In the software development world, the standard story is that you get software developed quickly, cheaply, or with high quality.  You can get any two attributes.  You can’t get all three.

In the Cloud, it is not that simple.  There are more like six attributes:

1. Price (What does it cost?)
2. Availability (How much can you count on it being there for you?)
3. Performance (How quickly can you get your transactions processed?)
4. Agility (How quickly will it expand or contract to meet your immediate needs?)
5. Control (How much control to you have over what is happening to your data and software?)
6. Security (Can you sleep at night?  This includes data security as well as the survivability of the CSP itself.)

In the general case, there really is not much relationship among these attributes.  The Cloud is not a product; it is a concept.  The Cloud is implemented in almost as many different ways as there are Cloud Service Providers.   You must understand the requirements of a particular workload first.  Then you can determine the appropriate set of CSPs.  Only then can you determine how these six attributes are related for that workload.

I have talked about moving a workload to the Cloud as a ten-step process:

1. Understand your business needs.
2. Select the workload.
3. Determine the real requirements in the areas of availability, performance, agility, control and security.
4. Determine what kind of a Cloud Solution you need (Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, or Software as a Service; and whether it should be a Public, Private, Community or Hybrid Cloud)
5. Select the candidate CSPs.
6. Submit the requirements and evaluate the responses.
7. Negotiate the contract.
8. Plan the migration, both into the Cloud and back out again when that becomes necessary.
9. Migrate the workload to the Cloud, test, and go live.
10. Measure and review.

It is critical that you know what your organization is trying to accomplish in moving to the Cloud.  It usually involves lowering costs, increasing agility, or decreasing the aggravation of running an IT infrastructure.  The order of these is important, as it should influence decisions as your move through the process.  Sometimes there are other, more hidden, objectives.  I worked on one project where the real objective was that the IT director for the subsidiary of a major international company wanted to be the first one to successfully take a workload to the Cloud.  He hoped to use that prestige to move up into the parent company.  That added a fourth, and most important, criterion: time to implementation.  There may be other compelling events that put a time constraint on the migration: hardware replacement plan, software license renewal, new product introduction, merger or acquisition.  If you do not implement a solution that meets the most important of these goals you will fail, even if the resulting solution works as needed.

Over a year ago I talked about selecting the first application to move to the Cloud.  After the first one, you will have a better feel for what should be next within your own organization.

Often the hardest part of moving to the Cloud is determining what your requirements really are in the Cloud.  Different workloads will have different requirements.  The key areas are usually:

1. Availability.
2. Performance.
3. Security.
4. Control.

I plan to have a blog on each generating the requirements on each of these in the near future, but there are a couple of important points to consider in general.

Most CSPs have published Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on availability and performance.  However, they are almost always not talking in the same terms that you are thinking.  In most cases, these differences of viewpoint make it difficult to compare the seemingly same SLA across multiple CSPs.  As one person muttered, they are apples and watermelons.  As you create your own requirements, document exactly how you are measuring them.  For example, you may measure response time as the time between when one of your customers enters a request and the customer receives an acknowledgement that the request has been processed.  Your CSP will measure response time as the time between the request reaching the edge of the CSP’s facility and the response leaving the CSP’s facility.  At a minimum, that leaves the Internet transit time in both directions out of the measurement.  Depending on the location of the CSP’s datacenter and its band-pass capacity, there could be a significant difference between the two measurements.

The last word:

Moving to the Cloud is sometimes a matter of compromise.  I’ll trade, for example, a loss of control for a substantial cost decrease, or I’ll trade paying a little more for increased agility along with disaster recovery capabilities.  The critical part is to keep track of the priorities, and make sure that what you end up with is “good enough” in all the important areas.

This is much like politics.  You may have issues with each candidate, but you will never find a candidate that you agree with on every point (unless you are running).  I find it helps to make a list of my really important issues, prioritize them, and then rate each candidate on those issues.  See which one comes out with the best “score,” then see if you can live with pushing that lever.  But if you don’t vote, you can’t complain.

Comments solicited.

Keep your sense of humor.

Walt.

Humans have been genetically engineered to take interruptions seriously.  If you are busy knapping a rock to make a stone tool and you hear a nearby growl, it is critical that you literally drop everything and make an immediate fight or flight decision.  Fortunately, the mind does not take the time to put everything carefully away so it can later easily pick up where it was.  There might not be a later if there is a delay in taking action.  When you have dealt with the bear, you look around for the rock and knapping stone and take the time to figure out exactly what you were doing and where you were in the process before resuming the task.

As a result, humans are not very good at multi-tasking.  We have all been in the phone meeting where you hear unrelated side conversations, the constant clicking of multiple keyboards, and the usual, “I’m not sure I understood the question” from someone who was specifically named in said question.  It really means, “Ah, I was busy doing something else and didn’t pay any attention to you.” I get really annoyed when I get an email from someone in the same meeting I’m in about an entirely different topic.  Now both of us are distracted, although part of that is my fault for allowing my own flicker.

Last Wednesday, the Washington Post published an article with some supporting stats:  Twenty-eight percent of traffic accidents in the US occur when people talk on cellphones or send text messages while driving (based on a report from the National Safety Council).  That translates to 1.4 million crashes each year caused by phone conversations, and 200,000 blamed on texting.  That is a lot of pain, lost time, and financial loss caused by easily avoidable interruptions.

Everyday, you have to be ready to react to the dumb driver and all of the other hazards in daily life.  The same thing happens in the office.  You get a phone call and you immediately switch your attention.  How many times have you hung up the phone, and not been able to remember what you were doing, and what was that great idea you had that has now flickered away?

As an aside, when was the last time you actually “hung up” the phone, or “dialed” it?  The younger generation has no idea where those terms come from – just part of the strangeness of us old folk.

Brick Lane, London (2008)

People talk about walking and chewing gum at the same time as difficult.  Walking and texting is almost impossible, as proven by the almost daily YouTube examples.  East London’s Brick Lane wrapped lampposts in fluffy, white rugby goalpost cushions due to the number of walking while texting accidents there.  The cushions were soon removed.  Even the British have a limit to absurdity.  The latest studies I could find showed about 1,000 walking while texting accidents resulting in emergency room visits in 2008 in the US, double the number that occurred in 2007 which was almost double the 2006 count.  In 2008, we in the US sent only about 1 trillion texts.  In 2010 we sent 2.1 trillion texts.

If you can’t walk and text, you can’t pay attention to someone else and text.

For most of us, you can ignore the interruption in the office.  You don’t have to answer that phone, read that email or text message right now.  You can, in fact, turn it all off while you are concentrating on an important task.  You might be surprised what you can do in an hour without any interruptions.  Even a nap is better uninterrupted.  Those messages will all patiently wait.

The same goes when you are the interrupter.  Do you need to make a call, or can you just send an email?  Don’t send an email, then text 30 seconds later because you didn’t get a response.  You can probably wait even an hour for the answer.  And maybe get in some good concentration time.

Face time with a real person should always have priority over a piece of electronics, even if that “face time” is over the phone.  Interrupting a conversation to read and even respond to an inanimate object or take another call is not only exceedingly rude, but is now wasting that other person’s time.  It sends a clear message: this interruption is more important than you are.

