Confessions of an Intentional Serendipity Coordinator

A few months back I had a great conversation with Pat McDevitt, a good friend of mine who at the time was the Engineering Leader for MapQuest.   MapQuest is going through some interesting changes and evolution from a product and engineering perspective and the topic of creating, sustaining, and driving a culture of innovation came up.  This of course led us to talking about the concept of Intentional Serendipity. 

We live in a marketplace where management-speak is fast, loose, and most of all abundant.  Most of it makes me sick and you immediately lose “lets go hang out and get a drink” points when I hear you babble one out.  You definitely don’t want to know what happens if you try to combine two of them together in a sentence.   But I have a dirty little secret to confess.   I have to say that no other management buzzword in the last five years has really captured much of my mind share as much as this phrase – Intentional Serendipity.

Now to be clear I am not really sure that it qualifies as “management-speak” just yet.  I really don’t hear to many people talking about it.  It hasn’t made it on to Bloomberg TV.  I haven’t read to much about it in the blogosphere although its definitely out there.  I have heard it only a smattering of times in podcasts.  I definitely know that it has not been thrown around ubiquitously at the conferences and industry events that I attend.    But it may be getting close to a break out.

Or perhaps I am just infatuated with the term because it most closely matches my style of how I like to cultivate innovation in my teams. 

I am not sure where it began and I am sure word-smithy pundits have thought to put these two words together for a very long time. But by and large I am an engineer at heart and its rare for us to be considered word-smithy pundits. 

The definition has to do with placing yourself in a situation where different ideas, processes, people, cultural norms are present (the intentional) and allowing those inputs to combine with your unique experience to create something new.  A new experience, a new idea, a new business, a whole new perspective, whatever.  There are lots of interesting definitions out there, but my personal favorite is short and sweet and comes from a Professional Learning educator for the YMCA in Toronto, named Peter Skillen.    His quote:

“Getting to where ideas can find you!”

 

I have always been fascinated about how the “Spark” of an idea comes to be and what drives the following ignition of that spark into actions and effort to turn into into reality.   Looking at my own life and career , its very clear to me that my own story is one full of Intentionally Serendipitous moments even though I may not have fully understood it at the time.  

Once you realize that it is indeed a real “thing” it can become an incredibly powerful force to harness in business, in your life, in anything.   But most especially for those of us in leadership positions in the Technology and Engineering disciplines.   The Institute of Design at Stanford University or “d school” basically operates on a very formal process by combining multi-disciplinary students and members for creating the fertile ground of amazing moments of inspiration.  Founded on the principles of Design Thinking it’s a pure application of Intentional Serendipity.   There is a great TED talk from Corey Ford at a TED event at UNC that I highly recommend watching.

As a technology leader in an organization I believe its my duty to create these opportunities to create this fertile ground. Referencing back to Skillen’s definition, Its my duty to create the place where the ideas can find members of my teams.   Oh sure, you have things like projects to get done, goals to accomplish, and the like – but providing these kinds of experiences for your teams is absolutely required if you want to create a culture where innovation can take root.

One of the ways I try to do that is by having “Out of the Blue Table Top Sessions” or as they have become to be known – Blue Table Top Sessions.  Bringing in engineering and architects with different skillsets, combine them with product and business people, provide a fun atmosphere, plenty of time, food, and a couple of key ignition questions or challenges to get the ball rolling.  

Creativity is highly encouraged.  The tables are covered in blue paper and everyone is issued a silver marker, and a buzzer.  Drawing on the tables with ideas, notes, thoughts, diagrams, doodles, everything is encouraged.   Throughout the course of a session the ideas generated are captured, technologies explored, and an inventory is created for deeper follow-ups. The teams get to pick which they think are the best/most viable/ or ah-ha! ideas of the session and those are given extra attention. 

