All Things Distributed

I have had the luxury of almost 4 months with any real conferences. Don’t get me wrong it is not that I do not enjoy the public speaking side of my job; it is just that I experience it always as rather disruptive. It is great to focus for a while and get things done. And the holiday shopping season is a good excuse to stay home at any e-commerce organization.

I did do a little outing to Washington D.C. to talk a meeting at the National Academies. A study is being done into very large scale systems development and I was invited to give Amazon’s view on this. It was a very interesting workshop where I was really interested in what the other participants would bring to the table. It is amazing to see how many organizations still believe that they can do a massive scale out in process and technology while still maintaining top-down control. They do not seem to understand how unnatural this strict control is. That the only way to achieve this is by resorting to tricks to limit the events that can happen, but that in any real large system you do not have the luxury of predicting and controlling all the events that can happen. Control is an illusion that might work in small systems but in Real Life you cannot maintain this illusion. A nice book to trigger a discussion on these topics is "Creation: Life and How To Make It” by Steve Grand, the inventor of Creatures.

A few talks were looking forward in a more innovative manner and specifically John Vu, one of the Chief Engineers at Boeing, gave an interesting presentation. He also presented a more directional view of where large scale system need to go and his views are not that different from Amazon’s in that self-organizing techniques are crucial for the future of system development.

But now comes a month that I’ll be on the road again. Next week I’ll be in London for the Future of Web Apps conference to talk about Amazon’s Web Scale Computing Platform and the Web Apps that are enabled by combining multiple of these services.

I will be back in London on March 14 for two presentations at QCon. This is a conference for enterprise architects organized by the same folks who organize JAOO. I had such a great time at JAOO last year that I let myself be tricked into give two presentations: one opening keynote on the Amazon Technology Platform, and one presentation on Availability & Consistency where I talk about the different trade-offs you have to make in state management when building very large scale distributed applications.

Two weeks after that I will be back in the US to talk at ETech about Web Scale Computing architectures.

Posted by Werner Vogels at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The phone and cable companies will fundamentally alter the Internet in America unless Congress acts to stop them. They have the market power, and regulatory permission to restrict American consumers’ access to broadband Internet content, including music and movies, and have announced their plans to do so.

There is a lot of freedom at Gnomedex for the discussion leaders to address the topics that are on their minds. I will use my session at 1:30 tomorrow to address the current state of affairs with respect to the Net Neutrality debate. Yesterday’s vote by the Senate Commerce Committee shows that there are still many strong arguments in favor and against regulation that would ensure fair treatment of all internet content.

I would like to focus the discussion tomorrow on the impact a lack of regulation will have on ”The Individuals”, those who use the Internet to access services, and on “The Innovators”, those who want to build and launch services that need to compete with the establishment.

Other discussion topics: Susan, Ethan

tags: Net Neutrality, Gnomedex, Gnomedex 6.0

Posted by Werner Vogels at 5:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (4)

The coffee breaks are the best parts of the conference

I stole this remark from Harrison Owen. His observation was that the traditional way people come together to discuss issues was not very effective, but that they all thought the coffee breaks were the place where all the action happened.

I do believe there is room for a traditional conference model. I will definitely go listen to an expert or someone with unique experiences. This dissemination model works well if there is a highly educational quality to the content or if there is good entertainment value to it.  George Dyson for example is someone who is fascinating to listen to over and over again. But there are other non-celebrity speakers that are equally interesting because of the story they have to tell. I normally like an extensive Q&A session, because it show what other participants are thinking about. I like it especially if it is an experiences presentation or something really extreme, but I have also walked away from a presentation needing to think first before making up my mind. Giving the ability for your audience to follow-up is important.

I have not seen many successful panels. The main cause is that the selection of panelist is often very incestuous. Nothing more boring than a panel of experts. The real interesting panels I have seen or that I have participate in were those where people were willing to take shot at the other panelists.  Some passion and emotion will go a long way in making things interesting. If your competitor is on this panel, be polite but go for his throat; show the world why your product is the best. I was on panel last year with Jon Crowcroft where we on forehand divided up the roles; we would both take a complete extreme point of view and defend it, even if these were not our positions in real life. Nothing more effective to get a discussion going than two mad dogs on a podium going at each other.

The “work-in-progress” approach allows for a high bandwidth communication. In short time a diverse set of off-the-wall technologies parade bye that often triggers a deeper follow-up later on.

Beyond this the conferences that focus on participation are best served by the Open Space approach. I don’t think the “unconference” hybrid model is as effective as Open Space. Unconferences still rely on big names and predefined topics to restrict the conversation. In Open Space all the participants come together on the first day to define the topics to be discussed and anyone can propose a topic within the theme of the conference. Participants then go to take part in the discussions they are most passionate about.  There is some additional structure around the process to make sure everyone learns about the details of every topic that was discussed. The outcome depends a lot on the theme or the goals of the conference, but in general I have found that the participants feel extremely empowered by this approach.

The goal of Open Space is to make the whole conference one long coffee break …

Posted by Werner Vogels at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The programs for 2 conferences with mainly operating and distributed systems contributions are online now:

• 1^st EuroSys Conference, April 18-21, 2006, Leuven, Belgium
• 3^rd Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI’06), May 8-10, 2006, San Jose, CA

With 58 papers between the two conferences the systems research field appears to be very healthy. I participated in the program committee for Eurosys, and I believe there was a total of over 170 submissions. Assuming NSDI received a similar number of submissions, and of the same quality, there is a lot of good experimental work going on.

I sure hope the organizations for both conferences will be making the papers available online as soon as the authors produce their final versions. There is no gain in keeping the content of the papers obscured until the conference: making the papers available early will create a better prepared audience, with better questions and discussion.

The Eurosys program committee was the last remnant of my former academic life and it is going to be my last program committee for a while; I don’t have the bandwidth anymore to give papers the attention they deserve. For Eurosys I had to review between 30 and 40 papers, each with 14 pages of deep technical content. We did a lot of group reviewing, which was a great help, but I spent too many late nights on this to be fun.

Posted by Werner Vogels at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)