Amazon IT moves into AWS

Amazon.com attempts IT switch to cloud computing

Amazon's e-commerce site is planning to move into Amazon Web Services. Jen Boden is Amazon's e-commerce IT director.

"Boden said her organization is in the preliminary stages of moving into AWS -- she started with some simple, homegrown applications, such as a list maintained for HR, which her team moved to AWS successfully. Larger sections of IT operations will move later with the financials likely to be last, since they are the most sensitive to security and compliance needs. Planning began last year, and the whole process might take another year and a half."

From the article it is interesting to see the confirmation that Amazon's own enterprise IT needs to go through the same transformation as any other enterprise IT team that has decades of old applications and data silos to support.

This effort is a great shot in the arm for cloud computing. The past year, most enterprise class IT shops have started pilot programs to figure out how to incorporate cloud storage and cloud computing into their roadmaps. When leaders like Amazon can point to solutions that others can follow, the laggards will come on board and we can finally move to the next phase in cloud computing and that is standards. With standards, utility computing will come one step closer.

Complexity and fault-tolerance

As an engineer I frequently look towards biology to get inspired or get ideas how complex systems need to be put together to stand the test of time. In this quest, I came across a wonderful article from a Yale research team that compared the transcriptional regulatory network of a bacterium to the call graph of the Linux operating system.


“It is a commonplace metaphor that the genome is the operating system of a living organism. We wanted to see if the analogy actually holds up,” said Mark Gerstein, the Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics; professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and computer science; and senior author of the paper.

Both E coli and the Linux networks are arranged in hierarchies, but with some notable differences in how they achieve operational efficiencies. The molecular networks in the bacteria are arranged in a pyramid, with a limited number of master regulatory genes at the top that control a broad base of specialized functions, which act independently.

In contrast, the Linux operating system is organized more like an inverted pyramid, with many different top-level routines controlling few generic functions at the bottom of the network. Gerstein said that this organization arises because software engineers tend to save money and time by building upon existing routines rather than starting systems from scratch.

“But it also means the operating system is more vulnerable to breakdowns because even simple updates to a generic routine can be very disruptive,” Gerstein said. To compensate, these generic components have to be continually fine-tuned by designers.

Operating systems are like urban streets – engineers tend to focus on areas that get a lot of traffic,” said Gerstein. “We can do this because we are designing these changes intelligently.”

As an engineer this is a very recognizable failure mode of functional design by humans. We are so focused on providing the functionality at the lowest cost possible that the system wide aspects of how the functionality should be reliably provided is lost. A biological system like the human body could lose an eye, a digit, or even a limb and we would still be able to function as a human being. But if you take one leg of a table or chair, the table or chair ceases to function as designed. It is only in high exposure or non-serviceable designs that this broader context is designed into the functionality of the system. Control systems of nuclear plants, or trading algorithms in finance are examples, as are the operating systems of deep-space vehicles.

Cloud computing today needs some innovations to address the broader system exposure of a business process executing in a remote location. For example, security and authenticity of data or a software asset are the two elements that become more nebulous in a cloud context. But solutions to these problems exist and cloud computing will adopt these as best practices. Cloud computing will become a better implementation of what private companies do with their internal IT today. Particularly at the SMB level, cloud computing is already much stronger than most internal IT processes, with well defined disaster recovery processes and geographical redundancy: two elements that are beyond the capital reach of most SMBs. Cloud computing is shaping up to be a new organization of IT capability that will enable the next generation of business process innovation.

Governmental data

With governmental data being pushed into the public cloud, APIs to access them are rapidly proliferating. The Guardian has set up a portal that allows users to search through the governmental data of the UK, US, Australia, and New Zealand and see how countries compare. There is also an active quest for good visualizations and the portal solicits its users to suggest visualizations.

One that caught my eye is called the-billion-dollar-gram which visualizes the relative budget size of programs and economic activity, with some interesting cross country and industry comparisons.

The ease with which this data can now be gathered by simple REST calls is making it possible to cross correlate this data with private enterprise data. The initial difficulties to overcome of course are data quality and the Guardian developers understood that. They are actively scrubbing the data with the help of their early adopters. From a statisticians or academicians point of view the data legends are missing making it difficult to properly compare these data sets so expect lots of misinformation to be generated by the early uses of these public portals. Nonetheless, we have to start somewhere and a transparent system that makes it easy to access lots of data is the best first start.

Government as a Platform

I saw a tweet fly by from Tim O'Reilly with the above label. When googling the matter, I came across a presentation Tim gave this summer exploring the new universe of APIs that enable access to governmental data. Combining this data with operational pieces in a typical CRM or ERP database would constitute a powerful means for ERP optimization.

