Telematique, water and fire.

Cloud Parsing

More clarity (and practicality) is emerging in the conversation regarding cloud computing. Joe Weinman's response to my previous post goes straight to the heart of it: there are reasons why the pure, platonic form of cloud computing just won't satisfy the requirements or live within the constraints placed on corporate production computing.

Dan Woods has a very good article this morning at Forbes.com in which he identifies three issues that will bring complexity to the cloud-based solutions. He identifies them as (1) governments, (2) network topology and (3) quality of service.

With all respect to his choices, I'd probably use different terminology when laying out the issues for a geekier audience. (The column IS entitled JargonSpy !!)

(1) government regulation regarding the jurisdiction in which certain kinds of data must remain is a big issue. But there are a whole slew of industry standards (such as PCI DSS) and just "best practices" that recommend keeping close watch on where data lives and where it's processed. Compliance with regulation, industry standard or corporate best practice is a more inclusive concept.

(2) the network topology issue is really about latency rather than speed. (See Weinman's Cloudonomics Rule #8)

(3) quality of service is a loaded term for those of us with networking backgrounds. Woods' use of the term makes sense to the general readership. In fact, it's an amalgam of service properties that seem to rest primarily on reliability, availability, performance and security. Thrown in for good measure, we need to consider connectivity and resilience of the cloud.

This article is heartwarming, in that it starts to add some texture and the appropriate measure of sophistication into the thinking around cloud computing. Thanks, Dan.

(Thanks to OnSaas for pointing out the article.)

Parsing The Cloud - Forbes.com

Cloud computing is a rich vein of semantic ore for the JargonSpy because so much that is said about the cloud makes it all seem so simple. Most of the time, the story goes like this: We have an application like Salesforce.com or Google Apps, or an application programming interface to a service like Amazon.com's EC2 or S3, and we ask it to do stuff for us. Then, out there in the cloud, it all happens. We don't have to worry about what happens in the cloud, and we do not really care where it is, who else has their stuff there or how it all works.

The days of not caring are quickly coming to an end. The cloud as an abstract entity in a place you don't have to worry about will be replaced by clouds that have geographies, special purposes, other companies and rules that guarantee compliance with regulations. This week JargonSpy takes a look at how and why the cloud will transform from the simple to the complex. ...

AWS EC2 gets more real(world)

The Amazon Web Services blog has announced some additions to Amazon EC2 that make it all that more viable for real world, production operations.

We just added three important new features to Amazon EC2: Elastic IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and User Selectable Kernels. The documentation, the WSDL, the AMI tools, and the command line tools have been revised to match and there's a release note as well.

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The Elastic IP Addresses feature gives you more control of the IP addresses associated with your EC2 instances.

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Availability Zones give you additional control of where your EC2 instances are run. We use a two level model which consists of geographic regions broken down into logical zones. Each zone is designed in such a way that it is insulated from failures which might affect other zones within the region.

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Finally, the User Selectable Kernels feature allows users to run a kernel other than the default EC2 kernel. Anyone can run a non-default kernel, but the ability to create new kernels is currently restricted to Amazon and select vendors.

EC2 becomes more viable as a commercial grade, virtual data center utility with each new feature. I'll be interested to see what this does to the service's adoption by both corporate IT and SaaS players with SLAs to maintain.

Transactional Cloud DB

EnterpriseDB seems to be making some interesting moves with the announcement of their offering.  I'm not sure I understand how they both scale and transactional DB functionality with any kind of service level assurance.  But, I'm all ears...

Another Amazon 'cloud' database, but this one will be Oracle-compatible

EnterpriseDB plans in March to start beta-testing an online version of its Oracle-compatible database that will leverage Amazon.com Inc.'s Web-based computing and storage services.

The EnterpriseDB Advanced Server Cloud Edition will be much more powerful than the SimpleDB Web database that Amazon itself plans to offer, claimed Bob Zurek, the Edison, N.J.-based software vendor's chief technology officer.

Zurek added that EnterpriseDB, which bases its commercially licensed software on the open-source PostgreSQL database, will offer a new pricing model that will help it compete with Oracle Corp.'s databases and the MySQL open-source technology that Sun Microsystems Inc. recently agreed to buy.
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The new challenges for your network management software

Peter Williams of Bloor Research does a nice job of describing the issues facing IT's management of networks as well as the vendor's challenges in delivering the right network management systems.  The piece then goes on to be a plug for Entuity's 'Eye of the Storm' network management suite, but it's done in this context. The advertizing not withstanding, I liked the staging and premise on which it was written.

Stormy times for your networks? Time to re-assess your network...

Those who provide network fault and performance management software have been experiencing new challenges as technologies advance and new software emerges. Enterprises using network management software unchanged for only two years will be behind the curve; in fact the vendors themselves are struggling to keep up.

Think of the challenges. There is virtualisation—of the servers, storage pools and the networks—which builds in extra (hidden) layers of complexity in continually mapping the virtual to the physical. Various trends include a shift towards more server-based shared applications and content management, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and software as a service (SaaS). Conversely, there is also peer-to-peer networking, as well as converged data and voice sharing the same wire, and wireless networking for both.

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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

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.

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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.

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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

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.
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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

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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

The Symbiosis of SaaS and Soft Appliances

Phil Wainewright starts out characterizing the packaged software appliance as a competitive offer to SaaS.  But, toward the end of the piece, he opens up the argument to say that "... SaaS vendors shouldn't see software appliances as competition.  Indeed ... managed appliances will probably become part of most SaaS vendor's infrastructure, deployed where it makes sense to handle certain operations on customer sites or otherwise outside of the vendor’s own data centers." 

While this is true, Phil's missed an important point:  SaaS vendors are the direct beneficiaries of "soft appliances", since they are an excellent means of implementing and deploying SaaS on a "virtual data center."  That is, the SaaS provider will employ infrastructure on demand, packaging their multi-tenant offers as soft appliances that can be provisioned as customer demand warrants.  Companies such as 3Tera make a strong case for (and hopefully a good business from) precisely this scenario. 

The bottom line is that SaaS has much to gain from embracing packaged software appliances, as both an infrastructure for on-demand service and as an on-site adjunct to their network-resident services.

» SaaS and the packaged software appliance | Software as Services | ZDNet.com

... Put all of these considerations together and you can see that appliance packaging — especially of open-source platform components — is a way of eliminating a lot of the problems associated with conventional software; but without moving entirely to a vendor-hosted SaaS model. “This is independent of the delivery model,” says Dietzen. “This is about cutting the cost of owning and running the software.”

So there’s a sense in which appliances are not so much a part of the SaaS model as competition for it. The appliance model provides many of the benefits of SaaS without forcing customers to store and access their data outside of the firewall. With a product like Zimbra, where the most intensive use is within the organization in any case, and where integration to other on-premise facilities such as telephony equipment is often important, it is often very difficult to argue for off-premise deployment anyway because that simply adds unnecessary cost and network latency. ...

On the other hand, there are many more applications that run much better off-premise because they involve a lot of interactions beyond the firewall anyway. So I think SaaS vendors shouldn’t see software appliances as competition. Indeed, as I hinted at the outset of this article, managed appliances will probably become a part of most SaaS vendors’ infrastructure, deployed where it makes sense to handle certain operations on customer sites or otherwise outside of the vendor’s own data centers. This assertion is especially credible if you count client-side platforms such as Silverlight, Apollo, Google Gears and so on as part of the managed appliance spectrum.

Technorati Tags: software appliance