CloudExpo Slides

Here are the slides that I presented together with Jakub on the CloudExpo Europe.

Cloud Transparency

Radovan wrote a comment on Werner's article about cloud transparency. I agree that operators need monitoring and developers want to optimize their apps. However I don't understand how these needs relate to (location) transparency. I think that this is rather about functionality (e.g. OOTB performance and right management tools) that the cloud offers.

I see a little schizophrenia in the AWS messaging. "We (AWS) want developers to play with all nuts and bolts, optimize, monitor, and trace at the network packet level. And when the code jumps into our queuing, simple db, payment or whatever other high-level service then forget all transparency, close your eyes and cross your fingers." :-)

I think that different developers have different needs in terms of the right transparency level. IMO AWS is heavily used by web developers. I believe that particularly web developers will lean towards higher transparency, packaged high-level services and easy deployment.

Radovan, what do you think about the Google AppEngine?

Just-in-Time vs. Just-in-Case BI Costs

Do you know how much power your BI really needs? More precisely, how much power it needs today at 9 AM, next weekend, and at the last day of the quarter or year? Have you bought the ultra-super-duper machine that handles even the highest usage spikes with ease? Or have you decided to sacrifice performance during these peak hours? Do you wait or waste?

Gooddata approach to this dilemma can be described with two keywords: Stateless & Virtualized.

The Stateless is about our architecture. Our product relies on six generic stateless services. The stateless is important for scalability. We can dynamically add any of the six generic service instances as we need to increase throughput of our BI platform.

Virtualized is how these services are deployed. Virtualization allows us to flexibly add hardware nodes to our computing cloud. We have images of different virtual nodes on hand. We can create a new node and dynamically add it to our computing cloud. The beauty is that this all can happen in just few minutes. And the decommissioning of such node is even faster.

We (and you, as our customer) pay for CPU ticks and storage, so the Stateless & Virtual gives you unmatched cost efficiency. Gooddata offers you access to unlimited computing resources. You can get as much of CPU, storage and network bandwidth as you need. And you pay only for what you are really consuming.

Pay for your BI project on Just-in-Time not on Just-in-Case basis.