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If you pick up an IT industry magazine these days, I am sure that you will see some reference to cloud computing.  I’m sure it appeared somewhere in Sky Mall magazine and someone in the C-suite has read it because the company has been doing some exploration of this new industry buzzword along with the technology surrounding it.  As a result, I have spent some time in last few weeks exploring the clouds.  Let me tell you what I have found.

 

According to Wikipedia, cloud computing is defined as an Internet based development and use of computer technology. It is a style of computing in which typically real-time scalable resources are provided “as a service” over the Internet to users who need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure (”in the cloud”) that supports them. I have spent most of my time looking and utilizing the Amazon Web Services. (http://aws.amazon.com) Amazon has many services but I have been concentrating on the EC2 and S3 products.  The Elastic Compute Cloud is Amazon’s product that provides commodity compute resources.  Amazon offers many different Operating Systems and software to choose from.  Additionally, you can make your own OS images, known as Amazon Machine Images (AMI), and use them in the cloud as well.  AMIs can be modified from the template but in order to have those changes saved they must be stored as a new template in the S3 area.  S3 is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service where you pay by the Gigabyte for storage space as well as data transfers to and from the S3.  

 

I found both service fairly easy to understand and deploy.  Within about two days of reading different documents and spending part of each day trying this and that I had access setup to the several AMIs. Also, I had already begun to start saving off custom changes to the AMIs in a template format so things like userids I created in the system were persistent.  I look forward to trying other cloud computing environments.   If anyone has had good experience with one please let me know.

 

There are still some outstanding questions for our business.  Amazon mentioned customers that have to be HIPPA compliance using the Amazon Cloud.  I saw no mention of PCI DSS, so I wonder if Amazon’s environment would be compliant. As with our company, and I’m sure this is a question for many others too, is how do we securely connect applications and/or services inside the company with resources residing in the cloud.  Also, monitoring the health of resources in the cloud is something that needs to be addressed. Eric Brown who writes the Technology, Strategy, People and Projects blog wrote about cloud computing and issues around it.  He brought up some good points and provided some links to additional reading.  So check out his article.

 As a side note, there are few interesting pieces of third party and open source software (not provided by Amazon) that can use Amazon’s S3 as a storage device for backups or global access to files.  I quickly tested out this one that is a Firefox add on that looked simple enough.  Here is a link to the Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer (S3Fox).  I did not try any of these S3 backup tools listed on this website but did run across them in my reading.   If anyone has used them with success, let me know.

 

 

It’s that time of year — the time for the office Christmas party.  There is an aspect to the company “Holiday” party that really gets me worked up.  However, given the current economic climate, I guess I should be glad to have a job and a company that can afford any kind of celebration at all.  Yet, this blog is an outlet for me and I desire to use this post to highlight my issue.  I’m not the first to feel this way, but maybe if the person he has influence on these matters, happens to read it, then it might bring to light this issue and help make this situation better wherever it occurs.  To get to the issue, my problem is “employee only” invites to the Christmas party.

One of the best Christmas parties I went to involved having a “casino” night and one that was held in a nice hotel where employees at their own expense could get a room for the night at a reduced rate.  I got to bring my wife and stay at a nice place too.  A couple could dance and drink while not having to worry about getting home.  Just get on the elevator and go to your room.  My anger around the “employee only” invite is that typically in an IT environment most people put in more than their 9-5 workdays in a year.  Therefore, an employee loses  “after hours”  precious time away from their spouses and family to handle company business in some fashion.  So, if there is any reasoning by the company that a Christmas party is a “employee benefit” then why “reward” employees by having another event (essentially stealing more time away from employees) that keeps the employees away from their significant others?

I don’t want companies to quit having Holiday parties.  Also, I’m sure a lot of planning goes into these events and I don’t want to belittle what I’m sure is done in the spirit of good intentions.  I have some suggestions. Hold the events during business hours or during lunch so the expectations around spouse attendance is removed.  Pass  all/part of the costs on to the employee or have some creative mechanism for contributions for the Christmas party (e.g. have employees pay $5 a day during some time period for the privilege of wearing dressed down clothes to work)

To be fair, I have heard some reasonable reasons and benefits for have the employee only attendance to the holiday party.  If a business is picking up the cost of the party, adding significant others can easily double the costs.  So I can see that from a cost containment perspective.  Also,  some employees may like it better without the spouses because they are now free to socialize with co-workers without the “burden” of having to keep the spouses entertained.  Most employee spouses don’t know most of other company employees.  I can see this perspective but I find meeting people and their significant others is often a great experience. This is not a personal compliant about my co-workers,  but  really who wants to spend 40+ hours with the same people and be expected to turn around and spend more time –personal time– with the same exact folks.

