I wrote on Mike Manos’s comment regarding James Hamilton’s post that Private Clouds are not the future.

Jan 25, 2010

Private Clouds Dead or Alive, views from James Hamilton and Mike Manos, logic vs. emotional

I’ve been thinking about what to write as a response to James Hamilton’s blog post on Private Clouds are not the Future.  It is well written and logical in its efficiency.

Last week Alistair Croll wrote an excellent InformationWeek article arguing that “the true cloud operators will have an unavoidable cost advantage because it's all they worry about. They'll also be closer to consumers (because they have POPs everywhere and partnerships with content delivery systems), and connecting with consumers and partners will become an increasingly essential part of any enterprise IT strategy.” Have a look at Private Clouds are a Fix, Not the Future.

Private clouds are better than nothing but an investment in a private cloud is an investment in a temporary fix that will only slow the path to the final destination: shared clouds. A decision to go with a private cloud is a decision to run lower utilization levels, consume more power, be less efficient environmentally, and to run higher costs.

StorageMojo’s Robin Harris also votes for emotions keeping private clouds future bright.

Why private clouds are part of the future

by ROBIN HARRIS on FRIDAY, 5 FEBRUARY, 2010

James Hamilton, Amazon architect and a very smart guy, recently blogged about private clouds. In Private Clouds Are Not The Future he argues that economies of scale make public clouds much more efficient than private clouds.

I think we agree that several effects make web scale public clouds more efficient

…

Robin adds his view it isn’t all about economics.

It isn’t all about the Benjamins
Economics is not the driver many assume. Individuals and companies often select less economic choices. Some people buy cars that cost $200,000 and get 12 miles to the gallon. Some companies buy $6/GB storage and then utilize just 1/3rd of that costly capacity.

Often perceived benefits are not well measured in dollars. Convenience, availability, consistency and control often relate to emotional needs and wants that are rarely quantified or questioned.

But we don’t have to invoke those to understand why private clouds will be part of the computing landscape. Just a quick look at one of the large Internet data centers will tell us what we need to know.

As much as people talk about Cloud Computing it is rare to hear someone talk about power.  Robin is the exception to the rule.

Show me the power
All the advantages of public clouds have analogs in the world of power generation and distribution. Power generation is cheapest when centralized and large-scale distribution systems move power at the lowest cost per watt.

Electrical power generation and distribution is over 125 years old. The technology is well understood, the industry is mature, and a massive infrastructure — including mile-long coal-hauling trains — supports production and distribution.

And yet, Google’s massive Dalles, Oregon data centers, built next to a substation a few miles from the nation’s largest hydropower system – one of the world’s most reliable power sources – flanks each data center with generators. I expect Amazon does the same.

You can read many things into what it means that AWS has 100 open positions in its developer resources.

Job Openings in AWS Developer Resources

I'd like to highlight a few of the nearly one hundred open positions on the AWS team. If you are a software engineer, manager, technical writer, program manager, or product manager and you like to work on cutting-edge projects with world-scale impact, you owe it to yourself to look at these positions.

Is Amazon having a hard time finding the right people?

Is AWS growing so fast they can’t staff quick enough?

Does this have an effect on service levels?

The AWS posted some of their postings to get your attention.

If you want to make it even easier for our development community to build amazing applications, I'd urge you to check out these positions:

• Senior Program Manager – You are passionate about great customer user experiences and understand how to organize and drive distributed development projects running under tight deadlines.  You will own the process, schedule, and success of several AWS teams building rich internet applications which enable customers to use our cloud computing services through point-and-click interfaces (position 92278).
• Senior Software Developer – You will fundamentally change the way people build, deploy, and manage cloud applications in a small team running fast to offer AWS customers a brand new service.  You will apply your experience building reliable, scalable, data driven distributed applications, knowledge of web protocols, and in-depth knowledge of several application servers, Linux tools and Java EE architectures. (position 109479).
• PHP SDK Developer – You are an experienced PHP developer with a passion for PHP APIs and a desire to help thousands of PHP developers use the AWS cloud to build PHP-based web and Facebook applications quickly (position 110634).
• Software Developer – You are a self-starting, self-directing Java developer who is creative and passionate about developing web-based applications which will be used by thousands of developers (position 110635).
• Senior Development Manager – You are a dynamic, innovative, and hands-on software development manager who will lead the production of AJAX web apps that enable customers to use our cloud computing services through point-and-click, web-based interfaces.  You will be responsible for leading a central platform team of talented and nimble engineers that work with several teams across AWS to produce great developer tools and websites for our customers (position 110632).
• Senior Technical Writer – You are passionate about making it easy for developers to get started with AWS services and to gain a deeper understanding through technical documentation.  You believe strongly in providing world-class, error-free documentation and will get your hands dirty with code samples and command line tools to validate your understanding (positions 111118, 108280).
• Software Development Engineer / Test - You are a customer advocate and passionate about ensuring the AWS management console provides an error-free user experience which delights customers by automating testing and deployment processes (positions 111171, 110638)

But the posting that got my attention was this Sr. Business Development Manager – AWS Federal Government.

