Executive Blog Posts

I'm SoftLayer's director of international operations, so I have the unique pleasure of spending a lot of time on airplanes and in hotels as I travel between Dallas, Amsterdam, Singapore and wherever else our event schedule dictates. In the past six months, I've spent most of my time in Asia, and I've tried to take advantage of the opportunity relearn the culture to help shape SoftLayer Asia's business.

To really get a sense the geographic distance between Dallas and Singapore, find a globe and put one index finger on Dallas and put your other index finger on Singapore. To travel from one location to the other, you fly to the other side of the planet. Given the space considerations, our network map uses a scaled-down representative topology to show our points of presence in a single view, and you get a sense of how much artistic license was used when you actually make the trip to Singapore.

The longest currently scheduled commercial flight on the planet takes you from Singapore to Newark in a cool 19 hours, but I choose to maintain my sanity rather than set world records for amount of time spent in a metal tube. I usually hop from Dallas to Tokyo (a mere 14 hours away) where I spend a few days, and I get on another plane down to Singapore.

The break between the two legs of the trip serves a few different purposes ... I get a much needed escape from the confines of an airplane, I'm able to spend time in an amazing city (where I lived 15 years ago), and I can use the opportunity to explore the market for SoftLayer. Proximity and headcount dictated that we spend most of our direct marketing and sales time focusing on the opportunities radiating from Singapore, so we haven't been able to spend as much time as we'd like in Japan. Fortunately, we've been able organically grow our efforts in the country through community-based partnerships and sponsorships, and we owe a great deal of our success to our partners in the region and our new-found friends. I've observed from our experience in Japan that the culture breeds two contrasting business realities that create challenges and opportunities for companies like SoftLayer: Japan is insular and Japan is global.

When I say that Japan is insular, I mean that IT purchases are generally made in the realm of either Japanese firms or foreign firms that have spent decades building reputation in market. Becoming a trusted part of that market is a time-consuming (and expensive) endeavor, and it's easy for a business to be dissuaded as an outsider. The contrasting reality that Japanese businesses also have a huge need for global reach is where SoftLayer can make an immediate impact.

Consider the Japanese electronics and the automobile industries. Both were built internally before making the leap to other geographies, and over the course of decades, they have established successful brands worldwide. Japanese gaming companies, social media companies and vibrant start-up communities follow a similar trend ... only faster. The capital investment required to go global is negligible compared to their forebears because they don't need to build factories or put elaborate logistics operations in place anymore. Today, a Japanese company with a SaaS solution, a game or a social media experience can successfully share it with the world in a matter minutes or hours at minimal cost, and that's where SoftLayer is able to immediately serve the Japanese market.

The process of building the SoftLayer brand in Asia has been accelerated by the market's needs, and we don't take that for granted. We plan to continue investing in local communities and working with our partners to become a trusted and respected resource in the market, and we are grateful for the opportunities those relationships have opened for us ... Or as Styx would say, "Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto."

-@quigleymar

I was born and raised in Brockville, Ontario, and I've always been a proud Canadian. In 2000, I decided to leave my homeland to pursue career options south of the 49th parallel, so I became an active participant in Canada's so-called "brain drain." It's never easy starting over, but I felt that my options were limited in Canada and that I wouldn't find many opportunities to make an impact on a global stage.

Fast-forward to 2012. Early in the year, we were introduced to GrowLab — a leading Vancouver based accelerator — by our friends at East Side Games Studio. They seemed to have a lot of incredible stuff going on, so I planned an exploratory mission of sorts ... In June, I'd visit a few Canadian cities with an open mind to see what, if anything, had changed. With the Catalyst Program's amazing success in the US, I hoped we could hunt down one or two Canadian startups and accelerators to help out.

I was very pleasantly surprised at what I found: A vibrant, thriving Canadian community of entrepreneurs that seemed to match or exceed the startup activity I've seen in Silicon Valley, Boulder, Boston, New York, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Dubai. How times have changed! Investing in the Canadian startup scene was a no-brainer.

The Catalyst team hit the ground running and immediately started working with GrowLab and several other incredible organizations like Communitech, Ryerson University Digital Media Zone (DMZ), Innovation Factory, Extreme Startups and the Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE).

