William Vambenepe's blog

This Forbes article (via John) channels 3Tera’s Bert Armijo’s call for standardization of utility computing. He calls it “Open Cloud” and it would “allow a company’s IT systems to be shared between different cloud computing services and moved freely between them“. Bert talks a bit more about it on his blog and, while he doesn’t reference the Forbes interview (too modest?), he points to Cloudscape as the vision.

A few early thoughts on all this:

• No offense to Forbes but I wouldn’t read too much into the article. Being Forbes, they get quotes from a list of well-known people/companies (Google and Amazon spokespeople, Forrester analyst, Nick Carr). But these quotes all address the generic idea of utility computing standards, not the specifics of Bert’s project.
• Saying that “several small cloud-computing firms including Elastra and Rightscale are already on board with 3Tera’s standards group” is ambiguous. Are they on-board with specific goals and a candidate specification? Or are they on board with the general idea that it might be time to talk about some kind of standard in the general area of utility computing?
• IEEE and W3C are listed as possible hosts for the effort, but they don’t seem like a very good match for this area. I would have thought of DMTF, OASIS or even OGF first. On the face of it, DMTF might be the best place but I fear that companies like 3Tera, Rightscale and Elastra would be eaten alive by the board member companies there. It would be almost impossible for them to drive their vision to completion, unlike what they can do in an OASIS working group.
• A new consortium might be an option, but a risky and expensive one. I have sometimes wondered (after seeing sad episodes of well-meaning and capable start-ups being ripped apart by entrenched large vendors in standards groups) why VCs don’t play a more active role in standards. Standards sound like the kind of thing VCs should be helping their companies with. VC firms are pretty used to working together, jointly investing in companies. Creating a new standard consortium might be too hard for 3Tera, but if the VCs behind 3Tera, Elastra and Rightscale got together and looked at the utility computing companies in their portfolios, it might make sense to join forces on some well-scoped standardization effort that may not otherwise be given a chance in existing groups.
• I hope Bert will look into the history of DCML, a similar effort (it was about data center automation, which utility computing is not that far from once you peel away the glossy pictures) spearheaded by a few best-of-bread companies but ignored by the big boys. It didn’t really take off. If it had, utility computing standards might now be built as an update/extension of that specification. Of course DCML started as a new consortium and ended as an OASIS “member section” (a glorified working group), so this puts a grain of salt on my “create a new consortium and/or OASIS group” suggestion above.
• The effort can’t afford to be disconnected from other standards in the virtualization and IT management domains. How does the effort relate to OVF? To WS-Management? To existing modeling frameworks? That’s the main draw towards DMTF as a host.
• What’s the open source side of this effort? As John mentions during the latest Redmonk/Willis IT management podcast (starting around minute 24), there needs to a open source side to this. Actually, John thinks all you need is the open source side. Coté brings up Eucalyptus. BTW, if you want an existing combination of standards and open source, have a look at CDDLM (standard) and SmartFrog (implementation, now with EC2/S3 deployment)
• There seems to be some solid technical raw material to start from. 3Tera’s ADL, combined with Elastra’s ECML/EDML presumably capture a fair amount of field expertise already. But when you think of them as a starting point to standardization, the mindset needs to switch from “what does my product need to work” to “what will the market adopt that also helps my product to work”.
• One big question (at least from my perspective) is that of the line between infrastructure and applications. Call me biased, but I think this effort should focus on the infrastructure layer. And provide hooks to allow application-level automation to drive it.
• The other question is with regards to the management aspect of the resulting system and the role management plays in whatever standard specification comes out of Bert’s effort.

Bottom line: I applaud Bert’s efforts but I couldn’t sleep well tonight if I didn’t also warn him that “there be dragons”.

And for those who haven’t seen it yet, here is a very good document on the topic (but it is focused on big vendors, not on how smaller companies can play the standards game).

[UPDATED 2008/6/30: A couple hours after posting this, I see that Coté has just published a blog post that elaborates on his view of cloud standards. As an addition to the podcast I mentioned earlier.]