The last word:

I am not a believer in New Year’s resolutions.  In fact, the last one I made was to not make any more, and I have actually kept that resolution.  But just for the fun of it, periodically turn off all of the interruptions.  Just concentrate on the task at hand.  Start with just ten minutes and work up to an hour or two at a time.  You might just be amazed.

Comments solicited, especially from the under-30 crowd.

Keep your sense of humor.

Walt.

New Year’s has always been a bit perplexing to me.  For most people, at least as we reach adulthood, New Year’s Eve was more important than New Year’s Day, when the eve of other holidays is just their precursor.

Early memories include the Mummers’ Parade in Philadelphia.  As with many other events, it has changed over the years. My early memories begin with the clowns being the first to go down Broad Street.  The TV would be on from breakfast so as not to miss a minute of the parade.  My grandparents would joke that the Mummers could withstand the cold, early morning, winter temperatures as they had so much antifreeze on board.  People would be sitting on mats made of newspaper so as to insulate themselves from the cold seeping up through the pavement all the way through their bodies.  I was taken to the Thanksgiving parade because the cold wouldn’t be so intense, but not the Mummer’s Parade.  The consensus among the adults was that it was just too cold to stand for long along the cement canyon walls that the buildings on Broad Street formed.  My grandmother thought the clowns were just silly, but the TV was tuned to them anyway.  As the day progressed we would snack at lunch so as not to miss any of the parade, which might, but not necessarily, have progressed to the fancy divisions by then.  As the winter’s bitterly bright sunrise light passed into its watery afternoon counterpart, Granddad would be anxious to see the football game; but Grandmom would be dubious about allowing him to change the channel lest she miss a string band.  Their TV was not a large, flat-screen with remote, but a smallish square set in a furniture style cabinet. Someone had to walk over to it and twist a knob that clicked between the channels.  Not wanting to wear down the ratchets on the knob you only did this after some consideration.  Then, too, when changing channels you might have to adjust the antenna that sat on top of the cabinet as the stations were broadcasting from different directions.  Eventually the men would be allowed to watch some of the football game.  At half time it was necessary to see where the parade was in its procession.  Sometimes, we would have dinner before the string bands finally made their appearance.  It was always the highlight of the day for my grandmothers.

The year I was in third grade it finally sunk into my little brain that one of the customs the adults participated in was the formation of resolutions to make them better people in the New Year.  After all, a New Year meant a new start.  Being somewhat conscience driven, I decided to make my own list.  I topped it with the goal of refraining from biting my fingernails, then I would keep my room neat and tidy.  I was constantly being corrected for both failings as a child.  I’m not sure if I actually got through New Year’s Day before succumbing to my “nasty habit” of biting my nails.  Ah, well, it made beginning of the next year’s list easy enough.  I think I did a bit better about picking up my things and putting them away.  But I’m sure it didn’t really last very long as it is still something with which I struggle.  Of course, now I have most of a house to clutter up and so can make even larger messes.

Somewhere in that time frame, I discovered that adults found something magical in staying up over mid-night and watching the years change.  Moma wasn’t very yielding to my pleas to join the adults in this vigil, so it had to wait for a year that Daddy wasn’t somewhere on a cruise with Uncle Sam’s Canoe Club.  Finally the stars were properly aligned and Daddy said something momentous like:  Sure.  Why not?  That should have been my clue that it wasn’t going to be the spectacular event I was anticipating.  My parents put my brother to bed at his regular bedtime.  He was still pre-school age.  Then they insisted that I get ready for bed so that I could go to bed as soon as the barrier between the years had been broken.  The interlude between my regular bedtime and mid-night was much longer than I had anticipated.  I’m sure the waiting wasn’t made any easier by having had a relaxing bath and putting on warm, cozy pajamas, then curling up on the sofa with a warm mug of hot cocoa, which was the special treat for the evening.  I remember struggling to stay awake as my parents sat next to each other talking softly, as they often did.  After some time they nudged me.  I could hear people shouting and horns blowing outside.  Daddy opened the front door and we all stepped out onto the font step and walk and shouted a Happy New Year to our neighbors. I was then swiftly shuttled off to bed.  So much for a big New Year’s celebration.

Our years in Naples introduced us to a slightly different tradition.  When we were there, in the early 1960’s, Neapolitans brought the New Year in with a Big Noise.  We had arrived in October so our first New Year’s was relatively early in our stay and we had very little ability with the Italian language.  We had sampled the festive Christmas market and bought a small Presepe, nativity scene.  After Christmas, we began to hear fire crackers.  We learned from our neighbors that it was customary to set off fire works to celebrate the advent of the year.  It would be a very big celebration with everyone in the city participating, we were told.  It was easy to find a kiosk that would sell fire works.  Small businessmen were everywhere.  I looked up the critical words to make our purchase.  Now, we hadn’t bought fire works in the States, so I had no idea what I was to be asking for so the general term was all I looked up:  fuoco d’artificio  Apparently I was only going to ask for one.  Daddy, Moma, Jim, who was now 6 years old, and I went to the nearest stand we could find and, haltingly, I asked for a firework.  The man put a small cherry bomb on the counter as we heard a loud explosion in the background.  I looked at the little rabbit turd and decided we needed something better.   So, I tried again.  Un più grande.  So, he put up something that resembled the deposit a deer would make.  Again an explosion from somewhere down the road.  Più grande.  Simile a quello.  To be clearer I waved my hand in the direction of the explosion we had just heard.  Now he put out something the size of a fist.  Daddy waited no longer.  He paid the man and we left.  Come New Year’s Eve we had a few sparklers and Daddy fixed a couple of Roman candles to the balcony railing.  They were exciting to watch.  Then he went to light The Bomb.  Moma, Jim and I were told to get inside the apartment.  Daddy flicked his lighter, lit the wick, ran for the apartment, closed the door and The Bomb went off with a deafening explosion.  Smoke filled the area so we weren’t sure what was left.  We looked around and couldn’t see Jim.  Daddy said he couldn’t see the balcony.  Moma was running down the hall looking for Jim.  We finally found him in my bedroom, the furthest room in the apartment from the balcony.  I had an old style vanity in the far corner where he was curled up in the niche for legs.  It took several minutes to coax him out.  We wandered back to see what damage we had caused the balcony.  Fortunately for all, there was nary a crack.  All that was left of The Bomb were a few small pieces of paper from the red wrapper and the ringing in our ears.  New Year’s Day it rained;  a meteorological effect Moma blamed on all the fireworks.  The remaining New Years we spent in Naples we were content to watch others set of their fireworks.

Mostly, Walt and I have spent New Year’s Eve very quietly.  One year, early in our marriage and before the obligations of rearing children, we enjoyed the celebration in the small town of Volcano, CA.  The town is in a small, bowl shaped valley that the first settlers thought was the remnants of an, hopefully, extinct volcano.  Early morning fogs help to reinforce that impression.  We went with a number of Walt’s colleagues from where he was working and their spouses to the St. George Hotel.  It had been built during the Gold Rush and maintained the ambiance of the era.  We arrived in the early afternoon of a beautiful day in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.  After checking into the hotel we spent the afternoon wandering through the picturesque little town.  The Post Office, just down the street from the Hotel, was so small that it had been wrapped in a red ribbon and bow.  We enjoyed a wonderful party with the advantage of not having to drive home when it was over.  Sometime the following day we all took our leave and drove back to the Bay Area.

