Cubegeek

How To Cloud A Mainframe

Once upon a time there was a mainframe computer. I ignored it. So did you. We were wrong.

My mighty mainframe was a CDC Cyber running NOS. It was such a craptastic machine that I hated doing homework precisely because the damned thing wasn't reliable enough for me to slack off until I was ready. Surely when I got into a groove of programming in fricking ADA, it would be broke. I hated my college's datacenter and the frogs who worked there. It was enough to make me love microcode and BNF. But that was 30 years ago, literally. Nevertheless, it left a bad taste in my mouth particularly because I loved DEC Vaxen and client server. After all, I did work at Xerox. 

But while I was at the big X, I did come to love and appreciate VM/CMS. What a cool idea. And there was always a weird kind of appeal to ISPF, I have to say. Plus it was also very cool to use a channel attached Overland Data tape drive that worked with IND$FILE. Ok enough reminiscing. We all know that IBM was an early embracer of Linux, and became even cool again when I read about something called a Beowolf cluster of Linux nodes running on a System 390. And of course the RS 6000. Yada. Yeah. They understand hardware. I even listened up to the time when they started on about The Grid and grid computing in general. Why? Because I have always been a big data fanatic. Ok, devotee. 

So this morning I'm talking to my engineering manager colleague down in LATAM and he's helping me to understand what sharp elements of his team have been doing over the past few years. I know a bit about it, but now I'm responsible to communicate that. Non trivial. It turns out that they've essentially been packing puffy clouds around mainframes. Huh? What?

We have come up with a way to put legacy mainframe data systems into cloud native architectures.

One of the things we do is work with airlines. I don't have to tell you again. You know. And a whole lot of airline reservation information, flight routing, frequent flyer currency, etc are on a multiplicity of divergent systems and architectures. We don't have patience with all of that. We're a systems integrator doing what needs doing in the AWS cloud. Of course a lot of this data is deeply embedded in complex systems that it will never make sense to re-engineer. So we said, leave it where it stands. We built stuff around it. Our offerings are called API Modernization and Middleware Modernization Blueprint. And what we've been able to do is engineer and rationalize what lives best where in an extended hybrid cloud environment. One of the things we've done is applied Scala Akka frameworks to create RESTful interfaces and GraphQL to smooth out the rough edges of ancient mainframe subsystems and scale them up to deal with the new real world of cloud & webscale applications. Another thing we've done is take complex business rule logic which was once a legacy monolith, generalized and retooled it to work in multiple applications. We've augmented or replaced IBM MQ message queues and worked them into both Kafka and Kinesis. We prefer the headache free Kinesis. We don't have patience with zookeeping. Naturally, we've used the power of Cloudwatch to provide more reliable and customizable system monitoring capabilities, and of course we've used the power of AWS Availability Zones to make the whole thing robust against failure. So yeah, we can think of your mainframes as a middleware component in our ever-evolving data management architecture. 

Obviously this is not cutting and pasting technology. It requires deep thought, patience and understanding. We've got our share of that and it's working out nicely. It's not easy to communicate all of those details, but I wanted to give you a heads up so you could consider some of the interesting directions our quest for data perfection has taken us. It has taken us back to the legacy of centralized computing, and we have recast that command and control to fit into contemporary cloud architecture. What a journey. Hey mainframe, we're pals again.

BlockCon Trip Report

So those of you who know me know that I know something about BI / DW and VLDB aka Big Data. I think I may continue to use VLDB to distinguish big structured data from high heaps of Hadoop which may or may not map to anything or reduce you to tears. So let's block and tackle shall we?

Brock Pierce
I'm fairly sure that I saw this dude a year ago at a conference in DTLA. Dude was in a completely different suit. Today he wore a cowboy hat and showed slides from his wedding at Burning Man. He's quite a showman, and his topic 'Disrupting the Disruptors' excited some non-zero fraction of the audience when he mentioned certain disruptions, which I forget. Seeing that he was an actor does not surprise me. He clearly knows how to play to different audiences. His overall message was very reasonable and underscored what people like me already know. Don't fuck with people's money. I think it's a message that needed to be said, underscoring what was true about what Jamie Dimon said in the previous fortnight or so. This is real money and real people will destroy the fraudulent, real people meaning governments in organized countries and organized criminals in others. 

Thinking about Pierce and the DTLA crowd, including the guy who runs Gem and pointed me to Netki boss Justin Newton, one is reminded that players will play in this space and when they have particular interests that they can articulate, things will happen. If I had any doubts about matters of inevitability, they were swept away. This is a herd of smart cattle. They may not know which particular direction or destination they will find, but when those hooves start thundering, watch out. What is clear from Pierce' perspective is that donkeys will get whipped. There's more regulation that applies here than most people are aware of. It's not a whole new type of human endeavor, it's just a whole new set of technologies that haven't put together a full ecosystem yet. It will be the web of value, but we already know what to do with money. 

