I always wanted to own the things, that I use. Movies, Music, Gadgets and lots of computer power. Perhaps it is a menfolk thing to hunt the booties and take them to your cave. Perhaps it is just stupid me, but believe me I am a collector.

Knowing this you would be very surprised if you enter the doors of my office.

Today the total amount of all capital assets of my company rest in some MacBook Pro Laptops and a Coffee Machine. Next week a camera crew is doing a portrait on our company and they asked me what they would be able to film in the office. And I had to say: Nothing, but we can take a walk at the beautiful waterside near my office. This is one major effect of a technology that is called cloud computing. You own nothing and yet everything keeps on working – and you are able to take a walk at the waterside (if available).

“The cloud” is really rather a dumb name for a revolutionary technology isn’t it? Because a cloud is flawy, nebulous and intangible which in other words mean, that you will never be able to describe it in a reasonable way.

Some abbreviations try at first glance to irradiate the dark, but at the second look SaaS, PaaS and IaaS are much more the sound I make, when I have heavy snuffles than any form of explanation onto what the cloud is.

In early web development stages IT people tended to draw a cloud in their diagrams when they meant “the internet”. There were arrows going into the cloud and coming out of the cloud and that meant “we don’t exactly know whats going on here”. So cloud computing is in that terms computer science where the IT technicians themselves don’t really know whats going on. And from my perspective today this is completely true. But it is rather a relief than a thread!

The cloud turned itself into something powerful much more like the black cloud-monster in LOST (without all the murder) than the fluffy “this-looks-like-an-elephant” cloud.

Our company (schnee von morgen webTV GmbH) builds up TV stations for customers like DER SPIEGEL, Discovery Channel and dctp and in the last years where everything turned “webby” we started to design and instantiate webTV projects.

The combination of films and the web is foremost very expensive with a strong leaning towards being commercially impossible. There are so many different codecs and platforms, that transcoding itself is one major doorkeeper. When the films are transcoded, worldwide delivery for a major broadcaster is an incredible complex problem – and it is very expensive.

Doing all this on a self owned IT infrastructure is a great idea if you just won the lottery twice in a row, but if you haven’t this is not a reasonable approach.

The TV business has such a high volatility in the production and the consumption of content that you have to have a really big IT infrastructure to cover the peaks. Which in effect means that you pay for boredom most of the time. Or in other words: Nothing is so expensive as the idle time of your infrastructure.

To solve this problem a high amount of virtual imagination is necessary. Because the first thing that solutions in the cloud do is to take things away that have become dear to us in the last years like:

- The feeling of standing in the server room at night with millions of LEDs blinking and the loud noise of the air conditioning.

- The ability to scream at somebody irrespective of the error that occurred.

- Solving problems “the old way” which in most cases mean: by fax machine.

But if you are willing to disclaim a little and try new ways of problem understanding and solving then cloud computing is going to enable things you might today think of being impossible.

Cloud computing is about sharing resources and that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. Basically it is a beautiful idea.

But what about reliability?

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.” Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless English humorist & science fiction novelist (1952 – 2001)

This is so true. And it is a allegory for the development in computer technology as I see it. For most part of the last 10 years I tried to construct unbreakable systems. This turned out to be very complex, very expensive and very very impossible.

Today we at schnee von morgen are proud to build systems that break all the time. The trick is not perfection, but rather a frowzy way of best practices and imperfection.

Its about teaching computers to behave like we want other humans to behave if things become difficult. To keep an eye on each other, to stand close in times of trouble and to call for help if needed.

Under these preconditions it is possible to construct self-healing and extreme stress resilient IT infrastructures.

Tradeoff is you are going to loose a certain amount of control. The high amount of virtualization that is required to share IT resources “in the cloud” leads to obscure intransparency if you want to understand your IT infrastructure as a whole.

There are times where I am not able to say how many servers on how many continents are currently running for my company and what problems they are currently solving. That is mainly because they organise themselves and the servers are only reporting solutions or problems.

It’s really a new way of thinking because you have to accept certain conditions as given. It’s like math were you have to accept that 1+1 is 2 and if you begin to think through this small precondition a whole science comes out.

In terms of cloud computing its about accepting a certain amount of loss of control which must lead to reliance and trust into one or more providers.

You will still be able to control results, but you will loose a certain amount of control of the underlying processes.

And you will loose that poor guy you shouted at every time when something IT-ish went wrong. Actually there are some very expensive placebo support contracts available, but they do just that: they give you a very expensive person to shout at 24/7. That doesn’t mean, that in case of a infrastructure failure in the cloud this person is able to explain to you what went wrong or to prioritize your needs. That is because thousands of other companies that work “in the cloud” will have the very same problems. And either the problem is solved for everyone, or for no one

So you could just save the money for that poor guy and take a walk. Being assured that everything possible is done to fix the problem. And next day in office you start designing a workaround for yesterdays error and teach your cloud to heal itself in case the error happens again.

I am actually happy about every real life error that occurs, because every time something unpredicted happens I learn a lot. It’s about thinking of things you haven’t thought of you haven’t thought of. And every real live trouble makes the infrastructure stronger and more reliable.

