Earlier this year during the 2008 Velocity Conference EngineYard made some fairly big waves (Google search) pre-announcing their open source cloud management tool, Vertebra.
This was of particular interest to me because of the CloudScale Project. We spent a considerable amount of time building a sysadmin messaging bus, but were never 100% happy with it. Vertebra looked like just the ticket, it would be open, and hopefully widely embraced, perhaps making our lives easier.
At the time, the EngineYard (EY) folks promised ‘right after summer’. With December literally right around the corner, you’ve got to wonder whether this vaporware will ever really show up. Given the recent layoff of the Rubinius team from EngineYard it seems logical to conclude that their management realizes that too many over-funded R&D projects aren’t necessarily going to be in the companies long term best interests.
Merb made it out the gate thankfully, but will Vertebra? There hasn’t been a single public release since it was pre-announced almost 6 months ago so I’m going to hazard a guess that we’ll either never see it or at least not for a long time. Maybe Velocity Conference 2009??
Come on, EngineYard, just get it out there, warts and all. Either it will gather some more support and live or it won’t.
Update: EY just released Vertebra today (2008/12/19). Find out more
here.
November 30th, 2008
Operating and administrating Internet infrastructure is not the same. For the uninitiated it may seem that ‘operators’ and ‘administrators’ (systems or network) are not different, but there is one important distinction: The primary job of an operator is “risk aversion”, while that of an administrator is to “control, manage, or maintain.” Given that most operators also “control, manage, or maintain,” this is a nuanced distinction. I was recently reminded of this distinction by the Overcast podcast (#4).
In Overcast #4, James Urquhart, Geva Perry, and Greg Ness explore why network engineers are a hold out when it comes to cloud computing. It’s very apparent why to me. Network engineering is a mature discipline and most of the folks engaged in it are, by their nature, network operators more than network administrators and extremely risk averse.
Of all of the cloud computing bloggers, I’m one of the most hands-on and technical. I’ve been in the position of maintaining network, systems, storage, and security infrastructure for almost 20 years now in a variety of positions. This gives me a unique perspective as an actual administrator and eventually operator of large scale infrastructure. That’s why I can say definitively that operators and administrators are not the same thing.
This is how I usually describe an operator:
An operator is a systems or network administrator who, when in the midst of a new deployment or change, sees the possibility for making a minor alteration to the upgrade or change plan that is low risk, but high reward in terms of fixing or enhancing the plan/infrastructure and then chooses not to do it.
Operators understand that even though the odds may be 1 in 100, or 1 in 1,000 that something may go wrong. It’s unacceptable to make a change to a plan that has not been tested or vetted. This is how the folks who run utilities or telcos also think. Failures will happen and your job as an operator is to reduce the risk and avoid making bad choices even in the face of temptation. The actual technical skills required to administer the infrastructure are just a byproduct of necessity, not your primary job.
This distinction and the importance of operating 24×7 highly available infrastructure will only become more critical as cloud computing becomes the de facto standard for building next generation infrastructure. In effect, every administrator needs to deliver rock solid cloud services, internal or external, to their consumers.
November 29th, 2008
Please update your RSS feed to point to:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/neoTactics
At some point in the near future, I’ll be switching over to new blogging/CMS software and this will keep your feeds from breaking.
November 25th, 2008
I’m tremendously excited to announce that I’m joining the GoGrid (the cloud computing division of ServePath) executive team as VP of Technology Strategy. In this role I’ll be providing the primary technology vision and direction of the company. GoGrid, an organization that competes with Amazon Web Services (AWS), has transformed from a web-hosting company into an innovation and technology-driven business. They have an amazing ability to reinvent their business model and anticipate trends.
I had multiple reasons for this decision, including the economic climate, which made it difficult to launch my startup, CloudScale. Most important, GoGrid’s direction and culture are a good fit for me. There are exciting developments that I’m not at liberty to discuss, and I see a bright future for the company. It’s a great opportunity to dig deeper into the cloud computing space and leverage my unique background and history in infrastructure & cloud services.
I’m not going away. I will continue to blog here about cloud computing, infrastructure, and IT.
My consulting business, neoTactics, Inc., is being put on the backburner and CloudScale is mostly shutdown at this point. The main issue there is the status of the code, which we were considering open sourcing. This is still a possibility, but it’s unclear if we’ll have the resources to get it done in a timely manner.
This is a very exciting opportunity to be contributing to the cloud computing (r)evolution at GoGrid.
–Randy Bias
VP Technology Strategy, GoGrid
ex-CEO, neoTactics, Inc.
ex-CTO, CloudScale Networks, Inc
November 24th, 2008
The notion that an Amazon or Google has an inherent cost advantage in building infrastructure is plain wrong. This notion comes up over and over again in cloud computing discussions. Most recently on a thread where I responded in some detail. Recommend you start there and then as soon as you are finished head over to James Urquhart’s more detailed blog posting on the same topic: “Do Your Cloud Applications Need to be Elastic?”
Cloud computing is not a panacea and these are not the droids you are looking for. Move along. Move along.
November 23rd, 2008
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