[UPDATED 2008/7/2: If you read this in your feed viewer (rather than directly on vambenepe.com) and you don't see the comments, you should go have a look. There are many clarifications and some additional insight from the best authorities on the topic. Thanks a lot to all the commenters.]

My work phone number is a typical US 10 digits number. In addition:

• a) My office is in the same area code as Stanford University.
• b) The area code appears twice in my phone number
• c) The number of the beast doesn’t appear in my phone number.
• d) An even number can only be in an even-numbered position if the value of that number is also its position (the leftmost digit is in position 1).
• e) The number of occurrences of non-zero numbers is always less than the value of the number.
• f) The answer uses as few different numbers as possible to meet all these conditions.

Asking your Oracle-employed bother-in-law to look me up in the employee phone book is considered cheating…

Anyone interested in application manageability and/or management integration should read about Jean-Francois Denise’s prototype for RESTful Access to JMX Instrumentation. Not (at least for now) as something to make use of, but to force us to think pragmatically about the pros and cons of the WS-* stack when used for management integration.

The interesting question is: which of these two interfaces (the WS-Management-based interface being standardized or the HTTP-centric interface that Jean-Francois prototyped) makes it easier to write a cross-platform management application such as the poker-cheating demo at JavaOne 2008?

Some may say that he cheated in that demo by using the Microsoft-provided WinRM implementation of WS-Management on the VBScript side. Without it, it would have clearly been a lot harder to implement the WS-Management based protocol in VBScript than the REST approach. True, but that’s the exact point of standards, that they allow such libraries to be made available to assist implementers. The question is whether such a library is available for your platform/language, how good and interoperable that library is (it could actually hinder rather than help) and what is the cost to the project of depending on it. Which is why the question is hard to answer in absolute. I suspect that, even with WinRM, the simple use case demonstrated at JavaOne would have been easier to implement using straight HTTP but that things change quickly when you run into more demanding use cases (e.g. event notification with filters, sequencing of large responses into an enumeration…). Which is why I still think that the sweetspot would be a simplified WS-Management specification (freed of the WS-Addressing crud for example) that makes it easy (almost as easy as the HTTP-based interface) to implement simple use cases (like a GET) by hand but is still SOAP-based, which lets it seamlessly enter library-driven territory when more advanced features are added (e.g. WS-Security, WS-Enumeration…). Rather than the current situation in which there is a protocol-level disconnect between the HTTP interface (easy to implement by hand) and the WS-Management interface (for which manually implementation is a cruel - and hopefully unusual - punishment).

So, Jean-Francois, where is this JMX-REST work going now?

While you’re on Jean-Francois’ blog, another must-read is his account of the use of Wiseman and Metro in the WS Connector for JMX Agent RI.

As a side note (that runs all the way to the end of this post), Jean-Francois’ blog is a perfect illustration of the kind of blogs I like to subscribe to. He doesn’t feel the need to post all the time. But when he does (only four entries so far this year, three of them “must read”), he provides a lot of insight on a topic he really understands. That’s the magic of RSS/Atom. There is zero cost to me in keeping his feed in my reader (it doesn’t even appear until he posts something). The opposite of what used to be conventional knowledge (that you need to post often to “keep your readers engaged” as the HP guidelines for bloggers used to say). Leaving the technology aside (there is nothing to RSS/Atom technologically other than the fact that they happen to be agreed upon formats), my biggest hope for these specifications is that they promote that more thoughtful (and occasional) style of web publishing. In my grumpy days (are there others?), a “I can’t believe United lost my luggage again” or “look at the nice flowers in my backyard” post is an almost-automatic cause for unsubscribing (the “no country for old IT guys” series gets a free pass though).

