“OpenTSDB is a distributed, scalable Time Series Database (TSDB) written on top of HBase. OpenTSDB was written to address a common need: store, index and serve metrics collected from computer systems (network gear, operating systems, applications) at a large scale, and make this data easily accessible and graphable.”
—OpenTSDB - A Distributed, Scalable Monitoring System
November 2011
“One at a time is a little anticlimactic and difficult to get in a froth over, but one at a time is how we win and how we lose.”
—Seth’s Blog: Preparing for the breakthrough/calamity
“
WHAT IF ONLY HAVE LITTLE IDEA? SMASH IDEA. THROW AWAY DETAIL. THROW AWAY FEATURE. THROW AWAY CAN’T.
INSIDE LITTLE IDEA IS BIG PROBLEM HELD DOWN BY CAN’T. SET IT FREE.
STARTUP IS SOLVE PROBLEM NO ONE ELSE WILL.
VISION IS SOLVE PROBLEM NO ONE ELSE SEE.
” —Lessons Learned: STARTUP IS VISION
“Remus provides transparent, comprehensive high availability to ordinary virtual machines running on the Xen virtual machine monitor. It does this by maintaining a completely up-to-date copy of a running VM on a backup server, which automatically activates if the primary server fails. Key features:”
—Remus - Xen Wiki
“The better accomodate modern Internet services, our new Serval architecture introduces a service-centric end-host network stack that makes services easier to scale, more robust to churn, and adaptable to a diverse set of deployment scenarios. A key abstraction of our stack is service-level anycast with connection affinity, provided by a new service access layer that sits between the network and transport layers. Applications communicate on opaque service names that “late bind” to a service instance via anycast, while maintaining affinity to the instance across mobility, migration, and interface failures. A connection can send traffic over multiple interfaces and paths, capitalizing on multi-homed hosts and multipath routing. Serval also registers and resolves service names automatically, obviating the need for manual name-resolution updates while supporting a wide range of service discovery techniques.”
—Serval Architecture
“The ideas in this paper—Don’t Settle for Eventual: Scalable Causal Consistency for Wide-Area Storage with COPS—are different. It’s not another eventually consistent system, or a traditional transaction oriented system, or a replication based system, or a system that punts on the issue. It’s something new, a causally consistent system that achieves ALPS system properties. Move over CAP, NoSQL, etc, we have another acronym: ALPS - Available (operations always complete successfully), Low-latency (operations complete quickly (single digit milliseconds)), Partition-tolerant (operates with a partition), and Scalable (just add more servers to add more capacity). ALPS is the recipe for an always-on data store: operations always complete, they are always successful, and they are always fast.”
—High Scalability - High Scalability - Paper: Don’t Settle for Eventual: Scalable Causal Consistency for Wide-Area Storage with COPS
“I agree with your summary “cloud is an application centric operations model”. The logical consequence is that since developers own the applications, the developer organization should own the cloud strategy. In the case of Netflix, using public cloud, the developer organization owns the top two boxes in your diagram and AWS owns the third one. IT operations continues to run the remaining datacenters and employee services, but isn’t in the loop for customer oriented services running in the cloud.”
—What cloud boils down to for the enterprise — Cloud Computing News
“
Whining about how hard the logistics are is just fine, but don’t conflate this with thoughtful feedback about whether your strategy makes sense.
Just about every great new project couples a brilliant strategy with impossible logistics that somehow get handled.
” —Seth’s Blog: The Confusion of Logistics and Strategy Problem
“You know the Tolstoy line “Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” that starts Anna Karenina? Well, every corporate IT department has its own unique pathology.”
—Do you really want to be in the cloud? « CloudPundit: Massive-Scale Computing
“
Another large enterprise client recently asked me to explain Rackspace’s organization to them. They wanted to transform their internal IT to resemble a hosting company’s, and Rackspace, with its high degree of customer satisfaction and reputation for being a good place to work, seemed like an ideal model to them. So I spent some time explaining the way that hosting companies organize, and how Rackspace in particular does — in a very flat, matrix-managed way, with horizontally-integrated teams that service a customer group in a holistic manner, coupled with some shared-services groups.
