Erik Howard

My kids and MY iPad

My kids have co-opted my iPad. Streaming cartoons from Cartoon Network is a real hit along with the How the Grinch Stole Christmas read-along book.

It’s coming up on 3 years now of writing, deploying and managing various types of applications in the cloud now. Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years.

Cloud Vendor Selection

Picking the best cloud vendor is like looking for unicorns. It’s not gonna happen. I have yet to find a vendor that has everything I need. That’s why I have apps deployed at Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid.

Amazon AWS

Amazon was the first cloud vendor I went with, so I’m most comfortable with their infrastructure, api’s and products. I don’t like Amazons slow file-system performance, it can be a killer for certain applications. I also feel like Amazon is trying to eBay me to death with all sorts of transactional fees. Don’t be fooled by their low instance/hr costs. Trust me, they make it up on the back-end.

Rackspace

Rackspace, known for their oft-repeated “fanatical support”, is the newest cloud vendor I plan on deploying applications with. I’ve been looking at Rackspace (aka Mosso back in the day) for a while now, but their costs and server-management features kept me from becoming a customer. Not so anymore.

The support that you get from Rackspace is definitely fanatical and sometimes borderline maniacal. Rackspace really goes out of their way to get the job done. Amazon’s support is not even in the same league as Rackspace.

The cloud servers from Rackspace are probably the fastest out there. I’ve ran my own benchmarks against my applications and Rackspace has always come out on top. The Cloud Servers management console is simple, yet gets the job done. The iPhone app is great also. In fact it’s too good. My two-year old son was able to open my iPhone and spin up an instance a few months back.

So what don’t I like about Rackspace? DFW in a nutshell. When their Dallas data-center goes down, Web 2.0 goes dark. To be fair, some of the outages at the DFW facility was not the direct fault of Rackspace. You really can’t mitigate trucks knocking out power transformers. But it seems like the DFW facility was brought online under some Faustian deal.

It also would have been nice to have some sort of load-balancing solution instead of rolling my own.

GoGrid

And last but not least is GoGrid. The one early win I had with GoGrid was their support for Windows servers at a reasonable price. Their support is great, but not maniacal. GoGrid also seems to keep pumping out new products and feature enhancements at a pretty good rate. They tend to keep themselves competitive with all other cloud vendors.

GoGrid’s pricing is also competitive. I love that they don’t charge for inbound traffic. GoGrid introduced their own CDN last year. I have not personally tried it, but it’s nice knowing that it’s there and I don’t have to offload my CDN hosting to another vendor.

Free load balancer is also a very nice win.

I’m still waiting for Ubuntu support from GoGrid. CentOS is nice, but I roll with Ubuntu nowadays. Is it that hard to support? The GoGrid management interface is nice and gets the  job done for the most part. It can be a bit buggy at times. But a quick refresh usually fixes the issue.

Free load balancer is great. Re-creating your load balancer when you have to add another server to the pool – not so great.

While I’ve been with GoGrid, I have not seen that many datacenter outages. But GoGrid or certain GoGrid customers seem to be magnets for DDoS attacks.

Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategy

If you don’t have a backup and disaster recovery plan you might as well be playing with depleted uranium. Having a backup and disaster recovery plan is critical to any type of solution if it’s running in the cloud or on dedicated hardware.

Besides coming up with a plan, make sure you test your plan. “Theoretical” is  a four-letter word when it comes to backup and disaster recovery.

NoSql does not mean NoHeadaches

I’m a big fan of NoSql databases. So much so, I started GoNoSql.com to talk about the latest in NoSql databases. But that does not mean I’m going to use MongoDB or Riak on every project I work on. Pick the right tool for the job.

But If you do decide to take the red pill and go down that NoSql rabbit hole, you better understand the quirks of your tool. Your HBase / Hadoop cluster may be bad-ass, but how are you going to back it up? As a side note, Cosmin Lehene has written a great two-part article (Part One, Part Two) on his experiences with HBase/Hadoop at Adobe.

Irrational Exuberance

Does your application or service really need to be in the cloud?

I’ve spoken with a few startups who have insisted from Day 1 that their application or service needs to be running in the cloud. So I ask them, why and how did they come to that determination. Most say we need to be in the cloud to be successful from Day 1 or we won’t be taken seriously if we are running on a $59/mo. VPS plan. Fail on so many levels.

Most applications don’t need the flexibility or scale that comes with cloud computing. That lowly $59 VPS will work for quite a while. But don’t forgot about backups! In fact most of my applications are running on VPS servers. I’m slowly moving things over to Linode (referral link). I’m really impressed with what Linode has to offer. Everything just works.

Don’t fall into the premature optimization trap or feel you have to deploy into the cloud because everyone else is doing it. Get lean and do a bit of customer development to find out who your customers are and what pain points you are trying to solve. I’m sure you will find out that you are probably not going to get a million uniques during your first month in business.

Automation and Repeatable Processes

Manual-intervention is the process killer. Manual-intervention is the little-death that brings obliteration. I will face my automation fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see it’s path. Where the automation fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only  I will remain.

While I may not have the parts for the Bene Gesserit order, take the advice and try to automate as much as you can. Automation saves time and grants predictability. Once a process has been automated, make sure it is repeatable.

