Enjoyment: Structure News: Jay Parikh, Google’s cloud, Docker’s rise

Friday, 31 July 2015

Structure News: Jay Parikh, Google’s cloud, Docker’s rise

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Welcome to the first edition of the Structure newsletter

July 31, 2015 / by Tom Krazit

Greetings from Structure! In this weekly newsletter you'll find regular updates on industry news, upcoming events, and interesting people. This week, we'll talk about Google's cloud business, why security is still such a concern for those contemplating the cloud, and the messy practice of standards setting in tech.

STRUCTURE NEWS

FIVE HOT TOPICS YOU'LL HEAR ABOUT AT STRUCTURE 2015

As we gear up for Structure 2015, here's a preview of some of the topics we knew we had to cover. We want to pick up right where we left off last year and give you the updates you need on both the present and the future of cloud computing.

WELCOME BACK! JAY PARIKH OF FACEBOOK

Jay Parikh will be back at Structure, and I'm looking forward to hearing an update on Facebook's homegrown networking infrastructure as well as what's coming up on the engineering roadmap with the huge increase in spending on research and development since we last talked.

INDUSTRY NEWS

TOUGH CLIMB FOR GOOGLE'S CLOUD REVENUE

The Information (subscription required) published a very interesting story this week on Google's cloud business, which according to its sources is projected to do $400 million in revenue this year. That's strong growth, but AWS is growing faster, which makes the challenges faced by Structure 2015 speaker Urs Hölzle of Google even harder.

TRACKING DOWN THE VILLAINS: OUTLIER DETECTION AT NETFLIX

Just because you're in the cloud doesn't mean you can forget about server performance. Learn how Netflix, a huge AWS customer, tracks down and deals with balky servers.

ADOPT AND PERISH: THE CIO's CLOUD DILEMMA

Former Gigaom Research analyst David Linthicum (who will be moderating a session at Structure 2015) weighs in on a tricky problem for the modern CIO: You probably have to embrace some kind of cloud services that will slowly but surely make your job irrelevant.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SCALING LINKEDIN

LinkedIn has grown from 2,700 users in its first week (which is kind of amazing for week one, actually) to over 350 million users. Josh Clemn of LinkedIn reviews how the company scaled its infrastructure to handle that growth.

EXECUTIVE ORDER: CREATING A NATIONAL STRATEGIC COMPUTING INITIATIVE

Who said nobody's ordering servers anymore? President Obama ordered a supercomputer this week. The National Strategic Computing Initiative will be "accelerating delivery of a capable exascale computing system that integrates hardware and software capability to deliver approximately 100 times the performance of current 10 petaflop systems across a range of applications representing government needs."

WHY DOCKER IS NOT YET SUCCEEDING WIDELY IN PRODUCTION

Docker is certainly hot right now, but what will it need to go really big? Simon Hørup Eskildsen of Shopify is an enthusiastic Docker user, but in this essay he lays out a few roadblocks in front of widespread adoption of the container ecosystem and Docker.

STRUCTURING SUCCESSFUL ENGINEERING TEAMS AT LINKEDIN AND ADMOB

Until Vinod Khosla and the cloud providers automate all of IT, you're still going to need people, and organizing and managing those people the right way remains as crucial as ever. Kevin Scott of LinkedIn talks about how he's done that over his career.

SECURITY STILL A TOP CONCERN FOR CLOUD BUYERS

As they say, you're not paranoid if they are really out to get you. After yet another year of huge data breaches, security remains a sticking point for gunshy cloud shoppers, and a Harvard Business Review study goes into detail about their worries.

BIG PICTURE

Technology standards are a good thing: too many non-compatible options hurt consumers and enterprises that wind up betting on the wrong vendor and find themselves stuck with bloated and temperamental services. But when everyone wants their technology to be The Standard, it can get a little messy.

Former Structure host Barb Darrow explored that tension last week over at Fortune with Jonathan Vanian in a story that's partly some insider baseball on how group press releases get written, but it is also emblematic of how big the stakes are for the container ecosystem over the next few years. As everyone jockeys to do The Right Thing by their customers by pledging their support for industry standards, larger companies can see an opportunity to make sure they control the development of the standard to their liking.

History is littered with standards battles that have not gone very well, in both hardware and software. Hopefully the Docker-led Open Container Initiative (which includes Google) can live alongside Google's Cloud Native Computing Foundation (which includes Docker) but there will have to be a lot of diplomatic communication between the two companies and their fellow members of these organizations to avoid conflict down the road.

It would be shame if these projects fail, as container standards are in everyone's best interest. But there's a lot of economic opportunity in controlling either container technology or container-management technology, and if you thought vendor lock-in was a problem a decade ago, failure to come up with standards could make a CIO wistful for the good old ERP days.