New Year’s Day has always been a peaceful holiday.  It is time for the last big holiday dinner.  In our family, that means a roast of pork with sides of potatoes, sauerkraut, and baked beans.   Don’t forget the pies for dessert.  It’s a time to embrace the warmth of family and fortify our spirits before getting back to the hurly-burly of the “regular” rhythm of our lives.

No matter how or where you celebrate, I wish you the very best of times throughout this New Year.

The last word:

A happy and prosperous 2012 to all.

We’ll head back to the Cloud next week.

Comments solicited.

Keep your sense of humor.

Walt.

Never let facts ruin a good story.  There is no Seamus Tiernan on the Infrastructure Committee of Galway County Council.  Since he was described as a politician, it is actually easy to believe that the story is true, especially when it is printed in a well-respected newspaper.

Getting away from the cloudy logic, there is some basis to this statement.  Is Cloud Computing a clean industry?  Can a company claim “going to the Cloud” as part of their “going green” campaign?

Not an easy question to answer.  Like all “Is it green?” questions there are at least two ways to look at it: locally and globally.

Are electric cars green?  Locally, clearly yes.  They do not pollute.  They use less energy to run than a petroleum-powered vehicle, although most of that is due to the fact that they are significantly lighter and very weak from a performance standpoint.  Also, if you can only go 35 miles before a six-hour fill-up, you tend to not travel very far and combine several errands into one trip.  If you treated a petroleum-powered car with the same weight and performance characteristics exactly the same way, it would also have a significantly reduced local carbon footprint.

Globally, the answer is much more complicated.  It depends on two factors: the additional energy and pollution caused by the creation of the car, especially the batteries; and how and where the recharging electric power is generated.  I suspect that in many cases, the global pollution of an electric car currently is actually higher than a small petroleum-powered vehicle on a per-mile driven basis.

Electric cars are not new.  In 1900, 40% of American cars were powered by steam, 38% by electricity, and only 22% by gasoline.  The first car that Thomas Edison bought was a Baker electric car (made in Cleveland).  Baker electric cars had a range of 50 miles between recharging, and this was over 100 years ago.  Of course today’s electric cars are a lot safer, although a Baker electric car was the first vehicle to use seat belts, and reached speeds over 75 miles per hour.  The demise of the early electric car was due to high cost, and the absence of a recharging or battery-exchanging infrastructure across the U.S.

What about the Cloud?  What does it take to run the Cloud, and what gets shifted when a company “moves to the Cloud?”  From a purely physical viewpoint, what gets shifted is IT infrastructure: primarily servers, storage, and networks.  All of that is powered by electricity – a lot of electricity.  More than one company has moved its datacenter solely because they could no longer get enough electrical power at their current facility.

Why so much power?  The faster a processor runs the more power it takes to run it.  For example, an Intel® Xeon® processor chip for a server at 1.86 GHz is rated at 45 watts, while the 3.06 GHz model is rated at 95 watts.  These are just representative numbers as there are dozens of Intel server chip models, but the trend is fairly constant: power requirements go up faster than processor speed, and this trend is consistent across chip vendors.

Intel processors are also very good at converting electricity to heat, possibly better than almost anything else.  If you put 100 blade servers in a rack, each with one or two high performance Intel chips, it can like putting 150 100-watt incandescent light bulbs in a very small closet.  A good rule of thumb is that it takes about as much electricity to cool the server as it does to run it.

Locally, therefore, “moving to the Cloud” is definitely green.  You have eliminated a lot of energy use and a lot of heat generation.  This is all good.  The global impact depends, again, on many factors.  But the basic concept of the Cloud allows that global impact to be substantially reduced.

The Cloud is all about virtualization, using one physical device to act like many devices.  In the case of servers, it lets a single physical server look exactly like a dozen or more servers, each running its own set of applications.  This works because in most environments, applications are not always very busy.  In your average IT shop, most servers are only running at 20-25% utilization.  The power is there for those few times a day or month or year when they are needed.  Think about your home computer.  You probably leave it on most of the time because when you want it, you want it NOW – not in the two or more minutes it takes Windows to boot up.  When you are sitting in front of it, you can be using anywhere from 10% to 100% of its processing capability.  Some video games, editing movies, even standard office work tasks can drive utilization very high.  But over the day, you are probably not using even 10% of the processing power you have.  When you put applications into the Cloud, the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) is going to put many applications into the same server, and balance it across a lot of applications or customers.  Typically, a CSP will run a server at 60-80% utilization.

Just using virtualization and spreading resources across many customers, a CSP can reduce energy utilization by about 50% over that used in the individual customers’ IT shops.

The Cloud is location independent.  Within wide limits, your CSP’s data center can be almost anywhere.  In the U.S., there is not much performance difference between a server 20 miles away and one 1,000 miles away.  What a CSP needs at its data center is power and high-speed Internet connectivity.  The data center does not have to be in a major city, it can be in a cornfield surrounded by wind towers or in a desert surrounded by solar cells.

There are of course other requirements.  A CSP wants at least two separate power sources and at least two separate high-speed Internet connections for its data center for reliability reasons.  It also needs to be accessible to the staff it takes to monitor and mange the facility, but many of those people can work from anywhere, using the Cloud.

The bottom line: move some or all of your IT infrastructure to the Cloud and honestly claim that you are going green, in at least that area.  Even if you are using an in-house Public Cloud in the same facility, you will be improving your carbon footprint through virtualization.

The last word:

You may remember that in my last blog I indicated that I “plan to talk about how you and the CSP can agree on how you will jointly manage the risk” of moving to the Cloud.  One of the best reasons to have a plan is so you know when things aren’t actually on the desired track.  When I heard of the Galway County Council conversation, I decided the planned topic could wait until next year.

I wish you and your families a very happy holiday season.

Comments solicited.

Keep your sense of humor.

Walt.

But the Cloud is not a product; it is a concept.  Moving to the Cloud is not an event; it is a journey.  I have provided some guidelines on selecting that first application to move to the Cloud and a ten-step process to move an application to the Cloud.

During your journey to the Cloud you will be presented with a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), even from the “supporters” in your organization.  You may be getting direction to save money, reduce capital expenses, make IT more responsive to the needs of the business, and streamline the IT staff – all of which sounds like “To the Cloud with haste!”  There is, however, always the little caveat “Don’t screw anything up.”  There is good reason for the FUD.  Moving to the Cloud can pose significant risks, and they must be understood up front, eliminated or at least mitigated during implementation, and continually monitored and managed over time.  These risks usually fit into five categories:

1. Security.
   Your Cloud solution must protect your data as required by compliance and legal regulations.
2. Performance.
   Your Cloud solution must provide the needed level of performance, probably measured in terms of response time: how long did it take before the end user received a “did it” notification.
3. Availability.
   Your Cloud solution must be available to your customers, employees and partners when they need it.
4. Control.
   Your Cloud solution will change who controls your data and some of your processes. What negative results could occur because of this change of control?
5. Change.
   The Cloud is different.  There are probably people in your organization who resist change, sometimes because they are concerned for their own job, don’t want to learn something new, or just because “We have done it this way for years.”

