 bit bus 10 Note that this number includes free as well as paid applications some of which are either ad supported or involve generating revenue through some other means 11 Norton 2008 E1CO1 02 21 2010 Page 24
28. lly occur is not in doubt In a culture still echoing with such reporte resque icons as Clark Kent or at least the more prosaic Bernstein and Woodward this was once unthinkable Now it is simply inevitable There was a time when the technology of newspapers cheap newsprint paper high volume printing presses delivery networks including everything from trucks to kids on bicycles was the only reasonable means for mass distribution of information In fact with help from some of the newer technologies there was even a new na tional newspaper USA Today founded in the United States as late as 1982 But with the advent of alternative delivery channels first radio then broadcast cable and satellite television increasing amounts of pressure were put on the newspapers The immediacy of the newer channels led to the widespread death of afternoon newspapers in most markets anything delivered to the dinner table in a physical paper was hopelessly out of date with the evening news on television or radio The morning papers had the advantage of broad coverage collected while most people slept and as a result have held on longer However at the same time intrinsic limitations of the newer technologies made them better for certain types of information though not as useful for others For example a two minute video from a war zone could convey the brutal reality of combat far more effectively than reams of newsprint but did little to describe
29. onstructed out of commodity components out of cheap stuff that breaks Data storage needed to be done in a simple yet fairly reliable manner to facilitate scaling the Google File System or GFS notice the lack of a traditional database but more on that later New types of application development architecture s would be required which came to include the so called map reduce family which inspired open source descendants such as Hadoop among others Operations needed to be as automatic and dependable as possible Outages in the application were tolerable after all this was search and who would miss a few results if an outage occurred So almost before anyone really knew what was happening in or der to scale a basic search facility and do so cheaply Google had created much of what we could probably first recognize as a cloud Another interesting case is Amazon In the first six or seven years Amazon largely built its computing infrastructure the tradi tional way out of big heavy servers with traditional relational data bases scattered liberally throughout That was fine in the early days and definitely fine during the first couple of years after the Internet Bubble burst particularly since much high end hardware could be had for pennies on the dollar after the first bubble but as com merce on the Internet began to gain some real momentum it be came abundantly clear that the Amazon computing architecture s h
30. re cost any where just reduce them all In the midst of the rubble of the first Internet Bubble burst ing many different groups began to wonder just how to make use of these increasingly capable commodity computers for problems that we really cared about mission critical problems the ones that absolutely positively have to work For example the roots of Appistry a company founded by one of the authors lie in just such a question When building a digital recording studio out of purely commodity parts no label cheapest fastest stuff that money could buy after running benchmarks the obvious question came up Why are we not using cheap stuff like E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 13 Three Ages of Computing 13 this meaning the plain label pure commodity computing parts for problems that we really care about The answers to that question how to ensure that commodity infrastructure could be ultimately reliable easy to operate easy to bring software into and so on led to multiple patents products and companies and is a question whose answers are definitely worthwhile The economics of utilizing commodity components are compel ling if and only if you can safely answer those key questions The economies of scale with commodity infrastructure such as general purpose processors are simply overwhelming when compared to specialty designs It is common for a collection of commodity com puters to deli
31. s of unique servers E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 21 Limitations 21 versions of servers and configurations of versions of servers that populate the typical pre cloud datacenter even the larg est cloud computing datacenter may have no more than a handful perhaps as few as three or four different possibilities e Packaging and Construction With consistency a given the next step is to consider more efficient higher density packag ing and datacenter construction Innovations in this area in clude everything from the very cheap naked computer motherboards mounted open air no cases on sheets of ply wood all arranged in stacks and rows to the more costly though highly engineered for space and cooling effi ciency stackable semi trailer sized containers stuffed full of the actual computing infrastructure There are now entire datacenters designed to accept a number of these preconfig ured stackable containers with hardly a month or two passing before someone presents yet a more efficient even more radi cal highly scalable modular datacenter All of these advances work with each other in turn depending on another and then enabling yet another The interactions are fas cinating and useful and will be explored in more detail in Chapter 2 Concepts Terminology and Standards and again in Chapter 8 All Things Data and Chapter 9 Why Inevitability Is Inevitable Limitations Of course with all of the excitement th
32. se of Salesforce com and competitors in the sincerest form of flattery emphatically proving otherwise that the enterprise cus tomer could trust these services That their initial rise to meaningful market share and then eventual dominance came largely at the expense of the traditional install in your own shop application with an overwrought often painful and unintentionally costly imple mentation was simply a bonus While each of these examples have their roots firmly in the mid dle of the second age either their original or subsequent decisions played crucial roles in bringing together the beginning of the third age the age of cloud computing It is during this era that that persistent vision that we discussed earlier can finally begin to become true Computing computation storage communication is relatively free scales up or down as needed scales as much as needed operates itself and always works With that in mind let us step back and take a look at some of the particular developments that are enabling this persistent vision to begin to become reality Broad Enablers Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s there were key advances that came together to enable the transition to the cloud computing era the third age We are at the cusp of this transition as we com plete the first decade of the new millennium While not a compre hensive list these are some of the more notable enablers E1C01 02 21 2010 16
