Computing Clouds

The cloud and monitoring

2009-10-27T13:30:00.001-05:00

The proliferation of cloud based solutions has a created a need for cloud monitoring solutions. Robert Scoble interviewed Nimsoft recently. Nimsoft just announced a new system that will let you monitor your cloud based systems in a unified interface.

… if you are an architect of software services based on cloud computing architectures you have a new kind of problem: figuring out what is going on in your systems across vendors and across services. What’s causing your slowdowns? Is it Twitter? Your own code? The part of your service running on Amazon? Rackspace? Google App Engine?

Nimsoft just announced a new system that will let you monitor your systems. I had a 30 minute conversation with Gary Read, CEO of Nimsoft, about cloud computing architectures and what’s happening in the world of building services and applications that use all these newfangled APIs.

How are you changing your approach to software if you are building systems based on cloud infrastructure?

Part I Discussion of cloud computing and what’s happening in changing architectures.
Part II An introduction to Nimsoft’s new cloud computing monitoring system.
Part III — a demo of the system.

The cloud model is a better model

2009-10-07T13:28:00.001-05:00

Sergey Brin in an interview agrees that the cloud model is the right model for computing. It doesn’t seem obvious to most people but in half a dozen years anyone installing software on computers will feel archaic and wasteful if you are an end user. Its the natural progression in computing, Computing as a utility, ubiquitous, engaging, social yet unobtrusive.

“ I think ultimately the cloud model is a better model.I think this installess system of the cloud is better.”

A Conversation with Sergey Brin by Erick Schonfeld on October 7, 2009

Sergey Brin is holding an audience this morning with a roomful of journalists in New York City. Below are my live notes.

Sergey Brin: We have had a number of interesting activities. A bunch of you saw the verizon announcement, android, software platform, more enhancements in terms of faster software, better software. A number of devices are coming out as a trickle, many more we expect. Google Books, a hearing today, but generally that is something I am very proud of, to make the world’s books accessible. Have written a little piece I hope comes out as an op-ed.

Eric Schmidt: It seems like Sergey has jumped the gun. We should focus mostly on search, and some of the ideas Sergey has. We are having our global sales meeting here, we brought senior sales executives. The mood was very, very positive. We told them that the worst is behind us and we are clearly seeing aspects pf recovery, what is notable is we are seeing aspects of recovery I not just US but in Europe. I thought it was going to be US first, Europe second, Asia we never saw a hit. We are increasing our hiring rate and investment rate in anticipation of a recovery.

Sergey: There are a bunch of things that have come out recently, you can now get more commercial results or less commercial results. There are other controls that are coming down the pike. I will highlight now, today you can restrict things by date, but that is based on dates mentioned in the text, cannot restrict based on the date the text was authored.

Steven Levy: You have more activity from your competitor in redmond, rolled out a branded search engine. Historically when one competitor steps up it opens up innovation. Do you feel this increased competition will ramp up your innovation, or is it just business usual?

Sergey: I think it is healthy for the industry to have many competitors. You’ve seen search engines such as Cuil and Powerset that MSFt acquired. MSFT has made its contributions. We are working as hard as we can, but I do think having all of those competitors out there generally helps the health of that industry.

Q: Do you think Bing is something different or a rebranding?

Sergey: I don’t want to speak about our competitors

Schmidt: Better for you to judge. We like to focus on our customers. We have been criticized

Ed Baig; where do you stand with Android?

Sergey Brin: At the outset, we started to focus on Android because phones basically lacked powerful browsers and phones also lacked the ability to easily run applications. I think Android has really addressed that really well, but it has also pushed the rest of the market. I am pretty excited for the future of mobile phones because they are increasingly getting quite capable. You can write an application across five phones, we plan to push the state of the art with Android. I might be overstating it a bit, but having the software platform has freed the hardware makers from software platforms, reinvigorating hardware design

Q: Enterprise market?

Sergey: definitely a market I am very excited about, born from an internal need, being able to handle many hundreds of thousands of emails. At the time that we started and launched in 04, Webmail offerings at the time [were limited] we wanted something that would work in an enterprise, and made it available to consumers, pushed things further [than our competitors].

We feel we are further ahead, for you to judge, in email caability and collaborative document editing. Sites All of those would be available to enterprises and consumers. And I think ultimately the cloud model is a better model.I think this installess system of the cloud is better.

Stephanie Mehta: can you characterize future investments Google needs to make for medium to larger enterprise?

Ken Auletta: If the judge says why should I not be concerned about your concentration of power?

Schmidt: It is an error to answer hypothetical questions from a journalist. The question you posed is not actually a question that will occur.. Book search, we thought we were doing something appropriate. We were sued by a bunch of publishers, and now it has come before a judge. We don’t want to change it unless we need to. The hearing is going on right now. My guess is in this hearing there will be a date for another hearing. Does putting the book sin the hands of someone like Google who has other strategic resources a problem? It is possible for another company to do what we are doing. And the rights registry, which we would administer is something we would do for the orphan works. The scenario that is in front of us is probably the best outcome for someone who is looking for information that is not otherwise available.

Sergey: regardless of the settlement we want to make more books available online.

Q: You keep adding to Chrome and nobody seems to be paying attention. If that is one of the places where the battle is fought you seem pretty far behind.

Sergey: Perhaps that is true in media . . .

Schmidt: let me, some of your assumptions about Chrome adoption are wrong. The adoption rate of Chrome is [very strong]. We are going to do a better job of getting that message out.

Schonfeld: Steve Ballmer calls it a rounding error, is it?

I don’t respond to Steve Ballmer questions. Next question?

Schmidt: The fundamental aspect of Chrome is speed. People who go to Chrome have a hard time moving back. Two months ago we announced Chrome OS. Everything is linked together, Chrome, Chrome OS, the cloud

Sergey: There is also the security aspect. In a recent hacker competition, Chrome was the only one to escape unscathed in terms of security vulnerabilities. And more stable.

Tom Post, Forbes: Lately there seems to be a revisiting of settlements with core media where you seem to be taking a new approach. Leading question is not is Google too big and mean, rather is Google being nice? Do you have a new product out called Google remorse?

Schmidt: In many ways we always wanted to be this Google, rather than the one we were perceived of last year. I am really proud about relationship with advertising agencies. In the media industry, the success of YouTube. We have always wanted to have these partnerships. We are learning how to do it ina way that they win too.

Sergey: People have always equated Google with the Internet, which is disrupting businesses.

Schmidt: Google is an innovator, the innovations in eth internet are causing collisions. Innovation plus collisions equal opportunity. The fact that Verizon has adopted the open principles we articulated five years ago is shocking. This is Verizon. It happened over time.

AP: AP’s president said that big news sites might be willing to pay for news if they get it as an excluive for 20 or 30 minutes.

Schmidt: We have a contract with the AP. I don’t want to talk about a proposed services where we pay more. We have to be very careful not to favor one publisher over another. We are not trying to get into the content business.

Q: What are the most attractive areas for acquisitions?

Schmidt: we turned off M&A down, we didn’t want an additional expense streams without. One day Larry and Sergey bought what became Android, and I did’nt even know about this. They said this is really interesting. I didn’t think about that, but now think about the strategic opportunities that created

The problem at buying at those levels. With a little one you can afford . Youtube and Doubleclick those will prove the best spending of money. They are harder. Any large acquisition we do will have a second review. We deal with a different world now than we did a few years ago. We bought that then MSFT has largely got out of that after their acquisition of aQuantive didn’t work out, so there.

Q: FCC?

Schmidt: I just met with eth chairman, this broadband plan is what they are really focused on. We are incredibly sensitive to roll out of broadband, the number of searches we get, the revenue, without broadband there is no cloud computing.

Q: So what policy suggestions did you give him?

Schmidt: More broadband. I think we are on our way to getting a national broadband plan for America. It is one of the best things the government can be doing.

Q: Do you ever worry Google is growing too fast?

Schmidt: No.

Q: how do you manage the growth?

Schmidt [jokes}: As you can see, not very well. In technology markets, you either grow or die.

Sergey: hardware is getting incredibly capable. It used to be that most of your money in a computer went to the display. Your costs now are dominated by broadband connection. I think that is an interesting trend. Wide broadband availability, when you think about your phone, you are probably paying $40 to $50 a month for it. Your device cost is negligible compared to your access cost. I think certainly there are changes on the horizon.

Schmidt: we provide the infrastructure below what you are talking about. Think about a Kindle two to three years from now, what will it look like? Better screens, more features, and there will be many Kindles. The iPhone has proven that you can sell a phone with a subscription. The contract cost is greater than the cost of the phone. So what do you think, do those prices remain higher from AT&T and those guys, does the hardware become free.

Sergey: From a consumer point of view, I think it will be better if you end up with devices that are not locked down to a service, like Kindle locked down to Amazon or iPpne to AT&T. I think it is better if the consumer can pick the devices and services they want.

Q: I can go through and fund really bad results. You seem to be rewarding a site’s authority and a site’s age. Also something Eric has said about signals, like Internet to purchase, you seem to have data other people cannot get because you give away free tools. Google Checkout. If other people can tap into Google Analytics to see conversion

Schmidt: every one of these has a competitor. Google is an advertising company, we don’t have cross-subsidization

Danny: There is no closed loop in

Schmidt: Well there is no closed loop, there are competitors and we make it possible for you t get out

Sergey: In analytics, we just noticed that when advertising partners start using analytics they spend more on our site because all of these stats become apparent to them. If I spend $1,000 a month more on Google, I will make X more profit. So we realized that we should make analytics

Q: When the phone companies had to deal with this, maybe the solution is that when a competitor comes into the market they have to lease Checkout data at a reasonable rate?

Schmidt: It is a false analogy. One, antitrust law does not cover it, two?, three information we make available to consumers

Segey: You could argue that Paypal and Amazon data is more valuable, so they should make it available first.

Q: coming back to Google book settlement,

Schmidt: In the book settlement, everyone has raised a lot of issues. The question is not whether they are interesting, but whether they have legal standing in the settlement.

Sergey: the companies that are making objections about out of print books are doing nothing for out of print books, MSFT and Amazon. I guess they scanned 15 books. These objections that Google will be the only one.

Schmidt: make an alternative proposal that solves the problem

Sergey: It would be legally impossible. You are looking at this as an either/or. Does not preclude other settlements, will make legislation more likely. The companies complaining now, if they were engaged in the digitization process we were ding, digitizing 10 million books, there would be nothing stopping them from achieving the same thing.

Schmidt: the goal is to get all the books available and make sure the authors are compensated. The settlement was not a total solution, it was the best we could do.

Q: How do you plan to promote this in places that don’t have libraries?

Sergey: In respect to the settlement, it can apply to all books in all languages, but unfortunately it only affects U.S> readers which is a really sad thing. One of the great things about the U.S. is the fair use aspect. Which other countries don’t have.

Q: Why is there not a danger you will be bringing consumers into closed loop in the future?

Schmidt: there are many reasons why will not be like MSFT. The first has to do with the culture and the founders. The other is the ease of moving out of these online services. Having taken such a strong position a a company. If we went into a room wand were exposed to evil light and came out and announced evil strategies, we would be destroyed. The trust would be destroyed. Fourth, none of us want to go through the legal proceedings.

The evil room we have not yet found in our campus.

