Weeknote 7: Traffic, snow and an awesome party (Week 49, 2017)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Another week means another weeknote and this one finished on a high because last night was the risual Christmas Party!

risual does Christmas parties rather well and I won’t go into the details here but suffice to say, a good time was had. I knew the weather forecast though and needed to be sober today (Mrs W wasn’t too happy about the idea of driving home in the snow) so I can bask in the delight of not-having-a-hangover.

Anyway, it was a joy to wake up in a Country House hotel this morning and see how the landscape was transformed. I took quite a lot of photos on my iPhone but Dropbox is currently refusing to upload them for me, complaining that one is corrupt (but not telling me which one!). I’ll edit them next week and post them then…

Then I drove home in the snow and ice. England can’t cope when it snows (or indeed with any other extremes of weather: too wet; too sunny; too windy). We do mild-grey really well though.

The week

My week was the usual mix of consulting (paid work), training and pre-sales. I was fortunate to spend a day at Microsoft in Reading on Tuesday, topping up my Microsoft 365 (Office 365, plus Windows 10, plus Enterprise Mobility + Security) knowledge. I’m hoping that, time permitting, some blog posts will come out of that.

I’ve been driving around the UK almost 30 years, and driving for work for most of them. This week drove home to me (excuse the pun) just how overloaded the UK’s road infrastructure is, when it took me more than 5 hours to drive to Reading and back (about 75 miles each way), then around 4.5 hours the next day to drive 190 miles on nothing but motorways and trunk A roads (180 miles of which were dual carriageway). It seems likely that the first place autonomous vehicles can take a hold is on major routes like this and I for one can’t wait. Maybe one day we’ll have segregated autonomous driving lanes on the motorways, where the cars can drive closer together (in constant communication and not constrained by human reaction speeds) and maybe even faster (if the law is changed).

This week also saw the quarterly Milton Keynes Geek Night, which I’m proud to have attended every one of! I’ve made a lot of contacts over the 5½ years it’s been running – some of whom I can now count as friends and this event had one of the best set of talks in a long while including:

  • Simon Collison (@colly) on “The Internet of Natural Things”
  • Laura Sutton (@L_Coull)’s “Non-geek’s guide to the Galaxy”
  • Dr Neil Smith (@neilnjae) showing us “Beatles vs. Rolling Stones: using data science to prove which band is best”!
  • Joe Leech (@MrJoe) wrapping up with “UX, Psychology and the Power of 100”

The next one clashes with my wedding anniversary, and Mrs W has even agreed to come along with me as an honourary geek!

At home

We’re hoping to convert our loft next year and the initial notice has been submitted for planning purposes. It seems that, now that councils are better at sharing information, marketers are scraping it to bombard us with offers of storage, home improvements, etc. Apparently, our neighbours will be getting mailshots from lawyers too… all very irksome…

Around town

I missed this event which was part of Milton Keynes’ 50th birthday celebrations – a floating carnival of decorated boats looks like quite a spectacle on the canal!

It’s really noticeable how many people are now sleeping rough on the streets of Milton Keynes. The Bus Shelter are trying to do something about that – but they need to raise funds to convert a double-decker coach to provide emergency shelter. To quote from their website:

“Homelessness can hit anyone – most of us are just three pay packets away from losing our home. With your help we can provide over 5800 safe, warm nights for people forced to sleep on the streets and help them find a positive future.”

Look out for the bus in the Intu part of the Shopping Centre (Midsummer Place) and please donate, if you can:

At the other end of the scale… I passed a man on the mean streets of MK proudly proclaiming that the best place to get a car parking space is the electric charging bays… it may not be illegal to park a petrol/diesel car in an electric space but it is selfish (especially as there are normal spaces free)…

Other stuff

Barclaycard sent me a new credit card “for security reasons”. It was nice to find that my Apple Wallet updated automatically on my phone and my watch. Sadly the many websites where I had the details stored for recurring payments (Apple iTunes, Microsoft, Amazon, M6 Toll, Transport for London, etc.) didn’t.

That reminds me… I wonder when my Curve card will show up… It seems I’ve been stuck with about 1500 people ahead of me in the queue for weeks now… in fact, the number seems to be going up (but if you use my referral link above, I can move back up the queue…)!

