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Google Wave

Pune GTUG presents a Seminar on Google Wave – The new communication and collaboration platform on the web. Seminar Topics:

• Introduction to Google Wave
• Building Extensions to Google Wave
• Building Gadgets – Walk through of building a Gadget
• Building Robots – Walk through of building a Java based Robot
• Using GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and EXT GWT to create polished Gadgets

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• Seminar on Google Wave: Intro, Gadgets, Robots – Pune GTUG Meet – Sept 12 (punetech.com)

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Details

Pune GTUG presents Android Jumpstart Seminar. A seminar where we would get people excited, thrilled and ready on Android Platform.

The objectives of this seminar are as follows: introduce Android, introduce the building blocks and architecture, talk on building an Application on Android comprising of all the building blocks.

Lucky draw winner wins an HTC phone from the sponsors of this event Quick Office and Synerzip Softech.

What

Details
Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.  A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Seminar Topics

• Introduction to Google Wave
• Building Extensions to Google Wave
• Building Gadgets – Walk through of building a Gadget
• Building Robots – Walk through of building a Java based Robot

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What: TechWeekend featuring “What makes Google Android different from other systems, and from regular Java” by Navin Kabra, “Maps, GPS and sensors in Android” by Rohit Ghatol, with a demo on an Android G1 phone, and more
When: Saturday, 1st August, 4:30pm
Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Atur Centre, Model Colony. Map.
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. Please register here.

What makes Google Android different from other systems – Navin Kabra.

Google’s Android is a brand new platform for mobile phones, and has been created from scratch specifically for this purpose. This means that it is a “modern” system that does not suffer from any legacy issues, and has taken the best ideas from various other projects to build a system that is arguably better than any of the other, competing, systems. Thus, for example, it uses the Java language as the development language, but has rejected the rest of the Java ecosystem. Specifically it uses a compeletely new virtual machine (Dalvik) which is redesigned with mobiles in mind – and has a number of very interesting design decisions that we will discuss. Similarly, the Android application framework represents a departure from the traditional way of doing things, and has a learning curve, but once you get used to it, it is great, especially for allowing different apps to share data, code, and in general co-operate.

We will explore and discuss this and various other design decisions in Android.

Maps, GPS and Sensor Capability – Rohit Ghatol

Rohit Ghatol is a co-founder of the Pune Google Technologies User Group (PuneGTUG), and one of the early adopters of the Google Android platform. He has already built a number of applications on Android, and is working on some interesting ideas in this area. In this talk, he will be discussing the mapping in the Android framework, and how the GPS and sensor capabilities can be combined with it to give powerful and rich experiences to users. He will be using his Google Android G1 phone to demonstrate these capabilities.

There will be one more speaker, but unfortunately, the details of that talk were not ready in time for this announcement. Please check back in a day for that update.

Also check out Dhananjay Nene’s slides from the first TechWeekend: “REST Explained.”

I had an opportunity to speak at the very first BMC India Technical Event held in Bangaluru on June 11th, 2009. At this event I talked about the changing landscape of data centers. This article is an excerpt of the talk intended to facilitate understanding of the presentation. The entire presentation is available here.

There are many factors causing the landscape of data centers to change. There are some disruptive technologies at play namely Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Virtualization has been around for a while but only recently it has risen to the level of making significant impact to data centers. Virtualization has come a long way since VMware first introduced VMware Workstation in 90s. The product was initially designed to ease software development and testing by partitioning a workstation into multiple virtual machines.

The virtual machine software market space has seen a substantial amount of evolution, The Xen® hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization. To vSphere, the first cloud operating system, transforming IT infrastructures into a private cloud-a collection of internal clouds federated on-demand to external clouds. Hardware vendors are also not too behind. Intel/AMD and other hardware vendors are pumping in lot of R&D dollars to make their chipsets and hardware optimized for hypervisor layer.

According to IDC more than 75% companies with more than 500 employees are deploying virtual servers. As per a survey by Goldman Sach’s 34 per cent of servers will be virtualized within the next 12 months among Fortune 1000 companies, double the current level of 15 per cent.

