What Caused The Amazon Web Services Failure?
This article on Reuters is entitled Amazon’s AWS Struggles To Recover After Major Outage Disrupts Apps, Services Worldwide, sums up today’s big news story.
But what went wrong?
I asked Google AI, where BT have their data servers and received this reply.
BT hosts its data servers in various locations across the UK, including London, Birmingham, and Dublin, Ireland, as well as in mainland Europe such as Frankfurt, Germany, and Amsterdam and Nieuwegein, Netherlands. They also have a presence in the United States, with facilities in locations like New Jersey.
Note.
- Nieuwegein is South of Amsterdam.
- There’s almost a direct straight-line route between Dublin and Frantfurt.
- Cambridge would lie on that straight-line route.
- BT’s Research at Martlesham in Suffolk would lie on that straight-line route.
- Is BT’s worldwide network closely monitored from BT Research?
- For more about BT Research read their Wikipedia entry.
- The straight-line route by-passes London.
The network seems comprehensive and well spread-out.
These are my thoughts.
The Value Of Research
I asked Google AI, if there were any spin-out companies from BT Martlesham and received this reply.
Yes, spin-out companies have been formed from BT’s Adastral Park research facility, including Real Time Content (RTC) and iome. Both companies were supported by BT and developed technologies based on research from the Martlesham site, with RTC focusing on personalized video services and iome providing location-based services through mobile internet.
I used to live near to BT’s Research Centre until 1990.
At the time, I was writing Artemis, the project management system and the multi-user version of that software and a BT research computer system used the same Hewlett-Packard hardware and an operating system written by BT at Martlesham.
Because of this connection, I learned a lot about their methods and the breadth of the research being carried out in Suffolk and was generally impressed.
I would suspect that legacy telecom companies like BT, France Telecom and Deutsche Telecom spend a lot of money on research. Do newer companies spend similar amounts?
Having a good research department behind you is an excellent form of insurance!
Will BT Research Have A Reliable 24/7 Power Supply?
Consider.
- By 2030, there will be upwards of 4 GW of offshore wind power along the Suffolk coast.
- Sizewell B will be 22 miles away, pumping out 1.2 GW until at least 2035.
- Sizewell C could be pumping out 3.3 GW from the mid-2030s.
- The 1.8 GW LionLink between Walberswick in Suffolk and The Netherlands could be in operation by 2030.
I am fairly sure that BT Research will have enough power, even if several data centres are built on the Martlesham site.
The Domain Name Res0lution Problem
Consider.
- The root causeof Amazon’s disaster appeared to be problems with its domain name resolution system.
- Executing fast lookup of domain names is critical.
I had a similar problem with the project management system ; Artemis, when I extended it to be one of the first relational databases in the 1980s. So I went to IBM’s library on the South Bank and dug out all their 1950s papers on looking up keys in tables.
In those days, with slower computers, which had smaller amounts of memory, the efficiency of the algorithm was very important and I got a significant improvement in look-up speed, by digging up ideas from the past.
If anybody wants to check out their algorithm with me, I’m always happy to oblige, but at 78 with poor eye-sight I’m probably past coding anything myself.
When I was dealing with BT Research, they would have made sure that something like domain name resolution was given the full research treatment.
My Conclusion
As I don’t have all the data, I will not speculate, but will await Amazon’s conclusion with interest.
Gatwick Second Runway Plan Approved By Transport Secretary
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on the BBC.
This is the sub-heading.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has approved plans for a second runway at London Gatwick Airport, as the government looks for economic growth opportunities.
These four introductory paragraphs add some detail.
The £2.2bn privately-financed project involves in effect moving the current Northern Runway 12 metres to bring it into regular use, as well as other developments, including extending the size of terminals.
The airport says its plans will bring jobs and boost the local economy. But there has long been opposition from campaigners and groups worried about the impact on the surrounding area.
Gatwick currently handles about 280,000 flights a year. It says the plan would enable that number to rise to around 389,000 by the late 2030s.
