It has always interested me to see how different development teams treat code reviews. Some teams see code reviews as crucial to their success while others see them as a barrier to getting things done. Over time, I’ve come to the conclusion that the culture around code reviews is an important indicator in predicting outcomes for a team.
I wholeheartedly believe this because I’ve seen the quality of code (and thus the product) and the culture of the team directly affected by a team’s code review practices. Ultimately, we can observe a team’s genuine agility in how it handles code review.
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Cloud: Datacenters, Meet Software!
The PC revolution has redefined the notion of a computer over the past four decades. Now it might be time to redefine the notion of a collection of computers, that is, to redefine the notion of a datacenter.
Datacenters are thought of as big places. Some of the more recent plants used by mega-users like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook have acres of land under roof, with many tens of thousands of individual systems and power requirements that would support a small city.
Even your friendly local, on-site enterprise datacenter is likely to be a big room with a big budget commitment and a lot of people hired to manage it.
But what if a datacenter could fit in the corner of a room, or under a desk, or in the palm of your hand?
This seems to be the direction we’re headed, as data loads simultaneously grow exponentially and become ever more distributed. This is also part of the vision I saw and heard outlined at the recent Open Compute Summit in San Jose.
Transparency as a Service
The summit was sponsored by The Open Compute Project Foundation, with a goal “to design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing,” according to its mission statement. Members strive to share ideas, specs, and intellectual property in an open environment. The foundation is keyed by Facebook and the company’s commitment to transparency in how it builds out the massive datacenter infrastructure it requires.
One significant announcement at the summit was made by Vapor.io and company CEO Cole Crawford. The company aims for nothing less than utter transformation of the datacenter, starting with a programmable, open-source based management solution at the top of the stack.
Crawford and Chief Architect Steven White envision a modern, data-driven datacenter in which servers are “cattle, not pets,” following the still-new concept of software-defined servers and centers. “The Open Data Center Runtime Environment is the first accepted contribution to the Open Compute Foundation using the reciprocal license thus ensuring that forks and branches won’t exist,” according to Vapor.io. “We did this to ensure that when you are interacting with your data center, you’re communicating over a community owned, community standard.”
The company’s ultimate vision is a modern hardware configuration that brings new levels of efficiency and output to datacenters of all sizes.
Mobility & Then the IoT
The fast-growing global dataflow has mobility as today’s primary driver. The proliferation of tablets and especially smartphones on a worldwide basis will cause the total amount of data being processed by the Internet to exceed a zettabyte (1 billion terabytes) annually this year or next. That’s more than 30 terabytes per second.
Smartphone ownership will reach into the billions soon enough, and even in many developing countries, such as the Philippines, there are now more mobile phones than people.
But we ain’t seen nuttin’ yet—the Internet of Things (IoT) will be adding billions of new devices to the global Internet soon enough. Though much of the traffic it generates will be hyper-local (via Bluetooth and other short-range technologies), enough of it will be traveling along the Internet to increase global bandwidth to the dozens of zettabytes by the year 2020, according to Gartner and others.
Think of it as cloud computing to the nth degree in all dimensions. Think of the phrase made famous by Sun Microsystems—“the network is the computer”–extending out to “the edge of the network is your computer.”
The edge of the network seems to me to be much like the edge of the universe, that is, there is no such thing to the single observer. One person’s edge is another’s center. Cyberspace expands outward from wherever you are, and you will expect the same performance (some day) for your single device or your enterprise no matter where you are.
Big, bulky, centralized data centers cannot provide this edge service ubiquitously and effectively. There is also the matter of energy consumption. Datacenters were using about 2% of all electricity consumption in the US in 2011—that number has certainly risen since then, although it did not rise as quickly as the EPA had originally estimated for the period 2007-11.
Focus on Power Consumption
But let’s not get distracted by this particular metric. The big picture is one that features global power consumption and the aspiration of billions of people in developing nations to have better lives.
As I’ve written about many times, and about which much of our research at the Tau Institute is focused, developing nations typically consume 3 to 5% of the electricity per-person of the developed world.
We believe that an aggressive national commitment to IT is a primary indicator of sustained economic and societal growth. To achieve significant economic improvement therefore means we must achieve significant new efficiencies in power consumption.
Right Direction
The vision laid out by Vapor.io seems to be a positive step in this direction. Crawford says the technology, which already has its first customer in Indiana in the US, aims for a PUE of 1.1, compared to an industry average of 1.9 (PUE, or power usage effectiveness, is a simple measure of the ratio of total energy required by a datacenter divided by the amount used by the computing resources. The overhead is primarily eaten up by air-conditioning.)
Crawford and team go further, asserting that a new metric needs to be put into place. The metric would be called performance per watt per dollar, or PWD.
New efficiencies and new metrics are one big part of the puzzle. Another big part takes us back to the question near the beginning of this article. What if I could hold a datacenter in my hand? When will I be able to do this?
For now, the direction is being set. The world will need more mega-datacenter technology in smaller urban spaces, as mobility and the IoT inexorably drive dataflows upward. It will also need as much cloud-driven technology within buildings and some day, per person, as we can imagine.
