"Ahead in the Clouds" Lisa '09 Keynote by Werner Vogels

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, was the keynote speaker at this year's LISA conference. His keynote was entitled "Ahead in the Clouds".

One of Werner's goals in this talk was to level set the audience with regard to the term "Cloud Computing". He wanted to make sure we understood the reality today of cloud computing versus all the hype.

Werner began with a movie produced by a company called Animoto. This is a company that doesn't own any server hardware. Their entire server infrastructure is hosted by Amazon. As a matter of fact, when they first started they were just a bunch of guys with laptops sitting in the corner coffee shop. He used this case study as an example of the power of Infrastructure as a Service. Their business model depended upon the rapid provisioning of servers as their customer base grew. They needed their operating expenses to to line up directly with customer use. If their company followed the traditional capital purchasing cycle, two things would have been different. First, they would have been required to seek funding from something like a venture capitalist, diluting their ownership of the company. Second, they could not have scaled to meet customer demand. Since they were using IaaS, they were able to rapidly scale as the customer demand increased.

He wanted to make one thing very clear. Amazon is not in the IaaS business in order to utilize surplus server capacity. They are in the IaaS business because they believe that it could be larger than Amazon.com. I think that this should signal system administrators to watch trends in the Infrastructure as a Service space. If this type of computing infrastructure will scale so large that Amazon's piece of it is larger than Amazon.com, it will have a tremendous impact on our profession.

As I have discussed in the past there is a bit of uncertainty with the role of system administrators in the cloud. Werner's view of this issue is that the job of the sysadmin will have to change. They will be required to perform more tasks with scripting and automation rather that interaction at the command line. They will need to be able to affect change whether the change is on one system, one thousand or ten thousand. In particular, the system administrator has new automation not previously available. The provisioning process is now available as an API.

There were several precursors that have allowed us to move in to the era of IaaS: Software as a Service, Distributed Computing, Virtualization, Service Oriented Architecture.

When we talk about SaaS as a precursor to IaaS, we are not talking about SaaS as a business model. Rather we are talking about how we can deliver a software solution as a platform and operate it. Previously, software was something that was authored, packaged, and shipped in a box.

The advances in distributed computing also contribute to the success of IaaS. We must be able to divide complex problems and distribute across many servers. Otherwise our biggest success would be limited by the size of the largest server we could build.

Virtualization is a critical factor in the success of IaaS. Virtualization in this regard is not simply the virtualization of compute resources. It is the virtualization of compute, storage, network, and I/O. We must be able to manage each of these resources discretely in order to meet SLAs and economies of scale needed by IaaS.

The last precursor is Service Oriented Architecture. This is a subtle, but very powerful, tool. Once we commit to SOA, services may be developed separately and loosely coupled. This helps us minimize or eliminate one of the largest expenses in enterprise I/T shops today: integration.

Werner points out that when transitioning from a traditional model to an IaaS model, we must take care to address uncertainty. In the past, developers and operators have hoarded resources such as servers and storage "just in case" there is a need for them in the future. It is a cultural change for them to trust that they may quickly, easily, and reliably provision and release resources when needed.

Amazon has an interesting perspective on organization. Werner noted that the organization matched their service architecture. There are different business units responsible for different internal services.

With a rather dramatic photograph of a data center destroyed by a tornado, Werner emphasised that if you need to provide end to end reliability to your customer, you must have geographic diversity.

I found Werner's keynote speech engaging and informational. I am encouraged that the CTO of one of the largest players in the IaaS field has a clear direction. I hope that in the future they can continue to provide products higher and higher in the application stack, allowing system administrators to spend less time on infrastructure and more time on providing direct value to our customers.

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[...] I just published a blog entry on the Usenix blog for LISA 2009. “Ahead in the Clouds” Lisa ‘09 Keynote by Werner Vogels [...]

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[...] Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, was the keynote speaker at this year’s LISA conference. His keynote was entitled “Ahead in the Clouds”. One of Werner’s goals in this talk was to level set the audience with regard to the term “Cloud Computing”. He wanted to make sure we understood the reality today of cloud [...] Go to Source for Full Story [...]

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[...] presentations. This year’s keynote was by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, and Charles Wimmer blogged about it for USENIX. Werner talked about the Amazon cloud services and how they relate to the future of [...]

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[...] presentations. This year’s keynote was by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, and Charles Wimmer blogged about it for USENIX. Werner talked about the Amazon cloud services and how they relate to the future of [...]

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