The Conspecific Hybrid Cloud

When you’re looking to add new tank mates to an existing aquarium ecosystem, one of the concerns you must have is whether a particular breed of fish is amenable to conspecific cohabitants. Many species are not, which means if you put them together in a confined space, they’re going to fight. Viciously. To the death. Responsible aquarists try to avoid such situations, so careful attention to the conspecificity of animals is a must.

Now, while in many respects the data center ecosystem correlates well to an aquarium ecosystem, in this case it does not. It’s what you usually get, today, but its not actually the best model. That’s because what you want in the data center ecosystem – particularly when it extends to include public cloud computing resources – is conspecificity in infrastructure.

This desire and practice is being seen both in enterprise data center decision making as well as in startups suddenly dealing with massive growth and increasingly encountering performance bottlenecks over which IT has no control to resolve.

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Performance in the Cloud: Business Jitter is Bad

One of the benefits of web applications is that they are generally transported via TCP, which is a connection-oriented protocol designed to assure delivery. TCP has a variety of native mechanisms through which delivery issues can be addressed – from window sizes to selective acks to idle time specification to ramp up parameters. All these technical knobs and buttons serve as a way for operators and administrators to tweak the protocol, often at run time, to ensure the exchange of requests and responses upon which web applications rely. This is unlike UDP, which is more of a “fire and forget” protocol in which the server doesn’t really care if you receive the data or not.

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Virtualization and Cloud Computing is Changing the Network to East-West Routing

It’s called “east-west” networking, which when compared to its predecessor, “north-south” networking, evinces images of maelstroms and hurricane winds and tsunamis for some reason. It could be the subtle correlation between the transformative shift this change in networking patterns has on the data center with that of El Niño’s transformative power upon the weather patterns across the globe.

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The Real News is Not that Facebook Serves Up 1 Trillion Pages a Month…

It’s how much load that really generates and how it scales to meet the challenge.

There’s some amount of debate whether Facebook really crossed over the one trillion page view per month threshold. While one report says it did, another respected firm says it did not; that its monthly page views are a mere 467 billion per month.

In the big scheme of things, the discrepancy is somewhat irrelevant, as neither show the true load on Facebook’s infrastructure – which is far more impressive a set of numbers than its externally measured “page view” metric.

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The Cloud and The Consumer: The Impact on Bandwidth and Broadband

As providers continue to push the notion of storing all things digital “in the cloud”, network providers must consider the impact on them – and the satisfaction of their customer base with performance over their network services.

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Web 2.0 Killed the Middleware Star

It started out innocently enough with a simple question, “What exactly *is* the model for PaaS services scalability? If based on HTTP/REST API integration, fairly easy. If native middleware… input?” You’ll forgive the odd phrasing – Twitter’s limitations sometimes make conversations of this nature … interesting.

Dispelling the New SSL Myth

Warning, this post is a bit vendor FUDy, but SSL is an important topic and it does bring up some issues worth arguing about. Hacker News has a good discussion of the article. Adam Langley started it all with his article Overclocking SSL and has made a rebuttal to the F5 article in Still not computationally expensive. 

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