IP Longevity Through Open Source

You never forget working for your first vendor.  I was reminded of this at the SUSEcon conference last November, when I met a young colleague who had recently started with the company and was overflowing with enthusiasm for the culture, workmates, and feel of the workplace compared to his previous experiences.  I saw the same degree of enthusiasm in former colleagues at NetApp, who had grown up with the company, and invested themselves completely in the company culture, even as it went through change.  My own experience with Sun Microsystems was also a match: there was something special about working in a place which, especially for a technologist, offered access to such great ideas, people, equipment & opportunities. For me, this was compunded by being there during the dotcom boom.

While I was at Sun, the place seemed to be brimming with innovation - we were proud of our brilliant ideas & cutting-edge execution. There were a few less-enthusiastic, or perhaps better said as "more realistic" people who didn't look through such rose-coloured glasses. These were the folk who had come to Sun from elsewhere - places like DEC (Digital Equipment Company), which had previously been one of the go-to places & hotbeds of innovation. They could see the good times wouldn't last, and in the end were proved correct.

It seems there has been a constant stream of "innovation" companies, each in turn attracting enthusiastic contributors, building great technology, and then folding or being consumed by some larger organisation that ultimately fails to capitalise on the innovations. The tragedy here is that as the smart people leave these companies, and the intellectual property gets buried under legal constraints, the innovations get lost, and the next generation effectively has to start from scratch. Sun's amazing technology & concepts of the late 1990's & early 2000's has only recently become part of the mainstream understanding (in 1997, no-one could understand what "the network is the computer" meant - modern smartphones demonstrate the concept completely), yet a lot of companies today are re-inventing the capabilities of the last generation of technology Sun developed before the decline & loss of personnel.

This is where free & open source is so interesting: once ideas expressed in open source are exposed, they are forever available, so the demise of a particular company doesn't bury the intellectual property (even if it does mean a lot of the workers on a project may not be able to spend as much time on it). Perhaps as more and more development moves into open source, we'll have less re-invention of the wheel (or even less out & out ignorance of what has come before).  

So long as we can work out a way to agree on licensing schemes....

Extra Time in Tokyo

For the first time ever, I actually got to spend some free time in Tokyo, over thr weekend between one corporate event & another. I could't have been luckier witht he weather - bright, blue autumn skies,  a crisp frostiness in the air that made walking around easy and comfortable, and no significant wind chill that would necessitate heavy coats.

As per usual I spent the extra time walking... a lot... If I did this much walking at home I'd probably be 20kg lighter :/  Saturday was Kamakura, one-time capital of Japan & home of the 2nd largest bronze bhudda in the country. Kamakura is a country town not far from the sea - there were actually tsunami awareness signs posted on telephone poles: "7m above sea level - be tsunami aware". The town is about 1hour by train from Tokyo central station - and it seems like house prices aren't that outrageous (around 40,000,000 yen gets you a 3br house), although I could have been looking at some dodgy properties...

With a multitude of temples & shrines dotted about a fairly picturesque little town, Kamakura is the classic historical walkabout of the kind that I would have hated as a child Maybe if, as a child, I'd been more into photography; or if ther was the same instant gratification that you get with photos these days, those wlakabouts would have been less dull.  Clearly I still lack the killer instinct for a good candid photographer, since there were a couple of wedding parties who would have made great subjects if I had the nerve to ask for a pose - just got the one snap.

Dinner was in Ginza. I didn't find the shabu shabu place that I went to about 10 years ago, but I found another instead which was pretty good - all you can eat in 90 min, which was a good deal considering I didn't have lunch.

On Sunday I took the subway again to Asakusa. The fine weather & Sunday crowds made it a vibrant place to go, and I was seduced by the smell of fresh baked something to a little store selling sweet Japanese bread & apple pies, and playing a 40's recording of japanese boogie-woogie music to the long queue of people eaiting to buy. It was fantastic! Crispy & biscuty on the outside, light & fluffy on the inside, and warm. So good I had eaten it before I even thought about taking a picture.  I'll have to go back next time for, ahh, "research". 

Another long walk through almost deserted backstreets to Ueno park, also lovely in the fine weather. There seemed to be some kind of koi fish competition going on, with some available for sale: 80,000 yen for a goldfish? 