We'll enroll startups participating in those organizations into the Catalyst Program, and we'll provide infrastructure credits (for servers, storage and networking), executive mentoring, engineering resources and limited financial support. SoftLayer wants to become the de facto Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider for Canadian startups and startups worldwide, so this is a huge first step onto the international stage. More importantly — and on a personal level — I'm excited that we get to help new companies in Canada make a global impact with us.

As a Canadian expat, having the opportunity to give something back means a great deal to me. I see an incredible opportunity to nurture and help some of these Canadian startups take flight. SoftLayer is still an entrepreneurial company at heart, and we have a unique perspective on what it takes to build and scale the next killer app or game, so we feel especially suited to the task.

One of the Canadian entrepreneurs we've been working with sent us this great video produced by the Vancouver-based GROW Conference about entrepreneurship, and it immediately resonated with me, so I wanted to be sure to include it in this post:

We've already started working with dozens entrepreneurs in Vancouver, Toronto, Hamilton and Waterloo who embody that video and have kindred spirits to my own. SoftLayer has a few Canadian ex-pats on our team, and as Catalyst moves into Canada officially, we're all extremely proud of our heritage and the opportunity we have to help.

Some have called our foray into the Canadian market an "international expansion" of sorts, I think of it more as a "coming home party."

-@gkdog

Last week, I got an email from a huge technology conference about their new website, exciting new speaker line up and the availability of early-bird tickets. I clicked on a link from that email, and I find that their fancy new website was down. After giving up on getting my early-bird discount, I surfed over to Facebook, and I noticed a post from one of my favorite blogs, Dutch Cowboys, about another company's interesting new product release. I clicked the link to check out the product, and THAT site was down, too. It's painfully common for some of the world's most popular sites and applications buckle under the strain of their own success ... Just think back to when Diablo III was launched: Demand crushed their servers on release day, and the gamers who waited patiently to get online with their copy turned to the world of social media to express their visceral anger about not being able to play the game.

The question everyone asks is why this kind of thing still happens. To a certain extent, the reality is that most entrepreneurs don't know what they don't know. I spoke with an woman who was going to be featured on BBC's Dragons' Den, and she said that the traffic from the show's viewers crippled most (if not all) of the businesses that were presented on the program. She needed to safeguard from that happening to her site, and she didn't know how to do that.

Fortunately, it's pretty easy to keep sites and applications online with on-demand infrastructure and auto-scaling tools. Unfortunately, most business owners don't know how easy it is, so they don't take advantage of the resources available to them. Preparing a website, game or application for its own success doesn't have to be expensive or time consuming. With pay-for-what-you-use pricing and "off the shelf" cloud management solutions, traffic-caused outages do NOT have to happen.

First impressions are extremely valuable, and if I wasn't really interested in that conference or the new product Dutch Cowboys blogged about, I'd probably never go back to those sites. Most Internet visitors would not. I cringe to think about the potential customers lost.

Businesses spend a lot of time and energy on user experience and design, and they don't think to devote the same level of energy on their infrastructure. In the 90's, sites crashing or slowing was somewhat acceptable since the interwebs were exploding beyond available infrastructure's capabilities. Now, there's no excuse.

If you're launching a new site, product or application, how do you get started?

The first thing you need to do is understand what resources you need and where the potential bottlenecks are when hundreds, thousands or even millions of people want to what you're launching. You don't need to invest in infrastructure to accommodate all of that traffic, but you need to know how you can add that infrastructure when you need it.

One of the easiest ways to prepare for your own success without getting bogged down by the bits and bytes is to take advantage of resources from some of our technology partners (and friends). If you have a PHP, Ruby on Rails or Node.js applications, Engine Yard will help you deploy and manage a specialized hosting environment. When you need a little more flexibility, RightScale's cloud management product lets you easily manage your environment in "a single integrated solution for extreme efficiency, speed and control." If your biggest concern is your database's performance and scalability, Cloudant has an excellent cloud database management service.

Invest a little time in getting ready for your success, and you won't need to play catch-up when that success comes to you. Given how easy it is to prepare and protect your hosting environment these days, outages should go the way of the 8-track player.

