This week I will be at CES in Las Vegas.   For a technologist, this is perhaps the greatest event to observe, explore, and get a good feel for all of the emerging technology trends.  AOL Technology will also have a very large presence from Games.Com to the rest of our media and entertainment sites.   It’s a massive event with so many different tracks that its almost impossible for me to choose.  If you will be attending and would like to connect up and compare notes, please feel free to drop me a line or stop by one of the AOL booths on the off chance I will be hanging out.

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Last week I put up a post about how AOL.com has 25% of all traffic now running through our MicroDC infrastructure.   There was a great follow up post by James LaPlaine our VP of Operations on his blog Mental Effort, which goes into even greater detail.   While many of the email inquiries I get have been based around the technology itself, surprisingly a large majority of the notes have been questions around how to make your software. applications, and development efforts ready for such an infrastructure and what the timelines for realistically doing so would be.   

The general response of course is that it depends.  If you are a web-based platform or property focused solely on Internet based consumers, or a firm that needs diversified presence in different regions without the hefty price tag of renting and taking down additional space this may be an option.  However many of the enterprise based applications have been written in a way that is highly dependent upon localized infrastructure, short application based latency, and lack adequate scaling.  So for more corporate data center applications this may not be a great fit.  It will take sometime for those big traditional application firms to be able to truly build out their infrastructure to work in an environment like this (they may never do so).   I suspect most will take an easier approach and try to ‘cloudify’ their own applications and run it within their own infrastructure or data centers under their control.   This essentially will allow them to control the access portion of users needs, but continue to rely on the same kinds of infrastructure you might have in your own data center to support it.   Its much easier to build a web based application which then connects to a traditional IT based environment, than to truly build out infrastructure capable of accommodating scale.   I am happy to continue answer questions as they come up, but as I had an overwhelming response of questions about this I thought I would throw something quick up here that will hopefully help.

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As everyone has been painfully aware last week the United States saw the devastation caused by the Superstorm Sandy.   My original intention was to talk about yet another milestone with our Micro Data Center approach.  As the storm slammed into the East Coast I felt it was probably a bad time to talk about achieving something significant especially as people were suffering through the storms outcome.  In fact, after the storm AOL kicked off an incredible supplies drive and sent truckloads of goods up to the worst of the affected areas.

So, here we are a week after the storm, and while people are still in need and suffering, it is clear that the worst is over and the clean up and healing has begun.   It turns out that Super Storm Sandy also allowed us to test another interesting case in the journey of the Micro Data Center as well that I will touch on.

25% of ALL AOL.COM Traffic runs through Micro Data Centers

I have talked about the potential value of our use of Micro Data Centers and the pure agility and economics the platform will provide for us.   Up until this point we had used this technology in pockets.  Think of our explorations as focusing on beta and demo environments.  But that all changed in October when we officially flipped the switch and began taking production traffic for AOL.COM with the Micro Data Center.  We are currently (and have been since flipping the switch) running about 25% of all traffic coming to our main web site.   This is an interesting achievement in many ways.  First, from a performance perspective we are manually limiting the platform (it could do more!) to ~65,000 requests per minute and a traffic volume of about 280mbits per second.   To date I haven’t seen many people post performance statistics about applications in modular use, so hopefully this is relevant and interesting to folks in terms of the volume of load an approach such as this could take.   We recently celebrated this at a recent All-Hands with an internal version of our MDC being plugged into the conference room.  To prove our point we added it to the global pool of capacity for AOL.com and started taking production traffic right there at the conference facility.   This proves in large part the value, agility and mobility a platform like this could bring to bear.

As I mentioned before, Super Storm Sandy threw us another curveball as the hurricane crashed into the Mid-Atlantic.   While Virginia was not hit anywhere near as hard as New York and New Jersey, there were incredible sustained winds, tumultuous rains, and storm related damage everywhere.  Through it all, our outdoor version of the MDC weathered the storm just fine and continued serving traffic for AOL.com without fail. 

