AOL's 3 steps to save $5mil in IT Operations

I met a bunch of Mike Manos's IT team from AOL in Santa Clara.  They were in town for Uptime Symposium and we invited the AOL team to meet some of the thought leaders in the bay area.  We gave Mike's team a bunch of Mike Manos's stories as there were a lot of people who used to work in Mike's group at Microsoft and Digital Realty Trust. Plus his brother Steve Manos was there as well.

I've gotten to know Mike as I used to help him on his presentations.  I met the presenters Chisty and Julie, so besides sharing the slides and writing a post, let me take a stab at telling the AOL story in a different way.

The opening slide is this.

After going through the slides i would try "AOL's 3 steps to save $5mil in IT Operations"

Clearing the Cruft is not going to get people's attention.  Saving $5mil does.

The results are summarized here early on.  This is good.

The order of the three steps presented are AOL Cloud, Power Absurdity, and Power Hog.

I would change the order. Put Power Hogs first.  Find those wasteful things.

Some of these power hogs are not only wasteful, but also absurd.  Project Absurdity after Power Hogs

What is left should try to go to AOL cloud.  The last step is the stuff left over gets moved to the cloud.

Although I bet you there are a bunch of VMware consultants who will gladly move the Power Hogs and Power Absurd to the cloud as well.  The more VMs the more they make.

The list of steps taken are good, but I would reorder them and use it is a good chance to make fun of their absent leader Mike Manos.  Without an executive sponsor a project this is impossible.  I wonder if Mike calls his staff Donkeys for not taking up the challenge.

Excellent slide with energy savings and carbon reduction.

Overall this is a well thought out presentation.  I only suggest some changes in the order of the content, changing the title, and adding some humor.

Good job AOL team.  Hope to see you soon.

AWS increases its hiring, 360 jobs in US, 180 jobs outside US

Werner Vogels posts on the AWS jobs available.

Do You Want to Help Build the Next AWS Service?By Werner Vogels on 19 April 2012 02:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over the past several years I’ve spent much of my time traveling around the world speaking about distributed systems. From building infinitely scalable data stores, architectures for high performance computing, to the challenges imposed by the CAP theorem, there are wonderful, complex, fascinating problems to be solved in the area of distributed computing. During my travels I’ve met thousands of brilliant engineers who are leveraging the cloud to deliver exciting new products and revolutionize IT as we know it. One thing that’s become obvious to me is that there are innovative, inspiring developers in every corner of the planet from Australia to Iceland and from Israel to Peru.

The specific jobs posts are here.

And that leads me to another distributed problem – finding good engineers to help AWS build the next generation of cloud computing services. We’ve got a big vision and to realize it we need to find qualified engineers to join us on our journey. A quick look at the AWS career web sites reveals that we are hiring hundreds of people around the world.

Click here for our current job openings in the U.S.

Click here for our current job openings in Europe, Asia, and South Africa

When you scroll through the US postings https://us-amazon.icims.com/jobs/search?pr=1&in_iframe=1. What is interesting is how many of the job positions have been opened over the past couple of weeks.

Time in a Data Center, a service for tracking time related events

GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham has a post on a new service for time related events.

Meet TempoDB, a database startup with an eye for time

By Stacey Higginbotham Apr. 13, 2012, 9:28am PT No Comments

• in Share18

TempoDB, a startup out of Chicago, has built a database-as-a-service offering specifically for time-series data. CEO and co-founder Andrew Cronk presented at the TechStars Cloud demo day earlier this week, and laid out the need for a specialty database for data that comes from thermostats, sensor networks, networking gear and other machines that spit out both values and times. But does the world (or the Internet of Things) need a specialty time-series database?

Time is a way to track events and supports a post analysis process, and it is interesting that a company has chosen to make time their main value proposition.

When I read this I thought of the song "Time in a Bottle".  If you could wind back time that would be worth using a cloud service.

Instagram's Mike Krieger Presentation on scaling its infrastructure with 5 employees

TechCrunch has a post on Instagram's founder Mike Krieger discussing its infrastructure.

How To Scale A $1 Billion Startup: A Guide From Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger

INGRID LUNDEN

posted 5 hours ago

26 Comments

Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have been noticeably silent since their photo-sharing app Instagram was bought by Facebook earlier this week for $1 billion.

In the meantime there has been a lot written about that deal, from praise to backlash, parsing what it meansand why.

But if you’d like to hear a little (actually, a lot) about how Instagram got to where it did, read on.

Last night, Krieger gave a presentation at an Airbnb event for employees and members of the network, part of a regular series called the Tech Talk. The subject was “Scaling Instagram.”

The presentation is here with 185 slides.

The most interesting slides I found at the end.

Are Data Centers and the Cloud close to being regulated? Mike Manos discusses challenges with Governments

Mike Manos is one of the data center executives who I always enjoy chatting with.  We chatted over drinks and dinner a few weeks ago in LV, and I am looking forward to when we are both in Santa Clara for Uptime.  One of the things I enjoy is reading one of Mike's post, and thinking about what he says and what I would say if we were drinking a beer.

Mike has a post on some observations he has collected.

« AOL Power Hog Award

Open Sourcing our Operational Scale Tools–Meet Trigger »

Cloud Détente – The Cloud Cat and Mouse Papers

April 2, 2012 by mmanos

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.

Mike shares where he is going with future posts.

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

One of the things I enjoy is listening to Mike and seeing where I have made the same observation. I wrote back in June 2010 that Government Regulation is coming to Google, Facebook, or Apple.

Who will be next for Government Regulation? Google, Facebook or Apple

FRIDAY, JUNE 11, 2010 AT 12:03AM

One side affect of the Microsoft anti-trust action is the governments of world feel good about taking on technology companies with regulation.  You go throughout history and technologies at first were not regulated - auto mfg, power generation, oil & gas, and healthcare.  And, there is still people arguing there needs to be more legislation in these areas.

The Data Center industry is one of the youngest industries that has little regulation.  When you look at the Mobile carriers they have dozens of years of regulation (remember how AT&T was broken up).  Can you foresee a future where data centers and the data in them is as highly regulated as mobile carriers?

Keep in mind Mike's warning of the coming regulations to the Cloud and Data.

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