Giving back the XPS13
Over the last six months I’ve had the privilege of working off of a Dell XPS13. I signed up for the Sputnik program thinking there was no way I would get one and was accepted early on. We received a test unit at Adknowledge and things just seemed to fall into place. Over the past decade of carrying a machine home with me daily, this has by far been my favorite. Various beasts have passed through my hands, most of them Latitudes or varying sizes, a couple ThinkPads and a pairs of MacBook Pros. None of them I’ve enjoyed as much as this little number. I had for many years thought I needed a big monster of a laptop decked out with a huge screen and massive drives. Recently I’d come to the realization that I spend 90% of my day in console session or in a browser where apps have gotten so much better over the last couple years. I don’t need a 16GB of RAM and 1TB of disk, the times I need more horsepower I am looking at something much bigger and will probably need to be running the app in a cluster or off of a VM server. What I need day to day is something that’s light and portable that I can fire up quickly. Something with a big enough keyboard for my hands (I’m 6’2″) and I don’t feel like I’m missing screen real estate. A machine that is not akin to setting up a Dungeon Master screen in front of me when I take it to a meeting. It gets bonus points when it looks sexy enough for the C-level people in the office to request one too. The XPS13 has been all of that and more. From the get go running Ubuntu on it has been a dream, it’s going to be a sad day on Friday when I turn it back in.  The new job I’m taking with Pivotal has a standardized order of a MBP for everyone. I’ll be required to run VMs much more often, so I don’t think the little guy would hold up (though I’d love to give it a try) even were I able to hold onto it. Thus I’ll have to set what has been my favorite laptop aside and move on to something else. The poor thing did get pretty hot on a minecraft server with a lot of action going on, so maybe his next life will find him some lighter usage and he can make someone else just as happy.
Bisectional Bandwidth
Getting caught up on some of my RSS backlog and really love this section from a post:
What the heck is bisectional bandwidth? If you draw a line somewhere in a network bisectional bandwidth is the rate of communication at which servers on one side of the line can communicate with servers on the other side. With enough bisectional bandwidth any server can communicate with any other server at full network speeds.
Wait, don’t we have high bisectional bandwidth in datacenters now? Why no, no we don’t. We typically have had networks optimized for sending traffic North-South rather than East-West. North-South means your server is talking to a client somewhere out in the Internet. East-West means you are talking to another server within the datacenter. Pre cloud software architectures communicated mostly North-South, to clients located outside in the Internet. Post cloud most software functionality is implemented by large clusters that talk mostly to each other, that is East-West, with only a few tendrils of communication shooting North-South. Recall how Google has pioneered large fanout architectures where creating a single web page can take a 1000 requests. Large fanout architectures are the new normal.
Datacenter networks have not kept up with the change in software architectures. But it’s even worse than that. To support mostly North-South traffic with a little East-West traffic, datacenters used a tree topology with core, aggregation, and access layers. The idea being that the top routing part of the network has enough bandwidth to handle all the traffic from all the machines lower down in the tree. Economics made it highly attractive to highly oversubscribe, like 240-1, the top layer of the network. So if you want to talk to a machine in some other part of the datacenter you are in for a bad experience. Traffic has to traverse highly oversubscribed links. Packets go drop drop fizz fizz.
Platforms
It’s been a few weeks now since I made it out to EMC World and attended the 2012 Data Scientist Summit. My purpose at EMC World was to get myself schooled on a couple of key technologies that we use, Hadoop and Greenplum. I build out and work to optimize the clusters that we run. Unfortunately this year was pretty light on the nitty gritty of either of those technologies, I did manage to walk away with some useful knowledge.
One of the key things that happened to me at the conference was running into Phil Simon. At the Data Scientist Summit he was involved in pretty good talk at the table and it wasn’t until I got back later and did a little googling that I came across the book he wrote, The Age of the Platform. The book interested me because the previous company I worked at (Universal Press Syndicate/uclick) had built it’s success upon a platform, in my opinion. Additionally at Adknowledge I believe a large part of the success they have is built upon a couple of key platforms. Â I burned through about half the book on my wait at the airport and my plane ride home. Work, kids, work, workouts, work and home improvement activities have kept me busy enough that I haven’t had a chance to get through the rest of it. I like the manner in which he writes, the litany of examples cited in order to back up his points and plain speak are refreshing. I’m just getting to the point where he delves into the platforms of the different companies he goes over (Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google) and I’m interested to see if they fit into my concept of the platforms I believe I have seen.
At uclick what I believe their power platform is predated my attachment to the company by many years. In fact I think the core platform they have dates back to the founders of the company. What they created in the 70s melded excellent authors, superb artists, talented content creators, an intelligent editorial staff and an ability to get that collaboration to clients on time. In any company how you move the output of smart people to be used by consumers is a key to victory, and they were doing it well. During my tenure there from 2000 to almost 2010 I witnessed a massive change, in that the manner in which they monetized on this platform collapsed, the degree and rapidity at which the tried and true business model eroded surprised many. One of the largest attributing factors I believe was the advent of massive amounts of free content and the scrambles that followed to find new ways to make money. The internet is still figuring out how to make real money off of real people instead of screaming into the void . Once they figure that one out it will be realized that real people read real content and I imagine the value proposition will come back for this conent. If they’ve kept that core platform in good repair and manage to keep with it they’ll be sitting pretty to reap the rewards.
At Adknowledge there are a variety of platforms employed. One which I think is interesting, and one of the key reasons I joined, was the way they target advertisement. It’s not based on context, for example: a pet supply ad on site about cats. It is instead based on what we can derive the consumer wants are based upon the information we have. At the time I joined in the tail end of 2009 you didn’t see other companies doing this. Only recently has it started to permeate the mainstream places such as Amazon and Google, where they figure out you have interest in a product and throw ads at you based on that product. This type of advertising I believe in the end services the consumer and the advertiser in a much better manner than the contextual advertising that is the norm.