This kind of Capability is not EASY or Turn-Key

That’s not to say there isn’t a ton of work to do to get an application to work in an environment like this.   If you take the problem space at different levels whether it be DNS, Load Balancing, network redundancy, configuration management, underlying application level timeouts, systems dependencies like databases, other information stores and the like the non-infrastructure related work and coding is not insignificant.   There is a huge amount of complexity in running a site like AOL.Com.  Lots of interdependencies, sophistication, advertising related collection and distribution and the like.   It’s safe to say that this is not as simple as throwing up an Apache/Tomcat instance into a VM. 

I have talked for quite awhile about what Netflix engineers originally coined as Chaos Monkeys.   The ability, development paradigm, or even rogue processes for your applications to survive significant infrastructure and application level outages.  Its essentially taking the redundancy out of the infrastructure and putting into the code. While extremely painful at the start, the savings long term are proving hugely beneficial.    For most companies, this is still something futuristic, very far out there.  They may be beholden to software manufacturers and developers to start thinking this way which may take a very very long time.  Infrastructure is the easy way to solve it.   It may be easy, but its not cheap.  Nor, if you care about the environmental angle on it, is it very ‘sustainable’ or green.   Limit the infrastructure. Limit the Waste.   While we haven’t really thought about in terms of rolling it up into our environmental positions, perhaps we should.  

The point is that getting to this level of redundancy is going to take work and to that end will continue to be a regulator or anchor slowing down a greater adoption of more modular approaches.  But at least in my mind, the future is set, directionally it will be hard to ignore the economics of this type of approach for long.   Of course as an industry we need to start training or re-training developers to think in this kind of model.   To build code in such a way that it takes into effect the Chaos Monkey Potential out there.

Want to see One Live?

We have been asked to provide an AOL MicroData Center for the Super Computing 12 conference next week in Salt Lake City, Utah with our partner Penguin Computing.  If you want to see one of our Internal versions live and up-close feel free to stop by and take a look.  Jay Moran (my Distinguished Engineer here at AOL) and Scott Killian (The leader of our data center operations teams) will be onsite to discuss the technologies and our use cases.

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Today my engineering teams and I are launching a phenomenal new product in beta that in my opinion will fundamentally transform how you consume electronic communications across email, social media, and beyond.   The product is called ALTO and I wont lie, I am totally pysched that its finally emerging.  In true “eating your own dog food” style I have used every iteration of this product for my own personal aggregation of mail accounts, social media accounts like Facebook and Linked In to name a few. I am sure my engineering teams are sick and tired of my endless “assistance” as the product has matured.  But in my mind it represents a new way to manage all those online communications we are bombarded with every day. 

What I love most about it is that it can be used by people like me with numerous e-mail accounts, online persona’s, and the like.  It can be equally effective for the casual user with a plethora of accounts and social media interactions.  It takes your digital world, organizes it, and returns control to you.

Maybe your red flags are going up already…  Does this mean I have to use AOL mail?  Nope, it definitely works with your AOL mail, but it also works platforms like Yahoo, and GMAIL, and more.  You might be thinking – Oh I see, you aggregate everything to this new Alto thing…forcing me to lose my mail stores across my various accounts right?  Nope.  Your mail stays right where it is, safe and sound.  However – it is now accessible in a format and a location that allows you be a powerful user of your own life!

So what is it?  Here is a quick high level glance…

Here is the interface at a glance.   One of the great little features that I love is that “Snooze button” on emails.  I can’t tell you how often I get a message that I definitely want to respond to, but I just cant in that exact moment.  I can snooze a message for however long I wish, and when the “alarm” goes off, the message reappears at the top of my mailbox.  Perhaps its small, but I find it super handy.

We are also introducing a whole new concept — Stacks!  Stacks are totally customizable ways of organizing your world and even allow you to create custom rules for those stacks and allow your mail to get organized in ways that matter to you!

Speaking of Stacks, we also have a few specialty pre-loaded stacks that make life so much easier… Imagine being able to search photos across all email boxes and social media platforms, and gives you an interesting and compelling set of views to go through those pictures.

The same capability is true for all attachments as well, there is a specialty stack allowing you to quickly scan through all attachments everywhere, all at once!

Get a lot of advertising and retail mails?  We solved that as well by creating a special retail stack, making your deal browsing something easy and fun to do…Just in time for the holidays!

