Cloud Confusion and the DoD

Last week the Department of Defense announced a new private cloud computing environment called RACE (Rapid Access Computing Environment). This was an announcement that received a ton of attention in blogs and the circles of cloud computing advocates and naysayers. The frustrating thing about announcements and the ensuing arguments that take place afterward is that there are very few people that really understand what cloud computing is and all of the facets that are involved. The problem really stems from the over-use of the term "cloud computing" to cover what seems to be every application that runs in your browser. Just because you don't know where the actual server is located, or because it runs in your browser does not make something cloud computing. As soon as the announcement was made about RACE, the comparisons to Google came flying in. First of all, this is not even the right comparison. I am behind using cloud computing for government applications, but if we are going to compare the systems, let's at least compare them fairly. RACE is more of an IaaS cloud service and Google is both SaaS (GMail, Google Docs, etc) and PaaS (AppEngine). It seems more fairly compared to the single service of EC2 provided by Amazon. I would love to take a deep dive into RACE, but unfortunately, and as expected for security, it is only available to someone with a government card or clearance. What they do say on the website though is that provisioning after a request only takes 24 hours. Is that truly on demand computing? Call me spoiled being able to provision dozens of servers with a single web service request in 5 to 10 minutes, but that is what I expect from a system now that claims to be on-demand. This is a great direction and good start for DISA. It is very encouraging to see the activity in the government space around cloud computing. We really need to stop lumping every cloud computing service or offering under the single banner of Cloud Computing. People will continue to make their offerings sound better than others with unfair comparisons and statistics. A common language and standard is needed for fair comparison. Until then, let the spin go on!

Why Social is Successful

Almost every time that I speak, I can count on being asked about where the internet is going and what technology will be the next "big thing". Obviously there are a ton of people that would capitalize on that if anyone could predict the future. Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and angel investors spend their days trying to decipher and figure out the answer to that question. It is clearly a tough question.I love technology and the constant curve of innovation that surrounds me at work everyday. With the new hot technologies being social applications, the whole world is getting a little smaller still. It is not surprising to me that applications such as Twitter and Facebook are so wildly popular. It does help that they are free, but the "freemium" model works like a catalyst. People generally don't sign up for something just because it is free, but because it is useful. These applications are successful because they are relational and they bring us into closer contact with one another. The internet a great warehouse of all sorts of information at your fingertips, but that only satisfies our curiosity and natural thirst for knowledge. Most people are looking for more meaningful relationships and someone that cares. The corporate website that only displays information and does not allow for a round trip of communication does not "get it" yet. That is the old way of doing business on the internet. Simply having a presence is not good enough. The internet has evolved to allow us what we really want: a conversation, and it will continue to move in that direction. The first generation of internet technology satiated our hunger for knowledge and now it is helping us connect with others in more meaningful ways. Social is sexy because that is how God made us. Just look at what the top search terms are on a daily basis: they are for people, celebrity figures, that we want to know about. It is really, a desire to get to know them better. It is the next best thing to a conversation. Dating sites have been wildly popular for years, and now, the feeling of instant connection with Facebook and Twitter are where we feel comfortable. We are able to connect with people we haven't seen in years and people we have never met. We can share our life experiences and our knowledge across all boundaries and all over the globe. The next technologies on the internet will bring us even closer and more connected. The written letter was and is an excellent form of communication, but it was made faster with the telegram, the telephone, and the cellphone - continually bringing us closer in relationships with greater and greater ease. I believe that internet technology will continue to do the same. Whether it allows us to take a course online from a renown instructor, get us just a little closer to our family, or connects us better with a business contact, social applications (done well) will continue to be successful. As to what it will be... well, let's talk about it on Twitter.

