Sites and Sounds of DataCentre2012: My Presentation, Day 2, and Final Observations

Today marked the closing lot of sessions for DataCentres2012 and my keynote session to the attendees.    After sitting through a series of product, technology, and industry trend presentations over the last two days I was feeling that my conversation would at the very least be something different.   Before I get to that – I wanted to share some observations from the morning. 

It all began with an interesting run-down of the Data Center and infrastructure industry trends across Europe from Steve Wallage of The BroadGroup.   It contained some really compelling information and highlighted some interesting divergence between the European market and the US market in terms of adoption and trends of infrastructure.   It looks like they have a method for those interested to get their hand on the detailed data (for purchase) if you are interested.  The parts I found particularly industry was the significant slow down of the Wholesale data center market across Europe while Colocation providers continued to do well.   Additionally the percentages of change within the customer base of those providers by category was compelling and demonstrated a fundamental shift and move of content related customers across the board.

This presentation was followed by a panel of European Thought Leaders made up mostly of those same colocation providers.  Given the presentation by Wallage I was expecting some interesting data-points to emerge.  While there was a range of ideas and perspectives represented by the panel, I have to say it really got me worked up and not in a good way.   In many ways I felt the responses from many (not all) on the panel highlighted a continued resistance to change in thinking around everything from efficiency, to technology approach.  It represented the things I despise most about about our industry at large.  Namely the slow adoption of change. The warm embrace of the familiar.  The outright resistance to new ideas.    At one point, a woman in the front row whom I believe was from Germany got up to ask a question if the panelists had any plans to move their facilities outside of the major metros.  She referenced Christian Belady’s presentation around the idea of Data as Energy and remote locations like Quincy, Washington or Lulea, Sweden.   She referred to the overall approach and thinking differently as quite visionary.   Now the panel could have easily have referred to the fact that companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and the like have much greater software level control than a colo-provider could provide.   Or perhaps they could have referenced that most of their customers are limited by distance to existing infrastructure deployments due to inefficiencies in commercial or custom internally deployed applications. Databases with response times architected for in-rack or in-facility levels of response times.   They did at least reference that most customers tend to be server huggers and want their infrastructure close by.  

Instead the initial response was quite strange in my mind.  It was to go after the ideas as “innovative” and to imply that nothing was really innovative about what Microsoft had done and the fact that they built a “mega data center” in Dublin shows that there is nothing innovative really happening.  Really?   The adoption of 100% Air Side economization is something everyone does?   The deployment of containerized compute capacity is run of the mill?  The concepts about the industrialization of compute is old-hat?  I had to do a mental double take and question whether they were even listening during ANY of the earlier sessions.   Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to be an apologist for the Microsoft program, in fact there are some tenets of the program I find myself not in agreement with.  However – You cannot deny that they are doing VERY different things.   It illustrated an interesting undercurrent I felt during the entire event (and maybe even our industry).  I definitely got the sensation of a growing gap between users requirements and their forward roadmaps and desires and what manufacturers and service providers are providing.  This panel, and a previous panel on modularization really highlighted these gulfs pretty demonstrably.   At a minimum I definitely walked away with an interesting new perspective on some of the companies represented.

It was then time for me to give my talk.   Every discussion up until this point had really focused on technology or industry trends.  I was going to talk about something else. Something more important.  The one thing seemingly missing from the entire event.   That is – the people attending.   All the technology in the world, all of the understanding of the trends in our industry are nothing unless the people in the room were willing to act. Willing to step up and take active roles in their companies to drive strategy.  As I have said before – to get out of the basement and into the penthouse.   The pressures on our industry and our job roles has never been more complicated.   So I walked through regulations, technologies, and cloud discussions.  Using the work that we did at AOL as a backdrop and example – I really tried to drive my main point.   That our industry – specifically the people doing all the work – were moving to a role of managing a complex portfolio of technologies, contracts, and a continuum of solutions.  Gone are the days where we can hide sheltered in our data center facilities.   Our resistance to embrace change, need to evolve with us, or it will evolve around us.   I walked through specific examples of how AOL has had to broaden its own perspective and approach to this widening view of our work roles at all levels.   I even pre-announced something we are calling Data Center Independence Day.   An aggressive adoption of modularized compute capacity that we call MicroData Centers  to help solve many of the issues we are facing as a business and the rough business case as to why it makes sense for us to move to this model.    I will speak more of that in the weeks to come with a greater degree of specifics, but stressed again the need for a wider perspective to manage a large portfolio of technologies and approaches to be successful in the future.

In closing – the event was fantastic.   The ability this event provides to network with leaders and professionals across the industry was first rate.   If I had any real constructive feedback it would be to either lengthen sessions, or reduce panel sizes to encourage more active and lively conversations.  Or both!