A government source has described the plans as a “no-brainer for growth,” adding that “it is possible that planes could be taking off from a new full runway at Gatwick before the next general election.”
Over the last fifty years, I’ve been involved in many large projects, as I used to write project management software and at one period in the 1980s, half of all the world’s major projects, were being managed by the Artemis software, that I wrote in a Suffolk attic.
I am starting this post by asking Google AI, when Gatwick’s Northern Runway was built. This was the answer I received.
Gatwick’s Northern Runway was built in 1979 by widening an existing taxiway to serve as an emergency runway. While the main runway is known as 08R/26L, the standby or emergency runway is designated as 08L/26R and is located just to the north of the main runway.
Note.
- 08 means that the runway is aligned at 080 degrees, which is almost due East.
- 26 means that the runway is aligned at 260 degrees, which is almost due West.
- Normally, when landing and taking off at Gatwick, your aircraft will use the Southern runway, which points to the West or Runway 26L.
This Google Map shows the layout of the airport.
Note.
- The longer Southern 08R/26L runway.
- The shorter Northern 08L/26R runway.
- The station in the North-East corner of the map is Horley.
- The station to the East of the runways is Gatwick Airport station.
- Both stations are on the Brighton Main Line, which runs North-South past the Airport.
- As when it was built, the Airport envisaged that the Northern runway would be turned into a runway that would meet all standards, I doubt there will be any problems rebuilding the Northern Runway, the required twelve metres to the North.
It was a cunning plan, when it was executed in the late 1970s and worthy of Baldrick at his best.
I do wonder, if it had been developed using Artemis!
Is Last Energy The Artemis Of Energy?
In Raft Of US-UK Nuclear Deals Ahead Of Trump Visit, I quoted from this article on World Nuclear News.
The article also contains, these two paragraphs, with talk about an MoU between Last Energy and DP World.
An MoU has also been signed between US-based micro-nuclear technology developer Last Energy and DP World, a global leader in logistics and trade, to establish the world’s first port-centric micro nuclear power plant at London Gateway. A proposed PWR-20 microreactor – to begin operations in 2030 – would supply London Gateway with 20 MWe of electricity to power the logistics hub, with additional capacity exported to the grid.
“The initiative represents a GBP80 million (USD109 million), subsidy-free investment for the development of Last Energy’s first unit, unlocking clean power supply for DP World’s ongoing GBP1 billion expansion of London Gateway,” Last Energy said. “The partnership is closely aligned with both UK and US ambitions to increase nuclear capacity and strengthen long-term energy security.”
Note.
- Last Energy are proposing a micro-reactor of just 20 MW.
- DP World own and/or operate sixty ports in over forty countries, so should know their energy requirements well.
- It appears that DP World are investing £80 million in Last Energy’s first unit.
- Thurrock Storage is a 300 MW/600 MWh battery close to London Gateway and the Port of Tilbury.
This Google Map shows London Gateway and the Port of Tilbury.
Note.
- DP World London Gateway is in the North-East corner of the map.
- The A13 road runs across the North-West corner of the map and links the area to London and the M25.
- Thurrock Storage is next to the Tilbury substation, which is marked by the red arrow.
- The Port of Tilbury is to the West of the substation.
I wonder if DP World London Gateway have had power supply problems.
The Design Of The First Artemis Project Management Software System
Before Artemis, project management was usually done on a large mainframe computer like an IBM-360-50, that I’d used extensively for solving simultaneous differential equations in a previous job at ICI.
Mainframe computers worked on complex problems, but to put it mildly, they were slow and needed a team to operate them and a big air-conditioned room to keep them happy.
When the four of us decided to create Artemis, our vision was something simpler.
- A processor – something like a PDP-11, which I judged would be big-enough for the computing.
- A visual display unit.
- A printer.
- A standard-size desk to hold the hardware.
- Ability to run from a 13-amp socket.
When it came to writing the software, I took few risks.
