Telematique, water and fire.

Opening the Added Value Layer for AWS

In the past weeks, Amazon has been providing more details regarding their support of "Paid AMIs", the means by which independent providers can offer up the use of their privately developed packages -- software "appliances" -- and set the fees for use, which are collected by Amazon and distributed to the owner.  In doing this, Amazon has reduced the friction and now allows for an added value ecosystem to emerge, built on top of AWS.  This is a smart way for Amazon to see what the market needs (and doesn't) and a good way to create a pool of companies and products from which they can pick and choose to support more directly, acquire or ... with whom they can decide to compete.

With the clear signals that Ray Ozzie sent recently about Microsoft's entry into Utility Computing and XaaS, the availability of "cheap, on-demand resource" will have more than one of the 800-pound gorillas in the mix.   Very interesting times...

Amazon Web Services Blog: Start filling up your Shopping Cart with AMIs

...   The AMI-creator can set any price for the AMI depending upon the software that is loaded or as compensation for the work and time he has put onto making it and AMI-consumer simply purchases the AMI just like he purchases more tangible items from Amazon.com.

Technorati Tags: AWS, EC2, S3, Microsoft

Ray Ozzie Clarifies Microsofts Cloud Computing Intentions

This past week, Ray Ozzie, CTO and CSA at Microsoft, made an interesting presentation to the financial analyst community.  In this outing, he made a great deal clearer MSFT's intentions and inclinations with respect to utility computing.  In the course of the presentation, he identifies the three layers of Microsofts utility offerings to come:  the Global Foundation Services comprising huge data centers running commodity technology, the Cloud Infrastructure Services and the Live Platform (the "application layer" or most easily recognized as SaaS). 

It's the Cloud Infrastructure that interests me.  If, as Ray and others have said, this layer is offered up as "Infrastructure as a Service", it potentially opens a huge door into inexpensive, on-demand computing for IT organizations that depend on Microsoft, as well as OTHER operating systems and applications. The success of such an offer depends, in my view, on the ability of enterprise IT, particularly the small and medium size enterprise that relies so heavily on Microsoft products, to use the IaaS utility as an adjunct resource, providing on-demand resources at extremely low price, with very quick provisioning, and high reliability and resilience.

[Thanks to Isabel Wang for her pointer to the text of the presentation and her analysis.]

MSFT Financial Analyst Meeting: Ray Ozzie

The next layer above that is our cloud infrastructure services layer. And this is the most fundamental software level of the services infrastructure. You can think of this as a utility computing fabric upon which all of our online services run. You know, among other services, this fabric has an efficient and isolated virtualized computation layer. It has application frameworks that support a variety of app models that are designed for horizontal scaling. And it has infrastructure that manages the automatic deployment and load balancing and performance optimization of the apps that it's managing running on its infrastructure.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, IaaS, utility computing

WADLing toward RESTful services

In the on-going dialogue between the RESTIANs and the Splat-ians (as in... WS-* which is often pronounced "double-yew ess splat"), there's apparently a proposal called Web Appliaction Description Language (WADL) that designed to provide descriptors for REST services.

WADL: The REST answer to WSDL

...

For SOAP Web services, descriptors based on Web Services Description Language (WSDL) form a fundamental piece of their actual design, mainly on account of the underlying complexity present in the actual service. In these scenarios, a descriptor not only serves the purpose of formally describing all the business logic it can fulfill, but it also aides in the creation of helper classes -- often called stubs -- used to build service clients.

Enter WADL, a similar description language to WSDL, but strictly targeting the requirements of RESTful services. REST started of simple enough, as live URL's on major portals which returned structured data to querying clients, but as interest has grown in this alternate approach to Web services, so has the scope and size of the business processes it attempts to fulfill, making descriptors a natural addition. ...

Technorati Tags: REST, WS-*, WADL, WSDL

More XaaS and the Fungibility of Computer Resource

Simon Wardley continues with an explication of his concepts of SaaS, FaaS and HaaS.  In the conversation was spawned around James Urquhart's position on standards, I believe that my pursuit of a standard representation of an assemblage of VMs and the network infrastructure on which they operate will fall somewhere near HaaS.

Simon then expands on the benefits (and inevitability ?) of XaaS fungibility.  He extends the conversation of market forces guiding the utility computing business to a notion of exchanges and brokers for "units" of service.  I remember thinking the same thing about the realtime competition to provide telecommunication / data communication services... in near realtime.  We're not there yet, so I'm not quite sure of Simon's time line ("Six years from now, you'll be seeing job adverts for computer resource brokers.").  That said, I competely agree that this is going to be a real part of the future of utility computing.

Bits or pieces?: JSOPs .... buy, buy, buy.

Carrying on from my last post, I want to breakdown the terms SaaS, FaaS and HaaS.

SaaS (Software as a Service) is simply where your data resides in an application from a SaaS provider.

