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…

If you’re a fan of RSS, you might know that OPML is a way to share a list of all your favorite feeds, without actually transferring the content of those feeds, saving them the hassle of manually subscribing to said feeds.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do the same with our operating systems and applications (web or local)?  System administrators can already make profiles with a variety of configuration tools, but it’s not at all based on user behavior, it’s based on what the sysadmin thinks to plan for.

What if everyday computer users could share their favorite email setup, easily as they share a link? What if IT was social?

Last week I saw to glimpses into the future of what I’m just gonna call “Social IT.”  Sorry. New Word Alert. Social IT.

JOLICLOUD

First let;s take a look at Jolicloud. I haven’t used it yet, but the screenshot is pretty clear.  Your OS is social. I don’t mean it has a dashboard of view of other social apps. I mean information about the OS can be social.  Jolicloud’s “First look” preview showed an interesting screenshot where the user could see everything theirs friends installed, and even suggested that you could subscribe to info about any topic:

There was also a group feature which was not really screenshotted thoroughly, but one could envision subscribing to notifications about all apps relating to music or business intelligence when you don’t subscribe to a person who knows about that stuff.

FIREFOX PLUGIN COLLECTIONS

Next, let’s look at Mozilla’s Firefox Plugin Collections.

This does two things.  By installing a Collection, it saves you the hassle of downloading and installing each extension manually.  It also lets you browse by collector rather than plugin.  So if somebody had good taste about web developer tools, they might also be trustworthy about ad-blocking.  Firefox Collections is a great service, but the social part is a little under-designed for.  It was hard to just browse various users’ collections.  It also would be nice to have more cross-linking, like a list of everybody who likes or uses a certain collection. But the service just launched, and these shortcomings are just another way to perceive the huge potential.

UBUNTU PPA

Last I want to mention something that’s been here for a while.  It’s a little different from the services above in that the individual actually touches the software, rather than merely sharing their usage of it, but Ubuntu’s PPA is a great idea that lets individual contribute software that might otherwise be hidden from users.  It’s also meant to be used by advanced users (whereas I see the trend of Social IT to be something that all regular users will participate in.)

GUESS WHO’S NOT CRAZY

Before you think this vision of personal computing is just a crazy dream of a system administrator, there’s reason to believe “regular people” want to easily share infomation with their friends, family, and professional peers, saving them the hassle of manual tweaks and step-by-step instructions.

Earlier this week, I saw a provocative tweet from @turoczy, wishing he could share Tweetdeck setups more easily.

I see this configuration sharing happening not just with local apps, but even hosted apps.  Obviously applications that already store meta-data in a relatively portable format will have an advantage, but I don’t think this will be limited to open source software.

A bit of a break from sysadmin work, have been learning some affiliate stuff for some volunteering I’m doing.

Notes to self:

• Once you sign up for Amazon Associates, you get access to refferal links, astore creation, widgets, and developer tools.
• The management interface is a little ‘web 1.0′ (calendar days have giant drop down for every day of the month), but clear and well organized.
• Reports (not just earnings, but mere clicks) are delayed 24 hours, so if you’ve made a mistake/sent the wrong link, you may not notice for a bit. 
• Amazon’s kickback is not dynamic, but it is variable. If you only refer one item, it’s 4%, 9, 6%.
• Because reporting is so delayed, this link checker is pretty handy. It tells you the page your link goes to, and what ID is associated with it. A nice sanity check when you start getting paranoid.

Further thoughts about Amazon’s delayed reporting:

I don’t want to complain too much about this, because in general, Amazon’s setup was friendly enough for me to pick up pretty quickly. But it definitely sticks out in this era of near-realtime reporting.  We can watch our bit.ly click’s update in as they come in.  Even the blackbox Google Adsense reporting/Analytics, though delayed, is less than a full day behind.  I’m only a few days into this, so I may find an alternative way to get these results.

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.

Though I’m a Linux a system administrator, I find myself interacting with Windows more often lately, usually because it touches the virtualization workflow in some environments I work with.  Lately I’ve been working on a bunch of Windows XP Professional hosts…. because they all run VMware Workstation 6.5, with Linux guests.

There are a couple of things about the installation I’m looking to script, so I’ve had to look up what: What’s a scripting language available on all Windows XP systems?

Answer: VBScript and Jscript  (Found out via this helpful  Stackoverflow.com post where somebody already asked this, so I didn’t have to.)

Windows does have another environment, Powershell, which looks great and quite Linux-like.  It can be installed on XP, but does not come stock.  It should come stock in Windows 7.

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