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pinyinyīnyáng), 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


Wow, Apple files a permit and media is all over its expansion in NC

Apple files a permit to expand data center capacity and the media is all over it.

Search Results

  1. Mac Rumors

     

    Apple Is Once Again Expanding Its North Carolina Data Center

    AppAdvice-10 hours ago
    Like the previous tactical data center, plans for the new one shows banks ... All in all, Apple's North Carolina data center is a huge setup that's ...

The data center media caught it too.

 

REPORT: APPLE PLANS ANOTHER DATA CENTER IN NORTH CAROLINA

Company files for permit for a 14,000 sq ft facility in Maiden

21 February 2014 by Yevgeniy Sverdlik - DatacenterDynamics

 
Report: Apple plans another data center in North Carolina
Apple's main Maiden, North Carolina, data center

Apple is planning to build a second mid-size data center on its property in Maiden, North Carolina, which currently has one 500,000 sq ft facility and a smaller, 21,000 sq ft one.

 

The company has filed papers for a permit with Catawba County that describes a 14,000 sq ft data center at the site, Hickory Record reported. Plans in the paperwork include a building with office and other ancillary space and a data hall cooled by 11 air conditioning units.

Om Malik Makes a Transition from GigaOm to True Ventures

Kara Swisher on re/code writes on Om Malik’s move full time to True Ventures, leaving GigaOm.  It is funny how many times people think Om’s name is Giga Om.  Going to True Ventures, Om won’t have this problem as much.  Om is different than most media in that he has made the jump to the VC community.  Reading Kara’s post reminds me of things that make Om fit in a technical community.

A sassy tech blog with class and standards and ethics and a big, big, voice?

...

But Om has been much more than a disruptor. He has also been a generous and kind adviser to anyone who needed help, including to competitors; a smart and analytical writer, whose fog-horn sensibilities nearly always cut through the incessant soup of hype that blankets the Bay Area tech landscape; a terrific reporter at his core, who knows news, has a nose for news and, well, knows it.

Kara closes also making the point on Om’s name.

From Medieval Latin, omniscient means “all-knowing,” which kind of sums up Om a lot of the time.

His own name also is defined as a “mystic syllable, considered the most sacred mantra.” Perhaps that’s going to far — I know he’d think (and say) so.

So let’s just agree that it’s been a good name — a really good name — to represent tech journalism online and we’re all the better for it and owe him a debt of gratitude.

Here is True Ventures post on Om joining.

Om is known for his prescient thoughts about the tech industry, his deep understanding of markets and trends, and his fast friendships with most of the other thought leaders in our industry. He is the most loyal and thoughtful friend an entrepreneur could ever ask for, including all of us at True. Few people in Silicon Valley are as respected, and as someone who has known Om for a long time, I can say with absolute authority that few people are as kind.

That is why it is an incredible honor to announce today that Om Malik will join True as a full-time partner. He has detailed his decision on GigaOM, and we are unbelievably blessed to have him dedicate the majority of his time to True. Om personifies this firm’s love affair with technology, and we are so looking forward to having him, his big ideas and his big heart around a lot more.

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What’s Om doing?

Status Update

I have hung up my reporter’s notebook for good and retired from the news business. I have joined early stage venture capital firm, True Ventures, as a full partner of the firm.

 It is great to see people make transitions and grow.

Disclosure: I work part time for GigaOm Research and have had the pleasure of good conversations with Om.

Will Facebook's acquisition change Whatsapp's policy of not storing chat history?

I was reading Om Malik’s post on Facebook’s Irrationality of buying Whatsapp.

The irrational rationality behind Facebook’s $16 billion acquisition of WhatsApp

 

14 HOURS AGO

22 Comments

facebook-gold
SUMMARY:

The huge price tag attached to Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp — one of the largest web deals in history — actually makes more sense than you might think at first glance.

And, one of the questions that occurred is whether Facebook will want to store the chat history from Whatsapp?  Currently the history is not stored.

WhatsApp communication between your phone and our server is fully encrypted.

We do not store your chat history on our servers. Once delivered successfully to your phone, chat messages are removed from our system.

Even though data sent through our app is encrypted, remember that if your phone or your friend's phone is being used by someone else, it may be possible for them to read your WhatsApp messages. Please be aware of who has physical access to your phone.

Cheers, 
WhatsApp Support Team

Facebook has the budget and infrastructure to store chat history.

Here is more information from Arstechnica referencing a Wired article.

On whether governments have demanded access to WhatsApp servers

"There really is no key to give," Koum says. The US National Security Agency, he insists, has no access to users' messages. "People need to differentiate us from companies like Yahoo! and Facebook that collect your data and have it sitting on their servers. We want to know as little about our users as possible. We don't know your name, your gender… We designed our system to be as anonymous as possible. We're not advertisement-driven so we don't need personal databases." This is more than a business position for Koum. "I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on," he says. "I had friends when we were kids getting into trouble for telling anecdotes about Communist leaders. I remember hearing stories from my parents of dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, sentenced to exile because of his political views, like Solzhenitsyn, even local dissidents who got fed up with the constant bullshit. Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state—the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech. Our goal is to protect it. We have encryption between our client and our server. We don't save any messages on our servers, we don't store your chat history. They're all on your phone."