cloud
There are 118 entries for the tag cloud
It’s about operational efficiency and consistency, emulated in the cloud by an API to create the appearance of a converged platform In most cases, the use of the term “consolidation” implies the aggregation (and subsequently elimination) of like devices. Application delivery consolidation, for example, is used to describe a process of scaling up infrastructure that often occurs during upgrade cycles. Many little boxes are exchanged for a few larger ones as a means to simplify the architecture and reduce the overall costs (hard and soft) associated with delivering applications. Consolidation. But cloud has opened (or should...
#fasterapp #ccevent While web applications aren’t sensitive to jitter, business processes are. One of the benefits of web applications is that they are generally transported via TCP, which is a connection-oriented protocol designed to assure delivery. TCP has a variety of native mechanisms through which delivery issues can be addressed – from window sizes to selective acks to idle time specification to ramp up parameters. All these technical knobs and buttons serve as a way for operators and administrators to tweak the protocol, often at run time, to ensure the exchange of requests and responses upon...
#fasterapp #ccevent WAN optimization is not and cannot be separated from application delivery Yes, yes I did say that. There's a reason for that, and after more than a decade of watching the markets that tangentially revolve around making applications faster I'm here to tell you it's a failure of monumental proportions. The very term WAN Optimization has always stuck in my craw (whatever and wherever that may be). That's because optimizing the WAN implies that you're making the WAN faster. The problem is that a WAN is either a dedicated link between two locations (old...
It’s like unicorns…and rainbows! #mobile Mark my words, the term “mobile” is the noun (or is it a verb? Depends on the context, doesn’t it?) that will replace “cloud” as the most used and abused and misapplied term in technology in the coming year. If I was to find a pitch in my inbox that did not someway invoke the term “mobile” I’d be surprised. The latest one to catch my eye was pitching a survey on the “mobile cloud”. The idea, apparently, around this pitch involving “mobile cloud” is the miraculous capability bestowed upon cloud...
#bigdata #infosec Storing sensitive data in the cloud is made more palatable by applying a little security before the data leaves the building… When corporate hardware, usually laptops, are stolen, one of the first questions asked by information security professionals is whether or not the data on the drive was encrypted. While encryption of data is certainly not a panacea, it’s a major deterrent to those who would engage in the practice of stealing data for dollars. Many organizations are aware of this and use encryption judiciously when data is at rest in the data center...
The shift of focus from north-south to east-west networking isn’t just inside the data center, it’s a global phenomenon It’s called “east-west” networking, which when compared to its predecessor, “north-south” networking, evinces images of maelstroms and hurricane winds and tsunamis for some reason. It could be the subtle correlation between the transformative shift this change in networking patterns has on the data center with that of El Niño’s transformative power upon the weather patterns across the globe. Traditionally, data center networks have focused on North-South network traffic. The assumption is that clients on...
#devops An ecosystem-based data center approach means accepting the constancy of change… It is an interesting fact of life for aquarists that the term “stable” does not actually mean a lack of change. On the contrary, it means that the core system is maintaining equilibrium at a constant rate. That is, the change is controlled and managed automatically either by the system itself or through the use of mechanical and chemical assistance. Sometimes, those systems need modifications or break (usually when you’re away from home and don’t know it and couldn’t do anything about it if you...
Who is most responsible for determining the adequacy of security in the cloud in your organization?
Dome9, whom you may recall is a security management-as-a-service solution that aims to take the complexity out of managing administrative access to cloud-deployed servers, recently commissioned research on the subject of cloud computing and security from the Ponemon Institute and came up with some interesting results that indicate cloud chaos isn’t confined to just its definition.
The research, conducted this fall and focusing on the perceptions and practices of IT security practitioners, indicated that 54% of respondents felt IT operations and infrastructure personnel...
Being too quick to shout “cloud” when the solution may be found elsewhere can lead to unintended consequences. As with all technology caught up in the hype cycle, cloud computing is often attributed with being “the solution” to problems irrespective of reality. Cloud is suddenly endowed with supernatural powers, able to solve every business and operational challenge merely by being what it is. Take, for example, the attribution of cloud as being “the solution” to the very real issue of severe snow in the UK. Cloud solutions can...
#devops #cloud If your goal is IT as a Service, then at some point you have to actually service-enable the policies that govern IT infrastructure.
My eldest shared the story of “The Turk” recently and it was a fine example of how appearances can be deceiving – and of the power of abstraction. If you aren’t familiar with the story, let me briefly share before we dive in to how this relates to infrastructure and, specifically, IT as a Service.
The Turk, the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century.
The...
Pondering the impact of cloud and Web 2.0 on traditional middleware messaging-based architectures and PaaS.
It started out innocently enough with a simple question, “What exactly *is* the model for PaaS services scalability? If based on HTTP/REST API integration, fairly easy. If native middleware… input?” You’ll forgive the odd phrasing – Twitter’s limitations sometimes make conversations of this nature … interesting.
The discussion culminated in what appeared to be the sentiment that middleware was mostly obsolete with respect to PaaS.
THE OLD WAY
Very briefly for those of you who are more infrastructure / network minded than application architecture fluent,...