I trawled through Akihabara & found the little video adapter gadget I was after, but nothing else stood out as being super-cheap.  The area seems to be as much about maid coffee shopes and anime model stores as electronics these days. The fashion market on the other side of the river was probably a better find.

Another lesson of Tokyo on weekends: Akasaka is pretty much closed. Only one restaurant in four was open, and I eventually grabbed a basic meal. Maybe near Ueno or Roppongi would have been a better option. 

The next lesson was to check other flight options than just from Narita (which is 90 mins from the city by bus). My flight to Beijing left at 8:20am, which meant I didn't have time to transit from Tokyo & has to camp at an airport hotel overnight. Not the greatest hardship in the world, but it basically wasted an evening with colleagues. 

My last view of Tokyo this time was the ground crew lined up waving goodbye to the plane - surprisingly uplifting & not something you'd conceive of in most places.

 

Finally, one unexpected bonus of the flight from Tokyo to Beijing (and the fine weather) was the epic view of Mt Fuji. If only I'd asked for a window seat!

Return to Shanghai

Another trip back to a place I'd been before, yet has changed so much.

Last time I went to Shanghai was late 2004 or thereabouts. I stayed on the Pudong side, when Sun Microsystems still existed and still had the budget to blow of serious marketing - like projecting the company logo onto the side of the 40-storey hotel building during the event. I was able to enjoy the airport maglev in its full glory of 410km/h (for about 3 minutes), which would have been much more impressive if it hadn't taken 40min to reach the station by taxi.

Things have proceeded apace - as expected. For one thing, there's so much more of it: vast tracts of reclaimed land were visible as I landed, with huge farms of wind turbines dotted out to sea, and some amazing scultping of the land for housing and government retreats. The Puding side has sprouted out, thanks to the world expo in 2008, and no longer appears to be a small bit on the wrong side of the river.

It still is, on the wrong side of the rivier, though - all of the really interesting stuff is on the old Bund side. The Bund itself has been totally rejuvenated - as expected, the crumbling ruins of former colonial glory have been ressurected & turned into swish hotels & office buildings. It was ripe to happen, I just wish I'd had a spare few hundred million back in the early 2000's to get into proerpty development...

The cool feel that was showing in ritzy places when I last visited is much more abundant now - whereas last time the bars and restaurants were all on the super-elite side of the price scale, now there's some really good stuff available at decent prices.  Or maybe the Australian dollar has just gone up in the meantime.

i went to a partner office at an extremely funky area probably most closely resembling an incubator park for startups; it also happened to be within a sculpture park.

All to soon, had to leave again. It remains my favourite city in China - too much more still to explore.

Subways and Cicadas

Watching The Karate Kid in an hotel in Tokyo - very strange for some reason...

Just back from an Okonamiyaki restaurant - great stuff.  It's really nice to have people join you for dinner when you're travelling, and even better when your colleagues ake you to good places to eat. After three evenings & three good meals I really appreciate their generosity. 

Tokyo has been massively humid - well over 30 degrees each day and well over 70% humidity. The cicadas are out in force, with that twanging kree-kree-kree that distinguishes them from those we have back home (and raises the feeling of being in a Miyazaki film). It still seems bizarre that my last trip was 8 years ago, but it doesn't seem much has changed, except perhaps more internet access around the place, and maybe a few more English signs here & there.

The one big thing that was different during this trip was the number of taxis we took: at least one or two every day - a complete change from when I at was Sun taking the subway & I've used cabs more on this 4-day trip than all my previous visits to Tokyo combined. The guys said it was a special case for foreign visitors, and considering the humidity I was grateful for that luxury. Ironically, though, the fares don't seem that far removed from what you'd expect to pay in Sydney for a similar duration... an interesting comparison of the way the economies of the two countries have been over the past few years.

Green and Pleasant Land

I've spent the past week in England, my first visit for twenty-five years, and a slightly strange experience. Everything is a little bit familiar, but odd enough to remind me this isn't home. Ironically, having so much family around makes it clear this isn't Australia.

The weather certainly isn't giving a clue this is England - temperatures pushing 30 degrees continuously since last week, and the sky spectacularly blue. In characteristic fashion, some Brits are starting to complain about it being too hot...

So Much for Upgrades

Landed in Dehli last night at 10pm, grinding my teeth that I didn't decide to get on an earlier flight from Mumbai, but then realising that there wouldn't have been anyone waiting to pick me up from the airport if I was early (and the hotel was half an hour's drive away).