Monitoring and Management

While it’s easy to sign-up with a cloud vendor and spin up a few servers. It’s not so easy to manage your new creation. If your lucky enough to have a technical founder or someone on your staff who understands the care and feeding of servers, your one step to winning the battle. If not, abandon hope all ye who enter here.

I’ve been working with Linux, Windows, AS/400′s, blah, blah, blah for years and I still learn new things everyday. Googling the Intertubes won’t make you a server management expert overnight either. Select a company that offers maniacal support (hint, hint) or hire somebody to keep your bloody infrastructure up and running.

I even have a virtual assistant who babysits my servers. Mind you theres not much to do since a lot of processes are automated. But when something does go wrong, I can sleep well at night. No more getting woken up at 2am when my cron scripts detects du %use is at 99%. Oh snap!

Today Dell jumped the shark and announced a new specialized line of cloud computing hardware.

Dell – seriously!? What makes this line of hardware any different from the servers your selling by the thousands to all the cloud vendors out there now? From their press release they state:

• New integrated cloud infrastructure solutions comprised of pre-tested, pre-assembled and fully-supported hardware, software and services enabling public and private cloud builders to easily and quickly deploy and manage cloud infrastructures with confidence
• New Dell Cloud Partner Program works with leading independent software vendors (ISVs) to offer customers easy-to-buy and deploy cloud solutions and blueprints optimized for Dell platforms
• New Dell PowerEdge C-series servers with hyperscale-inspired design for high-density compute performance with efficient energy consumption and low operational costs
• New Dell Cloud Services including consulting, deployment and support help customers plan, manage and reduce complexity when adopting cloud computing models

Nothing is new except that Dell can now charge cloud vendors more money for Dell’s new Cloud Edge hardware and even more money if you engage Dell’s consulting services.

Google’s Buzz has been out now for a few days. As with Apple’s recent iPad announcement, Google Buzz was met with a collective meh. Maybe it was due to product confusion, social media overload or a haphazard product rollout.

But one thing I won’t due is not check out the product. I see every new product as a learning opportunity. It drives me nuts when I hear people say things like “I don’t get it, wave goodbye buzz, the iPad is doa”. Unless you are a product engineer saying that your product sucks-ass, I’m probably going to take a look at your product or service.

A lot of so-called “Social Media Experts” and ” Technology Leaders” are doing just that. They are dismissing something that’s only been released in the wild for 48 hours. Google Buzz might go the way of Microsoft Bob, but it might turn into a smashing success.

I’ve never let my lack of understanding of something color my judgement. Instead, it’s an opportunity.

It’s been no secret that Verizon has been selling off it’s old-school copper customers fast and furious lately. But I somehow fail to catch the news that Verizon is also selling off it’s FiOS division, to which I happen to be a customer of.

If your not familiar with FiOS, it’s a bundled service (cable, internet and television) offering from Verizon operating over fiber-optic network. Service is delivered over fiber-optic cables using 3 different wavelengths. One for voice, one for internet and one for television. I’m happy to say that my house is legacy free. I don’t have any copper coming from the outside into my house, everything is all fiber-optics.

In my area (Portland Oregon) Frontier Communications based, out of Connecticut, has purchased all of Verizons POTS, copper cable and FiOS service for $5.3 billion dollars. Verizon was doing pretty good with operations here in the Pacific Northwest. Verizon also spent billions of dollars rolling out it’s FiOS service to my area. One of the first in the country to get FiOS. So it’s kind of surprising that Verizon would turn around and sell a promising asset that they spent billons rolling out.

There are also questions about wether or not Frontier can handle such a transaction. Frontier is buying assets 3x the size of it’s current operations. They are also buying a much more advanced network. It remains to be seen if they can handle the exisiting FiOS infrastructure and expand out the network – seriously doubt that.

Today Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, released Ubuntu 9.04.

What makes this release stand out from previous Ubuntu releases is the new Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud services.

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud services is the first commercially-supported Linux distribution that enables businesses to build private cloud environments inside their firewalls. Companies will now be able to create their own private clouds pretty easily.

The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is powered by open source system known as Eucalyptus.  The Eucalyptus API matches Amazons EC2 API. If you really are dying to create your own private cloud, check out the Ubuntu Eucalyptus Getting Started documentation.

Besides supporting creating private clouds, Ubuntu 9.04 will also be fully available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Thanks to the work of Alestic and others, creating an Ubuntu EC2 instance was quite simple. With Ubuntu 9.04, Canonical is taking more of a leading role in helping customers deploy Ubuntu EC2 instances.

• Erlang Debugging and UTF-16
  Posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 in Erlang – Comments: (0)
  I’ve been teaching myself Erlang.  It’s a great Functional Programming language. I’ve also dabbled a little with Scala.Besides wanting to learn a new computer language, I’ve also wanted to port some of my high-traffic Ruby On Rails sites into Erlang. Erlang will be able to handle 3x-4x the traffic using less resources. Less EC2 instances up and running means more money in my pocket.
• Installing Erlang on Ubuntu
  Posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 in Erlang – Comments: (0)
  Lets rewind to about a month ago. As I usually do, I skipped past the README files and installed Erlang with apt-get. Ten seconds later, I had Erlang up and running on my Ubuntu development VM. Like a bad teenage horror movie, I’m sure you can see where this is going.Fast forward to present day. I was running into another serious compiler error with Erlang.