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As the cloud is getting more players and interfaces, best and worst practices are emerging. As the market grows and more companies try to plug in, the cloud may benefit from guiding principles. Similar to new technology movements in the past, a natural process is underway to define “what is good”, which, for some in the industry, equates to “what is open”. Like religion itself, open can be defined in ways that are uplifting, or on the other side of the coin, restricting. Also, we learn again, nothing is free. Sponsor Cloud APIs Must Walk on Water If you’ve been part of a software development project, you know that sometimes it’s hard to get the team to all agree on best practices for interface design, database optimization, or even what technology to use. In this analysis, we take a look at some of the movements in cloud computing that start to lay a framework of good as it relates to this technology. In this context, API designers for cloud applications need to think ahead and avoid common pitfalls. For several reasons, more than ever before. First, because many people will be accessing your one piece of code. Second, is that in this world of open APIs, it’s easy to compare your code against another. We notice that data management practices are at the core, and details matter when provisioning in platforms. At the same time that groups are forming to align practices and forms of virtualization and cloud standards, a voice whispers that perhaps this is a free-market problem. People who benefit at solving it, will; others will ignore it or compete directly. We enjoyed this post from Joyent on where standards matter in a practical sense. In essence, the question raised: If a vendor makes it easy and bakes in the ability to “just do it”, do you know or care about the standards? This seems to mirror an iPhone development paradigm, which is to expect work from the vendor SDK or libraries. The SDK wraps standards implementations, which is done in the way best understood by that vendor. Do Unto Others as You Would Have Done To You We know the cloud is big – perhaps it will inevitably be bigger than the Internet itself as it usurps our conception of location, space and time. Where power forms, rules, groups, and organizations do as well. In information technology there is always tension between open standards and defacto standards. The former are crafted through agreements, the latter through leadership and market dominance. We asked in a prior series ” Will a single company become the dominant provider in the cloud? ” Today we look at the more practical side of “who is winning now” – who is setting the rules and who is in the trenches. Quite a number of the responses to our earlier posts emphasized that “the cloud should be free”, meaning that it should have governing principles to avoid one vendor from owning the landscape. Here are a few groups that have emerged to provide some context in how this may come together, both philosophically and practically. In both, the devil is in the details. A good summary of some of the current combining of forces is by the Open Grid Forum . (In our opinion, grids have given way to clouds as the dominant concept in this technology makeover). A resource directory of initiatives is located at the Cloud Standards Wiki , which in itself was formed by a handful of organizations and movements working to align around setting rules and patterns for cloud computing. The Open Cloud Consortium is organized around developing practices around sharing resources and has recently focused on a developing a test bed. The DMTF is working at the core definition of virtualization. It recently focused on the 1.1 version of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification that focuses on packaging virtualization instances and creating a portable mechanic distribution by defining envelope and collection parameters around the virtual machine and its services. The organization, which contains members of IBM, Microsoft, Dell, VMware, XENSource, Sun, and NEC, has submitted 1.1 for consideration as an ANSI and ISO standard. The efforts by the federal government in its data.gov initiative shows that there’s a market that’s starting to see the value of raw government data formats . Soon, we would expect this to be powered by a mesh of computer resources that allow all sorts of jobs – integrated jobs – to work with these data sets. It would comprising an active government cloud. Do Not Covet Thy Neighbors Network Resource When looking for things to avoid, we found a lot of philosophical questions around data ownership, logging and portability. These discussions are alive and well and seem to be being absorbed into vendor solutions and consortiums like the ones mentioned earlier. For a more practical view, we turned to a friend of ReadWriteWeb, Thorsten von Eicken , and have summarized his thoughts from a recent post, ” Top Cloud API Sins . Bold items are our (loose) mapping to biblical terms. Do not covet your neighbors resources. : Listing of resources without the details, e.g., a list-servers call that doesn’t return all the details for each server. This makes it very expensive to poll for server state changes … Do not make cast idols : Not returning a resource id on creation. Some APIs don’t give you a server i.d. when you request a server … Labor six days, rest on the seventh : Providing a task queue. Several APIs I’ve seen have a task queue that is supposed to provide updates on tasks that are in progress E.g., you launch a server