Cloud Computing for the Rest of Us

Use Cases

Given Cloud's nascent nature, there is a need to identify use case to help people to both understand Cloud Computing and see what are the appropriate Cloud applications to build. The Cloud Computing Use Case Discussion Group was formed to capture specific use cases as a way to describe and benchmark the emerging Cloud usage in the wild. Their most recent v4 white paper (link below) is worth a look.

At the very fundamental level, some combination of the four potentially actors - End user, Enterprise, Public Cloud, and Private Cloud - constitute a Cloud usage. There are two scenarios that I believe will become increasingly prevalent over time. One is the idea of "cloud bursting" whereby demand spike is met by accessing the public cloud. An use case was an insurance company expecting to process a large volume of claim after a natural disaster. Instead of putting the extra load onto the existing infrastructure and causing a system wide impact on other businesses and regions, it used the public cloud to handle excess traffic instead of investing in additional internal IT infrastructure that would have sat idle after the event.

The second scenario is to use the cloud for machine-to-machine process with no end user in mind. In the use case, an agency needs to conduct computing intensive processes over a growing large dataset. Instead of building up a physical infrastructure for the job, it was able to achieve the same result at 50% of the cost and without the setup time require for their own datacenter.

A Business Tool

The hot issues surrounding Cloud Computing are not technical in nature. For example, security and SLA (Service Level Agreement) speak to the nature of the user's business processes and needs. Only the business operators have the appropriate context to determine if a vendor's security and SLA are sufficient.

Newly enacted legal and professional requirements related to the location of the data and users are likely to be felt by enterprises as they expand market coverage through the Cloud. Different countries and regions have regulations on where specific data can reside physically. Similarly, contractual agreements such as digital rights management will also determine where and how a consumer can access information delivered through cloud.

http://cloudusecases.org/

Digital Publishing as a Platform

A New Platform

After talking with Steve Kobrin about Wharton Digital Press (WDP), it really got me thinking about what this could mean as a platform. More specifically, what are the areas of "experimentation" that may be worth trying.

Some Experiment Ideas

Hardware design: Since Kindle last much longer than iPad, but iPad can do the razzle-dazzle graphics, what makes for a better consumption experience and what are the trade-off's. It would be interesting to see if there are logical segmentation in terms of who would find which device "better" under what circumstances. And, most importantly, why.

Hardware business-model: since majority of cost comes from physical distribution, a national news-media firm is thinking about giving subscribers fancy tablet to cut cost over the mid/long term. A major financial firm is thinking about giving their bankers tablets as a way to eliminate the $10k average spend per year per banker in printing. With PoD, printing and distribution may not be a pain point for WDP per se, but this could be an opportunity to explore alliance with organizations who may be interested in providing subsidized hardware.

Software: interactivity is clearly one of the major benefits of going digital. It would be interesting to explore what are the key aspects that are important to readers and authors. The result could be fed into a process to create a framework/suit that makes the process easier in the creation chain.

Immersive relationship: with the hardware and content having interactivity through sensors and data trail, this is the first time that a publisher/author can have an on-going relationship with the readership. How should this work? For example, with the machines understanding what readers prefer in actual consumption, this could provide a venue for recommendation not unlike what Netflix Challenge has done but for reading.

For readers: I take a lot of notes when reading. Until now, this has been a very cumbersome process especially for retrieving specific detail and consolidating across volumes. Some sort of vault would be nice. Better yet, a way to automate cross referencing as I search for past notes would be sweet.

I could go on. This is going to be an interesting space to watch in the years to come.

What Happens when a Cloud Turns Dark

April 21st, 2011: when Amazon's East Zone went Dark

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) went dark for a few days in the US East Coast on Apr 21st. The impact was wide and widely noticed. So much so that Economist, a publication that I read avidly but not for its technology coverage, noted the breakdown in an article a few days later.

The fact that one data center went offline is not a surprise per se. (Without any hint of callousness and acknowledging the real impact on the businesses involved,) it just happens. What is more interesting is to consider the famed Warren Buffett quote and find out who has NOT been swimming naked in the rising Cloud.

Chaos Monkey and other Lessons

Netflix is one of the organizations that had fared well in the outage even though, given its large customer footprint, one would reasonably expect them to suffer all sorts of problems since they have moved their infrastructure to the Amazon Cloud. In their Tech Blog (below), Netflix team talked about how they dealt with it.

Instead of just moving their datacenter onto EC2 through VM, Netflix made architectural changes to take advantage of the inherit flexibility (and instability) of Cloud Computing. Nobody is perfect though and they did not account for the possibility of an entire zone/datacenter going out. In other words, switching over to other active zones was a time consuming and error-prone manual process.

The most interesting part for me is the Lessons Learned section. In addition to build up the ability to handle failover and recover at the Zone level, Netflix will scale up random disruptions, from Chaos Monkey to Chaos Gorilla, to introduce more failure as an on-going part of its system-wide robustness design.

An effective, albeit brutal, solution that could not be fathomed before Cloud Computing.

Lessons Netflix Learned from the AWS Outage