Cloud Computing and Community One East

Community One East is happening this week and I for sure will be attending. The event is taking place at Marriott Marquis Hotel, New York, NY. I am especially looking forward to the announcements tomorrow which sound very interesting :). Unfortunately, I can't go into details about what Sun Microsystems is announcing.

The first day of Community One is a free event featuring. The second day of the event is focused on Deep Dives with two half-day sessions on MySQL and two full-day sessions on Java and Web development. I will be attending the session, "Using Java EE and SOA to Architect and Design Robust Enterprise Applications."

Following the conference, I will be a panelist at a Cloud Computing Panel, "How Cloud Computing Affects Small Business," at Microsoft office in NY.

After the cloud computing panel, I must rush home to attend a conference call. It's going to be a long but exciting day!

It will be great to catch up with old and new friends at the event. I will also be Twitter-ing the event on my Twitter account.

Cloud Computing Seminar with Werner Vogels and Marten Mickos

Amazon, RightScale and MySQL (Sun Microsystems) will be hosting the Executive Seminar on Cloud Computing at NASDAQ MarketSite (NY) tomorrow.

Since I have been busy developing our new startup on EC2, it would be great to catch up with Mårten Mickos and Dr. Werner Vogels whom I originally met at Structure 08.

Cloud Computing is probably the most abused buzz word, but if anyone rightly deserves to be in the cloud computing space, it's Amazon.

Speakers at the seminar include Dr. Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon), Mårten Mickos (ex-CEO of MySQL) and Michael Crandell (CEO RightScale). I am hoping to catch up with Mårten Mickos during the event. He is a great guy and probably the most favorite Open Source CEO.

I find it funny that the event site still shows Mårten's title as "SVP of Sun Microsystems’ Database Group," even though Marten resigned in February.

8:30am Registration and breakfast

9:00am Ahead in the Cloud — The Power of Infrastructure as a Service
Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com
Werner Vogels will reveal the efficiency principles behind Amazon’s drive to develop Infrastructure as a Service, and discuss why the current economic climate is rapidly changing the IT perspective on cloud computing.

10:00am Growing Your Business in the Cloud with Open Source
Marten Mickos, SVP Database Group, Sun Microsystems
Marten Mickos will discuss why fast-growing businesses are taking advantage of the combined benefits of open source and cloud computing to accelerate the delivery of new applications, reducing overall risk and scaling infrastructure consumption up and down to meet demand.

10:45am Coffee Break

11:00am Smart Enterprises Moving to the Cloud
Michael Crandell, CEO, RightScale
Michael Crandell will talk about how enterprises are experimenting with the cloud today. You’ll learn methods for deploying applications to the cloud, and be guided through Right Scale’s best practices for designing, configuring, deploying and managing the lifecycle of multi-server cloud deployments.

11:45am Cloud Computing and the 2008 Beijing Olympics
Lotta Latsuo, COO, Starcut Ltd.
Lotta Latsuo will discuss how Starcut Ltd., a professional services firm that specializes in digital media and marketing, adopted cloud technology to build the NBC Olympics Mobile website for NBC’s coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics from Beijing.

12:15pm Closing remarks

In case you're attending and spot me, please say hi!

Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure

More notes from Velocity

Last session before the break is "Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure" by John Fowler (Sun Microsystems). John is responsible for hardware at Sun.

Applications are built in different ways.

Three things Sun is working on:

1. Computing
2. Open Storage
• focusing on $/performance
3. Networking
• huge bandwidth
  

He is talking about Web 2.0 architectures. The software running today wasn't there 10 years ago. Almost everyone is horizontally scaled which brings up a host of technology issues.

Sun's Web 2.0 kit: a set of performance and benchmarking applications. Sun will be open sourcing this and other tools. The tools tested are web/app server, cache layers, database and storage.

It's driving you crazy:

• power, heat, space
• scale
• understanding the infrastructure
• performance
  

Compute:

• relatively straightforward
• clock rates not going up. everyone scaling horizontally
• lower memory latency
• how can you have a high degree of concurrency
  

Cores and threads are on the move. Sun is working on 16 cores per socket. Future is higher and higher degrees of concurrency.

Open Storage (Servers + Storage + Open Solaris) :

• built on OpenSolaris
• performance of ZFS and SSDs
• cost efficiency of volume hardware
• scale easily
• millions of files
• gigabytes / sec
• management simplicity
• analytics with dTrace
• diagnostics with FMA
  

Why Applications Don't Perform:

• Waiting for DATA

Future:
Enterprise SSD:

• up to 5,000 - 8,000 write IOPS
• up to 30,000 to 40,000 read IOPS
• 32 GB
• $ per IOPS $0.08 compared to $2.43 traditionally.
  

New generation of flash is quite reliable and has no moving parts. Power consumption of SSDs is 2 watts compared to 13 watts for traditional HDD.

ZFS Hybrid Storage Pool Model:

• High Performance Read and Write Cache Pool
• ZFS combines main memory and SSDs for read caching
• Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC)
  

ZFS Intent Log pool

• ZFS is a transactional file system
• intent log stores small transactions
  

New Server memory hierarchy includes flash. Before 2010, flash will be in every server.

Also see:

• Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure PDF Presentation
• Innovation Drives Opportunity: Sun's Software Business PDF
  

Interviewed by Sun - Running 13th largest site in the world on MySQL and Sun hardware

Part of my responsibility at my current job is to lead the database team that manages the largest and most active MySQL on Solaris 10/Sun hardware deployment in the world. We have been using Sun hardware to deploy MySQL since the time when most MySQL database experts used to frown on this combination.

Of course, Sun's acquisition of MySQL made me really, really happy.

I was recently interviewed by Sun Microsystems about our Sun and MySQL usage and what do I find so interesting about Sun's UltraSparc T2 Niagara 2 Processors. At my work, I am in the process of replacing most of our database servers with CMT (chip multi-threading) enabled Niagara 2 servers. The video of my discussion is embedded below. Enjoy.