What Makes the Cloud the Cloud
Albert Wenger's thoughts on what makes a cloud
September 19th, 2008 — Cloud computing is a term that has been bandied about a lot the past couple of years. Like “Web 2.0,” it’s a term that has been adopted by companies and used for marketing purposes and for which everyone has their own definition. In a session this week at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures — which invests in some cloud computing startups, such as 10gen — laid out his thoughts on what makes the cloud the cloud.
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10gen Startup Profile
August 8, 2008 —10gen was founded in early 2008 to create a new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology to let developers quickly and easily build complex and scalable Web applications. The company recently secured $1.5 million in Series A financing from Union Square Ventures and will seek additional capital in the future. 10gen is part of the AlleyCorp (www.alleycorp.com) network of affiliated Internet companies. The 10gen platform is currently hosting Silicon Alley Insider, the business publication of its sister company Silicon Alley Media. 10gen has 12 employees.
With the shift to cloud computing, 10gen believe it is time for a "technology refresh" of some of the classic elements of the web application software stack. A new set of tools built with a cloud environment in mind from day one should, over time, provide new capabilities and flexibility for web application development.
10gen believes the cloud computing space is undergoing segmentation. Although traditional cloud models eliminate physical hardware provisioning, they still require technical staff to design a system architecture, even if running on Amazon EC2 servers. Decisions like what database, what load balancer, what app server, Apache pool size, etc. and system administration work have not disappeared.
Amazon Web Services is a collection of tools for building Web infrastructure. In contract, true platforms like Google App Engine and 10gen eliminate system administration and system architecture decisions.
10gen is a web application platform designed for "Cloud Computing." Consisting of an application server, an object database and a management system, 10gen was designed from the start for seamless deployment across large numbers of computers. The 10gen software stack is analogous to Google App Engine in that it provides a new stack of tools (database, grid management, application server) that are purpose-built to run in a cloud environment.
10gen is building a cloud stack from the ground up, including a database and application server, with the design goal of running sites and services of all sizes. The 10gen cloud computing architecture will enable developers to write Web applications and automatically scale as demand increases without re-architecting code. The company aims to provide significant time and cost saving advantages by allowing developers to focus on solving business problems and delivering functionality rather than expending effort on infrastructure, scaling and system management.
The 10gen stack includes a powerful database and application server. Wrapping the stack is a grid management layer that takes care of machine management, scaling, and load balancing. 10gen uses Git for version control and deployment management.
10gen's team is creating a virtual Web application server and database from distributed computing resources with the goal of providing horizontal scalability and geographical redundancy that is secure, transparent and easy to manage through a high-performance grid-aware object database, automatic on-demand application scaling and site management, deployment and performance evaluation tools.
10gen provides automatic, on-demand application scaling across servers; a grid-aware object database; automatic geographic redundancy and data replication; support for multiple programming languages; site management and performance evaluation tools; source code availability; the option to download software and ‘run your own cloud'; and 24/ 7 support with SLAs.
10gen tries to be operating system agnostic, and makes few assumptions about hardware and OS capabilities. The company recommends Linux for production clouds, although this is not essential. 10gen does not use operating system virtual machines: rather, it uses a sandboxed execution environment.
The 10gen application server provides the web server and execution environment for web applications. The application server is "grid aware," securely sandboxing several client contexts on the same machine. The 10gen runtime environment utilizes the Java virtual machine for execution of code.
The application server supports JavaScript as its first server-side development language, with Ruby support in early testing and other languages like python on the product roadmap. Over time, the goal of the 10gen system is language neutrality.
Instead of starting with a server-side language like PHP, Python, Java or Ruby, most of 10gen's libraries are written in JavaScript, and a lot of the system itself is in JavaScript. 10gen likes JavaScript because it is already the primary client-side language, thus allowing one class to be used on the client, server, and even database. It is dynamically typed, has lambda expressions, and many of the other features that excite people in the scripting world. It is also prototype-based (for inheritance), which is a very powerful concept.
Although JavaScript is perceived as being slow, 10gen's Javascript compiler generates java code, which is then compiled with javac into JVM bytecode, yielding very good performance. 10gen's JavaScript system is about 3-4 times faster than rhino or spider monkey.
Although server-side JavaScript is a new paradigm and lacks mature frameworks for application development like Rails for Ruby, and Zend Framework or Cake for PHP, 10gen uses the JVM for execution, which makes it easy to invoke Java libraries from JavaScript. For example, 10gen has wrapped the java JDBC interface in JavaScript, making it easy to communicate with any SQL database. Also, the company does provide a basic set of core libraries, which include XML, SOAP, Django templates, etc. It will take time for a comprehensive library to appear; however, 10gen believes that server-side JavaScript is simply a better way to develop web applications.
10gen provides a global filesystem, GridFS, which stores objects within the Mongo object-oriented database management system. The goal is for Mongo to be an alternative to an ORM (object relational mapping)/memcached (in-memory distributed object cache)/mysql stack.
Mongo is neither a relational database, nor "table oriented" like Amazon SimpleDB or Google BigTable. For developers that are familiar with object-relational mapping layers, the 10gen interface will be similar to use, but faster, more powerful, and less work to set up.