If Amazon’s Availability Zone strategy had worked as advertised its outage would have been non-news. But then again, no one really knows what was advertised… There’s been a lot said about the Amazon outage and most of it had to do with cloud and, as details came to light, about EBS (Elastic Block Storage). But very little mention was made of what should be obvious: most customers didn’t – and still don’t - know how Availability Zones really work and, more importantly, what triggers a fail over. What’s worse, what triggers a fail back? Amazon’s documentation...
Application performance is more and more about dependencies in the delivery chain, not the application itself.
When an article regarding cloud performance and an associated average $1M in loss as a result appeared it caused an uproar in the Twittersphere, at least amongst the Clouderati.There was much gnashing of teeth and pounding of fists that ultimately led to questioning the methodology and ultimately the veracity of the report.
If you were worried about the performance of cloud-based applications, here's fair warning: You'll probably be even more so when you consider findings from a recent survey conducted by Vanson Bourne...
Like urban legends, every few years this one rears its head and makes its rounds.
It is certainly true that everyone who has an e-mail address has received some message claiming that something bad is going on, or someone said something they didn’t, or that someone influential wrote a letter that turns out to be wishful thinking. I often point the propagators of such urban legends to Snopes because the folks who run Snopes are dedicated to hunting down the truth regarding these tidbits that make their way to the status of urban legend.
It would nice, wouldn’t it, if...
The “what” is a dynamic data center infrastructure. Cloud is “how” to get there. Admist the chatter and sound bites on Twitter coming from Cloud Connect this week are some interesting side conversations revolving around architecture and how cloud may or may not change the premises upon which those architectures are based. Architecture is, in the technology demesne, the “fundamental underlying design of computer hardware, software, or both.” A data center architecture is the design of a data center, the underlying fundamental way in which compute, network and storage resources are provisioned and ultimately delivered to support...
Convergence, consolidation, and common-sense. When WAN optimization was getting its legs under it as a niche in the broader networking industry it got a little boost from the fact that remote/branch office connectivity was the big focus of data centers and C-level execs in the enterprise. Latency and congested WAN links between corporate data centers and remote offices around the globe were the source of lost productivity. The obvious solution – get thee a fatter pipe – was at the time far too expensive a proposition and, in some cases, not a feasible option. We’d had...
It comes down to this: the on-demand provisioning and elastic scalability systems that make up “cloud” are addressing NP-Complete problems for which there is no known exact solutions.
At the heart of what cloud computing provides – in addition to compute-on-demand – is the concept of elastic scalability. It is through the ability to rapidly provision resources and applications that we can achieve elastic scalability and, one assumes, through that high availability of systems. Obviously, given my relationship to F5 I am strongly interested in availability. It is, after all, at the heart of what an application delivery...
Cloud is more likely to make an application deployment more – not less – complex, but the benefits are ultimately worth it. I was a bit disconcerted by the notion put forward that cloud-based applications are somehow less complex than their non-cloud, non-virtualized predecessors. In reality, it’s the same application, after all, and the only thing that has really changed is the infrastructure and its complexity. Take BPM (Business Process Management) as an example. It was recently asserted on Twitter that cloud-based BPM “enables agility”, followed directly by the statement, “There’s no long rollout of a...
We won’t have true cloud computing until we have a services-based infrastructure and standardization of cloud management frameworks. We may call it “cloud” today, but what we really have with the offerings today is “capacity on demand.” We don’t actually have all the pieces necessary to execute on the vision that is “cloud computing.” We’ve almost completed server standardization through virtualization but we haven’t really begun to standardize network and infrastructure services. And we’re certainly nowhere near ready to standardize on the cloud and application frameworks that will enable a seamless Intercloud. The term “utility”...
Just when you thought the misconceptions regarding cloud computing couldn’t get any worse…they do. We have, in general, moved past the question “what is cloud” and onto “what do I need to do to move an application to the cloud?” But the question “what is cloud” appears not to have reached consensus and thus advice on how to move an application into the cloud might be based on an understanding of cloud that is less than (or not at all) accurate. The problem is exacerbated by the reality that there are several types or models...
Oh, load balancers are networks and applications are development, and never the twain shall meet. We have a brittle system underpinning the data center: the network. It’s brittle, yes. But it works. Thanks to years of tweaking and tuning and troubleshooting, it works. We know where everything is, and how everything interacts, and it works. It works well, in fact, now that we’ve got it all figured out. Is it any surprise then that we might be resistant to change that might (probably will) upset that delicate balance? One of the most difficult challenges...
There’s a difference between automation and orchestration, and knowing which one you’re really doing is half the battle in achieving a truly dynamic data center. Randy Heffner on CIO.Com wrote an excellent article on SOA and its value, “SOA: Think Business Transformation, Not Code Reuse.” The problem I had with the article was not in any way related to its advice, conclusions, or suggestions. The problem I had was that I kept thinking about how perfectly much of his article could be applied to data center orchestration, operational transformation, and automation. Simply replace “SOA” with “orchestration”, “software reuse”...
Preparing for the upcoming Cloud Connect conference several speakers and presenters have put forth the proposal that no one should attempt to define cloud yet again. After all, if you’re attending the conference (and you are attending, of course, aren’t you?) then you certainly have a firm understanding of what cloud computing is and what it can do. But most end-users and business stakeholders won’t be attending and don’t have a firm understanding of cloud computing. Even the technology pundits to whom these constituents turn to learn about the technology often fail to really “get” cloud computing, as evinced...
