Monthly Archives: April 2008

Sun Should Be in the Consumer Cloud Services Business

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When Google App Engine was announced one of the features that was heavily pushed was it’s ability to scale. Combined with Amazon’s AWS products, I’ve been thinking about other companies who could/should be in the cloud services business. There’s the obvious ones that everyone talks about like Microsoft and Yahoo, but then another name came to mind: Sun.

What service should Sun offer to the world? I’ll give you a hint, they recently spent $1 billion dollars acquiring the company behind the product. Yep, none other than MySQL.

Love it or hate it, MySQL is widely used by many companies and individuals. What I’d like to see from Sun is a MySQL cloud service that works just like your current MySQL server(s), only better. It should scale such that I don’t have to worry about performance and replicate data sufficiently that I’ll always have access to my data. There’s no need for a new API, since MySQL already supports network connectivity.

With MySQL already in such wide spread use, the benefits would be easy to see. For instance, I could use such a service to power my WordPress blog with only a few changes to my wp-config.php file. Effectively requiring zero code changes.

Pricing wise I’d expect something similar to EC2 or S3, a general pay as you go schedule. Perhaps even with a very low use free option, just enough for people to get hooked. But if I were Jonathan Schwartz I wouldn’t stop there.

As nice as it is to have an easy to use pay as you go web service, there are many companies that would like the performance, scalability and reliability of such a service but don’t want to send all their data to Sun. Enter Sun’s Modular Datacenter, a.k.a. data center in a box. Okay, a very big box, but a box none the less. Take all the lessons they learn making the MySQL cloud service work and put them in the data center box and sell it.

This would also appeal to hosting companies, who could then offer the same sort of service to the users. Imagine some place like The Planet having a few of these in their data centers. They’d get the benefits of the cloud service without having to haul all that traffic over their Internet connections.

In my ideal world this wouldn’t be limited to MySQL. I’d love to see this same sort of thing for PostgreSQL, since Sun has also been pushing PostgreSQL for Solaris as well. Sadly I’m not holding my breath on that one. With PostgreSQL being a much more community based project, there’s nothing to stop some other company from providing this service.

Perhaps Sun should have changed their stock ticker to MYSQ instead of JAVA.

Twitter Updates for 2008-04-26

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  • At Utah Code Camp, say hi if you are around! #
  • @libel_vox Turn out for code camp seems pretty code. I think probably more people here than for podcampslc. #
  • @libel_vox I believe that it is wordpress.com only for now. #
  • in project management using Scrum session *p #
  • this ironruby talk seems to be just this guys view on what programming should be, ignoring everything else #

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Google Docs Spam

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One of the neat things about Google Docs is the ability to share the document with others. You can do this with anyone just by knowing their email address. Google will then send an email out that looks something like:

I’ve shared a document with you called “Spam sharing test”:

http://docs.google.com/a/example.com/Doc?id=xxxxxxxxxxxxxx&invite=

It’s not an attachment — it’s stored online at Google Docs. To open this document, just click the link above.
—

Shared this doc with you.

Which is a really handy way to collaborate with others on a document. And it seems the spammers have discovered this as well.

I’ve recently started seeing emails for documents that I’ve been invited to, which turn out to be just a bunch of spam. They’ve taken Google Docs and are using it in an attempt to mask their spam from email filters, by providing link to a service you might normally trust. I suspect that Gmail is unlikely to mark any doc invites as spam.

Currently this seems to be pretty limited, the spammers have to paste in the email addresses into an invite box. Google could do some basic things to prevent spammy looking invites from going out (do you really mean to invite 3.78 million people to share your document?). I’m not aware of a Google Docs API that allows you to script doc invites, but if there is one (or if they come out with one later) then you can bet the spammers will make use of that as well.

This will turn into another wack-a-mole situation, where Google will (hopefully) revoke accounts and API keys for users who are sending out spam in this way. Then the spammer will just start using another one of the 324,834 accounts that they’ve already created at Google until it gets blocked too. Rinse, lather and repeat.

Four Years of WordPress, One Year at Automattic

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On April 16, 2007 I started working at Automattic, amazing how fast the last year has gone by. As I started gathering up details for what I’ve been doing this past year, I found that in April 2004 was when I started using WordPress to power this blog.

Four Years of WordPress

My first post on this blog was from April 30, 2004, using a beta of WordPress 1.2. First though, a little history.

In mid-2003 I figured it was time for me to get in on this “weblog” thing. Although I’d had various sites on the web since 1995, there was something about the order and structure of a blog that appealed to me. Like many others during this time I took a look at MovableType as one option to power my blog, since all the cool kids were using it (like Jeremy Zawodny, one of the blogs I’d been reading regularly). That didn’t last very long. I went on to try every piece of blog software that I could find, none of them really worked the way that I’d hoped they would.

Feeling that all the available options out there weren’t going to cut it, I started writing my own (another thing that seemly everyone else was doing at the time). I quickly got it up to the point where publicly it was good enough. I used that for months, while continuing to look at other options.

Fast forward to March/April 2004 where I finally found WordPress. It was being actively developed and was easily the best out of all the other options that I tried. And I had installed pretty much everything out there.

Since then I’ve published more than 1,000 posts with over 1,500 comments. I started using Akismet, which has blocked more that 500,000 pieces of spam.

One Year at Automattic

It is amazing that a whole year has gone by since my Friday the 13th post. Fortunately though it’s pretty easy to sum up. This job is freaking awesome!

The people at Automattic are amazing. At one point I had met everyone in the company, which is saying something since we are scattered all across the globe. Since then more people have come aboard, and I look forward to meeting them face to face latter this year.

Before joining Automattic full time in April 2007, I had been doing contract work starting back in January 2007. The result of that work was the new wp.* XML-RPC methods. For the most part I really enjoy working on XML-RPC, though some of the specific APIs that are built on top of it are a bit quirky.

Working on WordPress.com has been absolutely fascinating. The scale and growth are pretty impressive. Check out some of the stats and you’ll see what I’m talking about. We are fast approaching 3 million blogs. Not bad considering we hit 2 million in December 2007, some 4 months ago.

The Future

There are so many ways in which WordPress still has amazing amount of potential. In the social network sphere we are seeing things like BuddyPress and Diso. From the WordPress as a platform department there’s Prologue (which reminds me, I need to get a new version out the door, keep an eye on prologuetheme.org) and WP Contact Manager. Even good old XML-RPC will continue to see improvement as time goes on.

The next year will bring a few more releases of WordPress. What’s really exciting though is seeing how people will continue to take WordPress to new and different places.

Google App Engine

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Today’s big news was the announcement of Google App Engine. Plenty of people have been covering the details, I just wanted to leave a few thoughts:

This looks like an amazing service. Being able to make use of Google infrastructure for your web app is a wonderful idea. Currently limited to Python, so all the Python fans are going nuts.

What Google App Engine (GAE) isn’t is a direct competitor to Amazon’s web services (EC2, S3, etc). What Amazon provides are virtualized services, what GAE provides is a specific platform. While that platform is pretty amazing, it is also complete and total vendor lock in. If you needed to move your application off of GAE, how would you do it? This might give pause to those interested in buying your startup.

There’s an SDK for starting your app before going live, but no way to migrate data from your test system to the live server. I imagine as people begin to use this new platform they’ll find other issues as well. That isn’t to say that GAE isn’t worth while, just that it isn’t a miracle cure.