These risks exist because you are bringing a new partner into your organization, the CSP (Cloud Service Provider).  The CSP will have significant control over your data, and the performance and availability of your applications.

For each application you will need to identify the security, performance and availability requirements.  They will help determine how to implement the application in the Cloud, and help you decide which of the multiple of CSPs can deliver an appropriate solution.  You will need to identify the control issues, and determine that they are resolved appropriately.  Often the “control” issues are really “fear of change” issues.  These can be the most complicated to deal with, but I strongly recommend that you attack those from the very beginning.  Talk to all of the stakeholders, get their concerns, and make sure you keep them informed throughout the process.  Provide them with detailed information about how you are going to deal with their issues.

In a blog 18 months ago, I talked about how these risk areas are shared between the CSP and your organization.  The bottom line: the CSP will limit their financial liability.  Ultimate responsibility resides with your organization.

You don’t need to start with the hard stuff.  Sometimes, the best way to start is with something easy.  The application still should be important – you want people to notice that the Cloud worked and provided real benefit to the organization.

If it is really simple, just do it.

What is a “simple” business application? To me and in this context, a simple business application is one that:

• Doesn’t involve data that is subject to compliance or privacy regulations.
• Doesn’t have strict performance requirements
• There is no business penalty if it doesn’t respond “instantly” all of the time.
• You don’t expect to push a high rate of transactions through the business application (a rule of thumb: more than 10 a second).
• Doesn’t have strict availability requirements (i.e., there is no business penalty if it is only available 95% of the time).
• Doesn’t involve a lot of data (more than a few gigabytes).

Alternatively, it might be something that will only be needed for a short time (from hours through a month or two), where the cost of going through the ten-step process isn’t justified by the business value or risk of just doing it. The Cloud can be very good at allowing you to try something quickly and inexpensively; something like a new marketing campaign, a new process, a new geographic market, even a new business application.

In these cases, pick up your credit card and go to any of the dozens of Public Cloud providers like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft and rent your own little piece of the Cloud.

Start with a pseudo-Cloud.  Four weeks ago I wrote about companies that provide services with Cloud in their name but which are really managed services, perhaps using your own IT infrastructure in your own facility.  While they may not be the Cloud by definition, their solutions have a lot of Cloud attributes and can provide at least some of the benefits.  They also represent less change and less transfer of control, so may be more palatable to some important stakeholders.

It really doesn’t matter how you start.  It matters that you start the journey, and that the first effort is a measurable success.

The last word:

Next time I plan to talk about how you and the CSP can agree on how your will jointly manage the risk.

Comments solicited.

Keep your sense of humor.

Walt.

The Holiday Season is here.  Hooray for Thanksgiving!  How did you spend your day?  Did you remember to say, “Thank you” to someone?

Not all of us can experience the Thanksgiving in the iconic Norman Rockwell painting, Freedom from Want.  It is an idealistic expression of family and the welcoming feelings of family gatherings.  Yet, annually we strive to create that vignette for ourselves.

When I was in elementary school, in the 1950s, we would draw, cut, paste turkeys, Pilgrims, and Indians.  It was a very short-sighted and syrupy interpretation of what Thanksgiving was and why we celebrate it.  More importantly to our narrowly focused little minds, it was the first vacation from school for that year.  Some had had Columbus Day off, but that was earlier and only the one day.  It seemed ever so long since the freedom of summer.  The grind on our poor little spirits was untenable.  More pragmatically, most schools were heated with coal furnaces and it cost too much to bank them for a Thursday, bring us back for Friday, and then bank them again for the weekend.  Columbus Day, being earlier in the year, didn’t worry the custodian about the care of the furnace. So, Thanksgiving break became a four-day weekend.  Upon dismissal Wednesday afternoon we would be primly marched from the classroom in our silent, straight girl’s and boy’s lines, clutching our Thanksgiving craft project.  Upon exiting the door we would run like the wind.  Need I add that many of the craft projects never got home or if they did they were the worse for wear?

By the time we got up Thursday morning, our mothers were already busy in the kitchen.  There were pies to bake and a big bird to get into the oven.  Some of my favorite Thanksgivings were when Daddy would help Grandmom, Moma’s mother, make pies.  She would add a “dollop” of schnapps to pumpkin and mince pie fillings.  I never knew how much a “dollop” was, and apparently neither did she.  She would ask my father if she had put in enough.  He would make a big show of touching his finger to the filling and tasting, then he would always say no, not enough.  She’d add a drop more and they’d check again.  He, of course, would try to see how much he could entice her to put into the pies.  It was a game for both of them and would set everyone in the kitchen, and it seemed everyone was always there, into giggles.  “Oh, Jimmy!” would put a stop to it.  She never really used much, but it was always a fun by-play for the two of them.

We would spend much of the morning watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV.  One year, when I was still very small and we were in Philadelphia, my grandfather took me in town to see the parade in person.  I can remember being dressed in my forest green leggings, with the forest green coat that had a fitted bodice and a full skirt on the bottom, with a matching hat. The only time he would let go of my hand was when he would lift me so I could see more.  It was noisy, and colorful, and the air was electric.  He bought me a balloon.  I remember watching the vendor carefully free it from the fistful of stings that tethered the multicolored cloud above his head. There were floats and bands and clowns.  A classic parade.  As soon as Santa passed, the crowd began to move and Granddad gripped my hand so hard I thought it would fall off.  He guided us to the subway, which was also crowded with the cheerful holiday throng. But I lost my balloon.  I was used to them being tied to my wrist, and Granddad had simply given it to me to hold.  Foolish me, I’d let go.  So I watched it drift up into the sky.

Thanksgiving was also football games.  They were long and tedious for little people who were excited by the holiday atmosphere and couldn’t sit still.  Whether we would be stationed out of town and it was just Daddy to annoy, or we were home with other family men, they would be riveted to the game and have no time to play.  Soon Moma, or if we were at grandparents’ houses, grandmothers would be telling us it was time to come to the table.  The men would grumble something about it being the end of the fourth quarter.  The women would bemoan the fact that the food was getting cold.  Then we were encouraged to eat until we were ready to burst. It was a feast, we were told.  It was insulting to those who had labored to put it together if we didn’t eat as much as we possibly could.  The skin of the bird was crackly and full of all the flavor from the basting.  If we were with my father’s parents there would be ambrosia salad.  That was a very sweet concoction of fruit cocktail, coconut, and sour cream that just slid down your throat.  At my other grandmother’s house there was a dish of stewed celery, which I thought was about the best vegetable ever.  For dessert we had to have a “sliver” of each variety of pie.  Then the adults would sit and talk for what seemed to be hours.  Children would be excused to go play.  If it was still light, we would slip outside where the brisk fall air would reinvigorate us.