And Jean-Francois even manages to repress his Frenchness enough to not take snipes at people just for the fun of it. Another thing I need to learn from him. For example, look at this paragraph from the post that describes his use of Wiseman and Metro:

“The JAX-WS Endpoint we developed is a Provider<SOAPMessage>. Simply annotating with @WebService was not possible. WS-Addressing makes intensive use of SOAP headers to convey part of the protocol information. To access to such headers, we need full access to the SOAP Message. After some redesigning of the existing code we extracted a WSManAgent Class that is accessible from a JAX-WS Endpoint or a Servlet.”

In one paragraph he describes how to do something that IBM has been claiming for years can’t be done (implement WS-Management on top of JAX-WS). And he doesn’t even rub it in. Is he a saint? Good think I am here to do the dirty work for him.

BTW, did anyone notice the irony that this diatribe (which, by now, is taking as much space as the original topic of the post) is an example of the kind of text that I am glad Jean-Francois doesn’t post? You can take the man out of standards, but you can’t take the double standard out of the man.

[UPDATED 2008/6/3: Jean-Francois now has a second post to continue his exploration of marrying the Zen philosophy with the JMX technology.]

A few announcements came out today.

The good news: Oracle’s acquisition of BEA closes. Unobstructed technical work can start.

The conveniently-timed news: WS-Management officially a standard.

Speaking of MMS 2008, any announcement there? Not much so far, as explained by Ian Blyth. If I parse the cross-platform part of the press release correctly, it says that management of non-Windows resources by Operations Manager is based on WS-Management, but WS-Management alone is not enough so Microsoft is providing a development kit for several non-Microsoft operating systems. It will be interesting to see what exactly is produced by these management packs. Can they be called on by management tools other Operations Manager or is the stuff that rides on top of WS-Management too proprietary to allow this? No word on SML/CML.

By the end of the week we may have a clearer picture, including what’s going on with the previously-announced reset on System Center Service Manager. Coté is on the scene and will undoubtedly share his thoughts.

As a side note, the way the MMS main page loads betrays the fact that, in 2008, Microsoft (or more likely its event marketing contractor) is using the same clueless HTML design approach that I first saw in 1995 and recently wrote about. All the text in the center of the MMS home page is contained in one large picture (available here). They didn’t even bother with a “ALT” field, so good luck to blind users. The part that says “Registration Overview Page” was made blue and underlined to suggest that it is a link, but it is just a part of the picture. Which, presumably, was supposed to be turned into a link using an image map. Well, turns out they can’t even get that right.

They tried to use a client-side image map (not available in 1995) but somehow the actual map code is commented out in the HTML source:

<!--<map name=Map>
  <area shape=RECT coords=18,549,210,572 href="registrationoverview.aspx">
  <area shape=RECT coords=17,596,222,634 href="registrationoverview.aspx">
</map>-->

As a result, the single most preeminent link on the home page is dead. And there is no server-side image map mechanism as a backup (which I remember used to be best practice when client support for client-side image maps was spotty).

Looking at the HTML source also reveals that tables are over-used. That’s the kind of HTML I can write, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

[UPDATED 2008/5/5: As expected/hoped, Coté did share his thoughts on this "cross-platform" move from the MMS floor.]

I follow Coté for his coverage of the IT management market. He also covers the so-called RIA (”Rich Internet Application”) playground, so through his blog (e.g. this post today) I involuntarily get news and comments about Flash, AIR, Silverlight and other I-hate-the-Web technologies. And I keep thinking “I hope they won’t mess up the Web too much for the rest of us on their way down to failure”.

Every time I run into a “no Flash, no service” site, I have a flashback (if you think the pun is funny then consider it intended) to 1995. That’s when Jean-Michel Jarre (the French musician, of Oxygène fame) launched his first web site, jarre.net (now de-commissioned). As a pioneer of electronic music, it wasn’t surprising to see him be one of the first artists to use the Web. As someone who likes to illuminate entire cities with laser beams, it wasn’t surprising to see him use overkill technology. So his Photoshop-wielding consultant created an entire site where each page was just one big image, with embedded text. It took forever to load and the stupidity of the approach shocked me so much that I remember it 13 years later. All the links were based on server-side image maps (the x/y coordinates of the pixel that you clicked on get sent to the server where a map links these coordinates to a target URL). The way HTML was at the time, you couldn’t use fancy fonts, colored text and elaborate wrapping (but you could blink!). And we all know that you simply can’t provide dates and locations of upcoming concerts without colored text, twisted fonts and a fancy layout.

