17 July 2009 | Freelancing Tips, Uncategorized | James

It’s everywhere you look in IT media these days–cloud computing. This constant news and analyst cycle has a downside though–figuring out what the heck is really going on in the cloud space has become complicated. That’s why I went to a premiere event for cloud computing a few weeks back to get the latest directly from the sources: the world top cloud computing companies. I learned a lot, but the number one takeaway from the event was how important cloud development skills will be for developers in the next few years. Today, there is a solid barrier between development and operations, but new platforms such as MS Azure, Amazon’s AWS, Google’s App engine and others make developers the front line of IT operations. Freelance software developers who want to command top dollars a year from now need to be paying attention to these markets and reading their expertise and skill. It may be an amazing opportunity to differentiate yourself from the pack and increase your billable rate. The following are my notes from the conference, and I will be paying close attention to the cloud space and checking in as major developments unfold.

The two biggest web technology players at the event (Facebook, Google) used this term often in referring to their programming discipline. The Register has a nice piece covering a passionate exchange between Microsoft and Google engineers on adherence to consistent primitives. Google said MS would fail at matching its speed because they lacked discipline around programming simplification. Google forces developers into narrow development frameworks driven by GFS, map-reduce and big table. If you want to create a service it must be built on those–end of story, game over.

Facebook then revealed much of the original PHP-MySQL code originally written by Mark Zuckerberg is still in use today. They also emphasized a very disciplined approach to keeping simple primitives as the core. This has allowed them to scale primarily by buying lots of servers without ever having to change much of their core code. Microsoft’s Azure product manager made Twitter #structure09 waves when he suggested very few people know how to scale the LAMP stack. Azure, he promised, would solve this scalability problem as a feature of the platform.

Overall code primitive design was foremost in the mind of the two web leaders, far surpassing infrastructure optimization, or even application features. Primitives are the new infrastructure for world scale web aps; servers/data-centers are now referred to as ‘atoms’: “Data centers are just atoms. Any idiot can build atoms together and then create this vast infrastructure”. —Vijay Gill, Google

Its a trend not a technology:
The conference speakers each offered quips about the definition of clouds. While everyone’s explanations were taken seriously, the biggest reaction was one of relieved laughter at Russ Daniels’ quip “Why are we so excited about the cloud?” Daniels asked, “One answer is everyone can draw a cloud.” It was clear despite the a conference being organized around the term, some healthy debate on nuance remained.

Ultimately speakers agreed on one thing above all, cloud computing is a macro trend not a technology. Trends aren’t easily bottled in a concise definition; they are multifaceted and manifold by nature–they spawn different instantiations, and propagate along a vector of continuous change. So what exactly is that change? I’d point above all to a new set of programming primitives where parallelism and massive scale are built in. At some point these new primitives become the new ‘infrastructure’ of IT.

Legacy vs. Cloud
Legacy vs. the cloud was discussed by every speaker connected to a legacy (so not Wordpress, Joyent, Google, or Facebook). While many journalists and some analysts say things like “will X business application move to the cloud,” this generally has a simple answer “No.” Applications do not like to move, and never have. Why does HP still have a Tandem business? Enough said.

In truth, there have not been many highly stateful, transaction-based cloud apps yet. It will come, but for now many of the process-based IT apps will stay on traditional infrastructure.

Just say no to servers:
Servers were essentially mentioned twice the whole day, other than in passing as a component of the cloud. “The biggest mistake we ever made was buying servers.” Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Wordpress said, which was then followed in the afternoon by Facebook’s cajoling of sytems OEMs.

Storage:
The problem described by almost every panelist operating a cloud infrastructure was storage. Its currently poorly virtualized and hasn’t gotten faster in years. This forces them to do unnatural acts of engineering and spending to grow storage and keep it cheap and fast. Everyone was excited about the coming wave of flash based storage devices–they are hungry for fast cheap storage.

Does this hot problem leave the door open for a hot new set of companies?