Mike Manos hasn't posted on his blog since May 20, 2011. Mike was nice enough to give me a heads up on what he posted today.
So, what has been Mike up to? His post as usual is quite long, but having worked with Mike many times I am going to boil down this long post into something that is thought of as a blog post, less than 200 words. :-)
Here is a graphic of what AOL has launched.
So what did Mike's team do? They shut themselves in their own world, in a cocoon for months to come up with a better way to run AOL's infrastructure.
Luckily I have a world class team at AOL and together we built and entered our own cocoon and busily went to work. We have gone down the path of changing out technology platforms, operational processes, outdated ways of thinking about data centers, infrastructure, and overall approach. Every inch fighting forward on this idea of unified infrastructure.
And part of that time was identifying the cruft.
As I look at the challenges facing modern IT departments across the world, their ability to “go to the cloud” or make use of new approaches is also securely anchored behind by the “cruft” of their past. Sometimes that cruft is so thick that the organization cannot move forward.
And getting rid of the cruft is required for automation.
One of the key foundations for our ATC facility is our cloud platform and automation layer.
Mike shared some of his achievements at Uptime.
We went from provisioning servers in days, to getting base virtual machines up and running in under 8 seconds. Want Service and Application images (for established products)? Add another 8 seconds or so. Want to roll it into production globally (changing global DNS/Load balancing/Security changes)? Lets call that another minute to roll out. We used Open Source products and added our own development glue into our own systems to make all this happen. I am incredibly proud of my Cloud teams here at AOL, because what they have been able to do in such a relatively short period of time is to roll out a world class cloud and service provisioning system that can be applied to new efforts and platforms or our older products. Better yet, the provisioning systems were built to be universal so that if required we can do the same thing with stand-alone physical boxes or virtual machines. No difference. Same system. This technology platform was recently recognized by the Uptime Institute at its last Symposium in California.
And Mike gives credit to his team.
The culmination of all of this work is the result of some incredible teams devoted to the desire to affect change, a little dash of renegade engineering, a heaping helping of some new perspective, blood, sweat, tears and vision. I am extremely proud of the teams here at AOL to deliver this ground-breaking achievement. But then again, I am more than a bit biased. I have seen the passion of these teams manifested in some incredible technology.
And what did Mike's team do? They modularized the work.
This time frame was made possible by a standardized / modular way to build out our compute capacity in logical segments based upon the the infrastructure cloud type being deployed (low tier, mid-tier, etc.). This approach has given us a predictability to speed of deployment and cost which in my opinion is unparalleled.
One of the things Mike can do that he couldn't do at Microsoft is use open source tools.
This time frame was made possible by a standardized / modular way to build out our compute capacity in logical segments based upon the the infrastructure cloud type being deployed (low tier, mid-tier, etc.). This approach has given us a predictability to speed of deployment and cost which in my opinion is unparalleled.
...
We used Open Source products and added our own development glue into our own systems to make all this happen.
Mike can now have really interesting discussions on the use of open source tools with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Mozilla, and others.