Throughout the session the ideas flow, conversation is spurred on, and the only requirement is that attendees come with an open mind, assume no constraints or live within the ones defined in the challenges or ignition questions and allow people to have fun.  The buzzers are there for when these basic rules are violated.  Its hard for people to truly get upset when they are buzzed with a loud cow mooing, or dog barking, or like sound.   Its all in good fun.  Someone also has to be in charge of pacing and timing.   The Coordinator.   The Coordinator is an equal member of the team in every way, except that they have the added responsibility to keep the day moving along either by distributing new challenges, making judgement calls, or taking bio breaks.   Its kind of like being the Dungeon Master playing a table top game of Dungeons and Dragons – except you get to be the half-elven fighter/mage too!

This process has been instrumental in many of the advancements on the tech and product sides of  the business.  Allowing the varied life experiences and unique skills of the people around you to contribute to the confluence of ideas is extremely satisfying as a leader and has a real benefit to the goals of your organization.

Whether you lead people formally or not, whether you lead an entire organization or just a small group – having a method of harnessing innovation is priceless.   Are you a Intentional Serendipity Coordinator?  If not…you failed your saving throw.

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CES International 2013

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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Lots of interest in the MicroDC, but do you know what I am getting the most questions about?

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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On Micro Datacenters, Sandy, Supercomputing 2012, and Coding for Containerized Data Centers….

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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Your personal Internet Era Communications Dashboard has Arrived!

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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It’s a Re-launch of Games.com–Now Play games on your computer or phone!

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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Familiarity Breeds “Unsent”–The Modern Email problem at Scale.

Everyone has heard of the old sayings “Familiarity breeds contempt”, so I thought it apropos to introduce it as a less understood concept when it comes to large scale Internet mail challenges.   The “spark” for me was a copy of a TechCrunch article entitled “Why No one has tamed e-mail” by Gentry Underwood that was forwarded to me this morning.  It’s a really good article and highlights some of the challenges the mail space is / has been / continues to go through.  Not sure if it really matters, but for full disclosure TechCrunch is an AOL company, although the content was generated by the guest author. 

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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The AOL Micro-DC adds new capability

Back in July, I announced AOL’s Data Center Independence Day with the release of our new ‘Micro Data Center’ approach.   In that post we highlighted the terrific work that the teams put in to revolutionize our data center approach and align it completely to not only technology goals but business goals as well.   It was an incredible amount of engineering and work to get to that point and it would be foolish to think that the work represented a ‘One and Done’ type of effort.  

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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WANTED: Mobile Engineers in Alpharetta, GA

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!

 

Title	Requisition Number	Link
Software Engineer (iOS), Mobile First	124300	http://bit.ly/Qn7X03
Software Engineer (Android), Mobile First	124298	http://bit.ly/MKzBmc
Sr Mobile Web Developer	124294	http://bit.ly/NyQ64B
Sr Mobile Web Developer	124293	http://bit.ly/MbJfhT
Sr Mobile Web Developer	124292	http://bit.ly/N93qH0
Data Engineer	124291	http://bit.ly/MpXlrg
Sr Mobile QA Engineer	124289	http://bit.ly/MKAond
Mobile QA Engineer	124288	http://bit.ly/MbJJEK
Software Engineer (Android), Mobile First	124271	http://bit.ly/SXQh8W
Software Engineer (iOS), Mobile First	124270	http://bit.ly/MQgm7a
Sr. Android Software Engineer	123631	http://bit.ly/MQgDHg

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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AOL’s Data Center Independence Day

Yesterday we celebrated Independence Day here in the United States.   It’s a day where we embrace the freedoms we enjoy as a country, look back on where we have come, and celebrate the promise of the future.   Yesterday was also a different kind of Independence Day for my teams at AOL.  A Data Center Independence Day, if you will. 

