Chargeback in the Cloud - The Movie

If you were unable to attend the live presentation on cost-effective defenses against chargeback in the cloud, or simply can't get enough performance and capacity analysis for the AWS cloud (which is completely understandable), here's a direct link to the video recording on CMG's YouTube channel.

The details concerning how you can do this kind of cost-benefit analysis for your cloud applications will be discussed in the upcoming GCAP class and the PDQW workshop. Check the corresponding class registration pages for dates and pricing.

Virtual cloudXchange 2018 Conference

Our abstract has been accepted for presentation at the FREE cloudXchange online event to be held by CMG on June 19th at 10am Pacific (5pm UTC). [Extended slides]

Exposing the Cost of Performance
Hidden in the Cloud

Neil Gunther
Performance Dynamics, Castro Valley, California

Mohit Chawla
Independent Systems Engineer, Hamburg, Germany

10am Pacific Time on June 19, 2018

Whilst offering lift-and-shift migration and versatile elastic capacity, the cloud also reintroduces an old mainframe concept—chargeback—which rejuvenates the need for performance analysis and capacity planning. Combining production JMX data with an appropriate performance model, we show how to assess fee-based EC2 configurations for a mobile-user application running on a Linux-hosted Tomcat cluster. The performance model also facilitates ongoing cost-benefit analysis of various EC2 Auto Scaling policies.

Webinar: Load Testing Meets Data Analytics

This Thursday, October 27 at 10 am PDT^*, I'll be participating in a webinar sponsored by SOASTA, Inc. They make a new breed of load-testing product called CloudTest® which, despite its name, is not restricted to load testing cloud-based apps, although it can do that too.

Calculating the Cost of Elastic Capacity

Neal Richter sent me the following tweet
Unfortunately, the paper ("Optimal staffing policy for queuing systems with cyclic demands," Int. J. Services and Operations Management, 2010) cited in the PhyOrg news item, that Neal tweeted, is not accessible to either him or me. Nonetheless, I found an earlier paper (2007) by the same author (Pen-Yuan Liao), which has a lot of the same words so, I'm assuming they both describe the same thing, more or less. Either way, I'm quite certain the math is the same.

Jackson's Theorem for the Cloud

Queueing theory, as a distinct discipline, just turned 100 last year. Compared with mathematics and physics, it's a relative youngster. Some seminal results include: Erlang's original solution for the M/D/1 queue (1909), his solutions for a multiserver queue without a waiting line M/M/m/m and with a waiting line M/M/m/∞; AKA "call waiting" (1917), the Pollaczek–Khinchine formula for the M/G/1 queue (1930) and Little's proof (1961). These results were established in the context of individual queueing facilities.

Intel's Cloud Computer on a Chip

Last week in the GCaP class, I underscored how important it is to "look out the window" and keep an eye on what is happening in the marketplace, because some of those developments may eventually impact capacity planning in your shop. Here's a good example:

This Intel processor (code named "Rock Creek") integrates 48 IA-32 cores, 4 DDR3 memory channels, and a voltage regulator controller in a 6×4 2D-mesh network-on-chip architecture. Located at each mesh node is a five-port virtual cut-through packet switched router shared between two cores. Core-to-core communication uses message passing while exploiting 384KB of on-die shared memory. Fine grain power management takes advantage of 8 voltage and 28 frequency islands to allow independent DVFS of cores and mesh. At the nominal 1.1V, cores operate at 1GHz while the 2D-mesh operates at 2GHz. As performance and voltage scales, the processor dissipates between 25W and 125W. The 567 sq-mm processor die is implemented in 45nm Hi-K CMOS and has 1,300,000,000 transistors.

The "cloud" reference is a marketing hook, but note that it uses a 2D mesh interconnect topology (like we discussed in class), contains 1.3 billion transistors with the new Hafnium metal gate (as we discussed in class), and produces up to 125 watts of heat.

The details of this processor were presented at the annual ISSCC meeting in San Francisco, February 2010.

Can Haz Guy: USA CIO Vivek Kundra

Columnist Chris O'Brien's interview with Vivek Kundra in the San Jose Mercury News, appears in "How new CIO has brought innovation to government" . . . "a quiet revolution in the way the federal bureaucracy works that may change our view of government for the better."

