—–

animoto – takes music files and photos and makes movies
- very seductive
- started as college kids with laptops; still working just off laptops and the cloud
signed up 25k customers an hour (facebook app)

infrastructure as a service

setting things straight:
* not amazon selling excess, designed as self-standing business
amazon is customer of aws, but others even larger

* sa jobs change if you insert cloud services into portfolio, but
not designed to end SA jobs

definitions liked and disliked
cloud = things somewhere managed by somewhere else
cloud is target for criticism, even when technology is used by something else
(air new Zealand failed due to mainframe failure, not “cloud”)

a style of computing where massively scalable it related capabilities are provided as a service across the Internet to multiple external customers – Gardner 2008

missing “on demand” – and releasing when no longer needed
missing “pay as you go” – if you don’t use, you don’t pay

foreign concept in computing, but not in other infrastructure (power, water, gas)
true utility – only pay for what you use

precursors:
: software as a service
- what it meant to create software that was operated, efficiently, at scale
– different expertise

: distributed computing
- needed new algorithms to work at a large, cost effective scale
- academics of 5 years ago didn’t cover it

: virtualization
- beyond cpu – disk, guarantees on IO, networking

: SOA – service orientated architecture
- simple description of service, don’t need libraries/software to determine how to use
http, REST, xml, whatever… then build your own w/ software
- no integration, pure tools

if major business magazines start calling Bezos crazy, we’re doing things right

first 5 years, amazon a traditional web shop. one single app ran amazon
- different command line flags for different purposes
- centralization not all bad

~2002 rearchitecture needed, and then Target wanted amz to do a site for them
- made them realize major opportunity out there
- to achieve a level of scale amz could not reach by self
- principle: drive cost down to infrastructure, we can lower retail prices
- competing on price is good for customers

next architecture should be platform
- service oriented approach, internal and externally
- now some of the largest ecommerce sites run on this platform

- take a piece of business logic, what data it operated on: break out to API
- API becomes only source to data
- bit by bit transition: business logic could move slowly

each amazon page hits 250-300 different amazon services to build/return
- each action/logic an independent service

technical architecture, and management architecture
- teams run services, build them, improve them, maintain them, enhance them
- no separation between development and IT
- thought: engineers would be in contact with customer, and motivated to drive improvement
- didn’t want an isolated operations department, did not want to isolate engineers

- allows fast innovation, mobility
– get a small team, standard way to get resources, try things out

600 services means 600 teams

internal rules for how to deal with failures
- if we lose a whole data center, customer should not be affected
- two data centers, may violate SLA, but functionally should be 100% correct

teams needed to scale w/ capacity
- doing that in parallel 600 times over: not so good
- became obvious when teams started communicating more and more w/ networking group

70/30 switch
70% of time scaling of servers, dealing w/ infrastructure matters
- more databases, new storage techs, failover testing

(mini aside from slides)
“game days” – just to make sure guarantees are met
- turn off a data center
- see what happens
- first time, looked really good on paper but didn’t work well in reality
- not just failover, beepers going off, switching to secondaries, etc.
- restore operation was difficult
– but if you don’t exercise frequently, you cannot tolerate when happens in real life

30% of time, energy, dollars on differentiated value creation
70% of time, energy, dollars on undifferentiated heavy lifting

technical debt for creating complicated solutions
- pay it off by making a shared service platform
- hoped to flip 70/30 switch

there isn’t an enterprise pattern you won’t find in amazon (search, prediction tracking, batch processing, etc.)

for some reason we tend to put DCs next to trailer parks, and trailer parks attract tornadoes

horror stories about data center loss

need multiple data centers; can’t pour money into one good one, need to focus on multiple good/ok ones?

disk failures are not age related (in large numbers)
8-10% of disk will fail per year, if makes it past infant mortality
- burn in is important
no prediction of which disk will fail per node
one guy in DC whose full time job is nothing else but replacing disks
10 guys with disk dense nodes

capacity planning for the busiest day of the year is hard
– average 200n a day, bursts to 900n in Q4/holidays

web-scale computing
- scalable infrastructure

virtualized infrastructure, start w/ computing
give engineers requirement to start building against software platform
amz does not mandate tools, languages — trusts engineers to make best choices, hiring practices to support this
– so forcing them to switch to programming paradigm would be bad
- so virtual machines were a part of the platform

amz was really good at server provisioning
- 5-6 hours from request to use
- but still did not incense engineers to release capacity when they no longer needed them
- needed to switch to minutes to provision
– learned (now) that still does not incense release behavior