The wrong load balancing algorithm can be detrimental to the performance and scalability of your web applications. When you’re mixing and matching virtual or physical servers you need to take care with how you configure your Load balancer – and that includes cloud-based load balancing services. Load balancers do not at this time, unsurprisingly, magically choose the right algorithm for distributing requests for a given environment. One of the nice things about a load balancing solution that comes replete with application-specific templates is that all the work required to determine the optimal configuration for the load balancer and...
Here comes St. Beaker and Santa Cloud … Twas two weeks past deployment and all through the house Echoed taps on a keyboard and clicks from a mouse The apps were all running inside VMware In hopes compute resources soon would they share. The dashboard showed statuses green and not red our admins had thoughts of going home in their heads The director was ready to it a wrap and I began...
An e-mail exchange with Kay Kinton, a spokesperson for Amazon, on the subject of Amazon and its recent run-in with the Zeus botnet controller, raised two very interesting and valid points. First, there is a fine balance that must be maintained by providers – cloud or traditional hosting – regarding the privacy of applications and data deployed by customers and monitoring/security. Second, Kay points out that it’s easier in the EC2 environment, at least, to disable botnets once they are discovered. The second point is one that appears on the surface to be true but I’m not entirely...
Like peanut-butter and jelly, cloud computing and application acceleration are just better together. Ann Bednarz of Network World waxes predictive regarding 2010 trends in application delivery and WAN optimization in WAN optimization in 2010. One of the interesting tidbits she offers from research firm Gartner is growth in the application acceleration market: Second, the research firm is predicting a return to modest growth for the application acceleration market in 2010. Gartner is forecasting a compound annual growth rate of 12.22%, with 2014 revenue of $4.27 billion. This, when viewed alongside...
Cloud computing environments are just as suited to illegitimate use as legitimate use. Do providers need a way to separate the chaff from the wheat to reassure enterprise-class customers that they’re doing everything they can to eliminate the hijacking of cloud computing resources for nefarious purposes? One of the negatives of being the technology darling du jour is that every misstep, problem, and outage is immediately jumped on and reported everywhere. Amazon is particularly susceptible to such coverage, being recognized as one of the leaders in public cloud computing. Last week Amazon suffered yet another outage, true, but...
An interesting thing happens when you combine toolkits like XAJAX and SAJAX and the ability to perform content-based routing: you can actually achieve function-level load balancing in both cloud-based and traditional architectures. As you might have discovered from previous posts mentioning it, I still do web application development to support hobby interests in my (very little) spare time. I’m currently in love with the XAJAX library, which has made development of what is supposed to be a very interactive application nearly effortless. I’m also very much enamored of load balancing/application delivery and cloud computing, specifically...
Beware the danger of building out isolated network and application network infrastructures in the cloud lest we end up with silos from which it is difficult to escape. While writing a separate post on the business value of public versus private cloud computing investments I specifically called out the fact that infrastructure – virtual or physical – provisioned in a cloud environment is applicable only to that cloud environment; it really can’t be shared within the enterprise architecture or other public cloud computing environments, for that matter. That led to considering the impact...
Ultimately the CAPEX vs OPEX arguments over public and private cloud computing are irrelevant. Business-value is the only metric that really counts. B renda Michelson, Principal of Elemental Links, writes “elemental cloud computing” recently tweeted: “100k buys way more public, than private, cloud computing power” which started a short but inspiring conversation on the subject centering around the observation that “cloud is the gift that keeps on giving.” That’s alluding to the fact that the compute power purchased in “the cloud” is an annual expense, unlike private, cloud computing power which requires renewal at...
With any luck I am already AFK for a visit with Don’s mother and his family for Thanksgiving. And I’m really (really, I swear) going to be AFK (away from keyboard) for the entire time. Really. I’m serious this time, stop looking at me like that. Ever heard of “pre-publishing?” So while I’m out, you might need something to read. And if so, you might want something you can read two or three times because, well, it was that entertaining. If that’s the case, I highly recommend you give “BSOFH: Catering to a niche...
These three things have a lot more in common than you might think and all three tend to evoke similar levels of frustration. A very real problem women face when shopping is this: no two brands define a size the same. If you usually wear a size 8 in “Brand X” you might actually wear a size 10 or 6 in “Brand Y”, depending on how the brand decided to define its sizing. Customers, women in this case, cannot count on consistency in sizes across brands. This makes shopping annoying because every time you change brands you’re never...
Cloud computing management functionality and standards are right now laser-focused on virtual machines, and most APIs include the ability to stop,start,launch,etc…at that level of the infrastructure. This is because the application is still insulated by its virtualized environment. The “depth” of management and standards efforts today stops at the hard shell of the virtualization layer and leaves the soft, chewy application center alone. This means nothing is really all that different for developers. But it could, and some might argue should, be different. The development of a web-application for a cloud computing environment today is really...
With just a few clicks you, too, can create a cloud computing environment. But if you’re like a lot of organizations, you may not know what to do with it after that. The latest version of Ubuntu Server (9.10) includes the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), which is actually powered by Eucalyptus. The ability to deploy a “cloud” on any server running Ubuntu is really quite amazing, especially given the compatibility of Eucalyptus with Amazon and the plethora of application images available for nearly immediate deployment. It supports both a public and private option, and a hybrid model, and...
