Bippity Boppity Boom! The Impact of Enchanted Objects on Development, Infrastructure and the Cloud

I have been spending a bunch of my time recently thinking through the impact on what David Rose of Ditto Labs and MIT Media Lab romantically calls ‘Enchanted Objects’.  What are enchanted objects?   Enchanted Objects are devices, appliances, tools, dishware, anything that is ultimately connected to the Internet (or any connected network) and become to some degree aware of the world around them.   Imagine an Umbrella that has a light on its hilt that lights up if it may rain today, reminding you that you might want to bring it along on your travels.   Imagine your pantry and refrigerator communicating with your grocery cart at the store while you shop, letting you know the things you are running low on or even bypasses the part where you have to shop, and automatically just orders it to your home.  This approach is going to fundamentally change everything you know in life from credit cards to having a barbeque with friends. These things and their capabilities are going to change our world in ways that we cannot even fathom today.   Our Technology Industry calls this emerging field, the Internet of Things.   Ugh!  How absolutely boring. Our industry has this way of sucking all the fun out of things don’t we?   I personally feel that ‘Enchanted Objects’ is a far more compelling classification, as it speaks to the possibilities, wonderment and possibly terror that lies in store for us.  If we must make it sound ‘technical’ maybe we can call it the Enchantosphere.

While I may someday do a post about all of the interesting things I have found out there already, or the ideas that I have come up with for this new enchanted world,  I wanted to to reflect a bit on what it means for the things that I normally write about.  You know, things like The cloud, big infrastructure, and scaled software development.   So go grab your walking staff of traffic conditions and come on an interesting journey into the not-so-distant world of Cloud powered magic…

The first thing you need to understand is, if you work in this industry, you are not an idle player in this magical realm.  You are, for lack of a better term, a wizard or an enchanter.   Your role will be pivotal in creating magic items, maintaining the magic around us, or ensuring that the magic used by everyone stays strong. While the Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy book references are almost limitless for this conversation I am going to try and bring it back to the world we know today.  I promise.  I am really just trying to tease out a glimpse of the world to come and the importance of the cloud, data center infrastructure, and the significant impacts on software development and how software based services may have to evolve. 

The Magical Weaves Surround Us

Every device and enchanted item will be connected.  Whether via through WIFI in your work and home, over mobile networks, or all of the above and more, these Enchanted Objects will be connected to the magical weaves all around us.  If you happen to be a network engineer you know that I am talking to you.  All of these objects are going to have to connect to something.   If you are one of those folks who are stuck in IPv4, you better upgrade yourself. There just isn’t enough address space there to connect everything in our magical world of the future.  IPv6 will be a must. In fact, these devices could just be that ‘killer app’ that drives global adoption of the standard even faster.   But its not just about address space, these kind of connected objects are going to open up and challenge whole new areas in security, spectrum management, routing, and a host of other areas.   I am personally thinking through some very interesting source-based routing applications in the Enchantosphere as well.   The short of it is, this new magical world is going to stress the limits of how things are connected today and Network Engineers will be charged with keeping our magical weaves flowing to allow our charmed existences to continue.  You are the Keepers of the Magical Weave and I am not talking about a tricked out hairpiece either.

While just briefly mentioned above – Security Engineers are going to have to evolve significantly as well.   It will lead into whole new areas and fields of privacy protection hard to even conceive at this point.  Even things like Health and Safety will need to be considered.  Imagine a stove that starts pre-heating itself based on where you are on your commute home and the dinner menu you have planned.  While some of those controls will need to be programmed into the software itself, there is no doubt that those capabilities will need to be well guarded.  Why, I can almost see the Wards and Glyphs of Protection you will have to create.

The Wizard’s Tower

As cool as all these enchanted objects could be, they would all be worthless IP-enabled husks without the advent of the construct that we now call The Cloud.  When I talk about ‘The Cloud’ I am talking about more than just virtualized server instances and marketing-laden terminology.  I am talking about Data Centers.  I am talking about automation.  I am talking about ubiquitous compute capabilities all around the world.  The actual physical places where the magical services live! The Data Centers which include the technologies of both IT and facilities infrastructure and automation, The proverbial Wizards Tower!  This is where our enchanted objects will come to discover who they, how they work, what they should do, and retrieve any new capabilities they may yet magically receive.  This new world is going to drive the need for more compute centers across the globe.  This growth will not just be driven by demand, although the demand will admittedly be huge, but by other more mundane ‘muggle’ matters such as regulatory requirements, privacy enforcement, taxation and revenue.  I bet you were figuring  that with all this new found magical power flying around we would be able to finally rid ourselves of lawyers, legislators, government hacks, and the like.   Alas, it is after all still the real world.  Cloud Computing capacity will continue to grow, the demand for services increasing, and the development of an entire eco-system of software and services that sit atop the various cloud providers will be birthed.

