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.

I often spend time with startups that are interested in building really successful, great big and hugely profitable companies. Thinking big thoughts from the beginning ...

One of the things that these guys see in the fabric is an opportunity to cleanly scale as they gain customers. Rather than living with the limitations of traditional architectures, these guys figure to start right from the beginning.

I Mean Full Service

Now I should point out when I say I work with guys like this, well I mean exactly that.

Sam Charrington, colleague and friend, spent a few days at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development, and Integration Summit show last week. One of the more interesting things about Gartner shows are the analyst briefings. While there is no single place that can definitively define what's going on in markets as diverse as those in which we participate, these briefings are a good place to take a snapshot of what things look like today.

A month or so ago JP Rangaswami (confused of calcutta) mused on a challenge thrown out by Alan Kay - why isn't there a Moore's Law for software?

That question got me to thinking a bit, and as I promised in A Moore's Law for Software - Part One, here's a (very) modest proposal.

More on the Underlying Problem

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.

One of the often-repeated baseball truisms is "that you can never have too much pitching". Even if you don't know anything about baseball, you can tell that this is true by just searching on that phrase and see what comes up. Go ahead: I've made it easy!

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

Michael Krigsman has been humming the "simplicity is good / complexity is ... not so good" tune lately - check out this and this - and it sounds pretty good to me. While his focus is primarily on self-induced organizational complexity, I think the same exact points apply to architectural complexity.

In fact, this is how I tend to describe the abstraction presented by an application fabric: