What the recent Facebook and Twitter DDoS outage tells us

The web is extremely fragile.

Posted By Randall on 12-Aug-2009 12:09

The recent Facebook and Twitter Outage was an attack on one person. Twitter was down for 2 days. F-Secure said it was like bombing a TV station because you don't like one of the newscasters. Hmm... Except it's not.

This one person, whose name I won't mention, made some Russians so angry that they disabled a web service used by millions of people. MILLIONs of people.

The damage was even worse than just taking out Twitter and Facebook. It also took out portions of Blogger run by Google, the most massive data center in the world. LifeJournal was also down.

If hackers angry at one person can take down four internet companies' websites used by millions of people, imagine if they were angry at, I don't know... two people!

The Open Source Myth

Should I open source my software? If you are asking yourself that question, this post may help you decide what to do.

Posted By Randall on 28-May-2009 16:15

My goal here isn't to rehash a stale topic that "everyone dismisses" but to simply answer some questions about why I believe Open Sourcing might not be the best path for everyone and why I've made some of the decisions I have. I want to help other people who might be faced with the decision to open source their own software make a better decision for themselves. There is plenty of pro-Open Source Software (OSS) material on the web, so I'll focus on arguments against it, because that is my current stance. There's my bias, read at your own risk.

Why Myths around Open Source

The goal of a myth is not to tell a true story of history, but to encourage a particular kind of behavior. The myths of open source are to promote the development and use of open source. They are designed to encourage the promotion of it to build what many believe will be a better world.

The value of the myth is to support a particular idea, regardless of the truth behind the myth. The proponents of OSS thought, or think, it'll make the world a better place, but has it? I don't know. I really don't know any other industry that gives away the fruits of its labor and still exists. Maybe there are some, I just don't know them.

Maybe you could consider charities like the Red Cross an open source equivalent to hospitals, but businesses are not charities and even charities rely on money to survive. If developers give away their software, where is the food going to come from? Lots, perhaps most, open source developers have salaried jobs. OSS is a side project, but if you want it to be your money maker, perhaps it isn't for you.

It seems like the Open Source movement is devaluing the labor required to build software. They are pushing developers into the realm of starving artists or garage bands with the only reward of their labor being a warm and fuzzy feeling. But warm and fuzzy feelings don't pay the rent or buy food.

The myth here is that OSS is better for the developer. In reality, it is better for everyone but the developer.

Try to remain rational

I know this is a heated topic. Open source or closed source has become part of the developer identity, so it can get a little emotional to say the least. Much of the issue is the same as debates on religion, so Paul Graham's thoughts on identity apply here as well.

I warn you, I may get a bit emotional myself, but I'll do my best to keep my comments rational and focused.

Some background

First, I'll point to Niel Gunton's Open Source Myth's from a few years ago. The article is a good one and sparked some healthy debate. In the slashdot conversation etymxris replies, "I just don't think that the government should grant monopolies on any idea." Let's be clear, we aren't talking about a monopoly on the idea, but rather the implementation of the idea, that is, the work, energy, research and development required to make the idea whole and usable. Remember, success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Second, some links at Orielly.com talk about myths related to OSS, both pro (1999) and con (2003).

You can't undo Open Sourcing your project

This is one of the biggest issues for me. It's the same reason I have no tattoos. I will never get a tattoo, because I don't want to do anything to my body that costs more to undo. If you open source your code, you can never take it back. I am not absolutely certain that I want to Open Source my code, so I don't. That is a good enough reason for me. Undecided = no.

Of course I could have different versions of the software, some of it open and some closed. I could fork it. Other people could fork it. I could have "closed source" features. But all that just makes the decision more complicated and easier to avoid. So I just say no.

If I never get a tattoo, I never have to worry that the needle was sterilized properly and I don't have to worry about getting a bad tattoo.

Closed source software is simpler for the developer. Code is complex enough. Do you want to focus on managing an open source community or focus on your customers? Managing forks? Maintaining control? Open sourcing code is like opening a can of worms. Who knows what will happen!

Some arguments say, if you open source your product, the community will make it better for you. Well, that's largely a lie and it's also motivated by laziness. A lot of OSS projects are released because the developer isn't skilled enough to complete the vision and people have little desire to implement someone else's vision. You're better off keeping your project closed and working hard to make it valuable enough for a customer to buy. Then you can ditch the day job and focus on your vision 100%.

License Virus

Daniel J. Schwartz, from Jenner & Block, LLP, in Open Source: Paper Tiger, Hidden Problems writes:

If a programmer simply clicks on a button to download even the smallest packet of code and thereby agrees to the GPL, then the GPL may require the entire software program, which incorporates the GPL-code, to be made available as open source under the GPL. This is true regardless of whether the programmer or employer ever intended others to be able to see, read, view and modify their software. Thus, a single click of the mouse may render otherwise proprietary software available to all. For this reason, the GPL is often referred to as the most “viral” open source license agreement – i.e., like a virus, it infects any code into which it gets inserted.

There are myriad OSS licenses. 65 different Open Source licenses in 9 different categories at opensource.org alone. There are just too many. These licenses are like viruses. If you use code that contains them, your code contains them. They attach themselves to everything you write and everything you distribute. These viruses run the risk of killing the host -- the software and the developer career.

It seems ironic that there is competition out there to enable people to give away their source code. Why can't the open source developer just put the code up on a web page? Even when releasing the code to the wild, there is still the desire to "keep it." To keep some recognition. To prevent abuse and "theft" of the idea. The OSS developer is saying, "I will relinquish profit, but you can't profit either!" Why? Well, perhaps on the pro side, as we will see later, there could be some protection of your right to use your own software.

It's a license popularity contest. It feels irrational. People get unpredictable when they venture outside rationality, so that is one reason to stay away. Exactly why it is so irrational is a bit of a mystery, but until it is solved, I can't say yes...

Legal Precedent

There is very little legal precedent to help the developer understand what will happen in court. There are some cases, one regarding model rail road software. One person selling train software sued someone who had open sourced his software. The OSS guy, then counter sued because the software seller used some of the OSS in the CSS, see the part about unfriendly communities below). Still, the OSS guy, Bob Jacobsen, still had to spend time in court to use his own free software. Just because you open source your software, doesn't mean it's yours.

Microsoft went after Linux for some of the same reasons. So, still a mystery in the mind of law, thus undecided = no.

I could do that myself

We often say this when we look at beautiful art, but could you? Why didn't you? If you can, please do. It will expand the market for the product and give consumers something against which they can compare different options. Make the closed source projects work harder to make a buck. Some believe competition is good, but I believe collaboration is better. Both kinds of people exist in the OSS world.

A lot of hackers out there think they could build a better open source version of a commercial product, but they fail and hurt their customers. I've lost emails on two different occassions because of bugs in Thunderbird. I never lost emails with Outlook Express, which is closed, but also free. Thunderbird is really bad at importing its own mail boxes. It can import from Outlook Express. Why can't it as easily import its own content? How can Thunderbird just forget that it has been setup and configured already? It's like they don't even know why it happens... That doesn't instill a lot of confidence and I'll never use Thunderbird again. If Outlook did that, people would stop paying for it.

Open source is a label used to market products. It's often a gimmick and it hurts the end user in some cases. Just because it's open source doesn't mean it will be supported later or it is quality software. Most end users aren't able to tell the difference anyway. Sure, you can add to the project if you know how (etc), but that doesn't mean you will, nor does that mean it will be in your best interest just having that capability years down the road.

The examples are that MySQL is not as good as SQL Server or Oracle. Then MySQL was bought by Sun, then Oracle bought Sun, so since MySql competes with Oracle, what happens to MySQL?

The idea that OSS is better for your personal or organizational future is a myth. The future is uncertain, regardless of whether or not you can see the code.

Think about it. Is the future of software threatened because computer processors are not open? You can't tweak your graphics hardware. You can't improve your own memory chips. It's not a rational argument, it's a myth.