As I’m able to read more of Phil’s book it will be interesting to see how he breaks down the platforms of those internet giants and see if they match in part to what I see as the platform of the companies that I worked at.
Hack the Midwest
Working with a group of coworkers for this weekends Hack the Midwest event. Being sysadmin guy it’s going to be a real change of pace to do a little more on the coding side. There is still going to be a decent amount of DBA and system work to do, that should be low hanging fruit though. I’ll get a chance to brush up those perl hacking skills. After last week at EMCWorld and sitting through tons of presentations it’s going to be a total turn around to spend 24hrs doing nothing but hands on. Should be fun and I’ll learn a ton from the guys I’m teaming up with.
ubuntu 12.04 upgrade
Shot up to the ubuntu 12.04LTS release last week. Things I currently am having issues with
DNS when I connect to the VPN has been all kinds of funky. I believe I fixed this today by turning off dnsmasq
I really don’t want a local resolver, how can I turn it off?
To turn off dnsmasq in Network Manager, you need to edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and comment the “dns=dnsmasq†line (put a # in front of it) then do a “sudo restart network-managerâ€.
My other issue has been going back and forth between the office and going from two monitors to my single laptop monitor. I haven’t have a change to figure out exactly what the problem is but if I delete my mointors.xml it gets me up and running for the time being.
Edit (2012-05-30): Deleting monitor XML did fix it up. It’s probably some cruft from running through the upgrade process that last two or three updates instead of doing a fresh install.
It’s all about the Big Data
From what I’m seeing it looks like the big companies out there have snatched up about every person out there that have managed to touch the Hadoop stack and the tech marketing machine is in overdrive. I’m spending a majority of my days (and some nights) dealing with Hadoop and Greenplum so I’ve got some skin in the big data market. Things are going a little bit crazy. I had someone mention that they are having a consultant bring big data to their company.. on a 1U server with two 146GB drives. Come on now, someone needs to slow this bus down before it goes over the cliff. We don’t need every hardware vendor to have a server setup that’s optimized for Hadoop. Cisco announced it now has a server targeted at Hadoop, are you kidding me? Let’s remember Hadoop is really aimed to run on a large cluster of the cheapest set of servers you can put together from your local computer recycle center. Is your cluster not running fast enough, drag that C64 out of the closet to add some task capacity and be sure to add in the tape drive as storage for a datanode. There is huge buzz around Hadoop VM and storage appliances for data stores. WAIT! The reason we are doing this in the first place is so the processing is close to the data and you don’t have to push data all around the network. Sure I see the advantage of scaling NAS appliances, believe me the ability to snap only block level changes on a petabyte of data for backups would be REALLY nice. Doesn’t that kill the whole idea of gaining speed by colocating the data and the processing in the same hardware? Sure it does, but I’m sure the vendors selling those solutions don’t want to go to deeply into that conversation. They want to show you that $100k rack of disks with a really cool face plate on it.
Big data is here and not only can we process data we thought was previously unprocessable, but we can also persist data that we was such a firehose previously we didn’t even think it was possible to hold on to it. This is all really cool shit, but it’s not the second coming and the hype machine needs to pop a pill and calm down a little. Most companies will never collect data on that level. There’s going to be a lot of small to midsize companies out there investing in big data infrastructure when a 2U opensource sql server with a ton of SSD drives (which is actually getting to be a reasonable price) will do everything they need much quicker than a distributed data warehouse.
Kansas Gov. Twitter Brouhaha
We had a lively discussion at work yesterday about the Brownback Twitter story that has been across the news. If you don’t know what happened, a student was present at a speech Gov. Brownback was giving and tweeted while he was giving the speech “just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.” She didn’t do any such thing in reality but Browback’s staff monitors Twitter as one of the media outlet and they informed the group that organized the event. The group that organized the event contacted the students school and she was brought in and reprimanded by the principal and told she was going to have to write an apology letter. Everyone seems to be up in arms about this and I’m trying to figure out why. First of all she wasn’t trying to make a political statement and has said she was just trying to get a laugh from her friends. If a student were to stand in middle of an assembly and shout out to the speaker the same thing I don’t think anyone would bat an eye at them getting a detention or worse. You could argue that what this girl did was different, it would probably be more akin to sitting at the front of the assembly and saying something snide at the speaker loud enough that the 10 or so friends closest to her would get a laugh, not intending for the speaker to hear. Twitter would be very close to this situation, it is digital conversation with a limited crowd, with the unfortunate exception that when you leave your account public the words hang out there for everyone to see. In this case the speaker did hear, reported it through the proper channels and the student was punished as would be appropriate for any student that causes a disruption during a school function. When I went to school if I got caught passing a note to the person next to me of similar content I would have gotten in trouble. Everyone seemingly wants to scream about first amendment rights and freedom of speech. What this translates to is saying student should be allowed to voice discontent at any authority figure is fair game and protected under free speech, and amazingly the Kansas school system has fallen in line with this thinking. To clarify, this means that it should be protected under free speech for students to make disruptions during assemblies, and it since it’s all covered as first amendment rights it should extend into the class room. Students should be able to stand up in class and tell their teacher they suck or the blow and the school system should defend them as just making statements under the first amendment rights and not be subject to punishment.
For the record my opinion on how she’s being treated would be totally different had she made the statement in the evening afterwards or at some point that wasn’t during a school function. I thought students weren’t supposed to have cellphones running during school hours anyway and they were supposed to be powered off.