“Where are you storing your data these days,” he asked casually after trying to come up with a better opening line but failing. “Ah, dahhling,” she drawled while gesturing in no particular direction with an almost deprecating wave of her hand. “The Cloud, where else?” Thanks to the nearly constant misapplication of the phrase “The Cloud” and the lack of agreement on a clear definition from technical quarters I must announce that “The Cloud” is no longer a synonym for “Cloud Computing”. It can’t be. Do not be misled into trying, it will only cause you...
Mobile devices may still be somewhat awkward in terms of supporting rich, web-based applications but they are leaps and bounds ahead of most infrastructure in their ability to figure out where you are. GeoLocation technologies used to be used by load balancing solutions to address poor application performance across high-latency connections such as intercontinental and satellite links. While this is still an important variable in assuring application performance, especially for very large sites, GeoLocation is increasingly used to comply with legal restrictions on broadcasting, export of data and applications, and to provide more relevant information to users than...
A lack of ability in the cloud to distinguish illegitimate from legitimate requests could lead to unanticipated costs in the wake of an attack. How do you put a price on uptime and more importantly, who should pay for it? A “Perfect Cloud”, in my opinion, would be one in which the cloud provider’s infrastructure intelligently manages availability and performance such that when it’s necessary new instances of an application are launched to ensure meeting the customer’s defined performance and availability thresholds. You know, on-demand scalability that requires no manual intervention. It just “happens” the way it should....
Spectacular “cloud” failures over the past few weeks have raised the hue and cry for portability and interoperability across clouds for data.The problem is that the cry is based on the false assumption that a “cloud service” is the same as an “application service.” Apparently Microsoft felt Google and Amazon were getting too much attention with their recent outages and decided to join the game. The absolute loss of data for thousands lots and lots of T-Mobile Sidekick users is regrettable and yes someone needs to address such issues but that someone is not a standards group or...
When an admin brags they can do some task with their eyes closed there may be hidden process inefficiencies that orchestration can uncover. But the orchestration in a public cloud is effectively done for you, with little opportunity to design based on your organization’s operational processes. Orchestration in a private cloud, however, is all up to you. I was doing the laundry a few weeks ago, folding the clothes before I took them upstairs and hung them up when I realized just what I was doing. What I had been doing for, well, a very long time...
A question I often hear is “Why don’t you just move load balancing/application delivery into a virtual appliance model?” My answer is almost always “That’s the wrong question.” The question that should be asked is “What are the potential impacts to the infrastructure and application?” Because the whole point of deploying an application delivery solution – virtual appliance or hardware – is about improving some facet of the infrastructure in order to better deliver your applications. So in order to determine whether using a virtual appliance is a good idea or not you have to ask what the impacts might...
Malicious links served up in a browser are OS agnostic. They don’t care about the OS because the target is people, not technology. In response to the problem of links and trust put forth in a recent post a reader replies that the answer to “evil links” is simply to run Linux instead of Windows. the very best solution is to run something other than windows, and with ubuntu at its current state of maturity (and free-ness), why wouldn't you? I won’t disagree with the assessment of Ubuntu and its current...
Operational efficiency in the cloud comes in part from automation and orchestration as well as from the outsourcing of management and maintenance of the hardware. While you can’t achieve the latter without cloud or hosting externally, you can realize a lot of the same efficiencies in a traditional architecture just by leveraging existing collaborative capabilities of infrastructure 2.0. Glenn Gruber of Software Industry Insights in “Who’ll Be the First to Offer Cash for Infrastructure” (which is a great read in general) says: And for those who are thinking about evaluating a private cloud...
If one of the drivers for moving to cloud-based applications is reducing costs, you should think twice about the placement of application security solutions. There’s almost no way to avoid an argument on this subject so I won’t tiptoe around it: web application security in the cloud is better accomplished at the edge, with a web application firewall or similar solution, than it is inside the cloud in the application. This is true regardless of whether the cloud model is public or private; basically if you’re being charged on a per-usage basis then placement of web application security...
Infrastructure 2.0 requires collaboration. Collaboration requires the ability to communicate. The ability to communicate requires integration. But how that integration will happen may shape the future of infrastructure and network architecture. There is a growing recognition of the basic problems associated with the rapid rate of change inherent in on-demand architectures (cloud) and the complexity that comes from virtualized data centers. Challenges such as IP address and application management, visibility, and last but not least, integration. Yes, that most dreaded of all technology concepts has finally come to the network. The...
Isolation of resources in “the cloud” is moving providers toward hosted data centers and away from shared resource computing. Do we need to go back to the future and re-examine mainframe computing as a better model for isolated applications capable of sharing resources? James Urquhart in “Enterprise cloud computing coming of age” gives a nice summary of several “private” cloud offerings; that is, isolated and dedicated resources contracted out to enterprises for a fee. James ends his somewhat prosaic discussion of these offerings with a note that this “evolution” is just the beginning of a long process. ...
Commoditized from solution to feature, from feature to function, load balancing is no longer a solution but rather a function of more advanced solutions that’s still an integral component for highly-available, fault-tolerant applications. Unashamed Parody of Monty Python and the Holy Grail Load balancers: I'm not dead. The Market: 'Ere, it says it’s not dead. Analysts: Yes it is. Load balancers: I'm not. The Market: It isn't. Analysts: Well, it will be soon,...
