Amazon improves EC2 (by embracing failure)

Amazon just announced two big improvements to EC2:

• Multiple Locations
  Amazon EC2 now provides the ability to place instances in multiple locations. Amazon EC2 locations are composed of regions and Availability Zones. Regions are geographically dispersed and will be in separate geographic areas or countries. Currently, Amazon EC2 exposes only a single region. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same region. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location.
  
  
• Elastic IP Addresses
  Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing. An Elastic IP address is associated with your account not a particular instance, and you control that address until you choose to explicitly release it. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, Elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or Availability Zone failures by programmatically remapping your public IP addresses to any instance in your account. Rather than waiting on a data technician to reconfigure or replace your host, or waiting for DNS to propagate to all of your customers, Amazon EC2 enables you to engineer around problems with your instance or software by quickly remapping your Elastic IP address to a replacement instance.

Datacenters and geographic regions are Single Points of Failure (SPOF) too.  Failure Happens, and it's far better (and cheaper) to build services that are resilient to failure than to try to prevent them from happening.  This is a big step in the right direction.

Update: RightScale posted an excellent overview of how this works.

MySQL User Conference Registration Up 32%

I was interested to note that as of this morning, attendee registration numbers for the MySQL User Conference (which O'Reilly co-produces with MySQL) are up 32% over the same period last year. This seems to be a good sign that the community is energized by MySQL's acquisition by Sun.

The conference takes place April 14-17 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Among other things, we'll be hearing from Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun, about Sun's open source strategy (presumably including their plans for MySQL), as well as a deep technical program with tracks including Storage Engine Development and Optimization, MySQL Cluster and High Availability, Replication and Scale-Out, Security and Database Administration, Performance Tuning and Benchmarks, Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, Web 2.0, Ajax, and Emerging Technologies, MySQL on .Net and Windows, and of course, MySQL and PHP.

It's shaping up to be a great conference.

Take the Money and Run? I think not.

There's a scorching article on Forbes about the Sun acquisition of MySQL, entitled Cash Me Out: The End of Open Source as Counter-Culture:

These deals have nothing to do with peace, love and software, and everything to do with money. The open source guys realize they can't build a decent business unless they hook up with the old closed source guys.

Meanwhile, the old guard have figured out that open source code can be a wonderful way to inflict pain. IBM pumps money into Linux and other open source programs because those programs undermine Microsoft. Microsoft has pumped money into Novell, the number two Linux player, to undermine Red Hat (nasdaq: RHT - news - people ), the number one Linux player. Oracle offers to support customers of Red Hat Linux because it hurts both Red Hat and Microsoft.

While there's some truth to the article's assertion that one open source business strategy is to use commoditization to hurt your competition, overall, the article misses the point of what I once called "the open source paradigm shift," the process that led us to Web 2.0. Just as the outcome of the PC revolution was a shift in power from hardware to software, from IBM to Microsoft, the outcome of the open source revolution is a shift in power from software to new data-driven web 2.0 services, from Microsoft to Google, so to speak. Huge new companies like Google have been built on top of the open source stack. This is business value creation on a stage not seen in decades, and open source has been a key driver.

But each new revolution in computing also drives opportunity for the older layers of the stack. Commodity hardware was a huge opportunity exploited by HP and Dell; commodity software will be a huge opportunity exploited by companies like MySQL, and now, presumably, Sun, if they execute on the opportunity. It's very short-sighted to see major open source acquisitions as a kind of "take the money and run" play by open source companies. It's a bet on just how profoundly the future is going to change.

Cynically viewing open source adoption by the enteprise as Forbes does misses just how profoundly open source is changing the computing and business landscape.

Obviously, I'm biased. I'm on the board of directors of MySQL (through the acquisition), as well as the operator of the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and the MySQL User Conference (which happens in Santa Clara April 14-17 in Santa Clara, and is the right place for Forbes to come to if they really want to see just how vital and interesting the MySQL community is.)

There was also a great comment on the Forbes article by a user who identified him or herself as probablynot, who wrote:

The fringe open source counter-culture you're talking about is alive and well. It's just moved on to more interesting territory, back beneath big business' radar.

By the time Forbes starts covering this stuff, most of the real innovators -- the people who do this for its own sake -- have already gotten out. For us, it's old news, and there's a lot more fun to be had elsewhere.

For open source, intrinsic reward is what it's all about. Maybe that's why the business community is having such a hard time getting a grasp on it? All the fun nowadays is in open source hardware (thanks to the flood of cheap component hardware out of Asia) and in so called mash-ups (allowing open-source hackers to harness the power of free software-as-service applications offered by Google and Yahoo and the like).

Expect some incredible innovation surfacing over the next few years in networked information services, and home-brewed robotics and gadgetry.

Amen to that!