I don’t know if many of you have read Robert Jordan’s fantasy series called ‘The Wheel of Time’, but in that series he has a a classification of enchanted objects called the Terangreal.  These are single purpose or limited power artifacts that anyone can use.   Like my example of the umbrella that lights up if its going to rain after it checks with Weatherbug for weather conditions in your area, or a ring that lights up to let you know that there is a new Loosebolts post available to read, or a garden gnome whose hat lights up when it detects evidence of plant eating bugs in your garden.  These are devices that require no technical knowledge to use, configure, but give some value to its owner.   They do their function and that is it.   By the way, I am an engineer not a marketing guy, if you don’t like my examples of special purpose enchanted objects you can tweet me better ones at @mjmanos. 

These devices will reach out, download their software, learn their capabilities, and just work as advertised.   Software in this model may seem very similar to todays software development techniques and environments but I believe we will begin to see fundamental changes in how software works and is distributed.   Software will be portable. Services will be portable.   Allowing for truly amazing “Multi-purpose” enchanted objects.  The ability to download “apps” to these objects can become common place.   Even something as a common place as a credit card could evolve to a piece of software or code that could be transported around in various devices.  Simply wave that RFID enabled stick (ok, wand) that contains your credit card app at the register and as long as you are wearing your necklace which stores your digital ID the transaction goes through.  Two factor authentication in the real world.  Or instead of a wand, maybe its just your wallet.  When thinking about this app enabled platform it gives a whole new meaning to the Capital One catchphrase Whats in your wallet?  The bottom line here is that a whole host of software, services, and other capabilities will become incredibly portable, and allow for some very interesting enchanted objects indeed.

The bottom line here is that we are just beginning to see into a new world of the Internet of Things… of Enchanted Objects.   The simpler things become the more complex they truly are.   Those of us who deal with large scale infrastructure, software and service development, and cloud based technologies have a heck of a ride ahead of us.  We are the keepers of the complex, Masters of the Arcane, and needers of a good bath.

\Mm

IPv6 to IPv4 Translation Made Business Beautiful. Think an Easy, less painful to your business in transitioning your Data Center.

I am a lover of simple, efficient, and beautiful things.  Ivan Peplnjak of ipSpace gets The Loosebolt’s Oscar Award for Elegance and Simplicity in a Complex Network Application.  There may not be a little statue holding up a giant router or anything but his solution to IPv4 to IPv6 translation on the Internet is pretty compelling and allows the application developers and IT folks to “outsource” all concerns about this issue to the network.

At some point your Data Centers and network are going to have to tackle the interface between the commercial IPv4 Internet and the IPv6 Internet.  If you are pretty aggressive on the IPv6 conversion in your data center, that pesky IPv4 Internet is going to prove to be a problem. Some think this can be handled by straight Network Address Translation, or having to dual home the servers in your data center on both networks.  But this challenge has cascading challenges to your organization.  Essentially it creates work for your System Admins, your developers, Web admins, etc.  In short, you may have to figure out solutions at every level of the stack.   I think Ivan’s approach makes it pretty simple and compelling if a bit of an unorthodox.  His use of Stateless IP/ICMP Translation,  which was originally intended a part of NAT64 and not on its own, solves an interesting problem and allows businesses to begin the conversion in a way that allows them to solve it one layer at a time and still allow those non-adopting IPv4 folks access to all the goodness within your data center.

His webcast on his approach can be found here.

\Mm

IPvSexy, Yes You to can get there too.

Today we celebrated going live with IPV6 versions of many of our top rated sites.  The work was done in advance of our participation in the IPV6 Launch Day.  For the uninitiated, IPv6 Launch Day is the date where major sites will begin to have their websites publicly available in the new Internet numbering scheme and is currently set for June 6, 2012.  As many of you likely know the IPv4 space which has served the Internet so well since its inception is running out of unique addresses.  I am especially proud of the fact that we are the first of the largest Internet players to achieve this unique feat.   In fact three of our sites occupy slots in the Top 25 Sites in the ranking including www.aol.com, www.engadget.com, and www.mapquest.com.  As with all things there are some interesting caveats.  For example – Google is IPv6 enabled for some ISPs, but not all.  I am specifically highlighting global availability.  

 

 

The journey has been an interesting one and there are many lessons learned going through these exercises.   In many conversations on this topic with other large firms exploring making this move, I often hear how difficult this process appears to be and a general reluctance to even begin.  Like the old saying goes even the longest journey begins with the first step.  

This work was far from easy and our internal team had some great learnings in our efforts to take our sites live beginning with the World IPV6 day in 2011.   Although our overall traffic levels remain pretty tiny (sustained about 4-5Mb/s) it is likely to grow as more ISPs convert their infrastructure to IPv6.

Perhaps the most significant thing I would like to share is that while migrating to the numbering system – I was very pleased to find the number of options available to companies in staging their moves to the IPv6.  Companies have a host of options available to them outside of an outright full scale renumbering of their networks.  There are IPv4 to IPv6 Gateways, capabilities already built into your existing routing and switching equipment that could ease the way, and even some capabilities in external service providers like Akamai that could help ease your adoption into the new space.  Eventually everything will need to get migrated and you will need to have a comprehensive plan to get you there, but its nice to know that firms have a bunch of options available to assist in this technical journey. 

 

\Mm