Chris Boos on Automation

First Microsoft’s concept to build servers into 40ft containers was tauntet by some people. Now after the industry adapted this concept, the advantages of their idea regarding flexibility and power effectiveness are approved and several companies jumped on the bandwagon:

• Dell <READ_HERE>
• HP <AND HERE>
• IBM <HERE>
• Sun <OLD_NEWS_HERE>

but wait, why are news from Sun old?. Right – Sun presented their Project Blackbox 2 years ago, but they seemed to be ahead of time, maybe the oilprice wasn’t hight enough and the worldwide crisis was beyond imagination or ….

To give you the full storie, datacenter containers were invented by – guess who – Google. This is really alarming, because they seem to have finger in every pie <LINK>. As I found out, Google patented the concept of having many servers inside a container and stacking multiple containers to a datacenter in 2003 <READ_HERE>. While Sun misinterpreted the concept just for creating a showcase for server hardware, other put more efforts in developing the idea. How the idea evolved, you can see here:

Video: Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision

Thanks to datacenterknowledge.com, who directed my to this story.

Roland

Turns out, supporting Mozilla’s firefox project wasn’t good enough for Google: they’ve got their own shiny new browser called Chrome now. It was all over the newspaper headlines today. Most commentaries featured it as “The return of the browser wars”. Funny as it seems that Web 2.0 finally brought us browser war 2.0, my prediction is that we will look at it from a different angle in retrospect: It’s another important step to kill our old fashioned notion of an operating system. The interesting thing about Chrome is the new virtual machine included. It’s called V8 and has been developed by guys who already created the the Java virtual machine for SUN.

So don’t compare Chrome to Internet Explorer – compare it to Midori.

Midori is a rumoured strategic project at Microsoft –a serious operating system beyond Windows. It seems to be more than a research study, though there is little official information. SD Times claimed that “Midori will introduce a higher-level application model that abstracts the details of physical machines and processors.” An operating platform rather than operating system, allowing us to make use of all those multicore-processors, multiprocessor-machines and multi-machine computing clouds.

In the old days, there was a single hardware, a single CPU, and a single operating system. On top of that, many applications could be executed. Things started to change with the Java virtual machine (JVM). Now the Java software effectively ran on the JVM, ignoring the underlying OS. Then there was virtualization: today, you can easily run several OS on a single computer using vmware. Sometimes, virtual machines are already used to eliminate unexpected interactions between applications: We got enough computing power to deploy less trusted applications into their own virtual machines – so we do it and eliminate hard to locate side effects. Who knows – we might just as well end up with each application running within its own VM. Now Google gives us V8 – the new operating platform included in their browser. Applications like Google Apps will use it as their operating platform and ignore the underlying OS. Others will continue to develop Flex application running on Adobe’s Flash-plug-in. Different platform, same thing.

And parallel computing on the desktop has just begun. It will add to the trend. In the future, a single hardware will have multiple CPUs with even more cores, and any number of operating platforms layered on top of it. It’s going to solve some compatibility issues and create a number of new ones: keeping all those layers of operating platforms up to date, for example.

Chrome’s V8 will be one of those operating platforms. Thus, Google moves from controlling the entrance to cyberspace to controlling the entrance to the V8 operating platform. It’s the next step beyond cyberspace.

“Burning Chrome” is a collection of short stories by Sci-Fi author William Gibson. It was published following his novel “Neuromancer” in which he coined the term “cyberspace”. So yes, Chrome is the logical next step after cyberspace.

Despite the fact that the new Google competitor Cuil is considered to be more energy efficient (because the black page background seems to be a big energy saver – if they get as big as Google of course <LINK>), Google is cutting edge when talking about the energy revolution. Sites like http://www.blackle.com or http://www.ecofree.org/ which claim to provide a more energy efficient Google search interface (at least on CRTs), by having had the black background idea ahead of cuil, are a minor issue to this revolution.

Google committet to be carbon-neutral by end of 2007 <READ HERE>, a goal, which they just missed, but as you might guess, they are working on that issue. Google needs to do somethink, as long as some of us believe that one Google search consumes as much as a 11-watt light bulb <READ HERE>.