Cloud computing similarly existed as a concept for many years now. However various factors finally coming together that are now making it ripe for it to have the most impact. Bandwidth has been increasing significantly across the world that enables faster access to applications in the cloud. Thanks to success of SaaS companies, comfort level of having sensitive data out of their direct physical control is increasing.

There is increasing need for remote work force. Applications that used to reside on individual machines now need to be centralized.

Economy is pushing costs to go down. Last but not least, there is an increasing awareness about going green.

All these factors are causing the data center landscape to change. Now let’s look at some of the ways that the data centers are changing.

Data centers today are becoming much more agile. They are quick, light, easy to move and nimble. One of the reasons for this is that in today’s data center, virtual machines can be added quickly as compared to procuring and provisioning a physical server.

Self service provisioning allows end-users to quickly and securely reserve resources and automates the configuration and provisioning of those physical and virtual servers without administrator intervention. Creating a self-service application and pooling resources to share across teams not only optimizes utilization and reduces needless hardware spending but it also improves time to market and increases IT productivity by eliminating mundane and time consuming tasks.

Public clouds have set new benchmarks. E.g. Amazon EC2 SLA for availability is 99.95% which raised the bar from traditional data center availability SLA significantly. Most recently another vendor, 3Tera came out with five nines, 99.999% availability. Just to compare Amazon and 3Tera, 99.999% availability translates into 5.3 minutes of downtime each year, the different in cost between five 9’s and four 9’s (99.99 percent, or 52.6 minutes of downtime per year) can be substantial.

Data centers are also becoming more scalable. With virtualization, a data center may have 100 physical servers that are servicing 1000 virtual servers for your IT. Once again due to Virtualization, data centers are no longer constrained due to physical space or power/cooling requirements.

The scalability requirements for data centers are also changing. Applications are becoming more computation and storage hungry. Example of computation sensitive nature of apps, enabling a sub-half-second response to an ordinary Google search query involves 700 to 1,000 servers! Google has more than 200,000 servers, and I’d guess it’s far beyond that and growing every day.

Or another example is Facebook, where more than 200 million photos are uploaded every week. Or Amazon, where post holiday season their data center utilization used to be <10%! Google Search, Facebook and Amazon are not one off examples of applications. More and more applications will be built with similar architectures and hence the data center that hosts/supports those applications would need to evolve.

Data center are becoming more fungible. What that means is that resources used within the data centers are becoming easily replaceable. Earlier when you procured a server, chances were high that it will be there for number of years. Now with virtual servers, they will get created, removed, reserved and parked in your data center!

Data centers are becoming more Utility Centric and service oriented. As an example look at Cisco’s definition of Data Center 3.0 where it calls it infrastructure services. Data center users are increasingly going to demand pay as you go and pay for what you use type of pricing. Due to various factors, users are going to cut back on large upfront capital expenses and instead going to prefer smaller/recurring operating expenses.

Most organizations have either seasonal peaks or daily peaks (or both) with a less dramatic cost differential; but the cost differential is still quite dramatic and quite impactful to the bottom line. In addition, the ability to pay for what you use makes it easy to engage in “proofs of concept” and other R&D that requires dedicated hardware.

• As the discrepancy between peak usage and standard usage grows, the cost difference between the cloud and other options becomes overwhelming.

Technology is changing; the business needs are changing, with changing times organization’s social responsibilities are changing. More and more companies are thinking about the impact they have on the environment. Data centers become major source of environment impact especially as they grow in size.

A major contributor to excessive power consumption in the data center is over provisioning. Organizations have created dedicated, silo-ed environments for individual application loads, resulting in extremely low utilization rates. The result is that data centers are spending a lot of money powering and cooling many machines that individually aren’t doing much useful work.

Cost is not the only problem. Energy consumption has become a severe constraint on growth. In London, for example, there is now a moratorium on building new data centers because the city does not have the electrical capacity to support them!