The hotel (Sheraton Delhi) is great: one of those palatial kind of places with grounds and be-turbaned guards and doorman. The lady in a sari met me and informed my room had been upgraded, which was really nice, until I realised that it was already pushing midnight and I'd be leaving at 4am just one day later. Oh well, an upgrade for 28 hours is better than no upgrade at all.

A packed day followed: meeting at the office, back to the hotel for media, back to the office for lunch, into a car to do a phone interview on the way to a customer, back to the office for debriefing. Hopefully I didn't make too much of a mess of things with the journos...

Outside a customer's IT department

Traffic Madness

Mumbai traffic is insane. This is something everyone knows, but it's something else to experience it. And I've done a lot of experiencing over the past couple of days. It's not scary so much as just all-in: everyone jostling for that little edge forward. The dumb thing is that if everyone kept lane discipline and, say, didn't run through red traffic lights, the whole system would probably work a lot more smoothly. Still, as the customer I met today said, Indians love to break the rules – to feel like they're winning something over the authorities. A sentiment we can appreciate in Australia, even if trying to drive in this mess would make most of us blow a fuse.

That's one definite upside to having a driver, quite aside from having someone who will pick you up, deal with the issues of parking, look after bags, etc. I'm thinking that if I eventually get to India for a holiday, this is a good way to do it.

There are some good roads – in fact on the first day it was too good: we took a brand new expressway and arrived at the customer site (ahem) 90 minutes early for the meeting. Still, better early than late...
The frightening thing about this 15km raise expressway is that there is no breakdown lane, no turn-offs, and it seems no way to cross over to the other side in an emergency. One broken-down car will cause a huge traffic jam. Two broken down cars will totally clog everything for hours. Fun just waiting to happen.

Open Cloud?

History has shown us how damaging it can be to funnel ourselves down a single proprietary path, no matter how popular a particular platform is at a particular point in time.  

It can even damage organisations who originally benefit from the lock-in: one only needs to look at the trouble Microsoft is having getting people to move on from Windows XP. A lot of that is due to the general move away from desktops to mobile platforms,  but early on a great deal was due to organisations having bought or built internal applications on top of Internet Explorer 6 & that did not work with Internet Explorer 7 or later, so would not work on newer Windows platforms....

Keep things open - make a bigger pie, rather than just trying to take all of the pie for yourself...

Far Away in Mumbai

Arrived in Mumbai after a drawn-out trip from Sydney to Brisbane to Singapore: 25 hours door to door, and 27 hours bed to bed. Left the cold, wet drizzly Sydney winter & arrived in the hot, wet, damp Mumbai monsoon season (890+ mm rain per day).

Last time I was in Mumbai was 9 years ago – but difficult to say if things have changed; at least this time, perhaps since it was so late, I didn't have two little girls follow me to the car begging for a dollar; heartbreaking, but at the time my driver said that anything I gave them would just be taken away. This time, scenes from Slumdog Millionaire were still strong in my mind since I'd just watched it on the flight, but the only thing I had to deal with was the mud & shit on the way to the carpark.

The  drive from the airport took a while – I'd foolishly booked myself into an hotel right at the tip of southern Mumbai, near the heritage district of Fort. This used to be the hub of activity, but these days high rents and the difficulty in upgrading the buildings has pushed most businesses further out (ironically, close to the airport is usually a better place to stay). The area has a very faded grandeur - art deco buildings aplenty, but all peeling and dilapidated.  A shame, and strange considering the land value is so high. Maybe there's only just so much you can do against the monsoon...

Finally Forbidden!

Thirteen years & 5 visits after my first trip to Beijing, I finally made it into the Forbidden City!  All I need to to now is get my arse over to the Great Wall at some point...

Eight years (!) since my last visit to mainland China, Beijing has changed dramatically: thanks to the Olympics there are English signs everywhere; the red army numberplated-Audis are gone, replaced by a multitude of private cars including Ferraris & Bentleys; the subway has grown from 2 lines to 10; and the only people riding around on bicycles are tourists.  The place looks more like Singapore now than the only-just-out-of-full-on-communism that I saw in 2000.

