Clearing up the cloud

Congratulation Mercedes! I was watching TV the other day and one of your commercials where you said your cars are "cloud powered" or "cloud enabled" or something like that came on and I knew it had happened: the use of the word cloud has officially become a joke.

Overall, I realize marketing and salespeople mean no harm when they drop the c-word, and I realize that the vast majority of consumers aren't big enough nerds to have a nuanced idea of what cloud computing is, but I definitely think there is room for some general education on what the word means, and what systems administrators hear when you say it.

If the term cloud strikes you as an old one, it's because it's been around forever. You won't get 50 pages into any networking book from the 90s before you find your first network diagram that involves something that looks like a cloud. Historically, the cloud has been used in network diagrams to signify the public internet -- the part of the network where you no longer have control.

The first definition of cloud is simply the public internet. So if your company has a presence on the public internet, congratulations! You can put cloud on as many pieces of marketing you want to.

Obviously that is not a very high bar -- just about anyone is on the internet (you bet your ass my blog is cloud powered) -- so this definition of cloud has become more like #2 at this point.

The other definition is much more interesting, but requires a little bit of digging into how the internet works. I'll do my best to keep it simple.

Amazon Web Services is a shining example of what cloud computing really is. Note that I have never actually used it before, but that's part of why it's so good: I could be torn out of my world of physical servers and trips to datacenters and thrown into a world where everything is virtually hosted by the AWS cloud of servers that I will never see or physically interact with without really feeling that much pain. Amazon built a great system of servers to sell people stuff, but then they started to say to themselves, "What else can our cool network of servers do?" and they came up with AWS. Now I question what date the projection charts say AWS will be a bigger business than amazon.com the shopping site, if it hasn't happened already.

Traditionally, if I wanted to host a website somewhere, I'd have to do it myself using my own computer resources, or I'd pay a managed hosting provider to do it. Managed hosting is the right choice for a lot of people (and we can think of Google as the managed hosting provider of this blog), but you have to live within the confines of what the provider is willing to let you do (Google won't let me install Wordpress on blogspot for some reason), and what other people you share the servers with are doing. These drawbacks are often irrelevant (I could care less how many catblogs blogger hosts), but as you design more complicated web-based software, you really start to see the advantages of managing your own hosting.

It used to be that managing your own hosting in a business environment was a much more significant cost and time undertaking than it has the potential to be now, largely because of services like AWS that make it easy. You had to hire a systems person to coordinate it all, you had to find and lease some space at a datacenter to put your servers in, you had to buy a significant amount of server and networking hardware. The scale hugely varies, but nobody would call it cheap. I'd ballpark a full cabinet in a nice datacenter with a reasonable amount of bandwidth as bare minimum $1,000 per month, probably closer to $1,500, and definitely with 2-3 year contracts attached. That's just the rent, humans and hardware not included.

Another disadvantage to managing your own servers is that you have to worry about a lot of things that aren't necessarily top concerns at managed hosting places. For example, suddenly you are responsible for all the redundancy that must be built into your servers in expectation of hardware failing, you are responsible for keeping your backups running consistently and knowing how to use them, you are responsible for figuring out how to serve your clients traffic if your entire datacenter goes offline -- which definitely happens (though good luck getting a good datacenter sales guy to even acknowledge the possibility of it happening).

I'm not saying all managed hosting providers are competently on top of all these major issues (some certainly are), but at least they aren't entirely your responsibility.

This is where AWS comes in. Instead of having to deal with your own physical servers located in datacenters, what if Amazon told you they could sell you some of their unused capacity and you could treat it exactly as if it were your own computer? And you'd be charged based solely on usage. And it can scale as big as amazon.com which is infinitely for all intents and purposes. And it can handle catastrophic failures because it is big enough to be designed to. That is what AWS offers.

This is cloud computing: servers that scale immediately and pretty much infinitely, located in geographically distinct locations in case of major catastrophes, and have the ability to heal themselves within some generous limits.

It would be like if your Mercedes SL sports car suddenly turned into a G people-mover when you had more passengers to transport. Or if you got a flat tire, an identical Mercedes would appear within a few seconds and seamlessly move you and your passengers into the working vehicle. Now that is a cloud powered Mercedes!

Managed hosting is still the right choice for a lot of people. AWS is the right choice for a hugely increasing number of people. Hosting your own hardware is the right choice for another significant chunk of people. For now, the tech world is respectably split into these categories and none hold a significant monopoly, but I have a feeling that will change as AWS puts managed hosting out of business, and companies can't resist the appeal of doing things cheaper in AWS instead of managing it by themselves entirely.

No matter what you do, you are technically "cloud powered" to some extent if you are on the internet, but marketers and, more importantly, sales people need to understand when you drop the word cloud on a nerd who manages private clouds, or one that manages servers within a public cloud, you are using an extremely loaded term -- certainly not one that has any business being applied to cars.

Finally, I have used AWS as my sole example of a cloud computing provider in this post, but there are plenty of competitors, and the number is growing daily. I am still of the school that does everything in-house and I think I like it, but I do get jealous of my systems friends who provision very large servers with a few dozen keystrokes, while I have provision large servers by researching exactly what hardware I want, convincing my bosses it's a good idea to buy then, lugging them to the datacenter, getting them mounted and cabled properly, installing them, and networking them.