On the topic of referrals, my energy switch to Bulb completed this week. It was painless (though I will have to wait to get my credit from First Utility, my previous provider – who seem more interested in selling broadband to me now than reducing my energy bills…). Unfortunately, neither I nor my friend have received our promised referral credits from Bulb. Enquiries are ongoing…

My son and I needed to force-quit an app on my Amazon Fire TV Stick but weren’t sure how. This blog post helped by pointing us to Menu, Settings, Manage All Installed Applications where Force Stop is one of the options.

Sadly, Amazon and Google’s inability to play together nicely means my Fire TV Stick won’t play YouTube videos from 1 Jan 2018. One is not amused:

I’ve been watching Channel 4’s series about Donald Trump’s rise (An American Dream). I’ll leave the politics aside but it’s fascinating to see how the wealthy can grow to take such a position of power…

I noticed that my Nextbase Dashcam was showing the wrong time (1 hour ahead) and every time I changed it, it reverted after the next power cycle… then I realised there was a timezone setting and it was still on GMT+1 (BST). After changing to GMT, all was good. It seems that it picks up the time from the GPS, so the timezone is the important setting…

I’m torn about the use of the new HEIC image format on my iPhone. On the one hand, I want to store the best quality images I can, on the other, I need them to be readable on all my devices…

Whilst I was at MK Geek Night this week, I spotted that War Horse is coming to Milton Keynes Theatre next autumn. I enjoyed the film and I’ve heard good things about the National Theatre production too, so tickets are booked for a family cultural treat:

My phone has decided that, when I get in the car, I’m headed for the local Tesco Express… that’s a little worrying (I wonder how does Siri determine my travel patterns?):

Podcasts

I’ve mentioned before that I listen to a lot of podcasts. One of these is the Microsoft Cloud Show. Sometimes, it can be a bit too developer-focused for my tastes but I enjoyed Episode 223, which pretty much encapsulates the conversations I have with customers as an Architect working with the Microsoft cloud!

I also got the chance to catch up with Matt Ballantine this week (one half of the WB-40 Podcast). It’s been a while since Matt and I had a chat but I really enjoyed bouncing around our thoughts on modern collaboration and team working. and team-working. Like Matt, I’m finding myself drawing/writing on screen more (at least when working, using a Surface Pro – my MacBook lacks any sort of touch capability) though it’s also showing how unpracticed I’ve become at writing!

Wrap-up

Anyway, before I get too far into Sunday evening I need to sign-off and check my children haven’t continued building their snow-wall across the neighbours’ drives…

Next week looks like it should feature a lot less travel (at least by road) and a return to cyclocross with my son. I might even be home a few evenings and maybe, just maybe, I’ll write a blog post that’s not one of these weeknotes! I live in hope…

Weeknote 5: Playing with Azure; Black Friday; substandard online deliveries; and the usual tech/cycling/family mix (Week 47, 2017)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This weeknote is a bit of a rush-job – mostly because it’s Sunday afternoon and I’m writing this at the side of a public swimming pool whilst supervising a pool party… it will be late tonight when I get to finish it!

The week

There not a huge amount to say about this week though. It’s been as manic as usual, with a mixture of paid consulting days, pre-sales and time at Microsoft.

The time at Microsoft was excellent though – I spent Tuesday in their London offices, when Daniel Baker (@AzureDan) gave an excellent run through of some of the capabilities in Azure. I like to think I have a reasonable amount of Azure experience and I was really looking to top up my knowledge with recent developments as well as to learn a bit more about using some of the advanced workloads but I learned a lot that day. I think Dan is planning some more videos so watch his Twitter feed but his “Build a Company in a Day” slides are available for download.

On the topic of Azure, I managed to get the sentiment analysis demo I’ve been working on based on a conversation with my colleague Matt Bradley (@MattOnMicrosoft) and Daniel Baker also touched on it in his Build a Company in a Day workshop. It uses an Azure Logic App to:

  1. Monitor Twitter on a given topic;
  2. Detect sentiment with Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics;
  3. Push data into Power BI dataset for visualisation;
  4. Send an email if the sentiment is below a certain value.