The OSS community is selling the hope that you will be able to modify the code later. The hope that you will be able to find a programmer who can help you when you need it. The hope that your software will never die, but OSS projects die all the time, so you aren't really limiting your risk. In fact, you may be increasing your risk if the developers behind the OSS project fall out of love with it or die because they can't afford to eat. Money is a good incentive to keep working on a block of code.

Too many forks, not enough spoons

I don't even want to count the number of Linux distributions available. Do you want something like that to happen to your software? I don't know. It seems like it would be better to have a community around Linux, but really it's a community around different distributions of Linux. Some OSS works in some distributions of Linux and doesn't work in others. Sometimes it's as easy as recompiling the original source for your distribution, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes you must install other software packages to make the software you want work. Truth is, OSS is highly dependent on other OSS projects. What if the projects your software depends on lose flavor with the developers behind them? What happens if Oracle stops supporting MySQL and your PHP app runs on MySQL?

This might not be a big deal to you. I can understand that. But look at the web now. How many browsers are built on top of webkit or gecko? There's infighting among the community as well. "My distro is better than your distro!" Okay, well the fact that there are multiple distros makes the OSS world more confusing for the end user and what the end user wants is simplicity.

OSS leads to complexity, subtracts value for the end user and replaces it with risk. We want less risk, not more. To say that OSS is less risky for consumers than commercial software is a myth. It makes it better for the hacker, sometimes, but not always.

The community is not completely friendly

From dossen (306388) at the slashdot response

To "rip off" (as in fork the project and become the "official" version) the code from such a project, you would need to provide enough of the infrastructure that the original company provides, keep people interested in your version, and merge any "good" changes

If you are a small development shop, this is not difficult. Not only do small development shops, and especially individuals, suffer from "Hit by the bus" syndrome that a larger company who forks your OSS may not. Larger organizations also have more money and power to market their version of your software. If they are really powerful, they can just recreate your software, but why give them a head start? This is a dog-eat-dog world and if your product is valuable, someone will want to compete with you. Not all of us are collaborators, but we all need to eat and some of us want SUVs.

So in this case, size matters. The smaller you are as an organization, the less power you have to defend your OSS project.

OSS is not necessarily VC friendly

Open source actually increases risk. Because there are few legal precedents, some attorneys caution against using open source software. There may be some questions about how much of your project you own and how much has to be made public.

Say Microsoft did win in their case against Linux and your project is built on Linux. Maybe you have to stop using your software or rewrite it for something other than Linux.

This uncertainty increases risk and therefore reduces valuations. Not all VC's care. Some do. Some actually prefer you build your apps on open source, because open source is free, meaning lower startup costs.

Not all changes from the community are good

Your community might want to take your software their own direction, but that doesn't mean the changes they implement make the software better. Multiple software developers means more confusing code, it's more difficult to maintain, and there is more of it. That's not always better for the end user of the software.

You may end up with too many cooks in the kitchen.

Not all developers are good developers -- few are great

I've seen some really bad code out there. We all have. Open sourcing your software exposes it to the good ones and the bad ones. You'll spend a lot of your time doing code reviews instead of writing your own code.

Input from the community distracts you from your vision

The whole reason you started writing your software was to implement a vision. We've seen lots of communities on the internet, that once they start growing in population, they get less and less focused on the original vision. As the size of the community approaches infinity, the quality of the content approaches average. That mirrors my impression of a lot of open source projects. They aren't great pieces of software. They are average pieces of software. Firefox isn't the fastest browser. It's an okay browser. MySql is an average database. It's good enough, but not the best.

I want to be the best. I want to strive to be the best every day and I don't want to make my customers settle for average software.

Lack of revenue potential

If you open source your software your monetization options become limited. What intellectual property do you have to sell? You can be a services organization of course, but that means you'll be working forever and there are a plethora of people around the world who will perform services for less money than you will.

The pool of competition for great products is a lot smaller than the pool of competition for services. Many more people can install Joomla than can build Joomla for example. It may be in your best interest to keep your good ideas in your head and let people use the product rather than the code.