- behavior comes from automation, because settings things up no longer difficult

chef, scalar, open source tools
- “provisioning is programmable”

VMs and xen -> amazon ec2 elastic computing cloud was born
- we’re also cheap
- emulate data centers as “reliability zones”, worldwide regions

storage
17% 70% of the storage was not relational – just key value
- 1 index
- turned into amazon s3

__% 20% of storage was single table, lots of indexes but no other tables
- amazon simpledb

amazon elastic block storage – treat it like a hard disk, present to ec2
relational databases, squid,

relational database service – “dba as a service”
not inf scalable database, but they run mysql for you – tune to size and storage
but they run it for you
use std mysql libraries
- not something they originally designed internally, matched customer need
- but now that it exists amz engineesr use it

saw how efficient engrs came using this service

amz infra services
principles:
scalable – incr/decr capacity in minutes
cost-effective – low rate, pay as you go
reliable – amazon’s proven infra (aware of cost of outages to customers)
secure – multilayer security

developed as tools
- each should be independent, or seductive on its own
- tools in your tool box, not forced to use all of them together

amazon virtual private cloud (vpc)
can create a walled garden in the cloud
vpn back to your environment
give a cidr block to vpc, then start creating subnets
- can allocate ec2 instances in those subnets
- either part of your block in your enterprise
looks like these nodes in the cloud are part of your local infra
std management tools, deployment tools, auditing tools still work
seamless extension of data center to cloud

if you release resources, you save money
increase agility – massive server park, around the world, multiple data centers
- removes constraints to thinking about this
- access to infinite scalable resources

enterprise computing these days is kinda 1990s
many haven’t reached client/server yet
too many amber terminals still in use
so “new IT” development happening in cloud

82B objects in s3 2009q3

enterprise partners: oracle, ibm, ms, redhat, sun
- but they’ve adopted different licensing models
- stop hammering them about cloud strategies – ask about how licensing is changing
– make sure they are changing (pay as you go)
- ibm is more creative: use all for free in development, production: pay small ec2 upcharge
pay a bit more on an hourly basis (10c/hour instead of 8.5c/hour)

use case trends:
DR, HPC, collaborations, large scale analysis, load testing, marking compliance
- allocate cloud for DR purpose if needed, and use for R&D, load testing

example case:
storage in s3, computing power on customer desktop (adobe air)
- back in time analysis of stock ticker info
-> could build new product w/o infrastructure

washington post example of disseminating hillary clinton’s schedule

guardian all expense reports for government, let users read all of them, mark suspect ones
-> crowdsourcing used the cloud

Internet Scaling
indy.com, indy500.com – 8 flash streams, lots of video feeds, etc. 3 times a year
espn
playfish – scaling gaming online
- farmville (?) 25M concurrent users
most marketing campaigns need the scalability

eharmony – 250 marriages a day
- use a relational database (ha ha ha – he didn’t get joke first time)
- large map reduce jobs go at night, new results in the morning

netflix picked amz b/c needed a platform that would really scale up
- even if they compete w/ amz for VOD
- amz wants netflix to be successful

can get hippa certified for putting data in amz
load testing turbotax.com prior to tax day

amz really wants the feedback to tweak operations, create new business models
- relational database service (rds)
- reserved/predicted ec2 at savings

reduce prices of storage, networking, and pass savings to aws

@werner on twitter
mynameise.com/werner
- integrates all these social network info

aws.amazon.com/ “and a credit card is all you need”

Questions:

- what happens if oracle kills sun/mysql?
A: not something they have much control over,

- chef, cfengine, config automation: how do you do network? is the net static, or do you provide tools to manage net?
A: build and provide some high level tools
elastic load balancer
except for vpc part, don’t give customers network control themselves
machines have firewalls and users can adjust those
but no control over edge routers, pieces

- virtual gardens/data security: strongly regulated data. how does that get affected?
A: many different layers in this story
what happens if you remove object? what happens if disk fails?
guarantees are necessary for aws to get certifications themselves
for the rest, it’s something amz tries to help their customers w/
security an end to end issue, so encryption still a good solution
see customers split data/metadata to encrypt payload but index/table metadata
- but then who manages the keys? amz does not do key management
some customers achieved hippa, ferpa
- whitepaper on website about this
but end-to-end issue
popular healthcare as a platform providers to work in this space
large parts work in the cloud, large parts stay in the walled garden

End of questions/talk.

