What's Facebook going to look like in 5 years, Youtube? Video is the future

PCWorld reports on Mark Zuckerberg’s public statement that in 5 years Facebook will mostly be video.

Facebook will be mostly video in 5 years , Zuckerberg says

Zach Miners@zachminers

If you think your Facebook feed has a lot of video now, just wait.

“In five years, most of [Facebook] will be video,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday during the company’s first community town hall, in which he took questions from the public on a range of topics.

He was responding to a question about whether the growing number of photos uploaded to Facebook is putting a drag on its infrastructure. But Facebook’s data centers have it covered, he said. The real challenge is improving the infrastructure to allow for more rich media like video in people’s feeds.

Who else’s future will be dominated by video content?

The Cloud Battle, A War to Sell Data Center Bits - Amazon, Google, Microsoft

This time of year is turning into a Cloud Battle, a war between Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to deliver bits as a service from data centers. iPhone vs. Android is a battle of mobile bits.  OS X vs. Windows 7/8/10 is a battle of desktop bits.  The Cloud is a battle to deliver bits as a service from data centers.

Microsoft had their cloud, and Google just finished theirs.  Next week is AWS Reinvent.  The media covers the battles.

Google's Newest Attack On Amazon

  • NOV. 4, 2014, 9:34 AM
  • 9,656
  • 1

When I read so many of the media articles though I think they are focused on how big fleet is or the latest technology.  Huh?  Like this article makes the point of measuring the naval power by the tonnage of the fleet misses the point.

Measuring Naval Power: Bigger Ain’t Always Better

Aggregate tonnage alone doesn’t win naval battles in the modern era, and suggesting otherwise is dangerous.

James-R-Holmes_q
By James R. Holmes
April 12, 2014

...

Navies were largely symmetrical in those thrilling days of yesteryear. That simplified matters. Size was a decent proxy for fighting power when battle fleets made up largely of capital ships bearing big guns squared off. That was before the era — an era that persists to this day — when small craft could carry armament comparable to that of capital ships. A destroyer couldn’t tote big guns back then. A lowly missile boat or sub can fire munitions comparable to those of a capital ship today — and to the same deadly effect.

I have got a chance to close hand see how executives at Google (Urs Hoelzle), Amazon (Werner Vogel), and Microsoft (Scott Guthrie) perform at Gigaom Structure on stage and behind.  It’s kind of like seeing the Generals/Admirals of the military.

This is not a simple battle where more servers and more MW of data center capacity win the war.  How well your team operates using the technology which in the case of the bits (software) was created by other team members is so important.

I think I could write a whole book on the battles between between Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. In fact, I am sure there is someone who has already made a book proposal for this.  Unfortunately or fortunately, I am too busy working on other things to document things in an entertaining way to sell a book.  What I can do is watch as an observer to see strategies being played.

The Cloud Battle may be one of the most interesting technology wars fought with billions of dollars of data centers and IT equipment and 10,000s of development staff, reaching around the world.

Below is Google’s Points of Presence.

NewImage

Oh, one point I do want to make that I forgot is.  Just like Sun Tzu the Art of War Point 18.  “All warfare is based on deception”  The good know how to deceive the enemy and they can use the media to spread the deception.  Don’t believe everything you read.

18. All warfare is based on deception.

Seattle is the Cloud Hub - Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Others, and now Apple

Apple’s recent arrival to Seattle as the media and others talking about Seattle as a Cloud Capital.

The Seattle region has emerged as a major cloud computing hub thanks to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and a wide range of startups focused on cloud infrastructure and services. Much of Google’s cloud infrastructure work happens out of its Seattle-area offices.

In the short run, the new Apple office could intensify the competition for top engineers, but long-term it promises to add to the region’s status as a cloud center.

Influx of tech giants

Apple is the latest in a long list of tech giants from Silicon Valley and elsewhere who have established engineering outposts in the Seattle region. That list includes Google, Facebook, Oracle, HP, and many others, most recently Alibaba.

Talking to a friend who has the challenge to hire Cloud infrastructure engineers who isn’t in the above list he made the following observation.  The typical pattern is engineers start at Microsoft, then move to Amazon, then Google.  His challenge is to catch the engineers while they are making the transition and hire them to his company.  

Take a 22 year old software engineer.  Have them spend 3 years at Microsoft, 3 years at Amazon, and if they were able to make it to 3 years at Google.  They’ll be 31 years old with 9 years experience building Clouds at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.  That is killer resume, and he/she can go anywhere in the world now.

Name another area you could do that and not move.

Oh and there are handful of people who will be able to put Apple on their resume.  Now that would kill.  Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple.

Google's Focus on Performance improves Data Center PUE 8 - 25%, finding the hidden story in the data

Google announced its use of Machine Learning to improve its data center PUE in May 2014 and I posted on the release.  At 7x24 Exchange Fall 2014 event, 25 years of 7x24 Exchange were celebrated and Google’s Joe Kava, VP of Data Centers presented on “Google - beyond the PUE Plateau.”  The keynote is one of the more interesting and insightful presentations made as Google shared information on its experience deploying Machine Learning to its data center fleet.  One of the questions from the audience was “how was the first data center chosen to use Machine Learning?”  A special guest in the presentation was the data center mechanical engineer who spearheaded the project, Jim Gao.  His answer.  The data center that has most clean data to work with.

NewImage.png
NewImage.png

Jim Gao and Joe Kava, 7x24 Exchange Fall Conference.

So what can this 25 year old mechanical engineer do with Machine Learning?  Below is data showing PUE, Wet Bulb, and Cooling Temperature across a range. The Blue areas are good, green not as good, yellow and red are bad.

NewImage.png
NewImage.png

Some of you may be saying big deal.  I can figure out how to run the mechanical systems with a low PUE at a given wet bulb temperature to hit a given cooling temperature.  Well the above was a graph to illustrate what can be seen looking at performance data.  What is beyond our ability to see is working out the best way to run your mechanical systems with 19 Input Variables.  The below are the 19 inputs to the Predictive PUE Machine Learning system to figure out the lowest energy consumption.

NewImage.png
NewImage.png

FYI, this predictive PUE system does not have autonomous control over mechanical systems.  It does provide information to the data center facility engineering teams on how they can improve PUE performance.  The predictive PUE model is 99.6% accurate.  Jim and Joe discussed how Google looked for a high degree of confidence in order to trust the numbers, and the human operators are an important part of the process like UPS drivers on their route.  UPS is famous for creating better routes for its drivers, but I bet they were not even close to the % savings Google achieved.

So how good are the results?  Google achieved from 8% to 25% reduction in its energy used to cool the data center with an average of 15%.  Who wouldn’t be excited to save an average of 15% on their cooling energy costs by providing new settings to run the mechanical plant?  Below is an example of what was historical PUE (blue) and New PUE (green) for a site.

NewImage.png
NewImage.png

One of the risks Google took in this presentation is they let a 25 year old mechanical engineer get on stage.  Was the risk of the kid presenting?  No, Jim was as polished as many who have presented for years.  The risk was everyone at 7x24 Exchange knew who Jim was and they could try and see if he would consider leaving Google.  :-)

NewImage.png
NewImage.png

The idea of using Machine Learning in data centers is new and have shown what can be discovered in the data.  It’s like there was a hidden story there waiting to be told.  Does you data center staff look for hidden stories in the data?  Shouldn’t you if you can save between 8-25% of the energy in systems.