I'll be at Cloud Camp here in Stockholm on November 23. Some familiar faces will be there, beyond yours truly then. I will discuss and present some real-live Database Cloud experiences, but as this is an unconference, don't expect slides, rather I will talk from my heart and give you some annoying and upsetting views on how things really are. Really!

I hope to see you there, pop by and say hello!
/Karlsson

Review of Thursday’s Cloud Events in Boston

Everyone is well aware by now of the EC2 outage that Amazon had back in April and it would have surprised no one if that high profile had put a damper on cloud adoption. But judging what we heard yesterday at Boston’s two cloud events (MassTLC’s Cloud Computing Summit and Vilna’s Moving Your Data to the Cloud Panel), cloud solutions can work just fine. For example, there was the customer story told by Douglas Kim, Managing Director, Global Head, PaaS & Cloud Computing at PegaSystems. Pegasystems is a Boston tech company that started offering …

Review of the O’Reilly Strata Making Data Work Conference

(reprinted from my guest blog for the Cloud Council of 7)

Monica Rogati of LinkedIn told a story of the early days at the firm, when the reporting system consisted of a single server under someone’s desk. One day, someone needed an Ethernet cable and unplugged the machine from the data outlet in the wall. LinkedIn’s data reporting, its life blood, instantly came to a screeching halt.

The Push to the …

More and more public cloud companies are moving to managed cloud services to improve their value-add (price premium) and the stickiness of their solution. However, the shift to a database as a service (DaaS) severely reduces the DBAs visibility into the business, thus limiting the ability to hand tune the database to the requirements of the application and the database. The solution is a cloud database that eliminates the hand-tuning of the database, thereby enabling the DBA to be equally effective even with limited visibility into the business and application needs. It is these unique needs, particularly for SQL databases, that is fueling the NewSQL movement.
DBAs traditionally have insight into the company, enabling them to hand tune the database in a collaborative basis with the development team, such as:
1. Performance Trade-offs/Tuning: The database is partitioned and tuned to address business requirements, maximizing performance of …

As public clouds are commoditized, the public cloud vendors are increasingly moving to higher margin and stickier managed services. In the early days of the public cloud, renting compute and storage was unique, exciting, sticky and profitable. It has quickly become a commodity. In order to provide differentiation, maintain margins and create barriers to customer exit, against increasing competition, the cloud is moving toward a collection of managed services.
Public clouds are growing beyond simple compute instances to platform as a service (PaaS). PaaS is then comprised of various modules, including database as a service (DaaS). In the early days you rented a number of compute instances, loaded your database software and you were the DBA managing all aspects of that database. Increasingly, public clouds are moving toward a DaaS model, where the cloud customer writes to a simple database API and the cloud provider is the DBA. …

It’s a busy summer at Pythian, with our continuing wave of speaking sessions at upcoming community and regional industry events.

Coming to a city near you, watch for Pythian presenting hot Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server database topics:

IN CANADA:

Oracle Technology Days – Montreal
August 9, 2011 – 8:30am – 1pm, Hilton Montreal Bonaventure

• 11:00 am – Join Marc Fielding for Mixed Workload Management for Oracle Exadata
• More Pythian Oracle Exadata resources
• View the Evite
• Register/Inscrire

Oracle Technology Days – Toronto
August 25, …

About Jelastic:

Jelastic is the next generation of Java Platforms as a Service.

Unlike previous cloud platforms, Jelastic:

• Can run any Java application and so does not require developers to change their code or get locked-into the platform,
• Can scale any application up and down by automatically adding or removing memory and CPU units depending on the application load,
• Takes all configuration and management worries away: developers simply specify the application stack and database options they need and Jelastic creates, configures, and maintains the environment for them
• Supports a wide range of application server stacks including Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, and GlassFish
• Out of the box, allows users to get a preconfigured instance of MariaDB up and running and available to the application.

A beta version …

Google and Microsoft trade patent claims. Actuate announces Q2 results. And more.

# Google accused Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies of organising a hostile patent campaign against Android. That prompted Microsoft executives to claim that Microsoft invited Google to be involved in the CPTN purchase of Novell’s patents. However, Google explained that joining CPTN might have decreased its ability to defend itself against potential patent claims.

# Actuate announced its Q2 …

The primary reasons people are moving to the public cloud are: (1) replace capital expenses with operating expenses (pay as you go); (2) use shared resources for processes like back-up, maintenance, networking (shared expenses); (3) use shared infrastructure that enables you to pay only for those resources you actually use, instead of consuming your maximum load resources at all times (pay-per-use). The first thing you’ll notice is that all 3 cloud benefits have their basis in finances or the cloud business model.
We will focus in on #3 above: Pay-Per-Use. The old school model was to build your compute infrastructure for the maximum load today, plus growth over the life-cycle of the equipment, plus some buffer so the systems don’t get overloaded from spikes in usage. The net result is that your average usage might run 10% of the potential for the infrastructure you mortgaged your home to buy. In other words, you were paying 10X more than …

When I spoke at Percona Live (video here) on running an E-commerce database in Amazon EC2, I briefly talked about using RAID 10 for additional performance and fault tolerance when using EBS volumes. At first, this seems counter intuitive. Amazon has a robust infrastructure, EBS volumes run on RAIDed hardware, and are mirrored in multiple availability zones. So, why bother? Today, I was reminded of just how important it is. Please note that all my performance statistics are based on direct experience running a MySQL database on a m2.4xlarge instance and not on some random bonnie or orion benchmark. I have those graphs floating around on my hard drive in glorious 3D and, while interesting, they do not necessarily reflect real-life performance.

Why? …