Perhaps at the end of the day, it’s truly the best measure of a good conference if you walk away wishing that more time could be spent on the topics.  As for me I am headed back Stateside and to digging into the challenges of my day job.    To the wonderful host city of Nice, I say Adieu!

 

\Mm

Sites and Sounds of DataCentre2012: Thoughts and my Personal Favorite presentations Day 1

We wrapped our first full day of talks here at DataCentre2012 and I have to say the content was incredibly good.    A couple of the key highlights that really stuck out in my mind were the talk given by Christian Belady who covered some interesting bits of the Microsoft Data Center Strategy moving forward.   Of course I have a personal interest in that program having been there for Generation1 through Generation4 of the evolutions of the program.   Christian covered some of the technology trends that they are incorporating into their Generation 5 facilities.  It was some very interesting stuff and he went into deeper detail than I have heard so far around the concept of co-generation of power at data center locations.   While I personally have some doubts about the all-in costs and immediacy of its applicability it was great to see some deep meaningful thought and differentiation out of the Microsoft program.  He also went into a some interesting “future” visions which talked about data being the next energy source.  While he took this concept to an entirely new level  I do feel he is directionally correct.  His correlations between the delivery of “data” in a utility model rang very true to me as I have long preached about the fact that we are at the dawning of the Information Utility for over 5 years.

Another fascinating talk came from Oliver J Jones of a company called Chayora.   Few people and companies really understand the complexities and idiosyncrasies of doing business let alone dealing with the development and deployment of large scale infrastructure there.    The presentation done by Mr. Jones was incredibly well done.  Articulating the size, opportunity, and challenges of working in China through the lens of the data center market he nimbly worked in the benefits of working with a company with this kind of expertise.   It was a great way to quietly sell Chayora’s value proposition and looking around the room I could tell the room was enthralled.   His thoughts and data points had me thinking and running through scenarios all day long.  Having been to many infrastructure conferences and seeing hundreds if not thousands of presentations, anyone who can capture that much of my mindshare for the day is a clear winner. 

Tom Furlong and Jay Park of Facebook gave a great talk on OCP with a great focus on their new facility in Sweden.  They also talked  a bit about their other facilities in Prineville and North Carolina as well.   With Furlong taking the Mechanical innovations and Park going through the electrical it was a great talk to created lots of interesting questions.  An incredibly captivating portion of the talk was around calculating data center availability.   In all honesty it was the first time I had ever seen this topic taken head on at a data center conference. In my experience, like PUE, Availability calculations can fall under the spell of marketing departments who truly don’t understand that there SHOULD be real math behind the calculation.   There were two interesting take aways for me.  The first was just how impactful this portion of the talk had on the room in general.   There was an incredible amount of people taking notes as Jay Park went through the equation and way to think about it.   It led me to my second revelation – There are large parts of our industry who don’t know how to do this.   In private conversations after their talk some people confided that had never truly understood how to calculate this.   It was an interesting wake-up call for me to ensure I covered the basics even in my own talks.

After the Facebook talk it was time for me to mount the stage for Global Thought Leadership Panel.   I was joined on stage by some great industry thinkers including Christian Belady of Microsoft, Len Bosack (founder of Cisco Systems) now CEO XKL Systems, Jack Tison-CTO of Panduit, Kfir Godrich-VP and Chief Technologist at HP, John Corcoran-Executive Chairman of Global Switch, and Paul-Francois Cattier-Global VP of Data Centers  at Schneider Electric.   That’s a lot of people and brainpower to fit on a single stage.  We really needed three times the amount of time allotted for this panel, but that is the way these things go.   Perhaps one of the most interesting recurring themes from question to question was the general agreement that at the end of the day – great technology means nothing without the will do something different.   There was an interesting debate on the differences between enterprise users and large scale users like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and AOL.  I was quite chagrined and a little proud to hear AOL named in that list of luminaries (it wasn’t me who brought it up).   But I was quick to point out that AOL is a bit different in that it has been around for 30 years and our challenges are EXACTLY like Enterprise data center environments.   More on that tomorrow in my keynote I guess.

All in all, it was a good day – there were lots of moments of brilliance in the panel discussions throughout the day.  One regret I have was on the panel regarding DCIM.   They ran out of time for questions from the audience which was unfortunate.   People continue to confuse DCIM as BMS version 2.0 and really miss capturing the work and soft costs, let alone the ongoing commitment to the effort once started.   Additionally there is the question of once you have mountains of collected data, what do you do with that.   I had a bunch of questions on this topic for the panel, including if any of the major manufacturers were thinking about building a decision engine over the data collection.  To me it’s a natural outgrowth and next phase of DCIM.  The one case study they discussed was InterXion.  It was a great effort but I think in the end maintained the confusion around a BMS with a web interface versus true Facilities and IT integration.     Another panel on Modularization got some really lively discussion on feature/functionality and differentiation, and lack of adoption.  To a real degree it highlighted an interesting gulf between manufacturers (mostly represented by the panel) who need to differentiate their products and the users who require vendor interoperability of the solution space.   It probably doesn’t help to have Microsoft or myself in the audience when it comes to discussions around modular capacity.   On to tomorrow!