- Much of the data decoding software, I’d developed when I left ICI to write a program to solve up to a thousand simultaneous differential equations.
- The scheduling software was generic and I’d first used it for different purposes in two programs at ICI.
- The aggregation software had been devised, whilst I was a consultant at Lloyds Bank over several bottles of wine with their Chief Management Accountant, who was a wizard with numbers. I suspect, but can’t prove it, that if the idiots that programmed the Horizon system for the Post Office had used that algorithm, the problems there would have been much smaller.
- I also spent a lot of time reading old papers from the 1950s in IBM’s library on the South Bank, looking for better algorithms.
- I also made sure, I chose the best hardware and I believe HP did us proud.
- I used HP’s operating system and proprietary database to cut down, what could go wrong.
- Almost all of the first system was written by one person – me!
But we also put the right features into how we supported, delivered and trained users of the system.
I certainly, think we made few mistakes in the design of that first system.
Have Last Energy Used A Similar Cut Back Approach?
Reading their web site, I think they have.
They have obviously chosen, the 20 MW unit size with care.
But from worldwide experience with wind turbines, linking smaller power sources together, is not as difficult as it once was.
These are some of the statements on their web site’s introductory screens.
- Fully Modular, Factory Made
- A Scalable Solution
- <24 Month Delivery
- 100+ Supply Chain Partners
- 300+ Pressurised Water Reactors Operating Globally
- 0.3 acre – Plant Footprint Fits Within A Football Field
But a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
It should be noted, that I have been over several nuclear power stations.
Three were a tour to show me how Artemis was being used to track and sign off, the problems identified after the Three Mile Island incident.
The other was a trip over Sizewell A, a couple of years before it was decommissioned.
Comparing these experiences with some of the chemical plants, that I’ve worked on, I would prefer to be close to a nuclear power plant.
Forty Years On
Tuesday was almost exactly forty years to the day since we sold Artemis.
Remarkably, as my son observed, we’re all still here. Perhaps, a bit battered maybe!
Appeasement 2.0
The low point of Russia’s war in Ukraine is that Trummkopf, has repeated Chamberlain’s mistake at Munich and presented Putin with Appeasement 2.0.
I wasn’t around in the days of Munich and Chamberlain, but my father was well-informed, as he was in Geneva doing something possibly at the League of Nations and heard a lot of the truth about what was going on in Czechoslovakia and Ukraine at first hand. He believed there was little to choose between Hitler and Stalin on the scale of evil.
In the 1970s, I worked with an Jewish Austrian engineer, who was called Samuels, at the GLC, who had escaped from Austria just before WW2 and then spent the war in the Royal Engineers in bomb disposal. After the war, he was an observer at Nuremberg.
He was one of the most amazing people, I’ve ever met and he taught me a lot about project management.
Aggregation In Artemis
One of the features of Artemis was aggregation, which enabled the project manager to total up the resources they’d need for a project.
I might have programmed the original aggregation for Mr. Samuels, but I can certainly remember discussing it with him. He needed it to check that particular sub-contractors weren’t overstreching themselves.
I lost contact with Mr. Samuels, when his wife died and he moved to CERN in Geneva. But he’s one of several people, who helped frame the design of Artemis.
Soviet War Crimes
This Wikipedia entry is entitled Soviet War Crimes.
This is the first paragraph.
From 1917 to 1991, a multitude of war crimes and crimes against humanity were carried out by the Soviet Union or any of its Soviet republics, including the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and its armed forces. They include acts which were committed by the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army) as well as acts which were committed by the country’s secret police, NKVD, including its Internal Troops. In many cases, these acts were committed upon the direct orders of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet policy of Red Terror as a means to justify executions and political repression. In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the USSR, or they were committed during partisan warfare.
As a teenager, my father used to tell me stories of atrocities by the Soviet Union and told me, he believed Stalin was on a level with Hitler.
One of the worst atrocities was the Katyn massacre in 1940, which is described in this Wikipedia entry and starts with this paragraph.
