Yesterday we refreshed the GoGrid product site, located at http://www.GoGrid.com .
The new site contains a variety of new as well as updated product and service information including:
A Flash tour of the product – a high-level overview of the product and feature
Feature details – a bit more detailed information on GoGrid
As I strive to better understand these new emerging technologies such as “cloud computing”, I frequently find myself reading various blog articles, many professing to be the end-all definition related to the topic. It is not very often that I actually come across an article that is informative, understandable and compelling enough to warrant note.
The post by Alex Iskold is a perfect example of one of these excellent articles. An important definition from his post:
The idea behind cloud computing is simple – scale your application by deploying it on a large grid of commodity hardware boxes. Each box has exactly the same system installed and behaves like all other boxes. The load balancer forwards a request to any one box and it is processed in a stateless manner – meaning the request is followed by an immediate response and no state is held by the system. The beauty of the cloud is in its scalability – you scale by simply adding more boxes.
Some may say that this article is a bit “heavy” on Amazon as the “killer service.” But I believe his point is that Amazon has put a lot of weight behind and person-hours into their products and they will be hard to duplicate, at least for players developing “cloud” products. But some of his general comments hold true regardless of the product: “Free from the need to solve the scalability problems, startups are able to focus on the specific problems their product or service is trying to solve.”
I recommend this as a good read on what Cloud Computing is, a la Amazon, and for people really trying to make heads or tails of grid, utility, cloud and distributed computing.
I guess I could have jumped on the bandwagon and started criticizing Amazon for the issues that it had on Friday with their S3 offering. But part of me wanted to see how it all shook out, what the cause was, what would change, if anything, and how their customers would take it. According to the blogosphere, the Amazon service was down for over 2 hours (which seems to be accurate after reading through this forum thread on the Amazon developer forum).
This official Amazon AWS response clip from the forum seems to explain the outage:
Early this morning, at 3:30am PST, we started seeing elevated levels of authenticated requests from multiple users in one of our locations. While we carefully monitor our overall request volumes and these remained within normal ranges, we had not been monitoring the proportion of authenticated requests. Importantly, these cryptographic requests consume more resources per call than other request types.
Shortly before 4:00am PST, we began to see several other users significantly increase their volume of authenticated calls. The last of these pushed the authentication service over its maximum capacity before we could complete putting new capacity in place. In addition to processing authenticated requests, the authentication service also performs account validation on every request Amazon S3 handles. This caused Amazon S3 to be unable to process any requests in that location, beginning at 4:31am PST. By 6:48am PST, we had moved enough capacity online to resolve the issue.
As we said earlier today, though we’re proud of our uptime track record over the past two years with this service, any amount of downtime is unacceptable. As part of the post mortem for this event, we have identified a set of short-term actions as well as longer term improvements. We are taking immediate action on the following: (a) improving our monitoring of the proportion of authenticated requests; (b) further increasing our authentication service capacity; and (c) adding additional defensive measures around the authenticated calls. Additionally, we’ve begun work on a service health dashboard, and expect to release that shortly.
Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team
The Dilbert cartoon continues its virtualization theme and the topic is a new “creative” way to ensure that you don’t have any bugs!
Obviously the GoGrid team doesn’t subscribe to this methodology, only to the cartoon.
Scott Adams continues his Virtualization story, now with Dogbert as the virtualization “consultant.”
I’m glad the monkeys aren’t on the GoGrid team!
Today I read an article on TechCrunch which was positioned as a poll eliciting responses on a generalized area of development. The framework, as outlined by Erick Schonfeld, was this: “come up with a killer Web app in 45 minutes” for the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami. I guess the goal is to actually build the app within the timeframe specified. The categories for the poll were:
Below are the stats taken @ 2:10pm on 2/12/08 from the TechCrunch site.
The thing that really grabbed me about this TechCrunch poll was not what was in the original post, but the 50+ comments that followed, many with several other ideas on the “killer app.” In fact, yours truly tried to jump into the comment thread as well. I figured that I should keep my comments short, but still the topic and inferred topics kept me thinking and spawned some other ones in the process.
Many other ideas
From today’s Dilbert cartoon (published on 2/12/08):
Will Dilbert be able to save the day? Our software engineers already have! Obviously, Dilbert hasn’t heard of GoGrid where you can deploy virtualized servers within minutes! I sure hope that Scott Adams builds this theme out. It might prove to be interesting.
Author’s Note: This post was revised on 6/23/08. The nature of computing is under going a revolution and rather than fully remove this post, I elected to refresh it so as to provide a better framework for readers.
There seems to be a lot of debate around different types of Computing Terms being used to describe server and hosting solutions. In fact, in the past, the blogosphere seemed to throw around terms like Grid, Cloud, Utility, Distributed and Cluster computing almost interchangeably. But, as of this revision, one term is rising to the top: Cloud Computing. (See recent trend analysis here.)
The definitions vary from source to source, author to author. While I cannot (and will not) attempt to articulate the end-all definition, I can write about how I view these terms and how they apply to the products that we offer, namely GoGrid. But before I dive into MY interpretation, providing what others view on these subjects may shed some light on our framework.
Terms as defined by Wikipedia
Many people view Wikipedia as an authoritative source of information but that is always subject to debate. Wikipedia defines some of these terms as follows (not the end-all definitions though) and I have taken some liberties of removing non-relevant information for argument’s sake:
Sometimes it is really difficult being a Hosting Provider.
As Mark Hendrickson points out in this recent article in TechCrunch, Twitter has stopped hosting with Joyent. After “frequent outage problems that have plagued Twitter,” it seems that Twitter has elected to host somewhere else. While I’m not sure if that is a result of issues at Joyent, Hosting always seems to be the “scapegoat” in situations like these.
As the TechCrunch article states, “both companies were showing strong support for each other on their respective blogs,” which I feel is rare in this age where people jump ship at the smallest issue. But the two companies still seem to be committed to each other, even if in a lesser degree:
“Both wrote posts (here and here) describing how they were working together to prepare for the Super Bowl this coming Sunday.”
Twitter’s main blog was updated today to state that they had chosen NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services as their new hosting provider.
I use Twitter frequently to relay personal and professional information daily (tweets coming from this and the ServePath blog when a new post is delivered, for example), as well as notifying contacts of my whereabouts when I’m at networking events, and will continue to use it. Twitter is an excellent service, imitated by many but still remaining a true leader within the space. (GoGrid is on Twitter here. And ServePath is on Twitter here.)