The IaaS Challenge: Amazon EC2 - A Layman's Experience

The left hand side of my cloud compass has been craving attention. I admit that I have been pretty ignorant of IaaS because I think the future leans more towards the more abstracted cloud technologies long-term for end-users. But, at the moment, I admit, in the majority of circumstances we still have to bother with hardware, servers, and all that hassle, and my ideal of it all being abstracted away is years off. Now I know that many people in the infrastructure world have been using services like EC2 for a while, I am not claiming to break any new ground here. The purpose of this post is to see if a layman like myself, someone with very little technical infrastructure knowledge or experience, can register for Amazon Web Services and set up an enterprise grade Windows 2008 Server with SQL Server 2008 installed. That's it. Now this is all motivated by the hassle I have had in the past getting through the process for provisioning hardware and software - forms, teams, people, licensing, procurement, logistics, installation team, configuration team etc etc. Wouldn't it be great to press a button to magically produce the hardware/software that I need? And how long would it take?

Timer at the ready...lets see if Amazon can meet my expectations, here's what I did:

• 8pm: Registered for Amazon Web Services. I just used my regular Amazon Id that I use for shopping (!) and ran through some basic screens to register, including entering my card information for billing.  AWS bill for what you use, so no initial payment, no fee for hardware, software, anything.

This gave me access to my Amazon Web Services Account screen.  Here I can view usage reports, billing information etc. But no time for that. I am against the clock, need to create my server!

•  8.05pm: Quick quick! Must create server. I see a link 'AWS Management Console', ah, that looks a likely candidate so I click on that.

Interesting, lots of options. Based on my knowledge 'EC2' is what I am after to create my server. I click on the tab, but I get a message saying that area is still provisioning, but should just take a few minutes. Doh. Well, I may as well see what the other tabs are, all included with my account:


Elastic Beanstalk: Great name. Basically you can deploy Java apps here and Amazon will sort out the hardware somehow.
S3: For storage. I create a 'bucket' in here just for fun. Ah, can upload files up to 5 Terabytes each. I feel the power I am wielding is pretty significant.
EC2: Now, I know a bit about this. Create virtual servers in the cloud. Can create them based on templates, so the one I am gunning for is some kind of beast of a server with Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008 pre-installed. But still waiting for this area to be provisioned.
VPC: Virtual Private Cloud: Allows Amazon infrastructure to be a logical extension of a company internal infrastructure - ie extend their firewalls to the Amazon infrastructure etc.

Oh, you can read about the rest at http://aws.amazon.com/......back to the story...

• 8.56pm: I get an email saying EC2 is ready, so I dive in, click on the tab and find an appropriate server template (AMI in Amazon speak), this one looks like what I want:

So I click 'select', run through a wizard and launch my instance, within seconds it is ready. I get a remote desktop shortcut to download to easily access my instance and a password. I double click on the shortcut. I am in.

• 9.10pm: Whoah, I have accessed my server. The spec looks good, I am sure someone with a bit more infrastructure know-how could interpret better, but 64 bit, 7.5gb, 2.25 ghz Xeon processor sounds reasonable anyway:

• 9.20pm: And now I have accessed SQL Server, created my table, and started creating some columns (granted, not the most thrilling of climaxes, but stay with me). Experiment complete!

So, I have provisioned an enterprise grade server, ready to use, with SQL Server 2008 installed, in under 1.5hrs. And I have no expertise in this area really. Am I impressed with AWS? You bet. Of course there are all kinds of questions over cost and issues for actual use in anger which I am not in a position to answer. But an area worth exploring to take away the can of worms that is infrastructure provisioning? Definitely. 'Click click click' and our servers are ready...get me there please.

**Update 14/03/2011: At approximately 11.30pm on the night of 13/03/2011, my experiment AWS account became self-aware and charged me through the nose (or I may not quite have understood the pricing model).....laymen be aware.

Salesforce.com Service Cloud 3 - WINNER? Tiger Blood?