Sergey: Chrome OS, if you want to use iton your Mac, every change is available, all the source code is available.

Schmidt: Today we have zero marketshare in Chrome OS because it is not shipping. Omagine a sceneario where we got to 80% market share with afree product, which I think is unlikely. Let’s say we go into the evil room and start charging. A competitor would be able to take the code that we had and continue to offer our business model, while our new business smodel runs us into the ground. That I why open source provides a protection.

Q: Will you make another stab at moving into other platforms (TV,radio)

Sergey: We are still optimistic on the TV front. Radio and print did not work out as we had hoped,. Televsion has a lot of similarity to Internet advertising in the sense of its much better measurability via settop boxes. You can see immediately how

Q: is pagerank long in the tooth, are links the still the best metric?

Sergey: No they are not and we decided that in 1999. We use various link algorithms, including what pagerank has evolved to, links are 1%, 100 other factors we look at. Yes,there is spam, and the web changes. We are able to do better an better, can do a much better job ranking than we could a decade ago, if we had rested on our laurels and just stayed with what was I our paper we published in 1998[?] we would be in pretty bad shape right now.

Larry Ellison on Cloud computing

2009-09-29T10:37:00.000-05:00

Larry Ellison ranted about Cloud computing being another fad created by the Computer industry. Larry is probably ranting because of his experiences with the Network Computer concept that he pushed in the past. Larry seems to believe that the world will always look like the proprietary and wasteful place that it was previously. Wake up Larry and smell the coffee. Your brand of computing is archaic and impractical. My answer to Larry’s rant.

As the whole world computerizes nobody cares about microprocessors, memory and databases. People want to do things like communicate, collaborate, share and create information. They don’t care about microprocessors, memory and databases. Computing is now a utility like electricity and water.
Cloud computing and Cloud applications are about the consumer market which matters more than the enterprise market which is shrinking. Existing large enterprises will shrink especially if they are using proprietary software sold by armies of shady sales people.
RDBM’s are great for client server but suck at providing web class data services hence all the middle-tier crap that has to be added in there.

Network Computer (often abbreviated NC) is a trademark of Oracle Corporation that was used, from approximately 1996 to 2000, to market a range of diskless desktop computer devices. The devices were designed and manufactured by an alliance, which included Sun Microsystems, IBM, and others. The devices were designed with minimum specifications, based on the Network Computer Reference Profile. The brand was also employed as a marketing term to try to popularize this design of computer within enterprise and among consumers. (see the Network Computer )

Cloud Computing adoption will happen very quickly

2009-09-14T14:12:00.001-05:00

The obvious reason why Enterprise Cloud computing will succeed faster than expected is the fact that very few enterprises have all the expertise in house to take advantage of cloud computing (also called "service-enabled application platforms"). The NIH Syndrome is rarely an issue in enterprises any more because pretty much everyone uses open source something. Everyone agrees that it is reckless and wasteful to reimplement something that is already available.

Many forward thinking enterprises are already using cloud computing wherever they can. The need for new capabilities developed and deployed fast means that clouds are a real option for the more progressive organizations. Why spend a fortune building a data center and developing a team when you can quickly get the capabilities that you need from Amazon’s EC2 or Rightscale? As larger enterprises shrink and reduce the rampant waste that was common in the past, cloud computing will provide better options and less risk.

John Foley blogs about an interesting sounding Gartner report that gives cloud computing up to 2015 for “mainstream enterprise adoption”. He describes it as “a surprisingly conservative forecast for business adoption of cloud computing services”. I actually thought the time lines were quite rapid and that we’re just not sure about what Gartner means by “mainstream”.

The bottom line is that I think the Gartner report misses a lot of the interesting enterprise movement that has gotten rolling in 2008. Smart enterprises are experimenting with the cloud today. They are cherry picking apps that are appropriate for today’s cloud offerings so they have the experience necessary to move more involved and sensitive ones tomorrow. That’s where the excitement is (at least for us)!

But one step at a time, let’s try the time line from the Gartner report on for size:

2009 is for “pioneers and trailblazers” — I can’t argue that enterprise adoption will go beyond trailblazers this year without having multiple vendors offer clouds with solid security certifications that enterprises can insert into their sarbox, PCI, HIPAA, etc. audits. There are a lot of really interesting, solid, cost saving, time saving things enterprises can do in the cloud in 2009, but they have to cherry pick the right projects. Will we get to these security certs for cloud offerings and all that in 2009? Probably, but not early enough to move the mainstream needle.

Beginning in 2010 “cloud computing will appeal to a broader range of companies, resulting in a more mainstream user base” — I would predict that it will take until next year for enterprises to have the red carpet rolled out in front of them leading them to the finish line with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed. From books about cloud computing, to cloud consultants, success stories, ROI calculations, security certifications, enterprise offerings, yadda, yadda. This is a lot of moving parts, most of which are not about whether EC2 works and is secure but about leading the horse to the trough.

It’s between 2012 and 2015 that “cloud services reach mainstream critical mass and commoditization” — And I’m thinking how long it is going to take AT&T, EDS, IBM Global Services, Savvis, and everyone else to have an enterprise cloud offering in full production, with all the services, consultants it takes to reel in the “mainstream”? Can I picture earlier than 2012? Mhhh.

What I really think is that the Gartner report misses a lot of the interesting action that has started to get into full swing. The moment sometime between 2012 and 2015 when the last enterprise moves into the cloud may be interesting, but it’s far more interesting when significant movement into the cloud starts to occur. And that’s definitely 2009 and more deeply so 2010.

Large companies don’t run one app. They aren’t sitting there waiting to decide when to move that app into the cloud. They have many apps. They all have different purposes, different stakeholders, different risk profiles, different security requirements, different development timescales, and on and on. The first ones could be moved into the cloud in 2008; more can be moved this year; yet more next year; and the last ones sometime in 2012-2015 if we believe Gartner. Great. Let’s focus on those that can move now!

We see many interesting examples. There are marketing sites that don’t have much security attached, are often under tremendous last-minute time-pressure to add compute resources, and whose production is often outsourced. Cloud this!

Or batch computations that operate on public data using public algorithms. Sounds impossible to find? Well, a major pharmaceutic company has a good deal of those. The next step up is massive compute jobs that use proprietary algorithms that are not super-sensitive and operate on public data. We’re working on some interesting architecture to enable these in the cloud. They have more steps leading to super secret data and very sensitive algorithms and we pushed those to the end of the queue. We’ll get there, perhaps not in 2009 or maybe even 2010, although cloud time seems to be moving even faster than internet time…

I could go on, but the point is that it will take enterprise IT shops a long time to build the internal know-how about the cloud to the point where they will be comfortable moving more and more mission critical applications over to reap the benefits. Now is the time to start building the experience and understanding of what works and what doesn’t. The smart ones clearly have started.

from RightScale CTO Thorsten von Eicken’s blog post, Gartner prediction misses today’s enterprise cloud action.

Cloud computing will change business forever!

2009-09-07T18:33:00.001-05:00

Its pretty obvious how radically cloud computing will change business and IT services in the enterprise. The two major changes will be the applications that folks will use and how those applications will be deployed and instituted.

ZDNet has a great article that outlines this inevitable changes.

8 ways that cloud computing will change business

The creation of a new generation of products and services. The economics of cloud computing lets innovative companies create products that either weren’t possible before or are significantly less expensive than the competition (or just more profitable.) This part of cloud computing is an arms race and there are short windows of opportunity since competitors can often put the economic advantages of cloud computing into their product formulations fairly quickly once they see that it works for you. Where it gets interesting is that many business ideas that required prohibitive amounts of computing power, scale, or radically new business models (the aforementioned open supply chains and Global SOA) but couldn’t be implemented due to existing technical limitations or cost-effectiveness, can now be realized. Every improvement in storage, processing power, or technology enables innovations that weren’t possible before (high speed Internet, for instance, made products like YouTube possible) and cloud computing makes these opportunities unusually accessible. Smart companies will take notice.

A new lightweight form of real-time partnerships and outsourcing with IT suppliers. Companies that did traditional outsourcing of their IT services a few years ago already know what this feels like; a large part of what used to be in-house is now being done somewhere else and changing anything is hard. But unlike traditional outsourcing of IT, cloud computing will provide agility and control that traditional outsource cannot match for the most part. Don’t like your cloud vendor? Unless you negotiated a long-term contract, you can often switch far easier than changing IT outsourcers. In fact, many cloud computing relationships consist of nothing more than a cancel-at-the-end-of-the-month commitment and corporate invoice. For many companies, this will actually be improvement over what they have now and give them choices they perhaps never had when everything required internal execution or to go through the outsourcing supplier relationship.

A new awareness and leverage of the greater Internet and Web 2.0 in particular. Most companies are still notoriously critical of Web technologies as “not serious” computing. But the Web has grown up considerably in the Web 2.0 era and the challenges in scale, performance, and satisfying fickle audiences of millions has created technologies, solutions, and architectures that can address them in powerful yet economic ways that many enterprise systems are finding hard to match. When cloud computing is adopted by an organization, they will find themselves thrown into the pool with the rest of the online world in many ways, whether this is the employment of social tools, SaaS, non-relational databases or a host of other technologies in their new cloud. And in the end, this will serve them very well and allow many companies to acquire the skills and perspectives required to compete effectively in the 21st century.

A reconciliation of traditional SOA with the cloud and other emerging IT models. A great post this week from our very own Joe McKendrick illustrates how SOA is evolving because of the cloud. The advent of cloud technologies will have to be dealt with and somehow encompassed by SOA initiatives that are already looking at their current toolset of heavyweight approaches and technologies with an eye towards seeking an onramp to change and improvement. Web-Oriented Architecture fits very well with cloud technologies which are heavily Web-based and it’s a natural, lightweight way of building SOA at virtually every level of the organization. For many organizations, the cloud will likely be the straw that broke the back of traditional SOA and move it to a place where it will meet new business and technical requirements, faster rates of changes, and new business conditions.

The rise of new industry leaders and IT vendors. While we’re seeing many of the top players in computing use their existing strengths to create successful cloud computing offerings, there were also be a new generation of companies that businesses generally aren’t used to dealing with as suppliers. Amazon and Google are two firms that generally aren’t regarded as deeply experienced in the enterprise, and there are many others. While it doesn’t seem that we’ll see many entirely new players compete with the big firms, it’s certainly not out of the question (and given the opportunity, likely from an investment standpoint) that we’ll see some very well-funded new cloud startups that lack the baggage of existing leaders (thereby moving very quickly) and bring a new sensibility (radical openness and transparency, new technologies, and Web-focus) that’s often needed with cloud computing. We may see perhaps even before the downturn ends. Either way, the industry landscape will be remade by cloud computing as it is one of the very few new IT developments that will be very broadly adopted in the next several years.

More self-service IT from the business-side. Many cloud solutions, particularly as they relate to SaaS, will require increasingly less and less involvement from the IT department. Business users will be able to adopt many future cloud computing solutions entirely using self-service. This also heralds, as McKendrick indicates, that many of these scenarios will be much smaller and more numerous, tapping into the The Long Tail of IT demand.

