Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’

Mark Lucovsky, famous for building Windows NT and watching Steve Ballmer throw a chair.

Mark Lucovsky was the other man in the room when Steve Ballmer threw his chair and called Eric Schmidt a “fucking pussy.”

Yes, the story is true. At least according to Lucovsky. Microsoft calls it a “gross exaggeration,” but Lucovsky says that when he walked into Ballmer’s office and told the Microsoft CEO he was leaving the company for Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and chucked it across the room. “Why does that surprise anyone?” Lucovsky tells Wired.com, seven years later. “If you play golf with Steve and he loses a five-cent bet, he’s pissy for the next week. Should it surprise you that when I tell Steve I’m quitting and going to work for Google, he would get animated?”

The famous flying chair shows just how volatile Steve Ballmer can be, but it also underlines the talent Mark Lucovsky brings to the art of software engineering. Lucovsky joined Microsoft in 1988 as part of the team that designed and built the company’s Windows NT operating system — which still provides the core code for all Windows releases — and after joining Google, he was one of three engineers who created the search giant’s AJAX APIs, online programming tools that drew more traffic than almost any other service at Google. “[He's] probably in the top 99.9 percentile when it comes to engineers,” says Paul Maritz, the CEO of virtualization kingpin VMware, who worked with Lucovsky as a top exec at Microsoft.

That’s why Maritz turned the tables on Google and coaxed Lucovsky to VMware.

No, Maritz didn’t recruit his old colleague just to squeeze some extra speed from the “hypervisor” that delivers the company’s virtual servers. He wanted VMware to build a new software platform for the internet age, and he relied on Lucovsky to tell him what that would be. Lucovsky pulled in a few more “99.9 percentile” engineers — including the two who helped him build Google’s AJAX APIs, Derek Collison and Vadim Spivak — and little more than a year and a half later, they delivered Cloud Foundry.

Cloud Foundry has many authors, most notably Collison, known for building the TIBCO Rendezvousmessaging system that sped data across Wall Street’s machines in the ’90s. But you might describe Cloud Foundry as a culmination of Lucovsky’s career: It takes the idea of a widely used software platform like Windows NT and applies it to the sort of sweeping infrastructure Google erected to run its massively popular web services. But then it goes further. After building the platform, Lucovksy and Collison convinced Maritz and company to open source it, letting others have it for no charge. In the words of Maritz, VMware seeks to provide “the 21st-century equivalent of Linux.”

In short, the platform is a way for software developers to build web applications, deploy them to the net, and scale them to more and more users as time goes by — all without having to worry about the computing infrastructure that runs beneath them. “It lets you worry about the app,” Collison says, “and not virtual machines or what operating system they’re running or all this other stuff.” VMware offers the platform as an online service at CloudFoundry.com, and in open sourcing the project, it hopes to spawn an army of compatible services and push the platform into private data centers.

The aim is a world where modern-day online applications can run across cloud services and data centers in much the same way Windows applications can run across PCs.

Drooling on the Cloud

Lucas Carlson saw an early version of Cloud Foundry before it was released to the world at large. “I immediately started drooling,” he says, “and I kept drooling until I finally got my hands on it.” Carlson is the CEO and founder of AppFog, a Portland, Oregon-based startup that has long offered an online service that does roughly the same thing as VMware’s platform. Four months after getting his hands on it, Carlson launched a new version of his service built atop Cloud Foundry.

There are many services that do what Cloud Foundry does. Google offers a similar service known as Google App Engine, letting outside developers hoist applications onto its internal infrastructure. Microsoft serves up Windows Azure. And Salesforce.com now owns Heroku, a San Francisco startup that helped pioneer the idea.

They’re typically called “platform clouds,” or “platform-as-a-service” — not to be confused with “infrastructure clouds” such as Amazon EC2. Whereas EC2 gives you raw resources for running apps, including virtual servers and storage, a platform cloud hides all that. It runs atop an infrastructure cloud, giving you tools for actually creating applications while taking care of the rest underneath the covers.

Cloud Foundry is building on an existing idea. But it takes a more egalitarian approach. For one, it’s designed to accommodate as many developers as possible. Whereas Google App Engine — and to a lesser extent Microsoft Azure — restrain the tools you can use, Cloud Foundry seeks to provide the same rapid scaling without those restrictions. It runs a wide of array of development languages and frameworks, including Java, Ruby, PHP, and Node.js, and it can work in tandem with an ever-expanding array of databases and other complementary services, including MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis.

“Azure comes with one view on the world. It gives you a model and if you bind to that model on how you’re supposed to build applications, you get some added efficiency,” says Patrick Scaglia, the chief technology officer of HP’s cloud services group. “But that’s not the way the new class of developers like to build things. Cloud Foundry is closer to what they want.”

Carlson agrees. “VMware got to see what Google did, and they got to reinvent it in a way that’s better and more attuned to the needs of developers,” he says.

And unlike Google and Microsoft, VMware has open sourced its code. Carlson doesn’t have the option of building a service based on App Engine. Nor does anyone else. But just six months after its debut, Cloud Foundry is running not only AppFog’s service, but services from BlueLock, enStratus, Tier3, and Virtacore. And earlier this month, a big name joined the crusade when HP revealed that will offer a Cloud Foundry service sometime this spring.