and you get a handle onto a task descriptor. For us that’s just overhead … Though shall not bear false witness : Not returning deleted resources in a “list resource” call. In particular, terminated servers must be returned in a list servers call for a certain duration, probably at least for an hour. Ouch! … Shall not covet his neighbor (or force me to repaginate) : Pagination that goes page-wise instead of using a marker, e.g. where you get page one or the first 100 resources and then issue a query for “page 2″ or “from 100 on”. Explain to me how a client can get a consistent resource listing when resources can be added and removed concurrently … Randy Bias added to Torsten’s post: Treat others as you want to be treated Your UI MUST use your API so you understand how to be a consumer of your own API … We plan on keeping up with this list and seeing how it intersects with implementations and standards that evolve. Please let us know your thoughts below. Nirvana: Smells Like Services Orientation Torsten goes on to describe a picture of the future. “Now here’s what I’d really like to see. This is what we’re working on for internal purposes and it’s not easy, which is an event based interface instead of a request-reply based interface… ” This sounds like a vision where we all win. Smart services in the cloud, rather than resources alone. This starts to get us closer and closer to an object-orientated network. Maybe that’s what the cloud will be for platforms, infrastructure and software. The industry has been quick to identify the layers. But perhaps the point is piecing them together in a smart transactional framework. A way to engineer highly reliable systems around these architecture challenges may sound familiar to those who monitor existing data centers today. Torsten continues, “We run a good number of machines that do nothing but chew up 100% cpu polling EC2 to detect changes. Fortunately cpu cycles are cheap ”. This is practical intervention between vision and get it done. We find it refreshing to hear this type of dialog in the industry and see a fresh opportunity for defining efficient patterns for this next generation of the cloud infrastructure. Perhaps a new concept is forming: “Divine Computing”. Where do you sit in the “just do it” spectrum? Photo credit: tsarkasim , Amsterdam Esogna Discuss

Judging from tonight’s episode of Top Model , we can already guess that there will be plenty of arguing in the Top Model apartment during America’s Next Top Model Cycle 14  – but what else will the lovely ladies be doing? Here’s what the CW is revealing about the upcoming challenges: Next Wednesday, the girls will only be allowed to wear one article of clothing when they pose for their first official Top Model shoot.  Plus, new judge Andre Leon Talley will make his first appearance at the judges’ table. On Wednesday,  March 26, the girls will get a surprise visit from former contestant turned TV personality Tocarra.  The contestants will also pose in a dance-themed shoot. Can’t wait to see what else is in store. I’ll keep you posted. What’s Coming Up on America’s Next Top Model Cycle 14? originally appeared on About.com Reality TV on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 23:42:10. Permalink | Comment | Email this

The Blackberry just doesn’t seem to have the luster it once did. Today, it had another nationwide outage. According to Data Outage News: “A number of users are reporting and an escalated RIM tech support call has confirmed data issues affecting WiFi devices NOT connected to a WiFi network. The outage is sporadic and issues are confirmed on at least on Verizon and T-Mobile on both US east and west coasts. Again, if you are connected to WiFi, you likely won’t notice any problems until you are out of WiFi range. This is not affecting ALL WiFi users, the reports are sporadic, but across all carriers, BIS and BES included.” Sponsor What’s going in with the Blackberry? Once the enterprise stalwart, it is now looking like a struggling behemoth. Its interface almost seems antiquated. An analyst group is now saying the iPhone is expected to beat out the Blackberry in 2011 for the number one spot. And now we have another outage. Twitter users are all over today’s outage. Some people are saying their service has been out since the morning. There have been some reports that the outage is international in scope. The last Blackberry outage came in December . Reported outages also came in 2007 and 2008. Blackberry has been facing a lot of of market pressure. The iPhone, the Android and the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series all present challenges to the Blackberry. A report by Trefis shows the iPhone beating out the Blackberry by 2011. The iPhone’s surge into the business community is a major reason for it overtaking the Blackberry. A Trefi analyst write in Forbes : We expect Apple’s market share to overtake that of RIM by 2011, and for Apple and RIM to have 11% and 8% market share, respectively, by the end of Trefis forecast period. We believe sales of the iPhone will eventually outpace BlackBerry sales for the following reasons: 1. Apple’s ecosystem of consumer products (Macs, iPad, Apple TV) and services (iTunes, iPhone apps) make the iPhone a more attractive phone for many consumers compared to the BlackBerry 2. End of AT&T exclusivity will give Apple’s iPhone wider distribution in the US (comparable to BlackBerry distribution) 3. iPhone is making inroads with business customers that have traditionally preferred the BlackBerry Discuss