\Mm

DataCentres 2012 – Nice,France

This week I am headed off to France to be a keynote speaker at DataCentres2012.   In my opinion this event is the pre-eminent infrastructure and operations conference across the whole of Europe if not the world.   Regularly attracting the best speakers and infrastructure professionals in the industry (myself excluded of course – perhaps they are looking for some comic relief?) along with an incredible list of attendees which is a veritable who’s who of our industry world-wide. 

By the looks of it, Cloud and Energy concerns will be the topic of many of the conversations.    No doubt many will focus on the impact  of technology, its usefulness, features, and capabilities.   But those of you who have heard me speak before know, that I believe there is a larger more personal story – for both the professional and the companies they represent.  The problems we are facing in the industry today are complicated, multi-faceted, and deep-rooted in the past of our own decisions or the decisions of our predecessors.   We sometimes think technology alone is the salve for all ills.   This is no more true than the purchase of a pen being the solution to writers block. 

My talk will center on this multi-faceted problem space.   I will use real world examples of how I have, and am tackling those issues.  Who knows?  I might even let loose some of the top secret work we have been doing internally to position us for the future.   

As always – If you happen to be at the conference or in Nice -  Don’t be a stranger!  

\Mm

Uptime, Cowgirls, and Success in California

This week my teams have descended upon the Uptime Institute Symposium in Santa Clara.  The moment is extremely bittersweet for me as this is the first Symposium in quite sometime I have been unable to attend.  With my responsibilities expanding at AOL beginning this week there was simply too much going on for me to make the trip out.  It’s a down right shame too.  Why?

We (AOL) will be featured in two key parts at Symposiums this time around for some incredibly ground breaking work happening at the company.   The first is a recap of the incredible work going on in the development of our own cloud platforms.  Last year you may recall that we were asked to talk about some of the wins and achievements we were able to accomplish with the development of our cloud platform.   The session was extremely well received.   We were asked to come back, one year on, to discuss about how that work has progressed even more.   Aaron Lake, the primary developer of our cloud platforms and my Infrastructure Development Team, will be talking on the continued success, features, and functionality, and the launch of our ATC Cloud Only Data Center.   Its been an incredible break neck pace for Aaron and his team and they have delivered world-class capabilities for us internally.

Much of Aaron’s work has also enabled us to win the Uptime Institutes First Annual Server Round Up Award.  I am especially proud of this particular honor as it is the result of an amazing amount of hard work within the organization on a problem faced by companies all over the planet.   Essentially this is Operations Hygiene at a huge scale, getting rid of old servers, driving consolidation, moving platforms to our cloud environments and more.  This talk will be lead by Julie Edwards, our Director of Business Operations and Christy Abramson, our Director of Service Management.  Together these two teams led the effort to drive out “Operational Absurdities” and our “Power Hog” programs.  We have sent along Lee Ann Macerelli and Rachel Paiva who were the primary project managers instrumental in making this initiative such a huge success.  These “Cowgirls” drove an insane amount of work across the company resulting in over 5 million dollars of un-forecasted operational savings, proving that there is always room for good operational practices.  They even starred in a funny internal video to celebrate their win which can be found here using the AOL Studio Now service.

If you happen to be attending Symposium this year feel free to stop by and say hello to these amazing individuals.   I am incredibly proud of the work that they have driven within the company.

 

\Mm

The Cloud Cat and Mouse Papers–Site Selection Roulette and the Insurance Policies of Mobile infrastructure

Its always hard to pick exactly where to start in a conversation like this especially since this entire process really represents a changing life-cycle.   Its more of a circular spiral that moves out (or evolves) as new data is introduced than a traditional life-cycle because new data can fundamentally shift the technology or approach.   That being said I thought I would start our conversations at a logical starting point.   Where does one place your infrastructure?  Even in its embryonic “idea phase” the intersection of government and technology begins its delicate dance to a significant degree. These decisions will ultimately have an impact on more than just where the Capital investments a company decides to make are located.  It has affects on the products and services they offer, and as I propose, an impact ultimately on the customers that use the services at those locations.

As I think back to the early days of building out a global infrastructure, the Site Selection phase started at a very interesting place.   In some ways we approached it with a level of sophistication that has still to be matched today and in other ways, we were children playing a game whose rules had not yet been defined.