AJAX enables the use of network-side scripting enabled application delivery solutions to offload client-side functionality and improve capacity and performance of dynamic (Web 2.0/AJAX) applications. In the last couple of weeks I’ve embarked on a home project to rewrite – from scratch – a couple of web applications that Don and I and friends use on a regular basis. Consider it a very restricted (in terms of users) social networking application, because that’s basically what it is. I made heavy use of AJAX for one component in the past version but have been really leveraging it a lot more...
How Infrastructure 2.0 might leverage publish-subscribe technology like PubSubHubub to enable portability of applications across clouds and data centers
Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. One of the topics surrounding cloud computing that continues to rear its ugly head is the problem of portability across clouds. Avoiding vendor lock-in has been problematic since the day the first line of proprietary code was written and cloud computing does nothing to address this. If anything, cloud makes this worse because one of its premises is that users (that’s you, IT staff) need not...
Sharing is core to a successful cloud implementation but not something every organization does well. How do you encourage business stakeholders to play well with others? In most definitions of “cloud computing” there lies a central, key component: shared resources. It is the sharing of resources, in fact, through which many of the benefits of reduced operating expenses are supposed to be achieved. It is the sharing of resources – or perceived inability to share resources – that confounds some folks when discussing private cloud, although there are several ways in which sharing of resources can...
A load balancing algorithm can make or break your application’s performance and availability It is a (wrong) belief that “users” of cloud computing and before that “users” of corporate data center infrastructure didn’t need to understand any of that infrastructure. Caution: proceed with infrastructure ignorance at the (very real) risk of your application’s performance and availability. Think I’m kidding? Stefan’s SOA & Enterprise Architecture Blog has a detailed and very explanatory post on Load Balancing Strategies for SOA Infrastructures that may change your mind. This post grew, apparently, out of some (perceived) bad behavior on...
Leveraging Java EE and dynamic infrastructure to enable a shared resource, on-demand scalable infrastructure – without server virtualization Many pundits and experts allude to architectures that are cloud-like in their ability to provide on-demand scalability but do not – I repeat do not – rely on virtualization, i.e. virtual machines. But rarely – if ever – is this possibility described. So everyone says it can be done, but no one wants to tell you how. Maybe that’s because it appears, on the surface, to not be cloud. And perhaps there’s truth to that appearance. It is more...
Why would miscreants bother with other routes when they can go straight to the source? People concerned with security of the cloud are generally worried about illegitimate access of the applications and data they may deploy in the cloud. That’s a valid concern given the needs of certain vertical industries to comply with privacy-focused regulations like HIPAA and PCI DSS. It’s an extremely valid concern given research and studies showing just how vulnerable most web sites and applications are. Hint: it’s more than you probably think it is, and it’s likely your application is vulnerable...
F5 and VMware demonstrate live migration of a virtualized application across clouds without downtime or user disruption Cloud is reaching the peak of possibilities and that (often) means just more paper solutions. You know the ones; the ones that exist only on paper (or in blogs as the case may be). Those paper solutions need to exist because the ideas need to come first either out of necessity, i.e. to solve a specific problem, or out of a desire to find new ways to leverage emerging technology, like virtualization. But still, you’d like to see some of these...
How to leverage a “private virtual cloud” such as Amazon VPC with your own dynamic infrastructure A couple of blog posts on Amazon’s recent announcement of its VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) have made much of the fact that the resources available within Amazon’s cloud via VPC aren’t public. These same commentaries seem to believe that this makes the resources not very valuable. One author called it a “terrible” implementation because “users can’t expose clients to the internet and can’t assign them IP addresses.” I understand how some might reach that conclusion if they...
DNS wasn’t meant to handle hybrid cloud architectures and on-demand routing When you start distributing services (workloads, applications) across multiple locations, a la cloud balancing, and those locations may change on a frequent basis you begin to run into problems with finding those services and scaling the rate of change effectively. DNS was designed to resolve host names, but never expected that the same host name might resolve to one of two, three, or four IP addresses all within the span of five minutes. If we want to support a rapid rate of change, we’d...
Cloud changes how we deliver applications but we’re still delivering applications With all the hype around cloud it’s easy to get caught up in deployment models and architectures and how much money it is/is not going to save us and, of course, with the cool factor that always surrounds such innovation. But when we get our heads too far up in the clouds we forget what we’re really doing: delivering applications. Whether it’s thin-client, fat-client, browser-based, client/server, three-tier, n-tier, traditional, .NET, Java EE, or cloud we are still all focused on the same goal: deliver an application. ...
Secure, optimized tunnels to a remote site, e.g. the cloud. Haven’t we been here before? In the continuing discussion around Business Intelligence in the cloud comes a more better (yes I did, in fact, say that) discussion of the reasons why you’d want to put BI in the cloud and, appropriately, some of the challenges. As previously mentioned, BI data sets are, as a rule, huge. Big. Bigger than big. Ginormous, even. One of the considerations, then, if you’re going to leverage a cloud-based business intelligence offering – or any offering in which very, very large data sets/files...