I also love the search capability that allows searching your digital life in ease.  Instantly find matching messages, contacts, pictures and media, and photos.

Want to see more?  How about a nifty marketing video?  Click the picture below to watch the video or click here!

In the coming weeks, we will add additional capabilities and features and are targeting full commercial launch early next year.  So proud of the work done here on something truly innovative and different in our space!

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Today we re-launched Games.Com with a specific focus on cross-platform related play.   With over 5000 HTML5 based games that can be played on your phone or via a traditional web browser.   The interface was re-designed to be much cleaner with a focus on being able to search for games easily, play them and even share!  Additionally we have added a lot of other great goodies such as the ability to see your gaming history, earn badges and points, and the introduction of a new rankings system via our new Social Bar. 

With the large immigration of gamers moving to multiple platforms and the huge increase in mobile gaming this new re-launch helps position us for the future!

The engineering teams worked tirelessly for weeks to prepare the site for its new look and capabilities and I for one am extremely proud of the work that they have done.   

This is only the first of a few exciting announcements this month, so stay tuned for some other great products.

If you have an inkling or some downtime to play a game, give it a try at www.games.com. See you on the Leaderboard!

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I remember my first visit to Quincy, Washington. It was a bit of a road trip for myself and a few other key members of the Microsoft site selection team. We had visited a few of the local communities and power utility districts doing our due diligence on the area at large. Our ‘Heat map’ process had led us to Eastern Washington state. Not very far (just a few hours) from the ‘mothership’ of Redmond, Washington. It was a bit of a crow eating exercise for me as just a few weeks earlier I had proudly exclaimed that our next facility would not be located on the West Coast of the United States. We were developing an interesting site selection model that would categorize and weight areas around the world. It would take in FEMA disaster data, fault zones, airport and logistics information, location of fiber optic and carrier presence, workforce distributions, regulatory and tax data, water sources, and power. This was going to be the first real construction effort undertaken by Microsoft. The cost of power was definitely a factor as the article calls out. But just as equal was the generation mix of the power in the area. In this case a predominance of hydroelectric. Low to No carbon footprint (Rivers it turns out actually give off carbon emissions I came to find out). Regardless the generation mix was and would continue to be a hallmark of site selection of the program when I was there. The crow-eating exercise began when we realized that the ‘greenest’ area per our methodology was actually located in Eastern Washington along the Columbia River.

We had a series of meetings with Real Estate folks, the local Grant County PUD, and the Economic Development folks of the area. Back in those days the secrecy around who we were was paramount, so we kept our identities and that of our company secret. Like geeky secret agents on an information gathering mission. We would not answer questions about where we were from, who we were, or even our names. We ‘hid’ behind third party agents who took everyone’s contact information and acted as brokers of information. That was early days…the cloak and dagger would soon come out as part of the process as it became a more advantageous tool to be known in tax negotiations with local and state governments.

During that trip we found the perfect parcel of land, 75 acres with great proximity to local sub stations, just down line from the Dams on the nearby Columbia River. It was November 2005. As we left that day and headed back it was clear that we felt we had found Site Selection gold. As we started to prepare a purchase offer we got wind that Yahoo! was planning on taking a trip out to the area as well. As the local folks seemingly thought that we were a bank or large financial institution they wanted to let us know that someone on the Internet was interested in the area as well. This acted like a lightning rod and we raced back to the area and locked up the land before they Yahoo had a chance to leave the Bay Area. In these early days the competition was fierce. I have tons of interesting tales of cloak and dagger intrigue between Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. While it was work there was definitely an air of something big on the horizon. That we were all at the beginning of something. In many ways many of the Technology professionals involved regardless of company forged some deep relationships and competition with each other.

