A couple of weeks ago I was talking with a group of (primarily) engineering students about how our need for scale is forcing all sorts of changes in our industry ... some technological, some economic, some social / cultural, and so on.

As engineers the temptation is to focus on the technological changes, which is good so far as it goes ... but there is so much more.

For example, think about the differences between the first bubble and now. For my money the single biggest difference is that now there are some pretty successful economic models in place ... ways to monetize crowds, to actually reward investors for taking risk to build an enterprise.

Robin Harris must have woken up grouchy today - he's dumping all over cloud hysteria on this fine Monday. After throwing the obligatory it's-all-marketing punch (the truth is that there IS a bunch of marketing, but there's also a bunch of real substance ... more on that in a minute), he gets down to business.

I am paraphrasing a bit, but here are his main points:

The only real key to Google's low cost structure is active cluster storage - if it's productized, anyone can be as cheap as Google (including your own datacenter).

Networks are still the thinnest resource in the computing landscape.

I'd like to propose a simple thought experiment. Consider this question:

What if computing is free?

While we're at it, assume that scale is always sufficient for the problem at hand, latency is acceptable, your applications always work, and that operations are cheap enough to be in the noise.

What's the Point?

The point of this is simple enough. One answer to this thought experiment was Google ... and that worked out pretty well.

Sometimes you can try to overload a few too many points into a phase, and instead of something useful you end up with a kind of 20-thought-idea-pile-up.

So I am awarding a Mad Kitty to myself for yesterday's headline on the post about floating data centers.

Now for something completely different ... startup IDS is pitching floating data centers. Some good discussion on the topic here and here.

One of my favorite parts of the role that Nicholas Carr is playing as an observer of modern computing culture, and a fomenter of useful change, is not so much what he has to say - and I think he says a lot of very insightful, very useful things - but what he triggers other people to say, think, and perhaps do.

At the very least, Carr certainly makes the conversation in our industry far more interesting.

Just ran across a very good post by Robin Harris from the misty dawn of time (last summer) stemming from the Google Scalability conference. Why should we care how Google scales? Like Robin points out,

They roll out new applications for millions of users with surprising speed, especially compared to corporate IT. They build data centers with hundreds of thousands of servers - and millions of disk drives - and run it all on free software.

Costly corporate kit, like RAID arrays and 15k FC drives, aren’t used. Yet they do more work in an hour than most companies do in a year.

I wonder if there's a "rolling brownout" in google applications today?

Earlier in the morning google reader (generally a really decent app to have around) was hanging, going into eternal "loading" screens (see below).

Since all of my blog / news feeds go through google reader (for now), I decided to switch gears and go research something. Except that google search was down as well.

JP Rangaswami reflects on a recent talk by Alan Kay here. Things get interesting when Kay wonders aloud

Mr. Benioff:
I guess this must actually still be 1892, or some other year when it was OK for enterprise applications to just summarily shut down for awhile.

But of course, this is the Web-2.0-SaaS-is-King era, in which rock star architects and eloquent marketing folks convince all comers that all customers can trust SaaS providers, that anyone can bet their companies on these elegant, brand-spankin' new apps because the golden age of "trust-us-we'll-run-them-for-you" enterprise applications is finally upon us.

Except that it isn't. Not yet anyway ...

Is "One Nine" Enough?