There are rumours/news that Google buys large chunks of land (800 acres in Oklahoma <LINK> and 1000 acres in Iowa <LINK>). So what to build on a site being 4 kilometer long and 4 kilometer wide? A fancy new datacenter with some Hi-Tech, sophisticated cooling facility? Housings and facilities for an army of human taggers to annotate the whole earth? A theme park?

Nope, my I guess is the big Google has other plans for using these site. A hint could be found on a page Googles homepage titles “Powering a clean energy revolution“, where Google describes their effort toward reaching the goal of beeing carbon neutral. I like especially the part, where the author name some companies Google and Google.org are cooperating with. Do you see the point? It’s obvious.

So in the near future Google will not only provide grid-like computing services with GAE, but they will provide carbon-free computing services and this might be putting some pressure on some people investing billions of dollars at the moment in build hi-tech datacenters. Sounds like Google not only wants to index, map and annotate the earth, but they want to save it.

Good luck.

Yesterday I had the chance to get a feeling for one of the hottest topics in IT infrastructure. A panel session at IBM PULSE 2008 was dedicated to the topic of Cloud Computing (even though IBM marketing people don´t seem to like the term and have come up with quite some innovative words – words no one uses, so let us stick with the cloud). The panel was buzzing with intelligence, unfortunately we as the audience could not really match up. So we listened to a pretty much directed discussion on how cloud computing would replace today´s approach to hardware and infrastructure in general. Well I do agree, no one needs dedicated servers when resources can be allocated dynamically and come preconfigured and interconnected. Kristin Hansen stripped the key features of a cloud down to simplicity (users do not care how their resources are set up, they just use them), mobility (obviously use is possible from anywhere and even a large computing cluster could be controlled from a phone like device) and elasticity (you only setup or pay what you really need). Sounds fine to everyone and Google and Amazon have definitely shown to the world that this concept works in a closed shop environment. According to Dave Lindquist IBM is working on a methodology and technology to make most applications “cloudable”. The most interesting remark I heard during the discussion was the “Cloud Computing is the combination of technology (virtualization and automation) and discipline (a stringent way of breaking down the offered services into small blocks in order to recombine them quickly and automatically upon the user´s request as well as defining standards or service catalogues to be offered)”. I guess the discipline part will put forth a great deal of discussions between process consultants and methodology consultants and in the end there will certainly be a couple of good ways to set things up. Just as certainly there will be the need to standardize these processes and methodologies in the end, so clouds are not proprietary but keep mobile even between cloud providers.

Naturally I am more interested in the technology part, that is needed behind cloud computing. Technology – in this case – not referring to the cloud management servers and agents themselves, but the technology surrounding them. The first technology that comes to mind is virtualization as without this core there will be no cloud, at least no cloud that can integrate legacy applications rather than working in a very tightly closed universe like Google does. There are quite some good approaches to virtualization – commercially as well as open source – and the approach taken should really depend on the needs of the applications to be run on a specific part of the cloud. It does probably make sense to even merge the available virtualization technologies within one cloud. It might make sense to use containers build into the operating system or complete hardware virtualization depending on the kind of application to be run and therefore a cloud manager will have to deal with all kinds of virtualization technology.

More on my focus is the service management side of cloud computing and I strongly believe that automated operating is a key component of a good cloud infrastructure. Definitely the cloud infrastructure and management components will take care auf automatic provisioning and resource management, but as soon as legacy applications – that do not really know that they are running on a beautifully scalable environment – are involved manual administration of these applications would mean chasing an ever changing rabbit across a chameleon planet – an image most amusing to bystanders but neither funny to administrators nor to the ones paying them. So in my opinion an automation engine could be fed IT model data and monitoring feeds directly from the cloud manager and could thus deal with the ever changing environment and keep the application automation rules up to date with the cloud components currently in use. This automation engine cannot use a drill down approach, because the infrastructure might not even support drill downs and can change ever so often. The automation engine assuring a good foundation for quality service a professional service management will have to use a more human “circle in” or divide and conquer approach.

Does this sound familiar? By the way, check out the articles on the “Blue Cloud”; technical pioneers at work (other bloggers also think about the blue cloud)…. Also interesting is the cooperation between Google and IBM on producing cloud standards