I remember sitting across numerous tables with government officials talking about making an investment (largely just land purchase decisions) in their local community.  Our Site Selection methodology had brought us to these areas.  A Site Selection process which continued to evolve as we got smarter, and as we started to truly understand the dynamics of the system were being introduced to.   In these meetings we always sat stealthily behind a third party real estate partner.  We never divulged who we were, nor were they allowed to ask us that directly.  We would pepper them with questions, and they in turn would return the favor.  It was all cloak and dagger with the Real Estate entity taking all action items to follow up with both parties.

Invariably during these early days -  these locales would always walk away with the firm belief that we were a bank or financial institution.   When they delved into our financial viability (for things like power loads, commitment to capital build-out etc.) we always stated that any capital commitments and longer term operational cost commitments were not a problem.    In large part the cloak and dagger aspect was to keep land costs down (as we matured, we discovered this was quite literally the last thing we needed to worry about) as we feared that once our name became attached to the deal our costs would go up.   These were the early days of seeding global infrastructure and it was not just us.  I still laugh at the fact that one of our competitors bound a locality up so much in secrecy – that the community referred to the data center as Voldemort – He who shall not be named, in deference to the Harry Potter book series.

This of course was not the only criteria that we used.  We had over 56 by the time I left that particular effort with various levels of importance and weighting.   Some Internet companies today use less, some about the same, and some don’t use any, they ride on the backs of others who have trail-blazed a certain market or locale.   I have long called this effect Data Center Clustering.    The rewards for being first mover are big, less so if you follow them ultimately still positive. 

If you think about most of the criteria used to find a location it almost always focuses on the current conditions, with some acknowledge in some of the criteria of the look forward.  This is true for example when looking at power costs.   Power costs today are important to siting a data center, but so is understanding the generation mix of that power, the corresponding price volatility, and modeling that ahead to predict (as best as possible) longer term power costs.

What many miss is understanding the more subtle political layer that occurs once a data center has been placed or a cluster has developed. Specifically that the political and regulatory landscape can change very quickly (in relationship to the life of a data center facility which is typically measured in 20, 30, or 40 year lifetimes).  It’s a risk that places a large amount of capital assets potentially in play and vulnerable to these kinds of changes.   Its something that is very hard to plan or model against.  That being said there are indicators and clues that one can use to at least play risk factors against or as some are doing – ensuring that the technology they deploy limits their exposure.    In cloud environments the question remains open – how liable are companies using cloud infrastructure in these facilities at risk?   We will explore this a little later.

That’s not to say that this process is all downside either.  As we matured in our approach, we came to realize that the governments (local or otherwise) were strongly incented to work with us on getting us a great deal and in fact competed over this kind of business.   Soon you started to see the offers changing materially.  It was little about the land or location and quickly evolved to what types of tax incentives, power deals, and other mechanisms could be put in play.   You saw (and continue to see) deals structured around sales tax breaks, real estate and real estate tax deals, economic incentives around breaks in power rates, specialized rate structures for Internet and Cloud companies and the like.   The goal here of course was to create the public equivalent of “golden handcuffs” for the Tech companies and try to marry them to particular region, state, or country.  In many cases – all three.  The benefits here are self apparent.  But can they (or more specifically will they) be passed on in some way to small companies who make use of cloud infrastructure in these facilities? While definitely not part of the package deals done today – I could easily see site selection negotiations evolving to incent local adoption of cloud technology in these facilities or provisions being put in place tying adoption and hosting to tax breaks and other deal structures in the mid to longer timeframe for hosting and cloud companies.

There is still a learning curve out there as most governments mistakenly try and tie these investments with jobs creation.   Data Centers, Operations, and the like represents the cost of goods sold (COGS) to the cloud business.  Therefore there is a constant drive towards efficiency and reduction of the highest cost components to deliver those products and services.   Generally speaking, people, are the primary targets in these environments.   Driving automation in these environments is job one for any global infrastructure player.  One of the big drivers for us investing and developing a 100% lights-out data center at AOL was eliminating those kinds of costs.  Those governments that generally highlight job creation targets over other types typically don’t get the site selection.    After having commissioned an economic study done after a few of my previous big data center builds I can tell you that the value to a region or a state does not come from the up front jobs the data center employs.  After a local radio stationed called into question the value of having such a facility in their backyard, we used a internationally recognized university to perform a third party “neutral” assessment of the economic benefits (sans direct people) and the numbers were telling.  We had surrendered all construction costs and other related material to them, and they investigated over the course of a year through regional interviews and the like of what the direct impacts of a data center was on the local community, and the overall impacts by the addition.  The results of that study are owned by a previous employer but I  can tell you with certainty – these facilities can be beneficial to local regions.