...

FaaS (Framework as a Service) is simply where your data and your application resides in a framework from a FaaS provider. Early examples of this include Zimki and BungeeLabs but neither are open sourced yet.

...

HaaS (Hardware as a Service) is simply where your data, your application and your framework resides in a machine environment (virtual or otherwise) from a HaaS provider. Again the same rules apply, I want no lock-in, no exit fee and an easy swap - hence open source standards are again the order of the day.

Technorati Tags: SaaS, utility computing

Clone? Split Personality? Confusion.

Over the course of the past week, I've noticed references to Rich Miller about topics I'm likely to write about, but don't remember having posted.  The first thought... Have I been blogging in my sleep?  Am I leaving my short-term memory at the door?

No.  It's an inevitable result of having a common name.  It's happened before, and will certainly happen again.  This time it's Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge.  Rich is a noted technology journalist who's had the good judgement to be interested in the next generation data center.  I've only recently found his site, and enjoy reading it.   It will go on my site's blogroll in the next day or so.


Technorati Tags: utility computing, data center

HP picks up Opsware

Not surprising, though I actually had figured that HP would probably pick up BEA first.  This is going to be interesting, as we look to see how HP decides to integrate the Opsware data center automation with the technology that HP has been peddling for a while... with not a lot of splashy results.

Data Center Knowledge: Data centers, design, power, cooling

HP will acquire data center automation specialist Opsware Inc. (OPSW) for $14.25 per share, or about $1.6 billion. HP said the purchase of Opsware, which started life as LoudCloud, will add to its portfolio of Business Technology Optimization (BTO) software offerings. It's also a clear sign of the growing importance of the data center in the strategies of the largest players in the technology industry.

Technorati Tags: data center, automation, Opsware

More on Utility Computing Standards

The conversation about which I wrote has been getting appropriate attention and more people with credentials weighing in.

James Urquhart points to utility computing market's need for "a standard for server (VM/framework/application/whatever) portability across disparate utility computing service providers."

To which I say: Amen. He then (correctly, IMHO) questions the ability of the virtual appliance concept by itself to be the answer. I got on a soapbox yesterday regarding a standard representation or description of VM assemblages. Were that available, it would go quite a distance to addressing the problem James points out.

For added goodness, Bert and Simon have commented on the post, summarizing their respective points of view. Simon's comment succinctly sets the context by stating that the creation of a non-proprietary standard and encouraging its adoption through open source availability is "...based upon the assumption that you have an engine with allows for portability between one CSP (common service provider) and another." This is the precondition I wish I'd stated as well as he has.

To return to my point: The engine to which he refers will require an accepted standard of description or, perhaps, of prescription. What's needed is a uniformly understood representation of VM assemblages: the application level components (VMs or physical servers), the network's components and the connections that lash them together as a functioning system. A standard limited only to VM description and representation of individual active units is necessary but not sufficient to meet the goal.

Service Level Automation in the Datacenter: utility computing

Recently, I have been telling anyone who will listen that this nascent utility computing market is still searching for a standard for server (VM/framework/application/whatever) portability across disparate utility computing service providers. I like the concept of a virtual appliance, but we need a (non-proprietary) standard, or we need another portability mechanism besides VMs.

Technorati Tags: utility computing, virtualization, standards

Technorati Tags: Standards, Utility computing, virtualization

Utility Computing, Competition and Standards

In the reading I've been doing recently regarding virtualization and utility computing, I came across Simon Warley's blog. One of his recent posts caught my eye for a number of reasons.

The first is his taxonomy of the utility computing market. Until reading the piece, I had (lazily) characterized the market as comprised of the SaaS and IaaS (infrastructure as a service) sectors. By adding the FaaS (framework as a service), I believe that he's done us all a favor. However, I'm now tempted to get granular on everyone and introduce another segment. (More on that later.)

The second reason for calling attention to the post is his rationale for the use of open source as the operational means of achieving standards. A part of me agrees, and another sends up flares. Perhaps the use of the term "open source" isn't as crisp as I need it to be in this case. I'd like to think this through a bit in order to find the my point of view.

I have to agree wholeheartedly that the objective is the formation of a competitive utility computer market, with competition based on price, quality and capacity.

Bits or pieces?: Competition, not greed, is good.

Utility computing concerns taking the idea of utility energy provision and applying it to the world of IT, so that companies buy computing resources in much the same way that they buy electricity - charged according to metered usage.

This market is growing, and will continue to grow in three distinct areas :-

SaaS (Software as a Service) : where entire applications are provided on a utility basis.

FaaS (Framework as a Service) : where an application development and deployment environment or framework is provided on a utility basis.

HaaS (Hardware as a Service) : where raw virtual machines are provided on a utility basis.
...

Update: This will teach me not to post too quickly, which I did before reading through the very interesting dialogue between Simon and Bert Armijo of 3Tera. Bert's submitted comments to the original post and in his own blog here.