Cloud providers know the secret to a successful cloud computing implementation is integration between the infrastructure and virtualization Ever notice that cloud providers are v e r y reluctant to reveal on what foundation their cloud computing architectures are laid? Most providers don’t want to share their “secret sauce” because, well, then everyone else could get into the game as well. While it is certainly true that the infrastructure – and specifically the application delivery infrastructure – you choose to lay the foundation for a cloud computing architecture can affect your ability to succeed and innovate...
The real power behind cloud is processes, and those don’t come out of a box VMworld, in case you’ve been out of touch, is approaching fairly quickly. As with any trade show/conference there’s likely to be a lot of announcements about this and that and oh, of course, that too. What is interesting about cloud computing and virtualization is that most of the really exciting announcements are not going to be about new products or new features. You heard me, they aren’t going to be about new products or features. The foundations for cloud...
Survey says IT still doesn’t agree on the definition of cloud – private or public – but everybody is doing it Every organization with a stake in cloud computing’s predicted billions of dollar market is interested in understanding what it is IT wants – and needs – for cloud. The only way to find out, in most cases, is to ask. So ask we did. We asked 250 IT managers, network architects and cloud service providers not only about how they define cloud computing, but how widespread adoption of the disparate models of cloud really...
You’re going to need a dynamic infrastructure lest you effectively negate the gains achieved by higher VM densities In the continuing saga of “do more with less” comes a new phrase that’s being tossed around: VM density. For example, VMware puts forth the notion that the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of virtualization technology must consider VM density, saying, “Density matters in a many-to-one relationship.” VMware illustrates this concept in the context of TCO, but in general an increasing number of solutions are beginning to tout not only the benefits of higher VM density, but of their solutions ability...
Just what is the bandwidth of a van full of hard drives traveling 300 miles at a speed of 65 mph? After a short Twitter discussion based on this post which suggested Ye Olde Sneakernet is the best way to transfer large data sets from the enterprise to the cloud (which is, unfortunately, not as uncommon a suggestion from cloud providers as you might think) I was dared to compute the actual bandwidth of said sneakernet (probably because I said I had the urge to do just that, but is that really important? I didn’t think so.) ...
Idle resources will always need to exist, especially in a cloud architecture With IT focused on efficiency – for reduction in operating expenses and in the interests of creating a greener computing center – there’s a danger that we’ll attempt to achieve 100% efficiency. You know, the data center in which no compute resources are wasted; all are applied toward performing some task – whether administrative, revenue generating, development cycles, or business-related – and no machine is allowed to sit around idle. Because, after all, idleness is the devil’s playground, isn’t it? But before...
Amazon EC2 and S3 are no more or less safe than they were last week despite hype around PCI compliance admission The recent admission/announcement that “Amazon EC2 is not PCI compliant” (this is not exactly true, but we’ll get to that later) has set off a rush of blogs, articles, and tweets that say, in effect, EC2 is no longer “safe”. But a lack of compliance does not make Amazon any more less safe than achieving PCI compliance makes a site more safe. Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet, I submit as proof the...
I was recording a podcast last week on the subject of cloud with an emphasis on security and of course we talked in general about cloud and definitions. During the discussion the subject of “private cloud” computing was raised and one of the participants asked a very good question: Some of the core benefits of cloud computing come from shared resources. In a private cloud, where does the sharing of resources come from? I had to stop and think about that one for a second, because it’s not something I’ve really thought about before. But it was...
Without processes the cloud is not a cloud So you’ve virtualized your application infrastructure using VMware or Microsoft or the “virtualization solution de jour.” You probably also virtualized the application access via an application delivery solution so you can provide scalability on-demand. You might have even virtualized your storage to make it more efficient. Basically, you’re all ready to go and operators are standing by … And therein lies the problem: operators are standing by. The on-demand piece of your little private cloud is almost entirely managed by human beings, which means...
Simultaneously one of the best use-cases for cloud as well as the worst. What’s IT to do? David Linthicum, SOA and cloud pundit and all-around interesting technology guy, recently pointed out a short post on business intelligence (BI) vendors joining forces with the cloud to offer cloud-based BI services. Four open-source and proprietary vendors on Wednesday announced a new partnership resulting in a cloud-based BI (business intelligence) stack. Jaspersoft and Talend will respectively lend their open-source BI and data-integration technologies to the integrated offering, which also employs Vertica's analytic database...
Why Carr’s analogy doesn’t describe today’s cloud environments and how SOA can get us closer to what he describes Back when cloud first starting drifting in to obscure the computing landscape there were a lot of parallels drawn between it and grid, and a lot of analogies used to explain the concept behind it. Cloud computing is most often analogized using Nicolas Carr’s analogy of the cloud as an electrical grid; that’s always bothered me at almost a visceral level. But I could never articulate why well enough and a lot of smart people told me that if I...
This isn’t all or nothing – focus on the right cloud model for each application and not the entire data center There’s a lot of discussion about why you should choose one cloud computing model over another and all of them miss the point entirely. This isn’t a mutually exclusive deal; it doesn’t have to be just one model chosen. In fact it shouldn’t be. Data centers aren’t comprised of single types of applications. There’s custom applications, deployed sometimes on well-known packaged platforms and in other cases on open source or lesser known platforms. There’s packaged...
