The last few weeks have been busy and it has been way too long since I have blogged. I’m currently thinking through the server tax and what’s wrong with the current server hardware ecosystem but don’t have anything yet ready to go on that just yet. But, there are a few other things on the go. I did a talk at Intel a couple of weeks back and last week at the First Round Capital CTO summit. I’ve summarized what I covered below with pointers to slides.
In addition, I’ll be at the Amazon in Palo Alto event this evening and will do a talk there as well. If you are interested in Amazon in general or in AWS specifically, we have a new office open in Palo Alto and you are welcome to come down this evening to learn more about AWS, have a beer or the refreshment of your choice, and talk about scalable systems. Feel free to attend if you are interested:
Amazon in Palo Alto
October 11, 2012 at 5:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Pampas 529 Alma Street Palo Alto, CA 94301
Link: http://events.linkedin.com/amazon-in-palo–alto-1096245
First Round Capital CTO Summit:
http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesHamilton_FirstRoundCapital20121003.pdf
I started this session by arguing that cost or value models are the right way to ensure you are working on the right problem. I come across far too many engineers and even companies that are working on interesting problems but they fail at the “top 10 problem” test. You never want to first have to explain the problem to a perspective customer before you get a chance to explain your solution. It is way more rewarding to be working on top 10 problems where the value of what you are doing is obvious and you only need to convince someone that your solution actually works.
Cost models are a good way to force yourself to really understand all aspects of what the customer is doing and know precisely what savings or advantage you bring. A 25% improvement on an 80% problem is way better than 50% solution to a 5% problem. Cost or value models are a great way of keeping yourself honest on what the real savings or improvement of your approach actually are. And its quantifiable data that you can verify in early tests and prove in alpha or beta deployments.
I then covered three areas of infrastructure where I see considerable innovation and showed all the cost model helped drive me there:
· Networking: The networking eco-system is still operating on the closed, vertically integrated, mainframe model but the ingredients are now in place to change this. See Networking, the Last Bastion of Mainframe Computing for more detail. The industry is currently going through great change. Big change is a hard transition for the established high-margin industry players but it’s a huge opportunity for startups.
· Storage: The storage (and database) worlds are going through a unprecedented change where all high-performance random access storage is migrating from hard disk drives to flash storage. The early flash storage players have focused on performance over price so there is still considerable room for innovation. Another change happening in the industry is the explosion of cold storage (low I/O density storage that I jokingly refer to as write-only) due to falling prices, increasing compliance requirements, and an industry realization that data has great value. This explosion in cold storage is opening much innovation and many startup opportunities. The AWS entrant in this market is Glacier where you can store seldom accessed data at one penny per GB per month (for more on Glacier: Glacier: Engineering for Cold Storage in the Cloud.
· Cloud Computing: I used to argue that targeting cloud computing was a terrible idea for startups since the biggest cloud operators like Google and Amazon tend to do all custom hardware and software and purchase very little commercially. I may have been correct initially but, with the cloud market growing so incredibly fast, every teleco is entering the market, each colo provider is entering, most hardware providers are entering, … the number of players is going from 10s to 1000s. And, at 1,000s, it’s a great market for a startup to target. Most of these companies are not going to build custom networking, server, and storage hardware but they do have the need to innovate with the rest of the industry.
Slides: First Round Capital CTO Summit
Intel Distinguished Speaker Series:
http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesHamilton_IntelDCSGg.pdf
In this talk I started with how fast the cloud computing market segment is growing using examples form AWS. I then talked about why cloud computing is such an incredible customer value proposition. This isn’t just a short term fad that will pass over time. I mostly focused on how that statement I occasionally hear just can’t be possibly be correct: “I can run my on-premise computing infrastructure less expensively then hosting it in the cloud”. I walk through some of the reasons why this statement can only be made with partial knowledge. There are reasons why some computing will be in the cloud and some will be hosted locally and industry transitions absolutely do take time but cost isn’t one of the reasons that some workloads aren’t in the cloud.
I think walked through 5 areas of infrastructure innovation and some of what is happening in each area:
· Power Distribution
· Mechanical Systems
· Data Center Building Design
· Networking
· Storage
Slides: Intel Distinguished Speaker Series
I hope to see you tonight at the Amazon Palo Alto event at Pampas (http://goo.gl/maps/dBZxb). The event starts at 5pm and I’ll do a short talk at 6:35.
–jrh