The article talks about how the ‘Gee-Whiz moment faded pretty fast’. While I am sure that it faded in time (as all things do), I also seem to recall the huge increase of local business as thousands of construction workers descended upon this wonderful little town, the tours we would give local folks and city council dignitaries, a spirit of true working together. Then of course there was the ultimate reduction in properties taxes resulting from even our first building and an increase in home values to boot at the time. Its an oft missed benefit that I am sure the town of Quincy and Grant County has continued to benefit from as the Data Center Cluster added Yahoo, Sabey, IAC, and others. I warmly remember the opening day ceremonies and ribbon cutting and a sense of pride that we did something good. Corny? Probably – but that was the feeling. There was no talk of generators. There were no picket signs, in fact the EPA of Washington state had no idea on how to deal with a facility of this size and I remember openly working in partnership on them. That of course eventually wore off to the realities of life. We had a business to run, the city moved on, and concerns eventually arose.

The article calls out a showdown between Microsoft and the Power Utility District (PUD) over a fine for missing capacity forecasting target. As this happened much after I left the company I cannot really comment on that specific matter. But I can see how that forecast could miss. Projecting power usage months ahead is more than a bit of science mixed with art. It gets into the complexity of understanding capacity planning in your data centers. How big will certain projects grow. Will they meet expectations?, fall short?, new product launches can be duds or massive successes. All of these things go into a model to try and forecast the growth. If you think this is easy I would submit that NOONE in the industry has been able to master the crystal ball. I would also submit that most small companies haven’t been able to figure it out either. At least at companies like Microsoft, Google, and others you can start using the law and averages of big numbers to get close. But you will always miss. Either too high, or too low. Guess to low and you impact internal budgeting figures and run rates. Not Good. Guess to high and you could fall victim to missing minimal contracts with utility companies and be subject to fines.

In the case mentioned in the article, the approach taken if true would not be the smartest method especially given the monthly electric bill for these facilities. It’s a cost of doing business and largely not consequential at the amount of consumption these buildings draw. Again, if true, it was a PR nightmare waiting to happen.

At this point the article breaks out and talks about how the Microsoft experience would feel more like dealing with old-school manufacturing rather than ‘modern magic’ and diverts to a situation at a Microsoft facility in Santa Clara, California.

The article references that this situation is still being dealt with inside California so I will not go into any detailed specifics, but I can tell you something does not smell right in the state of Denmark and I don’t mean the Diesel fumes. Microsoft purchased that facility from another company. As the usage of the facility ramped up to the levels it was certified to operate at, operators noticed a pretty serious issue developing. While the building was rated to run at certain load size, it was clear that the underground feeders were undersized and the by-product could have polluted the soil and gotten into the water system. This was an inherited problem and Microsoft did the right thing and took the high road to remedy it. It is my recollection that all sides were clearly in know of the risks, and agreed to the generator usage whenever needed while the larger issue was fixed. If this has come up as a ‘air quality issue’ I personally would guess that there is politics at play. I’m not trying to be an apologist but if true, it goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished.

At this point the article cuts back to Quincy. It’s a great town, with great people. To some degree it was the winner of the Internet Jackpot lottery because of the natural tech resources it is situated on. I thought that figures quoted around taxes were an interesting component missed in many of the reporting I read.

“Quincy’s revenue from property taxes, which data centers do pay, has risen from $815,250 in 2005 to a projected $3.6 million this year, paying for a library and repaved streets, among other benefits, according to Tim Snead, the city administrator.”

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post my job is ultimately to get things done and deliver results. When you are in charge of a capital program as large as Microsoft’s program was at the time – your mission is clear – deliver the capacity and start generating value to the company. As I was presented the last crop of beans harvested from the field at the ceremony we still had some ways to go before all construction and capacity was ready to go. One of the key missing components was the delivery and installation of a transformer for one of the substations required to bring the facility up to full service. The article denotes that I was upset that the PUD was slow to deliver the capacity. Capacity I would add that was promised along a certain set of timelines and promises and commitments were made and money was exchanged based upon those commitments. As you can see from the article, the money exchanged was not insignificant. If Mr. Culbertson felt that I was a bit arrogant in demanding a follow through on promises and commitments after monies and investments were made in a spirit of true partnership, my response would be ‘Welcome to the real world’. As far as being cooperative, by April the construction had already progressed 15 months since its start. Hardly a surprise, and if it was, perhaps the 11 acre building and large construction machinery driving around town could have been a clue to the sincerity of the investment and timelines. Harsh? Maybe. Have you ever built a house? If so, then you know you need to make sure that the process is tightly managed and controlled to ensure you make the delivery date.

