Ben Thompson is generally spot-on in his analysis of industry goings-on. But he missed a lot in The Cost of Developers this week. Here’s what he got right about this acquisition: Developers can be quite expensive (though, $7.5B (in equity) is only ~$265 per user (which is pretty cheap)) Microsoft is betting that a future …
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Tag:cloud
raas – the failure of “-as-a-service” in the physical world
Roads are empty something like 90% of the time. 8% of the time, they’re rightly-sized. 1.5% of time, they’re a little tight 1.5% of time, they’re a little tight.But that .5%? Holy CRAP But that .5%? Holy CRAP are they ever too small when they’re too small. Imagine if the “*-as-a-Service” model could be applied …
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vw to start driving into the cloud
VW is planning to put cameras and sensors on new cars sold after 2018 to aid self-driving vehicles, create better maps, and more. Ford announced concept vehicles back in 2010 that could Tweet while they drove. Pretty sure I don’t like this move on the part of VW – technologically, it’s super cool. But from …
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i’m surprised facebook doesn’t offer something akin to aws, gcp, azure, etc
Given the ridiculous popularity of {{Facebook}}, their huge datacenter investments, super-resilient computing models, etc, I’m very surprised they haven’t gotten into the cloud computing business like Amazon’s {{AWS}}, Google’s Cloud, {{Microsoft Azure}}, Digital Ocean, etc.
putting owncloud 8 on a subdomain instead of a subdirectory on centos 7
After moving to a new server, I wanted to finally get {{ownCloud}} up and running (over SSL, of course) on it. And I like subdomains for different services, so I wanted to put it at sub.domain.tld. This turns out to be not as straight-forward as one might otherwise hope, sadly – ownCloud expects to be …
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above the cloud storage
Who wants to go into business with me? I’ve got a super-cool storage company idea. Load up a metric buttload of cubesats with radiation-hardened {{SSD}} storage, solar power, and [relatively] simple communicaton stacks (secured by {{SSH}} or {{SSL}}, of course), and launch them into orbit. You think cloud storage is cool? What about above-the-cloud storage? Pros: …
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dell buys emc
So I missed predicting anything like this one. If you’ve been under a rock, like apparently I was last week, you’ve missed out on hearing Dell is purchasing EMC. For $67 billion. With a “B”. This seems to be taking lots of people by surprise, but it makes perfect sense: Dell is already a huge supplier of servers into not only …
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on-demand, secure, distributed storage – one step closer
In follow-up to a post from 2013, and earlier this year, I’ve been working on a pointy-clicky deployable MooseFS+{{ownCloud}} atop encrypted file systems environment you can rent/buy as a service from my company. I’ve also – potentially – kicked-off a new project from Bitnami to add MooseFS to their apps list.
owncloud vs pydio – more diy cloud storage
Last week I wrote a how-to on using Pydio as a front-end to a MooseFS distributed data storage cluster. The big complaint I had while writing that was that I wanted to use ownCloud, but it doesn’t Just Work™ on {{CentOS}} 6*. After finishing the tutorial, I decided to do some more digging – because …
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why do i use digital ocean?
Besides the fact that I have a referral code, I think Digital Ocean has done a great job of making an accessible, affordable, cloud environment for folks (like me) to spin-up and -down servers for trying new things out. You can’t beat an average of 55 seconds to get a new server. There are other …
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create your own clustered cloud storage system with moosefs and pydio
This started-off as a how-to on installing ownCloud. But their own installation procedures don’t work for the 8.0x release and {{CentOS}} 6. Most of you know I’ve been interested in distributed / cloud storage for quite some time. And that I find MooseFS to be fascinating. As of 2.0, MooseFS comes in two flavors – the …
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on-demand, secure, distributed storage
In follow-up to a friend’s blog post on TrueCrypt, and in conjunction with some previous investigation and interests I have had, I am wondering how difficult it would be to run a tool like MooseFS in conjunction with TrueCrypt to provide a Wuala-like service as a plausibly-deniable data haven a la {{Cryptonomicon}}.