After Walt and I married we faced the dilemma of most young couples:  who gets to make which holiday dinner?  Was it the young bride who, in our case, didn’t know how to cook, or which of the couple’s families get the honor?  Since Moma’s rule had always been the Christmas was for the Children, Walt and I decided that whoever had the youngest child should have Christmas, and Thanksgiving and New Year’s could be split.  That meant that early on, much of Christmas Day was at my parent’s as my sister, 16 years my junior, was still a child.  When we had children of our own, that shifted.  Then our Mothers began alternating who would hold the Thanksgiving dinner.  As my siblings weren’t married that was still relatively simple.  As our mothers aged, they decided to pool their resources and take the melded families to dinner at a nice restaurant.  My brother and sister-in-law do two Thanksgivings in one day to be with both sides of their families, my sister alternates.  Sometimes our sons can join us and sometimes not.  This year we have one home.  We are thankful for these opportunities to share family time and love.  I don’t know how you spent your Thanksgiving Day, but I hope you were able to enjoy some of the warmth evoked by the Rockwell painting.

The last word:

We hope your Thanksgiving was relaxing and your end of year holidays are joyous.

Comments solicited.

Keep your sense of humor.

Walt.

In the mid 1990s I was working on a project putting computers, and the Internet, into a high school.  I was observing one history class, held in one of the labs where every student had a computer connected to the Internet.  They were exploring early 19^th century farming techniques in the US.  I noticed some young men in the back row who were extremely intent on what was displayed on one of the screens.  So I wandered back.  Turns out they had a game:  who could first display a picture of a naked lady by only clicking – no keyboard activity allowed, and starting from the school’s home page or a link provided by the teacher.  Turns out these lads were very good at it.

The very first tool to search the Internet was Archie (“Archive” without the “v”) introduced in 1990.  Archie only searched through the file names of public anonymous FTP sites.  FTP sites hold files, not web pages like a company’s web site.  But, back then, that was where a lot of the information in the Internet was hidden.  The first “real” search engine appeared in 1993, followed by a host of others.  These worked by sending out web crawlers, scripts that literally roamed the Internet and kept track of what was where.  All of these prioritized the results based on the number of times the word you were searching for appeared on a page.

In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with a different scheme to determine the importance of a page for a given search: instead of looking only at the page, look at how many pages linked to that page.  They called this product “BackRub.”  They soon changed the name to Google (a misspelling of “googol,” a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros).  They wanted to imply that their search engine would provides large quantities of information for the users of the Internet.

I used to wade through the first three to five pages of results to find what I wanted, but Google has impressively improved its relevance analysis and I rarely go beyond the first page anymore.  Thus placement in the search results is now critical.  Not surprisingly, there has been a steady war going on between Google and web designers.  Web designers use a process called “search engine optimization” to improve the visibility of a web page to get it on that valuable first page of search results.  Google works just as hard to make it very hard to scam the process.  Usually, Google wins out and the search results are reasonably “fair” and, more importantly, very useful.

Of course, you can also bribe Google (although they call them “ads” and “sponsored links”).  Send Google money and your results show up on the first page.  So far, Google has been very careful to make it obvious that an entry is a sponsored link or an ad by putting them off to the right side or using a different background color with an explicit “Ad” tag.

Remember my earlier comment about the URL is king?  Not anymore.  If you want information about a product or company, you can just enter the name in a Google search.  You will almost instantly get links to the company’s website, some anti-company sites, product information, and competitors.

But searching is just one piece of Google.  In addition to searching, Google offers free email, free calendar, free web hosting, free data storage in the Cloud, free access to Microsoft Office-like applications, free collaboration facilities, free mapping services, free news, and free language translation.  They are also a competitor to Amazon and PayPal.

But wait, there’s more.  Google launched Google+ in June as direct competition to Facebook, supporting instant messaging and a host of additional social networking features.  This includes the ability to see what other Google+ users are interested in, and the ability to recommend sites or web pages for your friends.  Google+ was just opened to the general public in September, and reached 40 million users in October.  A Bloomberg article estimates that 22% of US adults will join within one year.

Google does not want you to interface directly with the Internet, but to interface only to the Googlenet (or whatever they may decide to call it). Do everything through google.com: search and surf the net, social networking, purchases, research, create and manage documents, email, instant messaging, run your business, play, ….

Today, Google uses your recent searches and web site visits to impact the priority of search results so you are more likely to get links on the first page which match the kinds of things you have looked at or for in the recent past.  Tomorrow Google will be able to further filter search results through the likes and searches of your friends.

Google has also demonstrated the willingness to support government censorship (e.g., China; and the way the current government is going soon here in the US).  China has shown that a government does not have to shut down undesirable web sites, simply tell Google to not present them in search results.  If you know where they are (back to the URL again), you can still find them.  It is just much harder.

A large portion of the Internet is already virtually invisible due to language barriers.  Soon it can be censored based on who you know and where you have been.  We run the serious risk of becoming like the US Congress: highly polarized and only interested in ideas from people who think like we do.  Any other ideas are perceived as clearly ridiculous or at least seriously misguided, and to be ignored.

Google has an estimated one million servers in data centers around the world processing over one billion search requests each day. It costs a lot of money to run these servers and data centers.  How can Google afford to do that?  They must be getting money somewhere.  They are, and a lot of money.  Revenue for the third quarter of 2011 was US$9.7 billion, with net profit of US$2.7 billion.  These numbers are both up by more than a 25% year over year.  They have obviously figured out how to build a business that survives economic uncertainty better than most companies.

Where does this money comes form?  Much of it comes from those ads and sponsored links, the Google AdWords program.  The more times we click on one of these sponsored links, the more money Google makes.  What if they could increase the odds of you clicking on one of those sponsored links?  Wow, if only they knew what ads you had clicked on in the past, what web sites you visited, and what people who thought like you clicked on.  Oh, wait, they do.

The last word:

Can this be fixed?  I’m not sure anything is really broken, and we probably can’t stop this trend. If you are looking for a product for your home, a new book, a restaurant, or almost anything this probably helps you.  If you are looking for facts to make a business decision, it is potentially a problem.

What can you do?  Mostly, just be aware.  I have no friends so they can’t influence me (OK, I do, but I don’t have a presence on Facebook or Google+).  I also make sure I’m not signed into Google when I do searches where I welcome opposing views.

This trend is not unique to Google.  Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and others are also trying to be your only portal to the Internet and for the same reasons.  Apple is also well known for its censorship on iTunes and iPod/iPad applications, adding another level of filtering that you might not agree with.

These companies, while not necessarily evil, will restrict what you see.  The official Google mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”  The unofficial Google mission statement is “Don’t be evil.”  There is potential real danger in meeting both of those statements.

Comments solicited.

Keep your sense of humor.

Walt.

Similarly, there are many companies that advertise a product or service with “Cloud” in the name that really have nothing to do with Cloud Computing.  Many managed services companies have simply added the word “Cloud” to their offering.  What they are calling a co-located private cloud, secure private cloud, or cloud-in-a-box is not really the Cloud.  (These are intended to be descriptive names, not a specific product name.  If I have accidentally picked a real offering name, my apologies.)

Let’s start with the definition of Cloud Computing.  I prefer to use the definition provided by NIST, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (formerly the National Bureau of Standards).  They recently published updates to their Standards Roadmap (July 2011) and their Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (September 2011).  According to NIST,

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

The five essential characteristics according to NIST (with my comments within brackets [ ]).