It’s a bit rough-and-ready (my Power BI skills are best described as “nascent”) but it’s not a bad demo – and it costs me pennies to run. You can also do something similar with Microsoft Flow instead of an Azure Logic App.

Black Friday

I hate Black Friday. Just an excuse to shift some excess stock onto greedy consumers ahead of Christmas…

…but it didn’t stop me buying things:

  • An Amazon Fire TV Stick to make our TV smart again (it has fewer and fewer apps available because it’s more than 3 years old…). Primarily I was after YouTube but my youngest is very excited about the Manchester City app!
  • Another set of Bluetooth speakers (because the kids keep “borrowing” my Bose Soundlink Mini 2).
  • Some Amazon buttons at a knock-down £1.99 (instead of £4.99) for IoT hacking.
  • A limited edition GCN cycle jersey that can come back to me from my family as a Christmas present!

The weekend

My weekend involved: cycling (my son was racing cyclocross again in the Central CX League); an evening out with my wife (disappointing restaurant in the next town followed by great gin in our local pub); a small hangover; some Zwift (to blow away the cobwebs – and although it was sunny outside, the chances of hitting black ice made the idea of a real road bike ride a bit risky); the pool party I mentioned earlier (belated 13th birthday celebrations for my eldest); 7 adolescent kids eating an enormous quantity of food back at ours; and… relax.

Other stuff

My eldest son discovered that the pressure washer can make bicycle bar tape white again! (I wrote a few years back about using baby wipes to clean bar tape but cyclocross mud goes way beyond even their magical properties.)

After posting my 7 days 7 photos efforts last week, I saw this:

I’ll get my coat.

I also learned a new term: “bikeshedding” (nothing to do with cycling… or smoking… or other teenage activities…):

It’s scary to see how much we’re cluttering space – not just our planet:

There’s a new DNS service in town:

I’ve switched the home connection from OpenDNS (now owned by Cisco) to 9.9.9.9 and will report back in a while…

This ad tells a great story:

Curve is now available to ordinary employees and not just business-people!

We recently switched back to Tesco for our online grocery shopping (we left years ago because it seemed someone was taking one or two items from every order, hoping we wouldn’t notice). Well, it seems things have improved in some ways, but not in others…

On the subject of less-than-wonderful online shopping experiences, after I criticised John Lewis for limiting website functionality instead of bursting to the cloud:

It seems they got their own back by shipping my wife’s Christmas present with Hermes, who dumped it on the front doorstep (outside the notified delivery timeframe) and left a card to say it had been delivered to a secure location:

It may be silly but this made me laugh:

Finally, for this week, I borrowed my son’s wireless charger to top up my iPhone. Charging devices without cables – it’s witchcraft, I tell you! Witchcraft!

Next week, I’ll be back with my customer in Rochdale, consulting on what risual calls the “Optimised Service Vision” so it was interesting to see Matt Ballantine’s slides on Bringing Service Design to IT Service. I haven’t seen Matt present these but it looks like our thinking is quite closely aligned…

That’s all folks!

That’s all for this week. I’m off to watch some more Halt and Catch Fire before I get some sleep in preparation for what looks like a busy week…

An open letter to John Lewis (and other retailers who charge for Click and Collect)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

As the retail sector has adapted to meet the demands of Internet-based commerce, many retailers have found home delivery to be expensive and unprofitable. Free delivery may close the deal but what does it actually cost the retailer to ship to personal addresses? Probably far more than that £3-5 P&P charge…

New Delivery Models for the age of Internet commerce

To address this, many traditional retailers have integrated with their existing operations to provide “Click and Collect” services whereby customer deliveries are sent to a nominated store. Sometimes this is done well. Other times the divide between the online business and the brick and mortar stores is painfully obvious – particularly when handling returns.

Meanwhile, Internet-only retailers have created pick-up points (e.g. Amazon), partnered with retailers (e.g. eBay and Argos/Sainsburys), or developed premium services (e.g. Amazon Prime) to subsidise delivery. Others (like Doddle) have created a business model around providing somewhere to have parcels delivered for collection on the way home from work.

Charging for Click and Collect?