If software patents weren't essentially worthless, then perhaps you could retain your right to sell the open source, but still, undecided.

Product company vs. Service Company

When I was a consultant, I realized that as a service provider, I am selling my hours. I only have so many hours to sell. If I build a product, I can sell those hours over and over again. That's better for me. I want to get out of the hamster wheel. I want to be able to focus on bringing good to the world in many more ways than I could ever do if I sold only my hours. Life is short.

Success Stories are Rare

There are some good OSS projects out there, but the success stories are dwarfed by those of CSS. How many billion dollar open source software companies are there? How many closed source?

A lot of the OSS community is selling false hope. You won't get a bigger community with OSS than CSS. You won't work less. You won't make more money. It's a myth. Stop using one or two or three success stories to convince thousands of people to release their hard work and receive no rewards. The risk/reward balance is irrational.

Open sourcing your software benefits those who can't write software. Those who aren't creative enough or skilled enough to build it themselves, but are skilled enough to build a services organization on top of your software or sell some product like TiVo that included it.

Who benefits from Open Source?

I was at a little web hacker community and someone told me I should go talk to this other guy over there and get his opinion of my idea. The first question out of that man's mouth was, "Is it open source?" I replied, "No." The guy turned and walked away. When I investigated the guy later, turns out he wasn't a software developer. He couldn't write code himself, but he sold lots of contracting gigs customizing Drupal and Joomla sites. He paid developers a little bit of money to do the work on top of those platforms and he pocketed the rest.

I have learned since then, that many of the biggest proponents of open source make money off open source, but contribute very little to the community themselves. The hypocrisy is enough for me to stay away.

Imagine telling doctors to open source their skills or attorneys to open source their skills. It's hard to be a great computer programmer. It takes years and decades of practice, degrees, research, dedication. It's a real risk and the creative individuals who take the time to build visionary software should be rewarded for it.

You can fix or enhance it yourself

If the software is flexible enough, it can be customized without getting to the source. Source code is not flexible for most consumers of software. Only consumers who can code or afford to pay someone who can code can enhance source code, so in most cases, liberated software is not free software.

Go to any hosting company's tech support forums and you'll see countless people complaining about some open source project's ability to run in that environment. Maybe the product is slow or has some incompatibility. Do the individuals using the software fix the bugs or improve the performance? No, they just complain about it and tell the hosting company to make their platform work with the open source.

So the argument that the consumer of OSS is free to modify it to do whatever is a myth. It just doesn't happen like they say it does and most end users don't know how to do it even if they have the source.

Complicating the issue are the myriad environments in which OSS operates, the languages used to power them, the stacks used to run them. It is not as simple as going in and fixing the software. You have to install and configure an environment where it will run, learn the language, then understand the code well enough to make a meaningful contribution to the project.

Even worse, if you do fix the problem for a particular environment, then you are stuck with whichever version you were on. Maybe the community doesn't want to incorporate your fix into the software, so if you want to upgrade later, you may have to re-fix it. It becomes an endless cycle.

Free as in Beer

When I say "free" I mean the commonly understood definition of "costs no money." Let's just end the confusion. Every time someone uses the term free, the "Free as in Beer, Free as in Speech" discussion has to happen. So Free Software is software that costs no money. Liberated software is software that is easily modified to do more things.

The world understands "free" to mean zero cost. Let's speak to the world using common language. I like what Registered Coward v2 (447531) at the slashdot response said:

...how many times do you see someone looking for an OSS aka "free" counterpart to a CSS aka "cost money" product? They're looking for free as in no cost, not as in I can mod it. That perception will limit entry and ultimately stifle innovation. How many innovative, vs "let's copy the functionality of product X" OSs programs are out there?

If the point of OSS is to give users control of their own computers, then the whole argument seems silly. I've been making my computers do anything I wanted them to since long before open source software. Even with open source software, many people can still barely use them, so it's really not a valid argument in my mind.

