3 ms·

GOOG took many years to write theirs and it's still problematic for them in anything in lots of their use cases. I think that's a creative interpretation of th

GOOG took many years to write theirs and it's still problematic for them in anything in lots of their use cases. I think that's a creative interpretation of the facts. GOOG is operating at enormous scales pushing the limits of operational knowledge. I think it's quite acceptable and natural that vendors are packaging up their learnings from 2007 into products now for most enterprises (which are starting to really eat them up). "Mesos/Kubernetes are vanishingly small parts of the larger ecosystems out there. You can't just wave you hands and disregard quite literally the billions of dollars of infrastructure that are deployed each and every year by major service providers and corporations. Tiny cloud providers are not the largest slice of the pie when it comes to dollars spent on networking gear right now." While I agree with your broader point about VxLAN v. MPLS (I think), the above isn't even wrong. Mesos/Kube aren't vanishingly small, that would imply they're shrinking, rather than small startups/projects that are growing at astonishing rates. You're also confusing billions of dollars of low-mid margin hardware with potential billions of dollars of mid-high margin software that's aiming at IBM, HP, CA, Oracle, and Microsoft's application servers and management tooling. Secondly, Mesos/Kube aren't cloud providers, they're the startups that represent the next generation (along with Cloud Foundry, OpenShift, and whatever Docker comes up with) of data center operating systems that are going to run the bulk of enterprise systems the way VMware does today. That said, there's a belief that all of this requires SDN/Overlay Networking like NSX or VxLAN that will magically fix network problems by bundling it with the app platform and waving a wand. Here I agree ... they won't. The secret behind good software defined networking is solid hardware defined networking ;) Sorry buddy. You're way wrong here. Either you've never built an infrastructure that anyone cares about losing for an hour or two while you figure out what went wrong or you're so tanked up on "cloud" kool-aid that you've forgotten how we got to this point and have failed to understand how large systems scale up from small ones. I dunno. Stepping back, I remember James Hamilton from Amazon at re:invent clearly was aiming directly at network vendors as the last bastion of costly proprietary mainframe thinking that will be commodified by software-defined cloud services on commodity hardware. It will take time. But they're pretty jazzed about it. "Show me a large multinational bank that's storing their transaction data on S3 or Ceph and I'll show you a bank that's not "systemically important". Ceph, I agree. Amazon OTOH has won the object storage game. S3 is the de facto API for all object storage now, whether it's from EMC, NetApp, etc. And mission critical banks are definitely using it, at humungous scale. I have no idea why you'd think S3 is appropriate for transactional data, it's an object store.

Nrsolis 11y ago
Right now most of my focus is in the financial industry. I would say "in the US" but the truth is that my clients are multi-national behemoths. I'm regularly on plane flights to EMEA and APAC. Believe me when I tell you that they are still running systems that were around in the 70's. They have a significant investment in code that can only properly run in a mainframe environment and isn't going to get thrown away anytime soon. This is not to say that they don't have any interest in "cloud" technologies...quite the contrary....they are deploying just about ALL of them: ESX, OpenStack, Cloudstack, etc. But what often emerges as a barrier to deployment is the operational details: things like upgrades to infrastructure, minimization of downtime, security, and integration with the rest of the network and computing infrastructure. They don't have the luxury of starting from scratch and they certainly can't just forget about how to make things work with their larger infrastructure. Does OpenStack even have a way to upgrade from Juno to Kilo with ZERO downtime? Questions like that are a huge part of the testing and design that go into their thinking. These guys spend $1B EVERY YEAR on computing. And here is ANOTHER barrier: they can't readily do business with startups. It just doesn't work for them. The possibility that a critical part of their infrastructure is dependent on the fortunes of a group of maybe 50 people being successful. And it's not enough to say "well they have the source code" and can support it themselves. That doesn't work for them when the auditors come out and need to identify WHO is responsible for taking care of support and the lifecycle of the code. They write the code for their applications; you can't expect them to code big parts of their OS too. SO....please take my comments in the spirit they are intended. You can't be successful unless you are able to sell you solutions to the broader market that includes lots of customers that aren't GOOG or AMZN. Don't forget staffing either. If your infrastructure requires a CS PhD to support/upgrade, you're going to have a hard time selling it out there. Handling of outages tends to be business-specific so NoOPS style models don't work everywhere. It's fine for FB, but not NYSE. As for storage, EMC is the standard. Transactional databases are in far more places than you'd expect. If your app has scaling issues with accessing a non-virtualized database or datastore, then that's going to be a problem for you. If your OS can't handle redundant datapaths or confuses the Ops people about which piece of physical hardware is causing the issues you're seeing at the virtual layer, then you're going to have even more problems. So I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid just yet. I love virtual infrastructure but there are still too many open questions that need answers before it's going to be a complete solution for mission critical stuff.

Nrsolis 11y ago

Right now most of my focus is in the financial industry. I would say "in the US" but the truth is that my clients are multi-national behemoths. I'm regularly on plane flights to EMEA and APAC. Believe me when I tell you that they are still running systems that were around in the 70's. They have a significant investment in code that can only properly run in a mainframe environment and isn't going to get thrown away anytime soon. This is not to say that they don't have any interest in "cloud" technologies...quite the contrary....they are deploying just about ALL of them: ESX, OpenStack, Cloudstack, etc. But what often emerges as a barrier to deployment is the operational details: things like upgrades to infrastructure, minimization of downtime, security, and integration with the rest of the network and computing infrastructure. They don't have the luxury of starting from scratch and they certainly can't just forget about how to make things work with their larger infrastructure. Does OpenStack even have a way to upgrade from Juno to Kilo with ZERO downtime? Questions like that are a huge part of the testing and design that go into their thinking. These guys spend $1B EVERY YEAR on computing. And here is ANOTHER barrier: they can't readily do business with startups. It just doesn't work for them. The possibility that a critical part of their infrastructure is dependent on the fortunes of a group of maybe 50 people being successful. And it's not enough to say "well they have the source code" and can support it themselves. That doesn't work for them when the auditors come out and need to identify WHO is responsible for taking care of support and the lifecycle of the code. They write the code for their applications; you can't expect them to code big parts of their OS too. SO....please take my comments in the spirit they are intended. You can't be successful unless you are able to sell you solutions to the broader market that includes lots of customers that aren't GOOG or AMZN. Don't forget staffing either. If your infrastructure requires a CS PhD to support/upgrade, you're going to have a hard time selling it out there. Handling of outages tends to be business-specific so NoOPS style models don't work everywhere. It's fine for FB, but not NYSE. As for storage, EMC is the standard. Transactional databases are in far more places than you'd expect. If your app has scaling issues with accessing a non-virtualized database or datastore, then that's going to be a problem for you. If your OS can't handle redundant datapaths or confuses the Ops people about which piece of physical hardware is causing the issues you're seeing at the virtual layer, then you're going to have even more problems. So I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid just yet. I love virtual infrastructure but there are still too many open questions that need answers before it's going to be a complete solution for mission critical stuff.