A few days later, the client asked me for a follow-up call. They said, “We’ve been thinking about what you’ve said, and have drawn out the org… and we’re wondering, where’s all the management?”
I said, “There isn’t any more management. That’s all there is.” (The very flat organization means responsibility pushed down to team leads who also serve functional roles, a modest number of managers, and a very small number of directors who have very big organizations.)
The client said, “Well, without a lot of management, where’s the career path in our organization? We can’t do something like this!”
” —To become like a cloud provider, fire everyone here « CloudPundit: Massive-Scale Computing
“
Default choices are often followed by inertia. Yeah, the company put a project on Amazon. It’s running fine, so people figure, why mess with it? They’ve got this larger internal private cloud story they’re working on, or this other larger cloud IaaS deal they’re working on, but… well, they figure, they can migrate stuff later. And it’s absolutely true that people can and do migrate, or in many cases, build a private cloud or add another cloud IaaS provider, but a high enough percentage of the time, whatever they stuck out there remains at Amazon, and possibly begins to accrete other stuff.
This is increasingly leaving the rest of the market trying to pry customers away from a provider they’re already using. It’s absolutely true that Amazon is not the ideal provider for all use cases. It’s absolutely true that any number of service providers can tell me endless stories of customers who have left Amazon for them. It’s probably true, as many service providers claim, that customers who are experienced with Amazon are better educated about the cloud and their needs, and therefore become better consumers of their next cloud provider.
But it does not change the fact that Amazon has been working on conquering the market one developer at a time, and that in turn has become the bean-counters in business saying, hey, shouldn’t we be using these Amazon guys?
” —Amazon and the power of default choices « CloudPundit: Massive-Scale Computing
“It used to be that the only way to collect the money we needed for roads and facilities and other widely used services was to charge a lot for the few things that were seen as extras. Now, though, it’s easier than ever to track actual use, to coordinate consumption with payment. The technology is no longer the problem, it’s our habits that are holding us back.”
—Seth’s Blog: The problem with amortization
“The move to cloud computing is a move towards software-defined everything. Software-defined infrastructure and programmatic access to everything inherently advantages developers, and it turns the hardware-wrangling skills into things for low-level technicians and vendor field engineering organizations. Operations becomes software-oriented operations, one way or another, and development skills are necessary to make this transition.”
—Why developers make superior operators « CloudPundit: Massive-Scale Computing
“The Kindle Fire takes the hybrid cloud connected model a long way where the Fire’s Silk browser UI runs directly on the device close to the user where it can be highly interactive and responsive. But the power and network-bandwidth hungry browser backend is hosted on Amazon EC2 where connectivity is awesome and compute power is not battery constrained. I love the hybrid model and we are going to see more and more devices delivering a hybrid user experience where the compute intensive components are cloud hosted and user interface is in the device. My belief is that this is the future of consumer electronics and, as prices drop to the $30 to $50 range, everyone will have 10s of these special-purpose, cloud-connected devices.”
—Perspectives - Free Lessons in Industrial Design & Customer Experience
“There may still be benefit in some SDN capabilities in a L3 ECMP datacenter network operating in a hybrid mode. Let the existing routing protocols control normal forwarding, but layer SDN capabilities on top. For example, implement active application-level connectivity monitoring using OpenFlow’s ability to inject packets out any port and install rules on adjacent devices to capture probe packets and deliver them back to the controller. This type of usage probably doesn’t require an additional control channel, relying on normal L3 connectivity to connect the devices and the controller.”
—Is OpenFlow/SDN Good at Forwarding? « Network Heresy
“To me, SDN offers the ability to decouple the distribution model from the physical topology, and it does so at the cost of the mechanism for that decoupling (additional control channel and control components). So if it is not providing additional value, then a system implementor has to weigh the ancillary benefits (better programming environment, better testing support, etc.) against the overhead that SDN carries with it.”
—Is OpenFlow/SDN Good at Forwarding? « Network Heresy
