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Sunday June 28, 2009

Enemy Of State Last Wednesday's opening session at the SIFMA technology management show covered three aspects of data center evolution in increasing order of abstraction: AMQP as a primary data management tool, the future of the NYSE data center as a virtual trading floor, and cloud computing (given by yours truly) as an incentive for building more reliable and scalable applications.

Carl Trieloff from Red Hat started literally down in the wires talking about the AMQP and how this might change the way we think about state persistence. Rather than worrying about the end points for state management, Trieloff argued that we should think about the messaging vehicles themselves as methods for ensuring that we don't create interoperability and persistence problems. I was reminded of Reuven Cohen's blog proclaiming XMPP as the new glue of the internet, supplanting HTTP, citing the use of XMPP in Google's Wave protocol as evidence. While I never believe a protocol spec serves as physical proof of a phase change in the matter of any system (SOAP based web services, anyone? Buehler?), it is one more indicator that we way in which systems carry their state is becoming as critical as where the state is preserved, particularly if the state is short-lived (whether edits to a Google document or stock exchange order book information).

Stanley Young, CIO of NYSE Euronext, discussed the exchange's core messaging platform, built on the Wombat engine, since acquired by the NYSE. It's another example of messaging trumping structured data management, and it served as a foundation for Young's discussion of how future exchanges - emphasis on plural - will be built. He declared that the "data center is the new trading floor" and that nearly 80% of the NYSE Euronext future data center will be available for co-location and what is effectively a private hosted data center. He closed by stating that the NYSE's goal is to be able to spin up a new market in 24 hours: the listed instruments, settlement functions, and order management defined, deployed and connected to a critical mass of players that truly defines "capitalism". If you can't value it, trade it, and make it fungible, it's not capital. The NYSE has its eyes set on expanding, rather than contracting, the capital exchanges. It's an equally strong statement about the growing importance of application agility.

I got to speak after them but before the coffee break, which is a slightly better slot than the "after lunch nap hour". While going through an update on cloud computing use cases for test and development and space/time adjunct scaling, as well as thoughts on building private clouds, I emphasized how cloud computing is making us rethink reliability. You can't build a cluster out of what you can't physically configure - unless you do it in software.

Application reliability has historically been about recovering state after a failure. With a virtualization layer intermediating the application and underlying hardware, tried and true clustering methods no longer make sense. Rather than keeping in-memory state we should be encapsulating it (hence the emphasis on REST); similarly we should be putting applications in more explicit control of their replication of data and memory instances. This doesn't mean that persisted state goes away -- databases, table oriented stores (BigTable, SimpleDB), and replicated file object systems (Mogile, HDFS) are going to increase in use, not decrease. But each of those components has explicit control of replication and failure recovery, rather than relying on clustering at the hardware level to do it implicitly. ( Jun 28 2009, 05:10:42 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Friday June 19, 2009

xkcd and Home Run Hitters I adore Randall Munroe's xkcd comic, mostly for the math jokes. I define "geek" as someone who uses epsilon in a sentence, so anything that references irrational number or NP-completeness is good for several laughs.

And here I thought I was the only one who made Erdos number jokes. Unfortunately, Erdos number theorists would dispute validity of newly acquired Erdos deuces (my newly minted term, flame my way) using Hank Aaron as a counter-example of how not to hit a theoretical home run through signature power alone.

Tip of the hockey bubble to Eszter Hargittai - an early morning tweet pointed to the fact that Google searches trying to grok the punchline were trending up this morning.

In case my nerdiness was in doubt, net summary of first hour of consciousness on this Friday: Saw a Facebook status update via Twitter that referenced an online comic that made a math joke about Erdos number 2 and made me think of Hank Aaron.

So I blogged about it. That's where my kids say "Dad, you're a nerd". That's a geek round-tripper. ( Jun 19 2009, 10:17:55 AM EDT ) Permalink

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Saturday June 06, 2009

Cory Doctorow's "Makers" Cory Doctorow was kind enough to give me an advanced reader's copy of his upcoming book Makers, which I read in about three sittings. Granted, I'm a Cory fanboy, and I devour his writings like Pop-Tarts (often simultaneously), but this one is, in my slightly biased opinion, his best yet.