Charlie Sheen has recently redefined the concept of 'Winner'. At least he is taking a radical and different approach to being a WINNER, which is entertaining, if not entirely sustainable.
In a similar way, salesforce.com love to be a winner, and have some innovative (maybe not as innovative as Sheen) ways of going about it. Service Cloud 3 has just been announced by salesforce.com in their latest attempt to steamroll the service call center market. With my experience of RightNow Technologies, I got a pretty good grasp of a best practice service call centre solution. RightNow is great at the service call centre stuff. Salesforce has been lagging behind for a number of years, but recently they have invested heavily in catching up. Have they bolstered their offering enough to eclipse RightNow? My verdict is that they have maybe concentrated too much on the bells and whistles and not quite enough on some core concepts. But at the same time, love the long-term path they forging. So, without further ado, 'The Good', 'The Bad' and 'The Ugly'.

The Good

• Social: Well, this is where it's at isnt it? Facebook is king, and so at last they have developed a link into that channel via 'Salesforce for Facebook'. They already have 'Salesforce for Twitter' which I am mighty impressed with having implemented it recently, and now they have covered the Facebook channel this is complete as far as my view of social is concerned. Why would you bother looking at any other 'social' platforms? Actually Twitter has a way to go to become mainstream (domain of nerds, analysts and celeb stalkers really at the moment), but is fast getting there (cheers Sheen). Facebook IS mainstream. So well done salesforce for filling the Facebook gap. Radion 6 integration looks promising also.
• Cost: All credit to salesforce for providing the Twitter and Facebook add-ons for free
• Chat: Again, a big gap filled here by what they are calling 'Salesforce Live Agent'. Salesforce bought Activa last year, and it seems by all accounts that they have a pre-built solution here that will sort out the Chat space.

The Bad

• Matching to an existing customer: Social is all well and good, but you grab these tweets, or facebook posts, and how do you match them to a customer within your existing database to maintain the 'single view'? Unsure about how the this will be achieved through Facebook, but with Twitter, you need the Twitter ID. And if I am a company, with my database of customer, I have very few, if any, Twitter IDs against them. To get there, will require a gradual, and likely MANUAL build up of Twitter IDs within the current customer database. Painful, gradual, manual, but inevitable.
• The basics: This annoys me release after release. Salesforce love the bells and whistles, but they fall short on the basics. For instance, Cases can come in and be assigned to a queue, but there is no round robin or ondemand pull from the queues to the agents. The only option is to have the agents cherry pick (call centre managers hate that). You can talk about grabbing appexchange 'black boxes' to address this all you want, but having standard config flexibility in these areas in a similar way to RightNow would solve a lot of headache. RightNow supports so many common customer requirements which can be configured with the flick of a few switches. The response 'write APEX' is not good enough from a salesforce.com point of view.
• Cost: The Knowledge module adds on additional cost to the base service platform. Knowledge is a fundamental part of a successful service call centre, and an effective way of deflecting calls and making the customer self sufficient. The cost of Salesforce Knowledge is prohibitive when you compare to RightNow where that is not only included, but is the central pillar of the app. Deflecting calls via their public facing knowledge module is such a powerful and measurable sell, I cannot understand why salesforce do not just bundle it in their standard Service Cloud license.
• Support: Salesforce for Twitter is not officially supported by salesforce. Got a problem? Legally, you are on your own. I suspect Salesforce for Facebook will follow a similar model - "It's free, so off you go, bye."

The Ugly

• Agent Console: Salesforce have introduced the brand spanking new agent console with a focus on multitasking (a bit slow to be honest), but they have left the old one, which is more 'single task' focused behind. Single Task or Multi-Task? It depends on the call centre, but both are common. Being currently involved in an implementation with a 'single task' agent focus, using the old console with ugly old UI is frustrating.

So, that is my high level verdict on Service Cloud 3. Overall, full marks for innovation effort to Salesforce as always, it is coming together. I am now going to tweet Charlie to see if he thinks if Service Cloud 3 is a "bitchin rock star from Mars". Only then will it get the proper stamp of approval.