SVForum Cloud Services SIG: "The Future of the Data Center"

By the title of the meetup, namely "The Future of the Data Center", you might conclude that the two scheduled talks would be about how to architect future data centers, racks, power, cooling, etc. But, the talks were a bit more focused on only two, but important, aspects of enterprise clouds:

Brad Stone, Nexenta: Cloud Storage.

Dave Roberts, ServiceMesh: The Big Win.

Cloud Computing according to Yahoo!

In a presentation yesterday at Cloud Computing at Yahoo! Lessons, Challenges and Futures, Yahoo! Cloud Wrangler Geoff Arnold presented a view of how the Yahoo network needs to evolve in the present day cloud computing environment.
Although the actual extent of the present day Yahoo network could not be divulged for obvious reasons, Geoff argued that public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) could not support the functionality that is expected of the Yahoo network. Even if the public network were to be made use of for a 24x7x365 production network, Yahoo would have to rent bare metal CPUs networked and storaged¹ together, and I do not know if the economics for such a deployment is already there. (We know, though, that Netflix uses AWS for streaming movies to its subscribers). This is probably true of other network based services such as Facebook's, Google's, etc.

Yahoo! Cloud Architectural Vision

The Yahoo! cloud architectural vision that was laid out — slide 31 on Slideshare.net — somewhat explains why general purpose public cloud services may not be sufficient: There seems to be substantial functionality that is somewhat Yahoo-specific that is not necessarily readily available in the public cloud. And, Geoff talked about "planet scale" for most of the functionality Yahoo delivers. In addition to the familiar layers of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, that are probably richer than their run-of-the-mill counterparts, he also sees a Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) layer sandwiched between SaaS and PaaS.

Overall, you come away with the awesome feeling that the Yahoo network is really very big.

The video of the presentation is at the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group channel at Ustream.

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¹We can regard this kind of journalistic license [of creating new verbs on the fly] as an advantage of the computer science profession.

Proud Recipient of a Google Chrome OS Notebook Cr-48!

Happiness comes to you in different ways. Today, I was surprised, along with 199 others I believe, at the HTML5 Talk event conducted by Google at their campus in Mountain View. While HTML5 was definitely talked about, the key surprise was kept so until the last few minutes of the presentation by the Chrome OS product manager, when he announced that everyone attending the talk would get a Cr-48, as part of their pilot program!

Cloud computing is certainly taking hold, and you can read about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's thoughts at the announcement. There are several reviews already out on the Cr-48, including this one by IT World.

Here's a first impression of an engineering major, a sophomore — my son — on the Cr-48:

Microsoft and Apple have to rethink their computer strategy!

Nothing but the Web.

GTUG Meetup on Google Apps Script: A Review.

This meeting on 6 October 2010 was primarily about Google Apps Script by Martin Omander, Developer Advocate at Google.

After a greeting by Van Riper, lead organizer of the Silicon Valley GTUG Meetup Group, the following initial announcements were made.

1. Bess Ho gave out the discount code for Paypal X Innovate conference; also mentioned games design, Oct 12.
2. Kevin Nilson talked about the upcoming Silicon Valley Code Camp, October 9-10. 
3. Wesley Chun, the chief organizer of the Google tracks in the camp, briefed the audience on what is to come in those tracks.

The main talk began by showing the home page of Google Apps Script:
Subsequently, Martin went through examples of different functions created by Google and others in the Script Gallery, e.g., =weather(), =getTweets(). He also went through a simple mail merge example.