It's a love story set with mild sci-fi context, as opposed to a sci-fi story with romantic themes embedded. However, "love" isn't just about interpersonal relationships; Makers is about people who thrive on labors of love - literally thrive, in a post-collapse economy. What's frightening is that Cory wrote the book as the global economy was unwinding at the end of 2008's North American summer season; by the time I got the book in March we were mumbling about new depressions of all kinds. As I read it, I was repeatedly reminded of Shoshanna Zuboff's theme in her book In The Age Of The Smart Machine (now 20 years in print), as she relayed it to Sun's systems engineers in 1995: When we think about a divison of labor in a corporation, we're also creating a division of love, because we should love what we do on a daily basis. Zuboff challenged us to think about individual empowerment, and what it means to really build things rather than create information In intervening two decades between Smart Machine and Makers, a number of business leaders have cried that business schools teach graduates how to make synthetic things - derivative securities, economic models, hedging strategies - but not tangible, real-world goods. If anyone doubts the verity of those long-standing concerns, please visit Detroit for the basis of a case study.

What if we really enter an age of massive free agency, of corporations orbited by tinkerers, coders, freelancers, constructors, and destructors? This idea has been sitting in a pile of (electronic) notes for three months, and only gestated into a blog when James Gosling took the stage at JavaOne wearing a T-shirt promoting the Java Store as a way to create value from labors of love. Makers on a fine grain scale.

So what's the book about? It's about love. It's about how (and why) others love us, or don't. It's about economics and corporations, and at the same time economics and corporations don't behave the way you'd expect at all times. It's about rights - not just copyrights and rights to use, but rights of expression and relation as well. Every time you think the book is taking a financial detour, it snaps you back to a personal future that is (in William Gibson's words) just not evenly distributed.

The only bad part: You can't buy the book until November (but you can pre-order it now, hint hint). Guess what everyone I know is getting for the holidays. ( Jun 06 2009, 09:09:06 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

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Thursday May 28, 2009

Unsolved Developer Mysteries I love when customers play "stump the geek" and ask really insightful, serious questions. It's partly what makes being a systems engineer at Sun challenging and fun (and yes, I consider myself an SE within my own group, but I'll pass on the is-a has-a polymorphism jokes, thank you). Yesterday's question scored an 8 for style and 9 for terseness (usually a difficult combination to execute):

What are the top developer problems we haven't run into yet? I gave an answer in three parts.

1. Unstructured data management and non-POSIX semantics. Increasingly, data reliability is taking the shape of replication handled by a data management layer, using RESTful syntax to store, update, and delete items with explicit redundancy control. If you're thinking of moving an application into a storage cloud, you're going to run into this. Applications thriving on read()/write() syntax are wonderful when you have a highly reliable POSIX environment against which to run them. And no, don't quote me as saying POSIX filesystem clusters are dead - the Sun Storage 7310C is an existence proof to the contrary. Filesystems we loved as kids are going to be around as adults, and probably with the longevity of the mainframe and COBOL: they'll either engineer or survive the heat death of the universe. There is an increasing trend, however, toward WebDAV, Mogile, SimpleDB, HDFS and other data management systems that intermediate the block level from the application. New platforms, not at the expense of old ones.

2. Software reliability trumps hardware replacement. An application analog to the first point. Historically, we've used high availability clusters, RAID disk configurations and redundant networks to remove single points of failure, and relied on an active/active or active/passive application cluster to fail users from one node over to a better, more healthy one. But what if the applications are highly distributed, recognize failure, and simply restart a task or request as needed, routing around failure? IP networks work (quite well) in that sense. It requires writing applications that package up their state, so that the recovery phase doesn't involve recreating, copying or otherwise precipitating state information on the new application target system. There's a reason REST is popular - the ST stands for "state transfer". And yes, this worked really well for NFS for a long time. Can I get an "idempotent" from the crowd?

3. Parallelism. If not bound by single thread, what would you waste, pre-compute, or do in parallel? This isn't about parallelizing loops or using multi-threaded libraries; it's about analyzing large-scale compute tasks to determine what tasks could be partitioned and done in parallel. I call this "lemma computing" -- in more pure mathematics, a lemma is a partial result that you assume true; someone spent a lot of time figuring out the lemma so that you can leverage the intermediate proof point. When you have a surfeit of threads in a single processor, you need to consider what sidebar computation can be done with those threads that will speed up the eventual result bound by single-thread performance. This isn't the way we "think" computer science; we either think single threaded or multiple copies of the same single thread.

