“Oh My God We’re All Gonna Die” – HostingCon 2010

A couple weeks back, I mentioned that I would be speaking at the HostingCon 2010 conference in Austin, TX. I also mentioned that I would post the presentation here for all to see after the conference and I want to make good on my word. The presentation is posted below (after the jump).

The title of my presentation is “Oh My God We’re All Gonna Die”. While the title is intentionally provocative, the message is, I think, pretty optimistic. Our industry is changing rapidly, while we’ll be forced to innovate and compete on a whole new scale, it will mean a leaner operation for businesses and better and more affordable services for end users.

Since there is no video of the presentation (sorry about that), I’ll try and sum it up as best as I can here.

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VPS: 6 years On All 6 Cylinders

In all the hullabaloo of HostingCon events this week, I nearly forgot that yesterday was the 6-year anniversary of ServInt’s VPS offerings. Passing that landmark day there was fitting. A lot of the folks we partnered with to create our VPS products were there, particularly Parallels, and it’s an excellent reminder of just how far we’ve come as a provider as well as a company.

ServInt has always considered itself a managed hosting provider first, with the vehicles we actually use to deliver those services an important concern, but ultimately just a technological envelope. We learned very early on that the most important part of a company is its people and we’ve been really, really lucky since then with our efforts to attract great people. VPS technology, and more specifically Virtuozzo, has been very good to us and we’ve been able to create powerful, unique products that have evolved immensely over the years.

There are a lot of really great things happening in hosting right now. We now have viable, virtualized alternatives to dedicated servers such as our own SuperVPS line, pairing the speed and control expected from a dedicated box with the reliability and scalability of a VPS. Cloud is on the horizon in some form or another, promising new ways to deliver content and store data and with it will come a new wave of entrepreneurship and a pay-as-you-go business model that is fueling a new generation of startups and industry leaders. A lot of this hasn’t come to fruition but it will be great to be a part of this industry as we all figure it out.

6 years ago, we had no idea what the industry would hold for us. Who would have thought that an online bookstore would become one of the most progressive cloud storage companies in the world, or that a small Russian software development firm would build the technological backbone of our most popular product?

So in 2015, when we’re driving our flying cars to work and scarfing down Jetsons-style breakfast tablets, who knows what will be fueling the internet?

I for one, can’t wait to find out!

Clouds and Wax Wings

Lifehacker, one of my favorite blogs of all time, had a great article earlier this week on the “hidden” dangers of cloud computing.  I’ve been digesting it for a few days and thought I’d add perspective from a web host.

To me, the current frenzy over cloud computing reminds me a bit of the story of Icarus, whose haste in gaining flight pushed him to create wings of wax only to die after they melted mid flight.

Gina Trapani, a fantastic writer, was primarily talking about Cloud services as opposed to Cloud hosting, however there are parallels between the two concepts.

Gina’s article mentions privacy as a primary concern for cloud users. She quotes an Op-Ed by Jonathan Zittrain in the New York Times:

Thanks in part to the Patriot Act, the federal government has been able to demand some details of your online activities from service providers – and not to tell you about it. There have been thousands of such requests lodged since the law was passed, and the F.B.I.’s own audits have shown that there can be plenty of overreach – perhaps wholly inadvertent – in requests like these.

On the cloud service she’s right, however on the hosting side, things are a bit more complicated.  Title II of the DMCA gives Online Service Providers (Including ISP’s and Web Hosts) a ‘safe harbor’ clause essentially protecting the host from having to monitor everything that is on a particular server.

Basically, a VPS server is treated like an apartment building.  If the police are investigating a murder, the superintendent will neither give them the entire building to search, nor will he search for the murder weapon himself.  With a warrant, the superintendent can allow the police to search a particular apartment, but he himself is not held liable for the murder that occurred on his property nor is he responsible for finding any relevant evidence.

The same idea applies to a hosting company and, say, a VPS. If the police have the proper court documents, we can give them ALL the information on a particular VPS, but we cannot and will not look inside the VPS and hunt a file for them, and we also cannot and will not give them every VPS on a server.

This is, of course, an enormous distinction to make, Gena writes:

To search your house or office (including documents stored on your computer’s hard drive), cops need to obtain a search warrant. To get to the information you’ve stored on a third-party’s web servers, they only need a subpoena, which is easier to obtain. This kind of search can also happen without your knowledge.

It is true that with an appropriate court order, authorities can gain access to a server without the user’s knownledge, they cannot however gain access without OUR knowledge.  ServInt’s policy has always been that we will tell a customer everything that we can under the law.

On the cloud, there are still some serious concerns about the viability of the platform, in fact they are the same reasons why ServInt hasn’t yet implemented its own cloud solution.

Latency is still a huge problem, lack of command-line access continues to be an issue, and good luck to those who need to make changes to Apache…it might be easier to disarm an atomic bomb.  All of these are compounded by the very real security and privacy concerns in current cloud implementations, especially cloud services.  That doesn’t discount the technology, nor does it imply that cloud services are bad per se, they are just fledgling.

The goal of a technology company should be to create a product that provides a solution so great, that what it lacks seems wholly irrelevant. As cloud solutions continue to represent the future of the industry, providers and customers alike must heed Icarus and be careful not to fly too close to the sun.

Photo used and altered under Creative Commons License, courtesy of flickr user pensiero.

Google Chrome OS: Stating the Obvious

When Google announced Chrome OS, the tech world exploded.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch promptly thanked himself for his own genius, Open Source Advocates and bloggers everywhere looked at Microsoft and Apple and predicted the death of desktop computing as we know it, and hosts and software companies everywhere rushed to release their own Cloud/OS/Storage Solutions in an effort to ride the free software wave. Even Walt Mosspuppet chimed in (probably, no, definitely NSFW).