The concept of a server needs to go the way of the dodo One of the reasons I enjoy Twitter is that quite frequently – if you’re following the right people – you’ll see a tweet that is absolutely profound despite its simplicity and the constraints placed upon the author. Recently we were having a mini-discussion on Twitter regarding the definition of availability that elicited just such a golden nugget from botchagalupe: “Apps designed for a cloud should remove the ‘server’ concept.” First, I really like the use of the article “a” in...
Context, it’s always about context (or the lack thereof) I received a call recently that most people have probably received: our banking institution just wanted to verify that yes, that was Don or I making purchases at midnight in Wisconsin and then later in Indiana and yet again that afternoon in Ohio. That’s a good thing, I’m sure, as they’re just trying to watch our back. But later in the day I tried to make a purchase and was, horror of horrors, denied. The bank, when called, seemed matter-of-fact about the situation. The security flag hadn’t been...
Availability means more than the dread “d” word The focus on making servers unhackable to prevent service disruption (that’s such a politic way of saying the dread “d” word – downtime) is admirable but exposes the tendency of technical folks to go down rat holes when discussing application delivery challenges and specifically the challenge of assuring availability of applications and services. What generally seems to happen when we start talking about availability in the cloud is that we go down the rat hole of talking specifically about the cloud and not applications deployed...
No, that isn’t a homophonic mistake. Dan directed my attention to an interesting article recently, “Are 3-tier web architecture models too rigid?” in which the author postulates that “maybe it is time to finally break out of the old 3-tier web architecture box and retire the concept…” In addition to a great mention of F5 and an “application delivery tier” in web architecture models (the concept of which deserves its very own blog post), the author inadvertently, I think, brings to the fore one of the reasons SOA might have failed to dominate the world: service...
So once we have the intercloud, what are we going to do with it? Some debate is heating up, at least on Twitter, about a variety of cloud-related topics. As James Urquhart pointed out in his “Three debates that will benefit cloud computing” debate is good, because it fuels innovation and drives markets forward. One of the things that’s frustrating about new technology and concepts is that terminology often confuses the discussion. We periodically still see discussions – and debates – around the definition of cloud computing, after all, so that shouldn’t be surprising at all....
Can intercloud intelligence eliminate the impact of intercontinental latency? Ken has always posited that it would be not only kewl but highly efficient if your data center could “follow the sun.” We all know that application performance is affected – positively and negatively – by distance. So if you’re a global organization with one primary data center that means some folks are going to have to settle for poorer application performance. That pesky speed of light law absolutely must be obeyed, for now at least, and intercontinental traffic has high latency, period. So let’s introduce the...
Can the inherent abstraction of virtualization succeed where SOA did not? My first read through a post on the Cloud Front Office led me to scoff disdainfully at the re-emergence of a concept central to a successful SOA implementation: the service catalog. Oh, we called it "registry" and then "registry/repository (reg/rep)" and finally "governance" but the concept behind it was exactly the same. Take a gander at the description of a cloud service catalog apparently growing out of discussions that began at Structure 09: Last week I attended Structure 09, one of the...
The importance of stress-testing in production Everyone is still a-twitter over the problems the web experienced last week right after the news of Michael Jackson’s death. There have been numerous stories on the fact that the Internet nearly fell over itself and died under the strain of trying to support the rush of millions of users as they queried, clicked, watched video, read blogs and news reports on the subject. The Internet itself, of course, was just fine. The infrastructure comprising our electronic highway was humming along, routing packets happily here and...
The concept of an “intercloud” is floating around the tubes and starting to gather some attention. According to Greg Ness you can “Think of the intercloud as an elastic mesh of on demand processing power deployed across multiple data centers. The payoff is massive scale, efficiency and flexibility.” Basically, the intercloud is the natural evolution of global application delivery. The intercloud is about delivering applications (services) from one of many locations based on a variety of parameters that will be, one assumes, user/organization defined. Some of those parameters could be traditional ones: application availability, performance, or user-location. Others...
I was chatting with my mother a couple weeks ago about cloud (she’s a used-to-be programmer turned project manager for a Fortune 500. Don’t look at me like that, I keep telling you it runs in the family) and one of the problems she lamented about was that folks don’t seem to understand how entrenched COBOL and the mainframe is in the organization. It’s so entrenched that given the choice between a client-server application and a COBOL application that did the same thing they chose the COBOL program because it was less expensive and they had the knowledge on staff...
Whether you are aware of it or not, if you’re deploying applications in the cloud or building out your own “enterprise class” cloud, you’re going to be using load balancing. Horizontal scaling of applications is a fairly well understood process that involves (old skool) server virtualization of the network kind: making many servers (instances) look like one to the outside world. When you start adding instances to increase capacity for your application, load balancing necessarily gets involved as it’s the way in which horizontal scalability is implemented today. The fact that you may have already...
You can’t differentiate until you do something different Gartner analyst and cloud pundit Lydia Leong reminds us that without differentiation, all clouds look pretty much the same. “These are traits that it doesn’t take a genius to think of. Most are known requirements established through a decade and a half of hosting industry experience. If you want to differentiate, you need to get beyond them.” [emphasis added] She lists traits common to most cloud providers: premium equipment, VMWare-based, private VLANs, private connectivity, and co-located dedicated gear but doesn’t really get into...
