[Links of the day] 23/05/2016: computational law , EU data protection regulation & 2M packets/s on AWS

• CodeX : Stanford R&D lab of computational law — the branch of legal informatics concerned with the automation and mechanization of legal analysis. I really think that we are getting to the point where every single IP and Assets will be handled/ represented by an AI and where the actual ownership of assets will be dynamically changing at the speed of computation Accelerando style. [Youtube Videos]
• 2 Millions packets seconds on AWS : leveraging SRIOV tech on AWS to process packet at high speed.
• EU General Data Protection Regulation : a great document dissecting the upcoming European General Data protection Regulation directive. This directive cover a very wide range of legislation, from right to be forgotten, data protection to compliance.  

[Links of the day] 11/05/2016: teaching with wargaming , EU FRAND OSS threat, Teams Coordination tradeoff

• Teaching strategy with wargames : fantastic article on how the teaching philosophy behind wargaming in the US army (navy and marines) 
• FRAND : FRAND stand for Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory licensing terms. This is the standard proposed by EU to be used for the future single digitial market. This standard, if implemented, will become a massive roadblock for the use, creation and consumption of open source software because it will not allow royalty free license to be used. However, its not too late and EU citizen comment on the proposal here. 
• Coordination amongst teams trade-offs: Team coordination is like designing a distributed system , compromise have to be made.

[Links of the day] 29/02/2016: AWS latency, EU H2020 HPC projects, Python Edge Fund

• AWS latency : if you need to find the closest AWS region this tool is for you
• 21 EU h2020 HPC project : here are the 21 project for High performance computing funded by EU. While I have my reserve regarding the real benefit of these project it might be useful to keep an eye on some of them: montblanc, exaNode and nextgenIO 
• Quantopian : gaming based Interesting edge fund where people compete with their algorithm for a slice of the fund.

[Links of the day] 08/02/2016: EU cloud tender, Solo5 unikernel and microXchg 2016 microservice conf

• EU cloud tender : EU just awarded 34 Millions Euro for its private/public cloud based on openstack to BT. However there is still a tender for cloud brokerage in the pipeline allowing breakout to public cloud. AWS, Azure and consort might still be able to sneak in the backdoor. Notable fact, openstack API dominate the overall document specifications.
• solo5 : native native x86_64 kernel that, when linked against an application becomes a unikernel. Works with qemu-kvm and virtio driver.
• microXchg 2016 : all the video from the microservice conference. If you have to watch one I highly recommend this one by Adrian Cockcroft : Analyzing Response Time Distributions for Microservices. Note that you can find his slide deck here and the code that comes with it here & here 

Guesstimating Private Cloud TCO

I decided to try out the fantastic GessTimate. Guesstimate is a spreadsheet for things that aren't certain. I recently started to gather informations on private cloud TCO and I decided to see if i could quickly sketch out a probabilistic private cloud TCO model with it.

First, a little bit of literature review. On one side, we have the public cloud with an open pricing which make cost calculation and comparison straightforward. On the other we have the fog of war of the private cloud. There is very few non-behind paywall reports or information out there and here is the result of a (very) quick search for serious source about private cloud TCO data :

• Redhat Private Cloud TCO model which seems interesting but the lack of public methodology makes it difficult to assess. 
• EU report from e-InfraNet FP7 project : “Cloud Computing Economics: An evidence-based approach for Research Applications” . Their analysis show that private cloud operated by public agency operate at a fraction of the cost of AWS (25% of the cost in certain case) 
• Helix Nebula – The Science Cloud report : again in this case it show the the CERN openstack based cloud is a fraction of the cost of AWS (up to 25x). 
• The Magellan Report : DOE cloud were found to be 2–13x less expensive than typical commercial offerings. 

While all the numbers and comparison are highly interesting, I needed to find something usable for building a probabilistic TCO model. Finally, I found that many reports and online information referenced Amazon's James Hamilton analysis of the breakdown of cloud cost. His model boil down to the following :

• Servers: 57% 
• Networking equipment: 8% 
• Power distribution and cooling: 18% 
• Power: 13% 
• Other infrastructure: 4% 

For my own model I decided to use the following categories :

• Cost of money : The interest that could be earned if the amount invested it. Yep money is not free. 
• Software : Not everything is Open source, and even so you still need to deploy it. 
• Hardware : Server, SSD, HDD, etc… 
• Network :connectivity, switch, cable, router, etc... 
• People/Support : How much do you spend on maintaining your environment and deal with the customer need. 
• Aircon/power : Powering and cooling your cloud 
• Building Racking : Well it’s not like you are running everything in the cloud :) 

Now that we have a model, let's plug that into guesstimate. You can see in the picture below the result of the exercise. Note, DO NOT pay attention to the numbers, they are completely fantasist as I couldn’t get access to the latest IDC datacenter cost report.

Private Cloud TCO Guesstimate

What I ended up with is a really neat model where you can plug your own numbers and come up with a quick estimation of your private cloud TCO. It will take more work to generate a more accurate model but its good enough for basic estimation. In the mean time, you can find the source here. If you extend/change it, don’t forget to give me a shout. I am interested to see what other private cloud TCO model are out there.

Update 07/02/2016: +Carlo Daffara pointed me to his extremely detailed CAPEX / OPEX spreadsheet model. I'm going to see if I can translate it to guesstimate as a more advanced exercise.

Links of the day 16/12/2015 : curl | sh, Huawei NUWA and EU Mikelangelo project

• curl | sh : People telling people to execute arbitrary code over the network. What harm can it do ?
• Nuwa : Huawei micro-server with disaggregated architecture based on commercial chips, and the computing and storage nodes can be switched on demand.
• Mikelangelo : EU project with some interesting bit of technology and consortium Member : Huawei, Cloudius (for OSv). Note the vRDMA concept where they aim to use shared memory approach over RDMA to speed up communication across VM.