David Usher @ Akoha private screening
Sony Alpha 100, ISO 125, 50mm, f/2.0, 1/80seconds.
Jeudi passé,
Akoha c’est permit un petit party privé. N’ayant pas le droit (nda) de raconter la teneur de la présentation (screening privé) , je me permets de faire des commentaires sur la soirée.
On parle donc d’alcool coulant à flot (bar open), d’amis (d’IleSansFil, du monde du podcasting, du monde des freelancer et évidement de quelques personnes d’Akoha), de jolies demoiselles (C’était quand même au Opus Hotel, sur St-Laurent), de bonnes musiques (David Usher est venu jouer quelques tounes) - mais particulièrement des premiers pas “public” d’Akoha.
Si cette soirée est tributaire du futur de la compagnie, Akoha va faire un véritable effet dans le domaine… heu… dans lequel ils sont ;-) - et je vais avouer que je vais être au devant de cette vague : j’ai déja mes crédances d’accès ;-).
I’ve been asked about the possibility of harnessing the power “of the cloud” in the context of an email server. For the simplicity of this blog post, I’ll assume the definition of “cloud computing” to be equivalent to “Amazon AWS” offer.
When emails goes in
This is the easy part. Receiving email in an EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) instance is as easy as receiving it anywhere. You launch 2 instances in different availability zone, grab 2 IP and change your MX records. With the recent availability of EBS (Elastic blocks store), you even have access to permanent storage for email. In hours (big maximum) you have a complete setup supporting fail-over and backup capability (leave your queue/data store on EBS for persistence and snapshot for backup).
Being in a full virtual environment also negate most scaling problems. You dynamically start and stop anti-{spam,virus} scanning instances following the need of your clients and customers. This setup is also very cost-effective: you don’t have to pay for hardware (servers, switches, hard drive..), maintenance, power and all the network management involved in having public infrastructure (bgp, firewall, etc…).You don’t even have to vouch for a long term contract.
For your customer, this represent a very decent offer: speed and latency in the Amazon cloud are very nice - way better than most small technical shop can afford.
Then emails have recipient
Emails are not only coming IN your infrastructure, they - sometime - must be transmitted to other people’s networks. This is where archaic email management style really fail. Emails as a services is a dynasty based on the conception that internet proprieties are big, controllable, static and permanent. This is the exact opposite of what you would get placing an email server inside Amazon Cloud.
You do not control IP space/range - even if, you are leased “1″ IP. This is the big “bug”. You have no idea what peoples do in their instances. Get used to it, your range will be tagged, {grey,black} listed often in dns based blocking list. Very often. White list will refuse your queries, since you cannot vouch for Amazon customer use of the cloud.
Solution, you can still use a smtp server install somewhere else, but… kind of defeat the whole purpose. The financial exercise of fighting dnsbl vs maintaining hardware infrastructure is left to the reader.
2 years ago, I’ve posted an open letter to sysadmin in which I whined against the incessant flood of system administrators whose only background was firewall configuration … this might be considered as a follow up.
In the last few weeks, I’ve seen the extent of the ignorance of some consultant/sysadmin. Lets start with one example:
On MLUG, I’ve had trouble convincing peoples that RAID arrays are not “backup system” - they are the representation of an high-availability/high-reliability solution for information system. I’ve receive couple of private email on the subject saying that I was wrong and that I should read some more on the system, that they were good backup tech. Ouch!
I really don’t know what to say… this is just too wrong. Lets be honest, I’m in fright that, one day, they’ll be called as experts in court proceeding. This sentence really is tainted by my interest in law, but still… If you are a consultant / intend to be one, please, heed my words.
Being a computer consultant is a job full of interesting challenges, and the pay is great (especially in Montreal where the cost of living is so low) but your name is the one thing you must protect at all cost… I’ve been able, in the last 5 years (taking exception for 1 year working @ SFL) to easily get contracts, without ever doing any promotional work. Currently there is so much demand that, even me - selling “myself”, I had to take a partner (which I’m very interested to be working with). So: Please, think before you post something on a public forum / email another consultant … I’m nice enough not to place names, but others might not..
Btw - If you are searching for a job in the domain, you can get in touch with me. I can give you a couple names that are in need… but be ready for a harsh response if you fail to answer some basic question before I refer you…
On Peter Laird’s blog (which is very - very - good), and re-hosted here, there is an interesting cloud computing/SaaS/*aaS industry mind-map.
There might be a couple field missing (data as a service : hadoop, SimpleDB, BigTable, microsoft also offer some data management), but as a overview, it is pretty accurate.
This map is also interesting as a base for investment decision - not that much to modify (and source are available) to get a precise market snapshot.
If you exclude all discussions about who invented what and whose name should appear near the definition of cloud computing (which is still less than an embryo), there is some pretty good threads going on over this “Cloud-Computing” group. One of my favorite is the challenges that computing “in the cloud” is bringing us.
I’m not that interested in defining “cloud computing” - there is so much discussion around the exact wording and how it compare to grid computing, SaaS, utility computing … it’s not even funny anymore. In addition to that, I’ve built my first “cloud-like” system in last January (2008), which is a big 6 months after google trend start acknowledging the word. I’m kinda late to this party.
Yet, in order to allow everyone to understand the next few posts, I’ll need to explain what it is. Do not mistake this text for a definition, its really only a very general - non technical - description of a how a cloud might appear:
a fully virtualized environment where the client control the application (sometime integrated with an operating system) and the provider offer a visualization layer over physically distributed hardware. The easiest example there is : Amazon EC2 & Enomaly.
Your application (which is a part or whole operating system) is run dynamically on computers around the world. If the computer where your code is crash, another one take the load. Your application can be migrated without you knowing it (no slow-down or interruption of services) and their infrastructure can easily evolve.
You control your application - they control the hardware. In other words, we are speaking of adding a layer of abstraction between the device driver and the application - a second operating system.
So, in a third party cloud system, we are in presence of dynamically allocated resources - you do not own - to your application. As a preview for my next posts, lets see how this might be dangerous.
Security, laws and localization of data in the cloud
This is really the issue which will be the most present in the next few years : in such services, you can’t know the exact localization of your data. Which mean you can’t know which law applies - and when.
By automatic process, your application can be migrated to another datacenter, in another country, under specific laws. Which could then allow … you to run your precious code… or…. them to read your private files.
Cloud computing based corporation still have a lot of work to defined all those variable - especially if they want to be an interesting option to corporation & government where privacy is important.