The reality is that OSS is neither Free as in Beer, nor is it Free as in Speech. It's not free. It costs money to pay someone to install, host, configure, and enhance free software. It requires time to learn and time is money. OSS is not free.

Open source does not make software more secure

One argument is that open source is more secure because other coders can go in there and fix it. But not all coders understand security. They may implement features that make your project less secure. More hands in the mix complicate the issue of security.

Plus, the black box makes it harder for hackers to understand. If they look at the code, it'll be easier for them to find the security holes too and there's no reason to believe they'll inform the community. Why should they?

I'm not even going to waste my time pointing out all the security problems with countless open source projects. There are a plethora of them. To say that OSS is more secure is a myth.

Is Russian ownership of Facebook a threat to national security?

Through its social graphs, Facebook knows more about Americans than most Americans. What if the Russians do too?

Posted By Randall on 26-May-2009 19:34


According to Techcrunch, Facebook took $200 Million from a Russian Internet Investment firm. Putting aside the scary images from Training Day, such an investment does raise concerns about foreign ownership of American properties and such concern is not without precident.

In 2006, when Dubai Ports World wanted to buy a stake in American shipping centers, the ports deal was reviewed, then Congress declared war on it. The argument went like this,

Terrorist organizations could use containers to smuggle weapons or terrorists into the United States, or could turn a container into a weapon by detonating a conventional, chemical, biological or nuclear weapon within a container once it arrives on American shores.

That deal posed a physical threat to our lives, but what about threats posed by knowledge gained from information on the Internet -- or behind it? Pause for a second. I know it sounds paranoid, but Japan is creating its own search engine. Why? Because, according to the article,

Many people in Japan fear that the domination of the three [internet search] firms will prevent Japanese companies from entering the market.

France is doing the same.

Governments around the world clearly believe information on the web is of National importance. So much so, that they are creating their own competitors to giants in the United States.

Not only do national governments believe it is critical to ensure access to information on the web, but they also want to limit access to information on the web. Lots of areas of Google maps are blurred for security reasons. Even India fears Google Earth may be a threat to their national security, because:

these websites provided minute details, photographs and 'extremely accurate navigational coordinates' of sensitive areas.

Even parts of Russia are blurred on Google Maps

These concerns are about visible, physical features of our land, but what about features of our social graph? Who knows whom. Where they live. Where they are going to be. What they listen to and read. Facebook has a very large collection of our most intimate connections. This information includes, and therefore, must be more valuable than the library books you read alone. The U.S. government wants access to our library records, because it believes it can use the knowledge of what an individual reads to help protect citizens of the United States. Might this information be beneficial to other organizations outside our government as well?

Of course I am not suggesting that this deal is

What security issues could result from a foreign interest having access to the most intimate connections between our citizens?

a security threat, but it does raise some interesting questions about knowledge and the future of information on the internet. Really, who knows? Maybe it is a security threat.

Even the CIA itself uses Facebook for hiring purposes. From Wired magazine,

"[Facebook is] an invaluable tool when it comes to peer-to-peer marketing," says Michele Neff, a CIA spokeswoman.

If it is valuable to our own Central Intelligence Agency, why wouldn't it be valuable to other not so friendly intelligence agencies? There is a lot more information behind Facebook's interface than is visible from the outside, but even from the outside, Facebook is valuable. I can't help but believe access to the raw data would be more valuable -- it must be.

What happens when a foreign intelligence has access to Facebook's emails? Imagine what they could find. They could find people who don't like the United States. They could find people who say angry things about our government.

I am not even going to pretend that I am as smart as the CIA or any other organized group, but if I can think of this, surely they have. How valuable would such data be? I don't know, but one of our concerns right now with North Korea is that once they know how to build nuclear weapons, they could sell this knowledge to other countries. According to PBS, regarding North Korea's monetization of nuclear capabilities, "The export of ballistic missiles and related technology is one of North Korea's main sources of hard currency." Pakistan sold, sensitive nuclear equipment and know-how to Iran. Not a physical product, only the knowledge. Knowledge.