[15:54] trombonekenny: Did you hear? Obama got MLB MVP for throwing out the first pitch
[15:55] IlliniBone: did he get the cy young, too?
[15:55] trombonekenny: and a golden glove. weird.
[15:55] IlliniBone: pitchers don’t get golden gloves
[15:56] IlliniBone: now you’re just making stuff up
[15:56] trombonekenny: well, he might at sometime in the future move to the outfield
[15:56] IlliniBone: they’re creating a new wing for him in the pro football hof, too
[15:57] trombonekenny: hell, they’re renaming canton to obama, oh
[15:58] IlliniBone: obama? oh.

Every Tuesday I’m going to share a blog, a Twitter, a TV show; some source of something that I think is great. If you Twitter, this is like a #followFriday. But this is on Tuesday, and not necessarily Twitter related.

This “sharing a blog I read” is something I’ve previously argued against doing. Clearly there’s risk. I could offend you with what I think is great. I could insult you with my low-brow levels of entertainment. Even worse, when you eventually read everything I read, you’ll lose interest in me. You’ll know what I know, before I have the chance to tell it to you. I mean, my humor is repetitive enough as is; what happens when you know the joke/story/news before I tell it? Eventually you won’t need me.

But, in the meantime, I’ll share what I can and maybe you’ll share things back with me.

We would be remiss to start our #sharingTuesday without nodding to my Canadian beer loving Saints over at pintday.org (or pd.o, or pode if you say it outloud). Their blog, the first I ever saw with their own ISSN, is a weekly collection of beer (laden? induced?) supported rants. This week’s draft (get it?) is especially funny because the boys teach you how to properly rant at a bar on a Tuesday. (pintday.org/archive/20011113)

Okay, two things. One, I know pintday’s blog is now defunct (the pintday spirit lives on, and I still try to worship). No one says funny has to be current. Old things can still be funny. How many times have I watched Ghostbusters in my life? And it still makes me laugh every. single. time. So it’s okay to dip into the vault at #sharingTuesday. pd.o will also be funnier if you like Canadian politics, computers, and hating traffic.

Secondly, yes, I know it’s Wednesday. Get off my back. Let’s be honest: these aren’t going to EVERY week, and maybe not even all on Tuesdays.

So, there we are. #sharingTuesday #1 is pintday.org Enjoy, and see you next week.

Hi all,

I run an IT Open House in Siebel Center the first week of classes and
field a lot of incoming student questions. Some of them are Computer
Science specific, but many are campus-wide — reflecting that our
students/customers/users are not as territorial or pigeon-holed as our
unit IT organizations. (An observation that a more campus-wide,
IT@Illinois perspective really does service our users better — at least
the student ones.)

I’m all for having a centralized repository of facilities (and their
info) available to students. If I can help let me know. But the walled
garden of only certain users in certain labs really makes this
complicated, and fragmented. From a user perspective, I don’t care that
ACES or VetMed have computer labs if I cannot use them. (And that cuts
the other way too — CS has labs, csil.cs.uiuc.edu, that are
restricted just to CS students. It means we’re also burned the first
week of the semester as Banner and auth groups don’t get updated as
quickly as students want.)

We could do better as a community of labmasters to unite under one
framework (authentication, authorization, applications, documentation,
signage, printing, promotion, support, labsitting, etc.) than we do as
isolated labs. Even if we are organizationally different, if we
appeared to our students as a common-front, we would service them better
(and might even make the job easier for us).

… That’s not too much to ask, is it?

The bigger questions that comes up in the open house isn’t “where are
the labs?” but “where can I print?” It’s an exercise for an IT Pro to
find 1) all the public labs on campus and their websites, 2) then their
printing information, charges and instructions. No wonder it confuses
our students so much. The best I could come up with to document and
share was: www-dave.cs.uiuc.edu/OH08-printing.pdf I would be
glad to replace that with something better (and share that with others).

How do we start to do that?