The article then goes on to talk about the permitting for the Diesel generators. Through the admission of the Department of Ecology’s own statement, “At the time, we were in scramble mode to permit our first one of these data centers.” Additionally it also states that:

Although emissions containing diesel particulates are an environmental threat, they were was not yet classified as toxic pollutants in Washington. The original permit did not impose stringent limits, allowing Microsoft to operate its generators for a combined total of more than 6,000 hours a year for “emergency backup electrical power” or unspecified “maintenance purposes.”

At the time all this stuff was so new, everyone was learning together. I simply don’t buy that this was some kind Big Corporation versus Little Farmer thing. I cannot comment on the events of 2010 where Microsoft asked for itself to be disconnected from the Grid. Honestly that makes no sense to me even if the PUD was working on the substation and I would agree with the articles ‘experts’.

Well that’s my take on my recollection of events during those early days of the Quincy build out as it relates to the articles. Maybe someday I will write a book as the process and adventures of those early days of birth of Big Infrastructure was certainly exciting. The bottom line is that the data center industry is amazingly complex and the forces in play are as varied as technology to politics to people and everything in between. There is always a deeper story. More than meets the eye. More variables. Decisions are never black and white and are always weighted against a dizzying array of forces.

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As mentioned in both of the articles I was one of hundreds of people interviewed by the New York Times for this series.  In those conversations with Jim Glanz a few things became very apparent.  First – He has been on this story for a very long time, at least a year.   As far as journalists go, he was incredibly deeply engaged and armed with tons of facts.  In fact, he had a trove of internal emails, meeting minutes, and a mountain of data through government filings that must have taken him months to collect.  Secondly, he had the very hard job of turning this very complex space into a format where the uneducated masses can begin to understand it.  Therein lies much of the problem – This is an incredibly complex space to try and communicate it to those not tackling it day to day or even understand that technological, regulatory forces involved.  This is not an area or topic that can be sifted down to a sound bite.   If this were easy, there really wouldn’t be a story would there?

At issue for me is that the complexity of the powers involved seems to get scant attention aiming larger for the “Data Centers are big bad energy vampires hurting the environment” story.   Its clearly evident reading through the comments on the both of the articles so far.   Claiming that the sources and causes have everything to do from poor web page design to government or multi-national companies conspiracies to corner the market on energy. 

So I thought I would take a crack article by article to shed some light (the kind that doesn’t burn energy) on some of the topics and just call out where I disagree completely.     In full transparency  the “Data Barns” article doesn’t necessarily paint me as a “nice guy”.  Sometimes I am.  Sometimes I am not.  I am not an apologist, nor do I intend to do so in this post.  I am paid to get stuff done.  To execute. To deliver.  Quite frankly the PUD missed deadlines (the progenitor event to my email quoted in the piece) and sometimes people (even utility companies) have to live in the real world of consequences.   I think my industry reputation, work, and fundamental stances around driving energy efficiency and environmental conservancy in this industry can stand on its own both publicly and for those that have worked for me. 

There is an inherent irony here that these articles were published in both print and electronically to maximize the audience and readership.  To do that, these articles made “multiple trips” through a data center, and ultimately reside in one (or more).  They seem to denote that keeping things online is bad which seems to go against the availability and need of the articles themselves.  Doesn’t the New York times expect to make these articles available on-line for people to read?  Its posted online already.  Perhaps they expect that their micro-fiche experts would be able to serve the demand for these articles in the future?  I do not think so. 

This is a complex eco-system of users, suppliers, technology, software, platforms, content creators, data (both BIG and small), regulatory forces, utilities, governments, financials, energy consumption, people, personalities, politics, company operating tenets, community outreach to name a very few.  On top of managing through all these variables they also have to keep things running with no downtime.

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The article highlights many of the challenges with mail today and how it is broken, or more correctly how it has become broken over time.  The challenges around SPAM, the content of mail being long and convoluted, most e-mail clients being absolutely terrible and the like.  The author also correctly highlights that it’s a hard problem to solve from a technology, design, and business perspective.  As good as a primer as I think this article is, there are some larger issues at play here to truly fix the mail problem.