No one likes constraints and as such you are beginning to see Technology companies use their primary weapon – technology – to mitigate their risks even in these scenarios.   One cannot argue for example, that while container-based data centers offer some interesting benefits in terms of energy and cost efficiencies, there is a certain mobility to that kind of infrastructure that has never been available before.    Historically, data centers are viewed as large capital anchors to a location.    Once in place, hundreds of millions to billions (depending on the size of the company) of dollars of capital investment are tied to that region for its lifespan.   Its as close to permanent in the Tech Industry as building a factory was during the industrial revolution. 

In some ways Modularization of the data center industry is/can/will have the same effect as the shipping container did in manufacturing.   All puns intended.  If you are unaware of how the shipping container revolutionized the world, I would highly recommend the book “The Box” by Marc Levinson, it’s a quick read and very interesting if you read it through the lens of IT infrastructure and the parallels of modularization in the Data Center Industry at large.

It gives the infrastructure companies more exit options and mobility in the future than they would have had in the past under large capital build-outs.  Its an insurance policy if you will for potential changes is legislation or regulation that might negatively impact the Technology companies over time.  Just another move in the cat and mouse games that we will see evolving here over the next decade or so in terms of the interactions between governments and global infrastructure. 

So what about the consumers of cloud services?  How much of a concern should this represent for them?  You don’t have to be a big infrastructure player to understand that there are potential risks in where your products and services live.  Whether you are building a data center or hosting inside a real estate or co-location provider – these are issues that will affect you.  Even in cases where you only use the cloud provisioning capabilities within your chosen provider – you will typically be given options of what region or area would you like you gear hosted in.  Typically this is done for performance reasons – reaching your customers – but perhaps this information might cause you to think of the larger ramifications to your business.   It might even drive requirements into the infrastructure providers to make this more transparent in the future.

These evolutions in the relationship between governments and Technology and the technology options available to them will continue to shape site selection policy for years to come.   So too will it ultimately affect the those that use this infrastructure whether directly or indirectly remains to be seen.  In the next paper we will explore the this interaction more deeply as it relates to the customers of cloud services and the risks and challenges specifically for them in this environment.

\Mm

This is just lost on so many companies / organizations…

Having experienced nearly all of the pain and desire one could have in trying to scale out applications, operations, and infrastructure, I have become a huge proponent of blending efforts between Development with Operations.   Additionally I think the blend should include lower level stuff like facilities as well.  The entire online paradigm fundamentally changes how the problem space should be viewed.

With Concepts like NoOps, DevOps, and the like becoming fashionable in the Development community its probably no surprise that these issues are being addressed from people’s own comfort spaces.  To a development engineer – those Ops folks are crusty and cranky.   To an Operations engineer those darn developers don’t really code for long term operations.   Its always the ‘throw the code over the wall’ and the Ops folks will make it work mentality.   In reality both sides are right.

The simple truth is (in my opinion) that the University System is to a large degree failing the industry especially when it comes to developing for future platforms.   Graduates are coming out by the thousands versed in the development of  Java, Ruby on Rails, and insert your favorite flavor of high level web platform here.   The amount of graduates who understand the underlying systems, and more basically how things work are becoming rarer by the year.  Add to this mix an understanding of developing for code to RUN, and the infrastructural and operational requirements associated with it you are dealing with a very rare set of skill sets.   Many of the big companies who do build for the RUN of software (read as SAAS, large scale online services, etc) actually go through a bit of “re-education” with new hires to either teach them these skill sets for the first time, or “re-program” the bad stuff they learned out. 

I had a series of related things come through my inbox and a video shared with me from last years Velocity conference.   I think they are powerful thought provokers to read and watch.  

The first is the video from Velocity by Theo Schlossnagle, a founder and principal at OmniTI.  It is  somewhat skunk-worked under the heading of Career Development.   Theo takes this from the perspective of the individual, but it is easily applied to organizations at large. Its 13 minutes, but well worth the time.

http://velocityconf.com/velocity2011/public/schedule/detail/20406

The second is a post by Adrian Cockcroft from Netflix talking about the development and evolution of DevOps/NoOps in the culture there.   The approach is right on, although I think to a large degree some of the real “ops” stuff has been outsourced to the cloud provider.   That being said I think the mindset shown here from a broader “Development Responsibilities” is definitely in the right way to think about the problem space.   I have often talked about the NetFlix Chaos Monkey approach and just how powerful that paradigm is:

http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2012/03/ops-devops-and-noops-at-netflix.html

The last is actually a response to the Cockcroft post by John Allspaw who used to run Flickr’s Operations and is now at Etsy.  Who while arguing the benefit of a stronger Ops presence and involvement also highlights the benefits of having Development and Engineering more aware of their surroundings.