The group is currently looking to add a few more head count.  This need lead us to that arduous task of phone and in-person interviews. During these endeavors to evaluate potential professionals to procure I have found that the way a Technical Architect functions is often much nuanced.  Let us look at what a dictionary says an architect is:

 

ar·chi·tect      /??rk??t?kt/ [ahr-ki-tekt] Pronunciation

–noun 1. a person who engages in the profession of architecture. 

2. a person professionally engaged in the design of certain large constructions other than buildings and the like: landscape architect; naval architect. 

3. the deviser, maker, or creator of anything: the architects of the Constitution of the United States. 

–verb (used with object) 4. to plan, organize, or structure as an architect: The house is well architected. 

 

The dictionary is very broad in explanation but correct in the general sense.  We get many candidates from a very large telecommunications company that is a big employer in the area.  However, the reality of the life an architect there is much different than ours.  The telecommunications company seems to operate by having very specific silos of subject matter experts.  The role of their architect is to shop a high-level, standardized (dare I say almost cookie cutter) design between the various silos looking for consensus and commitment.  I see this position as one of almost a technology project manager, the real value lies in the SME teams.  It seems that the person in the architect role looses technical savvy over time to the point were even some basic technical concepts are lost.

 

 

The best description of what it is that a Technical architect, either strategic or tactical, is that they gather requirements from the business unit and provide both a high-level and a detailed-level solution design.  This solution design must be in-line with the business needs.  Essentially, an architect is a broker or translator of business requirements and technology.  An architect conveys technological issues in a manner that the business can understand. In the other direction, an architect will translate the business’s requirements and needs to the implementers and support staff of the underlying infrastructure.

 

 

Dictionary Reference:

 

architect. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved October 09, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/architect

 

I have been witnessing some interesting behaviors in the past few weeks and months.  These behaviors are being exhibited by both a certain subset of a department and an external service provider (ESP) the company has been doing business with.  I don’t think that any group of people as a singular mind so it may be a stretch from one perspective to lump all these people together.  Which is a valid point, but I will say that from an observers point of view from an overall perspective, they can appear to be ”one” mind.  Also, intent is impossible to know.  I’m sure, from a physiological perspective and a legal one, firmer views into intent are explored.  At least for the point of this entry, it is the perception of intent of the group as a whole which is to be evaluated.

The internal group of people are going to have less control, responsibilities, influence on parts of what they do now in the future.  Their first reaction to this, which I would consider normal and natural, is to be defensive, upset, and to try and undermine it.  However, it has migrated to a more passive, aggressive kind of undermining.  In person, they are all on board with whatever you discuss.  Once you have travelled back home and communicate with them by email and telephone, they no longer want to play along.  They horde information and don’t want to share it.  The group exhibits more pleasure in poking holes and gripping about something than getting on-board to try to help work through and resolve any real issues.  If I had to guess, there is some underlying fear of loosing a job for these people.  I have to say that it is a valid fear.

I will admit that being in that same situations I would probably act that way.  At some level, we all could be terminated on any given day.  I try never to focus on these self defeating thoughts.  One should only be focusing on providing great value to company.  In the end, that is the biggest factor in keeping employees around.  The sad and ironic thing is that, those fears of losing a job is driving the non “team player” attitudes which is ultimately driving the stakeholders in the decisions to believe they are a problem and not part of the solution.  To summarize, the thing that seems to scare them the most is driving them to behave in a way that is going to insure that fear becomes reality.

As for the external service provider, their irony is similar to our internal group.  This provider is working on one part of a multi-part delivery for us.  It is not time to consider whom is to do the other parts. The service provider’s behaviors demonstrate that they want more than just the one part.  Which is fine, except they seem more focused on getting the next part than providing a real service to the company on the part they are currently trying to fulfil.  So, in the same vein as our internal group , the provider’s lack of focus and value on the part they are already commited to doing is going to gaurentee that the they will not get any additional parts.

 

We use the IBM Blade Center H chassis in our Data Center along with blades from other vendors including Sun Micro.  I have told both our IBM rep and Sun Rep that our life would be so much easier if we could get a SPARC based processor in an IBM Blade. <insert visual of well dressed sales guy rolling in the floor laughing>  Now that wish is a reality.  However, it is made by a third party and I haven’t heard/asked yet as to what using this in a IBM supported Blade Center would do to the support contract.

The article where I got this information from can be found at the register.co.uk website.  A single T2 processor with up to 32GB of memory can be in configured in the blade.  To see more of the specs, check out this website for the vendor Themis Computer.  If anyone is out there deploys this blade or even tests it, let me know.  I would love to get one to put in our lab.

If this works out, we could get to the point of only using IBM Blade Center H chassis and not have to maintain and support both the IBM and SUN blade centers.  I so love consolidation and the end to server proliferation.