An Englishman in New York...

...or an idiot abroad; i'll let you decide.

Anyhoo, just got back from a whistle stop tour of Toronto and New York, and familiarising myself with the subtle differences between us English speaking nations: "It's the little differences... Do you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese?", "Royale with Cheese!".

Despite the general lack of sleep, overeating and drinking, through excessive coffee consumption I did manage to get quite a lot crammed into my 5 days.

Met some really smart guys from Apprenda, who have a very interesting offerings in the PaaS space. In particular their private PaaS solution addresses a lot of the underlying problems in IT organisations: i.e. from being infrastructure centric. They stitch together the infrastructure into a grid using their peer-to-peer fabric, which creates some interesting options in managing message flow.

Their approach enables development resources to focus on the job at hand: write code, and pushes the configuration and service level management to the platform. One thing I really liked is that they've managed to use containers not only on Linux, but also Windows...

It looks very slick, and for web apps it's a no brainer, but my challenge is that I face is a legacy of mid-range and mainframe apps, and all the [cultural] baggage that comes along with that... Any thoughts as to how to start the transition?

I also spent some time talking to the Hadoop distro vendor MapR to bounce around my IT Operations Analytics concept I'm trying to get some traction on. They also have a really interesting offering, though their marketing has let them down up to now. Basically their approach is not to champion particular products within the Hadoop ecosystem, rather they will support anything on top of their MapR-FS file system.

With MapR-FS they've basically ripped out HDFS and replaced with a file system that addresses some of the key issues in HDFS, yet still support the HDFS APIs:

1. The NameNode is a bottle neck
2. Start times on a NameNode recovery are lengthy
3. Lack of POSIX compliance
4. Supporting legacy UNIX/Linux apps
5. Small files support

You can find out more on their architect at the website, but the inclusion of an NFS server really helps get data into Hadoop, and as we are finding, the sooner we can start storing data the more we have once we work out what we're going to do with it ;-). They also have a tonne of NetApp like snapshot and replication tools, which is no surprise given their CTO is ex-NetApp.

I'm about to start kicking the tyres with MapR, so will report back once I have a bit more experience, but I'm impressed with what I've seen thus far.

Signing off.

Sting, sorry Alex.

My take on strategy, tactics and point solutions

I often hear the term tactical prefixed to a solution that has been created to address an immediate problem. Personally I don't think these are tactics. A tactic is, according to a Google search:

"An action or strategy carefully planned to achieve a specific end"

There is often very little strategy or planning around most so called tactics, so I prefer to call them point-solutions. Tactics should be stepping stones to help realise a vision or goal. They should be well thought out, and always moving the environment forwards. So, in summary:

Strategy = Long term vision and/or goal

Tactics = Shorter term sub-goals

Point Solutions = Quick-fixes with no regard for strategy

I think it's very important to clearly define this terminology and stop using tactical for poor planning and quick-fixes; these don't move the environment towards an end state, more they create further challenges for an organisation.

CloudExpo London 2014

I went to CloudExpo Europe at ExCel in London yesterday. I only had a few hours due to needing to attend a meeting in the afternoon. I managed to traverse the floor a couple of times, pick up a load of handouts, and attend a few keynotes.

One theme that was very apparent in the infrastructure space is the ongoing disintegration of hardware and OS; by this I mean the un-bundling of a single vendor owning both: Sun/SunOS, Cisco/IOS etc. We've seen this with servers: Linux and commodity x86 servers, and we're now seeing this with both storage and networking. Take a look at Cumulus Networks as an example; if I were Cisco I would be very scared, particularly as Dell are now at the table in deals they historically haven't been.

What struck me is that we now have the potential install software like Puppet and Chef on every piece of infrastructure in the data center, and orchestrate the complete environment from one platform, and then seamlessly integrate this into the Application Life-cycle Management process. I heard a great term the other day on a DevOps Cafe podcast - "DevOpsability". I like that ;-) We're getting to a point that we can easily automate the day-to-day management and provisioning of our infrastructure - it is DevOpsable!

Interesting times ahead...

Don't mention the "C" word!

I have recently been involved with an organisation that can't say the "C" word: "Cloud". There I said it. Now, that wasn't so bad was it?

So what's the problem? I'll tell you what: organisations, particularly large ones, still don't know what the Cloud means to them... So rather than say it, they skirt around it: "Elastic Infrastructure", "On-demand Provisioning", "Capacity driven", and so on. All the while this further confuses the client as to what Cloud is, and what the organisation's strategy is to move towards all that Cloud goodness, whatever that may be. It's a funny old situation, and I'm wondering if it's unique. Are we all still struggling to define the Cloud? Should we just accept it for what it is, which is whatever you want it to be?

So what is it to me? In a word: differentiation, and in two: business differentiation. So what do I mean by this? In a nutshell it's about creating business opportunity by freeing up resources, and empowering those resources to be innovative. Innovation comes when you have a culture that enables people to not only fail fast, but to learn fast. This learning drives the innovation. Cloud technology allows us to do this in a cost effective, and timely manner. Its really that simple.

Stop worrying about saying the "C" word; just work or what your business goals and challenges are, and then see how Cloud can help you realise them.