Happy Reading!

\Mm

The Cloud Cat and Mouse Papers – The Primer

Cat and Mouse with Multi-national infrastructure –The Participants to date

There is an ever-changing, game of cat and mouse developing in the world of cloud computing.   Its not a game that you as a consumer might see, but it is there.  An undercurrent that has been there from the beginning.   It pits Technology Companies and multi-national infrastructure against local and national governments.  For some years this game of cat and mouse has been quietly played out in backrooms, development and technology roadmap re-works, across negotiation tables, and only in the rarest of cases – have they come out for industry scrutiny or visibility.  To date the players have been limited to likes of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others who have scaled their technology infrastructure across the globe and in large measure those are the players that governments have moved against in an ever intricate chess game.  I myself have played apart in the measure/counter-measure give and take of this delicate dance.

The primary issues in this game have to do with realization of revenue for taxation purposes, Safe Harbor and issues pertaining to personally identifiable information, ownership of Big Data, the nature of what is stored, how it is stored, and where it is stored, the intersection where politics and technology meet.   A place where social issues and technology collide.   You might call them storm clouds, just out of sight, but there is thunder on the horizon that you the consumer and/or potential user of global cloud infrastructure will need to be aware of because eventually the users of cloud infrastructure will become players in the game as well. 

That is not to say that the issues I tease out here are all gloom and doom.  In fact, they are great opportunities for potential business models, additional product features, and even cloud eco-system companies or niche solutions unto themselves.  A way to drive significant value for all sides.   I have been toying with more than a few of these ideas myself here over the last few months.

To date these issues have mostly manifested in the global build up of infrastructure for the big Internet platforms.  The Products and Services the big guys in the space use as their core money-making platforms or primary service delivery platforms.  Rarely if ever do these companies use this same infrastructure for their Infrastructure as a service (IAAS) or Platform as a Services (PAAS) offerings.  However, as you will see, the same challenges will and do apply to these offerings as well.  In some cases they are even more acute and problematic in a situation where there may be a multi-tenancy with the potential to put even more burden on future cloud users.

If I may be blunt about this there is an interesting lifecycle to this food chain whereby the Big Technology companies consistently have the upper hand and governmental forces through the use of their primary tools – regulation and legislation – are constantly playing catch up.  This lifecycle is unlikely to change for at least five reasons.

• The Technology Companies will always have the lens of the big picture of multi-national infrastructure.   Individual countries, states, and locales generally only have jurisdiction or governance over that territory, or population base that is germane to their authority.
• Technology Companies can be of near singular purpose on a very technical depth of capability or bring to bear much more concentrated “brain power” to solve for evolutions in the changing socio-political landscape to continually evolve measures and counter-measures to address these changes.
• By and large Governments rely upon technologies and approaches to become mainstream before there is enough of a base understanding of the developments and impacts before they can act.  This generally places them in a reactionary position. 
• Governmental forces generally rely upon “consultants” or “industry experts” to assist in understanding these technologies, but very few of these industry experts have ever really dealt with multi-national infrastructure and fewer still have had to strategize and evolve plans around these types of changes. The expertise at that level is rare and almost exclusively retained by the big infrastructure providers.
• Technology Companies have the ability to force a complete game-change to the rules and reality by completely changing out the technology used to deliver their products and services, change development and delivery logic and/or methodology to almost affect a complete negation of the previous method of governance, making it obsolete. 

That is not to say that governments are unwilling participants in this process forced into a subservient role in the lifecycle.  In fact they are active participants in attracting, cultivating, and even subsidizing these infrastructural investments in areas of under their authority and jurisdiction.  Using tools like Tax breaks, real estate and investment incentives, and private-public partnerships do have both initial and ongoing benefits for the Governments as well.  In many ways these  are “golden handcuffs” for Technology Companies who enter into this cycle, but like any kind of constraint – positive or negative – the planning and strategy to unfetter themselves begins almost immediately.

Watson, The Game is Afoot

Governments, Social Justice, Privacy, and Environmental forces have already begun to force changes in the Technology landscape for those engaged in multi-national infrastructure.  There are tons of articles freely available on the web which articulate the kinds of impacts these forces have had and will continue to have on the Technology Companies.  The one refrain through all of the stories is the resiliency of those same Technology Companies to persevere and thrive despite what might be crucial setbacks in other industries.

In some cases the technology changes and adapts to meet the new requirements, in some cases, approaches or even vacating “un-friendly” environs across any of these spectrums becomes an option, and in some cases, there is not an insignificant bet that any regulatory or compulsory requirements will be virtually impossible or too technically complex to enforce or even audit.