Some things remain similar – stepping off the subway at Tianamen Square I was approached by another  passenger who just wanted to chat in English for a bit. He wanted to go for a coffee (nothing suss?) but I only had a couple of hours to see the Forbidden City so had a good excuse to beg off.

Walking back around the palace from its northern gate, I saw the tourists on their bikes: two girls and a guy, youngish europeans by the look. They parked their bikes outside a little sidewalk bar jumping with live music. I had to stop & get a beer, although 30 RMB for a bottle of Laotian brew still seems a little outrageous.  It was nice, though...

n..n...n...Nürnberg...

Finally arrived in Nürnberg after spending 26 hours with my legs crunched up, followed by 20 minutes of mad sprinting to get from one end of Frankfurt airport to the other to catch the connecting flight. ffs! the absolute furthest possible gate!

Anyway, eventually got here and it's freezing! zero degrees with little flecks of soft stuff dropping down from the sky.

The Aldstadt at the centre of the city is great – an old mediaeval town turned into the mostly pedestrian shopping and residential precinct. Nicely done.

Design Matters, Even (or Most Importantly) When It's Invisible

This may be old news, and I may be slow on the uptake, but look at this:

This is a screenshot from Apple iTunes showing the track listing of an album along with its cover. I was looking at this idly, waiting for another 2am concall, when it struck me that the colours used for the track info were a remarkable match for the album cover.  I looked at another album, and saw that its text also matched, yet clearly with a  different colour scheme:

Now, usually I listen to music on a separate iPod - not really paying much attention to what's on screen. This has floored me, though. Somewhere along the line, someone has decided that having nice fonts, cover art & whatnot is not enough - the entire visual effect related by the album's cover design should be used to cue the metadata associated with the music. Not only that, but that has been integrated with a reasonable clever programming effort to determine what the colour scheme of the album is, and how best to represent the text effectively.

Here's another example:

This whole thing is an example of concern about the complete design of an interface which seems, frankly, lost on a vast proportion of people. That isn't to say that people don't appreciate it - but rather that people don't even think about it, and may not have even consciously noticed the effect, although they may notice something "off" if it wasn't present, and may like the look of something without being able to explain why.   Architects (real ones - in the built environment) face this sort of thing all the time:  people often don't see the value in good design until they experience it for themselves.

Much as I love UNIX & Linux, in that world chances are the graphic design would go no further than placing the cover art in a bounded box, with the track info all in regular text with regular colours on a regular background.  Informative, maybe even reasonably attractive, but lacking the near-invisible design that makes this & many other Apple products such a satisfying user experience.

So maybe "invisible design" is something to aim for.

Changing Email Habits

A change of role & change of workplace introduces a whole bunch of disruption to your workflow, and I'm finding myself dealing with new laptops, new operating systems, new email & calendaring and so on (I haven't even seen yet what I'll have to deal with for travel & expenses...)

It also introduces the opportunity to try to make some workflow changes for the better. Ever since I started using "proper" email for work in 1995 (as opposed to the weird old internal messaging systems earlier in the past), I've always had an email client sitting in the background, popping up messages as soon as they came in and demanding my attention.

It's probably self-evident, but it turns out this is really bad for productivity - studies into the effects of interruptions, such as this paper by Loughborough University & The Danwood Group, and described by Ben Hammersley in this address to the RSA, show that people tend to respond almost immediately to notifications of new email, and that dealing with the interruption requires "recovery" time afterward. For tasks that require a "flow" to be  achieved (such as coding, writing or other creative activity), it can take up to 20 minutes to get back into the swing of things, so in cases where email is automatically checked and alerted on every 5-15 minutes (the default for Outlook), some people never get a chance to get into a flow.

So new workflow habit #1 - set email check times to at least 30 minutes.

I might move this out to 1-2 hours, later on.  Some people are disciplined enough to only check email once or twice a day (using an auto-responder to inform correspondents to expect a delay). This may seem extreme, but when you consider that business communication used to be via dictated & type-written letter, it's still comparatively high-speed, and leaves the receiver more time to concentrate - which in the end leads to greater efficiency & productivity.


On another note, I usually try to make my email subject lines meaningful & relevant, and it turns out this can have a significant impact on whether they are read or not. In Dan Pink's recent address to the RSA (where he asserts that everyone is now in sales), he notes research that shows that having an interesting subject line: something that either shows direct value to the recipient (eg: information about a topic that person is currently working on), or sparks curiosity about the email's content (the current classic example being Barack Obama's "Hey..." email during the 2012 presidential campaign), makes the message much more likely to be read than more mundane/nonspecific subjects such as  "Question"  or "Followup".

