October 3, 2016

Notes on the transition to the cloud

1. The cloud is super-hot. Duh. And so, like any hot buzzword, “cloud” means different things to different marketers. Four of the biggest things that have been called “cloud” are:

Further, there’s always the idea of hybrid cloud, in which a vendor peddles private cloud systems (usually appliances) running similar technology stacks to what they run in their proprietary public clouds. A number of vendors have backed away from such stories, but a few are still pushing it, including Oracle and Microsoft.

This is a good example of Monash’s Laws of Commercial Semantics.

2. Due to economies of scale, only a few companies should operate their own data centers, aka true on-prem(ises). The rest should use some combination of colo, SaaS, and public cloud.

This fact now seems to be widely understood.

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October 15, 2015

Basho and Riak

Basho was on my (very short) blacklist of companies with whom I refuse to speak, because they have lied about the contents of previous conversations. But Tony Falco et al. are long gone from the company. So when Basho’s new management team reached out, I took the meeting.

For starters:

Basho’s product line has gotten a bit confusing, but as best I understand things the story is:

Technical notes on some of that include:  Read more

October 5, 2015

Consumer data management

Don’t plan to fish in your personal data lake.

Perhaps the biggest mess in all of IT is the management of individual consumers’ data. Our electronic data is thoroughly scattered. Most individual portions are poorly managed. There’s no integration. The data that’s on paper is even worse. For example:

For the most part, the technology community is barely trying to solve those problems. But even when it does try, success is mixed at best. For example:

And those are some of the most successful names.

There are numerous reasons for this dismal state of affairs.  Read more

May 26, 2015

IT-centric notes on the future of health care

It’s difficult to project the rate of IT change in health care, because:

Timing aside, it is clear that health care change will be drastic. The IT part of that starts with vastly comprehensive electronic health records, which will be accessible (in part or whole as the case may be) by patients, care givers, care payers and researchers alike. I expect elements of such records to include:

These vastly greater amounts of data cited above will allow for greatly changed analytics.
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May 2, 2015

Notes, links and comments, May 2, 2015

I’m going to be out-of-sorts this week, due to a colonoscopy. (Between the prep, the procedure, and the recovery, that’s a multi-day disablement.) In the interim, here’s a collection of links, quick comments and the like.

1. Are you an engineer considering a start-up? This post is for you. It’s based on my long experience in and around such scenarios, and includes a section on “Deadly yet common mistakes”.

2. There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding the business model at my clients Databricks. Indeed, my own understanding of Databricks’ on-premises business has changed recently. There are no changes in my beliefs that:

However, I now get the impression that revenue from such relationships is a bigger deal to Databricks than I previously thought.

Databricks, by the way, has grown to >50 people.

3. DJ Patil and Ruslan Belkin apparently had a great session on lessons learned, covering a lot of ground. Many of the points are worth reading, but one in particular echoed something I’m hearing lots of places — “Data is super messy, and data cleanup will always be literally 80% of the work.” Actually, I’d replace the “always” by something like “very often”, and even that mainly for newish warehouses, data marts or datasets. But directionally the comment makes a whole lot of sense.

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March 5, 2015

Cask and CDAP

For starters:

Also:

So far as I can tell:

Read more

February 1, 2015

Information technology for personal safety

There are numerous ways that technology, now or in the future, can significantly improve personal safety. Three of the biggest areas of application are or will be:

Implications will be dramatic for numerous industries and government activities, including but not limited to law enforcement, automotive manufacturing, infrastructure/construction, health care and insurance. Further, these technologies create a near-certainty that individuals’ movements and status will be electronically monitored in fine detail. Hence their development and eventual deployment constitutes a ticking clock toward a deadline for society deciding what to do about personal privacy.

Theoretically, humans aren’t the only potential kind of tyrants. Science fiction author Jack Williamson postulated a depressing nanny-technology in With Folded Hands, the idea for which was later borrowed by the humorous Star Trek episode I, Mudd.

Of these three areas, crime prevention is the furthest along; in particular, sidewalk cameras, license plate cameras and internet snooping are widely deployed around the world. So let’s consider the other two.

Vehicle accident prevention

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January 27, 2015

Soft robots, Part 2 — implications

What will soft, mobile robots be able to do that previous generations cannot? A lot. But I’m particularly intrigued by two large categories:

There are still many things that are hard for humans to keep in good working order, including:

Sometimes the issue is (hopefully minor) repairs. Sometimes it’s cleaning or lubrication. In some cases one might want to upgrade a structure with fixed sensors, and the “repair” is mainly putting those sensors in place. In all these cases, it seems that soft robots could eventually offer a solution. Further examples, I’m sure, could be found in factories, mines, or farms.

Of course, if there’s a maintenance/repair need, inspection is at least part of the challenge; in some cases it’s almost the whole thing. And so this technology will help lead us toward the point that substantially all major objects will be associated with consistent flows of data. Opportunities for data analysis will abound.

Read more

December 31, 2014

Notes on machine-generated data, year-end 2014

Most IT innovation these days is focused on machine-generated data (sometimes just called “machine data”), rather than human-generated. So as I find myself in the mood for another survey post, I can’t think of any better idea for a unifying theme.

1. There are many kinds of machine-generated data. Important categories include:

That’s far from a complete list, but if you think about those categories you’ll probably capture most of the issues surrounding other kinds of machine-generated data as well.

2. Technology for better information and analysis is also technology for privacy intrusion. Public awareness of privacy issues is focused in a few areas, mainly: Read more

December 10, 2014

A few numbers from MapR

MapR put out a press release aggregating some customer information; unfortunately, the release is a monument to vagueness. Let me start by saying:

Anyhow, the key statement in the MapR release is:

… the number of companies that have a paid subscription for MapR now exceeds 700.

Unfortunately, that includes OEM customers as well as direct ones; I imagine MapR’s direct customer count is much lower.

In one gesture to numerical conservatism, MapR did indicate by email that it counts by overall customer organization, not by department/cluster/contract (i.e., not the way Hortonworks does). Read more

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