Here is the presentation:

Government As Platform

View more documents from Tim O’Reilly.

One of the tidbits of info that jumped out for me was that 45% of all map mashups are based on Google maps, but only 4% on Microsoft virtual world. That is the power of first mover advantage. Given the push towards light-weight federated systems, the economic lock-in of the big four, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP is finally broken. Agility is king again. For example, look at this of www.datamasher.org

And now something completely different: brain simulation

Our good folks at the national labs have been developing cloud computing for two decades, so what they are doing now is possibly an indication of what we'll be doing with the cloud a decade from now. Researchers at IBM Almaden have been working on the largest brain simulation to date; 1.6 billion neurons with 9 trillion connections. The scale of this endeavor still dwarfs the capacity and capability of any commercial cloud offering; the simulation uses roughly 150 thousand processors and 150TBytes of memory.

Just to provide a sense of the OPEX of such an installation: Dawn, a IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer at LLNL, hums and breathes inside an acre-size room on the second floor of the lab's Terascale Simulation Facility. Its 147,456 processors and 147,000 gigabytes of memory fill 10 rows of computer racks, woven together by miles of cable. Dawn devours a million watts of electricity through power cords as thick as a bouncer's wrists—racking up an annual power bill of $1 million. The roar of refrigeration fans fills the air: 6675 tons of air-conditioning hardware labor to dissipate Dawn's body heat, blowing 2.7 million cubic feet of chilled air through the room every minute.

Given the fact that a real brain only consumes about 25Watts, clearly there is a lot of room for technology innovation. Silicon innovation however has come to a stand still with venture capital completely abandoning this segment. There are no VC firms in the US or EU that have any funds that target this vertical. It is rumored that Google is designing its own silicon now since no commercial chip manufacturers are providing the innovation that Google needs.

Governmental IT: Analytics is not a dirty word

Over at Smart Data Collective, Bill Cooper wrote a wonderful article on deep analytics. In particular, I liked his assessment on the resistance expressed by customers that can't see the forest for the trees.

I’ve watched many government agencies balk at the idea of data mining and complex analytics. They are concerned about switching to a new data architecture and the potential risks involved in implementing a new solution or making a change in methodology.

Having been there, I do understand their concerns, but fear of change is what’s holding government agencies back from being able to fully leverage the data that already exists to effect change at the local, regional, state and national levels. Analytics are the key to lowering costs, increasing revenue and streamlining government programs.

In my own government experience and now, looking at it from the other side, I have come to believe that government clients need to think about data the way the world’s top corporations do. Like all federal agencies, these companies already had huge repositories of data that were never analyzed – never used to support decisions, plan strategies or take immediate actions. Once they began to treat that data as a corporate asset, they started to see real results. The best part is that leveraging these mountains of data does not require a "rip and replace" approach. Inserting a data warehousing/data mining or complex analytics capability into a SOA or cloud computing environment can be very low risk and even elegant in its implementation. The potential rewards are immense!

That’s what’s needed in the government sector. We need to view analytics not as a dirty word but as a secret weapon against fraud and other challenges impacting all areas of the government sector.

I am a big believer that the future of the cloud consists of federated systems for the simple reason that large data sets are captive to their storage devices. Federated systems makes service oriented architectures (SOA) a natural architecture pattern to collate information. The fact that Google Gears and Microsoft Azure exhibit SOA at different levels of abstraction is clear evidence of the power of SOA. Add coarse grain SOAs to these fine-grained patterns and you can support federation and scale internal IT systems even if the core runs in Gears or Azure.

Interactive Map of cloud services

Appirio, a company that helps enterprise customers leverage PaaS cloud platforms such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps, put a nice interactive navigator on their website.
The Appirio cloud computing ecosystem map aims to provide more clarity in the fast evolving cloud services market. It tries to help enterprise decision makers to accelerate their adoption of the cloud by trying to provide a standard taxonomy.



Ryan Nichols, head of cloud strategy at Appirio, states: "The cloud ecosystem is evolving so quickly that it's difficult for most enterprises to keep up. We created the ecosystem map to track this evolution ourselves, and have decided to publish it to help others assess the lay of the land. With broader community involvement, we can create a living, breathing map where anyone can access, drill down and interact with dynamic information. This will bring some much-needed clarity to the cloud market."

Unfortunately, since the map is geared towards the enterprise customer it ignores all of the innovation that is taking place in the mashup, programmable web, and mid-market products, such as Zementis ADAPA in the Cloud. Given the new ways in which the cloud enables new application architectures and services, the enterprise market is the worst indicator of the evolving cloud ecosystem.