Lets take a look at a couple of the examples that have been made public that highlight this kind of thing.   Back in 2009, Microsoft migrated substantial portions of their Azure Cloud Services out of Washington State to its facilities located in San Antonio Texas.  While the article specifically talks about certain aspects of tax incentives being held back, there were of course other factors involved.   One doesn’t have to look far to understand that Washington State also has an B&O Tax (Business and Occupation Tax) which is defined as a gross receipts tax. It is measured on the value of products, gross proceeds of sale, or gross income of the business.  As you can imagine, interpreting this kind of tax as it relates to online and cloud income and the like could be very tricky and regardless would be complex and technical problem  to solve.  It could have the undesired impact of placing any kind of online business at an interesting disadvantage,  or at another level place an unknown tax burden on its users.   I am not saying this was a motivating factor in Microsoft’s decision but you can begin to see the potential exposure developing.   In this case, The Technology could rapidly change and move the locale of the hosted environments to minimize the exposure, thus thwarting any governmental action.  At least for the provider, but what of the implications if you were a user of the Microsoft cloud platform and found yourself with an additional or unknown tax burden.  I can almost guarantee that back in 2009 that this level of end user impact (or revenue potential from a state tax perspective) had not even been thought about.   But as with all things, time changes and we are already seeing examples of exposure occurring across the game board that is our planet.

We are already seeing interpretations or laws getting passed in countries around the globe where for example, a server is a taxable entity.   If revenue for a business is derived from a computer or server located in that country it falls under the jurisdiction of that countries tax authority.    Imagine yourself as a company using this wonderful global cloud infrastructure selling your widgets, products or services, and finding yourself with an unknown tax burden and liability in some “far flung” corner of the earth.   The Cloud providers today mostly provide Infrastructure services.  They do not go up the stack far enough to be able to effectively manage your entire system let alone be able to determine your tax liability.  The burden of proof to a large degree today would reside on the individual business running inside that infrastructure.  

In many ways those adopting these technologies are the least capable to deal with these kinds of challenges.  They are small to mid-sized companies who admittedly don’t have the capital, or operational sophistication to build out the kind of infrastructure needed to scale that quickly.   They are unlikely to have technologies such as robust configuration management databases to be able to to track virtual instances of their products and services, to tell what application ran, where it ran, how long it ran, and how much revenue was derived during the length of its life.   And this is just one example (Server as a taxable entity) of a law or legislative effort that could impact global users.  There are literally dozens of these kinds of bills/legislative initiatives/efforts (some well thought out, most not) winding their way through legislative bodies around the world.

You might think that you may be able to circumvent some of this by limiting your product or services deployment to the country closest to home, wherever home is for you.  However there are other efforts winding their way through or in large degree passed that impact the data you store, what you store, whose data are you storing, and the like. In most cases these initiatives are unrelated to the revenue legislations developing, but balanced they can give an interesting one – two punch.   For example many countries are requiring that for Safe Harbor purposes all information for any nationals of ‘Country X’ must be stored in ‘Country X’ to ensure that its citizenry is properly protected and under the jurisdiction of the law for those users.   In a cloud environment, with customers potentially from almost anywhere how do you ensure that this is the case?  How do you ensure you are compliant?   If you balance this requirement with the ‘server as a taxable entity’ example I just gave above there is an interesting exposure and liability for companies prove where and when revenue is derived.     Similarly there are some laws that are enacted as reactions against legislation in other countries.

In the post-911 era within the United States, the US Congress enacted a series of laws called the Patriot Act.   Due to some of the information search and seizure aspects of the law, Canada forbade that Canadian citizens data be stored in the United States in response.   To the best of my knowledge only a small number of companies actually even acknowledge this requirement and have architected solutions to address it, but the fact remains they are not in compliance with Canadian law.  Imagine you are a small business owner, using a cloud environment to grow your business, and suddenly you begin to grow your business significantly in Canada.  Does your lack of knowledge of Canadian law excuse you from your responsibilities there?  No.  Is this something that your infrastructure provider is offering to you? Today, no.  

I am only highlighting certain cases here to make the point that there is a world of complexity coming to the cloud space.  Thankfully these impacts have not been completely explored or investigated by most countries of the world, but its not hard to see a day/time where this becomes a very real thing where companies and the cloud eco-system in general will have to address.  At its most base level these are areas of potential revenue streams for governments and as such increase the likelihood of their eventual day in the sun.    I am currently personally tracking over 30 different legislative initiatives around the world (read as pre-de-facto laws) that will likely shape this Technology landscape for the big providers and potential cloud adopters some time in the future.

What is to come?