As a business development leader for Amazon Web Services (AWS) focusing on the US Federal Government Sector, you will have the exciting opportunity to help shape and deliver on a strategy to build mind share and adoption of Amazon's platform of infrastructure web services (Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon SimpleDB, and Amazon SQS). Your broad responsibilities will include helping to further expand AWS to key federal government agencies and partners by establishing both business and technical relationships, and managing the day-to-day interactions with these organizations. The ideal candidate will posses both a business background (with a focus on the federal market) that enables them to drive an engagement and interact at the CXO/VP level, as well as a technical background that enables them to easily interact with software developers and architects. He/she should also have a demonstrated ability to think strategically about business, product, and technical challenges for both AWS customers as well as AWS.

It will be interesting to see the battle for cloud computing solutions in the federal gov’t sector.  This is where IBM, HP, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft will be fighting hard head to head.

Amazon has a phenomenal amount of data on AWS and much of that data is shared with the partner community,.  One partner is cloudkick.

graphs

visualize important metrics like http latency and ping - from multiple data centers.

monitoring

set up monitoring in a just a few clicks
get alerts when services go critical
monitor ping, http, https & ssh

Cloudkick wrote this post on Amazon’s network performance issues.

Visual evidence of Amazon EC2 network issues

Update: After seeing this story picked up, we ran our numbers again to demonstrate a broader picture of the issue at hand. We ran a sample of ping latency across several hundred EC2 instances managed by Cloudkick located in the US-East availability zone. Below you will see that the issues started around Christmas, and have been on-going since.

An average ping latency of 50ms (as seen in the period between 11-30 and 12-14) is relatively low and normal. The spikes in latencies up to 1000ms are definitely abnormal, and should never be encountered on healthy private network.

Amazon has a great track record in performance and reliability, so this is why we are so surprised by this data. As Amazon spokesperson Kay Kinton said, “When customers report a problem they are having, we take it very seriously. Sometimes this means working with customers to tweak their configurations or it could mean making modifications in our services to assure maximum performance.”

Original post:

A couple of weeks ago we noticed that our ping latency graphs on Cloudkick looked very odd.

This post was picked by DataCenterKnowledge

Amazon: We Don’t Have Cloud Capacity Issues

January 14th, 2010 : Rich Miller

A chart from CloudKick looking at latency for resources running on Amazon EC2.

One of the key selling points for cloud computing is scalability: the ability to handle traffic spikes smoothly without the expense and hassle of adding more dedicated servers. But this week some users of Amazon EC2 are reporting that their apps on the cloud computing service are having problems scaling efficiently, and suggesting that this uneven performance could be due to capacity problems in Amazon’s data center

And Register as news, and refers to DataCenterKnowledge and cloudkick.

"Amazon has a great track record in performance and reliability, so this is why we are so surprised by this data," reads Cloudkick's blog post on the matter.

Cloudkick's numbers are limited to Amazon's "US-East" availability zone. EC2 serves up processing power from two separate geographic locations - the US and Europe - and each geographic region is split into multiple zones designed never to vanish at the same time.

enStratus, an outfit similar to Cloudkick, confirms the latency increase, but it says the spike is significantly smaller. Response time from the company's network into "all regions" of the Amazon cloud increased by 10 per cent on January 9, enStratus CTO George Reese tellsThe Reg, and it has remained roughly that high ever since. Reese's sample size is around 300 server instances.

Cloudkick and enStratus released their data in the wake of a blog post from Alan Williamson, co-head of the UK-based cloud consultancy AW2.0, who asked whether Amazon was experiencing capacity issues after one of his customers experienced a serious slowdown beginning at the end of last year. "We began noticing [the problem] around the end of November," Williamson tells The Reg. "We had been running with Amazon for approximately 20 months with absolutely no problems whatsoever. We could throw almost anything at them and it wouldn't even hiccup."

Echoing what Cloudkick and enStratrus have seen, Williamson says he eventually traced the problem back to network latency. On the application in question, the average time needed to turn around a web request jumped from about 2 to 3 milliseconds to about between 50 and 100 milliseconds.

Responding to an inquiry about the post from Data Center Knowledge, Amazon said that their infrastructure does not have capacity issues. And this afternoon, the company sent a similar statement to The Reg.

"We do not have over-capacity issues. When customers report a problem they are having, we take it very seriously," a company spokeswoman said. "Sometimes this means working with customers to tweak their configurations or it could mean making modifications in our services to assure maximum performance."