More tolerance for innovation and experimentation from businesses. With fewer technical and economic barriers to creating new ways to improve the business (LOB, marketing, sales, customer service, IT, horizontal services), cloud computing will enable prototyping and market validation of new approaches much faster and less expensively that before. While legal, branding, and compliance will often struggle to keep up the pace with the rest of the organization, there will be gradual thawing of the glacial pace of change as business possibilities become, well, more possible in the cloud computing world. This won’t fix the often broken innovation mechanisms in businesses, but then again, cloud computing is so accessible that many new internal entrepreneurs (see previous point) will use the tools to create new solutions anyway.

The slow-moving, dinosaur firms will have trouble keeping up more nimble adopters and fast-followers. Not adopting cloud computing doesn’t spell the immediate demise of traditional companies that aren’t good at making technology and cultural transitions (and make no mistake, cloud computing is a big cultural change), but it will pile onto other recent advancements and make it even harder to compete in the modern business environment. In the end, those too slow to adopt the benefits while managing the risk are likely going to face serious and growing economic and business disadvantage.

For many organizations in the short term the apparent potential of the individual changes above will often not be sufficient to them to make the transition to cloud computing, particularly as the cloud market is so new and major players such as IBM and HP have yet to arrive in full force. But gaining competency in cloud computing today by conducting pilots and building skills will server companies well and begin to position them for the future IT landscape. Longer term, cloud computing is increasingly appearing to be a transformative change in the business landscape.

An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.

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What is Cloud Computing?

2009-08-30T17:40:00.001-05:00

A great video interview on Cloud Computing with Kristian Hammond covers What is Cloud Computing? It's not about using your PC on an airplane! Northwestern University's Kristian Hammond explains this vision for the future of the Internet.

What is cloud computing?

Gartner defines cloud computing as "a style of computing in which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided 'as a service' using Internet technologies to multiple external customers." Beyond the Gartner definition, clouds are marked by self-service interfaces that let customers acquire resources at any time and get rid of them the instant they are no longer needed.

The cloud is not really a technology by itself. Rather, it is an approach to building IT services that harnesses the rapidly increasing horsepower of servers as well as virtualization technologies that combine many servers into large computing pools and divide single servers into multiple virtual machines that can be spun up and powered down at will.

How is cloud computing different from utility, on-demand and grid computing?

Cloud by its nature is "on-demand" and includes attributes previously associated with utility and grid models. Grid computing is the ability to harness large collections of independent compute resources to perform large tasks, and utility is metered consumption of IT services, says Kristof Kloeckner, the cloud computing software chief at IBM. The coming together of these attributes is making the cloud today's most "exciting IT delivery paradigm," he says.

Fundamentally, the phrase cloud computing is interchangeable with utility computing, says Nicholas Carr, author of "The Big Switch" and "Does IT Matter?" The word "cloud" doesn't really communicate what cloud computing is, while the word "utility" at least offers a real-worth analogy, he says. "However you want to deal with the semantics, I think grid computing, utility computing and cloud computing are all part of the same trend," Carr says.

Carr is not alone in thinking cloud is not the best word to describe today's transition to Web-based IT delivery models. For the enterprise, cloud computing might best be viewed as a series of "online business services," says IDC analyst Frank Gens.

from What is cloud computing?

How to read a WSDL File

2009-06-19T11:49:00.003-05:00

WSDL files define the interface to a web service. To consume a web service, you access the service's WSDL file to determine information about it. If you publish your application logic as a web service, you must create a WSDL file for it.

WSDL is a draft standard supported by the World Wide Web Consortium. You can access the specification at the following URL:

http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl

A WSDL file takes practice to read. You can view the WSDL file in a browser, or you can use a tool such as Dreamweaver MX, which contains a built-in utility for displaying WSDL files in an easy-to-read format.

The following example shows a WSDL file for the BabelFish web service:

<?xml version="1.0" ?> 
   <definitions name="BabelFishService" 
xmlns:tns="http://www.xmethods.net/sd/BabelFishService.wsdl" 
targetNamespace="http://www.xmethods.net/sd/BabelFishService.wsdl" 
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" 
xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/" 
xmlns="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/"> 
      <message name="BabelFishRequest"> 
         <part name="translationmode" type="xsd:string" /> 
         <part name="sourcedata" type="xsd:string" /> 
      </message> 
      <message name="BabelFishResponse"> 
         <part name="return" type="xsd:string" /> 
      </message> 
      <portType name="BabelFishPortType"> 
         <operation name="BabelFish"> 
            <input message="tns:BabelFishRequest" /> 
            <output message="tns:BabelFishResponse" /> 
         </operation> 
      </portType> 
      <binding name="BabelFishBinding" type="tns:BabelFishPortType"> 
         <soap:binding style="rpc" transport="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http" /> 
         <operation name="BabelFish"> 
            <soap:operation soapAction="urn:xmethodsBabelFish#BabelFish" /> 
            <input> 
               <soap:body use="encoded" namespace="urn:xmethodsBabelFish" encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" /> 
            </input> 
            <output> 
               <soap:body use="encoded" namespace="urn:xmethodsBabelFish" encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" /> 
            </output> 
         </operation> 
      </binding> 
   <service name="BabelFishService"> 
      <documentation>Translates text of up to 5k in length, between a variety of languages.</documentation> 
      <port name="BabelFishPort" binding="tns:BabelFishBinding"> 
         <soap:address location="http://services.xmethods.net:80/perl/soaplite.cgi" /> 
      </port> 
   </service> 
</definitions>

The following are the major components of the WSDL file:

definitions

The root element of the WSDL file. This area contains namespace definitions that you use to avoid naming conflicts between multiple web services.

types

(not shown) Defines data types used by the service's messages.

message

Defines the data transferred by a web service operation, typically the name and data type of input parameters and return values.

port type

Defines one or more operations provided by the web service.

operation

Defines an operation that can be remotely invoked.

input

Specifies an input parameter to the operation using a previously defined message.

output

Specifies the return values from the operation using a previously defined message.

fault

(not shown) Optionally specifies an error message returned from the operation.

binding

Specifies the protocol used to access a web service including SOAP, HTTP GET and POST, and MIME.

service

Defines a group of related operations.

port

Defines an operation and its associated inputs and outputs.

Adobe Flex Development

2008-09-18T10:06:00.001-05:00

Learn Flex by examples...A bunch of examples for Adobe Flex and ActionScript for Flex developer, AIR developer, ActionScript 3.0 developerall aspects of advanced design and layout ...

Adobe - Flex 3
While Flex applications can be built using only the free Flex SDK, developers can use Adobe® Flex® Builder™ 3 software to dramatically accelerate development. Try Flex Builder 3 ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Adobe - Flex Developer Center
... see what other developers are creating, and ask your coding questions in the Flex development ... The requirements to start an official Adobe Flex user group are very basic: you must ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

The Official Flex Team Blog: Flex in a Week is available
Flex in a Week is a week-long, video based online training program for developers. This self-paced program is free and is intended to help developers accelerate their Flex learning ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Adobe Labs - Adobe Flex Software Development Kit
The Adobe® Flex® SDK is the foundation of Flex, providing the core Flex compilers, component library and debugger. Using only the free SDK and an IDE of your choice, you can ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

flexcomponents : Flex Component Development
This list is 110% about developing components for Adobe Flex. We are discussing the creation and development of Flex components, not using components to write applications.
more ...
go to website
Cached

Zend To Collaborate With Adobe To Accelerate Rich Web Application ...
... with a Zend Solution that includes Zend Platform application server to manage our applications and queue up asynchronous jobs when under load, Zend Core managed PHP environment, Zend Studio in conjunction with Adobe Flex Builder for our development ...
more ...
go to website
Source: PR Inside
NewsDateTime: 9/16/2008

Zend, Adobe to Collaborate on RIA Tools
Zend Technologies has announced a collaboration with Adobe to bring together Zend's PHP technologies with Adobe Flex. The two companies will deliver technologies, content, and services to make it easy for enterprise developers to build rich Internet ...
more ...
go to website
Source: Dr. Dobb's Portal News
NewsDateTime: 23 hours ago

Adobe Joins PHP in Zend Framework
Adobe is jumping into the PHP world in a bid to further the use of its Flex rich Internet application (RIA) technologies. The graphics and Web development software giant is partnering with Zend, the lead commercial backer behind PHP, to extend Flex ...
more ...
go to website
Source: InternetNews.com
NewsDateTime: 9/16/2008

Read all '"Rich Internet Applications"' posts in Webware
To improve the performance of its applications, Coghead rewrote the front end of its service in Flex, Adobe's application development environment.
more ...
go to website
Source: CNET News
NewsDateTime: 9/16/2008

The Open Road
... and messaging technology used to "connect back-end data sources to rich Internet applications written with its Flex development tool." This is very cool. BlazeDS will be made available for free under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Adobe ...
more ...
go to website
Source: CNET News
NewsDateTime: 9/16/2008

hugs

Videos from YouTube
Title: Get Adobe Flex 3 for Free
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 2/27/2008 12:17:41 PM
Title: Part1 Yahoo Maps in Adobe Flex 3
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Maps,Yahoo,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 2/28/2008 7:00:41 AM
Title: Putting up an Adobe Flex Project from Google Code
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 2/26/2008 3:16:24 AM
Title: Web2.0 Expo 2008 - Adobe Flex technology explained
Categories: Tech,ajax,computer,zedomax,space,adobe,flex,2008,video,aviation,electronics,mechani,expo,technology,game,medicine,web2.0,

Published on: 4/24/2008 6:33:04 PM
Title: Adobe Flex Data Grid with Ruby on Rails using HTTP Services
Categories: on,HTTP,Services,Flex,3,Howto,Ruby,Rails,Adobe,

Published on: 10/23/2007 7:33:02 PM

Adobe Flex Design and Layout

2008-09-18T09:13:00.001-05:00

Designing a UI - Layout. ..Learn Flex by examples...A bunch of examples for Adobe Flex and ActionScript for Flex developer, AIR developer, ActionScript 3.0 developerall aspects of advanced design and layout ...

