Congratulations to Albert Wu and his team at SilkFair on their recent mention in the Wall Street Journal. Albert contacted 3tera shortly after we came out of beta, and have been using AppLogic for well over a year through our hosting partners. He also had the distinction of being the first user to ever publicly post about his experience with AppLogic.

I’ve had the pleasure of talking with Albert a few times about business and technology. He’s a heck of an entrepreneur so it’s exciting to see him succeed and to be able to be small part of SikFair’s ongoing success.

With well over 18 months of data, 3tera’s metering system is starting to provide some interesting statistics. One example I can share for instance, is the graph below which illustrates that since January 2007 the average resource consumption per AppLogic user has quadrupled even as we’ve added more and more new users.

I’ve been reviewing the metering data from AppLogic installations recently to determine uptime and for the first 7 months of 2008, our users experienced 99.9% availability. I’ll be sharing more stats over the coming days, but for the moment I want to congratulate our operations team and all our data center partners!

Now, on to get the next two nines.

Xseed’s recent announcement offering AppLogic in Japan means cloud computing is now truly global.

Alistair Croll recently posted an excellent writeup on Gigaom that attempts to segment our somewhat noisy market into 9 vendor sectors that IMHO many prospective users may find helpful in understanding vendor positioning. Alistair put 3tera’s AppLogic alone in his “cloud building” sector, but like most of Alistair’s work the whole piece is worth a read so I won’t repost it all here.

Sys-con ran a three page piece today with 20 experts trying to define cloud computing. The results run the gamut from the uselessly broad “internet centric software” to the only somewhat more pragmatic ”infrastructural paradigm shift that enables the ascension of SaaS” to the disbelieving “Clouds are the next hype-term for the next year or two.” So, why are folks having so much trouble defining cloud computing?

IMHO there are two reasons. First, cloud computing really is still being defined as those of us developing the technology work closely with early adopters putting the new technology to work. In other words, whatever cloud computing is today, it will evolve before it stabilizes. Don’t fret this as a bad thing, though, because it’s quite the opporiste. A little competition will benefit all as more vendors produce useful technology and elevate user expectations of cloud computing. Second, as most readers will already have noticed, a great deal of the noise in the space is being propagated by companies with no new technology; they simply want to share in the attention. While this creates noise, it’s actually normal in developing spaces. So, rather than provide yet another definition, let me provide a use case to show just how real and different cloud computing makes infrastructure.

About four months ago one of our customers was having an issue; a small percentage of page requests were getting dropped. The application involved was a search engine, and ran on around 100 servers in production. The problem wasn’t severe, but was evident to customers. After investigating the issue on their own, they requested our assistance along with a couple other vendors. A two hour Webex trial and error session ensued, but the problem persisted. If you’ve ever had to hunt for intermitant errors then you know what we were going through. At this point, though, the story diverts from your typical experience. The customer application was running on AppLogic after all, so it was a packaged system, literally scalable and portable as a unit.

Rather than proceed with tests on the production system, the customer agreed to send us a copy of their application! Yes, that’s right, a complete copy of the search engine - ready to run in our labs. Just as easily as you exchange Word documents with coworkers, they sent us a complete 100 server application. We then made several copies, each of which ran on just a few servers, and started destructive testing. We failed servers, dropped connections, deleted volumes - anything we could think of to exacerbate the error and make it repeatable. A few hours later the problem was solved - a simple misconfiguration in a third party piece of software.

Had this application been running on standard infrastructure, no doubt this story would have had a completely different ending. In all likelihood the error would have persisted for days or even weeks, because the type of troubleshooting we did wouldn’t have been possible. Cloud computing provided this customer a new way to deal with errors in production resulting in a better user experience, reduced manpower, and of course lower cost. 

So yes, there is a very real difference provided by cloud computing technology and its impact will be felt across our industry. Just don’t expect anyone to agree on exactly what it is for a while.