And if you think at this moment: I will not be able to trust in something inscrutable like this.

Ask yourself:

1.) How does your car work.

2.) How does cell division work.

3.) How does your tax computation work.

Because your life is going to depend on 1 and 2 – and your business ideas are definitely affected by 3. All in all trust is not such an uncommon thing for us. It is only uncommon in terms with computers.

If this article makes you think “why don’t I too take part in this cloud-thing” … presumably you already do. Facebook, Google, Flicker, YouTube, del.icio.us, Twitter, webmail – ever used or heard of any of these? Big parts of our digital life are already sourced out to the cloud and this process is having a huge momentum.

It seems to be the natural movement in IT business to share resources to reduce costs. I’m not saying, that cloud computing is risk-free or that any kind of self immanent benefit comes with the cloud. There are new risks that come with shared cloud infrastructure independent from the type of cloud usage: shared infrastructure, shared platforms or shared web services come with new risks. We haven’t even got a full overview of the types of new risks that shared IT resources do. But I like to say “We cross that bridge, when we reach it.”

To close the circle: I’m going to take a walk at the waterside now. That is because I know, that there are currently no problems in our cloud and furthermore I have trust that upcoming problems will be solved. The beauty about this is, that I can concentrate on real problems like: How will we watch TV in the future? And I don’t have to worry about infrastructure anymore.

What I painfully found out today was, that if you chance the language of your Gmail Webinterface … well don’t.

I used the german Interface, but I had to change the language to english because a plugin I needed was only availlable in english. What Gmail does when you change the language of your interface is to change the names of all Labes / IMAP Folders in the background. So my “Alle Nachrichten” folder got renamed to “All messages” which screwed up my Mail.app and I had to resync the whole Account – which takes about three hours with my 30.000 + Messages.

It seems although as if there is no data corruption – only the need to resync everything.

Live unter: http://medienradio.org

Das Thema ist natürlich “Die Zukunft des webTV”. Mit einem Blick auf Flash, html5, Codecs, Apple, Microsoft … der Kampf der Giganten.

Nachtrag:

Die Sendung findet sich unter: http://medienradio.org/mr/mr020-web-video/

oder als direkter Link unter: http://medienradio.org/audio/100318_MR020_Web-Video.mp3

Vorneweg I: Ich hatte bei dem Artikel eigentlich das übliche “Wir lieben S. Jobs und Flash ist total blöd” gebashe erwartet. Das bleibt aber aus. Und das Kernargument des Artikels habe ich selbst so zum ersten mal gelesen … und es ist intelligent. Außerdem passt es gerade zum aktuellen Diskurs.

Vorneweg II: Das Thema “Zukunft von Flash” kocht immer noch höher. Aktuell will ich nur auf zwei Artikel in der deutschen IT-Szene hinweisen. 1.) FSF: Google soll Flash den Todesstoß versetzen / Golem.de mit hochamüsanten Kommentaren und 2.) Google: weniger Gears, mehr HTML 5 / heise.de mit wirklich höchstamüsanten Kommentaren. Wer sich duch die beiden Kommentar-Threads durchgearbeitet hat, der hat einen recht guten Überblick was gerade an Pro und Kontra Flash Argumenten so geht – und obendrein welche Schimpfwörter eigentlich gerade so “En Vogue” sind.

Kommen wir also zum Kernargument. Multi-Touch Systeme sind keine 1 zu 1 Übersetzung der guten alten Maus. Das trifft insbesondere meinen Link aus dem letzten Artikel von The Flash Blog. Dort wird einmal sehr lustig und anschaulich gezeigt, wie das Internet ohne Flash aussieht. Die Kernaussage ist quasi: Lasst zu, dass Adobe Flash auf die Endgeräte portiert – und alles wird gut.

Das ist etwas zu kurz gedacht. Obwohl Multitouch Systeme bestimmte Eingaben (Zoom, Slides, Scroll) viel schöner umsetzen als es mit einer Maus möglich ist, bietet die klassische Maus bezogen auf einen Bildpunkt oder Knopf o.ä. vier Zustände der Interaktion: Mouse Over, Klick, Doppelklick und rechte Maustaste. Wenn wir Doppelklick und die Verwendung der rechten Maustaste mal außer acht lassen bleiben immer noch zwei Zustände die Mausbenutzer alltäglich anwenden. Wir sind gewohnt bei Mouseover mit mehr Informationen und Interaktionsmöglichkeiten versorgt zu werden und diese dann mit dem Mausklick zu aktivieren. Beispielsweise blenden die meisten Videoplayer die Controlls erst bei Mouseover ein. Die neuen Apple-Produkte kennen diesen “Mouseover” Zustand nicht.

Ich stimme mit Daniels Morgans Ergebnis nicht überein, dass damit Flash und das iPad einfach nicht zusammen passen – aber eines ist richtig: Für die Produzenten von Flash Inhalten bedeuten Multitouch Displays eine größere Umstellung, als allgemein angenommen wird. Es wird ein Prozess der Anpassung stattfinden.