ICOs are a volatile term, and people are already coming up with alternative acronyms. But the writing about underwriting is on the wall. Entrepreneurs can enable a new class of investors in boilerplate fashion so long as they are clear and have no intent to deceive. This will ultimately have salient effects on financial transparency in startups and the accountability of OTC traded public companies. Huge, but ultimately very reasonable. I get it. 

The other half of the speech was something interesting that I'm noting from both he and Richard Heart. After you make your first doshpoint, the emphasis is on other things. This is reinforcing my set of ideas around 'the smart money'. Easy for Burning Man types, after all, they're not playing to the masses. Well, not at first. Quoth Pierce, a 'billionaire' is not the person with a billion dollars but someone who helps a billion people. 

Experts & Grownups
I had the good fortune to be sitting between an angel investor herder, Jeff and a legal diligence dude, Matt. The former I only spoke a small bit to, whereas I had a bunch of questions for the latter. We briefly talked about China as I poked him about how much the SEC is likely to say. He informed me that their may be questions in the minds of some startup entrepreneurs about whether they can pivot from security to utility or vice versa, but the law is clear. There are, apparently, relatively pro-forma channels for doing this sort of business, and in fact one company has done so as an exchange back in the day. These packages of diligence, provided by his firm which has a technical auditor as well as an economist can look at all of these things. As I thought before, he added some confidence to the idea that coins are commodities and can work like commodities markets. 

Other Kibbles & Bits
First of all the overall sense that I got from this conference is that there is a good amount of money and brains in the crowd. There is a level of energy that is frenetic. People are committed to be present in the space. There is a wide variety of done-ness to the projects on display and what is one conference today will surely be 3 or 4 separate conferences in the future. Blockchain is simply too big to put under one roof, and the roof they had this time was already too small.  This crowd skewed towards entrepreneurs and devs, very much unlike the one last year DTLA which skewed towards financial folks and VCs. I suspect there is a lot of hashing (!) out to be done before this becomes what I would consider a coherent industry. But believe me, the gongs of inevitability are vibrating the air. 

NEO
I talked to my friend Mark J who introduced me to one of his technical associates. His idea is to generate a coin economy around subcontractors to his product. It's a super cool idea and I hope it works out. But I must say that I need some clarity around the difference between a value coin and a utility coin. I asked his tech guy, whom I'll call 'Pedro', where he was on the idea of Solidity. I tell you it was such a relief when I heard him blurt that it sucks. I'm glad I'm not the only one with reservations about writing what ought to be considered ironclad contracts in a language that looks like a crippled half-sister of Javascript. They're building what they're going to build. So I asked him what he thought about EOS, and he skipped right to the money. He said that if he had to do it all over again, he would choose the Chinese system called NEO, which he characterized as a 2nd and a half generation blockchain ecosystem. If he didn't say the word 'bulletproof' his expression implied it strongly. I popped over to the NEO website and promptly lost my ability to recognize the problems it claims to solve. Only proving I have a lot more homework to do. 

Bitcoin's Antifragility
The best thing I wanted to hear was that there are some practitioners and champions in this brave new world who understand that it is actually brave to be new, and newer is not always better. So I was pleased to hear the term 'anti-fragility' in the presentation of Jimmy Song. His presentation was coherent and structured and I have added him to my feeds. I will continue to keep an ear out. 

Identity
Identity and security are one of my ongoing concerns, and one of the deeper reasons I am paying attention to blockchain. The blockchain will bring to the masses what I'm calling a more 'perfected security'.  Since the beginning days of e-commerce a bit of fudging has been going on primarily owing to the original design of the Apache webserver. Too much of the WWW is built on stuff that was overburdened for the applications they would eventually support. Now there are more than enough serious developers to make thing work with purpose-built languages and frameworks. Go exists because of what the web has become.  The internet of value will clean up some of the messy identity and security problems we now face, not only for the web itself, but across enterprises as well. It was clear during the panel discussion here that there is a broad set of customers in the identity market and a lot of market penetration is going to happen with brand-y products that may or may not be a comprehensive solution. I'm rather skeptical right now. I want there to be a standard that is at least as good as KYC (if that's a standard). It didn't appear that the panelists were interested in that so much. So I'll keep my bets with Apple and the more boring financial community for the moment. 

Pay Close Attention
The two best presenters for my attention span were BlockCypher and This Guy.

BlockCypher
Basically they are the AWS of blockchain tech. They lease infrastructure and they have an API that ties the whole thing together. No matter which cryptocurrency does what, this company is the surest bet. They have the proper commercial attitude and they've lined up the most real world partners of anybody I can recall at the conference. They're doing work. 