Whilst charging for delivery is commonplace (perhaps with free delivery over a certain threshold), one major UK retailer (John Lewis) charges for Click and Collect under a threshold value of £30. Their systems have the business intelligence to email me after failing to complete a transaction but sadly not the intelligence to understand why that might be (a £29.90 order that attracts a £2 click and collect charge, when a £30 order would be free).

This was my response, by email – and now here in public:

“Dear Sir or Madam,
Earlier today, I received the email below, based on a transaction that was not completed. I would complete my order, if it wasn’t for your policy on Click and Collect. My order is 10p short of your threshold for free Click and Collect.

 

Because you will charge me £2 for this, I will simply purchase elsewhere. I can have free shipping with Amazon, to home. Or I could just walk into your store and hope you have stock…

 

I understand that shipping to home is unprofitable – that’s why many retailers offer free Click and Collect and charge for home delivery. Charging for Click and Collect is short-sighted and, frankly, not acceptable. You have deliveries to store anyway, whilst it costs me to drive to you, then you charge me £2 for the privilege!

 

I would much rather support John Lewis than a faceless US-based Internet retailer and I urge you to reconsider your policy on charging for Click and Collect – not just for this transaction but for all customers, all of the time.

 

Yours Faithfully,

Mark Wilson”

I could buy another item to take me other the limit. There are even threads on Internet forums advising of the cheapest item to buy! I could even return the extra item immediately after collection (increasing costs to John Lewis as they process a refund). All of this is gaming the system though and it increases friction in the transaction, which translates to inconvenience to me as the customer.

Call to Action

If you, like me, feel John Lewis needs to take another look at its Click and Collect policy, feel free to use the text above as the basis for your communication. Contact details for John Lewis are on their website (or you can email Customer Services directly). The John Lewis Partnership website also has a list of Directors who manage John Lewis’ commercial activity and develop the strategy and business plan for the company.

My first attempt at home automation: Alexa-controlled Christmas tree lights!

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve wanted to play with some home automation tech for a while now but the absence of clear standards and relatively high cost of entry (with many of the popular systems requiring a hub) put me off. We also have the relatively unusual situation in that there is nearly always someone in our house, so even the idea of a smart thermostat to turn down the heating when we’re out (e.g. Nest, Hive, etc.) is not a good fit for our lifestyle.

Then, a few weeks ago, I bought myself an Amazon Echo Dot. My business case was weak. After all, voice controlling my Spotify playlists is a bit of a novelty (and not all of the “skills” that are available in the US are available over here in the UK) but I could see there was potential, especially once IFTTT support comes to the UK (which it finally did, last week).

Over the weekend, I decided to take things a little further and to see if I could control some lights. I wasn’t getting far with the fixed infrastructure in the house (due to challenges with a lack of a hub and B22 vs. E27 light fittings meaning I’ll need to convert some of the light pendants too…) but my colleague Richard Knight (@rmknight) suggested a TP-Link Smart Plug and I picked up a TP-Link HS110 on Amazon. Then it was a case of deciding which lights to control – and I went for the Christmas Tree lights…

After a fairly simple setup process (using TP-Link’s Kasa mobile app) I had the switch working from my phone but then I took things a step further… voice control with Alexa. Kasa and Alexa are integrated so after enabling the skill in Alexa and linking to Kasa, I was able to control the lights with my voice:

Everything I’ve described so far was just a few minutes’ effort – remarkable straightforward out-of-the-box stuff. Being a geek, I started to think what else I could use to control the Smart Plug and I found an excellent post from George Georgovassilis (@ggeorgovassilis) on controlling a TP-Link HS100 Wi-Fi Smart Plug. In the post, George sniffs the network to work out exactly how the smart plug is controlled and he provides a shell script, then others have chipped in with C# and Go options. I had to find which IP address my Smart Plug was using (looking at the DHCP server leases told me that, then a MAC address lookup confirmed that the unknown device starting 50:c7:bf was indeed a TP-Link one).  Using the compiled C# code I successfully controlled my HS110, switching the lights on/off from the command line on a PC.

