Articles tagged with opinion

Our CEO Richard Davies recently wrote a guest post for ComputerWorldUK about how to spot fake clouds. Here is the full text:

The term cloud computing has become a constant fixture in the media — and indeed in the boardroom. It seems that you can’t have a conversation in IT without the term coming up at least once.

The reasons for this are clear; the economic outlook continues to look bleak and in these times of austerity everyone is trying to cut costs, and specifically avoid large capital expenditure, while still trying to do things more quickly. Cloud in its truest form, with its promises of reduced CAPEX and increased IT scalability, can deliver on this. But, and it’s a big but, we are increasingly seeing things being associated with cloud that simply don’t fit into the model of cloud computing.

It’s almost like cloud is a magical term and if it’s used to describe your technology, riches will befall you. Well I think that’s the hope of many marketing departments who are selling technology that isn’t cloud, but peddling it as if it is.

The three key benefits of the cloud model are the pay-as-you-go payment structure, its on-demand scalable nature and the self service provisioning it affords. For anyone attracted to the cloud model, these three attributes should be used as the acid test as to whether something is truly cloud or just hot air.

At an infrastructure level, we’ve seen many hosting companies launch cloud offerings but only a handful could meet the attributes outlined in our acid test. For example, many “cloud offerings” still require customers to ask the service provider’s staff to scale servers on their behalf, while others will lock customers into monthly or even annual contracts.

Many businesses have already started adopting cloud and a lot of these have enjoyed the kind of benefits they were promised. However that’s not always the case. The problem is the fake cloud scenario I describe above. Some businesses have found that the ‘cloud’ service they’ve been sold is not actually cloud at all.

Therefore, before rushing in and signing with a cloud service provider, businesses need to check that what they are signing up to really is cloud. True cloud is scalable, flexible and PAYG, but there are many supposed cloud offerings that don’t offer this. Instead, they are traditional contracts with the word ‘cloud’ included to take advantage of the buzz.

Cloud can without doubt help a business as it tries to become more cost and operationally efficient. But businesses need to be careful of fake cloud. My advice to any business is to insist on true cloud service, with fully automated self-service scaling and PAYG pricing from where they need it. The reaction of the prospective provider will tell the organisation whether this offering is truly cloud and will therefore offer the benefits they are looking for.

As has been predicted for years, the world is running out of IPv4 addresses.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which manages global IP addresses, doled out the last five /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses in February to the five regional internet registries. Those regional registries are expected to run out soon after — indeed, APNIC, the Asian registry, are have already changed their policies to restrict allocation from their final /8 block.

So what happens now? Well, there are several possibilities, but our prediction is that a brand new market will spring up in second-hand IPv4 addresses. Like the Wild West, it’s going to be lawless and unpredictable for a bit — and sadly the profits will go to the current IPv4 address hogs.

IPv4 exhaustion: a highly predictable surprise

The first thing to say is that the expiry of IPv4 is hardly a surprise: we’ve known it was doomed for a long time. The whole of IPv6 was developed to deal with the problem, with a giant 128-bit address space that simplifies routing. Indeed, IPv6 is the only long-term solution.

The problem is that moving everyone to IPv6 isn’t simple. IPv6 isn’t backwardly-compatible with IPv4, and plenty of hardware still only supports IPv4, so companies will have to run both in tandem for a while. Rather chillingly, IPv6 still only accounts for 0.03% of the Internet’s traffic.

IPv6-only hosting: not useful yet

So, as a website owner, what can and should you be doing? The sad truth is that it makes no sense for you to move your website from IPv4 to IPv6-only at present.

The problem is that as a website owner, you want to reach the largest possible audience for your site. This means that you will have to continue to run an IPv4 version of your site for as long as there are significant numbers of viewer with IPv4-only connections to access it. Which there are at present, and will be for years to come until every broadband provider has upgraded to IPv6.