Lucovsky — quite the contrarian — takes issue with Maritz calling the platform “an operating system for the cloud.” But this is where the metaphor makes sense. “What differentiates operating systems is the ecosystem that’s built around them — what applications and services interact with these layers of software,” Carlson says.

“Paul wants to create the biggest ecosystem around platform-as-a-service, as if it was an operating system — so that there’s the most interoperability and portability around that technology.”

And Maritz wants to do so without hooking developers to a particular software or hardware vendor, including VMware. “One of the potential bad things about this move to the cloud is that you might go back to how things were with mainframes in the ’60s and ’70s, where you had these very proprietary environments. Once you checked into the IBM universe, you could never check out again. Are we going to go back to that world with the Google cloud and the Microsoft cloud?” Maritz says. “If you’re a developer, you need a set of services that can make your life easy, but that don’t bind you forever and a day to the stack of one vendor.”

In other words, Paul Maritz is playing against type.

Derek Collison, the co-founder of Cloud Foundry.

New Stripes for Maritz

With Cloud Foundry, Maritz is departing not only from his past with Microsoft, but from his present with VMware. VMware’s bread-and-butter virtualization business is built on proprietary software, and many believe that VMware’s vSphere hypervisor and its sister tools foster the same sort of “vendor lock-in” that Maritz seeks to avoid with Cloud Foundry.

“The day we take VMware seriously as an open source company is the day they open source vSphere,” Scott Crenshaw, the vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s cloud computing unit, told us not long after the arrival of Cloud Foundry. Red Hat offers its own platform-as-a-service, OpenShift, and Crenshaw questioned whether Cloud Foundry would remain open — and whether it would run as well atop infrastructure software from VMware competitors.

Maritz acknowledges that open sourcing Cloud Foundry was a departure for VMware. But he says the company was doing what it had to do. “These are the rules you have to play by today,” he says. “We’re still a mid-sized company. We’ve been very successful, but we don’t have the footprint of a Microsoft or a Google. We have to bend to the forces of history, not the other way around.”

Lucovsky goes further: “For a platform to be pervasive in today’s world, it has to be open source.” Think about Google opening sourcing Android to make up lost ground on Apple’s iPhone. But it’s worth remembering that Lucovsky is very much a coder, not a businessman. In 1988, when he first met with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, they didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye. “Bill said his goal with NT was to charge $1,000 a copy instead of $15,” Lucovsky remembers. “But I was there just to write software.”

According to Lucovsky and Collison, convincing Maritz to open source the Cloud Foundry code took some doing. But Lucovsky promptly dismisses claims that the platform won’t run as well if it’s not on VMware’s hypervisor. In fact, the platform was specifically designed to run the same way on any infrastructure.

“The code is absolutely infrastructure agnostic,” Lucovsky says. “We developed it on our Mac laptops, and at launch, we were running it on Amazon [EC2]. We’ve been running it on vSphere and [VMware's infrastructure cloud platform] vCloud and bare metal machines.” According to Collison, even Maritz pushed for this. “It was very controversial as you can imagine,” he says. “But Paul said: ‘I agree with you. Keep going.’ That was a big thing for him to do.”

Maritz says VMware doesn’t have a concrete plan for making money from Cloud Foundry. “A leap of faith,” he calls it. And yes, the company could close up the project, much as Oracle has done with the many open source projects it inherited from Sun Microsystems. But the project already has a life of its own.

“The open source code is there,” says HP’s Patrick Scaglia. “If VMware changes its stance, the community can take the code and set up shop somewhere else.”

The Cloud Foundry team: Derek Collison, James Watters, Marc Lucovsky, Pat Boseman, Matthew Page, Vadim Spivak.

Man as Metaphor

This summer, VMware took its egalitarian stance even further when it introduced a version of Cloud Foundry that runs on your personal laptop. This lets developers build and test their applications even before they deploy them to the proverbial heavens. And the project continues to embrace additional languages, framework, and other complimentary services.

The platform is designed to accomodate new tools — and quickly. After Cloud Foundry was released, an analyst at research outfit Gartner Group complained that it didn’t include “auto scaling,” meaning it wouldn’t automatically provide additional computing resources as your app needed them. So, Lucovsky promptly built a demo app that did auto scaling. Remembering the demo, he flips the bird at that Gartner analyst — wherever he is.

Only seven months after its debut, Cloud Foundry has progressed farther than Maritz or Collison or Lucovsky imagined. But Lucovsky makes a point of saying if the platform is successful, it won’t be successful for years to come. “We have some guys on our team who are fresh out of college and new to this kind of stuff and they say: ‘We’re got to win next year,” he says. “But the truth is that a platform like this takes a really long time before it’s really pervasive and you can really think of it as a Linux for the cloud.”

That said, Maritz wants things to happen quicker. “My frustration is that [Lucovsky and Collison] have such a high standard for people they add to their group, they always have open head count,” he chides his team. And then, later in the conversion, he does it again.

Whatever the fate of the project, it shows where the enterprise software world is going. The world has evolved from Microsoft’s desktop OS to sweeping web services like Google, and now these two are coming together in a new type of operating system for running not mere desktops or individual servers but armies of servers and even multiple data centers.

Mark Lucovsky isn’t just a man who goaded Steve Ballmer into chucking a chair across an executive office. He’s a metaphor for the evolution of modern software.

Photos: Jon Snyder, Wired

Source:http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/11/cloud-foundry/all/1