Flex cookbook beta - Select the right containers and layouts
Flex cookbook beta - Flex offers quite a number of ... Acrobat; ColdFusion; Flash; Flex; Adobe AIR; Dreamweaver; Flash Player ... Layout Managers: Canvas: Absolute (x=10, y=10) or constraint ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Adobe - InDesign CS3 : Desktop Publishing Software, Page Layout ...
The professional's choice for creating page layouts. ... Creative Suite family; Dreamweaver; Flash; Flex ... you upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite® 3.3 Design Premium. Now with new Adobe ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Flex and ColdFusion - Flex 3 Getting Started - Adobe Learning ...
... with Flex Part 1; An Introduction To Adobe Flex For ... and limitations of HTML-based design apply to a ColdFusion-based application. Flex is generally not limited by HTML layout ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

3c. Designing a UI - Layout - Flex 3 Getting Started - Adobe Learning ...
Designing a UI - Layout. In this section, you will learn how to use Flex's built-in MXML components and containers as well as ActionScript 3.0 to layout your application.
more ...
go to website
Cached

Design and Layout
Build a Yahoo Music Mashup with Adobe AIR by Jack ... artistsâ€”and get your hands dirty with Flex and ... great newsletters cover all aspects of advanced design and layout ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

The Daily Download
However, the layout of the various components is malleable--users can ... fangs its terms of service--before uploading scads of photos to Adobe Photoshop Express. Ratings: Design and ... And it succeeds as a proof-of-concept that Flash and Flex allow you to ...
more ...
go to website
Source: Download.com
NewsDateTime: 13 hours ago

The Daily Download
You can even check out offensive and defensive schemes for all NFL teams to help you design the perfect team every week. This ... All the options are presented in an uncluttered layout--you'll get exactly what you need from this application with a minimum ...
more ...
go to website
Source: Download.com
NewsDateTime: 9/10/2008

hugs

Videos from YouTube
Title: Get Adobe Flex 3 for Free
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 2/27/2008 12:17:41 PM
Title: Part1 Yahoo Maps in Adobe Flex 3
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Maps,Yahoo,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 2/28/2008 7:00:41 AM
Title: Putting up an Adobe Flex Project from Google Code
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 4/24/2008 6:33:04 PM
Title: Adobe Flex Data Grid with Ruby on Rails using HTTP Services
Categories: on,HTTP,Services,Flex,3,Howto,Ruby,Rails,Adobe,

Published on: 10/23/2007 7:33:02 PM

Adobe Air and Flex tutorials

2008-09-18T08:15:00.001-05:00

Learn Flex by examples...A bunch of examples for Adobe Flex and ActionScript for Flex developer, AIR developer, ActionScript 3.0 developer

Adobe - Flex Developer Center
Read the RIA Buzz. Stay current with the latest news for Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR and more from the world of richer apps. Sign up for the newsletter
more ...
go to website
Cached

Adobe – Adobe AIR Developer Center for Flex
Featured tutorials and articles ... Stay current with the latest news for Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR and more from the world of richer ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Adobe Labs - Adobe Flex
Adobe® Flex® 3 is a cross platform ... now on the desktop with Adobe AIR™. This page provides a summary of the Flex ... applications and much more. Flex Developer Center Tutorials ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Adobe AIR and Flex - Getting Started
tutorial on getting started with Adobe AIR Beta 1 ... So I decided it was time to start doing a few Adobe AIR application tutorials especially with the recent updates.
more ...
go to website
Cached

The Tech Labs | Adobe Air, Flash and Flex Tutorials
The Tech Labs is a blog/tutorial site for web designers and developers. We run tutorials to improve how you design and build websites.
more ...
go to website
Cached

Sun Moves JavaFX Closer to Primetime
... kit (SDK) for JavaFX, two JavaOne conferences after it announced the rich client platform meant to take on Adobe's AIR and Flex ... For now, the SDK gives developers a chance to begin creating apps with it, study the tutorials and documentation and ...
more ...
go to website
Source: InternetNews.com
NewsDateTime: 8/28/2008

hugs

Videos from YouTube
Title: Get Adobe Flex 3 for Free
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 2/27/2008 12:17:41 PM
Title: Part1 Yahoo Maps in Adobe Flex 3
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Maps,Yahoo,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 2/28/2008 7:00:41 AM
Title: Putting up an Adobe Flex Project from Google Code
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 4/24/2008 6:33:04 PM
Title: Adobe Flex Data Grid with Ruby on Rails using HTTP Services
Categories: on,HTTP,Services,Flex,3,Howto,Ruby,Rails,Adobe,

Published on: 10/23/2007 7:33:02 PM

Adobe Flex tutorials

2008-09-18T07:38:00.001-05:00

Learn Flex by examples...A bunch of examples for Adobe Flex and ActionScript for Flex developer, AIR developer, ActionScript 3.0 developer

Adobe - Flex Developer Center
Learn Flex in one week by going through this video training course.
more ...
go to website
Cached

Adobe - Flex Developer Center - Flex and Java
Bruce Eckel shows you how to create Python XML-RPC services and call them from your Flex/Adobe AIR apps. Video Tutorial: Creating an expressive app using Flex, Hibernate, and XFire
more ...
go to website
Cached

Adobe Flex Tutorials - Tutorialized
Adobe Flex Tutorials ... Create a Login System with Flex and PHP in Adobe Flex / Builder 2007-11-23
more ...
go to website
Cached

Adobe Flex Builder Tutorials - Tutorialized
Adobe Flex Builder Tutorials ... Create a Login System with Flex and PHP in Adobe Flex / Builder 2007-11-23
more ...
go to website
Cached

2d. Tutorial - Flex 3 Getting Started - Adobe Learning Resources
Use Design view to lay out the user interface. 1. Create an application file named PlainText.mxml. 2. Switch to the Design mode. 3. From the Components view, drag a Label component ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Sun Moves JavaFX Closer to Primetime
... kit (SDK) for JavaFX, two JavaOne conferences after it announced the rich client platform meant to take on Adobe's AIR and Flex ... For now, the SDK gives developers a chance to begin creating apps with it, study the tutorials and documentation and ...
more ...
go to website
Source: InternetNews.com
NewsDateTime: 8/28/2008

hugs

Videos from YouTube
Title: Get Adobe Flex 3 for Free
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 2/27/2008 12:17:41 PM
Title: Part1 Yahoo Maps in Adobe Flex 3
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Maps,Yahoo,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 2/28/2008 7:00:41 AM
Title: Putting up an Adobe Flex Project from Google Code
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 4/24/2008 6:33:04 PM
Title: Adobe Flex Data Grid with Ruby on Rails using HTTP Services
Categories: on,HTTP,Services,Flex,3,Howto,Ruby,Rails,Adobe,

Published on: 10/23/2007 7:33:02 PM

Neat Adobe Flex applications nice

2008-09-17T21:08:00.001-05:00

Flex applications on Adobe AIR ... Flex 3 provides runtime localization support, which works great in AIR

Collaborative Data Entry with Flex and BlazeDS : Christophe Coenraets
... example of enabling collaboration in a Flex application using ... ways, everytime the same result). Have a nice ... http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/data_entry.html
more ...
go to website
Cached

Adobe - Developer Center : An architectural blueprint for Flex ...
There's a neat way to do this in a Flex application, using a two different source ... As you can see, MXML is a really nice language ... reviewtube.model.*" xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Adobe - Developer Center : An architectural blueprint for Flex ...
Adobe Flex 2. Try; Buy; Sample files: ReviewTube.src.zip ... There's a neat way to do this in a Flex application, using a two different source ... As you can see, MXML is a really nice ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Flex Doc Team: Creating Resizable and Draggable Flex Components
I wanted users of a Flex application to be able to move and ... Neat. The 'x' cursor gets locked on the edge when you ... at the drag and drop doc here: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Best Adobe Flex Resources and Tutorial Sites
Article on the best Adobe Flex resource and tutorial ... to find on his site are examples of cool applications built using Flex. ... Alex writes short posts that are usually nice Flex ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

The Daily Download
Also neat is the option to grab someone else's level and pull it back in the ... All of these applications are shareware programs with limited trials to give you a taste ... compared with something like Apple's Mail application, it looks like a nice step ...
more ...
go to website
Source: Download.com
NewsDateTime: 9/10/2008

leverages Flex and AIR to deliver a great desktop application for ... Browse and view sample application hugs

Videos from YouTube
Title: Get Adobe Flex 3 for Free
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 2/27/2008 12:17:41 PM
Title: Part1 Yahoo Maps in Adobe Flex 3
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Maps,Yahoo,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 2/28/2008 7:00:41 AM
Title: Putting up an Adobe Flex Project from Google Code
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 4/24/2008 6:33:04 PM
Title: Adobe Flex Data Grid with Ruby on Rails using HTTP Services
Categories: on,HTTP,Services,Flex,3,Howto,Ruby,Rails,Adobe,

Published on: 10/23/2007 7:33:02 PM

Great Flex adobe applications

2008-09-17T21:02:00.001-05:00

Flex applications on Adobe AIR ... Flex 3 provides runtime localization support, which works great in AIR

AIR:Articles:Building Your First Flex-based Adobe AIR Application ...
AIR:Articles:Building Your First Flex-based Adobe AIR Application From Adobe Labs
more ...
go to website
Cached

FlexStore
more ...
go to website
Cached

Adobe - Developer Center : Building multilingual Flex applications on ...
Building multilingual Flex applications on Adobe AIR ... Flex 3 provides runtime localization support, which works great in AIR ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Adobe - Flex Developer Center
Watch how NASDAQ leverages Flex and AIR to deliver a great desktop application for ... Browse and view sample application code for these Flex 3 sample applications from Adobe and the ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Great New Flex book: Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and ...
ColdFusion, Flex, Ajax and other items of interestGreat New Flex book: Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java
more ...
go to website
Cached

Read all '"Rich Internet Applications"' posts in Webware
... Ubuntu 7.10, Fedora 8, OpenSuSE 10.3; and it lacks some other functionality--but it's a great ... the performance of its applications, Coghead rewrote the front end of its service in Flex, Adobe's application development environment. Applications are ...
more ...
go to website
Source: CNET News
NewsDateTime: 9/16/2008

Read all '"Adobe AIR"' posts in Webware
... lacks some other functionality--but it's a great ... who is a product designer for Adobe Flex and previously ... allows developers use HTML, Flash, AJAX, Flex, and other Web 2.0 tools to create desktop applications. One such application built using Adobe AIR ...
more ...
go to website
Source: CNET News
NewsDateTime: 9/16/2008

The Daily Download
With the latest versions of Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements ... What's great about JAlbum is that everything is customizable ... And it succeeds as a proof-of-concept that Flash and Flex allow you to create robust online applications that look ...
more ...
go to website
Source: Download.com
NewsDateTime: 1 hour ago

The Daily Download
With the NFL season under way many football fans are just getting started with another great season of Fantasy Football ... All of these applications are shareware programs with limited trials to give you a taste of what you'll get by registering for ...
more ...
go to website
Source: Download.com
NewsDateTime: 9/10/2008

ZDNet Must Read:
... may be changing. For instance, one of the more popular sessions on Monday was developing on Adobe Flex and Flash and Rich Internet Applications ... Sounds great, but portfolio management dictates that you want to be wary. And once you add up this ...
more ...
go to website
Source: ZDNet Blogs
NewsDateTime: 9/10/2008

leverages Flex and AIR to deliver a great desktop application for ... Browse and view sample application hugs

Videos from YouTube
Title: Get Adobe Flex 3 for Free
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 2/27/2008 12:17:41 PM
Title: Part1 Yahoo Maps in Adobe Flex 3
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Maps,Yahoo,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 2/28/2008 7:00:41 AM
Title: Putting up an Adobe Flex Project from Google Code
Categories: Education,computer,science,Lively,Flex,Mike,Jesus,Adobe,

Published on: 4/24/2008 6:33:04 PM
Title: Adobe Flex Data Grid with Ruby on Rails using HTTP Services
Categories: on,HTTP,Services,Flex,3,Howto,Ruby,Rails,Adobe,

Published on: 10/23/2007 7:33:02 PM

Cool Flex adobe

2008-09-17T20:58:00.001-05:00

Cool New Flex Components ...Adobe announced today that Adobe AIR now runs on Linux. AIR is a cool cross-platform runtime that enables developers to create Rich Internet ... To improve the performance of its applications, Coghead rewrote the front end of its service in Flex, Adobe's

FlexBox: A directory of Adobe Flex components
more ...
go to website
Cached

The Official Flex Team Blog: Cool New Flex Components
I received two emails on the weekend informing me of components to add to the Flex components page on Flex.org. The first was from Connect Studios, who have released 2 more ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