What a lot of people lost in the hype was what Google OS actually was — Linux with a browser on top of it. As cool as it will undoubtedly be, we already have something very similar in an arguably more useful capacity. Namely, the VPS control panel, ala CPanel or Plesk.

When you sign up for a ServInt VPS, you’re getting a powerful Linux box with stable and tangible resources. It’s a very fast virtual machine — much quicker than most non-virtual machines — and it’s managed largely by a very intricate control panel, the two most popular options of which are Plesk and CPanel. Instead of using a browser to mess with the computer that is sitting in your lap, you’re using a browser to manage a computer potentially far more powerful than the one in your lap that could be thousands of miles away.  Plus, it’s going to get upgraded overtime, it will only get faster with technology, and it’s being managed by some of the most brilliant geeks in the world at ServInt.

Google Chrome OS was supposedly designed for use with netbooks, which aren’t particularly beefy machines, while control panels were designed for use with much more powerful virtual machines. If you need to encode video, you have to install an encoder in Chrome OS and presumably encode the video right there on the unit. With a control panel, you could install FFMpeg on a VPS, upload your video, and have the far superior resources of your VPS encode your video for you in a fraction of the time an Atom-powered netbook could all while you were doing other things (like watching other Walt Mosspuppet videos). Your only bottleneck is your internet connection.

This isn’t meant as a criticism of Google or those that are excited by the company’s entry into the world of OSes, it’s merely an invitation out of Google’s reality distortion field and into a larger conversation about the future of computing.

Chrome OS is no doubt going to push the idea of thin client/cloud computing even further. It’s particular flavor of Linux will be fast and sleek and I think that’s fantastic. But, its fundamental argument is that computing can be a remote endeavor, that the web is the real way to get work done and that it’s ok to outsource your CPU.

My point is that no one was really arguing against that. In fact, companies from ServInt to Microsoft and from Oracle to Canonical are all moving towards the complete outsourcing of the CPU. This is not the future, this is the status quo and if tech companies of all shapes and sizes ignore that they will simply cease to exist.

Kudos to Google for helping nudge computing towards where it needs to go, but this technology is already here.

You just have to realize you need it.

Photo used and altered under Creative Commons License, courtesy of flickr user damien78.

Cow Tipping and the Cloud

Growing up in the Washington DC Metro Area has some unique advantages.

DC is built on a swamp, and thus has four very distinct seasons…the two most brutal being our unforgivably humid Summers and our frigid winters for which Washingtonians are almost always completely unprepared.  DC is also home to the seat of international political power, a thriving tech community located primarily in Northern VA (Hi Mom!), and some of the most ruthless traffic congestion on the East Coast.

The District is within driving distance of staggeringly rural areas…areas that I would frequent regularly as an irresponsible kid.  These areas had cows…

…I think you know where I’m going with this.

It is not impossible to tip a cow, but it is far more likely that the cow will tip the person.

Contrary to popular belief, cows do not sleep standing up, their legs do not passively lock, and their sense of smell and hearing is far superior to yours. They can reorient themselves if someone were to shove them, and if they fell and were not hurt in the process…they could get right back up and potentially hurt the attempted tipper.

Cow tipping is a myth, a myth that everyone who ever lived near a farm loves to say they took part in. It is a socially accepted falsehood because we find it funny and exciting, perhaps because we want to do it ourselves. The legendary act of cow tipping sounds eerily similar to the current implementation of cloud services. It is a socially accepted platform because we find it cool and sexy and because we want to do it ourselves.

While I, and ServInt as a whole, don’t discount the cloud, the fact of the matter is that there is no consensus over what cloud hosting, cloud computing, or even what the overarching concept of the cloud actually is. It’s a platform that hasn’t ripened but that is being pushed…hard…by many of ServInt’s competitors and the tech world as a whole.

So far, cloud services have largely been either cloud application hosting or cloud storage.

Some of the more popular cloud applications have come from Apple with its MobileMe service, Google and Google Apps, and Microsoft’s recently announced Office Web (I assume that’s a working title) just to name a few of the largest. On the storage front, you have Amazon S3 and SC2, Rackspace Cloud (formerly Mosso), and Windows Azure.

All of these services are cool, but they’re a prime example of what is wrong with this corner of the web right now…there is no focus. Both Amazon and Rackspace have released API’s that would allow developers to better tap into their services…however this strikes me as less of a benefit and more of a symptom. Building a platform is great, but there needs to be something built on that platform, otherwise it’s just there.

Despite the attractiveness of cloud services and the genuine potential the platform carries with it, current services have shown to be spotty and unreliable. This says that the cloud should play more of an auxiliary role in a server environment instead of taking over as the environment entirely.

In all fairness, that is something that both Microsoft and Rackspace have both publicly aspired to, namely the cloud as a support role in a traditional server set up, but I would argue that’s proof that now is the time to wait on moving everything to the cloud.

At the end of the day an enterprise server — whether it’s VPS or dedicated — will still remain the most important aspect of hosting. The future of this industry lies in supplementing that vision in order to evolve with a new solution entirely…not simply creating a weak platform and expecting it to perform the same way a rack would.

The enterprise server will evolve into the enterprise cloud server. It will grow and its voice will crack, but it will not go away.

It will also NOT be tipping any cows.

Photo used and altered under Creative Commons License, courtesy of flickr user akakumo.