You may or may not have been following the progress of the work that we have been doing here at AOL over the last 14 or so months but the pace of change has been simply breathtaking.  One of the first things I did when I entered into the company was deeply review all of the aspects of Operations.  From Data Centers to Network Engineering, to the engineering teams supporting the products and services and everything in between.   The net of the exercise was that AOL was probably similar to most companies out there in terms of technology mix, from the CRUFT that I mentioned in a previous post, to latest technologies.  There were some incredible technologies built over the last three decades, some outdated processes and procedures, and if I am honest traces of a culture where the past had more meaning of the present or future.

In a very short period of time all of that changed.  We aggressively made changes to the organization,  re-aligned priorities, and perhaps most of all we created and defined a powerful collection of changes and evolutions we would need to bring about with very aggressive timelines.    These changes were part of a defined Technology Roadmap that broke the work we needed to accomplish into three categories of work.   The categorization focused on the internal technical challenges and tools we needed to make to enhance our own internal efficiencies.  The second categorization focused on the technical challenges and aggressive things we could do to enhance and bring greater scalability to our products and services.   This would include things like additional services and technology suites to our internally developed cloud infrastructure, and other items that would allow for more rapid product delivery of our products and services.   The last categorization of work, was for the incredibly aggressive “wish list” types of changes.  Items that could be so disruptive, so incredibly game-changing for us, that they could redefine our work on the whole.  In fact we named this group of work “Nibiru” after a mythical planet that is said to cross into our solar system and wreaks havoc and brings about great change. 

On July 4, 2012, one of our Nibiru items arrived and I am extremely ecstatic to state that we achieved our “Data Center Independence Day”.  Our primary “Nibiru” goal was to develop and deliver a data center environment without the need of a physical building.  The environment needed to require as minimal amount of physical “touch” as possible and allow us the ultimate flexibility in terms of how we delivered capacity for our products and services. We called this effort the Micro Data Center.   If you think about the amount of things that need to change to evolve to this type of strategy it’s a bit mind-boggling. 

Here is just a few of the things required to look at/change/and automate to even make this kind of achievement possible:

• Developing an entirely new Technology Suite and the ability to deliver that capacity anywhere in the world with minimal to no staffing.
• Delivering extremely dense compute capacity (think the latest technology) to give us the longest possible use of these assets once deployed into the field.
• The ability to deliver a “Microdata Center” anywhere on the planet regardless of temperature and humidity settings
• The ability to support/maintain/and administer remotely.
• The ability to fit into the power envelope of a normal office building
• Participation in our cloud environment and capabilities
• The processes by which these facilities are maintained and serviced
• and much much more…

In my mind, Its one thing to claim a technical achievement, its quite another to operationalize that achievement and make the process of supporting it repeatable. That’s my measure as to when you can REALLY declare victory.  Science Experiments don’t count.   It has to just plain work.    To that end our first “beta” site for the technology was the AOL campus in Dulles, Virginia.  Out on a lonely slab of concrete in the back of one of the buildings our future has taken shape.

Thanks in part to a lot of the work going on in the data center containerization space, we were able to jump start much of the work in a relatively quick fashion.  In fact the pace set the Data Center and Technology Operations teams to deliver this achievement is more than a bit astounding.   Most, if not all, of the existing AOL Data Centers would fall somewhere around a traditional Tier III / Tier II Uptime Institute definition.   The teams really pushed ahead way outside their comfort zones to deliver some incredibly evolutions in a very short period of time.   Of course there were steps along the way to get here.  But those steps now seem to be in double time.  A few months back we announced the launching of ATC, Our first completely automated facility.   The work that went into ATC, was foundational to our achievement yesterday.   It allowed us to really start working on the hard stuff first.   That is to say the ‘Operationalization’ of these kinds of environments.   It set the stage of how we could evolve to this next tier of evolution.   Below is a summary of some of the achievements of our ATC launch, but if you were curious for the specifics on our work there feel free to click the ‘Breaking the Chrysalis’ post I did at that time.  You can see how the work that we have been driving in our own internal cloud environments, the changes in operational procedure, the change in thought is additive and fundamental to our latest achievement.   Its especially interesting to note that with all of the interesting blips and hiccups occurring in the ‘cloud industry’ like the leap second and  the terrible storms on the East Coast this week which affected many data centers, that ATC, our completely unmanned facility just kept humming along with no issues (To be fair neither did our traditional facilities) despite much of the initial negative feedback we had received was solely based around the reliability of such moves.   It goes to show how important engineering FOR Operation is.  For AOL we have built this in from the start.