That was my somewhat top of mind list, based partly on the talk I gave at CloudSlam 09 which will be updated for SIFMA in New York later this month. ( May 28 2009, 02:16:01 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

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Thursday May 07, 2009

Cloud Computing Round Table Video Sys-Con.TV has posted the video of our "Cloud Computing Round Table" held on March 29 in Times Square. It was a fun exchange with a lot of sharp dialogue and discussion about reliability, application fit and function, and whether or not amazon.com is going to eat your data center. Of course, having amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels on the panel made that discussion topical and lively. ( May 07 2009, 04:09:10 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

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Tuesday May 05, 2009

Free (Technology) Agents Had breakfast with a friend this morning who commented on the state of the economy in and around our neighborhood by saying that "there are many free agents available." He wasn't talking about the Yankees, Mets, Devils, Rangers, Knicks, Nets, or any other sports franchise that funnels ticket revenue into the hands of free agent players who haven't delivered a local championship since 2003 (Devils, Stanley Cup). His perception was that with many technology people on the move, the market is ripe for new ideas coming to fruition in new (and old) companies; cyclical unemployment injects strategy and experience into companies that invest in newly available players. Friend's summary comment: "In two years, we'll see another wave of breakthrough innovations." It would be an early indicator of technology helping the economy innovate its way out of the current slump.

Why would this work for technology companies and not sports franchises? Quite simply, the acquisition of a free agent is unlikely to change the basic strategy of a team or the rules of a game. Strategic changes in a game almost always result from a lack of talent, not the sudden availability of creative people.

Int this current NHL season, the NJ Devils changed from a defensive-minded style to a goal-scoring, offensive strategy when goaltender Martin Brodeur suffered an injury requiring four months of recovery. Late San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh perfected the West Coast Offense (read Michael Lewis' The Blind Side for a compelling story wrapped in a West Coast Offense) and forced strategic defensive changes in the game. And the grandfather of several current NBA offensive schemes is Pete Carrill's Princeton Offense. What do all three have in common? They were designed to deal with a deficit of talent or skill: goaltending and first-rate defense (Devils), rushing (West Coast Offense), and height (Princeton Offense).

The barriers to entry for new ideas have never been lower: you can develop your idea using a wealth of open source software, deploy it to test in a cloud infrastructure and leverage social networking mechanisms to spread awareness. It's a ripe environment for engineers to give us something (locally) to celebrate. ( May 05 2009, 10:44:15 AM EDT ) Permalink

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Monday April 27, 2009

Rubber Balls and The Job Market A break from the emerging markets travelogue.

A few weeks ago I vowed to spend at least a little time each day helping people I know who have been affected by the current economy find new job opportunities. The local economy is nasty; I realized that half (literally) of my close friends are technically unemployed. Through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and email, I've been trying to connect people, and along the way I discovered Dave and Deb Levy's blog about married life under the pressures of job friction. I have known Dave for a while (he's a fellow Devils fan and hockey head); his admonition not to treat your friends who are between jobs as if they have the plague is sage advice.

And now for a travelogue in the middle of an emerging trend: I adore Kevin Carroll. I heard him speak five years ago at an NHL event, and was hooked. His point, then as now, is that we excel at play -- and we should treat work as something that we love, something that motivates us to play with others, something that gives us joy in the smallest facets. If you can't "play" at work, then you're in the wrong job, or positioning yourself the wrong way. Today's job market is an opportunity to re-think work, and the pleasure we get from our jobs. I'm reminded of a talk by Shoshana Zuboff, in which she said "It's not about division of labor, it's about division of love, if you are separated from the things you love to do." She was referring to management as a disintermediating function (this was pre-Internet boom, circa 1995), but the theme is organization chart invariant.

So onto a trend in middle of a travel-blog: Dave's wife Deb quotes a friend of hers describing the chaotic interplay of adult life themes - job, health, home, family. We juggle them all, and they are all glass balls, not to be dropped or mishandled. Except for work - a job is a rubber ball. Drop it, bat it, or have it swatted away, and it bounces in a new direction. ( Apr 27 2009, 09:06:20 PM EDT ) Permalink

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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Day 6: Bengaluru and Tiger Tech Back into something resembling a chronological sequence: blogging from the front row of the ITC Window hotel meeting room, where we'll host the Bengaluru Sun employee Town Hall later this morning. I arrived in Bengaluru after a semi-redeye that left Johannesburg and deposited me into Mumbai airport a few minutes after midnight. After a transfer and an early (3:30 am early) flight, I found myself in the new Bangalore airport. This is my first visit to India in nearly two years, and Bengaluru seems quieter, even perhaps more organized. The freeway from the airport to the city was easily navigated (although it was 5:30 in the morning).