Facebook contains information that can give, perhaps unfriendly, organizations in the world knowledge about many American citizens and also their ties to citizens of other countries as well. These connections are valuable and they aren't only valuable to corporations who want to sell us kitsch. They may want to sell us some propaganda too.

Knowledge is very powerful. Is access to knowledge a security threat? Of course it is. Is access to Facebook's knowledge a security threat? If the CIA believes Facebook is a valuable medium to help them protect our security, why couldn't it also be used to threaten our security?

Cloud Computing and the Hype Cycle

We are about 6 months into the hype cycle, with a lot left to go. What will the industry be feeling over the coming months and years?

Posted By Randall on 02-Jun-2008

There was an article today at ComputerWeekly, called "The end of the IT Department, is it in the cloud?" In it, Tom Austin of Gartner says he expects uptake of cloud services to increase dramatically by 2013. If it is true that the hype-cycle is cresting, there will be 5 years of trough, which is unlikely. We haven't really gotten started with cloud computing and there is a lot of hype left to be generated.

There was a lot more hype around Web 2.0 in my opinion and cloud computing has a lot more substance. Austin agrees saying, cloud computing is "probably the single biggest magnitude wave of change that we've ever seen." The situation now though, is that those on the edge of IT are getting tired of hype in general. It started with the dot com boom, then Web 2.0, Social Networking, and now there are a lot more skeptics out there. Anything getting buzz in the industry is going to get a lot more scrutiny as well -- and faster.

There are a lot of parallels between the hype around Web 2.0, Social Networking, and Cloud Computing, but the significant difference is that cloud computing is more difficult for the consumer to understand, because few of them interact directly with cloud computing services. For them, cloud computing is mostly behind the scenes. They use and interact with Web 2.0 websites and social networks, but they know little of the infrastructure behind the systems. For that single reason, the buzz will not reach such dramatic levels as Web 2.0. Still though, "cloud computing" only really got started at the end of 2007, it is premature to be suggesting we've reached the crest of the wave.

We have yet to really understand what cloud computing is and all the benefits it will offer society. Most conversations about the topic outside conferences are still trying to explain exactly what cloud computing is. Until we understand what it is, how can we comprehend the magnitude of the influence? You could say we don't understand it enough and therefore expect too much, but the opposite is true.

Mosso CloudFS

Today, Mosso announced a cloud storage service to compliment their cloud computing service. Existing Mosso customers can consolidate cloud providers and save money on bandwidth compared to Amazon S3.

Posted By Randall on 05-May-2008

Cloud computing is the hot topic in the computing space today. For nearly two years now, Mosso has been providing compute cloud services on the LAMP stack and Microsoft .NET, but accounts are now limited to 50GB of disk space without incurring overage fees. Each gig over costs $0.50. Compare this to Mosso's new cloud storage offering at $0.15 per GB.

The Cloud Storage service is priced to compete with Amazon's S3, which Qrimp currently uses for database backups. We abstracted the remote storage calls, so I suspect it will be a trivial matter to convert from S3 to Mosso. I signed up for the early beta, I'll blog more about that as I use the service. You can sign up for the free pre-release beta here. John Engates also has a post in the Racklabs Blog talking about the process of building the Cloud Storage system.

The thing that really interests me about the service is now Qrimp can consolidate our service providers. Mosso provides our database and compute cloud services, but backing up to S3 requires managing multiple vendors. Being on the .NET platform, we can't easily use Amazon EC2, so the logical answer is to move file storage to Mosso's Cloud.

I can't wait to use this new service. Subscribe to the Qrimp Blog and I'll keep you updated. I plan to post some code samples for others who are on S3, but would like to migrate to CloudFS.

The difference between Web Hosting and Cloud Computing

What exactly is the difference between hosting and cloud computing? Aren't they the same? No.

Posted By Randall on 24-Apr-2008

Gordon Haff's post on The New Hosting Provider? over at Illuminata made me realize the differences between cloud computing and web hosting aren't exactly clear. Where do all these things fit? Who needs what? He mentions simple services like Blogger being more attractive to the novices, but cloud computing isn't about solving a specific software problem, like building a blog.