The news that Google is buying DocVerse is now official. The reasons why Google bought this small company can be learned by taking a look at the people who started this small company out of Seattle. Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui worked at Microsoft before launching DocVerse in 2007. Sinha ran product strategy for Sharepoint and SQL, 1.6B and $3.0B products, respectively. DeNeui served as program manager on the SQL Server Strategy Team and the program manager for the WinFS ISV Team. Sponsor The two have built a strong company that will help Google in its battle with Microsoft. Sinha and DeNeui know Microsoft products. They know the Microsoft processes and its culture. DocVerse understands the challenges of working on deeply collaborative technologies. That’s a goal for Google as it continues to develop Google Apps. The DocVerse application installs a lightweight plug-in that is installed in the background of the user’s machine. The plug-in opens a widget in the document sidebar that includes a unique link. Any time a user makes an update to a Microsoft docment, the plug-in syncs the web page that is associated with the document. Every modification gets synced. When multiple people work on a document, the updates are made through the plug-in and versions are stored online. Syncing will become increasingly important for companies as more of the workforce uses smartphones. Google does a good job with email synchronization. But enterprise collaboration tools have a higher level of complexity. Co-editing, for instance, has to carry from the PC to the mobile device among mulitple users. Interestingly, Jive Software uses the DocVerse functionality for their product add-on: Jive Connects for Microsoft Office. The competition is getting fierce in the enterprise space. We wonder how this competition will affect the DocVerse relationship with Jive. Discuss

For entrepreneurs trying to form a startup, one of the first challenges they face that persists throughout the businesses life is how to find and keep talented partners and employees. From finding that first co-founder to finding the prolific programmers to fill your ranks later down the line, talent acquisition is always a major step in any business. Just look at some of the deals that have gone down in the Valley; Facebook didn’t buy FriendFeed for their technology, that deal was mostly about getting FriendFeed’s talented employees on the Facebook team. Sponsor A new book from author David Russo, 17 Rules Successful Companies Use to Attract and Keep Top Talent: Why Engaged Employees Are Your Greatest Sustainable Advantage , seeks to make this process more clear for businesses. Russo is the CEO of Eno River Associates, Inc., which is a consulting service that helps business executives build better team relationships. Their portfolio of clients includes American Express, Johnson & Johnson, and the CIA. With his new book, Russo outlines the key strategies he has learned over the years as a consultant and human resources executive that has helped him and others create winning teams. The book doesn’t waste any time getting into its 17 rules; after a brief introduction the entirety of the book consists of one chapter per rule. The rules cover a broad base of topics, including the more straightforward rule #4, “Provide Ample and Appropriate Resources,” to the more abstract rule #12, “Understand Human Capital.” One of the key rules that sticks out to me is #3, “Cultivate Leadership, Not Management, and Know the Difference!” “Whereas managers administrate, leaders have the power to influence, to motivate, even inspire, and those are distinctly different traits,” writes Russo. “Indeed, true leadership is the ability to display attributes that make people want to follow.” Russo points out that leaders need to have passion, vision, and energy, as well as recognize that each employee has value to the success of the business. He likens this value to a tight end in a football game running “a crisp pattern” and distracting the defense despite knowing before the play that he’s not going to be the ball carrier. Another rule which will likely strike a chord with the startup culture is #10, “Make Room for Fun in the Workplace (Nurture Lightheatedness/Levity).” Anyone who has seen the popular workplace movie “Office Space” knows what a bland work environment can do to employees spirits, but I don’t think we have to worry about startups not having enough fun on the job. Aside from being passionate about the job they’re doing, most startup employees are probably used to everyday being “casual Friday” and taking a brain break in a game room. Granted, not every experience is like this, but we all know that many startups are a very relaxed environment, which Russo says is very important for attracting skilled employees and keeping them happy. Other important rules Russo includes on his list include knowing how and when to “cheerlead,” acknowledging and rewarding efforts and contributions, and the lastly, telling the truth. While this book isn’t aimed directly at startups, young entrepreneurs looking to lead their team to success should certainly take a look at this book. One of reasons I would suggest it is that at times, young entrepreneurs who have little or no workplace experience are suddenly thrust into a CEO role. If your company takes off, you might be in charge of a lot of people very quickly, and this book will certainly help keep them happy. Disclosure: A review copy of 17 Rules was provided to ReadWriteWeb by Pearson Education, Inc. Photo by Flickr user madebytess . Discuss