The Official Flex Team Blog: November 2007 Archives
Cool New Flex Components ... re writing new recipes and incorporating some of your recipes from the online Adobe Flex ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Flex.org - Rich Internet Application Development
Stay current with the latest news for Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR and more from the ... UMap (Flex) [full-time] Flex Guru - Start-up with cool technology and clients at Sensidea; Obsidian ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Flex cookbook beta - Cool text effect
Flex cookbook beta - One solution making labels and textArea like the effect in Need for Speed menu's, You can see this in action at www.umbrellacorp.no
more ...
go to website
Cached

Read all '"Rich Internet Applications"' posts in Webware
Adobe announced today that Adobe AIR now runs on Linux. AIR is a cool cross-platform runtime that enables developers to create Rich Internet ... To improve the performance of its applications, Coghead rewrote the front end of its service in Flex, Adobe's ...
more ...
go to website
Source: CNET News
NewsDateTime: 9/16/2008

The Open Road
... and messaging technology used to "connect back-end data sources to rich Internet applications written with its Flex development tool." This is very cool. BlazeDS will be made available for free under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Adobe ...
more ...
go to website
Source: CNET News
NewsDateTime: 9/16/2008

The Daily Download
Organized is a free Widget for Mac OS X 10.5, but in the interest of the continued development of cool ... The capability to bring tools from the Creative Suite to the desktop or the Web with Flash or Flex could lead to novel ways of exploring Adobe's ...
more ...
go to website
Source: Download.com
NewsDateTime: 9/16/2008

ZDNet Must Read:
SAP developers are increasingly playing with Adobe Flex software development kit to jazz up graphics. Instead of this: You get this ... Vyew (pronounced view) had a cool demo of a document being revised through real-time collaboration. There were so many ...
more ...
go to website
Source: ZDNet Blogs
NewsDateTime: 9/10/2008

Category: Business models
SlideRocket, the Flex-based online presentation builder that’s been attracting ... advertising, venture capital or the prospect of getting bought out by Google/Adobe ... The purpose is not to look ‘cool’ though, it’s so sales users can organize ...
more ...
go to website
Source: ZDNet Blogs
NewsDateTime: 9/4/2008

hugs

Videos from YouTube
Title: Dizzee Rascal - Flex
Categories: Maths,Dizzee,Rascal,X,Factor,English,Flex,&,Hip-Hop,Music,

Published on: 11/8/2007 10:56:04 AM
Title: Flex "Te Quiero" Music Video
Categories: "Te,Latin,Style,Reggae,Quiero",Music,Nigga,Romantic,Video,Reggaeton,Flex,Music,Fusion,

Published on: 12/4/2007 5:19:36 PM
Title: Kumbia All Starz "Por Ti Baby" ft. Flex Music Video
Categories: Starz,Baby,Kumbia,Quintanilla,AB,Music,Video,Por,Ti,All,Flex,ft.,Music,

Published on: 3/27/2008 11:39:58 AM
Title: DJ Flex Ft. Belinda - Te Quiero (Official Remix)
Categories: Belinda,Reggae,MusicTunez.Net,Quiero,Remix),Nigga,Dj,Reggaeton,(Official,Flex,Te,Music,

Published on: 3/27/2008 10:18:23 AM
Title: Mad Cobra - Flex (Time to Have Sex!)
Categories: Mad,jamaican,rap,reggae,90's,jamaica,Flex,Cobra,beach,dancehall,Music,

Published on: 7/7/2007 6:26:00 AM

Computing clouds

2008-09-17T20:55:00.001-05:00

tools for the Web developerput incredible computing power in the hands of many...IBM, Yahoo!, and Google are all putting the power of cloud computing to work.Much is being written about the “computing cloud” and the vast array of implications the “cloud” will have on our lives in the nearAs corporate giants get more interested in managing clouds , startups already in the sector are defending their turf and trying to make cloud computing more enterprise friendly. RightScale , a one-year-old startup that offers a management platform ...

Cloud computing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
... Retrieved on 2008-07-31. ^ Open source fuels growth of cloud computing, software-as-a-service ^ Cloud Computing: The Evolution of Software-as-a-Service ^ With Their Heads in the Clouds ^ ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Google and the Wisdom of Clouds
A lofty new strategy aims to put incredible computing power in the hands of many. ... Google and the Wisdom of Clouds A lofty new strategy aims to put incredible computing power in ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

Computing Heads for the Clouds
IBM, Yahoo!, and Google are all putting the power of cloud computing to work. Here's a short primer on how the new technology works.
more ...
go to website
Cached

Computing Clouds or Clowds? | The Relationship Economy.....
Much is being written about the “computing cloud” and the vast array of implications the “cloud” will have on our lives in the near
more ...
go to website
Cached

Even IBM’s Got Computing Clouds - GigaOM
It looks like after Amazon, a mere book retailer, showed them the way, all the technology powerhouses have fallen in love with cloud computing. Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo ...
more ...
go to website
Cached

RightScale Makes Multiple Clouds Work
As corporate giants get more interested in managing clouds , startups already in the sector are defending their turf and trying to make cloud computing more enterprise friendly. RightScale , a one-year-old startup that offers a management platform ...
more ...
go to website
Source: Gigaom.com
NewsDateTime: 6 hours ago

Citrix and VMware Want to Turn Data Centers Into Clouds
As the VMworld conference kicks off in Las Vegas, expect to see virtualization try to hook its star to cloud computing much like a tired stripper might lure a lucky gambler into marriage. Since virtualized servers act as the basic building blocks of ...
more ...
go to website
Source: Gigaom.com
NewsDateTime: 9/15/2008

VMware takes its turn at cloud computing
Virtualization specialist VMware is sticking its head in the clouds, and hoping for sunshine. The company on Monday opened up its VMworld 2008 conference with a flurry of announcements. Most notably it is aiming to turn its infrastructure products ...
more ...
go to website
Source: CNET News
NewsDateTime: 9/15/2008

News - Business Tech
Virtualization specialist VMware is sticking its head in the clouds, and hoping for sunshine. The company on Monday opened up its VMworld 2008 conference with a flurry of announcements. Most notably it is aiming to turn its infrastructure products ...
more ...
go to website
Source: CNET News
NewsDateTime: 9/15/2008

VMware looks to the clouds
VMWARE HAS REVEALED plans to concentrate on cloud computing, allowing organisations running VMware virtual infrastructures will be able to move workloads both around their internal data centres as well as onto external service providers as capacity ...
more ...
go to website
Source: The Inquirer
NewsDateTime: 9/16/2008

hugs

Videos from YouTube
Title: Patrice - Clouds (Official Version)
Categories: Freepatriation,world,pop,Patrice,Songwriter,clouds,r&b,Free-Patri-Ation,music,soul,Music,hip-hop,

Published on: 4/17/2008 8:26:44 AM
Title: Under The Influence of Giants - In The Clouds
Categories: The,Kopach,[Producer],Fox,Giants,Rock,Island,Smith,Thorn,Cathy,Influence,Travis,of,JP,Christopher,Brad,Clouds,Pellow,Under,In,Music,

Published on: 2/20/2007 7:34:23 AM
Title: Devildriver - Clouds Over California
Categories: Devildriver,California,Records,Roadrunner,Clouds,Over,Metal,Music,

Published on: 5/9/2008 11:06:38 AM
Title: the orb - little fluffy clouds
Categories: orb,Music,

Published on: 6/24/2006 3:08:51 AM
Title: Paul Weller - Above The Clouds
Categories: [Producer],The,Pedro,Rock,Island,Lynch,Romhanyi,Above,Weller,Clouds,Brendan,Paul,Music,

Published on: 4/3/2007 9:50:14 PM

IBM’s Blue Cloud

2008-02-20T15:19:00.001-06:00

More cloud Computing initiatives.

IBM wants some of that Web 2.0 mojo. That is what is behind its announcement today of Blue Cloud, a set of “cloud computing” offerings that will be available to its corporate customers in the first quarter of 2008. Of course, cloud computing is just Web computing by another name. It implies massive server farms, massive storage, and the ability to support Internet-scale applications and usage patterns.

Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Salesforce.com.com are all examples of cloud computing already available to consumers and businesses today. These are mostly in the form of specific applications, but Amazon offers its suite of Web services, which are a collection of generic cloud computing offerings—computing cycles, storage, communications. Even Salesforce.com offers its cloud computing infrastructure to other companies through its AppExchange. IBM should not have any trouble competing.

Blue Cloud is being billed as more of a distributed computing architecture than what you find in most corporate data centers. It is based on an open-source project called Hadoop that manages computing resources across large clusters of computers. Hadoop includes an open-source version of MapReduce, the same software Google uses to efficiently distribute its computing chores across its servers around the world.

So IBM is basically bringing this massive-scale computing architecture to its corporate customers. That will be good for corporate applications because this sort of distributed architecture lends itself to Web 2.0 apps, which are already invading the enterprise. The question remains as to how exactly IBM is going to implement Blue Cloud. Will it offer it on its own hosted server farms around the world or teach big company CIOs how to build their own mini-Googles across their own data centers?

My guess is it will probably be a little bit of both.

IBM’s Blue Cloud is Web Computing By Another Name

Cloud Computing from Rackspace

2008-02-04T15:30:00.000-06:00

Another cloud computing initiative

Last week’s incident with Amazon Web Services briefly going down may have raised questions about the reliability of cloud computing, but demand is high enough for competitors to keep trying to get into the game. The more companies that enter this space, the cheaper and more competitive that Web-scale computing should become.

Today, hosting provider Rackspace is offering a new cloud computing service through its subsidiary Mosso. (Disclosure: Rackspace is a TechCrunch advertiser). The service competes with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), although it doesn’t require any load balancing or other administration. It also competes with Joyent and Media Temple’s Grid Service. Pricing starts at $100 a month for:

—50 GB of storage
—500 GB of bandwidth for transferring data
—3 million HTTP requests.

From there additional capacity per month costs:

—$0.50/GB of storage
—$0.25/GB of bandwidth
—$0.03/1,000 HTTP requests

This is a bit more expensive than Amazon (which charges in a different way) but a lot cheaper than the $350 to $400 a month Rackspace charges to host a dedicated server for a Website.

Mosso bills itself as a Web app hosting service. Applications are hosted on redundant server clusters (although the data center is only in one location, so something could take the whole thing out—like, say, if a truck were to run into a nearby power transformer). Coders choose what technology stack they want their apps to run on and upload their code. Mosso supports both Windows and Linux, PHP, Ruby on Rails, .Net, Perl, Python, MySQL, and SQL Server. (Amazon, in contrast, does not support Windows). Mosso does not yet support Java applications, but it is working on that. The company actually has been testing the service for nearly two years and already runs 37,000 apps.

