5 details about Google's Cloud

Here is a post on GigaOm on 5 things your probably didn’t know about Google’s cloud.  Here is one.

1. Google Compute Engine Zones are probably in Ireland and Oklahoma

In 2012 Google released impressive internal photos of their data center facilities and mapped them out. However, the Compute Engine Zones are very non-specific, e.g. “europe-west1-a”. Indeed, they have only two geographical regions (Europe West and US Central) compared to Amazon’s nine. In addition to its 13 locations, SoftLayer has announced 15 new data centers just for this year.

Google’s networking is very opaque. If you traceroute an Amazon or SoftLayer instance, you can see where traffic is going, the network providers, and usually the locations of the routers. In contrast, Google goes into its network at the closest POP, and everything else is very hidden.

It’s possible to guess where Google is locating its cloud. A test of a Google Compute Engine instance showed round trip responses within 20ms from London, UK. If we compare that to pings from London to the three European countries where Google has facilities — Ireland, Belgium and Finland —  we can rule out Belgium and Finland because the ping round trip time is too high. Only the Ireland facility is close enough.

Google europe-west1-aAmazon eu-west (Ireland)Belgium
0.be.pool.ntp.org		Finland
0.fi.pool.ntp.org

20ms

22ms

38ms

49ms

Disclosure: I work part-time for GigaOm Research.

If AWS is invincible, then why fund a direct competitor? DigitalOcean gets $37.2 mil

The way some people talk AWS has already won the cloud battle and the spoils are left to the rest.  The beauty of the cloud and their customers is as fast as VMs can be spun up, new businesses can figure out better ways to spin up VMs.  Here is Gartner’s infamous magic quadrant on IaaS.

NewImage

So how’s this for a change.  DigitalOcean doesn’t show up anywhere in this graphic.  Yet has just received $37.2 mil series A funding and has spun up its 1,000,000 VM.

DigitalOcean Growth

In the past 15 months and with only a handful of engineers we’ve been able to hit some amazing milestones. We’ve launched over 1,000,000 virtual servers, processed 18,000,000 events, opened new datacenter regions in San Francisco and Singapore, for over 100,000 customers.

NewImage

DigitalOcean had a simple vision.  Make life easier for the developer.  Vs. Amazon make more money.  Make things stickier, make it hard for people to leave AWS.

We started DigitalOcean in the summer of 2011 with a simple mission: to make developers lives easier. We thought that the other players in the space had made IaaS too complicated. We focused on user experience and simplicity. Guiding ourselves with a single principle, can we build a product that we would love ourselves?

With three engineers we built the first version of our product and with help from the Hacker News community our growth exploded when we announced our SSD powered cloud.

Part of the problem AWS is having in its efforts to make it harder for people to leave it makes it harder to get started as well.

Cloud is not a Panacea, Yin and Yang, Public Cloud and Private

The way some people talk about the Cloud it is a Panacea.

a remedy for all ills or difficulties :  cure-all

Many people have built marketing initiatives and customers are ready to buy the Cloud believing it is the Panacea for their IT issues.  

Myself I have tried to argue that the Cloud has limits, and others will say no they can point to customers who have been successful being in the Cloud.

My latest attempt is to try and discuss the Yin and Yang concept.

In Chinese philosophy, the concept of yin-yang (simplified Chinese: 阴阳; traditional Chinese: 陰陽; pinyin: yīnyáng), which is often called "yin and yang",[1][2][3][4] is used to describe how opposite or contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world; and, how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another. Many natural dualities (such as light and dark, high and low, hot and cold, fire and water, life and death, and so on) are thought of as physical manifestations of the yin-yang concept.

Some may think their data center was the dark days and the solution in AWS is the light.

NewImage

The Yin and Yang is drawn to show even in the light their is a bit of dark and in the dark is a bit of light.

Even when you look at AWS which is the epitome of Public Cloud it has bits of private in it.  The data centers are built or leased by Amazon.com and there are no public disclosures on those data centers.  The equipment in the data center is a guarded a secret.  The BIOS, Processors, RAM, HD, Network, and Storage Systems are all private.

What is the change management process for APIs?  Is it in control of the public or does amazon.com make the decisions on when they will make changes?

The strength of the Public Cloud is following a retail model to address consumer needs.  Where IT has gone to dark side is where they think they can dictate to users what their needs are.

If the internal IT group is customer driven and customers have options, then there is not as much a reason to go the Public Cloud.

 

 

 

Netflix made 11 presentations at AWS Re:Invent

AWS Re:Invent had many sessions and the folks at Netflix created a post so you could find the Netflix one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.

Yes there are eleven Netflix presentations made at AWS Re:Invent.  Here are two.  You can go to this link to see all.

Netflix Presentation Videos from AWS Re:Invent 2013

 

AWS recorded all the talks, there are hundreds of videos, so to make it easier to find the Netflix related ones, here are links to the videos.

DMG206 - Development Patterns for Iteration, Scale, Performance and Availability
Neil Hunt - Chief Product Officer



ENT203 What Enterprises Can Learn From Netflix
Yury Israilevsky - VP Cloud and Platform Engineering


What you mean the Cloud has Issues? WSJ advises small business users

With all the hype for the Cloud it is easy for people to think the cloud doesn’t have problems.  WSJ has a post on the problems with clouds for small business users.

The Problems With Heading Into the Cloud

When small firms use remote services, they face headaches they never had before

 
By  CONNECT
February 3, 2014

Ah, the simplicity of the cloud. For small businesses, it means not having to manage big IT setups in their office, turning instead to remote services that let them do everything from storing data to running software online.

Well, maybe not as simple as many entrepreneurs expect. Experts warn that shifting big jobs to the cloud still means business owners need to oversee a host of everyday IT operations around their own office. And it introduces technical considerations they may never have thought of.