Drizzle

and …

I went to the Boston MySQL Meetup on Monday for a fairly crowded and lively discussion on Drizzle and Gearman. The talk was led by Eric Day and Patrick Galbraith, two very well known members of the MySQL community.

Here is a link to the presentation.

Drizzle

In short, Drizzle is a fork of the not-yet-released MySQL 6.0 and represents a reversion to first principals upon which MySQL was founded: fast, lightweight, and optimized for web applications. The genesis was a customer advisory board (CAB) meeting in 2005 where the core MySQL users felt that the database was heading in the wrong direction (meaning towards corporate needs) and was not being responsive to the needs of web app developers. They have standardized on C++ for development (MySQL is C and C++), have stripped out a bunch of unused code, and have modularized it around a microkernal architecture that should make it far easier to maintain and extend going forward.  Here is a list of the differences between Drizzle and MySQL.

One key data point is that MySQL 6 is over 1.2 million lines of C and C++ code. Drizzle has gotten that down to < 300k. The team supporting this is in the research side of Sun and is separate from the core MySQL team. It should be interesting to see how this plays out. Other facts: over 100 community contributions have been accepted to date. That’s pretty significant in a project that’s only a year old.

Drizzle could very easily become the “new MySQL” but it’s too early to tell if this will happen.

Gearman (anagrams to Manager)

Gearman is lightweight scale-out distributed messaging service.  In some ways, it’s a bit of a cross between a message queue (e.g. IBM WebSphere MQ) and a publish & subscribe engine. Gearman enables applications to “job out” tasks to other servers in a synchronous or asynchronous manner.

Gearman was created to solve the “kittens” problem at LiveJournal, where resizing images (often of kittens) on uploads was killing their servers.  They created a resizing farm and moved it off of the Web servers.  The LiveJournal application then published out the resizing work to this farm using Gearman’s Client API.  The Gearman Job Server then jobbed it out to a Gearman Worker (in this case a resizing server) which performed the image actions and notified the Job Server when it was done.

Think of Gearman a bit like Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS), but open source and portable to any server environment.  It’s also really fast (the claim was 50,000 actions per second on an 8 core machine).

Gearman is also fault-tolerant.  Clients connect to a single Job Server, but fails over to another Job Server automatically if the first one is unavailable.  Workers connect to all Job Servers, so any Job Server can dispatch any task.

This is such a universally applicable capability that I’m a bit surprised that nobody has done this before.  There areo other open source message queues, including JBoss Messaging, ActiveMQ and others.  Those are targeted at replacing IBM WebSphere MQ and not necessarily web-scale applications.  They are heavier and more feature-rich, but not as fast or lightweight.

We could have used Gearman at Givvy for our charity search process and at one point I had discussed using SQS with the team.  The need to maintain and regularly update the search index (using Solr), had we achieved any market traction, would have required a level of decoupling of search from the core application.  Gearman is supposedly in use by LiveJournal, Yahoo!, Digg and others.

I can envision some interesting use-cases:

• image resizing
• video transcoding
• search index updates
• e-commerce order processing
• data replication (database and file)
• any type of Map Reduce-like processing (parallel operations on a large data set)
• HPC distributed processing (risk analytics, etc.)

I am here at Interop in Las Vegas (note – I really loathe this town).  Interop claims over 14,000 registrations, and by the crowds it seems that they may not be exagerating too much.  The energy is good and there are a lot of people here to learn and develop partnerships.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen a conference with this much vitality.  Most conferences in Boston seem pretty lame in comparison. Even some S.F. events I’ve been to in recent years were pretty slow.

I guess it is a testament to the market addressed by Interop – IT infrastructure, SaaS and Cloud Computing.  I love seeing some of the vendor presentations in the booths – many of which are just really lame.  But it’s still fun to see them having fun because there are 20+ people sitting there and listening – really listening.

As I’ve started to get a lot more cloud-focused these days, I thought it might make sense to put all of my cloud computing content on a dedicated blog. Announcing CloudBzz!  

As some of you may know, I am a complete convert when it comes to cloud computing.  It’s my goal to never, ever, purchase another piece of data center equipment.  For my career, it’s my goal to find like-minded people and help companies achieve the promise of cloud computing – with services, products or both.

Long live the Cloud…

Symform, a Seatle company focused on cloud-based storage for the enterprise, has just taken $1.5m of venture financing according to Xconomy.  The basic premise is that your data is stored on my computers, and mine on yours.  Or more precisely, a very small portion of my data, super-encrypted, resides on the servers of many other customers.  It’s redundant, secure and “in the cloud.”

Now you get to hear a familiar refrain of many entrepreneurial types… I had this idea over two years ago.  I even tried to get some of my totally smart ex-colleagues from ODI to join me (this is a big-brain storage-oriented thing, after all).  My concept has several differences, but the core idea of a cooperative shared storage cloud was there.  Kudos to Symform for getting it done!