1. On-demand self-service.
   A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service’s provider.  [This should usually be provided in fairly granular units, often much less than a single physical resource such as a server or disk storage unit.]
2. Broad network access.
   Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, laptops, and personal digital assistants [PDAs]).  [To get this level of network access requires that the Internet be part of the network.]
3. Resource pooling.
   The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence [emphasis added] in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacenter). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth, and virtual machines.
4. Rapid elasticity.
   Capabilities can be rapidly and elastically provisioned, in some cases automatically, to quickly scale out and rapidly released to quickly scale in. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be purchased in any quantity at any time.  [The easiest way to view this is that there is always the exact amount of resources available to do the job within the performance service level agreements, no matter how the load goes up or down over time.]
5. Measured Service.
   Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.  [This is often referred to as “pay for use” or “utility billing.”]

Almost all Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) that offer the Public Cloud provide all of these characteristics.  Go to Amazon, Google, or any of the hundreds of other Public Cloud CSPs and you may never actually interface with a human, nor will a human ever be involved in providing the resources in the Cloud.  Everything is done over the Internet.  Your work is using the same resources that dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other customers are using.  You likely do not know where your work is being processed, although you can usually specify at least the country.  The resources scale up or down as required (although you can usually impose upper limits to avoid run-away scenarios).  Your cost depends on how much resources you use.  It is really as simple as provide a credit card and you have a data center that is always exactly the size you need.

This is especially great for small business, startups, though even large enterprises can profit.  You do not have to know what resources you will need or how those requirements will change over time.  Have a need, have a credit card, and you can get a data center, usually within minutes.  Want disaster recovery?  Just pay a little extra for the option and your CSP will automatically fail your work over to another data center hundreds or thousands of miles away.  Decide you need to expand your market to another continent?  Ask your CSP to host part of your work at a data center within your new market.  This eliminates the Internet lag time crossing intercontinental distances (at least one quarter of a second from the eastern US to India), and, very importantly, can enable you to comply with local privacy laws.

A Private Cloud can be a much different story.  In a Private Cloud, specific hardware components are assigned only to your work.  No other customer is sharing “your” server or “your” disk storage unit.

Long before the Cloud existed, Managed Service Companies (MSCs) started addressing some of the critical problems companies were having with their IT infrastructure. They would come in, buy your infrastructure, “buy” your IT personnel, then lease it all back to you.  The equipment might stay in your own building, exactly where it was.  From an appearance perspective, nothing changed. The same people came in every day and did the same things on the same equipment to provide the same services.  But it had three very important benefits:

1. You no longer had the capital expense of procuring equipment and keeping it up to date, and you no longer had the personnel costs associated with the staff on your books as employees.  Now everything was an operating expense.  If you needed more equipment, or more people, it was the MSC that did the procurement, installing and supported the equipment, did the hiring, handled the training, and paid the taxes.  Overall, the total cost probably dropped a little but the accounting was a lot simpler, and the relationship between cost and benefit was a lot clearer.
2. IT was the MSC’s core competency.  They were a lot better than you were at running data centers.  They could improve your security, performance and availability simply because they knew, and followed, best practices.  Things got better.
3. Because the MSC was in the business of running data centers, they could almost always procure equipment and people a lot faster than you could.  They could almost always do in weeks what you took months to accomplish in terms of updating your IT capability.  This meant that you were now much more agile, and able to react more quickly to competitive pressures, business opportunities, or changes in regulations or compliance rules.

The next step was to physically move “your” equipment and personnel to the MSP’s facility, along with the infrastructure and personnel of other customers. Now the MSP can provide more specialized resources, like security experts, as a reasonable price since they can spread the cost across many customers.  By having some spare equipment, they can provide faster response to increase resource requests.  Through appropriate location selection, they can save money on power and people.  The bottom line is lower costs to the customer, better security, performance and availability, and more agility.  These MSPs can often provide increases in server performance and storage capacity in a day or less.

Initially, the MSP took control of everything.  With their “Cloud” offerings then allow a company to take a single or small set of applications and move them to their managed services offering, usually hosted at their facility.  Some companies, not necessarily MSPs or CSPs, offer some form of “cloud-in-a-box,” usually a single rack of servers, storage and network gear that can be set in your facility and used as a local Private Cloud.  They usually provide more processor power and storage capacity then you initially need, allowing for some level of growth.  They often charge based on what you actually use.

While these solutions provide some of the benefits of the Cloud, they are not the Cloud.

1. You don’t have on-demand self-service.  Beyond some point, real people have to be involved to increase performance and capacity.  Those increases are not fine grained, but fairly large increments such as one or more servers or one or more storage units.  For example, while most CSPs charge for Public Cloud storage on the gigabyte level, most Private Cloud storage is charged on the terabyte level (a terabyte is one thousand gigabytes).
2. You can easily get broad network access.
3. With a Public Cloud in an MSP’s or CSP’s facility you do get some limited level of resource sharing in the area of network and spares.  In your own facility, you may get some network resource sharing but no server or storage resource sharing.  Obviously, in a co-located private cloud there is no location independence, and often with an MSP you know exactly where your equipment is located.
4. With a Private Cloud in an MSP’s or CSP’s facility, you can get fairly rapid elasticity, but no where near what you can get in a Public Cloud.  Few MSP’s or CSP’s provide a means to reduce the resources (or price) assigned to your workloads, even if the requirements reduce.
5. Most CSPs will charge based on actual usage, many MSPs still charge on the basis of what equipment is assigned to your workloads.

Most importantly, however, is that it doesn’t matter whether what you have is the real Cloud or just called the Cloud.  What matters is that it provides you the appropriate levels of security, availability, and performance with the benefits of reduced cost, better agility and reduced aggravation versus running your own shop.  When a “private cloud” in name or in reality solves your business problems, use it. Any of these solutions can open up the opportunity to use Cloud Bursting, the automatic rolling of some of your workload from a Private Cloud to a Public Cloud due to increased workload or a disaster.  Many MSPs and CSPs provide this option, which can provide a very low cost disaster recovery or peak period solution.

One way to tell if you are dealing with a real cloud company or a managed services company trying to become a cloud company is if they can provide you a single invoice for this kind of hybrid public / private cloud environment.  Several of the MSPs I have talked with provide two invoices, largely due to a lack of full integration of their managed services offerings into their Cloud offerings.

The last word:

A co-located Private Cloud may not be a real Cloud, but it can still provide your company real value.  Perhaps more importantly, it can be an important step in going to the Cloud.  From the pure technology side, if you can move one or more applications to this local cloud, you can easily move them to the real Cloud when, and if, it provides the right benefits at acceptable risk.

And, if your boss is pressuring you, you can announce that the company is now “in the Cloud.”

Comments solicited.

Keep your sense of humor.

Walt.

• Confidentiality means that only those people who are supposed to see their data can see it.
• Integrity means that only authorized processes are allowed to modify data and only in very specific ways. For example, it means that the transaction I send to the Cloud arrives unchanged at the service provider, and the response comes back to me unmodified. It means data stored in my archive hasn’t been changed while it is just sitting there for years.
• Availability means that the data is accessible when needed.