So, last year saw a miniature Raspberry Pi-powered Christmas Tree (featuring my terrible soldering) – this year I’m controlling the full tree lights using mainstream components – I wonder what Christmas 2017 will bring! And my second Echo Dot is arriving today…

Amazon AWS Summit highlights (#AWSSummit)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 10 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I spent a chunk of time at Amazon’s AWS Summit in London earlier this week. It was interesting to be back at the ExCeL exhibition and convention centre as the last time I was there was another big vendor event – Microsoft Future Decoded – and on the topic of organisation, let’s just say that whilst Amazon had the registration sorted (Microsoft had some issues with that last year), Amazon’s schedule meant we couldn’t get to the technical tracks because of the queues for the escalator (there were no stairs that I could find!).  It seems that ExCeL’s ICC has some logistical challenges when dealing with a few thousand people moving from one level to another!

I was interested to see which partners were exhibiting in the Expo though:

There seem to be plenty of opportunities around cloud services but one set of partners who noticeably absent were the big systems integrators. As we moved to the keynote, I couldn’t tweet the highlights as connectivity became an issue (standard conference issues around WiFi and mobile phone access – plenty of signal but too many sharing it) but I settled into Dr Werner Vogels’ (@Werner) presentation and found it interesting on a number of levels:

  • Whilst there were announcements about Amazon releases, many of the points made were equally applicable to other clouds (e.g. I could apply the same issues and learning to Microsoft Azure):
    • Start-ups have no legacy/dependencies, a low cost structure and can move quickly to disrupt log-standing industries.
    • Not that long ago millions of dollars were required to start an Internet business. It was “indirect funding of the American server industry” – but not any more: cloud infrastructure and platform services have a low barrier to entry and no up-front costs or vendor tie-in.
    • The cloud’s not just for start-ups: enterprises can benefit too (although I’d argue that variable costs are a challenge for some finance departments and new features arriving daily are not always a good thing for end users).
    • Automation is key [in IaaS/PaaS]: whether it’s for testing, building, deployment or infrastructure creation.
    • Real-world workloads come in all shapes and sizes – there’s no need to standardise on the lowest common denominator when you can change the services you use to fit. With cloud you can make mistakes (fail fast and move on) that would be expensive using physical servers or even a virtual infrastructure platform.
    • AWS is a platform and an ecosystem – some organisations are creating their own platforms on top of AWS (e.g. Omnifone’s B2B media platform).
    • Invention is continuous, with new services, and a movement towards micro-services based on smaller blocks (Dr Vogels used a Tetris analogy), containerisation, event-driven computing, etc.
    • Security is a shared responsibility – Amazon provide the tools (and a workbook for compliance with local laws) and customers need to use them correctly.
    • There may be compliance benefits from the cloud, for example: if you store customer data then you become a data controller – and if you process it on AWS, Amazon becomes a data processor; by signing the AWS data processing agreement organisations comply with EU data processing requirements known as article 29, providing assurances that are not available with on-premises services.
  • The stats involved (and Amazon’s growth) are enormous:
    • 102% year on year increase in data in/out of S3.
    • 93% year on year increase in usage of EC2.
    • Over 1 million active customers (every month – excluding amazon.com) – from start-ups to enterprise, in many vertical markets.
    • Five times the compute capacity of the other 14 providers in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure as a service combined. 
    • AWS’ pace of innovation is such that 516 major new features and services were launched in 2014 – almost double the previous year (and that’s a pattern with: 24 in 2008; 48 in 2009; 61 in 2010; 82 in 2011; 159 in 2012; 280 in 2013; 516 in 2014) – it’s actually really hard to keep up (and I’d say the same for Azure too!).
  • Whilst Amazon is leading this sector, they did not come across as arrogant – indeed Dr Vogels highlighted that the Amazon motto of being “the earth’s most customer-centric company” applies to AWS too. Customers are in charge, not providers and, if Amazon’s not providing what they need, customers will walk away – perhaps not literally (there’s no lock-in but moving workloads is non-trivial) but they will use another cloud for their next project/programme.

One message that I found difficult to swallow was that “hybrid IT is part of the journey, not the destination“. Maybe that’s true in the long term but, in my world of Microsoft cloud services, I see real use cases for hybrid clouds (I’ll be writing more on that soon).