This first article was really just to bring out the basic premise of the conversation and topics I will be discussing and to lay the groundwork to a very real degree.  I have not even begun to touch on the extra-governmental impacts of social and environmental impacts that will likely change the shape even further.  This interaction of Technology, “The Cloud”, Political and Social Issues, exists today and although largely masked by the fact that eco-system of the cloud is not fully developed or matured, is no less a reality.   Any predictions that are made are extensions of existing patterns I see in the market already and do not necessarily represent a forgone conclusion, but rather the most likely developments based upon my interactions in this space.  As this Technology space continues to mature, the only certainty is uncertainty modulated against the backdrop of a world where increasingly geo-political forces will continue to shape the Technology of tomorrow.

\Mm

Open Sourcing our Operational Scale Tools–Meet Trigger

Not that long ago we made a decision to begin Open Sourcing some of our internal products and tools into the community at large.   There are some really interesting benefits for open sourcing some of these internally developed tools and as a company we begun to do some very interesting work in this space.  Some of our work has gotten quite a bit of attention such as SocketStream which is a very fast, real time web framework. 

Today I am very pleased to announce that we are open-sourcing one of the tools that we use to manage and maintain our network infrastructure.   We call it Trigger.  

Trigger is a Python framework and suite of tools for interfacing with network devices and managing network configuration and security policy. Trigger was specifically internally designed to increase the speed and efficiency of network configuration management.

Trigger’s core device interaction utilizes the freely available Twisted event-driven networking engine. The libraries can connect to network devices by any available method (e.g. telnet, SSH), communicate with them in their native interface (e.g. Juniper JunoScript, Cisco IOS), and return output. Trigger is able to manage any number of jobs in parallel and handle output or errors as they return.

If you think a tool like this would be interesting for you or your company feel free to give it a try.  The Open Source repository for it can be found here at :https://github.com/aol/trigger. 

For the complete set of documentation is hosted at ReadtheDocs:

http://readthedocs.org/docs/trigger

This is just the first of many internal efforts and tools that we plan to Open Source.  I will announce more tools in the coming months that have helped AOL to scale over the years.  Stay tuned!

\Mm  

Cloud Détente – The Cloud Cat and Mouse Papers

Over the last decade or so I have been lucky enough to be placed into a fairly unique position to work internationally deploying global infrastructure for cloud environments.  This work has spanned across some very large companies with a very dedicated focus on building out global infrastructure and managing through those unique challenges.   Strategies may have varied but the challenges faced by them all had some very common themes.   One of the more complex interactions when going through this process is what I call the rolling Cat and Mouse interactions between governments at all levels and these global companies.  

Having been a primary player in these negotiations and the development of measures and counter measures as a result of these interactions, I have come to believe there are some interesting potential outcomes that cloud adopters should think about and understand.   The coming struggle and complexity for managing regulating and policing multi-national infrastructure will not solely impact the large global players, but in a very real way begin to shape how their users will need to think through these socio-political  and geo-political realities. The potential impacts on their business, their adoption of cloud technologies, their resulting responsibilities and measure just how aggressively they look to the cloud for the growth of their businesses.

These observations and predictions are based upon my personal experiences.  So for whatever its worth (good or bad)  this is not the perspective of an academic writing from some ivory tower, rather they are  the observations of someone who has been there and done it.  I probably have enough material to write an entire book on my personal experiences and observations, but I have committed myself to writing a series of articles highlighting what I consider the big things that are being missed in the modern conversation of cloud adoption.  

The articles will highlight (with some personal experiences mixed in) the ongoing battle between Technocrats versus Bureaucrats.  I will try to cover a different angle on many of the big topics out there today such as :

• Big Data versus Big Government
• Rise of Nationalism as a factor in Technology and infrastructure distribution
• The long struggle ahead for managing, regulating, and policing clouds
• The Business, end-users, regulation and the cloud
• Where does the data live? How long does it live? Why Does it Matter?
• Logic versus Reality – The real difference between Governments and Technology companies.
• The Responsibilities of data ownership
• … regarding taxation exposure
• … regarding PII impacts
• … Safe Harbor

My hope is that this series and the topics I raise, while maybe a bit raw and direct, will cause you to think a bit more about the coming impacts on Technology industry at large, the potential coming impacts to small and medium size businesses looking to adopt these technologies, and the developing friction and complexity at the intersection of technology and government.

\Mm

AOL Power Hog Award

I have received a ton of emails after my post about our Uptime Institute Server Round Up Award asking me about our “Power Hog” Award.   In case you missed it, part of our internal analysis was going through and identifying inefficient servers and systems and we motivated the owners of those systems to migrate their installations to the cloud infrastructure that we built out.  You definitely knew you were in trouble when a Power Hog Award arrived on your desk.   I guess we were not below shame as a tactic.   So for those of you who were interested in seeing our illustrious(?) award I thought I would share a photo of one.

 

\Mm