Some of the panel also talked about some specific Cloud Service Providers they had talked to about their concerns, and those CSP’s responses and promises.  One mentioned that they liked the ease of use and low cost of Amazon, at least for some applications.  That comment garnered some fairly negative reactions from the others on the panel, including, “Would you trust your IT to a book seller?”  That generated a good laugh from the panel and audience.

However, that answer may now be “yes.”  Earlier this month, Amazon announced a new encryption feature that allows you to encrypt data at rest stored in Amazon S3.  Amazon S3 is “Amazon Simple Storage Service,” designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.  “Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure, fast, inexpensive infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.”  There are not many businesses that need web services on a larger scale than what Amazon uses in its own business.

Amazon S3 allows the storage of arbitrary “objects.”  These might be documents, database files, images, music or movies, software, or anything else you can store on a computer.  Each individual object can be up to 5 terabytes in size plus have to 2 kilobytes of metadata that describes the object.  The owner assigns each object to a “bucket.”  Each bucket belongs to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account.

This is the Cloud.  You pay for what you use.  The pricing is fairly complex, based on the amount of storage you are using, the amount of data that is moving out of Amazon S3 and the number of transactions per day.  A back of an envelope calculation says you could have a lot of activity against a total of 1 terabyte of data for less than $200 per month, with full redundancy.

Amazon S3 supports four different access control mechanisms that allow you to control who can access your data as well as how, when, and where they can access it.

1. Identity and Access Management policies let you give different individuals different access rights.
2. Access Control Lists allow you selectively grant certain permissions on specific stored objects.
3. Bucket Policies allow finer access control to individual objects with a single bucket.
4. Query String Authentication allows you to share data objects through URLs that are time-limited.

Amazon S3 uses checksums stored with the data to periodically verify the integrity of your data.  If Amazon S3 detects data corruption, it automatically repairs it using redundant data.

In terms of availability and disaster recovery, it will be hard to beat what Amazon S3 can provide: 99.99% availability over a year.  More importantly, Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and survive the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.

What is left to worry about is confidentiality.  Enter Amazon S3 Encryption.

Amazon S3 Encryption has two options: server-side encryption, which is managed by Amazon, and client-side encryption, which is managed by you.  In either case, you can use SSL encryption to protect data being uploaded or downloaded to Amazon S3.  SSL (HTTPS) is the same encryption you use for your on-line banking and other secure on-line applications.

The server-side encryption uses AES-256.  Also known as Rijndael, AES is a block cipher encryption standard adopted by the U.S. and other governments. It has been analyzed extensively and is now used widely worldwide including defense applications. AES is one of the most popular algorithms used in Symmetric Key cryptography. “AES” is often followed by a number, as “AES-256”, which indicates the length of the key in bits.  The longer the key, the harder it is to break the encryption without the key.  Each object has a unique key, and these keys are themselves encrypted with a master key, which is periodically changed.  This rekeying means that someone without current valid credentials will not be able to access an object using information obtained before the rekeying.

For many applications, this server-side encryption for data-at-rest coupled with SSL data-in-motion will be sufficient.  However, some certifications and perhaps your company’s policy require that you manage the encryption keys.  While there is no reason to not trust Amazon’s employees, at least a few of their estimated 33,700 employees would have access to those keys and could, either maliciously or accidentally, capture and decrypt your data.  For those cases, Amazon S3 offers client side encryption.  In this case, you create and manage the keys.  Amazon never sees unencrypted data and never has access to the keys.  You could safely store your most valuable proprietary information in a Cloud managed by your biggest and most evil competitor.

The down side is that you must manage the keys yourself.  Key management is not an easy task.  It requires that you have the right processes and procedures and have vetted the right employees to manage them.  You must make sure that the keys never escape to someone who shouldn’t have them.  Just “giving” a key to an employee for their legitimate use is complicated because you have to protect the key throughout that transportation process.  Mess this part up and you risk giving someone keys to data they should not be able to access.

More importantly, you must make sure you never lose a key.  No matter what happens, storage failure, accidental or deliberate action by an employee or contractor, building failure, you must never lose the keys.  Lose the keys, lose the data.

In the early days of World War II, as Winston Churchill was approaching Paris on his last visit just before the Germans took the city, he remarked that it was sad to see the center of Paris burning. What he actually saw was the many plumes of black smoke from all the embassies and French government offices burning their papers. If the data had been stored electronically and encrypted, it would have taken only a few seconds to destroy the keys and the data would have been rendered useless, with no environmental impact.  If you decide to no longer use Amazon S3 for your data storage, copy the data to your new storage infrastructure and destroy the old keys.  No one can recover that data.  You can just walk away from it.  It does not matter if Amazon deletes some or all of the data, just assigns the storage space to a new customer without wiping the disk, or tries to sell the drives on e-bay.  Again, I have no expectation that Amazon would act irresponsibly, but without the keys it really does not matter.

Amazon S3 encryption should allow you to solve many of your data security problems, inexpensively.  Most privacy laws around the world do not count data as really being lost if was encrypted.  You should be able to, for example, use Amazon S3 encryption as part of a compliant solution for HIPAA (personal health) data.  I doubt you could put together a total solution that would be PCI compliant (credit, debit, and ATM cards).  However, it might be possible to use it as part of specific process steps.

Make sure you thoroughly test the performance of any Cloud implementation, including Amazon S3, before you put it into production.

The last word:

This is yet another example of how fast the Cloud is evolving.  Cloud Service Providers and tool vendors are improving their products and creating new offering at an astounding rate.  A rating of a product or company that is more than six months old may actually be useless.  If you avoided putting an application in the Cloud last year because the Cloud was not ready, you might want to look again.

Comments solicited.

Keep your sense of humor.

Walt.

Hallowe’en is the flagship of the fall season.  It means that we have left Daylight Savings Time and the relaxed mood of summer for the hustle and bustle of Standard Time and the working, learning part of the year.  It had meant that through most of my life.  Recently, Daylight Savings Time has come and gone with a much more elastic whim of Congress.

Before starting school, Hallowe’en meant gingersnap cookies and candy corn.  Every once in awhile my father’s mother would stretch a bit and get the harvest mix instead of the plain candy corn.  She was also into the little cardboard figures that Elementary school teachers were wont to put around their classrooms.  There would have one on the refrigerator door, on the door to the basement, a couple on the mirror in the dinning room.  Instead of candy, she gave coins to Trick or Treaters.  How much she gave depended on how well she knew you or your parents.  If she didn’t know you she dropped a penny or two into your bag.  If she knew you lived in the neighborhood, she might pop for a nickel.  If you were the child of a close friend or a relative she bestowed a dime.  She would stop the Trick or Treater at the door and attempt to guess who it was.  She was most generous to those who she knew, but could fool her.  The year I was five was one of the best.  Our costumes were always home made.  We were to choose to be something generic such as a witch, ghost, cowboy or such.  One didn’t dress as a named celebrity or movie character.  That year Moma and her mother made Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy costumes for themselves.  Grandmom, being a couple inches taller, got to be Raggedy Andy.  We had an early dinner and Moma and Grandmom dressed themselves and me amid gales of giggles.  Then we drove from Sharon Hill, where Grandmom lived and we were staying, to Olney, the neighborhood in Philadelphia where my other grandmother lived.  Daddy rolled the car to a stop and parked a block from Grandmom’s corner row house.  They were row houses then, not townhouses.  Cautioning each other to be silent, Moma and Grandmom walked up the street while Daddy and I waited in the car.  We would have been a give-away, and they couldn’t have that!