Rackspace Offers Cloud Computing with Mosso

The Big Table

2007-12-26T00:44:00.001-06:00

BigTable is a compressed, high performance, and proprietary database system built on Google File System (GFS), Chubby Lock Service, and a few other Google programs; it is currently not distributed or used outside of Google. It began in 2004^[1] and is now used by a number of Google applications, such as MapReduce, which is often used for generating and modifying data stored in BigTable^[2], Google Reader,^[3] Google Maps,^[4] Google Print, "My Search History", Google Earth, Blogger.com, Google Code hosting, Orkut^[4], and YouTube^[5]. Google's reasons for developing its own database include licensing costs, scalability, and better control of performance characteristics.^[6]

BigTable is a fast and extremely large-scale column-oriented database system, with a focus on quick reads from columns, not rows. It's designed to scale into the petabyte range across hundreds or thousands of machines, and to make it easy to add more machines to the system and automatically start taking advantage of those resources without any reconfiguration".^[7] Each table has multiple dimensions (one of which is a field for time, allowing versioning). Tables are optimized for GFS by being split into multiple tablets- segments of the table as split along a row chosen such that the tablet will be ~200 megabytes in size. When sizes threaten to grow beyond a specified limit, the tablets are compressed using the algorithms BMDiff and Zippy, which are described as less space-optimal than LZW but more efficient in terms of computing time. The locations in the GFS of tablets are recorded as database entries in multiple special tablets, which are called "META1" tablets. META1 tablets are found by querying the single "META0" tablet, which typically has a machine to itself since it is often queried by clients as to the location of the "META1" tablet which itself has the answer to the question of where the actual data is located. Like GFS' master server, the META0 is not generally a bottleneck since the processor time and bandwidth necessary to discover and transmit META1 locations is minimal and clients aggressively cache locations to minimize queries.

Other Implementations

The Hadoop project has made some progress toward a working implementation of BigTable. They call this project Hbase.

"Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, Hbase will provide Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop."

References

^ "First an overview. BigTable has been in development since early 2004 and has been in active use for about eight months (about February 2005)." Google's BigTable

^ "Bigtable can be used with MapReduce, a framework for running large-scale parallel computations developed at Google. We have written a set of wrappers that allow a Bigtable to be used both as an input source and as an output target for MapReduce job". pg 3 of "Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data", 2006

^ "Reader is using Google's BigTable in order to create a haven for what is likely to be a massive trove of items." Official Google Reader blog.

^ ^a ^b "There are currently around 100 cells for services such as Print, Search History, Maps, and Orkut." Google's BigTable

^ "Their new solution for thumbnails is to use Google’s BigTable, which provides high performance for a large number of rows, fault tolerance, caching, etc. This is a nice (and rare?) example of actual synergy in an acquisition." YouTube Scalability Talk

^ "We have described Bigtable, a distributed system for storing structured data at Google....Our users like the performance and high availability provided by the Bigtable implementation, and that they can scale the capacity of their clusters by simply adding more machines to the system as their resource demands change over time...Finally, we have found that there are significant advantages to building our own storage solution at Google. We have gotten a substantial amount of flexibility from designing our own data model for Bigtable." from the Conclusion of "Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data", 2006

^ *"Database War Stories #7: Google File System and BigTable"

[External links

Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data -(official paper; PDF)

BigTable: A Distributed Structured Storage System (video)

more video

Google's BigTable -(notes on the official presentation)

"How Google Works"

"Google's BigTable" -(from the blog "Geeking with Greg")

C-Store and Google BigTable

Mondrian uses BigTable - by Guido van Rossum

Bigtable-like structured storage for Hadoop HDFS - (from the Lucene-hadoop wiki)

MapReduce

Column-oriented DBMS

Google Code for Educators - Google: Cluster Computing and MapReduce

2007-12-26T00:19:00.001-06:00

Below are some cool Google videos on cluster computing.

Google: Cluster Computing and MapReduce

This submission contains video lectures and related course materials from a series of lectures that was taught to Google software engineering interns during the Summer of 2007.

Lectures

Lecture 1 - Introduction

Distributed systems overview, review of synchronization and networking.

Slides - Introduction to Distributed System Design

Lecture 2 - MapReduce

Overview of the MapReduce programming model.

Slides - MapReduce

Lecture 3 - Distributed File Systems

Overview of distributed file systems with attention to the Google File System.

Slides - The Google File System

Lecture 4 - Clustering Algorithms

Types of clustering algorithms, MapReduce implementations of K-Means and Canopy Clustering

Slides - Canopy Clustering

Lecture 5 - Graph Algorithms

Graph representations, distributed Pagerank, distributed Dijkstra.

Slides - The Anatomy of a Search Engine

Google Code for Educators - Google: Cluster Computing and MapReduce

UWTV Program: The Google Linux Cluster

2007-12-25T18:21:00.001-06:00

The University of Washington Department of Computer Science and Engineering has a couple of interesting broadcasts related to high performance computing.

The Google Linux Cluster
Google's Linux cluster currently processes over 150 million queries a day, searching a multi-terabyte web index for every query with an average response time of less than a quarter of a second, with near-100% uptime. In this discussion, Google Fellow Urs Hölzle will describe the software and hardware infrastructure that makes this performance possible, as well as provide an overview of the main problems facing a web search, software architecture, servers and compact rack hardware designs.

UWTV Program: The Google Linux Cluster

CSE Colloquia - 2002
The University of Washington Department of Computer Science and Engineering presents broadcasts of research colloquia by members of the department and the greater computer science community. The colloquia present cutting-edge research in all areas of computer science.

Included in this series are the following programs:

How does the Google platform work.

2007-12-25T18:07:00.001-06:00

Google requires large computational resources in order to provide their service. This article describes the technological infrastructure behind Google's websites, as presented in the company's public announcements.

Google's first production server rack, circa 1999

Network topology

Though the numbers are not publicly known, some peopleestimate that Google maintains over 450,000 servers, arranged in racks located in clusters in cities around the world, with major centers in Mountain View, California; Virginia; Atlanta, Georgia; Dublin, Ireland; and new facilities constructed in The Dalles, Oregon^[1] and Saint-Ghislain, Belgium.^[2] In 2009 Google is planning one of its first sites in the upper midwest to open in Council Bluffs, Iowa close to abundant wind power resources for fulfilling green energy objectives and proximate to fiber optic communications links.^[3]

When an attempt to connect to Google is made, Google's DNS servers perform load balancing to allow the user to access Google's content most rapidly. This is done by sending the user the IP address of a cluster that is not under heavy load, and is geographically proximate to them. Each cluster has thousands of servers, and upon connection to a cluster further load balancing is performed by hardware in the cluster, in order to send the queries to the least loaded Web Server. This makes Google one of the biggest and most complex known content delivery networks.

Racks are custom-made and contain 40 to 80 servers (20 to 40 1U servers on either side), while new servers are 2U Rackmount systems.^[4] Each rack has a switch. Servers are connected via a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet link to the local switch. Switches are connected to core gigabit switch using one or two gigabit uplinks.^{[citation needed]}

The Main index

Since queries are composed of words, an inverted index of documents is required. Such an index allows obtaining a list of documents by a query word. The index is very large due to the number of documents stored in the servers.

The type of Servers that Google uses

Google's server infrastructure is divided in several types, each assigned to a different purpose:^[4]

Google DNS Servers answer the DNS requests and serve as intelligent, worldwide load-balancers. They guess the data center nearest to the user to speed up all HTTP requests.

Google Web Servers coordinate the execution of queries sent by users, then format the result into an HTML page. The execution consists of sending queries to index servers, merging the results, computing their rank, retrieving a summary for each hit (using the document server), asking for suggestions from the spelling servers, and finally getting a list of advertisements from the ad server.

Data-gathering servers are permanently dedicated to spidering the Web. They update the index and document databases and apply Google's algorithms to assign ranks to pages.

Index servers each contain a set of index shards. They return a list of document IDs ("docid"), such that documents corresponding to a certain docid contain the query word. These servers need less disk space, but suffer the greatest CPU workload.

Document servers store documents. Each document is stored on dozens of document servers. When performing a search, a document server returns a summary for the document based on query words. They can also fetch the complete document when asked. These servers need more disk space.

Ad servers manage advertisements offered by services like AdWords and AdSense.

Spelling servers make suggestions about the spelling of queries.

Server hardware and software

Original hardware

The original hardware (ca. 1998) that was used by Google when it was located at Stanford University, included:^[5]

Sun Ultra II with dual 200 MHz processors, and 256MB of RAM. This was the main machine for the original Backrub system.

2 x 300 MHz Dual Pentium II Servers donated by Intel, they included 512MB of RAM and 9 x 9GB hard drives between the two. It was on these that the main search ran.

F50 IBM RS/6000 donated by IBM, included 4 processors, 512MB of memory and 8 x 9GB hard drives.

Two additional boxes included 3 x 9GB hard drives and 6 x 4GB hard drives respectively (the original storage for Backrub). These were attached to the Sun Ultra II.

IBM disk expansion box with another 8 x 9GB hard drives donated by IBM.

Homemade disk box which contained 10 x 9GB SCSI hard drives.

Current hardware

Servers are commodity-class x86 PCs running customized versions of Linux. Indeed, the goal is to purchase CPU generations that offer the best performance per unit of power, not absolute performance. Estimates of the power required for over 450,000 servers range upwards of 20 megawatts, which could cost on the order of US$2 million per month in electricity charges.

Specifications:

Over 450,000 servers^[1] ranging from a 533 MHz Intel Celeron to a dual 1.4 GHz Intel Pentium III (as of 2005)

One or more 80GB hard disks per server (2003)

2–4 GiB of memory per machine (2004)

The exact size and whereabouts of the data centers Google uses are unknown, and official figures remain intentionally vague. In a 2000 estimate, Google's server farm consisted of 6000 processors, 12,000 common IDE disks (2 per machine, and one processor per machine), at four sites: two in Silicon Valley, California and two in Virginia.^[6] Each site had an OC-48 (2488 Mbit/s) internet connection and an OC-12 (622 Mbit/s) connection to other Google sites. The connections are eventually routed down to 4 x 1 Gbit/s lines connecting up to 64 racks, each rack holding 80 machines and two ethernet switches.

Project 02

Google is currently developing a supercomputer at a data center located in the town of The Dalles, Oregon, on the Columbia River, approximately 80 miles from Portland. The project, codenamed "Project 02",^[7] is expected to substantially add to their current global network capable of processing billions of search queries per day and a growing repertoire of other services.^[7] The new complex is approximately the size of two football fields with cooling towers four stories high.

Server operation

Most operations are read-only. When an update is required, queries are redirected to other servers, so as to simplify consistency issues. Queries are divided into sub-queries, where those sub-queries may be sent to different ducts in parallel, thus reducing the latency time.^[4]

To lessen the effects of unavoidable hardware failure, data stored in the servers may be mirrored using hardware RAID. Software is also designed to be fault tolerant. Thus when a system goes down, data is still available on other servers, which increases the reliability.

References

^ ^a ^b Carr, David F. "How Google Works." Baseline Magazine. July 6, 2006. Retrieved on July 10, 2006.

^ "[1]." Invest Wallonia. April 27, 2007. Retrieved on May 10, 2007

^ "[2]." Council Bluffs. July 9, 2007. Retrieved on August 21, 2007

^ ^a ^b ^c Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture (Luiz André Barroso, Jeffrey Dean, Urs Hölzle)

^ "Google Stanford Hardware." Stanford University (provided by Internet Archive). Retrieved on July 10, 2006.

^ Hennessy, John; Patterson, David. (2002). Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. Third Edition. Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 1-55860-596-7.

^ ^a ^b Markoff, John; Hansell, Saul. "Google's quasi-secret power play." San Diego Union Tribune. June 14, 2006. Retrieved on July 10, 2006.

Some Related links

Google Research Publications

The Google Linux Cluster — Video about Google's Linux cluster

Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture (Luiz André Barroso, Jeffrey Dean, Urs Hölzle)

How Google Works

Original Google Hardware Pictures

How many servers does Google have?