-@jpwisler

I like to think that we are beyond 'defining' cloud, but what I find in reality is that we still argue over basics. I have conversations in which people still delineate things like "hosting" from "cloud computing" based degrees of single-tenancy. Now I'm a stickler for definitions just like the next pedantic software-religious guy, but when it comes to arguing minutiae about cloud computing, it's easy to lose the forest for the trees. Instead of discussing underlying infrastructure and comparing hypervisors, we'll look at two well-cited definitions of cloud computing that may help us unify our understanding of the model.

I use the word "model" intentionally there because it's important to note that cloud computing is not a "thing" or a "product." It's a way of doing business. It's an operations model that is changing the fundamental economics of writing and deploying software applications. It's not about a strict definition of some underlying service provider architecture or whether multi-tenancy is at the data center edge, the server or the core. It's about enabling new technology to be tested and fail or succeed in blazing calendar time and being able to support super-fast growth and scale with little planning. Let's try to keep that in mind as we look at how NIST and Gartner define cloud computing.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a government organization that develops standards, guidelines and minimum requirements as needed by industry or government programs. Given the confusion in the marketplace, there's a huge "need" for a simple, consistent definition of cloud computing, so NIST had a pretty high profile topic on its hands. Their resulting Cloud Computing Definition describes five essential characteristics of cloud computing, three service models, and four deployment models. Let's table the service models and deployment models for now and look at the five essential characteristics of cloud computing. I'll summarize them here; follow the link if you want more context or detail on these points:

• On-Demand Self Service: A user can automatically provision compute without human interaction.
• Broad Network Access: Capabilities are available over the network.
• Resource Pooling: Computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned.
• Rapid Elasticity: Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released.
• Measured Service: Resource usage can be monitored, controlled and reported.

The characteristics NIST uses to define cloud computing are pretty straightforward, but they are still a little ambiguous: How quickly does an environment have to be provisioned for it to be considered "on-demand?" If "broad network access" could just mean "connected to the Internet," why include that as a characteristic? When it comes to "measured service," how granular does the resource monitoring and control need to be for something to be considered "cloud computing?" A year? A minute? These characteristics cast a broad net, and we can build on that foundation as we set out to create a more focused definition.

For our next stop, let's look at Gartner's view: "A style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using Internet infrastructure." From a philosophical perspective, I love their use of "style" when talking about cloud computing. Little differentiates the underlying IT capabilities of cloud computing from other types of computing, so when looking at cloud computing, we really just see a variation on how those capabilities are being leveraged. It's important to note that Gartner's definition includes "elastic" alongside "scalable" ... Cloud computing gets the most press for being able to scale remarkably, but the flip-side of that expansion is that it also needs to contract on-demand.

All of this describes a way of deploying compute power that is completely different than the way we did this in the decades that we've been writing software. It used to take months to get funding and order the hardware to deploy an application. That's a lot of time and risk that startups and enterprises alike can erase from their business plans.

How do we wrap all of those characteristics up into unified of definition of cloud computing? The way I look at it, cloud computing is as an operations model that yields seemingly unlimited compute power when you need it. It enables (scalable and elastic) capacity as you need it, and that capacity's pricing is based on consumption. That doesn't mean a provider should charge by the compute cycle, generator fan RPM or some other arcane measurement of usage ... It means that a customer should understand the resources that are being invoiced, and he/she should have the power to change those resources as needed. A cloud computing environment has to have self-service provisioning that doesn't require manual intervention from the provider, and I'd even push that requirement a little further: A cloud computing environment should have API accessibility so a customer doesn't even have to manually intervene in the provisioning process (The customer's app could use automated logic and API calls to scale infrastructure up or down based on resource usage).

I had the opportunity to speak at Cloud Connect Chicago, and I shared SoftLayer's approach to cloud computing and how it has evolved into a few distinct products that speak directly to our customers' needs:

The session was about 45 minutes, so the video above has been slimmed down a bit for easier consumption. If you're interested in seeing the full session and getting into a little more detail, we've uploaded an un-cut version here.

-Duke