 Way back in 2006 when Amazon released their first enterprise web service, S3 (Simple Storage Service), I immediately wanted in. At the time we were wracking up huge data center and hardware bills (for a small company) and storing tens of terabytes of image files. We got in the S3 early beta but didn’t get too far because we needed image processing to happen in the cloud to be cost-effective.  My contact at Amazon hinted that a compute infrastructure was not long in coming.

When EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) launched in 2007, I really wanted in. The digital photo business was winding down, so there was no point.  My 2008 venture, did use EC2 and S3 and we saved many thousands of dollars and hours by not having to worry about hardware. While there were countless stories of Web startups using cloud services back then, only recently have I begun to hear of enterprise applications in the cloud.

I know what you’re thinking.  What about SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com with their PaaS (platform as a service) models?  Yes, these are in the cloud, and fit in most people’s definition of “cloud computing.”  However, for me the inflection is where enterprises are now deploying any type of application, not just those that are build as ASP or SaaS frameworks, or that require you to build into a narrow framework like sforce.   Truly custom apps written in any language are not what sforce was designed for.

Now I am hearing about life sciences companies putting the cloud to work in HPC environments for drug discovery or genetic mapping. And trading firms, like Majedie Asset Management, who own or manage no physical data center assets.  All of their applications – from the most trivial to the most mission-critical – live in the cloud.

There are tools providers like RightScale and  Stax building deployment management environments on top of Amazon and other cloud infrastutures.  There are folks like Enomaly building cloud stacks for deployment by telcos and hosting providers.  There are guys likeGood Data building BI in the cloud.  

Think of the opportunity!  Over the next 10-15 years millions of systems now operated in-house will be ported to the cloud.  An increasing number of new applications will be built specifically for cloud environments.  Vendors of systems management, security, indentity and access control, databases, ERP, CRM, and most other types of IT technology will create cloud versions of their systems, and new vendors will emerge for this new environment.  

There will be opportunities across all aspects of enterprise IT to profit from this wholesale shift.  How will you participate?

We’ve all heard the concept of the hive mind, where when one member/node/bee/ant etc. knows something it gets transmitted instantly throughout the hive. The Borg from Star Trek is the hive made evil, with no free will.

Twitter behavior is starting to look more and more like a benign hive, where participants have free will but often willingly join in collective behavior.  A recent example of this came from Demi Moore (twitter user “mrskutcher“) who saw a tweet from someone in San Jose who said she was going to kill herself.  Demi re-tweeted one of these horrible tweets from sandieguy and the collective jumped into action.  The San Jose police were contacted.   Hundreds of Twitter users sent supportive messages (a few a-holes were mean), and we all hope that the crisis was averted and @sandieguy is getting the help she needs.

This is only the beginning.  Imagine as tweeting gets even easier, and more pervasive.  The ability to mobilize the hive mind to deal with a crisis, inform the world, solve problems, generate action and more is only going to get more powerful.  

A collective/hive mind can be powerfully negative as well.  Imagine at some point a Rush Limbaugh-like personality who uses Twitter to mobilize hate and fear-mongering in a way that is destructive.  Imagine Hitler with a Twitter account (no, I’m not comparing Rush to Hitler).  Scary, though perhaps if there was a Twitter in the 1930’s Hitler may never have been able to go so far.  Maybe the benign, voluntary, and informed collective would have forced a quicker response to the threat.  

For marketers, this collective mind is a huge opportunity – and an even larger threat.  Never has it been so easy to inform a huge community of influencers about your experience with a product or service.  We all know that people are much more likely to complain than to compliment, so downside risks from the hive will impact more brands than upside.  A strange trend, though, is that my informal scan of the environment shows that there are a LOT of positive tweets about brands.  Perhaps this is because collective participation is so easy and immediate – it takes only a few seconds to tweet about that great customer service you just got, so why not?  If you’re not following your brand on Twitter, you are missing a huge opportunity.  Someone talks you up?  Reward them!!  Someone puts your brand down?  Make it better and win them back – instantly.  They’ll tweet about how impressed they are with your attention. 

One brand that gets the collective is Zappos.  Tony Hsieh (CEO) follows most of his followers, and he probably has a whole team dedicated to tracking the conversations about his incredible service.  There are over 350,000 people who follow his tweets.  Most are huge fans and never miss an opportunity to say so. 

For good or for evil, the global collective mind is here – and it’s growing.   Resistance is futile – assimilation has begun!

Yesterday a post from Barack Obama appeared on my Facebook feed.  It was about the Open for Questions system on Whitehouse.gov.  The Open for Questions application allows anybody to register and vote up or down on questions related to the economy, health care, security and other topics of interest.  You can also ask your own questions.  On Thursday (tomorrow), President Obama will answer some of the most popular questions in a town hall setting.