The Internet Archive doesn’t have a copy of this original Jarre site, I don’t know if it has survived anywhere other than in my scarred-for-life brain. And if you go to JM Jarre’s current site, guess what? It is a Flash-only site. With my non-Flash Firefox all I get is a black page with a sentence (in French only, and not even grammatically correct) pointing me to the Flash download page. Looking at it with my Flash-enabled IE confirms (after a long wait for the Flash content to download) what I expected: other than a few videos (which could indeed use a simple Flash player embedded in the HTML page), there is no value whatsoever in using Flash for this site. The photos of his 80’s haircut would look just as good/bad in HTML.

Just like there are some usages for which image maps are appropriate, there are some for which Flash and friends are the right tool. But if they were only used where they belong, there wouldn’t be nearly as much hype around them. Poor Coté would have to spend more time with boring IT management geeks and less with Flash hipsters.

We IT management geeks are pretty familiar with data at different “meta” levels. For example:

• The content of a configuration record: data
• Who can access that content: metadata
• Who can set access permissions on that content: meta-metadata
• etc…

Trying to keep the layers separated (good luck Savas) is tempting for performance reasons but it’s like trying to shore up an ever-leaking levee in the face of a major storm. Semantic technologies get a lot of power out of the fact that they don’t even try.

I was prompted to write this because I recently learned that it also happens in medicine:

• Hypoparathyroidism: low parathyroid hormone
• Pseudohypoparathyroidism: normal parathyroid hormone levels, but a problem with the parathyroid receptor such that the symptoms are the same as those of hypoparathyroidism
• Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism: normal parathyroid hormone levels and a normal parathyroid receptor, but presents with the same symptoms as pseudohypoparathyroidism (but without the consequences)

Good luck getting your health insurance to cover a pseudo-disease. Don’t even bother calling them about a pseudo-pseudo-disease.

Earlier this evening I was listening to a podcast from the Commonwealth Club of California. The guest was Frances Beinecke, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council. It wasn’t captivating and my mind had wandered on another topic (a question related to open source) when I caught a sentence that made me think that the podcast had followed me on that topic:

“If we are not at the table we are on the menu”

In fact, she was quoting an energy industry executive explaining why he welcomes upfront discussions w/ NRDC about global warming. But isn’t this also very applicable to what open source means for many companies?

Everything below is off-topic for this blog.

To be fair, I should clarify that not all Commonwealth Club podcasts (here is the RSS feed) fail to keep my attention. While I am at it, here is a quick listener’s guide to recent recordings (with links to the MP3 files) in case some of you also have a nasty commute and want to give the CCC (no, not that one) a try. Contrary to what I expected, I have found panels discussions generally less interesting than talks by individuals. The panel on reconstructing health care was good though. The one on reconciling science and religion was not (in the absence of a more specifically framed question everyone on the panel agreed on everything). They invite speakers from both sides of the aisle: recently Ben Stein (can’t be introduced in a few words) and Tom Campbell (Dean of Haas business school at Berkeley) on the conservative side and Madeleine Albright (no introduction needed) on the progressive side. All three of these were quite good. As I mentioned, the one with Frances Beinecke (NRDC president) wasn’t (it quickly morphed into self-praises for her organization’s work, including taking a surprising amount of credit for Intel’s work towards lower power consumption). Deborah Rodriguez, (director of the “Kabul Beauty School”) was the worst (at least for the first 20 minutes, I wasn’t paid enough to keep listening). Thomas Fingar (Chairman of the National Intelligence Council) was ok but could have been much better (he shared all the truth that couldn’t embarrass or anger anyone, which isn’t much when the topic is the Iraq and Iran intelligence reports on WMD). In the process he explained what the intelligence community calls “open source intelligence” and he wasn’t referring to the RedMonk model. Enjoy…