First Problem – This is not an Email Problem

E-Mail is just a symptom of a larger set of challenges.  I would posit that the problem space itself has evolved and morphed from e-mail into a “Digital Lifestyle Organization” (DLO) issue.  Solving issues relating to e-mail, only solves part of the problem space.   The real challenge is that users are now being bombarded by messages, information, news, and the like from tons of different sources.   The signal to noise ratio is getting extremely high and is resulting people’s frustrations to grow increasingly caustic.   Yes, there is Spam.  But there is an equal amount of opt-in notes and messages, social updates from various social media platforms, RSS feeds, News updates, and a lists of other categories.  It can all be a bit mind-boggling and off-putting.  The real question should not be how to solve the e-mail problem, but rather – how to solve the Digital Lifestyle Organization problem.   Mail is simply a single element in the larger problem.

That’s not to say the points in the article are wrong or cant be applied to this wider definition.  You still face a huge design, interface, workflow challenge trying to organize this kind of data.   The client in whatever form it takes must be easy to use and intuitive.  A task that is elusive in the e-mail space to be sure, and is likely to be even more rare in this new “DLO” world. 

Second Problem – There is comfort in an old pair of Shoes

One of the interesting things I have learned here at AOL since taking on the role of CTO is that there is actually strata of different kinds of users.  I would place myself in the category of power user willing to try and jump platforms for better look/feel, even minor differentiated features and capabilities.  This layer of “Technorati” are constantly looking for the next best thing.  There are other strata however, that don’t necessarily embrace that kind of rapid change, moderate change, or in fact there are layers that don’t like any change at all!  It’s a complicated set of issues and engineering challenges.  At a rough business level, you can lose users because you change to much or don’t change at all.   Some of my friends in the space consider this a timing issue… of when to perfectly time these transitions.  The facts are however, these different stratas change at their own pace and we should understand that certain strata will never change.  In essence you have a few options – An introduce a platform that changes regardless of the user base desires, stay stagnant and never change, or try to find some kind of hybrid solution knowing that it may ultimately increase some of the cost structures around supporting different kinds of environments.  Unless, of course, you build something new that is SO Compelling at to change the game entirely.  

Candidly speaking, this is an issue that AOL has struggled with longer than just about everyone else in the space.   Historically speaking we have oscillated across all of these solutions over close to 30 years with varying degrees of success.  While we can debate what ‘success’ looks like, there is no denying that we have been looking at the science of e-mail for a long time.  With a loyal user base of tens of millions to hundreds of millions users, it provides us with a rich data set to analyze behaviors, usage patterns, user feedback, costs, trends, and the like.   Its this data that highlights the different usage patterns and strata of users.   Its data that is impossible to get as a start-up, and so immensely massive that categorization is no trivial task.

The process we use in terms of understanding these strata could best be described as ‘Electronic Ethnography’.  There are some interesting differentiations in how mail and Digital Lifestyle in aggregate  is used across a variety of variables.  Things like age, gender, location, locale, friends, social circles, and a host of others all play a role in defining the strata.  Simply speaking there are some strata that simply don’t want to change.   Others are very comfortable with their current e-mail experience and don’t see a driving need to change, etc. 

This essentially nets out to the fact that E-mail and information aggregation is a very complex space.  We must face the fact there will be segments of users that will simply not change because something cooler has come about or some features were added or modified.  In my personal opinion the only way to truly impact and change these behaviors is to come up with something so compelling, so different, that it changes the game and solves the DLO issues.

Third Problem – BIG and Complex

While this was called out by Gentry Underwood in his article it cannot be stated enough.  Whether you focus on mail, the larger DLO space, or any kind of personal information aggregation – there are a host of factors, variables, and challenges to really solve this space.   It also drives big infrastructure, operations, and the like.  Its not going to be easy.  As the TechCrunch article headlines – Go Big or Go Home.   It’s a huge problem space, It’s a huge opportunity, and half measures may help but in and of themselves wont do much to move the needle.   Mail and what I call the DLO space is a huge opportunity of the future of our usage of the Internet medium, in fact it may be the biggest.   There will likely continue to be many casualties trying to solve it.

