Once again, the day opens with short keynotes.
Starting us off is James Staten of Forrester. James gives us two words to think about in respect to cloudonomics: Down & Off. When the application (resource) isn’t in use, you can turn it off. When you turn it off, you aren’t paying.
James says to write applications in components that are as small as possible. Only turn on what you need, when you need it. James is describing cloud applications that have a zero footprint until a request is made. [Sounds event-driven to me. I like it.]
In the same respect, monitor performance thresholds to determine when an instance can be turned off. Make “down” and “off” part of your design.
[Of course, need to be smart in “systems management” with a hyper distributed, small component architecture. Need to understand/monitor/manage the collective, to complete transactions].
Scott Baker, Director of Systems Engineering and Operations, Eventbrite
Scott is buzzing through a history of datacenter building and love. However, he’s learned to love the cloud. A favorite point of the crowd is “To have agile development, you need to have agile operations”. The cloud, according to Scott, provides agile operations.
Oriol Vinyals, PhD Student, UC Berkeley, Microsoft Research Fellow: Building the Overmind: AI and Cloud Computing
Oriol is looking at artificial intelligence, Starcraft and the Cloud. Starcraft, according to Oriol, is a strategy game. To win, you need to gather resources, produce units and attack your opponent. Starcraft, apparently, is a good AI problem to solve.
Challenges: long horizon, concurrent, partially observable (don’t see the complete board), and real-time.
Connections to cloud computing: resources, tasks, opponents & weapons (users & servers).
Oriol shows videos of swarms and defenders responding, you can see parallels to cloud computing and effective management of resources.
Marvin Wheeler, Chief Strategy Officer, Terremark, on the Open Data center Alliance. From the website:
“The Open Data Center Alliance is an independent consortium comprised of leading global IT managers in a wide range of vertical segments, who have come together to provide a unified vision for long-term data center requirements.
In support of its mission, the Alliance is developing and delivering an Open Data Center Usage Model Roadmap, which defines Usage Model requirements to resolve key IT challenges and fulfill cloud infrastructure needs into the future. This vendor-agnostic roadmap serves as the foundation for member planning of future data center deployments, and relies on open, interoperable, industry-standard solutions.”
Marty Kagan, President and Co-Founder, Cedexis on Cloud Performance Data
Cloud Bakeoff: Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Joyent, Rackspace and Windows Azure. Bitcurrent is publishing a study. EC2 East wins for HTTP request, but need to factor in request origin for best performance.
Neal Sample, Vice President, Architecture, Technology Product Management, Developer Program, eBay
Neal waled through models and curves on cloud bursting. eBay has moved from 2000 servers down to 800 servers, with excess requests bursting to the public cloud. By reducing infrastructure costs, eBay has been able to redirect that investment into business intelligence, providing additional value to the business.
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