#moosefs @smartfile – distributed, redundant file management (#olf2013 talk)
As promised, some follow-up to OLF. Chris from SmartFile gave a great talk at OLF this year on MooseFS and how SmartFile leverages it to handle their rapidly-growing storage infrastructure. Specifically, he compared it to Ceph and GlusterFS. In short, MooseFS provides better configurability than either Ceph or {{GlusterFS}}, runs with lower overhead, and provides …
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after “the cloud”
Cloud computing has been hyped for the last decade+. For those few of you haven’t heard of it and understand it, cloud computing is a computing-as-a-utility concept wherein compute (and storage) happens on systems which you may not own. That’s it. So – now that we’ve been offloading our storage, computing, and other tasks to …
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p2p cloud storage
I have yet to find a peer-to-peer file storage system. You’d think that with all the p2p and cloud services out there, there’d be a way of dropping files into a virtual folder and having them show up around the network (encrypted, of course) – replicated on some kinda of RAID-over-WAN methodology. I’m thinking {{Cryptonomicon}}’s …
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this is not the year of the linux desktop
2013 will not be the YoLD. Nor will 2014. Or 2015. This will be a shock to the fanatical FLOSS heads out there. But not to me. I’ve never thought that “this will be the year of the Linux desktop” – regardless of how many magazine, journal, blog, and other articles have been published about …
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don’t implement your scheduler in a pure queue design
Recently came across a seriously funky issue with one of HP’s products (don’t laugh – I know there’s loads of funkiness in HP tools). HP Cloud Service Automation (3.1) allows you to schedule requests in the future. It also allows you schedule end dates for subscriptions. That’s neat. Here’s the problem: if you delete a …
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cloud computing in easy steps by david crookes
In my ongoing hunt to find worth-while tech books (most recently in the field of cloud computing), I’m here today to write about {{Cloud Computing in Easy Steps}} by {{David Crookes}}. First to note – this book is NOT about how to deploy cloud computing. It is about how to use lots of free and inexpensive options if you …
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cloud computing bible by barrie sosinsky
The first comment I have about {{Barrie Sosinsky}}’s book, {{Cloud Computing Bible}} is that it’s the first one I’ve read that doesn’t appear to have any sucky parts. This is a plus. {{Hybrid Cloud for Dummies}} was pretty much a waste of time. {{Deploying OpenStack}} was even worse. {{Sosinsky}}’s work, though, is not only less …
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decentralizing email
After several years of pushing all of my personal email into Gmail, I’ve decided that relying [almost] exclusively on one provider is just not the best idea ever. Google is great. But, as with any cloud service, exclusively relying on just one provider is not the best. Going forward, I am going to be relying …
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hybrid cloud for dummies by judith hurwitz et al
Many years ago, I started programming C++ with a friend of the family and member of my home church. We dove in with {{Borland C++ for Dummies}} by {{Michael Hyman}} and {{Stephen Prata}}’s {{C++ Primer Plus}} (Waite Group). Prata’s book was fantastic – if you were at the advanced high school / collegiate level. While …
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deploying openstack by ken pepple
Where do I begin? How about with this being perhaps the most overpriced tech book I have ever seen. At just under 70 pages, and a penny shy of $25, {{Deploying OpenStack}} by {{Ken Pepple}} exceeds the cost per page numbers I can remember from college. Wow. Thankfully, I did NOT pay for this book – I …
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establishing a data haven cloud
In {{Neal Stephenson}}’s seminal book, {{Cryptonomicon}}, he describes the creation of a “data haven” in the fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta. Why has no-one started building such a service (or, at least not in a public way) on existing cloud services (eg {{AWS}} or Rackspace) and/or create their own global network? Data backup and replication is not …
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the failure of the technical sales cycle in enterprise software
Specifically in the realm of data center management and {{automation}} software, but applicable to all other niches, sales people are too focused on this quarter, their commission, and getting ink on the page. In the broader context of the software companies producing tools / products, there is a general focus of getting to the next customer – forgetting …
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automation
I have been deeply involved in data center management and automation for well over 5 years. Most companies still view automation the Wrong Way™, though – and it’s a hard mindset to change. Automation is NOT about reducing your headcount, or reducing hiring. Automation is used to: improve the efficiency of business tasks improve employee productivity reduce human …
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