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), at Joseph Stalin’s order in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv NKVD prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by Nazi German forces in 1943.
I haven’t found out, what my father was doing in 1940, but I am fairly sure he knew of the Katyn and other massacres, as he occasionally commented.
Note.
- The involvement of the NKVD.
- The Katyn massacre is a sub-plot in the film Enigma, which has this Wikipedia entry.
I took this picture of a memorial to Katyn in the centre of Birmingham.
I believe that we ignore the lessons of Soviet behaviour at Katyn, at our peril.
In Vladimir Putin’s Wikipedia entry, there is this paragraph about his parents.
Putin’s mother was a factory worker, and his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy, serving in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. During the early stage of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, his father served in the destruction battalion of the NKVD. Later, he was transferred to the regular army and was severely wounded in 1942. Putin’s maternal grandmother was killed by the German occupiers of Tver region in 1941, and his maternal uncles disappeared on the Eastern Front during World War II.
It appears that Putin Senior left the NKVD destruction battalion before 1942. Does that mean he could have been at Katyn?
I do suspect, that Putin Senior told some interesting stories to his son, about the correct ways to deal with your opponents and wage a war.
Conclusion
We are treading a very similar path over eighty years later.
Why Do Major Rail Projects Go Over Budget?
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Rail Technology Magazine.
This is the sub-heading.
Experts from the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) will be questioned by the Transport Committee on their work advising the Government on planning major transport projects this week.
This is the introductory paragraph.
The cross-party Committee will ask witnesses, including NIC Chair Sir John Armitt, why infrastructure projects such as HS2 go over budget, how the Department for Transport can manage them more successfully, and the Government’s ability to learn from mistakes or from positive examples in other countries.
In my time, I have written a lot of project management software and it has generally sold well, especially in the fields of aerospace, construction, defence, oil & gas and vehicles. It has also sold well in Australia, France, Korea, Norway, The Netherlands and the United States.
In the UK, two major areas of Government ; rail and the NHS did not use any of my software, despite having large numbers of suitable projects, whereas nationalised companies like British Aerospace, British Leyland and Ferranti were big users. The Chevaline project, which was the refurbishment of the UK’s nuclear deterrent by the Callaghan Government also used my software.
I do find this split strange. A retired MP once told me, that it is traditional.
But Rail and the NHS always seem to get it wrong! Is it because, they are two government departments that deal a lot with the General Public?
On the other hand, the Inland Revenue seem to do better. But my planning software was used to plan the move to Telford!
Perhaps, there is a lot less traditional thinking in the Inland Revenue.
A New Metier
This article in The Times today is entitled Too many Sir Humpreys are stopping London from taking a punt.
The article is about one of Britain’s most successful private investors ; John Gunn.
The article also introduces a new company to me, with this paragraph.
His latest enthusiasm is for Metier, a company that aims to leapfrog electric vehicle power to convert buses and heavy trucks to hydrogen fuel cells. Several big firms such as Volvo are making new hydrogen-powered vehicles, but Gunn and his partners reckon there is more money in reconfiguring existing ones.
It was Metier, that caught my eye.
In the 1970s, with three others, I started a company called Metier Management Systems, which developed a project management system called Artemis.
We were very successful, in that we sold the company for a nine figure sum and won two Queen’s Awards for Exports.
Since then, there have been several successful companies named Artemis, but we haven’t seen a Metier.
Until now that is and I hope that the hydrogen vehicle company is as successful worldwide as we were.
Strangely, my first job on leaving Liverpool University was in a hydrogen factory and I am a great believer in using the gas as a source of energy.
Metier have a web site, if you want to find out more about the company.
The Crown Estate Awards GBP 5 Million In First Supply Chain Accelerator Round
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on offshoreWIND.biz.
This is the sub-heading.
The Crown Estate has awarded nearly GBP 5 million in funding to 13 organisations across England, Wales, and Scotland in the first round of its Supply Chain Accelerator.