I’m packing my bags to return home, having spent the past week in Japan at a private show hosted by our new partners at NetOne Systems. Attendance was excellent and the event was very impressive, even having its own tradeshow floor featuring dozens of booths complete with fully operational demonstration equipment, including an IBM mainframe.  Our sessions for press interviews and customer demonstrations or AppLogic were packed to standing room only thanks to the excellent organization and customer relations of NetOne. Xseed, the first Japanese service provider to begin offering commercial AppLogic services, used the event as a venue for making their service announcement as well. If you read Japanese, you can see some of the press coverage on Atmarkit.

More than two years ago, when we first came out of stealth mode, some of our first inquiries came from Japan. Unfortunately, at that time we weren’t ready to service customers here. My visit with customers this week has shown that the Japanese market is ready to embrace cloud technology. They respond to the efficiency, the scalability and the energy savings. And today, in conjunction with NetOne, 3tera can provide the service needed. Cloud computing is on the horizon in the land of the rising sun.

After 2 years+ of showing people how to run Wordpress on a grid, we finally bit the bullet and moved our own blog on Wordpress. On a grid, of course.

As advertised, the process was smooth and easy — the Wordpress famous 5 minute install worked on the standard LAMP cluster infrastructure from AppLogic. Five minutes flat (here’s how).

The rest of the two late nights on the weekend were dedicated, of course, to style sheets, plugins and porting the contents over. Much to my amazement, the process was way easier than I expected.

• The stylesheets (aka themes) in Wordpress are simple to set up, yet powerful — probably the easiest to set up among all the web apps I have used. (Of course, the word easy is cautiously applied to anything that has to do with CSS, but that wasn’t Wordpress’s fault; and, big thanks to Firebug!).
• The plugin model in Wordpress is install-by-file-copy (remember the old DOS days?) while still activation is from the GUI — simply brilliant combination.
• Pouring in the contents — 114 posts dating back to December 2005 — took a bit of work; the easiest way I found was through simulating Wordpress import: simple XML, only a few fields were really necessary, the rest Wordpress seemed to fill in itself (e.g., I set only the post_date and Wordpress autofilled the post_date_gmt; the only surprise was the post_status — must be set explicitly to publish; in hindsight, this could have been fixed with a single checkbox from the manage posts panel). Part of the time was, of course, spent reading some of the old posts — equal bits nostalgic and refreshing.

Overall, quite enjoyable. After the 4-conferences week (aka, the cloud computing conference week plus LTPact) and a lot of talking, talking and talking, it was great to get something done with my own two hands (and two keyboards). There is something really rewarding, in the sense of instant gratification, in putting up web applications and tailoring them to work exactly as you want them (PHP, while not the best language ever, is nearly the perfect instant gratification language, no offense to Ruby).

As a result, now all public facing infrastructure of 3Tera runs on the grid, as does almost all of our internal infrastructure. A shout out to the good folks at SiteKreator for taking our web site all the way to here — we are still running some personal sites on it and I will most definitely set up the first web site of my next startup there again.

Now, I wish our blog would become as popular as to deserve some of the more advanced infrastructure we have for LAMP applications — self-scaling based on load and remote replication. We’ll get there. In the meantime, to those who need such infrastructure today, it is easily available.

It’s been WAY too long since I’ve found time to write. If you ever start a company, be prepared - a packed calendar is a requirement for success.

Since the last time I posted we’ve added 3 new members of the 3tera team:

Sean Mulvaney came on board last month as an account manager. Sean’s spent years in the software business and is quickly ramping up to speed bringing new users into the cloud.

Shubham Gupta joined the engineering team as a summer intern and got dropped right in the middle of the Windows build out.

Joseph Dempsey is now an integral part of our support operations. He’s got many years of Linux and Windows operations experience and if you use AppLogic you’re sure to encounter Joseph posting on the forums.

We’re growing quickly and have several more openings in support, engineering, operations and sales. Care to take a walk in the cloud?