Azure verses Amazon AWS Pricing

Microsoft released the pricing today for their cloud computing platform called Azure.  The costs really look competitive when compared across the other platforms that are currently offered in the market.  The breakdown is as follows:

• Windows Azure
• Compute = $0.12 / hour
• Storage = $0.15 / GB stored / month
• Storage Transactions = $0.01 / 10,000
• Bandwidth = $0.10 IN / $0.15 OUT / GB
• SQL Azure
• Web Edition - Up to 1 GB relational database = $9.99
• Business Edition - Up to 10 GB relational database = $99.99
• Bandwidth = $0.10 IN / $0.15 OUT / GB
• .Net Services
• Messages = $0.15 / 100,000 message operations
• Bandwidth = $0.10 IN / $0.15 OUT / GB

As you can see, they look fairly competitive to Amazons pricing in the different areas which can be found on the pages for EC2, S3 and SQS.  It is very hard, if not impossible, to do a complete side-by-side comparison that covers all of what is offered and all of the different configurations and software stacks, but let's look at some of the basics to get an idea.

Let's first look at the storage services offered by the platforms since they are almost identical in function and feature.  Azure's platform for storage is a flat $0.15 / GB / month and
$0.01 / 10,000 transactions.  Data transfer across all of Azure's services is $0.10 IN and $0.15 OUT / GB. This makes the calculation for storage very simple on their part.  S3 has a tiered pricing scheme which makes it a little more difficult to calculate, but does offer some cost saves when storing vast amounts of data.  On light storage (1-50 TB) Amazon will charge $0.15 / GB for storage, $0.10 IN and $0.17 OUT / GB in bandwidth.  Amazon divides the types of transactions in their pricing: $0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST and LIST request and $0.01 per 10,000 GET (and other) request.  This ultimately gives Azure the win on the low end for storage.  As soon as you go over the 50 TB / month threshold for storage or transfer more than 10 TB of data OUT of storage however, Amazon wins in price on the growth.  The more your store, the less it will cost you on Amazon, even going down to $0.12 / GB.  The data transfer rates going out can get as low as $0.10 / GB OUT.  Amazon also does not charge you for data transfer from S3 to EC2 (inside the cloud).  It is not clear if the same holds true for Azure. So, if you have a lot of data, then Amazon will give you the better prices, but if you are light on data and traffic, then Azure has the best price.  All that being said, it is important to note that Azure is severely limited during the preview period to 50 GB of storage.  They could add tiered pricing in the future to compete with Amazon's pricing at larger volume.

Probably one of the most anticipated, but hardest thing to compare, was the pricing on the compute hours for Azure.  This is extremely difficult for many reasons: Amazon offers a dozen different types of operating systems while Azure is the only environment.  Amazon virtualizes the memory and cpu so you have the option of adding horsepower at added costs and Azure has not published any information about the underlying metrics of a computational unit. Azure takes care of all of the scaling and load balancing within the fabric and these are add on services that you must pay for with Amazon.  Lastly there is an upper limit of 2000 VM hours right now on Azure during the preview period.  With all that being considered, if you compare the lowest price Windows installation on Amazon at $0.125 / hour to the $0.12 / hour on Azure, then Azure wins on price ever so slightly.  It is very hard to say how the "speed" compares on the two systems by virtual core and if this is even a fair price comparison, but it is the closest we can get for a comparison.  When included the tiered pricing from Amazon for data transfer, which lowers the cost per GB as you go up, and include Amazon's costs for Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing then the waters start to get very muddy.

The easiest to compare is the messaging systems on both cloud offerings.  Azure is offering 100,000 message operations for $0.15, plus the regular $0.10 IN and $0.15 OUT / GB.  Amazon offers 100,000 message operations for $0.10, plus the Amazon tiered pricing for data.  It is very likely that the majority of the messaging operations on these platforms will stay internal to their platform which takes the cost on Amazon for data virtually down to $0.00.  In this case Amazon beats the Azure pricing by 1/3.

I was happy to see Microsoft release the pricing for Azure today as I have been anxious to see what the cost comparison would be.  With pricing relatively close between the two, I would venture to say that Azures success will depend on its ease of use and streamlined single platform while Amazon will continue to thrive on its openness and plethora of options.

