These Things Matter To Me

VMware’s vCloud Express holds a unique position of offering an API that is both a provider API, and a low-level virtualization API.  This has  the potential to give users/customers an incredible amount of freedom in terms of both providers, and virtualization technologies.  However, it’s bit late to the Internet (external cloud) party, and people can be skeptical about late arrivals declaring themselves a Standard. So to be a good citizen both symbolically and practically, VMware needs to build some bridges with some existing efforts, not just invite others to its party.

But who?

Libcloud.  If VMware is all really all about freedom, it needs to work with other efforts equally invested in user freedom, and libcloud is all about provider flexibility.

Wait. What’s libcloud?

Libcloud aims to be a unified interface to cloud (infrastructure) providers. It’s company/provider agnostic, and speaks to provider API’s. It’s built for people who need to to talk to the cloud that they don’t own, like EC2, Slicehost, etc. (Yes, other projects have the same vision, and many want to standardize the cloud, but frankly libcloud has gotten farther than anybody, in less time than anybody, with real code living sitting in github right now.).
The main user/sponsor of libcloud is Cloudkick, who makes a really nice monitoring/management dashboard for popular providers (BTW, I really recommend Cloudkick, no affiliation.)

VMware totally wants tools like Cloudkick to work with vCloud Express providers.

Cloudkick reboot screen

Libcloud can already do a lot of basic management tasks with a growing list of providers.

infrastructure providers libcloud currently supports

But what if libcloud worked with the potentially hundreds of vCloud Express providers that will exist shortly?

infrastructure providers libcloud could support with vCloud Express interface

The way the libcloud project is working right now, there’s basically one rep from each provider helping to make an interface to libcloud.  With just a little bit of engineering time, VMware has the power to make an interface that would result in compatibility with 100’s (1000’s?) of providers.

So what are you waiting for, VMware? Join the libcloud list and get involved.  With a bit of effort you can some street cred for vCloud Express’s mission, without changing any of your technology, adding a ton of value to all your provider partners.

In plain English: Today VMware outlined a service where you can pay a 3rd party host your VMware guests. They also released an API that would make it so you wouldn’t have to switch management suites when you switched providers. Or decided later on to host your VM’s yourself. The hosting service is called vCloud Express, and it currently includes 5 providers, expected to grow to hundreds (thousands ?). The API is part of their vCloud universe, which includes a lot of other stuff besides vCloud Express.

The most exciting part of this is independence. A customer shouldn’t have to switch software when they grow. Or when they shrink. When they’re focused on agility. When they’re focused on performance. When they’re focused on security. So many software vendors can only have one kind of customer. Though there’s room for improvement, this move by VMware suggests that they’re creating a platform for people to use no matter where’s they’re at.

Industry articles are saying vCloud Express competes directly with Amazon’s EC2 service, and though there is an overlap (you can now pay somebody, not VMware, to host VMware-powered virtual servers), VMware’s strategy is a bit different. They don’t want to be the service provider. They either want to sell you the bits OR sell the provider the bits. But they’re creating a flexible space for the customer, where we don’t have to change technologies or management tools, no matter how much/little involved we are in managing the low-level infrastructure.

I see vCloud Express as more akin to a combination of the open-source/ EC2 API-comptible Eucalyptus and EC2 itself.  Users can grow management process, in-house tools, and 3rd party tools around either a behind-the-firewall Eucalyptus environment or Amazon Ec2, because it’s basically written for the same API.  And if all goes according to plan, VMware vCloud API can achieve the same thing.  A mixed environment with common tools written against the same platform.

I have a million bones to pick with VMware’s cloud approach, and the standard corporate hubris involved in being a late-comer to an established market, and submitting a proprietary reality as a new standard

But for this week, I want to just say, “right on” to VMware.  Though they don’t see it this way, it’s a major course correction, and a great example for other enterprise software vendors.

vCloud Express is off to a great start, and I hope to see its vision of customer freedom truly realized.  If so, its success wouldn’t even be tied to VMware hypervisors…

In Google Apps there are users, and there are administrators… of everything.  A Google Apps administrator has the permission to change anything and everything about a domain’s settings.

Wish: Google would let organizations create administrators of just some things. 

As it stands,  organizations are unable to give administrative power in an a la carte manner via the Google Apps Dashboard. This can bring  extra burden to organizations who typically would let first level support handle basic account stuff, and leave more delicate configuration changes to a select group of people.

This can result in the person you trust to change your SSO server configuration, having to be the person who resets a user password.

Not optimal.

When your pilot is small, it’s fine limiting your Google Apps cabal to a small set of administrators who have the power to change anything in the Google Apps dashboard, but who rarely get called on to support uesr requests. But once your Google Apps implementation grows, that design doesn’t scale so well.

Google Apps does have an API which has led to many 3rd party tools, (some costing $30,000+), which may allow customers to more finely tune administrative rights, but this basic characteristic would be most welcomed in the native Google Apps Dashboard, as most pilot users will need this before they commit to anyting enough to buy 3rd party tools.

View the 20 second clip:
(apologies people not in the States who haven’t configured a hack/proxy server yet to watch Hulu)  

Now imagine… If you were nerd predisposed to O’Reillyisms… if you and your friends followed him and his posse on twitter, and read the O’Reilly Radar blog, you’d be hyperventilating over twitter, too, when Tracy Jordan says, “You’re my Radar O’Reilly!”  Except he didn’t. He said, “You’re my Radar Oreily.”  That slight difference in the spelling of O’Reilly matters.  I found out tonight there was a character named Radar Oreily in a popular television show, MASH that took place in the military. (And now the helicoptor part makes so much sense…)

Le sigh…

Ah well.  One day we will reach the singularity, and Liz Lemon and Clay Shirky will be on the same panel. But for now, we wait.

In my fresh WordPress 2.7 install, the Plugins nav had a “1″ next to it that would not go away. I couldn’t figure out what the heck it was trying to notify me about.

Here’s what I’ve been trained to think it means:

• 1 plugin needs attention
  (As in, “you’re not quite done installing a plugin, you need an API key or something.”)
  or
• 1 plugin just got installed. Or enabled. Or disabled.
  (And this notification will soon fade away.)

Sometimes it was red.

Sometimes it was grey.

Here’s what it actually meant:

An inactive plugin that came with my install, WP-Super-Cache,was eligible for an upgrade. This was installed via Dreamhost who may have packaged some dormant plugins. I have no idea at the moment whether non-Dreamhost installs will run into this.

I guess it’s a variation of the “needs attention” design pattern, but given that it was an inactive plugin, and the status of the available upgrade wasn’t particularly prominent or connected or linked-to from the Plugin (1), I know I’m not the only one who’s been stumped by this. I won’t name names, but a WP vet I asked didn’t know either.

GUESS WHO’S NOT CRAZY.

The more you know.

I just read over at Search Engine Land that Google announced it will be shutting down/stopping new development on multiple Google products, including Google Video (so far, just new uploads, not deleting anything, or disabling the search of existing content).

For this reason, I posted on the Google Apps support forum asking for emotional closure

You’re almost pleased.