Hyperledger Project
I've tended to forget about this project primarily because I've been answering newbie questions about cryptocurrencies instead of actually building something and answering questions I need to know. Altoros looks like a very sharp operation and so I'm not surprised that they are rather deep into working with those companies that are ready to take a serious look. Oleg's presentation was the first coherent thing I've heard about the differences between private and public blockchains that wasn't dripping with hype about the superiority of Bitcoin. It cannot be that there are only 500 people in the world smart enough to implement, especially given open source, the guts of a world class blockchain. So the breadth of companies seriously looking at this project augur well for the future. I'm really looking to see if I can get a copy of Oleg's presentation.

That's all for now. I should go again next year, and I'm hoping and expecting that if and when Amazon makes an announcement, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

It's Not About the Chart

I think many people are unaware of the fact that data analysis is designed to establish a broad consensus and that consensus is supposed to reflect an approximation of reality over time.

That means firstly that everyone must be reminded that they are modeling reality, not representing reality. There are assumptions about the model which need to be kept in mind. If these assumptions are not appropriately understood and well communicated, there is likely to be discord in the ‘now what?’ phase of decision making.

This also means that assumptions may change, and reality may change. So new models must be made. Older ones should not necessarily be discarded, but remembered as heresies against the new regime. There is always value in studying heresies because one cannot always validate assumptions and certain assumptions may revert back over time.

When people are focused on charts and graphics and technologies without paying attention to the process and social dynamics of decision making, they are only seeing a fraction of the problem they are trying to solve. These are the reasons why aphorisms exist like:

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

The most difficult and vexing questions to answer are:
1. What were we thinking when we made that decision?
2. Who knew what and when did they know it?
3. Why were we not paying attention to X?

These questions always show up in the wake of a disaster, and the inability for people to address them shows the incompleteness of their thinking around the matter of modeling a changing reality, establishing consensus, and keeping track of the appropriateness of assumptions.

In other words, governance of the decision making process is very valuable and often overlooked (or assumed to be automatic) when a system of analysis is successfully put in place.

Obligatory Seriousness on Goldman Sachs Interest in Bitcoin

So this happened.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is weighing a new trading operation dedicated to bitcoin and other digital currencies, the first blue-chip Wall Street firm preparing to deal directly in this burgeoning yet controversial market, according to people familiar with the matter.

I have yet to meet a neutral objective analyst of the Bitcoin market. So I’m really not expecting to get a very good answer as to what happens next. I do expect, however, that Bitcoin in particular will react differently as a market leader and that other coins are traded in a basket without reference to their actual strengths and weaknesses. At some point that will change. I’m singly focused on Bitcoin because the most people know the most about it, and I consider it the safest investment of them all.

Anyway, I know a lot of people have been jawboning against Bitcoin, especially a good friend of mine who works for Morgan. They had a jolly good laugh a couple weeks ago when they were convinced that China and Jamie Dimon were going to destroy Bitcoin. The price has rebounded. (and yes I bought on the dip). So now they are going to think twice and wonder what Goldman is doing. I like the idea that Goldman’s interest seems to be coming from its own captive audience of customers, but I cannot imagine that GS will build an exchange to compete with the likes of Kraken, Bitfinex and Coinbase.

One smart thing would be for GS to simply acquire Coinbase (although I wish they wouldn’t), or one of the notable exchanges. It’s a decent idea for them to make their own exchange. They could amass a fair amount of goodwill by funding or certifying banking transactions with one of the major exchanges. But also one of the historical problems in establishing these large public cryptocurrency exchanges is that no banks would do business with them. I’m certain that GS has enough contacts and influence in the industry to quickly martial some tech folks behind market making, and simply on reputation alone could convince people to ‘bank’ on their exchange. In the end, all the bitterness about MtGox was about who was sloppy and who was a crook. So if GS doesn’t have a reputation as being sloppy and crooked, there’s another piece of the market who would trust a GS branded Bitcoin exchange. Interestingly enough, I bet GS knows 1000 whales who would actually pay for access to such a branded exchange, which is somewhat reasonable to expect.

About six months ago, I thought that private blockchains would be an avenue towards improving the lot of clearinghouse tech. Today I’m not so sure. I’d be willing to bet that there’s a lot of efficiency to be gained in the settlement process without blockchain. I’m sure GS among others have figured exactly how much by now, so we should see walking at long last after all the talking. I expected that investment houses would simply chuck out their staffs and replace them with blockchain settlements. But they could save a lot of money by tailoring a service around Bitcoin itself rather than trying to build their own blockchain. The trick is that they’re going to have to buy enough themselves to manage that business as their internal paper. That will make the price go up, as they acquire, and allow their customers to acquire. It’s a big part of the liquidity that Bitcoin needs. If all GS has done is setup their own systems to work with Bitcoin for settlements and for their own investment customers convenience, it would be a very smart move, and all they really needed to do. If I were a macher at Goldman, that’s what I would do.