What is Cloud Computing?

Remember the old days when mainframes were really expensive, so companies that needed a lot of computing power would time share Crays? Cloud computing is like that. Cloud Computing is hardware, a lot of hardware, in a data center, somewhere, that is shared by many users. Users of the cloud, like time sharers of Crays, are given as much computing power as they need -- when they need it.

This differs from typical Web Hosting, because web hosting gives you a fixed server or a portion of a single server, where cloud computing gives you the benefit of many servers all working together as one. Your particular website or application may only need one small portion of a single server, so there's no need to get a dedicated server. Those servers sit on, consuming power and space even if it isn't needed.

Where cloud computing really offers benefits is when a website or application gets hit with a lot of traffic in a very short amount of time. This is also known as "slash-dotted" or "the digg effect." As you can see from those links, on a regular web host, you'd be toast. This very thing happened to John M. Willis recently, but Mosso, a cloud computing provider, saved his bacon.

This is because Mosso has additional capacity, beyond a single server, to serve his blog. If the hits come in a massive wave, The Cloud automatically distributes the load to multiple servers. When the hits subside, John's blog is taken off those additional servers, freeing up computing space for other blogs and sites like Qrimp.

Scaling a site is not a trivial problem. Difficulties lie at all levels of the stack and working out the kinks becomes exponentially more difficult as you add servers to the farm. You have to build a high performance network for all the servers and then you have to make sure those servers can communicate with each other effectively. On top of that is the software that has to properly use data caching and optimized code. The industry is so diverse that there are experts at every level -- and they are expensive -- the good ones anyway.

The good news is that end users don't have to worry about it anymore. Those end users include developers as well. The less people have to worry about, the more productive they can be and the better they are able to solve particular problems. Mosso solves Qrimp's hardware problem, Qrimp can then focus on and solve the software optimization and interface problems, and our customers can focus on their business problems and how they are going to solve them with databases and web applications.

With typical web hosting, the end user, the builder of the website still has to solve the problems at every layer of the application. Of course scaling a site only becomes a problem if it is popular and at that point, like Kyle says, you can bring in the nerds, but you also have to pay for their dedicated services all by yourself. The advantage of Cloud Computing, is that you pay for the hosting and you get the Scalability Nerds' expertise included.

Google App Engine vs. Qrimp

Google just announced their App Engine product that allows developers to create web apps to run on the Google Infrastructure, but it is not browser based web development.

Posted By Randall on 08-Apr-2008

Webware has a post talking about Google's new App Engine. App engine is a cloud product that enables developers to build systems that will run on Google's infrastructure. Their offering competes with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Mosso to some degree.

So how does this compare to Qrimp? Qrimp too is a cloud computing environment, but Qrimp differs from App Engine, EC2 and Mosso in that you don't have to know how to program to use it. Qrimp is browser based web development, which is a layer on top of the infrastructure that simplifies the development of web systems. With Qrimp, you just copy/paste your spreadsheet data and the rest is done for you. Building a system that would enable that functionality and also run on one of the clouds would be a job unto itself -- that's what Qrimp is for.

EC2 and App Engine are the infrastructure only, so to build a system to run on them, you still have to know how to program and build databases from scratch. You need to understand data modeling and HTML. If you understand those things, Qrimp is even better, but you don't have to know them to use Qrimp.

It's exciting to see these new technologies coming out. EC2 and App Engine and Mosso are like the old Cray mainframes that allowed organizations to build complex algorithms that needed a lot of processing power to run effectively. These clouds are exposing the hardware to organizations who need them to run the applications built on top of them. Qrimp does the same thing, except Qrimp goes one step further into actually bringing the application development environment itself into the web browser.

With the other three cloud offerings, you must develop your system locally on your own hardware, write the code, debug it, build the database and then push that compiled code up to the cloud hardware, or in some cases edit it there. With Qrimp, there is nothing local, it all happens in the browser -- you could even build a custom web application using your cell phone!