Fourth Problem – Monetization

From a pure business perspective – Its hard to make money off of mail.   The most common way to monetize mail (or aggregated information) is likely to be advertising.  However, advertising has a direct negative impact on the overall user experience in general and is a key driver of user loss.  You can easily see this in the overall reduction of “advertising” in mail across a number of key players.   Another method is tying it to an overall paid user subscription. But this is challenging as well, are the features and overall “stickiness” of your product something that customers will see a continued value for.  At AOL we have both models in use.   Interestingly, we have users in both models, that fall into the strategy that consider “change” as bad.  As mentioned in the third problem, mail is a big problem, and will require some kind of monetization scheme to justify some of the efforts.  While the larger players have existing user bases to help with this challenge, it’s a real issue for some of the more innovative ideas coming out of smaller start-ups, and is likely a key reason for their potential demise.  The person or firm who comes up with a non-ad/non-subscription based monetization strategy will truly change the game in this space.

With Google’s purchase of Sparrow, the re-design of Microsoft’s Outlook product, some interesting announcements that we have coming out, and a small explosion of start-ups in this space – Things are starting to get interesting.  Hard.  But interesting for sure.  May have to post more on this in the near future.

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So today I am happy to announce the roll out of a new capability for our Micro-DC – An indoor version of the Micro-DC.

While the first instantiations of our new capability were focused on outdoor environments, we were also hard at work at an indoor version with the same set of goals.   Why work on an indoor version as well?   Well you might recall in the original post I stated:

We are no longer tied to traditional data center facilities or colocation markets.   That doesn’t mean we wont use them, it means we now have a choice.  Of course this is only possible because of the internally developed cloud infrastructure but we have freed ourselves from having to be bolted onto or into existing big infrastructure.   It allows us to have an incredible amount geo-distributed capacity at a very low cost point in terms of upfront capital and ongoing operational expense.

We need to maintain a portfolio of options for our products and services.  In this case – having an indoor version of our capabilities to ensure that our solution can live absolutely anywhere.   This will allow our footprint, automation and all, to live inside any data center co-location environment or the interior of any office building anywhere around the planet, and retain the extremely low maintenance profile that we were targeting from an operational cost perspective.  In a sense you can think of it as “productizing” our infrastructure.  Could we have just deployed racks of servers, network kit, etc. like we have always done?  Sure.   But by continuing to productize our infrastructure we continue to drive down the costs relating to our short term and long term infrastructure costs.  In my mind, Productizing your infrastructure, is actually the next evolution in standardization of your infrastructure.   You can have infrastructure standards in place – Server Model, RAM, HD space, Access switches, Core switches, and the like.  But until you get to that next phase of standardizing, automating, and ‘productizing’ it into a discrete set of capabilities – you only get a partial win.

Some people have asked me, “Why didn’t you begin with the interior version to start with? It seems like it would be the easier one to accomplish.”  Indeed I cannot argue with them, it would have probably been easier as there were much less challenges to solve.  You can make basic assumptions around where this kind of indoor solution would live in, and reduce much of the complexity.   I guess it all nets out to a philosophy of solving the harder problems first.   Once you prove the more complicated use case, the easier ones come much faster.   This is definitely the situation here.  

While this new capability continues the success we are seeing in re-defining the cost and operations of our particular engineering environments, the real challenge here (as with all sorts infrastructure and cloud automation) is whether or not we can map similar success of our applications and services to work correctly in that space.   On that note, I should have more to post soon. Stay Tuned! 

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AOL is expanding and growing in the Atlanta area.  We are looking for strong, tech savvy mobile engineers to help us drive the next generation experience for some of the Web’s most well known and iconic brands!

If you are a developer in the Atlanta area and really want to work on platforms and products that operate at a huge Internet scale.  This could be a phenomenal chance for some incredible experience to work at a re-energized Internet company looking to drive and blend Technology and Media.

The only downside would be that you would have to work in my organization!

So here is what we are looking for!

If you have any questions or comments feel free to email me directly or send me a comment.  Staffing Firms and Recruiters need not respond.  

Here are just a few of the brands that we host and support:

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