There is a movement under way to officially change the designation of the city from Bangalore to Bengaluru, recognizing and celebrating its correct local pronunciation rather than a Westernization simplification. Of course, I was tempted to try to align the Western "Bengal" prefix into some root of Bengaluru, but I've been corrected that the two words have no common etymology. It didn't stop me from thinking "Bengal tiger" however, and noticing the airport posters promoting conversation and protection of the black and orange cats.

Part three in a continuing series of random thoughts about technology and local issues: a great story about using telemetry to track tigers and therefore improve the efficacy of tiger conversation efforts. Taking digital pictures of tigers as they cross fixed points is as strong as single-factor identification (unless there are tigers prowling with pirated stripes). Easier than collaring, less intrusive than tracking, and another example of using technology in support of future-looking, local culture. ( Apr 21 2009, 01:46:06 AM EDT ) Permalink

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Monday April 20, 2009

Day Four: Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg It's so rare for me to have an "off day" while traveling on business that I'm remarkably lazy about preparing an itinerary. My usual plan includes: find some entertainment in a local casino and/or Hard Rock Cafe, if they exist (I'm a creature of habit); look for local Jewish historical culture (I've been to the synagogue in Shanghai); explore a museum with unique local significance.

I wasn't mentally prepared for my trip to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg; it's a moving and intense experience that could have easily taken four hours to absorb fully. I was drained after two hours, and I described the intensity of the exhibits and story-telling as similar what I felt in Yad VaShem, the Jerusalem museum and memorial to the Holocaust.

I had a two-part reaction to the timeliness of the museum -- first, it's remarkable that a museum has been developed and gained popularity in less than a full generation since the deconstruction of apartheid, and yet the museum chronicles the roots of issues going back two or more centuries. Second, some of the intensity derives from many of the events chronicled occurring in my adult life; from mid-1980s on-campus protests for universities to divest of holdings in South Africa to the freedom of Nelson Mandela and the victory of his African National Congress. Others, like the death of Stephen Bantu Biko, I had heard about in song (Peter Gabriel's "Biko" was ringing in my ears) but for them I had little context until I walked through the story personally. It was at that moment that I drew the parallel to the Yad VaShem memorial, which exhorts us to continue to "bear witness" so that we develop a collective history and resistance to broad-scale human rights and dignity issues. Those of us who witnessed the joy of Mandela's release from prison have a responsibility to re-tell the context of the basic human rights issues that made it the literal turning point in a museum gallery. The Stephen Biko Foundation puts a simpler point on it: "a foundation of ideas; a memory bank for the nation." Discussion and respect.

However, my first hint that I was in over my jet-lagged head came when I bought my ticket and was handed a card that said "Whites" on it. Approaching the entrance to the museum, guests are separated into two turnstiles clearly labeled "Whites" and "Non-Whites". The first exhibit as you proceed through the turnstile explains the racial classification system that was the basis for enforcing apartheid.

Classification is something we take for granted in the social networking space; we use hash tags on Twitter and Technorati tags to better provide context for our content. Just as my encounter with the Mozambique hawker made me think of technical opportunity in a positive way, seeing the effort put into classification of people for the purpose of deciding their rights made me shudder. Not to dismiss Richard Stallman, it's not just about software being free; it's about software enabling freedom. ( Apr 20 2009, 11:45:26 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

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Days 3-5: No Natural Barriers Despite my luggage trailing me by twelve hours, the Johannesburg leg of the trip got off to a good start. My hotel was adjacent to a casino, and where there's a casino there's usually a men's clothing store amidst other shopping adventures. Sure enough, I arrived at the door of a popular South African menswear store two minutes after closing time. But the store staff let me in, I bought the only thing that fit me (a cotton sweater), and was set for Day Three of the trip.