33. tructure itself both in composition and operations In any case this whole area will be explored in much more depth in Chapter 8 All Things Data Pervasive High Quality Access The reality quality variety quantity of high quality visually attractive widely available devices has had a tremendous impact on the development of cloud computing Typical devices include fixed desktops with one or more flat panels laptops and netbooks of every size price range and performance ubiquitous sometimes special ized and nearly always relatively inexpensive handheld devices such as the iPhone and its growing range of competitors such as the rapidly expanding range of devices running the An droid operating system from Google Perhaps most impor tantly these devices share in common a wide range of wireless high speed Internet access Taking all this into account this plethora of high quality pervasive always connected devices has greatly increased the number of customers for services and content the data and applications sold on the cloud and has also increased each customer s appetite for even more services and data Consider one small example In March 2008 Apple an nounced that they would create a marketplace from which third party developers could sell applications to owners of an iPhone Despite a tremendous amount of uncertainty E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 19 Broad Enablers 19 including many who thought that the whole
34. ver can take hours if not days With virtualization that ini tial work is done once and the results put on the shelf to be deployed onto physical hardware when needed This process sometimes referred to as hydration can be done in as little as a few seconds to minutes and repeated as often as needed thereby enabling the possibility of easily deploying basic soft ware to large numbers of computers e Application Architectures Beginning with the development of object oriented languages and tools in the 1980s and 1990s and continuing on through the beginning of web services and service oriented architectures during this decade software ar chitectures have made many strides toward the eternal goal of software reusability itself driven by the desire to make it easier to construct software A key characteristic of typical cloud ap plications has been the fine grained components with an ex posed application programming interface API or interface i e the ability to make use of that portion of an application from nearly anywhere on the Internet any place that makes sense and probably even a few places that are just for show This ability to mix and match relatively independent soft ware services is crucial in making software more useful For many this has been the practical realization of service oriented architectures SOA an interesting topic that we will explore in more detail later the book A more detailed discussion of t
35. ver the same capacity for less than 10 of the cost sometimes far less than 10 of enterprise grade servers and mainframes It is no longer a question of is this possible but rather how when and where That same question How can we use commodity infrastructure for problems that we care about is being asked and answered in various ways by forward thinking technologists and executives every where in the relentless pursuit for cheaper faster better and is integral in the transitions to cloud Third Age Now let us resume our narrative Early in the second age Yahoo had made a name for itself by indexing the Internet which for some time was mostly manually done While this was sufficient for a while it soon became apparent that manually built indices could never keep up with the growth of the Internet itself Several other indexing efforts began including AltaVista Google and others but it was Google that brought everything together While a full understanding of why Google became so dominant at least as of this writing is beyond the scope of this book several key factors can be easily understood e First the collection of data about the current state of the In ternet and the processing of that data had to be as absolutely automated as possible E1CO1 02 21 2010 Page 14 14 The Sound of Inevitability In order to save as much money as possible the infrastructure would be c
36. vices for future proliferation of cloud based services For example consider that even such a venerable ancient institution as the Catholic Church has launched a number of initiatives in the social media including Facebook Twitter YouTube and more and the present Pope has even encour aged young people to evangelize the Gospel into these new societies and into this new continent speaking of the communities that are formed in the various social networks and that this is a very high priority Ponder this carefully If a 2 000 year old institution that has rarely been accused of haste can understand the funda mental nature of these changes and act on them can any orga nization afford to do less E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 20 20 The Sound of Inevitability After all this is what our cultures now expect this is what people demand this is how people interact To recap there have been several key factors that have enabled the development of cloud computing at this time in this place Now let us turn our attention to what some of these early clouds have contributed to our understanding of cloud computing of just what is possible Big Contributions While most of these enablers came about for different reasons it has really been the combination of all of the above that enabled cloud computing to get started Once started of course the pace of innovation began to increase significantly and t
37. y ways that the history of comput ing can be written this one will only focus on the big changes the nexi themselves where the very possibilities change Three Ages of Computing While there many ways to get a handle on the evolution of com puting in order to gain an initial understanding just where cloud computing fits of just how significant and yes disruptive it is and will be it is sufficient to consider the broad sweep of computing history E1C01 02 21 2010 Page 7 Three Ages of Computing 7 First Age Think about the role of computing within the typical organization prior to the widespread adoption of the Internet The focus was on automating particular operations creating supporting business pro cesses and of course always improving efficiency Notice that the focus was within individual organizations by and large Yes there were purpose built networks for interacting between organizations some of them even fairly large and impor tant stock trading and manufacturer specific EDI electronic data interchange networks are two notable examples and even for certain organizations to interact with their customers e g credit card authorization networks but each of these tended to have a very specific rather narrow focus Even more important these examples were relatively few and far between and very difficult to achieve This was the first age of computing in which organizations looked internally for th
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