Powering one server contributes to on an average 6 Tons of carbon emissions (depending upon the location of the server and how power is generated in that region) It is not too farfetched to claim that every data center has some servers that are always kept running because no one knows what business services depend on them but in reality no one seems to be using them. Even with the servers that are being used, there is an opportunity to increase their utilization and consolidate them.

Now that we have seen some of the ways that the data centers are changing, I am going to shift gears and talk about evolution of data centers. I am going to use the analogy of evolution of web to changing landscape of data centers. Just like web evolved from Web 1.0 where everyone could access, to Web 2.0 where people started contributing to Web 3.0 where the mantra is everyone can innovate.

Applying this analogy to Data Centers we can see how it has evolved from its early days of existence to where we are today,

Using the analogy of Web world, we can see how data centers have evolved from their early days till now.

• In the beginning, Data centers were nothing but generic machines stored together. From there it evolved to blade servers that removed some duplicate components and optimized. Now in DC3.0, they are becoming even more virtual and cloud based.
• So from mostly physical servers we have moved to Physical and Virtual servers to now where we would even treat underlying resources as virtual.
• Provision time has gone down significantly
• User participation has changed
• Management tools that used to be nice to have are playing a much important role and are becoming mandatory. Good example once again is UCS where Bladelogic Mgmt tool will be pre-installed!
• The role of a data center admin itself has changed from mostly menial work into a much more sophisticated one!

Slideshow for “Changing Landscape of Data Centers”

If you cannot see the slideshow above, click here.

What:

Details
Agenda for this meet:

• Brief History of Android
• Android Phones
• Android Experiments
• What is Android?
• What’s in new SDK
• Android Architecture in detail
• Application Fundamentals
• User Interface
• Resources and Assets
• Data Storage
• Content Providers
• Security and Permissions
• Developing Android Applications In Eclipse, with ADT
• First Android Application
• Further Reading

About the Speaker: Sushrut Bidwai

• Leading a team of 15+ programmers in Nasik.
• Works mainly on Java centric technologies and that too specifically Google centric like GWT, Android, GAE for Java.
• Provide information content to fellow developers through our blogs like androidcompetencycenter.com.
• Worked with Persistent Systems and YagnaIQ (Pune based startup) at the start of career.
• Rest of the things can be found on http://sushrutbidwai.com/about

For more information about PuneGTUG, see the PuneTech wiki profile of PuneGTUG. For other tech events happening in Pune, see the PuneTech calendar.

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Last weekend, for example, PuneGTUG had a presentation on the Google App Engine. The presentation was attended by about 25 people, and Pranav Prakash did a good job of giving an overview of GAE and also built a sample app right there to give the audience an idea of what exactly is involved in building an app. The slides of the talk are here.

PuneGTUG would like to hear from you as to what technology you are most interested in learning about. More generally, they are interested in finding out how this forum can be made more useful for you. And, of course, if you could speak on one or more related topic, then please let them know – speakers are always welcome.

So please fill in this form, to let them know.

And if you’re interested in keeping in touch with the activities of the PuneGTUG, join the PuneGTUG mailing list, and subscribe to the PuneGTUG blog.

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• Introducing the Google Maps Data API in Labs (googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com)
• Google Mashup Editor (google.com)

What

Details
Agenda for this meet:
1. Little talk about Cloud Computing
2. Getting Started with Google App Engine Python
3. Live Examples on Google App Engine
4. Question and Answer
5. Introduction to Google App Engine Java (if time permits)

Speaker: Pranav Prakash

For more information about PuneGTUG, see the PuneTech wiki profile of PuneGTUG. For other tech events happening in Pune, see the PuneTech calendar.

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• Get started building your own web apps with the Google App Engine (sharingatwork.com)
• Let Me Rephrase the Google App Engine Announcement (themindstorms.blogspot.com)
• Giftag: Best Buy Now Uses Google App Engine (montysmegamarketing.com)
• On a blogging break – playing with Google App Engine (webnomena.com)

Sorry for the inconvenience caused.
- Vishwesh Jigrale, Pune GTUG Manager

For more information about PuneGTUG, see the PuneTech wiki profile of PuneGTUG. For other tech events happening in Pune, see the PuneTech calendar.

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