North Carolina and the Amazon Associates Program

The North Carolina General Assembly has a mandate to balance the budget every year, which I can appreciate because at least it keeps us somewhat focused as a state. I guess I have a very hard time understanding how the General Assembly can try to get that money out of companies that are not even located within our state borders.
I am a member of the Amazon Associates program which will pay a small commission on products sold from simply advertising on your site.  I have not made any significant amount of money from this, but there are several people in our state that do very well supplementing their income and even forming a small business out of concepts such as the Amazon Associates Program.  The North Carolina General Assembly has now added to the budget that Amazon must pay the taxes on products sold through the program to North Carolina.  Amazon's answer.... pull the plug and don't offer it anymore.  I don't blame them.  What services is North Carolina providing for them?  They do not have any buildings here that our Fire Departments, Police Departments or Emergency services help protect.  They don't have any cars or trucks that use our streets and highways.  They do not have a physical presence here that consume any of the state provided services.  Why should they pay taxes?  What the General Assembly is doing is stifling small business and is really doing absolutely no good for the state.  It only serves to drive companies away from our state.  After passing a budget with this nonsense in it, why would Amazon even consider placing a facility here or locating a division here within North Carolina.  The passage of this item buried in the middle of the budget has produced no additional revenue for North Carolina and only serves to drive business away and make its own citizens consider moving to neighboring states.  Here is an excerpt from the email that I received from Amazon explaining the shut down of the program within North Carolina:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor. As a result, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com after June 26. We were forced to take this unfortunate action in anticipation of actual enactment because of uncertainties surrounding the legislation’s effective date.

If we are going to look for ways to balance the budget, let's make sure that we actually have the ability to collect money or cut the money from many of the wasteful programs already in place.  Please don't drive business and people away.

CloudFront Added to AWS Console

The Amazon Web Services management console has a new addition. A new tab appeared this morning at the top of the console at http://console.aws.amazon.com allowing you to manage your CloudFront distributions.

Using the console, you can choose to create a new distribution, select the bucket from within S3 and add up to 10 CNAME entries for the distribution. This functionality is convenient, but is not the functionality that I would have liked to see added to the console next as you have been able to do all of this with S3Fox for several months now.  I was hoping to see the management functions for CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling to appear in the console.  These should be available in the console this year I have been told, but it was wishful thinking to expect them this early in the year.

DigitalChalk at ASTD

DigitalChalk is going to be giving away $300 over Twitter at the ASTD 2009 Conference in Washington DC this year.  If you are at the conference and have a Twitter account, you can play.  Watch crazy man Josh in this video...



I heard that they were at the White House yesterday and President Obama asked how he could play, but they sadly had to turn him down since he isn't going to be present at the conference.  Oh well, maybe next time.

The goal of the game will be to figure out a word or phrase that will be on the back of a bunch of shirts running around the conference.  If you want to be a live participant in the game, go see Josh and Tony at booth 1519 and make sure that you follow DigitalChalk's Twitter account http://twitter.com/digitalchalk .  More information is available on Tony's blog.

In the Works at DigitalChalk

There are a lot of exciting things happening at DigitalChalk right now.  The development, operations, and quality teams are very hard at work on a new release of the product coming very soon.  Code named "Einstein", this release is packed full of feature requests from our customers.  While we wrap up the open tickets and complete QA, I thought I would start giving a sneak peak at some of the features that are going to be included by writing about them here in my blog over the next couple of weeks.

We have done a lot of work on the interface of DigitalChalk in the Einstein release.  Immediately you will notice that we have changed the look to be much more streamlined.

We had a couple of goals in moving this direction.  First of all, we really wanted to be able to provide much more information on a single page to the instructor or student.  This is really a challenge because we needed to balance between a page that feels cluttered and has too much information and keeping it "too clean" where the information cannot be found on the same page without navigating away.  It is also important to us that Einstein is compatible with a wide range of browsers.  Those of you that have done any development at all on the web know what a pain that can be.  Something that works in Internet Explorer will not work in Safari, and something that works in Firefox will not work in Internet Explorer and that isn't even taking into account all of the different versions of the browsers.  Sometimes this feels like a loosing battle for a complicated site.  Page rendering time has also been an area that we have devoted significant resources toward.  We are seeing an improvement now of over 500% on some pages!  I will be including more screenshots in the future of various parts of the site as I talk about specific changes.  We are all very excited about the changes and can't wait to push them out to you.