Two years ago, I wrote a blog post that got some notice, which surprised me. It was a piece about going back to Emacs as my primary content creation tool, first as a CEO, and now as a CTO. A brief recap is that I spent most of my career as a programmer and a software architect, and preferred Emacs as my code editor for much of that time. Reconsidering Emacs was an experiment that I was excited about, but wasn't sure how it would work out. On the Internet, the post was met with roughly equal parts disdain and appreciation, but tens of thousands of people read it, so it seems that I touched on something interesting. Some of the more challenging and funny posts on Reddit and HackerNews predicted that I'd have hands shaped like claws or that I'd have lost my eyesight because I use white...
In late November of 2017, I informed Fugue's Board that I intended to lead a search for a new CEO. We had a substantial amount of money on the balance sheet, some really impressive customers, a solid product, and a highly motivated team - many of the things needed to attract a world class CEO. My passion has always been for technology and team building, and it's been an amazing 4 years at the helm through the R&D and engineering phases of the company and well into the go-to-market execution phase, but I've known since founding Fugue that someday I'd look for a partner to fulfill Fugue's potential, and the time is right. Growing Fugue is now about execution in the market, building out great sales and marketing functions, and scaling the business. We've put together great teams to...
This article was first published in DZone's Cloud Zone on April 3, 2017. The repercussions of recent cloud outages—AWS’s S3 crash and Azure’s Active Directory cascading failure—linger in IT departments and manifest in revenue loss. But, the bigger story is that the next outage is around the corner—unpredictable, coming to get us on a random Tuesday. Whether businesses are using cloud providers, on-premise data centers, or hybrid setups to host web services and backends, infrastructure failures are a fact of life and have to be on our radars as a matter of routine. This makes architecting for failure and for the future, from the start, among the most pressing imperatives for business IT departments. The next five years will see the rise and democratization of centralized control...
Harry Weller, General Partner leading NEA’s east coast venture practice, passed away unexpectedly on November 19, 2016. Please see NEA’s words for Harry. J. R. R. Tolkien, one of Harry’s favorites, said, “A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds.” Harry never counted on life or decisions or business being safe. He looked into this world and bypassed the routine—working fiercely, shaping vivid insights, sharing a smart magic, driving others forward emphatically and lifting them up generously at the same time. He knew that noise was just noise and broke past it. He had the rare wisdom that an explorer finds and shares. A phenomenon in business, Harry was a committed partner to companies and technologies. He had an uncanny instinct about both. His profound impact on Fugue will ever...
The approach taken by Fugue is to allow cloud infrastructure to be treated as code. This concept is required if developers are to generate applications that can exploit the cloud's capabilities and deliver on the promise of immutable infrastructure. -Ovum's On The Radar report on Fugue Fugue provides simplification of your life on the cloud through abstractions. Abstractions can be expressed in one of two ways: as black boxes, or as language. Fugue puts as much into language as we can, so that you can do things with it that we didn't predict. Black boxes are easier for a platform builder to make, because they do things in one particular way. They are also less flexible for the user, because they do things in one particular way, which may not be the way the user needs or prefers.
As we migrate applications to the cloud or build there natively, cloud computing itself is changing how we compose and operate our systems. We increasingly compose systems of elastic collections of services running on many compute instances. We now commonly employ application statelessness in order to exploit cloud system elasticity and to achieve the performance required of web scale systems. As we make these changes, we discover that systems management, operations, policy enforcement, and security in the cloud cannot be accomplished easily with tools and methods adapted from traditional data center environments. Our reality is that the elastic compute systems of any given enterprise are now distributed across tens, hundreds, thousands or more nodes running an ever-growing array of...
For several years, cloud adoption by developers, tech companies, and enterprises has been gaining momentum. Global cloud spending is accelerating and market forecasts are impressive. The cloud is often thought of as a collection of remote data centers. It’s generally used that way by organizations when they first experiment with it—or even when they move whole applications to it. Not surprisingly, cloud service providers offer familiar topologies of services for folks conversant with the data center: virtual machines and containers, virtual networks, load balancers, etc. But, these really are metaphors rather than the traditional things they resemble on data floors. They are useful abstractions in composing applications with semi-traditional architectures. The metaphors nevertheless...
Years—no, decades—ago, I lived in Emacs. I wrote code and documents, managed email and calendar, and shelled all in the editor/OS. I was quite happy. Years went by and I moved to newer, shinier things. As a result, I forgot how to do tasks as basic as efficiently navigating files without a mouse. About three months ago, noticing just how much of my time was spent switching between applications and computers, I decided to give Emacs another try. It was a good decision for several reasons that will be covered in this post. Covered too are .emacs and Dropbox tips so that you can set up a good, movable environment. For those who haven't used Emacs, it's something you'll likely hate, but may love. It's sort of a Rube Goldberg machine the size of a house that, at first glance, performs all...
We at Luminal are launching our new vision for computing: Fugue. Fugue embodies a set of core computing patterns that rely upon: Automating the creation and operations of cloud infrastructure through a no-touch runtime environment. This uses an active infrastructure OS under users’ control and within their environment. Short-lived compute instances that are created and destroyed by this infrastructure OS, resulting in higher fidelity systems that optimize performance and cost. Simplification of compute instances to reduce vulnerability. You may recognize in these patterns the meme of “immutable infrastructure”—the idea that computing infrastructure elements not be changed through in situ repair or upgrade—but rather that they be purposefully thrown away and replaced in order...
In two previous posts, I explored the concepts of "Minimum Viable Clouds" and "More than Minimum Clouds." To recap, a Minimum Viable Cloud must: be an SOA hide implementation be fully automated be a utility have global fault tolerance be Opex A cloud that is More than the Minimum must: promote stateless, distributed compute have asynchronous messaging have data persistence as a service Future clouds are those that move past the performance and composition aspects of cloud-native applications into new territory in efficiency and security. There are many possible futures for cloud, and likely several that will be realized. At Luminal, we have a vision of cloud computing that provides significantly more control, efficiency, and security than is currently...
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