This phrase was used close to a dozen times by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com at his recent keynote at the MySQL conference. Werner used it to describe the day to day tasks of most web operations teams… tasks like racking boxes, configuring routers, and installing software. He mentioned ops teams at Amazon got to spending 70% of their time in this mode, and this was one of the main catalysts for developing infrastructure that brings us S3, SQS, EC2, and more.

Removing this “undifferentiated heavy lifting” (hereto referred as UHL) from your cycles is supposed to free operations to spend more time actually operating. As I was listening to the talk, I wondered how many folks believe there is some competitive advantage in UHL? Certainly choice of hardware, network architecture, data center setup all fall under UHL and can mean the difference between success at scale versus utter failure. Nonetheless, the argument is that you shouldn’t reinvent the wheel and should take advantage from those providers (Amazon in this case) who do the UHL for you, right? Well, a lot of people certainly think so based on how much press and use is being directed towards the cloud.

This begs the question: “If racking boxes, configuring OS’s and so forth is UHL today, what will be UHL tomorrow?” That question is material to companies in the systems management market because getting caught on the wrong side of UHL means your future is (as our favorite magic 8 ball would say) “Outlook Not So Good”.

Luckily, UHL today is mostly about the pain associated with hardware and network provisioning and configuration. These problems are bounded just enough to make it feasible for someone to simply delegate them to a cloud provider (as many already have). Of course, the implications to management vendors focused on managing UHL tasks are not pleasant if you buy the idea that most applications will move into this sort of an environment. If you buy this vision, then conceivably the future will require one GIANT Tivoli license for the One-Cloud-Provider-To-Rule-Them-All, right? Heh, not quite, but it’s fun to think about it that way!

The reality is that this trend is forcing both service providers as well as application developers to rethink their operation strategy. Providers want to be more like clouds, developers want to run inside them.

Why rethink their ops strategy? Because the stuff that sits above the UHL layer… the middleware, the databases, and most importantly, the code that makes up a given application present the most daunting challenges due to their complexity. This leaves a meaty management problem yet to be solved. One that has more to do with managing complex software stacks with components which might reside inside or outside of the cloud and with an ‘elasticity’ (to borrow another one of Werner’s terms) which demands equal agility in the management layer than what is found in the software stack.

This is where the next big wave of innovation will happen in the management space, and we’re excited to be a part of it. Come visit our booth at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

The team just finished our second successful MySQL Con. Many thanks to Marten & Zack and all the folks at O’Reilly that put on such a great conference.

This year definitely had a different feel, and of course that had a lot to do with Sun’s influence. It felt like it was almost a new event, a chapter 2 for MySQL, and its ecosystem of vendors and customers. There were more people - I don’t know exact numbers, but it felt appeared to be twice as packed. The exhibit hall was the same, but we took up a bit more space than last year and certainly there were much fancier booths - ours included! We even gave away multiple prizes this year - our fun 8-ball tshirts, and a couple remote control helicopters. Scott Baird and Mike Hogan were the lucky winners this year.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is our fit with the MySQL customers. This year we met several of our own customers and users face-to-face - including an entire legion of the Rackspace/Mosso guys. I had dozens of conversations with MySQL users managing the LAM-* stack, and showed them how Hyperic helps wrangle all the moving parts. Several of them were lined up when the exhibit hall opened the next day to tell me how their deployment went the night before! Very cool. We spend a lot of time talking to users - via the forums, email and phone - so to see their faces the next day after they deployed is a really cool experience.

And this experience wasn’t mine alone, Hyperic has grown quite a bit in the past year, almost tripling in size. So we had many more people from all departments hanging out on the floor and interacting live with users. Check out our own Mark Deadder, sales guru, wooing a small crowd while flashing his broken wing. (Minutes before, Mark fatally crashed the demo helicopter - perhaps if we could monitor it with HQ, the wing would still be attached!)

Thanks, MySQL - we’re looking forward to next year already!

InfoWorld has published extensive interviews with a stable of Open Source thought leaders on the eve of the Open Source Business Conference. Dubbed The Open Source Roundtable, it delivers a series of interviews with 11 individuals on the vanguard of Open Source, including, I was pleased to learn, Javier Soltero. For the sake of completeness, the others include Matt Asay of Alfresco, Dave Rosenberg of MuleSource, Chris DiBona of Google, Bruce Perens, ESR, Sam Ramji of Microsoft, Mark Spencer of Digium, Bob Sutor of IBM, Zack Urlocker of MySQL, and Andy Astor of EnterpriseDB.

I’m going to say this now - Javier deserves a ton of credit for incorporating community into Hyperic very early on. How many other CEO’s can say that one of their earliest hires was the Open Source community guy? He recognized from the beginning that a key to Hyperic’s success was our community. Speaking of which, look for some very interesting announcements coming down the pipe later this week :)

See the full interview with Javier here.