What does this actually buy AOL?

Ok, we stuck some computers in a box and we made sure it requires very little care and feeding – what does this buy us?  Quite a bit actually.  Jay Moran, the Distinguished Engineer who was in charge of driving this effort is always quick to point out that the problem space here is not just about the Technology.  It has to be a marriage with the business side as well.  Obviously the inherent flexibility of the design allows us a greater number of places around the planet we can deploy capacity to and that in and of itself is pretty revolutionary.   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.   This is a huge game changer.  So much so, allow me to do a bit of the ‘back of the napkin math’ with you.   Lets call our global capacity in terms of compute, storage, etc. that we have today in our traditional environments – the Total Compute Capability or TCC. Its essentially the bandwidth for the work that we can get done.   Inside the cost for TCC you have operating costs such power, lease costs, Data Center facility maintenance costs, support staff, etc.  You additionally have the depreciation for the facilities themselves (or the specific buildouts – if colocating), the server and other equipment depreciation, and the rest.   Lets call that baseline X.   The MicroData Center strategy built out with the latest, our most dense server standards and infrastructure would allow us to have 5X the amount of total TCC in less than 10% of the cost and physical footprint.   If you think about how this will allow us to aggregate and grow over time it ultimately drives us to a VERY LOW operational cost structure for delivering our products and services.   Additionally it positions us for the future in very significant ways.

• It redefines software architecture for greater resiliency
• It allows us an incredibly flexible platform for driving and addressing privacy laws, regulatory oversight, and other such concerns allowing us to respond rapidly.
• It further reduces energy consumption and carbon footprint emissions (important as taxation evolves around the world, as well as ongoing operational costs)
• Gives us the ability to drive Edge Computing delivery to potentially bypass CDNs for certain content.
• Gives us the capability to drive ‘Community-in-a-box’ whereby we can quickly launch new products in markets, quickly expand existing footprints like Patch in a low cost, but still hyper-local platform, allow the Huffington Post a platform to rapidly partner and enter new markets with minimal cost turn ups.
• The fact that the technology mix in our SKUs is comprised of compute, storage, and network capacity maximizes the amount of products and services we can deploy to it.  

As Always its really about the People

I cannot let a post about this huge win for us to go by without mentioning the teams involved in delivering this capability.  This is not just a win for AOL, or to a lesser degree the industry at large in another proof-point that it cant evolve if it puts its mind to changing, but rather the Technology Teams at AOL.  When I was first approached about joining AOL, my slightly sarcastic and comedic response was probably much like yours – ‘Are they still around?’ But the fact of the matter is that AOL has a vision of where they want to go, and what they want to be.   That was compelling for me personally, compelling enough for me to make the move.   What has truly amazed me however is the dedication and tenacity of its employees.  These achievements would not be possible without the outright aggressiveness the organization has taken to moving the company forward.  Its always hard to assess from the outside just how hard an effort is internally to achieve.  In the case of our micro Data Center Strategy, the teams had just about every kind of barrier to deliver this capacity.  Every kind of excuse to not make it, or even not to try.   They put all of those things aside and just plain executed.  If you allow me a small moment of bravado – Not only did my teams simply kick ass, they did it in a way that moved the needle for the company, and in my mind once again catapulted themselves into the forefront of operations and technology at scale.   We still have a bunch of Nibiru projects to deliver, so my guess is we haven’t heard the last of some of these big wins.

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