Friday morning was spent with customers, Friday afternoon with Sun employees in a Town Hall format. It was another great set of discussions with employees about team work and customer focus. While it's impossible to understand the culture, politics, and people of any country in just a few days, I left with a few strong impressions.

Johannesburg has no natural barriers. Many cities are built nestled against a mountain range, on the banks of a river, or around a natural ocean harbor, springing up with defense or low-cost transportation in mind. Johannesburg arose up on top of the gold mines, and driving around the city you'll see small mountains of mine excavations and the constructs of mine heads.

Sports are an international language; rivalry is an international boundary-drawing technique. Cricket, rugby, field hockey, and soccer are a big deal. Hotel staff wore jerseys from their favorite soccer teams on Friday, extending the notion of what constitutes a "uniform" and providing grounds for a lot of discussion and good-natured kidding. Preparations for the 2010 FIFA World Cup are well underway (that's the pixelated style stadium under construction), and the road construction has a pronounced impact on weekday traffic in and around the "business area" of Johannesburg. The Indian Premier Cricket League began play on Saturday in Johannesburg, mixing a bit of American-style cheerleading and in-stadium "production" (read: theme music) with international cricket. Saw a field hockey team in the airport and felt a bit sheepish wearing an ice hockey t-shirt. In the airport, I picked up a VodaCom Cheetahs rugby hat, and was asked "Do you support them?" I only answered that I liked the hat, out of concern for stepping into the local equivalent of Red Sox-Yankees politics.

With the national election coming up next week, political posters abound in a truly multi-party system. It was equally interesting (to me) to see the surfeit of attention given to Barack Obama, from Shep Fairey-style portraits of ANC candidates mimicking the "Hope" poster to t-shirts of Obama for sale in a local mall. In the airport, Obama's books line the top shelf of the news stand side by side with those of South African writers and political figures.

Saturday afternoon had me in an open-air market, haggling over the price of a beaded zebra figure. The "hawker" showed me his "cash register" - a combination of his Mozambique passport, his South African visa and neatly folded bills. He brings his handcrafts over the border at regular intervals, sleeping in or near the market for weeks at a time, repeating the process in a commute that includes an international boundary described in at least half a dozen languages. I was immediately reminded of Kiva, the micro loan, crowd-sourced company that helps micro-scale businesses grow by infusing them with capital in reasonable sizes and terms. When the zebra joins the menagerie of other figures I've purchased on various long-haul trips, it will remind me of boundaries, and how we have a technology opportunity (and imperative) to help cross them. ( Apr 20 2009, 07:00:45 AM EDT ) Permalink

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Friday April 17, 2009

Cloud APIs: Call'em As You See (and Extend) Them Tim Bray and I sat down (albeit 2,600 miles apart) to talk about the Sun Cloud APIs in all of their RESTful grace. We got into why a Creative Commons license makes sense for an API, why the top-level API set is so small, how and why a cloud deployer might want to expand the APIs, and what lessons Tim learned from slogging through more developer documentation than is considered healthy, even by Canadian standards.

Hockey was not discussed.

Transcripts and pointer to the audio are on the Innovating@Sun blog or click to play away below:
( Apr 17 2009, 04:56:13 PM EDT ) Permalink

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Days One and Two: Headlines and Hockey
I had a great time meeting the sales team in Mexico City. We had close to 200 people at our town hall, and I was struck by the pre-meeting activity. Nearly everyone was congregated in the back of the room, talking to each other, rather than filling seats or checking email and messages. Despite traffic that added nearly an hour to some quasi-local travel, everyone was more interested in real-world social networking, the kind that requires coffee and breakfast sandwiches.

My peer Denis Heraud, Senior Vice President of Sun's Emerging Markets Region, made a fabulous point during the question and answer session: someone had asked about compensation for complex deals, and Denis pointed out that everybody - commissioned sales people and engineers, those on bonus plans, even engineers - derives the majority of their pay as salary. Salary is not deal specific. It's a function of teamwork and execution. As the company gets smaller, flatter and leaner, our ability to use teamwork -- internally and externally with our partner community -- is going to make our combined output greater than the sum of individual efforts.

I saw the seedlings of that kind of teamwork in the back of the room, persisting after the huevos ran out, and it came through in meetings with our systems engineers.

