The Open Cloud Manifesto provides a solid definition of the state of cloud computing. Just like other industry movements in distributed computing, enterprise integration or other, cloud computing is evolving in many different directions but the core patterns and architecture of outsourced infrastructure, platforms and software supporting elasticity, multi-tenancy, metering etc.
The hope of the manifesto and other cloud computing standards/organization, standardization in the areas of deployment, execution and management are desirable. When standards exist, it allows us to focus on generating business logic and the value it provides versus the technical wiring and potential workarounds necessary. Just like Web Services and the standards they developed over the past 10 years, I envision cloud computing will take a similar period of time to clarify and flush out the details that can be standardized.
The one area that has traction is support for REST/SOAP based APIs. In fact as companies develop private clouds and potentially expose them as to the public, other architectures such as SOA become important in providing concise and clear interfaces to business logic.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
Wiseclouds: Eating the Dog Food
As part of our development of WiseClouds, it is important that we demonstrate our agnostic nature in evolving the company and its technologies. The site itself is a Google Apps Engine based with integrations into Salesforce.com and Amazon EC2. We will also include Azure in the future along with WordPress for blogging services. This simple example allows us to demonstrate the use of PaaS, IaaS and Saas.
Wiseclouds is out
As part of my own transformation to work with customers in new and interesting ways, I am collaborating with a team at WiseClouds to bring cloud computing training and consulting to a wider audience. Similar and yet different then SOA, Cloud means many things but is already proving its value in a few customers I work with and is on many a tongue in IT.
Anyway, check out what we are working towards which is generating very useful training content along with a group of experienced practitioners in Service and Cloud Computing technologies.
Anyway, check out what we are working towards which is generating very useful training content along with a group of experienced practitioners in Service and Cloud Computing technologies.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Cloud Computing begins but beware of the bill!
Per Gartner and other research organizations, customers have gotten familiar to the Adoption curve slide as part of state of the union for a technology segment. Cloud Computing in its various flavors (SaaS, IaaS and PaaS) has hit main street or in Gartner parlance is with the Early Adopters. Organizations that adopted SaaS (i.e. Salesforce.com, Workday) realized the financial benefits of the pay per subscriber model. Now as the space has rolled out Infrastructure and Platform services, customers are dipping their toe in the water or jumping right in. Some teams are placing functions in the cloud to take advantage of the elasticity features due to the processing volume necessary. Others are rapidly developing applications to fill voids in their technology stack sometimes by the Sales organization or other non-traditional technology. This wild-west period eventually settles down when the rest of the marketplace catches up and Cloud becomes the standard technology medium.
The piece that is daunting right now is the cost that can creep up on you if you are not careful. With billing being an aggregation of the data stored, data shuttled, number of instances, number of connections or other metrics, it gets easy to forget the costs especially if elasticity is enabled in the environment. Similar to mobile data plans, triple play packages, the end of the month bill can be staggering. For now, make sure you not only architect a solution but also the cost models associated with that solution. A good rule of thumb is when developing and testing within the cloud, the costs are quite reasonable. If developing a large scale application that will be running 24x7, be clear on the aggregate costs and talk with the vendor about pricing flexibility.
The following examples provide details from two popular vendors on pricing:
Microsoft Azure Pricing
Amazon Web Services Pricing
The piece that is daunting right now is the cost that can creep up on you if you are not careful. With billing being an aggregation of the data stored, data shuttled, number of instances, number of connections or other metrics, it gets easy to forget the costs especially if elasticity is enabled in the environment. Similar to mobile data plans, triple play packages, the end of the month bill can be staggering. For now, make sure you not only architect a solution but also the cost models associated with that solution. A good rule of thumb is when developing and testing within the cloud, the costs are quite reasonable. If developing a large scale application that will be running 24x7, be clear on the aggregate costs and talk with the vendor about pricing flexibility.
The following examples provide details from two popular vendors on pricing:
Microsoft Azure Pricing
Amazon Web Services Pricing
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Cloud to Cloud Integration
After having hosted a Cloud Computing event in November and hearing how companies are dipping their feet in the cloud, the next logical step we discussed was inter cloud communication. As a small company I may buy into Salesforce.com for CRM, Workday for HR/Financials and Google AppEngine for custom apps. How do I tie these solutions together for data synchronization? What if the data to be exchanged is extremely large? What solutions can I use to do the heavy lifting?
Service Bus solutions either deployed locally or in the cloud provide a composition medium to support such interactions. Cloud platforms expose public APIs via REST or SOAP for near-real time communication.
Large data sets and exchange of this for processing is being investigated by a interesting consortium called Open Cloud Consortium.
Another interesting area may be the creation of middleware in the cloud. Grand Central tried to support this in the early 2000 timeframe. It was a little ahead of its time but now we are seeing Amazon SQS, Microsoft Azure w/Biztalk and other similar platforms.
Service Bus solutions either deployed locally or in the cloud provide a composition medium to support such interactions. Cloud platforms expose public APIs via REST or SOAP for near-real time communication.
Large data sets and exchange of this for processing is being investigated by a interesting consortium called Open Cloud Consortium.
Another interesting area may be the creation of middleware in the cloud. Grand Central tried to support this in the early 2000 timeframe. It was a little ahead of its time but now we are seeing Amazon SQS, Microsoft Azure w/Biztalk and other similar platforms.
QCon, Security and Musings
I was fortunate to speak at QCon San Francisco, CA on November 20 discussing Service Security and my own journey on understanding security but more importantly how services can be hacked. It was interesting when examining the audience to see a mixture of participants but the lack of questions was a little disconcerning. I could take three things from that:
1) Everyone in the audience was familiar with service hacking / security.
2) People are not very familiar and were afraid to ask questions or didn't understand the content.
3) People were not interested.
Since the audience stayed for the entire presentation and questions were basic, I think the majority of the audience was in category 2.
With the increasing discussion on Cloud Computing (QCON was loaded with Cloud presentations as was SOA / Cloud Symposium 2.0/1.0) security had very little presence. In understanding security, my own education was due to a client requirement. With just a couple months of effort, I was able to better understand the security technology. The harder part has been in understanding the hacking culture, finding helpful material and approaches and how that impacts services I create. Here is the link to the QCon presentation.
1) Everyone in the audience was familiar with service hacking / security.
2) People are not very familiar and were afraid to ask questions or didn't understand the content.
3) People were not interested.
Since the audience stayed for the entire presentation and questions were basic, I think the majority of the audience was in category 2.
With the increasing discussion on Cloud Computing (QCON was loaded with Cloud presentations as was SOA / Cloud Symposium 2.0/1.0) security had very little presence. In understanding security, my own education was due to a client requirement. With just a couple months of effort, I was able to better understand the security technology. The harder part has been in understanding the hacking culture, finding helpful material and approaches and how that impacts services I create. Here is the link to the QCon presentation.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
ECAUG 1.0: Architecture User Group
Wednesday this week I hosted a user group in Waltham, MA focusing on Cloud Computing experiences. I was fortunate to have Steve Robbins of Modus21 and Matson Wade representing HKM at the event. In their discussions, they broke down their experiences with Amazon Web Services specifically EC2, S3, SQS and a few other features. If you are interested in participating in the future, let us know. We can extend an invite to the Ning forum that we have setup and you can check out the presentations. A couple of criteria at the moment are you are based in the US and you are willing to proactively participate. No vendors are allowed which in turn provides a more frank and interesting discussion.
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