2007-12-25T17:54:00.001-06:00

Tristan Louis has a pretty good estimation of how many servers Google has.

An interesting tidbit coming out of the Google S-1 filing is that they have spent about $250 million on hardware equipment. From there, we can get a few guesses at the magnitude of the Google system. Based on quick back of the envelope calculations, it looks like Google is managing between 45,000 and 80,000 servers. Here’s how I arrived at this conclusion:

According to calculations by the IEEE, in a paper about the Google cluster, a rack with 88 dual-CPU machines used to cost about $278,000. If you divide the $250 million figure from the S-1 filing by $278,000, you end up with a bit over 899 racks. Assuming that each rack holds 88 machines, you end up with 79,000 machines.

However, one must recognize that equipment is not all CPUs. As a result, you must discount the figure of $250 million to account for routers, firewalls, machines for employees, etc… So let’s assume for a minute that only about $200 million is going to the CPUs. That still leaves us with 719 racks or a bit over 63,000 machines.

Even if we discount other equipment to be costing $100 million, we end up with a bit over 31,654 machines on 359 racks.

So how much processing power is that? Well, once again, the Google cluster document provides some interesting tidbits. Per the document, the racks that were used were

88 dual-CPU 2 Ghz Intel Xeon servers with 2 Gbytes of RAM and an 80-Gbytes hard disk.

That means that, on the low end, the Google cluster has the following stats:

359 racks

31,654 machines

63,184 CPUs

126,368 Ghz of processing power

63,184 Gb of RAM

2,527 Tb of Hard Drive space

In the middle range of my estimates, the cluster would have:

719 racks

63,272 machines

126,544 CPUs

253,088 Ghz of processing power

126,544 Gb of RAM

5,062 Tb of Hard Drive space

And on the high end of my estimates:

899 racks

79,112 machines

158,224 CPUs

316,448 Ghz of processing power

158,224 Gb of RAM

6,180 Tb of Hard Drive space

Assuming that the 1Ghz chip is going at about a third the gigaflops of a 2Ghz processor (3.3Gflops), we can then guess at the size of the Google supercomputer. Just for the sake of argument, let’s go with 1 Gigaflop per processor. This means that the Google supercomputer has about 126 teraflops of power on the low end of my estimates, 253 teraflops on the middle end, and 316 teraflops on the high end. This would easily put it on top of the list of fastest computers in the world.

Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of power.

How many Google machines

Google Ping

Modular by Design - Software

Google files S-1

Google goes blogging

Spread the work

Google and the Wisdom of Clouds

2007-12-25T17:37:00.001-06:00

With Google, Yahoo, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon all working on cloud computing its pretty obvious that its not a fad.

December 24, 2007

Google's Next Big Dream

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Podcast: Beyond The Cover

A Sea Change

Google's CEO on the Power of Clouds

The Two Flavors of Google

Google and the Wisdom of Clouds

Google and the Cloud

2007-12-25T13:35:00.001-06:00

The Businessweek Cover Story of December 13, 2007 contains the article that inspired this blog. The article is included below:

Google and the Wisdom of Clouds

A lofty new strategy aims to put incredible computing power in the hands of many

by Stephen Baker

One simple question. That's all it took for Christophe Bisciglia to bewilder confident job applicants at Google (GOOG). Bisciglia, an angular 27-year-old senior software engineer with long wavy hair, wanted to see if these undergrads were ready to think like Googlers. "Tell me," he'd say, "what would you do if you had 1,000 times more data?"

What a strange idea. If they returned to their school projects and were foolish enough to cram formulas with a thousand times more details about shopping or maps or—heaven forbid—with video files, they'd slow their college servers to a crawl.

At that point in the interview, Bisciglia would explain his question. To thrive at Google, he told them, they would have to learn to work—and to dream—on a vastly larger scale. He described Google's globe-spanning network of computers. Yes, they answered search queries instantly. But together they also blitzed through mountains of data, looking for answers or intelligence faster than any machine on earth. Most of this hardware wasn't on the Google campus. It was just out there, somewhere on earth, whirring away in big refrigerated data centers. Folks at Google called it "the cloud." And one challenge of programming at Google was to leverage that cloud—to push it to do things that would overwhelm lesser machines. New hires at Google, Bisciglia says, usually take a few months to get used to this scale. "Then one day, you see someone suggest a wild job that needs a few thousand machines, and you say: Hey, he gets it.'"

What recruits needed, Bisciglia eventually decided, was advance training. So one autumn day a year ago, when he ran into Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt between meetings, he floated an idea. He would use his 20% time, the allotment Googlers have for independent projects, to launch a course. It would introduce students at his alma mater, the University of Washington, to programming at the scale of a cloud. Call it Google 101. Schmidt liked the plan. Over the following months, Bisciglia's Google 101 would evolve and grow. It would eventually lead to an ambitious partnership with IBM (IBM), announced in October, to plug universities around the world into Google-like computing clouds.

As this concept spreads, it promises to expand Google's footprint in industry far beyond search, media, and advertising, leading the giant into scientific research and perhaps into new businesses. In the process Google could become, in a sense, the world's primary computer.

"I had originally thought [Bisciglia] was going to work on education, which was fine," Schmidt says late one recent afternoon at Google headquarters. "Nine months later, he comes out with this new [cloud] strategy, which was completely unexpected." The idea, as it developed, was to deliver to students, researchers, and entrepreneurs the immense power of Google-style computing, either via Google's machines or others offering the same service.

What is Google's cloud? It's a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies of the World Wide Web. This makes search faster, helping ferret out answers to billions of queries in a fraction of a second. Unlike many traditional supercomputers, Google's system never ages. When its individual pieces die, usually after about three years, engineers pluck them out and replace them with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows, almost like a living thing.

A move towards clouds signals a fundamental shift in how we handle information. At the most basic level, it's the computing equivalent of the evolution in electricity a century ago when farms and businesses shut down their own generators and bought power instead from efficient industrial utilities. Google executives had long envisioned and prepared for this change. Cloud computing, with Google's machinery at the very center, fit neatly into the company's grand vision, established a decade ago by founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible." Bisciglia's idea opened a pathway toward this future. "Maybe he had it in his brain and didn't tell me," Schmidt says. "I didn't realize he was going to try to change the way computer scientists thought about computing. That's a much more ambitious goal."

ONE-WAY STREET

For small companies and entrepreneurs, clouds mean opportunity—a leveling of the playing field in the most data-intensive forms of computing. To date, only a select group of cloud-wielding Internet giants has had the resources to scoop up huge masses of information and build businesses upon it. Our words, pictures, clicks, and searches are the raw material for this industry. But it has been largely a one-way street. Humanity emits the data, and a handful of companies—the likes of Google, Yahoo! (YHOO), or Amazon.com (AMZN)—transform the info into insights, services, and, ultimately, revenue.

This status quo is already starting to change. In the past year, Amazon has opened up its own networks of computers to paying customers, initiating new players, large and small, to cloud computing. Some users simply park their massive databases with Amazon. Others use Amazon's computers to mine data or create Web services. In November, Yahoo opened up a cluster of computers—a small cloud—for researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. And Microsoft (MSFT) has deepened its ties to communities of scientific researchers by providing them access to its own server farms. As these clouds grow, says Frank Gens, senior analyst at market research firm IDC, "A whole new community of Web startups will have access to these machines. It's like they're planting Google seeds." Many such startups will emerge in science and medicine, as data-crunching laboratories searching for new materials and drugs set up shop in the clouds.

For clouds to reach their potential, they should be nearly as easy to program and navigate as the Web. This, say analysts, should open up growing markets for cloud search and software tools—a natural business for Google and its competitors. Schmidt won't say how much of its own capacity Google will offer to outsiders, or under what conditions or at what prices. "Typically, we like to start with free," he says, adding that power users "should probably bear some of the costs." And how big will these clouds grow? "There's no limit," Schmidt says. As this strategy unfolds, more people are starting to see that Google is poised to become a dominant force in the next stage of computing. "Google aspires to be a large portion of the cloud, or a cloud that you would interact with every day," the CEO says. The business plan? For now, Google remains rooted in its core business, which gushes with advertising revenue. The cloud initiative is barely a blip in terms of investment. It hovers in the distance, large and hazy and still hard to piece together, but bristling with possibilities.

Changing the nature of computing and scientific research wasn't at the top of Bisciglia's agenda the day he collared Schmidt. What he really wanted, he says, was to go back to school. Unlike many of his colleagues at Google, a place teeming with PhDs, Bisciglia was snatched up by the company as soon as he graduated from the University of Washington, or U-Dub, as nearly everyone calls it. He'd never been a grad student. He ached for a break from his daily routines at Google—the 10-hour workdays building search algorithms in his cube in Building 44, the long commutes on Google buses from the apartment he shared with three roomies in San Francisco's Duboce Triangle. He wanted to return to Seattle, if only for one day a week, and work with his professor and mentor, Ed Lazowska. "I had an itch to teach," he says.

He didn't think twice before vaulting over the org chart and batting around his idea directly with the CEO. Bisciglia and Schmidt had known each other for years. Shortly after landing at Google five years ago as a 22-year-old programmer, Bisciglia worked in a cube across from the CEO's office. He'd wander in, he says, drawn in part by the model airplanes that reminded him of his mother's work as a United Airlines (UAUA) hostess. Naturally he talked with the soft-spoken, professorial CEO about computing. It was almost like college. And even after Bisciglia moved to other buildings, the two stayed in touch. ("He's never too hard to track down, and he's incredible about returning e-mails," Bisciglia says.)

On the day they first discussed Google 101, Schmidt offered one nugget of advice: Narrow down the project to something Bisciglia could have up and running in two months. "I actually didn't care what he did," Schmidt recalls. But he wanted the young engineer to get feedback in a hurry. Even if Bisciglia failed, he says, "he's smart, and he'd learn from it."

To launch Google 101, Bisciglia had to replicate the dynamics and a bit of the magic of Google's cloud—but without tapping into the cloud itself or revealing its deepest secrets. These secrets fuel endless speculation among computer scientists. But Google keeps much under cover. This immense computer, after all, runs the company. It automatically handles search, places ads, churns through e-mails. The computer does the work, and thousands of Google engineers, including Bisciglia, merely service the machine. They teach the system new tricks or find new markets for it to invade. And they add on new clusters—four new data centers this year alone, at an average cost of $600 million apiece.

In building this machine, Google, so famous for search, is poised to take on a new role in the computer industry. Not so many years ago scientists and researchers looked to national laboratories for the cutting-edge research on computing. Now, says Daniel Frye, vice-president of open systems development at IBM, "Google is doing the work that 10 years ago would have gone on in a national lab."

How was Bisciglia going to give students access to this machine? The easiest option would have been to plug his class directly into the Google computer. But the company wasn't about to let students loose in a machine loaded with proprietary software, brimming with personal data, and running a $10.6 billion business. So Bisciglia shopped for an affordable cluster of 40 computers. He placed the order, then set about figuring out how to pay for the servers. While the vendor was wiring the computers together, Bisciglia alerted a couple of Google managers that a bill was coming. Then he "kind of sent the expense report up the chain, and no one said no." He adds one of his favorite sayings: "It's far easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission." ("If you're interested in someone who strictly follows the rules, Christophe's not your guy," says Lazowska, who refers to the cluster as "a gift from heaven.")

