It’s Academy’s night and is a good time for a geek to retrospect on the coolest 2008 iPhone applications:

• My pick: Trailguru. I’m an avid road cyclist and take the iPhone with me to log the stats of my short runs, like this one or this one or this other one. Excellent use of the GPS. The two chief shortcomings are the battery life and the UI. In spite of a few dead-on-arrival cases, I still log the iPhone and run Trailguru on all my runs;
• My wife’s pick: Hangman. Old wine in a new bottle. When it’s set on hard words, the entertainment is warranted. It can keep everybody in the car entertained;
• Children’s pick: Monkey Ball was love at first sight. They have yet to move on. Distant runner ups include: Audi A4, iTicTac, Labyrinth, and Koi Pond.

One day, I will dig into Objective-C and dust off pound defines (as in #define) to make one of my own!

Today, Unix time has counted the 1234567890 second since midnight January 1st 1970 when the Unix epoch has started. I visited cool sites such as http://www.1234567890day.com/ and http://www.coolepochcountdown.com/ Long life to Unix! So long until Tuesday, 19 January 2038.

This Monday, Prof. Ion Stoica invited me to Berkeley to give a lecture on eBay’s scaling, challenges, and lessons learned, as part of their Cloud Computing class. I really enjoyed the opportunity to present and the open, lively discussion that resulted. Questions clustered around the transactional nature of the eBay workload, eventual consistency, and the this-is-life-in-a-big-city kind of scaling practices (inclusive of people and process implications, which play a key role alongside the technology). With a Fortune 500 mindset, I shared my view of Clouds and some research big rocks that in my opinion can profoundly impact Cloud adoption.  

While visiting, I learned that Berkeley’s magnum opus paper on Cloud Computing will be unveiled to the public on Thu Feb 12th. In January, I had a sneak preview of the paper and was impressed by its breadth and depth.

I read a couple of highly intriguing research papers on next generation datacenter switching, Monsoon and SEATTLE.  They develop a Cloud-friendly view wherein a large-scale datacenter features:

• Flat plug-and-play addressing eliminating any server fragmentation
• High bisection bandwidth
• VM enablement
• Cost efficiencies at large scale

by way of:

• Huge and STP-free L2 domain with up ~10^5 servers in it
• IP presence limited to connecting the datacenter to the Internet
• Custom control plane and/or custom DHTs

I buy the spirit of these new-wave requirements, albeit with some caveats.

I will work hard to drive requirements strictly top-down from my applications and their own modus operandi down to the network, before I sign on a blank check for a anyone-to-anyone dynamic network environment.  As a case in point, let’s assume that I have a design pattern by which my applications are either stateless or have their state fully externalized (in fact, it’s one of the design principles at eBay). From this, I derive that I will not live migrate virtualized application instances and will use simple create/destroy semantics instead. If I don’t have to worry about live migration, my network closet and my associated processes will begin to look a whole lot simpler. [This is quite something to admit for one who set a live migration benchmark back in 2005!]

In a Cloud provider scenario, the top-end does look open to any application style and its opposite. Is it really so and do we need to be all inclusive? I believe that we can still handily contain the requirements posed to the network by thinking in terms of abstracted tiers (each tier is what is horizontally-scaled to the customer, independently). Furthermore, as we look up the chain, the various PaaS stipulations provide a host of cues in terms of partitionable, directional, tiered workloads.

Lastly, for these ideas to be operationalized at scale, the new control plane(s) will need to earn quite some trust, just like any other foundational piece. After all these years, we are still very scared of STP flaps and their turning into a SPOF for the datacenter.

I enjoyed reading these papers and am grateful for their out-of-the-box, stimulating thoughts.

Is there a rose without thorns, an Ethernet without STP?