Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

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.

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.

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.