Logistics for the 2nd leg of this trip required that I leave Mexico City about half a day after arriving, although that was enough time for me to exhaust my (primarily food oriented) Spanish vocabulary. I believe I ordered fish tacos and hot peppers for lunch; sadly I can't phrase the gradations of caliente or picante that properly represent what my mouth felt like for the next half an hour.

Next stop: Johannesburg for a similar set of meetings. Long non-stop flights are an opportunity to completely disconnect from the non-stop stream of email, phone calls and sports score updates. It was nice to get a flurry of text messages with Devils score updates from their first-round NHL playoff game when I changed planes in Paris, but at 2:00 AM New Jersey time I had no chance to connect with my family or friends to celebrate their victory in a more personal way.

I wrote most of this from 39,000 feet, literally passing Kilamanjaro on the way, while also finishing the first book in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle and knocking off a backlog of ESPN Magazine issues whose predictions and commentary seem dated only a month after being printed. There's a stark contrast between the two that goes far beyond heft and format. Stephenson uses four centuries of historical context and deep creativity to create a tale that spans 900 pages (per book); with less than 10% of the page count and perhaps 5% of the content volume, one of my favorite sports publications had trouble holding my interest given that real-time updates (scores, standings, and public fan outcry) reduced its time value rapidly.

Sidebar and specific data point: ESPN, The Hockey News and the last issue of Beckett's Hockey Card Guide, all plane reading material, all mentioned the NJ Devils' Travis Zajac as a player to watch during the NHL playoffs. Interesting in that all three keyed on the same fact at roughly the same time; less interesting in that those of us who follow the team with a mascot that looks like the cross-breeding of Steven Van Zandt and Hellboy were aware of Zajac's prowess before "bailout" became a breakfast word.

What's the point? What's the aggregation and mash-up of the time value of data, journalism, interpretation and face to face meetings? Simple: In every employee meeting I've had in the past few weeks, from one-to-ones to one-to-Mexico City, people have asked about press headlines involving Sun. I don't have comments on the headlines, but I do find myself commenting on the press:

Copy & Paste isn't journalism. Look carefully at the "hundreds" of stories on any topic, and you'll find that most of them are syndicated stories from AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, or other news sources with varied headlines. A hundred local writers banging out headlines isn't news; it's redistribution. I don't have details but I'm betting that the number of hockey writers learning to spell "Zajac" started with either of the Devils' beat writers - Rich Chere or Tom Gulitti.

The internet isn't killing newspapers, newspapers are killing newspapers. The internet has dramatically changed the time value of news, especially for real-time data (financial, sports, weather). On the other hand, the internet doesn't create commentary, insight, and interpretation (flame wars in comment threads not included); that's why we have reports and news organizations. I still get ESPN Magazine and the Hockey News because I like their commentary and analysis; neither of them publish standings or statistics unless it's in support of a critical analysis. I subscribe to my weekly town newspaper; but I don't read the Newark Star Ledger or Bergen Record - I get better Devils coverage out of Devils blogs where physical constraints of column inches and financial burdens of ad support don't limit the content.

I'd prefer we write our own headlines. One of my favorite youth hockey coaches (known affectionately as a Real Screamer) used to tell his players never to read their own headlines. He wouldn't let me, as manager, keep statistics, he refused to see milestones such as qualifying for the state playoffs as meaningful because he believed that they caused players to look at the headline, and not the whole story that needed to be developed. Focus, teamwork and execution write the headlines.

Without putting on the rusty propeller hat, I can clearly recall the trade press writing about Apple in 1995. If you believed those headlines, put your iPods and iPhones down. Apple figured out what it was (consumer products company), how to get there (leadership and cost), and did so. The spectacular output of my trip through multiple hemispheres is seeing first-hand how Sun has the people, product and energy to write its own headlines. ( Apr 17 2009, 06:05:41 AM EDT ) Permalink

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(Customer) Service Oriented Architecture: Air France Fail Day two of my emerging markets trip had me leaving Mexico City, changing planes in Paris, and continuing on to Johannesburg, South Africa. The departure side of the trip was a pleasure, including an extra spicy fish taco lunch and a smooth exit/entrance/rescan going through the gauntlet at Charles De Gaul airport. Despite the fact that airport security confiscated a bottle of whiskey I was toting for a friend in SA (they claimed it had to be bagged, even though it was sealed, in the original gift box and I had the duty-free receipt, someone in Paris is enjoying a bit of Jacques du Tennessee), it was almost too easy.