Brick and mortar stores still suck at the internet

It amazes me that prominent members of the brick and mortar retail industry are still completely clueless when it comes to how they need to be operating online. I remember about a decade ago I had tracked down a specific part for my vacuum via the sears.com website. When I drove 15 miles north to pick it up, they had no idea what I was talking about, couldn't do anything with the online item number I brought from the website, and had no vacuum part. First world problem -- I know.

Over the weekend I have been rearranging the living room and it turns out my 6' TOSLINK cable that pipes delicious audio from my desktop computer to the nice speakers isn't long enough anymore. We have a new furry member in the household that likes to eat wires so I have to do the new wiring carefully and it is somewhat inconvenient to change it later after it has all been bundled nicely and "locked in". With this in mind, I was ready to pay the 100%+ premium (compared to ordering from Monoprice or Amazon) and grab a cable at Fry's.

Turns out I suck at estimating lengths and the longest cable Fry's sells (15' for $30) didn't make it by about 3'. Doh. I checked Amazon Prime for 25' ones (preferably from their quality Amazon Basics brand) and they didn't have any obviously available, so I found what I needed in about 45 seconds on Monoprice for $5 + $5 shipping. I'll take the other one back to Fry's -- done deal, or so I thought.

This morning -- in a mix of curiosity, boredom, impulsiveness, and disappointment with the temporary, shitty wiring job I had to do using the too-short cable -- I decided to check Best Buy's website to see if they have what I need. Hey, with a family member who seems to survive on a diet of about 10-15% wires, it couldn't hurt to have 2 of these around.

I hit up http://www.bestbuy.com and searched for TOSLINK. Wow! A 20' Startech cable for $21 -- that isn't bad at all. I see a trip to Best Buy in my immediate future -- perhaps with an impulsive video game buy, or a replacement iPhone cable (stupid cat).

Best Buy doesn't have the best reputation for being super competent but hopefully they have enough clue to have their online to brick and mortar situation down pretty well.

Green Flag: "Check Stock In Stores Near Me" -- this should be standard at any online store with a significant brick and mortar presence.

Yellow Flag #1: the "BETA" icon next to the in-stock search -- it's 2012 and fairly talented US web developers are a dime a dozen. Find a shop or hire some coders and get the online stock checking perfected now. Fire anyone who tells you it's very difficult or impossible, because it isn't if you don't suck.

Yellow Flag #2: "Marketplace Item, Sold and Shipped by Buy.com" -- fuck this. Best Buy, don't be naive; don't waste your money trying to be Amazon; you will never win. Amazon built a brilliant shopping platform (and an even more brilliant computing platform) and you can't compete without bringing significantly new things to the table, which you aren't. I'm going to go out on a hyperbolic limb and guess Bezos has more innovation in his morning piss than your entire board of directors combined.

Anyway, back to the website and still feeling hopeful I will be making a trip to Best Buy today. Let me put in my zip code -- which is one of the densest neighborhoods on the west coast, with close to 4 million people in the surrounding area, and has at least 5 Best Buys if you go 10 miles in any direction -- I'm sure this relatively common 20' cable from this well known cable manufacturer is available at this store that should have its online shit together. "Go".

"There are not any stores within a 50 mile radius of 98122 with any of the displayed products in stock"

What. The. Fuck. That is one harsh informative message and one grand display of online retail incompetency. Entire floors of marketing, retail, and online sales people at Best Buy's headquarters should probably be fired over this.

If I wanted to order something online, I'm going to go to the place that I already pay $79 a year to for fast, free shipping and order it. They have almost everything I need if I can wait a whole 2-3 days (sometimes less). And if they don't have a sort of specialty item like a really long TOSLINK cable available via Prime, I'll go to a different online site that specializes in high quality cables of every type and size you could imagine at simply amazing prices that really highlight the insulting markup on cables found in most brick and mortar stores.

At no point during my online shopping experience does the thought of going to bestbuy.com and paying for shipping for something that is likely at least a little bit overpriced (and sometimes significantly overpriced, like cables) enter my head, nor will it ever at any point in the foreseeable future. I don't think I've ever ordered anything from bestbuy.com, but I've definitely made about a half dozen trips to the local stores in the last year and spent a few hundred bucks.

The only time bestbuy.com becomes relevant is if I'm being an impatient, impulsive consumer and I want to know if I can get my cable now -- possibly without even changing out of what I slept in or taking one look in a mirror. And it completely fails at this seemingly no-brainer service.

I guess I'm waiting until Wednesday or Thursday when my Monoprice cable shows up. Best Buy lost $20-70 worth of revenue today and won a badge they should be trying to avoid: sucking at being a brick and mortar store with a website. And they are far from alone.

Off the top of my head, one place that seems to be doing it right is Walmart. I honestly don't shop there very often (they don't have a large footprint in the Seattle area), but I recall their site-to-store connectivity being high quality. You've probably been taking lessons from Walmart for years -- here is another one.