Towards a Cloud Capacity-Cost Formula

One of the (unscheduled) plenary sessions at Velocity 2009, was entitled: “Why elasticity, performance, and analytics will change how Webops is judged" (PDF), given by Alistair Croll. An earlier version of Alistair's ideas can be read on his blog. As I understand it, he's attempting to tie together the capacity-on-demand concept of cloud computing with the way a user is charged for resource consumption and how the provider counts revenue; a kind of dynamic capacity planning and chargeback association. Currently, for example, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine and Salesforce, all do this differently. This looks like a very important point, which I would like to understand more thoroughly. By slide 3 in his presentation, he refers to a simple capacity formula and that's what I want to discuss here, because that's what suddenly locked up my attention.

Cloudy Web 2.0: So Much for the 5th Utility

A real utility, like water, gas and POTS, implies that it's always there, with only very rare and explainable exceptions. Which reminds me, did they ever figure out who hacked (as in "chopped") the major phone cables in Santa Clara County, last month?

I Really Don’t Know Clouds at All (video)

As the well-known cloud-architect, Joni Mitchell, said so presciently:

"I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all”

Or, as Larry Ellison put it more succinctly, "What The Hell Is Cloud Computing?"

Like all things Web 2.0, there's an overabundance of fascination with what can be done vs. how fast it can be done or how many things can be done, before the system might fail to scale.

Slacker DBs in the Cloud Base

In my view, another reason Larry Ellison diss'd Cloud Computing last year (even though he promoted "Thin Clients" a decade ago, but completely overlooked the necessary infrastructure to support it: aka the cloud), is that he's afraid of how it might negatively impact sales of the ORACLE RDBMS. Why? Most of the world's data is not in relational form, and never will be. More importantly, Google knows this. (Think MapReduce)

One of the first people to see this coming was relational database academic, Joe Hellerstein at UCB. In his 2001 talk entitled "We Lose" (PDF slides), slide 5 contains the gist of his prescient observations:

• Grassroots use Filesystems, not DBs
  
• Grassroots use App servers, not ORDBs
  
• Grassroots write Java, PERL, Python, PHP, ... NOT SQL!
  

He defines Grassroots as: "Hackers. But also DBMS engineers, Berkeley grads, Physicists, etc."

Now, somewhere in between are Slacker Databases: "Amazon SimpleDB, Apache CouchDB, Google App Engine, and Persevere, offering far greater simplicity than SQL, may have a better way of storing data for Web apps." Hellerstein was more right than he could've known.

NorCal CMG Meeting Location

For those of you who haven't attended before, the Feb 3rd (Tues) meeting of the Northern California CMG will be held in Suite 100 of the Compuware building in Pleasanton, California. Here's the Google map. Three talks will be presented:

• 9:30--10:30 Mongo Measurement Requires Mongo Capacity Management, Neil Gunther, Performance Dynamics Company
  
• 10:45--11:45 Wasted MIPS, Wanton MIPS: a MIPS Recovery Initiative, Tom Halinski, Compuware Corporation
  
• 1:00--2:00 The Apdex Index Revealed, Neil Gunther, Performance Dynamics Company
  

Breakfast starts at 8:30 am and registration is $25 at the door.

NorCal CMG Meeting Feb 3, 2009

If you're in the neighborhood, I'll be giving two talks:

1. "Mongo Measurement Requires Mongo Capacity Management"
   
2. "The Apdex Index Revealed"
   

at the next meeting of the Northern California Computer Measurement Group.

JournalSpace.gone

So, this is Web 2.0? And I'm supposed to put my entire existence on a (black) Cloud!? Do you know who is managing your web services? This is how you might find out.

Part of me still wants to believe it's a slightly premature April Fool hoax. I mean, just look at the filename on that HTML page. But I checked slashdot and it's still there. So, it must be true. :-\ The earlier innuendo (on "Tuesday") that it might have been MacOS X going nutzoid, has now been narrowed to a (the?) sysadm going postal on the database. Can you say, "Secondary storage"?

Pay per VPU Application Development

So-called "Cloud Computing" (aka Cluster Computing, aka Grids, aka Utility Computing, etc.) is even making the morning news these days, where it is being presented as having a supercomputer with virtual processor units just a click away on your home PC. I don't know too many home PC users who need a supercomputer, but even if they did and it was readily available, how competitive would it be given the plummeting cost of multicores for PCs?