Dave

PS. You can see my Spring CCSP poster about the IT Open House at
www-dave.cs.uiuc.edu/CCSP-2009-ITOpenHouse.pdf

LCDR Ken Collins, Conductor
Jeff Daeschler, Graduate Student Conductor

*Program*
Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Star Spangled Banner

Americans We / Henry Filmore

American Salute / Morton Gould
Jeff Daeschler, Graduate student conductor

Florentiner March / Julius Fucik
Jeff Daeschler, Graduate student conductor

American in Paris / George Gershwin, John Krance

Nautical Variations / Jeffrey A. Taylor
Phil Coleman, Euphonium

Black Horse Troop / John Philip Sousa

Phantom of the Opera / Warren Barker

Armed Forces Salute / Bob Lowden

Illinois Loyalty / T.H. Guild, Mark Hindsley

…. Wow, typing that up, that’s a lot of America. See you tonight! 7pm on the Quad.

[ Edit: Updated 6/26 with more info from the real program. ]

“TMZ.com mentioned me today, and I didn’t even have to show them my hoo haw. Weird.”

Then later, “This is science: Dudes have a hoo haws, and ladies have hoo hoos. I can’t believe I have to explain this. DO NOT MAKE ME DRAW YOU A PICTURE.”

Then later, “Just realized I’m discussing genital colloquialisms with half a million people at once. I have been to the future and it really is weird.”

It sure is, Wil. Cool, but weird.

Still wondering when we’re going to start heading ’south’ to Josh’s folks place.

Josh’s mom can cook for me any night of the week. I wonder if she’s found the sausage I hid in her fridge.
(Insert hidden sausage jokes about your mom here.)

Why am I always staying at the top of Embassy Suites? Don’t they have lower floors? Any why were the cockatiels always asleep when I looked at them, but I heard them every morning when I was trying to sleep?

Fresh kegs are always welcomed. Even the Bud Light was spot on this weekend.

930 miles total, good times. What did I do for Earth Day? Drove additional 320 miles for doggy daycare, but it was worth it.

Seen on trucks: “Farm boys plant it deeper” and “Silly boyz, trucks are for chics.”

Taking 65 from Louisville to Nashville is a more scenic route than 24 was coming back.

OMG did we see tree damage. Icy winter, I guess.

57N had construction, so we took a Benton-Ida route 37 detour. Was neat to drive through Benton again, around the square, seeing the old places. Decided not to go look at Granny’s old place. It’s still there, untouched, in my mind.

I didn’t buy anything at Starbucks, but I pooped there.

The traffic in Nashville seemed really screwy. Lots of exit here, get across 8 lanes of traffic in 1 mile, exit here, loop 270 degrees around, repeat. Who designed these highways?

Getting out of the concert was nuts. Too much traffic, not enough direction. Too many flashing reds/flashing yellows not getting the job done. GPSes are so totally worth it.

Hotel Business Suite had fast enough computers, but was like 90 degrees. Pay-for-wifi sucks.

Need smarter smart phone. Took over an hour tonight to catch up on tweets, and that was after occasionally reading them on the current phone.

Vanderbilt’s stadium grass felt great on bare feet, but you put your shoes on to go to the port-a-potties.

Did not know Jason Mraz was two years older than me. And his hat is older than both of us combined.

Did not kick MC’s ass in cribbage, not even once, but played masterful Euchre.

Weather for the weekend: NICE. 80s/90s, sunny (or some clouds, not dark), windy. So glad I repacked to include shorts. Was not expecting it to be THIS NICE.

You can find Cubs fans anywhere, even in an SEC school parking lot.

Organic trip to Maker’s Mark Distillery materialized after almost no arm-twisting. Was told other bourbon tours not as good. Wouldn’t know – was only one I really wanted to visit.

Was a little giddy driving down the Bourbon Trail. THE TWISTY, WINDY, TURNY, CURVY, shoulders? oh no, we don’t need shoulders BOURBON TRAIL OF DEATH. Driving to a distillery should not be a white knuckled experience. Good thing the sample was small, we might not make it out of there.

Got to dip my fingers in 12′ diameter, 12′ deep 100+ year old vats of sour mash. It was delicious. Tasted like cereal and beer.

Visiting the Maker’s Mark family really did feel like family, from the last minute unscheduled tour, to the sassy merch counter lady, to the surprisingly good Mint Julep bottle sample, to the workers out front painting shutters.

Maker’s Mark did an excellent job of their ‘mark’ branding. I could have spent hundreds in that gift shop.

Totally going back when my barrel is ready. (They send you a golden ticket.) Next time, more sampling and dipping! And trying that place on 65 the employee recommended when we were relaxing in the parking lot.

Lesson: the tastier the barbeque, the more it’s going to hurt later.