So, you’ll need an IPv4 address for your website and ElasticHosts will continue to provide IPv4 cloud servers for quite some time to come. What we do plan is to introduce IPv6 support so that you can run IPv4 and IPv6 versions of your site in parallel. This parallel approach works for most but not all website viewers today. This coming Wednesday’s World IPv6 Day will highlight broken networks for fixing, hopefully making the parallel approach practical. However, very few customers will be able to switch to IPv6-only.

In fact, we expect IPv6-only to start on the access side, with Carrier Grade NAT. This works since many broadband users only connect out to the web, which can work via IPv6 to IPv4 translation, but do not need the rest of the IPv4 web to be able to connect back to them.

Once IPv6 access is sufficiently widespread, only at that point will IPv6-only hosting start to make sense

Market in IPv4 space: sad but likely

Since you will still need IPv4 addresses for your website for some time, cloud hosting providers like ElasticHosts will have to continue to provide these for you.

There are large numbers of unused IPv4 addresses, as earlier in the Internet’s history large companies were given address ranges that they didn’t fully use. With no IPv4 addresses left for allocation, high demand, and large numbers of unused but allocated addresses, these will surely be recycled.

We at ElasticHosts would love to see unused addresses simply reallocated to others. There are have been some generous moves, such as when Stanford returned a /8 block for reallocation. And perhaps the central registries could get tough and forcibly reclaim unused space, or start making annual charges per IP for allocated space to encourage returns.

However, sadly and realistically a brand new market in second-hand IPv4 addresses is what we at ElasticHosts expect to see. The first signs are already visible. In March, Microsoft bought more than 650,000 IPV4 addresses in Nortel’s liquidation sale. Microsoft paid $7.5 million for these, or a remarkable $11 per IP address. A few trading sites have already sprung up, such as www.tradeipv4.com. The owner says he’s had many expressions of interest, but has yet to make a sale.

When this market becomes more mainstream, the prime beneficaries will be the current IPv4 hogs, which is a sad state of affairs! We would love to see more voluntary returns of unused space, registries making forceable reclaims or even a registry charge on IP space to incentivise hogs to return it. Sadly, this isn’t what we expect.

There are difficult and testing times ahead for internet infrastructure — like the Wild West, new markets are not the most comfortable places to be. Nonetheless, we at ElasticHosts are monitoring the evolving situation carefully for our customers, will continue to provide IPv4 addresses for everyone who needs one, and will be introducing IPv6 options for you to run in parallel with IPv4. Rest assured that we will continue providing the scalable, usable cloud servers that you love!

Speaking today at Ad:Tech, ElasticHosts CEO Richard Davies will explain how ElasticHosts and Peer 1 have partnered to address the “Cloud Crunch” and deliver on-demand cloud services with 100% availability and scalability.

Join us there!

Speaking today at Data Centre World, ElasticHosts CEO Richard Davies will explain how ElasticHosts and Peer 1 have partnered to address the “Cloud Crunch” and deliver on-demand cloud services with 100% availability and scalability.

Speaking today at the Campbell-Lange Workshop Forum on Open Source and Cloud Computing for design companies, ElasticHosts CEO Richard Davies will explain how “cloud computing offers the potential for design businesses to move their core software and computing services to internet-based providers who can scale these services to meet variations in demand”.

Speaking at CloudCamp London today, our CEO, Richard Davies, will share our vision of “How cloud will change your company”, as previously presented at Powered by Cloud in February.

Using the example of a life insurer which uses a hosting cloud, SaaS CRM and an infrastructure cloud, we describe the benefits which they reap.

We believe that:

• Cloud will make your business more flexible, scalable and cost effective
• Internal IT must refocus on innovation where it really matters to the business
• Agile competitors are already using cloud to punch above their weight

CEOs, CIOs and CTOs must act now to understand this fundamental shift in IT, and to make sure that their business emerges strengthened through leading their industry into cloud, rather than weakened by faster smaller competitors.

Speaking in the closing session of Powered by Cloud today, our CEO, Richard Davies, will share our vision of “How cloud will change your company”.

Using the example of a life insurer which uses a hosting cloud, SaaS CRM and an infrastructure cloud, we describe the benefits which they reap.

