Posts Tagged ‘QuickQuip’
QuickQuip: Vint Cerf “Internet Access Is Not a Human Right” < Agreed…
Last Updated on Monday, 12 March 2012 01:21 Written by Celframe Security Team Monday, 20 August 2012 07:20
Wow, what a doozy of an OpEd!
Vint Cerf wrote an article for the NY Times with the title “Internet Access Is Not a Human Right.” wherein he suggests that Internet access and the technology that provides it is “…an enabler of rights, not a right itself” and “…it is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category [human right,] since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things.”
This article is so rich in very interesting points that I could spend hours both highlighting points to both agree with as well as squint sternly at many of them.
It made me think and in conclusion, I find myself in overall agreement. This topic inflames passionate debate — some really interesting debate — such as that from Rob Graham (@erratarob) here [although I'm not sure how a discussion on Human rights became anchored on U.S. centric constitutional elements which don't, by definition, apply to all humans...only Americans...]
This ends up being much more of a complex moral issue than I expected in reviewing others’ arguments.
I’ve positioned this point for discussion in many forums without stating my position and have generally become fascinated by the results.
What do you think — is Internet access (not the Internet itself) a basic human right?
/Hoff
View the original article here
QuickQuip: Don’t run your own data center if you’re a public IaaS < Sorta…
Last Updated on Monday, 12 March 2012 01:21 Written by Celframe Security Team Thursday, 16 August 2012 01:42
Patrick Baillie, the CEO of Swiss IaaS provider, CloudSigma, wrote a very interesting blog published on GigaOm titled “Don’t run your own data center if you’re a public IaaS.”
Baillie leads off by describing how AWS’ recent outage is evidence as to why the complexity of running facilities (data centers) versus the services running atop them is best segregated and outsourced to third parties in the business of such things:
Why public IaaS cloud providers should outsource their data centers
While there are some advantages for cloud providers operating data centers in-house, including greater control, capacity, power and security, the challenges, such as geographic expansion, connectivity, location, cost and lower-tier facilities can often outweigh the benefits. In response to many of these challenges, an increasing number of cloud providers are realizing the benefits of working with a third-party data center provider.
It’s a very interesting blog, sprinkled throughout with pros and cons of rolling your own versus outsourcing but it falls down in being able to carry the burden in logic of some the assertions.
Perhaps I misunderstood, but the article seemed to focus on single DC availability as though (per my friend @CSOAndy’s excellent summarization) “…he missed the obvious reason: you can arbitrage across data centers” and “…was focused on single DC availability. Arbitrage means you just move your workloads automagically.”
I’ll let you read the setup in its entirety, but check out the conclusion:
In reality, taking a look at public cloud providers, those with legacy businesses in hosting, including Rackspace and GoGrid, tend to run their own facilities, whereas pure-play cloud providers, like my company CloudSigma, tend to let others run the data centers and host the infrastructure.
The business of operating a data center versus operating a cloud is very different, and it’s crucial for such providers to focus on their core competency. If a provider attempts to do both, there will be sacrifices and financial choices with regards to connectivity, capacity, supply, etc. By focusing on the cloud and not the data center, public cloud IaaS providers don’t need to make tradeoffs between investing in the data center over the cloud, thereby ensuring the cloud is continually operating at peak performance with the best resources available.
The points above were punctuated as part of a discussion on Twitter where @georgereese commented “IaaS is all about economies of scale. I don’t think you win at #cloud by borrowing someone else’s”
Fascinating. It’s times like these that I invoke the widsom of the Intertubes and ask “WWWD” (or What Would Werner Do?)
If we weren’t artificially limited in this discussion to IaaS only, it would have been interesting to compare this to SaaS providers like Google or Salesforce or better yet folks like Zynga…or even add supporting examples like Heroku (who run atop AWS but are now a part of SalesForce o_O)
I found many of the points raised in the discussion intriguing and good food for thought but I think that if we’re talking about IaaS — and we leave out AWS which directly contradicts the model proposed — the logic breaks almost instantly…unless we change the title to “Don’t run your own data center if you’re a [small] public IaaS and need to compete with AWS.”
Interested in your views…
/Hoff
View the original article here
QuickQuip: “Networking Doesn’t Need a VMWare”
Last Updated on Thursday, 8 March 2012 11:46 Written by Celframe Security Team Thursday, 8 March 2012 06:17
I admit I was enticed by the title of the blog and the introductory paragraph certainly reeled me in with the author creds:
This post was written with Andrew Lambeth. Andrew has been virtualizing networking for long enough to have coined the term “vswitch”, and led the vDS distributed switching project at VMware
I can only assume that this is the same Andrew Lambeth who is currently employed at Nicira. I had high expectations given the title, so I sat down, strapped in and prepared for a fire hose.
Boy did I get one…
27 paragraphs amounting to 1,601 words worth that basically concluded that server virtualization is not the same thing as network virtualization, stateful L2 & L3 network virtualization at scale is difficult and ultimately virtualizing the data plane is the easy part while the hard part of getting the mackerel out of the tin is virtualizing the control plane – statefully.*
*[These are clearly *my* words as the only thing fishy here was the conclusion...]
It seems the main point here, besides that mentioned above, is to stealthily and diligently distance Nicira as far from the description of “…could be to networking something like what VMWare was to computer servers” as possible.
This is interesting given that this is how they were described in a NY Times blog some months ago. Indeed, this is exactly the description I could have sworn *used* to appear on Nicira’s own about page…it certainly shows up in Google searches of their partners o_O
In his last section titled “This is all interesting … but why do I care?,” I had selfishly hoped for that very answer.
Sadly, at the end of the day, Lambeth’s potentially excellent post appears more concerned about culling marketing terms than hammering home an important engineering nuance:
Perhaps the confusion is harmless, but it does seem to effect how the solution space is viewed, and that may be drawing the conversation away from what really is important, scale (lots of it) and distributed state consistency. Worrying about the datapath , is worrying about a trivial component of an otherwise enormously challenging problem
This smacks of positioning against both OpenFlow (addressed here) as well as other network virtualization startups.
Bummer.
View the original article here
Tags: Doesnt, Networking, QuickQuip, VMWare | Posted under Celframe CRM, Celframe Ookey, Celframe Security, Celframe Server, Security, Support Team, Web | No Comments