It cannot be overstated how innovative and powerful this concept is.  The established model is that you communicate your wishes and concerns to your elected representatives in Congress, and they’re supposed to advocate for their voters.  Of course, nobody trusts these (mostly) guys to listen or to do anything other than what’s in their own interests – which are often not in alignment with the voters who elected them.  Plus – to get your voice heard you need to get to three members of Congress who may or may not have a great and responsive staff.

Obama just bypasses Congress to gather the Will of the People on a national level, and uses highly viral social media to do it (bypassing old media as well).  He can then look at the results -  and with the support of hundreds of thousands or even millions of votes and voters he can steer the discussion with far more legitimacy.  By letting us in, he’s binding himself to the people.  By giving us voice, he’s removing the filters and communication blockages that occur with any leader.  Obama describes the presidency as a “bubble.”  When you’re in the bubble, you can’t know that people are thinking or feeling.

Open for Questions is a powerful way to burst the bubble and get close to the voters — his customers.  Sure, this makes for good policy – but this is mostly about marketing.  His supporters love him even more for his openness and proof that he “gets” the social graph and why that matters.  Even his detractors have to stop and admire the openness and leveraging of new media, and some of them will – perhaps grudgingly – grow closer to Obama’s view of the world.

What are you doing to listen to your customers?  Are you using social media to bypass the filters from sales, marketing and customer service that make it difficult to know what your customers are really thinking?

Many hours are spent on building the best website for the money.  We think about site structure, content, look and feel and other elements to the design and delivery of the site.  As much work as it may be to get this new beauty out the door, it’s just the start.

There was one client I worked with a while ago who wanted a new website.  We discussed where there business was coming from, how they wanted it to grow, and the types of clients they wanted to attract.  Once we had an idea of what the site should say, I tried to engage this client in a discussion about how they were going to get people to see it.  If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it… Well, you get the picture.

Let’s make something clear – their monthly unique visitor count is in the low hundreds.  Very low hundreds.  Most of the inquiries they get from their site are related to a service that they have listed but they don’t perform anymore.   The website was actually worse than nothing – it was costing them time and effort to respond to these unwanted inquiries.

When I tried to steer the conversation towards marketing, the client looked at me like I was from Mars.  The site was their marketing, right?  At least that’s what they thought.  Even in B2B, many people get to a vendor or service provider site through search.  Or ads, or PR, or some form of marketing activity.

They were willing to spend $ on redoing their site, but nothing on marketing it so people would visit.

Folks, it’s simple.  The website is a tool – it’s not the marketing plan.  The really hard part is driving traffic to the tool to start them down the sales funnel.  And programs that work for one company may not apply to yours.  So, you need to have a comprehensive plan to test different marketing vehicles — and this can be done without spending a lot on the programs.

Would paid search yield results?

What about SEO?  Is the content relevant, current, and do you have people linking to you?

Do you post your own blog?

Do you have lots of great referenceable clients and can you post their stories on your site and alert a bunch of bloggers who may care about them?  Not just in your industry, but in theirs?

Can you showcase your talents by making something interesting for people – like a microsite on something with interest in your target audience?

You don’t need to have  a huge budget these days to generate traffic.  Note – for this client, a few hundred more visits by people who are interested in their offerings could result in a big jump in business for them.

Normally here I don’t say much about politics.  This is really about marketing, strategy, etc. for technology.  But in this case I can’t help myself.   As has been widely reported and discussed on blogs far and wide, Michelle Obama served food at a D.C. homeless shelter yesterday.  There’s a picture in the LA Times story on her visit of an unidentified man taking Michelle’s picture on a cellphone, for which the LA Times’ Andrew Malcolm questions (in a very condescending and mean-spirited way) why a homeless man has a cellphone.

Before you can say “Please pass the jelly!” the scallywags of conservative media, including Michelle Malkin and Kathy Shaidle, siezed on this as just another reason why liberals suck and the homeless suck worse.

For the record, I voted for the GOP presidential candidate from 1984 through 2000 and two republican governors of Massachusetts (Bill “Big Red” Weld and Mitt “look at my hair” Romney).  I’m a fiscal conservative but socially I identify much more with the democratic party.  I would say that Weld did too, which is why I consider myself a “Weld Republican” (or more traditionally a Rockefeller Republican).

The more and more I hear people like Malkin, Shaidle, and the “incendiary entertainer” Rush Limbaugh (so called by Michael Steele, Republican National Committee chair), the farther I want to distance myself from having anything to do with the Republican Party.  And judging from the elections in the last few years, I am not alone.  If the GOP wants me back, they know where to find me — but they better look more like Lincoln and a lot less like Limbaugh.