Mongo is similar to Amazon SimpleDB and Google BigTable in that all three are non-relational. However, Mongo is a true object database, rather than a key/value data store. Mongo also has greater depth of functionality than existing cloud databases. An early alpha release of Mongo will be available next week, with a full release targeted for late in the year.
10gen is open source. Alpha I is available now and is an early preview release. Q4'08 is targeted for beta, and Q1'09 for full general availability. 10gen will offer paid 24/7 support at the general availability release. Customers will be able to run their application on 10gen's own cloud instance, which is hosted with multiple providers in multiple data centers. Pricing post alpha is yet to be established, but will be competitive with other offerings, and with a very low minimum bill size. Over time, the company expects 10gen technology to be offered directly by various web hosting providers. People can also run their own cloud with the 10gen technology.
Competitors include Google, Amazon, Heroku and emerging Ruby on Rails cloud deployment platforms. Key competitive advantages include server-side javascript, 10gen's grid-aware object database technology and open source.
Reaching for the Clouds
A new startup hopes to compete in the crowded Web-application infrastructure market by making its platform open source.
July 25, 2008 — This week, a startup called 10gen released a preview of its infrastructure software for Web applications, entering a competitive field crowded with startups and the formidable Google, with its Google App Engine. The company received $1.5 million in an early funding round from Union Square Ventures.
Full Article on Technology Review
10gen
Union Square Ventures writes about their investment into 10gen.
July 20, 2008 — My love for computers and software started as a teenager growing up in Germany. I fondly remember my Apple II which followed my TI 59. I early on discovered that I could earn money with my programming skills and wound up doing some after school work for Siemens. While I mostly wrote code on a local machine, I got to do some mainframe stuff in Cobol. I was struck at the time by how incredibly cool and easy it was to have code running on a machine that was in a different city (Munich) over 100 miles away that reliably and rapidly provided access for thousands of Siemens endusers across the world. That was almost 25 years ago.
Full Article on Union Square Ventures
10gen, New Cloud Computing Firm, Closes $1.5m Series A
Union Square Ventures Backs Platform-as-a-Service Technology Provider
NEW YORK, NY — July 21st, 2008 — 10gen (http://www.10gen.com/), creator of a new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology that helps developers more quickly and easily build dynamic, scalable Web sites and applications, today announced $1.5 million in Series A financing from Union Square Ventures. The cloud computing company, founded earlier this year by DoubleClick veterans Kevin Ryan, Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz, and former Joost engineering VP, Geir Magnusson Jr., aims to provide significant time and cost saving advantages by allowing developers to focus on solving business problems and delivering functionality rather than expending effort on infrastructure, scaling and system management.
"At 10gen we are building a cloud stack from the ground up - including a database and application server - with the design goal of running sites and services of all sizes," noted Dwight Merriman, Founder and CEO. "Rather than porting existing tools into the cloud, Web development can only prosper by building new technologies for this environment, technologies which are available in an open way such that many companies and other entities can collaborate on their development."
10gen's team is creating a virtual Web application server and database from distributed computing resources with the goal of providing horizontal scalability and geographical redundancy that is secure, transparent and easy to manage through a high-performance grid-aware object database, automatic on-demand application scaling and site management, deployment and performance evaluation tools. The application server supports JavaScript as its first development language, with Ruby support in early testing and other languages on the product roadmap.
"The 10gen team brings together a great vision for cloud computing with amazing experience in building Internet scale systems" said Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger, who will be joining 10gen's board of directors. "We are excited to support them in their effort to provide the development community with an open source platform-as-a-service."
10gen is part of the AlleyCorp (http://www.alleycorp.com/) network of affiliated Internet companies. The 10gen platform is currently hosting Silicon Alley Insider (http://www.alleyinsider.com), the business publication of its sister company Silicon Alley Media.
About 10gen
10gen is creating a new platform to let developers quickly and easily build complex and scalable Web applications. The 10gen cloud computing architecture will enable developers to write Web applications and automatically scale as demand increases without re-architecting code. The 10gen stack includes a powerful database and application server. For more information, please visit http://www.10gen.com/ or email info@10gen.com. For career information please email resumes to jobs@10gen.com.
About Union Square Ventures
Union Square Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm based in New York City. USV invests in companies that disrupt markets by capitalizing on ubiquitous connectivity and commodity IT infrastructure. USV's current portfolio includes Etsy, Twitter and Indeed, and past investments include Tacoda (acquired by AOL), FeedBurner (acquired by Google) and del.icio.us (acquired by Yahoo!). For more information, please visit www.unionsquareventures.com.
Contact:
Michael Berkowitz
Director of Corporate Communications
AlleyCorp LLC
(646) 747-1544
mberkowitz@alleycorp.com
Ex-DoubleClick CEO heads into the clouds
Kevin Ryan's sixth Manhattan startup will ride the latest Web trend offering low-cost infrastructure services through cloud computing.
May, 8, 2008 — Former DoubleClick Inc. Chief Executive Kevin Ryan is starting his sixth Manhattan-based tech firm in the past three years, a company called 10gen that will offer Web sites low-cost infrastructure services.
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