Ein Beispiel für einen ähnlichen Anpassungsprozess sind die Lauftexte bei Nachrichtensendern. Moderne LCD-Bildschirme geben Fernsehbilder als 25p – Format und nicht als 25i Format wieder – dadurch geht eine Menge Bewegungsinformation verloren. Die meisten Nachrichtensender haben sich daher dem neuen Medium angepasst und benutzen anstatt der Lauftexte kleine Tafeln, die sich am unteren Bildrand austauschen und deutlichen besser für das Netz zu komprimieren sind und auf LCD Bildschirmen sehr gut darzustellen sind.

Eine neue Technologie bedeutet also zum einen nicht, dass man die alten Inhalte 1zu1 übernehmen kann – zum anderen bedeutet aber auch eine technologische Neuerung nicht automatisch, dass alles schon dagewesene Mumpitz ist.

Nachtrag 22. Feb 14:30 Uhr / Da war ein Dreher im Artikel. Daniel Eran Dilger ist der Autor des Eintrages. Der Inhalt und die Argumente stammen aber von Morgan Adams. Nochmal danke @tim für das aufmerksame Lesen.

Nachtrag: Danke @felix. Der direkte Link auf die Sendung ist: http://ondemand-mp3.dradio.de/file/dradio/2009/12/25/dlf_20091225_1630_5c34ed06.mp3

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/12/amazon-cloudfront-now-supports-streaming-media-content.html

hat das Potential den Markt für multimediale Inhalte im Web gehörig umzukrempeln. Wir hatten ausgiebig Gelegenheit die neuen Möglichkeiten im “geheimen” und mit hervorragender Unterstützung von Amazon in den letzten Monaten zu testen. Was Amazon hier auf den Markt bringt senkt die Einstiegshürde für Streaming Media enorm. Während das Aufsetzen einer “Streaming Infrastruktur” bislang aufwengig, teuer und umständlich war – und überdies für kleine Projekte unrealistisch ändert Amazon die Spielregeln.

Mit dem neuen Streaming-Feature muss der Anbieter seine Videodateien nur noch in einen speziellen Ordner ziehen (Bucket) und bekommt nach minimaler Konfiguration einen Streaming-Link (rtmp) auf seine Datei. So einfach!

Wir streamen mit der schnee von morgen webTV GmbH schon seit einem Monat beispielsweise dctp.tv mit dieser Technologie. Wir betreiben momentan noch parallel als Fallback eine eigene Streaming-Cloud (auch auf Amazon Servern) werden die aber in Zukunft nur noch für Live-Übertragungen und besonders sicheres Streaming (DRM) einsetzen.

Das Amazon S3 Plugin erfordert in der Bedienung keine weiteres Know-How. Das damliche Bild hier habe ich einfach über die WordPress “Upload Image from Computer” Funktion hochgeladen und beim Einbau in den Artikel hat WordPress automatisch den Link auf das Bild im S3 Bucket gesetzt.

Da ich zusätzlich das Plugin WP Cache aktiviert habe und somit unnotige Anfragen von der MySQL Datenbank fernhalte ist dieser Blog (Kanonen auf Spatzen) nun hochskalierbar.

So werden die Vorzüge der Cloud für jedermann a) erschwinglich und b) handhabbar.

The main problem so far working with ec2 instances was, that you couldn´t store data reliable on the running server, but had to use amazons s3 storage (or another server) instead. This results to scripting tons of half reliable backup + restore scripts … and all goes bad if you have to work with a relational database (eg mysql) … which made me go crazy concerning reliability of data.

Today amazon launched a service called elastic block store, which seems to solve all there problems. In the end block store is a mountable device which you can hang in any ec2 instance. The devices can hold up to 1TB of data and standart customers can create up to 20 devices …that sums up to 20TB of persistant storage.

I started testing today and i had some timeouts trying to sync s3 + persistant block storage using a ec2 instance – but in the end everything worked fine for me … next stop will be running mysql databases on this storage.

Unfortunately you can´t mount this persistant storage read only on more than one machine. So I´ve got to find another solution to this … but all in all this made my day

The Problem with WordPress installations is … you can do so many different thing with wordpress that you can never be sure what your page looks like after the next upgrade/update. For this page I use a modified K2 Template which looked pretty much different after the upgrade of the blog-system. Most of the widgets were offline and some other strage things happened. The automated upgrade plugin uses FTP for its file actions – in my case I had no ftp access to my site up (I always use sftp myself) so I had to configure. I ran into some (selfmade) problems with file perms of the ftp user where the plugin wasn´t a great help debugging. Just be sure, that your ftp user has got all the rights he needs to modify your wordpress installation including making + destroying of folders. But if you got everything set up (backup, backup, backup!!! before you do anything backup! including your database! yes! dont forget the database!) it´s a great help in keeping your installation up to date. And as I found out right now it also keeps your pluging up to date. I´m not sure if that is wordpress or the plugin, but outdated plugins got a new *update me now* button next to them.