The Software World
The third big piece of the puzzle involves the software that’s eating the world, in the phrase made notorious by Mark Andreessen in the Wall Street Journal in 2011. The world of cloud computing is a world of virtualization, containers, languages, platforms, architectures, and many things as-a-service.
It is a world that is not familiar to many people in the world of datacenters. A grand conversation is beginning to take place, and will need to intensify dramatically to sync up where the world of data is going and where the world of datacenters should be going.
The Cost of a Data Breach By @IanKhanLive | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Learn about the current state of security breaches and what it is costing businesses.
One of my recent conversations with a Cloud security expert at a conference opened up doors to some new information for me personally. Our conversation was around the current status of the Cloud Industry, the Security Challenges and how we can make the Cloud more secure and so on. Did you know that security breaches have huge financial implications such as at an average:
Announcing @LAutomation to Exhibit at @CloudExpo New York [#IoT #Cloud]
SYS-CON Events announced today that Litmus Automation will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Litmus Automation’s vision is to provide a solution for companies that are in a rush to embrace the disruptive Internet of Things technology and leverage it for real business challenges. Litmus Automation simplifies the complexity of connected devices applications with Loop, a secure and scalable cloud platform.
Additional Views on Support By @AndyJonak | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
This month I want to revisit supporting infrastructure and datacenter environments. I have touched (some would say rant) upon this topic since my post in April 2014 called “Take a Holistic View of Support”. My thoughts and views on this topic have not changed at all: it’s critical for any organization to have a holistic, comprehensive strategy and view of how they support their IT infrastructure and datacenter environments. In fact, I believe it’s even more critical today then it was a year ago when I wrote that blog post.
We work with many different organizations in many different types of industries and we see daily the needs and challenges for these organizations in being able to support their IT environments. Now let me know say this: supporting the IT environment might not carry the same prestige or is as “sexy” as implementing large new IT projects or IT initiatives such as implementing new systems or applications, but it’s just as critical or potentially even more so. As once those initiatives or projects are put in place, the supporting of these initiatives and projects on an ongoing basis is how they will be judged to be successful but the organizations. Many of us have been there or have been part of this: A successful IT project, but poor support going forward, and the project was not necessarily classified as a success because of that poor support. But that initial implementation went very well.
Secure Cloud @WhoaCloud Named “Bronze Sponsor” of @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
SYS-CON Events announced today that WHOA.com, an ISO 27001 Certified secure cloud computing company, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo® New York, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
WHOA.com is a leader in next-generation, ISO 27001 Certified secure cloud solutions. WHOA.com offers a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class cloud services for business including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Secure Cloud Desktop, Cloud Storage, Disaster Recovery, Integrated Applications and Security.
QTS Data Centers to Exhibit at @CloudExpo NY | @DataCenters_QTS [#Cloud]
SYS-CON Events announced today that QTS Realty Trust, one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing providers of data center facilities and cloud services and a leader in security and compliance, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
QTS Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: QTS) is a leading national provider of data center solutions and fully managed services, and a leader in security and compliance. The company offers a complete, unique portfolio of core data center products, including custom data center (C1), colocation (C2) and cloud and managed services (C3), providing the flexibility, scale, and security needed to support the rapidly evolving hybrid infrastructure demands of web and IT applications. With 12 data centers in eight states, QTS owns, operates, and manages approximately 4.7 million square feet of secure, state-of-the-art data center infrastructure and supports more than 850 customers. QTS’s Critical Facility Management (CFM) can provide increased efficiency and greater performance for third-party data center owners and operators.
IoT and Networked Field Services By @KRBenedict | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]
Articles about the IoT (Internet of Things) have moved from technical journals to our daily newspapers. They are a popular mainstream media topic today, but where are there actual business values found as a result of the IoT? In this article we will explore some of these topics.
In the rugged blue collar environment, vehicles, high valued equipment and other assets can be connected to the IoT to wirelessly report on their status, hours of operation, location, environment, maintenance and repair needs. This data can alert management when there is a problem, event or automatically create service tickets or send alerts when an action or decision is required. The IoT has the ability to provide “situational awareness” across large geographic areas and thousands of assets all at the same time. This capability helps both decision-makers and automated systems better understand how to optimize the use of experts, equipment and schedules across different geographic areas.
Increasingly, Pay-Per-Use Is Paying Off By @AriaSystemsInc | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
You hear the terms “subscription economy” and “subscription commerce” all the time. And with good reason. Subscription-based monetization is transforming business as we know it. But what about usage? Where’s the “consumption economy”? Turns out, it’s all around us.
When most people think of usage-based billing, the example that probably comes to mind first is metered public utilities — water, gas and electric. Phone services, especially mobile, might come next. Then maybe taxis. And that’s about as far as most of us get before we scratch our heads. What else is there? Plenty. In this post, we take a look at several market niches where pay-per-use options are already the norm and why they work.
SaaS Bill of Rights By @Vormetric | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Recently, we released the results from the cloud edition of our 2015 Insider Threat Report. My colleagues Andy Kicklighter and CJ Radford delved into the results in their blog posts from March 24 and March 26, and I’ve gone into a bit more detail about the findings below. But, the purpose of this blog is to do two things: a) discuss what we hear matters when it comes to successful and safe SaaS consumption and delivery and b) with this feedback in mind, outline the tools and capabilities necessary to make this happen.