Maybe it’s because I’m coming from a SaaS angle though, rather than IaaS and PaaS – I did attend a hybrid cloud deep dive session at the AWS Summit but missed the first 10 minutes as I was delayed by the need for micro-escalator-services or the “escalator of things” (credit to Vitor Domingos @VD for that thought).

I can see why, when running your own applications, there is little need for long term usage of on-premises infrastructure or so-called “private cloud” platforms once you’ve taken advantages of the efficiencies that cloud IaaS/PaaS provides. So, creating a hybrid cloud may be a bridge to the future state, rather than a two-way street; but maybe there are limitations about the data that you want to store in the cloud? Perhaps the cloud BC and DR is still too risky (although maybe you could consider multiple clouds)? Or connectivity challenges might exist that rule out exclusive cloud usage? Or perhaps I’m just a Luddite!

One thing’s for sure – applications shouldn’t be moved to the cloud “as is” – cloud migration is an opportunity to rethink how things work – and Amazon has an that might help with that.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for the whole day – there were many more technical tracks I wanted to attend (and huge queues to get into the sessions) but I had an appointment elsewhere. The AWS Summit was certainly a worthwhile investment of my time though (even as a Microsoft consultant) – I’ll be watching out for it again next year.

In conclusion, I’ll make just the one observation: systems integrators need to find new opportunities to deliver value in an increasingly agile and commoditised world – for example as cloud integrators – and they need to move quickly. Incidentally, this is not news – but for a while now we’ve been able to say “cloud is not for everyone”. Increasingly though, those barriers to cloud adoption are being broken down.

Further reading

Journey through the Amazon Web Services cloud

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 12 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Working for a large system integrator, I tend to find myself focused on our own offerings and somewhat isolated from what’s going on in the outside world. It’s always good to understand the competitive landscape though and I’ve spent some time recently brushing up my knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which may come in useful as I’m thinking of moving some of my computing workloads to AWS.  Amazon’s EMEA team are running a series of “Journey to the Cloud” webcasts at the moment and the first two sessions covered:

The next webcast in the series is focused on Storage and Archiving and it takes place next week (23 October). Based on the content of the first two, it should be worth an hour of my time, and maybe yours too?

 

Getting to grips with the Amazon Kindle

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

It takes a special gadget to capture my wife’s attention but the Amazon Kindle seems to have done quite well. Actually, I think that the Kindle’s success is largely down to the fact that it appeals to non-geeks (the low price helps) but I recently bought Mrs W. one as a present.

It was my first experience of using one of these devices (I’ve only used the Kindle app on iOS or Windows Phone until now) but it really couldn’t have been much simpler to set up. This is the latest incarnation of the Kindle (the Kindle 4 – officially known as “Kindle, Wi-Fi, 6″ E Ink Display“) and when it arrived, I wasn’t sure whether to open the “frustration free” packaging to find another box inside and wrap it as a gift, It turns out that the brown, wedge-shaped box with the word Kindle on the side and a rip-tab is the actual product packaging (typically functional and no-frills, but substantial enough to prevent damage).

After unboxing, all that was needed was to:

  • Plug the Kindle into a computer using the supplied USB cable.
  • Select the language.
  • Connect to a Wi-Fi network (using the soft keyboard).
  • Register (in this case, to an existing Amazon account – more on that in a moment).

That’s all the basics to get going but, in the Manage Your Kindle section of the Amazon website I also:

  • Edited the name (not much point my wife having a device that had defaulted to “Mark’s Kindle”).
  • Added an email address from which to receive personal documents (if emailed to the Kindle).

At this point it’s probably worth mentioning something about sharing Kindles.  Because I’ve been using the Kindle app on my devices, it made sense that we should be able to share publications with one another. Unfortunately, sharing requires the use of a single account (hence why my wife’s new Kindle was automatically named “Mark’s Kindle” and why the welcome note is addressed to me…). In the United States, there are limited options to lend books but it’s not universal, and it’s far from the model that we see in print (walk to shelf; pick up book; give to friend; friend returns book at some stage a few weeks later) – although I did find an interesting analogy on the Amazon website.

With multiple Kindles on one account:

  • We can select purchases individually but they are charged to one card.
  • Purchases using the Kindle will go to the Kindle being used at the time.
  • Purchases from the Amazon website can be sent to whichever Kindle is chosen.
  • Any purchase made can be also loaded onto other Kindles on the same account.