We believe that:

• Cloud will make your business more flexible, scalable and cost effective
• Internal IT must refocus on innovation where it really matters to the business
• Agile competitors are already using cloud to punch above their weight

CEOs, CIOs and CTOs must act now to understand this fundamental shift in IT, and to make sure that their business emerges strengthened through leading their industry into cloud, rather than weakened by faster smaller competitors.

ElasticHosts recently released our HTTP API. In the course of system integration for our products, evaluating our competitors’ APIs and designing our own, we came to a clear view on what makes a great HTTP or web services API. Like many things in computing, it comes down to KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid — simple for the users, that is!

Simple syntax

Simple syntax means making it easy for any user with a standard tool to call the API. If you can’t call the API with curl from a single line of shell then your API is not good enough. This rules out many of today’s cumbersome XML-RPC and SOAP APIs, although you will want XML as an option for users who are using XML-friendly languages.

We believe in:

• Choice of syntax: Different users will find different syntax most natural. At the unix shell, space-deliminated text rules. From Javascript, you’ll want JSON. From Java, you may want XML. Some tools parse x-www-form-encoded data nicely. A great HTTP API makes every command available with data in all of these formats for all of these users, specified with either different URLs or MIME content types. (OK, we admit that we’ve only released text/plain ourselves so far, but the rest are coming very soon!).

• Don’t reinvent the wheel: Smart people designed the internet. There are good existing mechanisms for security (e.g. SSL/TLS), authentication (e.g. HTTP auth), error codes (e.g. HTTP status codes), etc. Use them, and don’t invent your own, unlike one UK payment gateway who invented a simple XOR encryption which is vulnerable to a known plaintext attack and didn’t fix it when we pointed this out!

Simple semantics

Simple semantics means having a small number of powerful, orthogonal commands. If your API needs a 300 page document to explain it then something is wrong. Equally, your users shouldn’t even be aware of the artificial abstractions and data structures which you invented inside your software.

We believe in:

• Few powerful orthogonal commands: For your API users, each call adds overhead, both in code and response times. Produce a few powerful calls which do the work of many smaller ones. In our case, our API has a single call for “server create”, where this would take many calls with some of our competitors’ APIs: starting the server, associating a static IP, associating persistent storage, etc.

• No artificial abstractions: API users don’t care how you wrote your software, and shouldn’t have to know or change their calls when you change your design. Try as hard as you can to hide your internal structures from the user unless it’s absolutely necessary to expose them. In our case, a cloud infrastructure platform provides virtual server hardware, and we let users configure this as they would real hardware, choosing an amount of RAM, specifying which hard disk is on which IDE bus, etc. We don’t invent “instance types” and we deal with mapping the well-known hardware descriptions to how the virtualization platform sees them.

• Immediate response where possible: All of our API commands are synchronous, and they usually complete within seconds of all input data arriving. If we can do this for a cloud infrastructure platform, then surely you can for your application?

Happy New Year, and may your 2009 APIs be good ones!

For CloudCamp London today, we are sharing an overview of “How clouds can and will differ”.

We believe that even within cloud infrastructure there are significant differences between providers, based on:

• Physical location: Location of infrastructure determines network speed of users and data jurisdiction
• Target users: Target users determine features and services offered in addition to raw virtual servers
• SLA: Whether they offer a SLA with financial penalties if broken, level of SLA determines redundancy of infrastructure and hence price of product
• Server config: Whether they offer a full range of operating system images, with flexibility to instantly rescale server sizes and total capacity to any level
• Web UI and API: Whether they offer infrastructure management via both intuitive web interface, and API (fitting standards when they emerge)

ElasticHosts will be the second UK-based cloud infrastructure provider to launch — and we believe that our UK physical location will make us extremely attractive for UK-based customers, due to:

• Much better network latency and bandwidth if cloud infrastructure is on the same continent as users (<3 vs. >50 milliseconds)
• No legal conflicts if single legal jurisdiction covers host and buyer (e.g. US Patriot Act investigations, overseas data limits imposed by EU Directive on Personal Data Protection)