So new workflow habit #2 - [continue to] make sure email subjects are relevant & interesting.


Number 1 is going to be tougher than number 2 - and I may have to overcome and/or deal with expectations of others around me - so it will be interesting to see how it works out.

Going For Gold Isn't Enough

For many years, IT services within organisations have been advertised to business projects using a familiar set of names: usually “gold”, “silver” and “bronze”. There may be some noun associated with the service as well, such as “gold processing tier” or “silver storage tier”. The premise behind this kind of naming is that “everyone understands what this means”, and to some extent this is true from a relative point of view – gold is understood to be “better” than silver, which in turn is “better” than bronze. But what does “better” mean in the context of the services on offer? How can someone differentiate between the different services & decide which one to use? What happens when a new service is introduced that fits between the existing ones?

Most of the time the answer to these questions is “no-one knows”, which is less than ideal. The big problem with this precious-metal-related naming methodology (or any other arbitrary method such as colours, gemstones or suchlike), is that although they give a relative indication of “goodness”, they don't actually tell anyone what the service offers, and nor is there any consistency between what a name means from one organisation to the next (or even within a single organisation – they are arbitrary terms, after all). This usually results in a business project simply choosing what sounds like the “best” service (i.e. “gold”), even if the project's needs don't align with what the service is offering. Alternatively a cash-strapped project may choose the “least” option (i.e “bronze”) simply to save on costs, without understanding, for example, that running a database on bottom-tier infrastructure just won't work. This problem is compounded as IT organisations become more like service providers, and especially as automated orchestration is used more to provision and advertise services to business users through self-service portals and the like. It's this context which leads us to understand the way we should be designing and describing our IT services, which is to be as specific as possible.

The concept behind being a service provider (either internally to an organisation or externally), is to consolidate resources and then apportion them to different projects or customers on a per-use basis. The idea is that by offering a standard set of well-defined services, the provider can reduce waste, streamline processes, take advantage of infrastructure efficiencies like data deduplication and single-instance cloning, and save their organisation money (and/or make a margin). The key phrase here is “standard set of well-defined services”: in the service-provider context, customers (or projects) must choose from a menu, rather than being allowed to pick and choose how the ingredients will be combined. In turn, the service provider must be very clear on what is included in the services being offered, and also on what the price will be per unit.

In a NetApp storage context, this means that some understanding of potential workloads must exist in order to develop a service appropriate for each workload the provider wants to cater to, including all of the efficiencies and capabilities relevant to that workload. The goal is to then normalise the per-gigabyte pricing so that simple comparisons can be made on the effective usable space, rather than on the basic physical capacity. For example, likely de-duplication rates for Virtual Server (VSI) workloads in VMware are around 50%, which is greater than the de-duplication rates for simple file sharing at around 20%, so a provider can define different services with per-gigabyte rates for these two workloads that take these savings into account. For example, the “NFS datastore for VMware VSI” might be offered at $0.50/GB, while the “NFS datastore for general data” might be offered at $0.80/GB. This naming and pricing helps the customer or project understand what they are ordering, and helps the service provider direct the customer to the most appropriate service for a workload.

Once you start naming these services in a descriptive way, you can extend them to add additional capabilities. For example the “NFS datastore for VMware VSI” might be extended to a new service called “NFS datastore for VMware VSI with local backup”, which introduces NetApp SnapShots on a defined schedule, and includes an additional per-gigabyte price to cover to cost of capacity used for those backups (perhaps a 20% premium). Another example might be “NFS datastore for general data with Disaster Recovery”, which would include a SnapMirror copy of the data at a remote site, and would have an associated premium to cover both copies of the data, networking costs, and so on.

It's easy to see how infrastructure policies can be applied to basic services to build up a complete catalogue of services, and how the capabilities and efficiencies of the infrastructure can be used to set pricing so that customers or projects can select based on both functional requirements and budget, and service providers can direct customers to the most appropriate infrastructure. With a descriptive naming system, providers can easily introduce new or extended services as technologies become available, without worrying about having to squeeze between or around arbitrary names (is aluminium better or worse than bronze? What sits between silver & gold?). Furthermore, if a service is named according to the functionality it provides, then the underlying technology can be swapped out without necessarily having to re-name the service: for example, if a file sharing service moves from fibre-channel disk to SATA disk plus FlashCache, the customer's view of the functionality remains the same, even though the underlying technologies moved from what might once have been called “gold” storage to what might once have been called “silver”.