I’m not sure how easy it would be to damage the E Ink display but I didn’t want to take the chance – we bought a cover for Mrs W.’s Kindle which does have the downside of increasing weight and volume but also looks quite nice.  Amazon’s official cover is expensive (the one with a built-in light is even more so) but there are plenty of third-party alternatives available (the one I bought was less than £10 from Amazon.co.uk).

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with the Kindle. Strangely, buying one for my wife has increased my use of the Kindle app on my iPad (partly due to our increased use of our Amazon account) and a Kindle Fire could well be my next tablet, assuming they make it to the UK before the rumoured iPad Mini…

Designing a private cloud infrastructure

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A couple of months ago, Facebook released a whole load of information about its servers and datacentres in a programme it calls the Open Compute Project. At around about the same time, I was sitting in a presentation at Microsoft, where I was introduced to some of the concepts behind their datacentres.  These are not small operations – Facebook’s platform currently serves around 600 million users and Microsoft’s various cloud properties account for a good chunk of the Internet, with the Windows Azure appliance concept under development for partners including Dell, HP, Fujitsu and eBay.

It’s been a few years since I was involved in any datacentre operations and it’s interesting to hear how times have changed. Whereas I knew about redundant uninterruptible power sources and rack-optimised servers, the model is now about containers of redundant servers and the unit of scale has shifted.  An appliance used to be a 1U (pizza box) server with a dedicated purpose but these days it’s a shipping container full of equipment!

There’s also been a shift from keeping the lights on at all costs, towards efficiency. Hardly surprising, given that the IT industry now accounts for around 3% of the world’s carbon emissions and we need to reduce the environmental impact.  Google’s datacentre design best practices are all concerned with efficiency: measuring power usage effectiveness; measuring managing airflow; running warmer datacentres; using “free” cooling; and optimising power distribution.

So how do Microsoft (and, presumably others like Amazon too) design their datacentres? And how can we learn from them when developing our own private cloud operations?

Some of the fundamental principles include:

  1. Perception of infinite capacity.
  2. Perception of continuous availability.
  3. Drive predictability.
  4. Taking a service provider approach to delivering infrastructure.
  5. Resilience over redundancy mindset.
  6. Minimising human involvement.
  7. Optimising resource usage.
  8. Incentivising the desired resource consumption behaviour.

In addition, the following concepts need to be adopted to support the fundamental principles:

  • Cost transparency.
  • Homogenisation of physical infrastructure (aggressive standardisation).
  • Pooling compute resource.
  • Fabric management.
  • Consumption-based pricing.
  • Virtualised infrastructure.
  • Service classification.
  • Holistic approach to availability.
  • Computer resource decay.
  • Elastic infrastructure.
  • Partitioning of shared services.

In short, provisioning the private cloud is about taking the same architectural patterns that Microsoft, Amazon, et al use for the public cloud and implementing them inside your own data centre(s). Thinking service, not server to develop an internal infrastructure as a service (IaaS) proposition.

I won’t expand on all of the concepts here (many are self-explanitory), but some of the key ones are:

  • Create a fabric with resource pools of compute, storage and network, aggregated into logical building blocks.
  • Introduced predictability by defining units of scale and planning activity based on predictable actions (e.g. certain rates of growth).
  • Design across fault domains – understand what tends to fail first (e.g. the power in a rack) and make sure that services span these fault domains.
  • Plan upgrade domains (think about how to upgrade services and move between versions so service levels can be maintained as new infrastructure is rolled out).
  • Consider resource decay – what happens when things break?  Think about component failure in terms of service delivery and design for that. In the same way that a hard disk has a number of spare sectors that are used when others are marked bad (and eventually too many fail, so the disk is replaced), take a unit of infrastructure and leave faulty components in place (but disabled) until a threshold is crossed, after which the unit is considered faulty and is replaced or refurbished.

A smaller company, with a small datacentre may still think in terms of server components – larger organisations may be dealing with shipping containers.  Regardless of the size of the operation, the key to success is thinking in terms of services, not servers; and designing public cloud principles into private cloud implementations.