A FRENETIC LEARNER

On Nov. 10, 2006, the rack of computers appeared at U-Dub's Computer Science building. Bisciglia and a couple of tech administrators had to figure out how to hoist the 1-ton rack up four stories into the server room. They eventually made it, and then prepared for the start of classes, in January.

Bisciglia's mother, Brenda, says her son seemed marked for an unusual path from the start. He didn't speak until age 2, and then started with sentences. One of his first came as they were driving near their home in Gig Harbor, Wash. A bug flew in the open window, and a voice came from the car seat in back: "Mommy, there's something artificial in my mouth."

At school, the boy's endless questions and frenetic learning pace exasperated teachers. His parents, seeing him sad and frustrated, pulled him out and home-schooled him for three years. Bisciglia says he missed the company of kids during that time but developed as an entrepreneur. He had a passion for Icelandic horses and as an adolescent went into business raising them. Once, says his father, Jim, they drove far north into Manitoba and bought horses, without much idea about how to transport the animals back home. "The whole trip was like a scene from one of Chevy Chase's movies," he says. Christophe learned about computers developing Web pages for his horse sales and his father's luxury-cruise business. And after concluding that computers promised a brighter future than animal husbandry, he went off to U-Dub and signed up for as many math, physics, and computer courses as he could.

In late 2006, as he shuttled between the Googleplex and Seattle preparing for Google 101, Bisciglia used his entrepreneurial skills to piece together a sprawling team of volunteers. He worked with college interns to develop the curriculum, and he dragooned a couple of Google colleagues from the nearby Kirkland (Wash.) facility to use some of their 20% time to help him teach it. Following Schmidt's advice, Bisciglia worked to focus Google 101 on something students could learn quickly. "I was like, what's the one thing I could teach them in two months that would be useful and really important?" he recalls. His answer was "MapReduce."

Bisciglia adores MapReduce, the software at the heart of Google computing. While the company's famous search algorithms provide the intelligence for each search, MapReduce delivers the speed and industrial heft. It divides each task into hundreds, or even thousands, of tasks, and distributes them to legions of computers. In a fraction of a second, as each one comes back with its nugget of information, MapReduce quickly assembles the responses into an answer. Other programs do the same job. But MapReduce is faster and appears able to handle near limitless work. When the subject comes up, Bisciglia rhapsodizes. "I remember graduating, coming to Google, learning about MapReduce, and really just changing the way I thought about computer science and everything," he says. He calls it "a very simple, elegant model." It was developed by another Washington alumnus, Jeffrey Dean. By returning to U-Dub and teaching MapReduce, Bisciglia would be returning this software "and this way of thinking" back to its roots.

There was only one obstacle. MapReduce was anchored securely inside Google's machine—and it was not for outside consumption, even if the subject was Google 101. The company did share some information about it, though, to feed an open-source version of MapReduce called Hadoop. The idea was that, without divulging its crown jewel, Google could push for its standard to become the architecture of cloud computing.

The team that developed Hadoop belonged to a company, Nutch, that got acquired. Oddly, they were now working within the walls of Yahoo, which was counting on the MapReduce offspring to give its own computers a touch of Google magic. Hadoop remained open source, though, which meant the Google team could adapt it and install it for free on the U-Dub cluster.

Students rushed to sign up for Google 101 as soon as it appeared in the winter-semester syllabus. In the beginning, Bisciglia and his Google colleagues tried teaching. But in time they handed over the job to professional educators at U-Dub. "Their delivery is a lot clearer," Bisciglia says. Within weeks the students were learning how to configure their work for Google machines and designing ambitious Web-scale projects, from cataloguing the edits on Wikipedia to crawling the Internet to identify spam. Through the spring of 2007, as word about the course spread to other universities, departments elsewhere started asking for Google 101.

Many were dying for cloud knowhow and computing power—especially for scientific research. In practically every field, scientists were grappling with vast piles of new data issuing from a host of sensors, analytic equipment, and ever-finer measuring tools. Patterns in these troves could point to new medicines and therapies, new forms of clean energy. They could help predict earthquakes. But most scientists lacked the machinery to store and sift through these digital El Dorados. "We're drowning in data," said Jeannette Wing, assistant director of the National Science Foundation.

BIG BLUE LARGESSE

The hunger for Google computing put Bisciglia in a predicament. He had been fortunate to push through the order for the first cluster of computers. Could he do that again and again, eventually installing mini-Google clusters in each computer science department? Surely not. To extend Google 101 to universities around the world, the participants needed to plug into a shared resource. Bisciglia needed a bigger cloud.

That's when luck descended on the Googleplex in the person of IBM Chairman Samuel J. Palmisano. This was "Sam's day at Google," says an IBM researcher. The winter day was a bit chilly for beach volleyball in the center of campus, but Palmisano lunched on some of the fabled free cuisine in a cafeteria. Then he and his team sat down with Schmidt and a handful of Googlers, including Bisciglia. They drew on whiteboards and discussed cloud computing. It was no secret that IBM wanted to deploy clouds to provide data and services to business customers. At the same time, under Palmisano, IBM had been a leading promoter of open-source software, including Linux. This was a key in Big Blue's software battles, especially against Microsoft. If Google and IBM teamed up on a cloud venture, they could construct the future of this type of computing on Google-based standards, including Hadoop.

Google, of course, had a running start on such a project: Bisciglia's Google 101. In the course of that one day, Bisciglia's small venture morphed into a major initiative backed at the CEO level by two tech titans. By the time Palmisano departed that afternoon, it was established that Bisciglia and his IBM counterpart, Dennis Quan, would build a prototype of a joint Google-IBM university cloud.

Over the next three months they worked together at Google headquarters. (It was around this time, Bisciglia says, that the cloud project evolved from 20% into his full-time job.) The work involved integrating IBM's business applications and Google servers, and equipping them with a host of open-source programs, including Hadoop. In February they unveiled the prototype for top brass in Mountain View, Calif., and for others on video from IBM headquarters in Armonk, N.Y. Quan wowed them by downloading data from the cloud to his cell phone. (It wasn't relevant to the core project, Bisciglia says, but a nice piece of theater.)

The Google 101 cloud got the green light. The plan was to spread cloud computing first to a handful of U.S. universities within a year and later to deploy it globally. The universities would develop the clouds, creating tools and applications while producing legions of computer scientists to continue building and managing them.

Those developers should be able to find jobs at a host of Web companies, including Google. Schmidt likes to compare the data centers to the prohibitively expensive particle accelerators known as cyclotrons. "There are only a few cyclotrons in physics," he says. "And every one if them is important, because if you're a top-flight physicist you need to be at the lab where that cyclotron is being run. That's where history's going to be made; that's where the inventions are going to come. So my idea is that if you think of these as supercomputers that happen to be assembled from smaller computers, we have the most attractive supercomputers, from a science perspective, for people to come work on."

As the sea of business and scientific data rises, computing power turns into a strategic resource, a form of capital. "In a sense," says Yahoo Research Chief Prabhakar Raghavan, "there are only five computers on earth." He lists Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. Few others, he says, can turn electricity into computing power with comparable efficiency.

All sorts of business models are sure to evolve. Google and its rivals could team up with customers, perhaps exchanging computing power for access to their data. They could recruit partners into their clouds for pet projects, such as the company's clean energy initiative, announced in November. With the electric bills at jumbo data centers running upwards of $20 million a year, according to industry analysts, it's only natural for Google to commit both brains and server capacity to the search for game-changing energy breakthroughs.

What will research clouds look like? Tony Hey, vice-president for external research at Microsoft, says they'll function as huge virtual laboratories, with a new generation of librarians—some of them human—"curating" troves of data, opening them to researchers with the right credentials. Authorized users, he says, will build new tools, haul in data, and share it with far-flung colleagues. In these new labs, he predicts, "you may win the Nobel prize by analyzing data assembled by someone else." Mark Dean, head of IBM's research operation in Almaden, Calif., says that the mixture of business and science will lead, in a few short years, to networks of clouds that will tax our imagination. "Compared to this," he says, "the Web is tiny. We'll be laughing at how small the Web is." And yet, if this "tiny" Web was big enough to spawn Google and its empire, there's no telling what opportunities could open up in the giant clouds.

It's a mid-November day at the Googleplex. A jetlagged Christophe Bisciglia is just back from China, where he has been talking to universities about Google 101. He's had a busy time, not only setting up the cloud with IBM but also working out deals with six universities—U-Dub, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Maryland—to launch it. Now he's got a camera crew in a conference room, with wires and lights spilling over a table. This is for a promotional video about cloud education that they'll release, at some point, on YouTube (GOOG).

Eric Schmidt comes in. At 52, he is nearly twice Bisciglia's age, and his body looks a bit padded next to his protégé's willowy frame. Bisciglia guides him to a chair across from the camera and explains the plan. They'll tape the audio from the interview and then set up Schmidt for some stand-alone face shots. "B-footage," Bisciglia calls it. Schmidt nods and sits down. Then he thinks better of it. He tells the cameramen to film the whole thing and skip stand-alone shots. He and Bisciglia are far too busy to stand around for B footage.

Baker is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York .

Google and the Wisdom of Clouds

About this blog

2007-12-25T13:17:00.000-06:00

This blog is all about Cloud computing.

Cloud computing is a computing paradigm shift where computing is moved away from personal computers or an individual server to a “cloud” of computers. Users of the cloud only need to be concerned with the computing service being asked for, as the underlying details of how it’s achieved are hidden. This method of distributed computing is done through pooling all computer resources together and being managed by software rather than a human.

The services being requested of a cloud are not limited to using web applications, but can also be IT management tasks such as requesting of systems, a software stack or a specific web appliance.

This simplifies IT management as well as increases efficiencies of system resources. IT administrators no longer need to install software and manually setup all the systems, but instead they have management software do this. Resources are used more efficiently as computers can be consolidated to be used for more tasks. This ensures underutilized systems do not sit idle.

Cloud computing Architecture

The architecture behind cloud computing is a massive network of "cloud servers" interconnected as if in a grid running in parallel, sometimes using the technique of virtualization to maximize computing power per server.

It is made up of a front-end interface which allows a user to select a service from a catalog. This request gets passed to the system management which finds the correct resources, and then calls the provisioning services which carves out resources in the cloud. The provisioning service may deploy the requested stack or web application as well.

User Interaction Interface: This is how users of the cloud interface with the cloud to request services.

Services Catalog: This is the list of services which a user could request.

System Management: This is the piece which manages the computer resources available.

Provisioning Tool: This tool carves out the systems from the cloud to deliver on the requested service. It may also deploy the required images.

Monitoring & Metering: This optional piece tracks the usage of the cloud so the resources used can be attributed to a certain user.

Servers: The servers get managed by the system management tool. They can be either virtual or real.

Cloud storage is a model of networked data storage where data is stored on multiple virtual servers, generally hosted by third parties, rather than being hosted on dedicated servers. Hosting companies operate large data centers; and people who require their data to be hosted buy or lease storage capacity from them and use it for their storage needs. The data center operators, in the background, virtualize the resources according to the requirements of the customer and expose them as virtual servers, which the customers can themselves manage. Physically, the resource may span across multiple servers.

Cloud services are all Web services offered via Cloud computing.