So consider making bland old “gold”, “silver” and “bronze” and thing of the past, and well-defined, descriptive services that incorporate infrastructure capabilities the way of the future. It will certainly make life less confusing for your projects & customers.

Stop Thinking About Storage as "Tiers" & Start Thinking About Workloads

In the olden days (which for purposes of this article means "the 1990's"), Gartner introduced - or at least popularised - the concept of "Storage Tiers". The idea was that with new & differentiated storage technologies becoming available, some decision had to be made as to which kind of storage you'd use for a particular kind of data. At the top tier ("Tier 1"), you stored mission-critical, frequently-accessed, latency-sensitive data like OLTP databases. In the middle (call it "Tier 2"), you stored less latency-sensitive data that was still business-critical and needed backup, DR and/or replication such as email systems, and at the bottom (call it "Tier 3"), you stored infrequently accessed or archive data.

Each of these tiers had assumed physical characteristics: Tier 1 was fast, high-performance (and most expensive) disk, usually connected to a fibre channel SAN and featuring high-availability, synchronous replication and so on; Tier 2 was lower-speed disk, with some degree of high availability; Tier 3 was the biggest, cheapest, highest-density disks, probably connected via file sharing networks, and less likely to have high availability features included. These physical characteristics in turn led to an association with specific disk technologies: Tier 1 became small-capacity 15,000rpm fibre channel drives, Tier 2 became large capacity fibre channel drives (maybe operating at 10,000rpm), and Tier 3 became large-capacity SATA drives.

This was fine, for a while: storage arrays frequently provided no additional performance considerations beyond spindle type, spindle size and spindle count; and application managers became used to the the idea that they really only had 3 flavours to choose from, and that Tier 3 was “the slowest”, and Tier 1 was “the best”, so they chose the latter.

Then someone invented solid state drives.

With a tiering system so firmly tied to particular drive technology and “Tier 1” as “the best” (meaning “the fastest”), the introduction a new, faster storage device type created a slight problem: what's better than 1? Fortunately computer scientists all know that you're actually supposed to start counting at zero, so the answer was clear: the new “best” was “Tier 0”, and the top-level descriptions were nuanced to place high-speed transactional data on this new tier.

Problem solved. Until someone invents something faster (like phase-change state drives, or something). At that point we'd have to call the new technology “Tier -1”, which finally clearly shows how ridiculous it is to tie a drive technology to an expected workload.

That's the point of this article – we should be thinking in terms of “workloads”, rather than “tiering”, since tiering is so closely tied to disk technologies, and since the physical drive characteristics are no longer the sole feature to consider. In a NetApp environment there are several features to take into account when designing the solution for a given workload: deduplication & compression, FlashCache, FlashPools, FlashAccel, and so on.

Once we understand what a workload is going to be, we can design a storage system to provide the best combination of features to handle that workload – which may mean that even high-performance workloads are deployed on lower-speed disks. A classic example of this is a typical Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) workload: many (hundreds or even thousands) of copies of essentially the same operating system and application binary data, with latency-sensitive access. The many copies of data can be deduplicated down to a few or even one instance of actual physically stored data. The first time this data is accessed by a VDI client, it is placed in the controller FlashCache. Subsequent requests for the data from any client are then served directly from the cache. What this means is that the actual disk performance is almost irrelevant, so lower-speed (and lower-cost) drives can be used, and fewer of them thanks to the deduplication effect. The solution becomes cheaper, more efficient, and more performant all at the same time.

This is just one example, and there are plenty more. The main point is that this combination of technologies (slow disk, deduplication, FlashCache) is suitable for that workload, and gives better performance than a traditional “Tier 1” storage infrastructure. It means that it is no longer appropriate to simply use storage tiering to decide the best infrastructure for a given workload. What solution designers need to do now is understand the characteristics of a workload, and then combine the available storage features to most effectively support it.

So from now on, think about workloads, not tiers. This is especially true when trying to develop Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings. But more about that later.