Everyone on Broadway/2nd in Nashville was either going into a club/bar, leaving a club/bar, or carrying their music gear (drums, guitar, etc.) to the next gig. Live music everywhere, but with a party of 8 and full bellies, and beer at the hotel room, we just window shopped — didn’t go in. Need to check out the Nash nightlife when rooming within walking distance of downtown.

Nashville needs an open liquor law so you can properly street roam around Broadway.

I drove all the time this weekend and didn’t look at a GPS once. Damn thing kept beeping from the back seat, tho.

If you let Andrea pick the CD, it’s going to be Sting.

Cue the discussion, yet again, about what defines a bourbon and when whiskey is spelled without the e.

Could have been the heat, could have been the booze, could have been the intensity, but I couldn’t stop the tears during the tin whistle solo in Bartender (opened the DMB set). Jeff is an amazing sax player, but it just then sunk in I wouldn’t hear Roi anymore. So I took off my hat and enjoyed the song.

First time ‘tweeting’ during a concert. It’s kinda fun. Liked how 4 of us noted the ‘last stop’ tease.
What drum tease did Carter do in his closing drum solo set?

Dave did a nice job of something old, something new. The new songs need to evolve; drop their pop roots and blossom into some kick ass jams. Will reserve judgement until the new disc drops and have heard it again this summer.

BTW, this was DMB concert number 25 for me, I think. 26, 27, and 28 already purchased/scheduled. May consider one night of Deer Creek.

Vandy’s stadium is small, but looks like a fun place to play. Got serious claustrophobia walking out their tunnel with 20k other people, not moving quickly. Unnnngh. Go Commodores!

I think everyone in Tennessee wears sandals. And tank tops. And smiles.

It shouldn’t surprise me, but it does: We can all be adults, but go away for a weekend and act like children. In good and bad ways.

I like how every DMB weekend requires brand new bottles of condiments. Somehow I wound up with the mustard and mayo. See you in Alpine!

(If I missed anything, let me know and I’ll update the recap.)

Through blogging or twittering I’m going to try to make this social: keep others informed on what I’m reading, invite discussion, solicit suggestions. Big Rocks could mean anything that helped me in my job, but right now IT governance and remodeling on campus is a big topic, so I’m starting there.

Last Thursday’s goal was reviewing the IT@Illinois Concept papers and Chuck’s Concepts about Concepts white paper. I only got through the Illinois Tomorrow paper, but I have three pages of typed comments. (My first week and I’m already behind.)

This Thursday I might be traveling, so I want to read a few more things ahead of time to ponder in the car. I hope to get through the rest of the concept papers.

The next goal is to review the Library Service Models: reskimming the Budget+ report from last April about the future of the library, and then reading the New Service Models (NSM) Action Plan (April 2009). I care about the university libraries, as a student and staff member, so this is interesting to me. But in a larger sense, I see the NSM program as a resource to better understand IT@IL. Like campus IT, the library was faced with “do more with less” and has spent the last two years in a process of evaluation, communication, and now action. They’re essentially ahead of the game for what we will face as IT@IL. What can we learn from their experiences? How far apart should IT@IL and the library be? (You probably can already guess my thoughts on this.)

There’s a talk/discussion on Friday about the Action Plan but I’ll be out of town. Will someone go and take notes for me?

IT@IL people: Even if you don’t read anything about the NSM, check out these three things discussed at the Feb 4, 2009 faculty meeting: www.library.uiuc.edu/nsm/spring2009update.html. From the PPT: Guiding Principles: Interdependence, Resilience, Deep engagement in research and teaching communities, Commitment to building strong, responsive collections. That directly parallels many of the IT@IL concepts.

If any of my library friends are reading this, do you have pointers to any other ‘must reads’ that have come out of the library program? Anything good from the project teams bubble up to the top?

top - 00:19:39 up 23 days,  1:29,  4 users,  load average: 2.69, 2.38, 1.77
Tasks: 207 total,   2 running, 204 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s): 12.6%us,  1.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 77.8%id,  8.5%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem:  16432232k total, 16347460k used,    84772k free,   147064k buffers
Swap:  1048568k total,  1048568k used,        0k free,   940724k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
22848 astudent  25   0 14.3g  13g  820 R  100 84.5   1872:33 nano

We’re all a little curious how you can even get nano (aka pico) up to 14 gigs of RAM. Ick.