When I went to board the plane, though, Air France didn't find my ticket. This should have sent off loud klaxons for me, and should have initiated something of a "tie off the loose ends" set of transactions -- if I wasn't auto-checked in, then my bag was likely not going anywhere either. The gate agent re-assigned me into a seat, but the transaction died on the network vine. Somewhere around the equator, a flight attendant handed me a message saying I should contact baggage service in Johannesburg. Good news: they found my bag. Bad news: it was enjoying a vacation in France without me. As soon as AF realized that my ticket wasn't checked in, a series of transactions to find my bag, route it to the plane, and verify if it could be loaded within the departure window should have commenced without any whining or outside influence. Wasn't this the whole point of SOA?

While some analysts proclaim the death of SOA, the idea isn't bad, as long as the focus is on delivering some sort of result. What Air France needs is a mix of real-time request routing, SOA, and a focus on customer service.

Thirteen hours after landing, and 2 hours after my bag supposedly was supposed to arrive behind me, I still haven't heard from Air France. No idea where my bag is, or if or when I'll see it. They're doing their best to ensure I don't fly with them again, as it appears my luggage experience is far from unique.

If SOA is dead and social networking is alive, here's an idea: What if Air France's customer service people follow negative threads on Twitter or blogs? The "service" that matters here is customer service, whether automated or not, and human intervention in human problems frequently goes further than automated admissions of cluelessness.

Personally, I think it's the evil karma of wearing a suit that has come back to re-route the suits themselves away from me, but I don't have the tweets to prove it. ( Apr 17 2009, 05:43:03 AM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

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Tuesday April 14, 2009

Day Zero: Emerging Markets and Bath Tubs I'm about to leave for a 4-city trip to our emerging markets region, visiting Mexico City (April 15), Johannesburg (April 17), Bangalore (April 21) and Mumbai (April 23). I'm hugely looking forward to talking to employees, customers, partners, and the media along the way. I'm going to remain Jersey-connected, at least virtually, as the NJ Devils start the NHL playoffs on Wednesday, and I'm also scheduled to keynote the virtual Cloud Clamp 09 on April 23rd.

Time zones can work to your advantage: my April 23 keynote is at 10:00 AM Eastern but 7:30 PM Mumbai local time, so I'll be webcasting from my hotel room. Most of the Devils games are at either midnight or 5:30 AM in local time. Caffeine and bandwidth will bend space-time, or at least it may seem that way. I've made a mental note not to add my own Sterling tones when Matt Loughlin announces a Devils goal. However, the increasingly superstitious part of me knows that the Devils won the Stanley Cup in 2000 purely because I rebroadcast the exploits of Patrik Elias and Sergei Brylin using the reverberation of my Boston hotel bath tub for dramatic effect.

Speaking of bath tubs (and here you thought it was a non-sequitur)...

My Cloud Slam talk will tie together levels of abstraction and Bath Tub Curves with an emphasis on how they shape the reliability mechanisms used for cloud computing. Seriously. ( Apr 14 2009, 11:27:01 AM EDT ) Permalink

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Thursday March 12, 2009

ACM Queue Blog Aggregation ACM Queue gets it -- they went from a primarily print edition to online, and now that they're online they're looking for ways to drive readership and interest. One of the (many) reasons I like print media is that you get an edited, assembled product that tells a story to some extent. You'll find content you want (which is why you purchased, subscribed, or liberated the dead trees from the next cubicle over), some content you don't want, but most important, some content that you didn't know you wanted but is informative, challenging or otherwise useful. This is the downside, for example, to googling the answer to an HTML/CSS question: you learn the syntax needed but nothing of the design, best practices or larger questions you could have been asking, many of which would have been prompted if you bought the magazine or book and took it to your nearest favorite reading spot. If you want to expand your readership, you have to expand the potential content that attracts those readers to your online property.

Editors at Queue are now aggregating author blogs, with a lineup on the Queue landing page and a full aggregation page one level down. And, shameless plug, they've added my blog with Sun peers Tim Bray and Bryan Cantrill and some marquee names like Cory Doctorow, Werner Vogels and Bruce Schneier. They're taking a risk as they have no editorial control over what I say in this white space, but if it helps their readers explore further than a search result, it's a win for both of us. ( Mar 12 2009, 04:19:38 PM EDT ) Permalink

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