I understand both positions. I have "done time" in the formal standards organizations. (Remember OSI? X.400? X.500?) I've also spent a good portion of the past five years in the thick of open source and standardization with the creation of Univa Corporation, a company dedicated to delivering HPC infrastructure based on commercial distributions of and enhancements to the open source Globus Toolkit.

I believe that the crux of the gentlemen's disagreement shows up in this metaphor from Simon:

Agreed, virtualisation is a technology which can be used but it is not utility computing.

However, what you have created is not just virtualisation but the equivalent of Jar files for infrastructure at the HaaS level.

There's an argument that in delivering the "Jar files for infrastructure", what's now called for is the equivalent of the Jar manifest, a formal, standard description of the contents and possibly the recipe for lashing together the assembly of VMs and their contents. Through description standards adopted by and understood by the utility providers, customers have that freedom to "emigrate" from one to another. But I'm not convinced that the actual implementations of infrastructure ... the virtualized network infrastructure in particular ... needs to be open source software. In this regard, I tend to side with Bert.

Where I depart from Bert's argument is when he characterizes 3Tera's AppLogic as maintaining "... the existing infrastructure model of load balancers, NAS, firewalls etc ... that lets you define infrastructure for your app exactly as you would have built it before..." Exactly? I don't believe that's quite the case. The designer of a newly defined assemblage of servers and its underlying networks (physical and virtual) can begin "fresh" to create an extensive and impressive configuration in an AppLogic-based virtual data center. But, the vocabulary used is that of a specially defined, constrained set of load balancers, NAS, firewalls etc.

I'd claim that the network on which the virtualized servers and appliances at the SaaS and even at the FaaS layers has not been sufficiently virtualized, not exposed as a sufficiently rich abstraction layer nor even described in a standard manner. There does not yet exist the layer of abstraction and vocabulary by which one could, as Bert claims, "... take their existing images and move them to traditional colo. No lock-in." If there were, I'd be able to use those same descriptions of infrastructure to efficiently move a "legacy" configuration from a corporate data center or a traditional colo to an AppLogic-based utility or another utility service's HaaS/FaaS (such as Amazon's AWS).

Technorati Tags: utility computing, SaaS, markets

Technorati Tags: markets, SaaS, Standards, Utility computing, virtualization

SaaS and PS

In Phil Wainewright's post from yesterday discussing SaaS and the lessons learned from SalesForce.com's release of its technology as a platform, he quotes Frank McCracken, co-founder and professional services director of SaasPoint.  Among other worthwhile items, he pointed to the role of professional services in SaaS.  The benefits of even a little bit of "high-touch" when delivering SaaS makes perfect sense.  The issue for a vendor is how to (at least) recover the cost of professional services and how to prevent the necessity of PS from becoming a gating factor for small SaaS companies with no people to spare for PS.

» SIs putting product onto AppExchange | Software as Services | ZDNet.com

...
McCracken also revealed that Salesforce.com’s dependence on professional services is somewhat greater than its on-demand image often suggests. In its early days — which McCracken witnessed as an insider, having been the first recruit to Salesforce.com’s professional services team in EMEA — the company quickly found that customers need help to get up-and-running with application.

“Salesforce tried it without professional services and they had lots of churn,” he explained. “We found that even if customers had professional services just for one day, they didn’t leave the service.”

He revealed that a vital ingredient when selling the online product — which Salesforce does mainly over the phone and via web conferencing — is to get people to put their data in and start using the system. Once that happens, they’re much more likely to continue to subscribe. But some kind of hand-holding always seems to be needed to get them started.

Technorati Tags: SaaS, PS, professional services

Email and the Five Conversations

Isabel Wang has an interesting post on her blog in response to Google's announcement of their Postini acquisition.  (BTW: Congrats again, Tim!)  In it, Isabel makes the point that email (like many of the newly arrived interpersonal and group messaging technologies) is a means to an end.  She then references Matt Howard's (and SMBLive's) concept of the 5 Conversations, of which I wasn't aware until now. 

Worth the read and the follow up to 5 Conversations.

isabel wang's blog: Email is not a killer app!

...But email is NOT a killer app (let alone THE killer app)! Instead, what SMBs really want is a coherent, 360 degree solution for managing their front- and back-office operations. As SMBLive CEO Matt Howard puts it, running a business is all about maintaining 5 conversations: you use office productivity apps to organize your own ideas, collaboration platforms to share information with colleagues and partners, transaction and contact management tools to keep track of current vendors and customers, sales/marketing/networking services to connect with new ones...

While email can play a role in these interactions, it's a means rather than an end. A means whose usefulness may one day end. As Dennis Howlett writes on ZDNet: "I see a combination of Twitter and Facebook as having the potential to replace 90% of the email I receive while improving my personal productivity." ...