This morning’s plenary session, based on the scheduled speakers, is focused on the nebulous cloud. The cloud is what everyone in technology talks about, but everyone defines differently. It’s the section of the flow chart where magic happens. Somehow, we will send our data into the cloud and all our wishes will be fulfilled.

To be fair, this vagueness and my pessimism are precisely why these speakers have been invited to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. Tim O’Reilly has a grand vision for the cloud, for ubiquitous computing, and the use of technology to help solve the world’s problems. I commend him for that. I hope this morning’s speakers do justice to his vision and that, if there are valuable lessons to be learned, that we learn them.

Today’s LAMP Stack

David Recordon (Facebook)

Over the last decade, the LAMP stack hasn’t been fundamentally updated. A cache, such as memcached has been added. Different languages (Perl, Python, Ruby) have been used in place of the original PHP. Even different web servers have been used in place of Apache.

Facebook created HipHop for PHP, which compiles PHP into C++. Creating native executables in this way reduces CPU use by a large factor (a number I didn’t catch).

There are alternatives for the database component in the stack, too. MySQL is ubiquitous at this point. Facebook doesn’t really use the relational bits of MySQL very much. So they have been using databases from the NoSQL family—Hadoop, according to the presentation.

David made a point I think a lot of people miss. When evaluating databases, or any other software, first look at what problem needs solving, then find a product that solves it in the correct way. Too often I see people advocating their preferred solution without even looking at the problem.

Data is the lifeblood of Facebook (and we all have our own opinions about that). They are able to use a plethora of Open Source tools to store the data, scale the data, and analyze the data.

This talk wasn’t very focused on the cloud, aside from Facebook being a nebulous site where people store their data without really knowing where it goes or how it’s used. I expect this was more for public relations, given all the bad press they’ve had. Not that anyone stops using Facebook.

Open SETIQuest – It Will Be What You Make It!

Jill Tarter (SETI Institute)

Jill started her talk by explaining what SETI is and why it exists, which I won’t go into here, since it’s just a Google search away. I used to run SETI@home a bit over a decade ago when I was in college and felt like using my computer as a space heater.

Jill is here, representing SETI, because she wants to involve the world in their search. SETI has classroom materials covered, but they are lacking in the social networking world. Jill wants people to first identify themselves as Earthlings, recognizing our place in the Universe.

SETI, with the development of the setiQuest community, hopes to use the vast resources available in the Open Source world to improve the project. These include physical resources, such as cloud storage and compute cycles, to human resources, such as programmers and analysts.

Cloudant has created a SETI stack on the Amazon AWS infrastructure.

Open Cloud, Open Data

Jean Paoli (Microsoft)

I’m always a little concerned when I see a speaker from Microsoft at OSCON. While I can imagine that there are employees at the company who genuinely embrace Open Source—and, presumably from this talk, open data—I can’t lay aside my suspicion. Microsoft does not have a benevolent history with competition, so when a representative shows up to talk about an open cloud with open data, I instinctively look for the company’s angle. What is their nefarious plan?

Jean talked about open standards and open data. Data portability, standards, easy migration and deployment, and developer choice. For some reason, when he talks about the “open cloud,” I have thoughts about Microsoft’s OpenDocument move a few years ago. Sure, parts of it were open, but the format as a whole was useless for non-Microsoft tools.

He claimed that Microsoft Windows Azure is an open and interoperable platform. I have a hard time swallowing that. The #oscon IRC channel was not kind in its commentary. A selection from the channel logs:

<b3gl> "Microsoft totally agrees..." as long as you pay your Windows, Azure and MSSQL license fees

<alapapa> standards are great…as long as they're ours

<dbrewer> wow, thanks Microsoft.  You think I should be able to use any language I want, I appreciate your permissions.

<b3gl> dbrewer: Notice he didn't say "We believe if you want to use Linux ...."

Public Static Void

Rob Pike (Google, Inc.)

Programming languages used to be relatively simple, but still fairly powerful. They’ve gotten considerably more complex and confusing. The C++ language was used as an easy target during the talk. Rob went on to bash various (in most cases deservedly) programming languages as a way to lead into what he called the renaissance of language design.

Many of the emerging languages are dynamic and interpreted, and there’s a false dichotomy that they are considered good while the static and compiled languages are considered bad. Part of the problem is that the latter class of languages are old, designed in a different age of computing.

Obviously, the end goal of this talk was to talk about the Go language, which tries to bridge the gap between the dynamic interpreted languages and the static compiled languages.

Toward an Open Cloud

Lew Moorman (Rackspace.com)

Lew’s talk was to introduce OpenStack. Rackspace took the internal software that powers their cloud and donated it to OpenStack. I wonder if this is something we can use at my day job to build an internal cloud. The stack is licensed under the Apache 2 license and they don’t use a dual licensing model, which sounds nice.

I was wrong, the talks weren’t really about demonstrating the wonder of ubiquitous computing and how we can move in that direction so much as a showcase of organizations in the cloud or using the cloud. It was really just one long commercial.