These three paragraphs add more details.
According to The Crown Estate, the funding will help kick-start projects drawing down from a GBP 50 million fund established in May this year to accelerate and de-risk the early-stage development of UK supply chain projects that service the offshore wind sector.
The Crown Estate’s match funding will contribute to a combined development investment of over GBP 9 million, which, if the opportunities successfully conclude their respective development stages, could lead to more than GBP 400 million of capital investment, said the UK body.
Projects receiving funding include those enabling floating wind platforms, anchoring and mooring systems, operations and maintenance facilities, test facilities, and those supporting the skills
The grants have been widely spread in both the public and private sectors and appear to be supporting a variety of technologies.
What About Project Management?
When the four of us started Metier Management Systems to develop Artemis in the 1970s, we got no help from the Government or any agency.
I wonder what difference, government support of this nature would have made?
I don’t know whether any project management development is being supported, but it is my view, that each new generation of projects will bring forward new challenges.
Hovercraft
I’ve only ever ridden in a hovercraft once and that was in Hong Kong, when to celebrate the sale of Artemis to Lockheed, C and myself had a few days holiday in the colony.
We did the tourist trip to Canton, where you took a hovercraft up the Pearl River and then took a train back.
This is a Chinese video from YouTube of a hovercraft similar to the one on which we rode.
I asked Google, “What Killed The Hovercraft” and found two articles on the BBC.
The first was an emotional article, which was entitled Hovercraft Capsize Disaster Off Hampshire Coast Recalled 50 years On.
Just look what has happened in recent times to Boeing, after the problems with the 737 MAX.
The second is a more factual article, which is entitled What happened to passenger hovercraft?, where this is the sub-heading.
It’s 60 years since the British inventor Christopher Cockerell demonstrated the principles of the hovercraft using a cat food tin and a vacuum cleaner. Great things were promised for this mode of transport, but it never really caught on. Why?
I saw that demonstration.
These three paragraphs of the BBC article discuss the end of passenger hovercraft.
The cross-Channel service from Dover to Calais closed, external in 2000. The two vessels, the Princess Anne and the Princess Margaret, could carry only 52 cars. Larger ferries and cheaper-to-power catamarans, as well as the Channel Tunnel, proved too much competition. Routes in Japan and Sierra Leone have also since ceased.
“The problem militating against expansion has always been the noise for residents, who have to hear the hovercraft all day, 365 days a year,” says Warwick Jacobs, who runs the Hovercraft Museum, at Gosport, Hampshire. “The sound can travel quite a way, depending on the wind speed. We could have had hovercraft running on the Thames, for instance, but they’d have been too noisy.”
Recent models are quieter than their predecessors because of more efficient engines, while plans are in place to build electric-powered hovercraft, which will reduce the decibel count even further, Jacobs says.
Note.
- Over the years, I have been involved with anti-noise technology and even talked to McDonnell Douglas about it for one of their airliners.
- Electric propulsion and anti-noise technology are just two of those technologies that could transform the economics and unfriendly features of the hovercraft.
But what hovercraft need is a killer application in a high profile area, that gets engineers thinking.
Why Artemis Was Fast
Some of you will know, that I wrote Artemis; the project management software system in the 1970s.
It was generally accepted, that Artemis could do project management calculations, quicker than other software and this obviously helped it gain a high market share.
Here’s why!
In the 1950s and 1960s, computers were much smaller and very efficient algorithms were developed to handle large amounts of information in a small amount of memory.
Nowadays, I suspect obvious and very inefficient algorithms are used because programmers are very lazy.
When I was writing Artemis; the project management system in the 1970s, I spent many hours finding these old algorithms in IBM’s library, so consequently the software was faster, than its competitors.
Modern Data Centres
I wouldn’t be surprised to find, that data centres use so much electricity and get so hot, because they use stupid algorithms, that would have been rejected by IBM in the 1950s.
The Anonymous Widower 