Grandmom asked, “Do I know you?”  They nodded, yes.

“Do I know you well?”  Again they nodded.

“Do you live on this street?”  They shook their heads, no.

“Do you live between here and 2nd St.?”  Another shake.

“Toward 5th St.?”  Shake no again.

It seemed forever, but must have been only 10 or 15 minutes before they signaled that we would come up.  Not only had my one grandmother been unable to identify her daughter-in-law, but Moma was also her Goddaughter.  My other grandmother had been her best friend through school.  They had dated together and traded off dates with my two grandfathers after World War I.  Everyone laughed until our sides ached.

The first year I went Trick or Treating on my own was with Moma’s grave reservation.  We had always gone only to houses where we were known, in familiar neighborhoods.  But I was in Fourth Grade now, living in San Diego in a brand new development like so many that were sprouting up in the 1950s, and, most critically, Dad was on a carrier in Asia and my brother, Jim, was a toddler of 2.  My best girl friend lived next door.  She and I went as a Dutch boy and girl.  I was in the pantaloons, full blouse and cap into which I stuffed my braids, and she was in a dirndl skirt, apron, and cap with the side points.  After much cautioning about where we could go and that we should stay together and were to be back by our very strict time limit, off we went.   We ran from house to house just as fast as we could so as to cover as much ground as possible.  VickiJo expected quite a haul as she had taken a pillowcase while I had a simple brown grocery bag.  For those of a younger generation, grocery bags were much more generous then, so her pillowcase wasn’t as much an increase in size as in strength.

The fall of my sixth grade found us back in Philadelphia, living with my father’s parents.  Daddy had been transferred to Cuba and we were waiting for our name to come to the top of the list for housing on base.  In the 1950s one did not attempt to remain a child.  The goal was to grow up as soon as the adults would convey to you the various privileges maturation brought.  I decided that I was too grown up to grow Trick or Treating.  I didn’t want to dress up in a costume.  We were too new to the area for me to have “found” a best friend.   The kids in school here were very different from what I had left.  There were undercurrents I could feel but not identify.  Besides this was just a whistle stop until we moved on to Daddy and Cuba, so I wasn’t making a great effort to get to know anyone at school more than casually.  However, Jim was now four, and felt it absolutely necessary to go Trick-or-Treating.  Being too young to go by himself, I became the designated escort.  I adamantly refused a costume and a bag but acquiesced to walking my little brother around.  I probably wasn’t very gracious about it because I still feel a degree of resentment that I had to stave off “growing-up” for one more year.  My grandparents had lived in this house since before my father went to school, and many of their neighbors were still the same people that had seen my father grow up.  I lost track of how many time we heard, “Oh, you’re Louise’s grandchildren.  How is Jimmy (our father, not my brother)?  Here, both of you need a treat.”   I didn’t have enough pockets to put all of the treats into, so as we walked off the front stoop I would slip what I had been given into Jim’s bag.  Most likely one of the few times he had received such largesse of gee-dunk from me.

Jim’s first grade Hallowe’en found us living in Naples, Italy.  Trick-or-Treating was not part of the Italian culture.  The DoD school we attended did the best they could to have a celebration for the elementary students at the end of the school day.  This wasn’t really sufficient to satisfy my brother’s desire to go around in costume.  As we were scattered around the city, evening Trick-or-Treating didn’t occur in the American Ex-pat community.  The apartment building we lived in had one other American family.  The apartment building down the hill had a third family, but they had no children.  Our balcony was on the same level as theirs, so we would wave across the tiny street between us and conduct small conversations.  The gentleman had been the US Consul for Naples and they had decided to spend, at least some part, of their retirement there.  He and his wife shared many little tidbits of information that helped us to enjoy our stay in Naples.  Moma suggested that I take Jim, in his costume, across the way to Trick-or-Treat.  In my usual contrary way, I balked.  I didn’t know these people very well.  They had no kids.  I knew they wouldn’t be expecting a holiday visit.  I felt I would be intruding.  Jim was very eager to wear his costume somewhere.  We went.  As we left the building, Milko, the portiere and his wife gave us a strange look and simply wished us a good evening.  Jim skipped and I walked to the next building where we were greeted with a similar look:  Americani pazzi.   Up the stairs we walked and knocked on their door.  As the door opened, Jim shouted, “Trick or Treat!”  The look on the gentleman’s face was priceless.  His wife scurried over and invited us in as I was trying to back away.  “I’m not prepared.  Just a minute. I’m sure we have something somewhere.  Come in.  Come in.  Come in.”  Jim and I entered a very different home.  They had traveled all over the world for our State Department and furnished their home with pieces from their many assignments.  The hassock was a camel saddle from Arabia.  The coffee table was a huge, beaten brass tray from Iran.  She told me that she wouldn’t buy glass.  Crystal was too easily broken when they would move, so all their cups and goblets were of silver.  They might dent, but they wouldn’t break.  They had purchased their carpets from different Mediterranean countries.  There was a glass-fronted cabinet full of antique weapons which caught Jim’s eye.  There was a large curved scimitar with a deep blood groove, and several very evil looking daggers.  There were some pistols from very different eras.  They insisted we sit and share a snack with them as they delighted us with stories of how they had gotten some of their treasures.    We were the first Hallowe’en visitors in years.  We had a truly wonderful evening.  On the way out Jim was given a small packet of goodies so there would be something in his bag to take home.  It was one of the most unique and delightful holiday visits I’ve had the privilege of enjoying.

By High School, there were a couple of costume parties, but sixth grade had been the last real hoorah until I had children of my own.

When our sons were small I would buy blanket fleece and make their costumes such that they could be used as blanket sleepers that winter.  When we lived in Troy, MI, Walt and the gentleman across the street from us would take our boys and theirs around.  The men would stroll down the center of the street while they boys would run from side to side to knock on every neighbor’s door.  Chris, the other mom in this grouping and I would stay home to pass out treats to those coming to our houses as we shouted across the street to each other.  Weather permitting.  This was Michigan, after all.

By the time our boys reached upper elementary school we had lived in a couple more places and with growing height and age I tried to discourage them from going door to door.  I felt then, and now, as I did when I was a youngster: Hallowe’en Trick or Treating is for young children.   Somewhere over the recent years the culture around Hallowe’en has changed just as its spelling has.  How many remember that that apostrophe used to be required?  How many feel that they should be allowed to wear costumes to work?  We have many neighbors where we currently live who decorate their houses in a manner similar to what they put out at Christmas.  As for me, I most enjoy seeing the little ghosties and goblins coming around.  They are a true delight.  And, I view Hallowe’en as the herald of rapidly approaching Thanksgiving and then Christmas and New Years.

The last word:

Enjoy the holiday season!

Comments solicited.

Keep your sense of humor.

Walt.