Here are the first three thoughts that came to my mind when I heard about Microsoft’s bid to acquire Yahoo (in order, to the extent that I can remember):

• After XBox this will take their focus further away from enterprise software. Good for Oracle.
• I wonder how my friends at Yahoo (none of which I know to be great fans of Microsoft’s software) feel about this (on the other hand the stock price rise can’t be too unpleasant for them)
• Time to get ready to move away from Yahoo Mail

Turns out I should have added an additional piece of good news to the first bullet: after this they won’t be able to afford SAP for a while. This I just realized after reading this New York Times column which argues, in short, that Microsoft should acquire SAP rather than Yahoo.

A few quotes from the article:

• “you’ve probably never heard of BEA“: this obviously doesn’t apply to readers of this blog.
• “it’s not much fun hanging out on the enterprise side of the software business“: ouch. If it’s fun you’re after, try the IT management segment of enterprise software business.
• “to find the best acquisition strategy, ask, ‘What would Larry do?’“: does this come as a bumper sticker?

Of course if Microsoft gets Yahoo and things go really badly, then it could be SAP who acquires Microsoft…

According to this article, the Universal Postal Union is in talks with the ICANN to get its own “.post” TLD. Because, you see, “restricting the ‘.post’ domain name to postal agencies or groups that provide postal services would instill trust in Web sites using such names“. If you’re wondering what these “groups that provide postal services” are, keep reading: “the U.N. agency also could assign names directly to mail-related industries, such as direct marketing and stamp collecting“. I have nothing against stamp collectors, but direct marketing? So much for the “trust” part. Just call it “.spam” and be done with it.

I doubt that having to use a “.com” name has ever registered as a hindrance for FedEx, DHL or UPS in providing web-based services. And these organizations have been offering on-line package tracking and other services since before many of the postal organizations even had a way to locate post offices on their web site. That being said, http://com.post/ would be a great URL for a blog.

If the UPU really wants to innovate, what would be more interesting than a boring TLD would be a URI scheme for postal mail. Something like post:USA/CA/94065/Redwood%20City/Oracle%20Parkway/500/William%20Vambenepe but in a way that allows for the international variations. That would be a nice complement to the “geo:” URI scheme.

Now, should I categorize this as “off-topic”? What would the IT management angle be? Let’s see. Maybe as a way to further integrate the handling of virtual and physical servers? Kind of a stretch (being able to represent the destination as a URI in both cases doesn’t mean that delivering a physical server to an address is the same as provisioning a new VM in a hypervisor). Maybe as an additional notification endpoint (”if the application crashes, don’t send an an email, send me a letter instead”)? As if. Alright, off-topic it is.

For those of you who still have my @yahoo.com personal email in your address book, now is a good time to replace it with the more portable one composed of my first name @vambenepe.com. This way there won’t be any problem when I move away from Yahoo (which is where my personal emails are currently redirected) after the Microsoft acquisition.

This is not a knee-jerk anti-Microsoft reaction. It’s just an intuition that their attempt to acquire Yahoo is driven more by lust for Yahoo’s audience than anything else (Tim Bray seems to agree). And that having acquired the audience, Microsoft is going to want something more for its $44.6 billions (or whatever the final price ends up being) than the few dollars I send to Yahoo every year for freedom from ads and a few additional services. Things like promoting Silverlight for example (did you hear that the Web broadcast of the 2008 Olympics will supposedly require Silverlight? Since I don’t own a TV, that would make me a little upset if I cared about the Olympics).

When the time comes (I am willing to give Yahoo-Microsoft a chance to prove me wrong), I’ll probably just move to my own server unless I find a provider who offers a great email-and-only-email service. It won’t be GMail.

In the meantime, whether this acquisition succeeds or not, thank you for updating your address books.