Two steps forward, three steps back Every time there is a major shift in technology thought about architecture the question of how it will and should impact infrastructure arises. When SOA was the “next great thing” there was a spate of announcements regarding how infrastructure would not only support it but integrate into its ecosystem. This time it’s virtualization, and its impact on infrastructure both from a support standpoint and usage is getting a lot of mindshare. In a recent announcement around virtual network infrastructure Om Malik of GigaOm has some interesting commentary: As...
I’m heading out today for a little time off and so you’ll have to make due the rest of the week without any (new) words of wisdom from me. I know, try to pull yourself together. You’ll live, really, and I’ll be back Monday with something interesting, promise. While I’m out, you might consider checking out some of the blogs I follow myself on a regular basis. They’re always full of interesting tidbits and stories and wisdom on a variety of subjects, and if you don’t follow them yourself you might find something interesting in them. ...
An interesting thing happened on the way to testing that application from the cloud. We broke the innertubes!
Pros and Cons of Application Testing in the Cloud
A firm wanted to test their application and need 100 browser instances. In the old days it would have required 100 machines -- that would be a massive undertaking. Even with hardware virtualization, you would need 5 to 10 machines, and there would be some complex configuration issues. However, by putting it all in the cloud, they were able to sync up 100 virtual instances of the browsers and take them down over...
Balancing Cost, Performance, and Capacity in the Cloud There is a huge difference between provisioning applications to support capacity and provisioning them to support performance requirements. That as capacity increases performance decreases is one of the truisms of scalability that is likely to be one of the first axioms of cloud computing that will bite us in the proverbial rear-end while simultaneously reaching for our wallets. Alistair Croll of BitCurrent has a couple of great charts that illustrate this point perfectly. He then goes on to discuss how that affects cloud computing in “The cloud’s...
Automating components is easy. It’s automating processes that’s hard. The premise that if you don’t have an infrastructure comprised solely of Infrastructure 2.0 components then you cannot realize an automated, on-demand data center is, in fact, wrong. While the capabilities of modern hardware that come with Infrastructure 2.0 such as a standards-based API able to be leveraged by automation systems certainly makes the task all the more simple, it is not the only way that components can be automated. In fact, “legacy” infrastructure has been automated for years using other mechanisms that can certainly be incorporated into the...
Google didn’t kill HTTP. Neither did Colonel Mustard or Professor Plum. In fact, HTTP is still very much alive. Okay, folks, it’s time to stop declaring the death of protocols/technologies prematurely. Please? Especially when such proclamations are clearly not representative of reality. From ElasticVapor :: Life in the Cloud In Google's announcement what I found most fascinating was the protocol they choose for the basis of their new realtime vision. It wasn't HTTP but instead XMPP was selected as the foundation for this decentralized and interoperable vision. What this means in...
Cloud may change the definition of “business critical” applications
Google outages are rapidly becoming as passé as earthquakes to native Californians; unless it’s a really big one, no one really pays much attention. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Google’s latest “crash” (caused by some interesting routing problems, apparently) evinced an attitude of nonchalance from Stanley.
Who is Stanley? I don’t know, except that he was quite vocal about the outage and his opinion that he was “not really bothered by it.”
Google Crashes Again on Friday
Stanley Was wrote: Wednesday May 27 from around 8pm till shortly after midnight, I...
Understanding the impact of compression on server resources and application performance While doing some research on a related topic, I ran across this question and thought “that deserves an answer” because it certainly seems like a no-brainer. If you want to decrease bandwidth – which subsequently decreases response time and improves application performance – turn on compression. After all, a large portion of web site traffic is text-based: CSS, JavaScript, HTML, RSS feeds, which means it will greatly benefit from compression. Typical GZIP compression affords at least a 3:1 reduction in size, with hardware-assisted compression yielding an average...
There’s apparently been a bit of confusion over what, exactly, F5 thinks of cloud computing as an organization based on a recent blog post. I thought I’ve been fairly clear on where F5 stands in terms of cloud computing but I may be suffering what’s known as the “curse of knowledge”, which means I am so deeply entrenched in F5’s view of cloud that I forget that other people don’t have the luxury of that knowledge. So I’d like to take this opportunity to clear up any misconceptions that may be floating around and just set the record...
Greedy algorithms can result in the right solution in the end, but rarely do Don and I were having a discussion with our oldest son the other night about writing a chess program. There are myriad options for implementing the learning aspects of a chess program, but this is not a task for the timid. He ended up proposing a much simpler solution (this was just an exercise in ‘can I write it’, after all) that would have essentially used a very greedy algorithm; one that made a decision regarding the computer’s next move based on current state of...
The consensus seems to be, at least from the myriad surveys, studies, and research, that cloud as a model is the right answer, it’s just the location that’s problematic for most organizations. Organizations aren’t ignoring reality; they know there are real benefits associated with cloud computing. But they aren’t yet – and may never be – willing to give up control. And there are good reasons to maintain that control, from security to accountability to agility. But the “people” still want the benefits of cloud, so the question is: how do we put...
If they aren’t now then Infrastructure 2.0 may force them in that direction - and vice versa. My brother (yes, it does run in the family) has a degree in computer science which, by most definitions, makes him a developer. That’s the focus of most computer science focused degree programs, much to the chagrin of the myriad other IT-focused specialties like networking, security, and operations. Interestingly enough, he worked his way through college as a sysadmin and his first job out of college was as a sysadmin. And now he’s doing a little of...
Everyone who is involved in networking, application networking, cloud computing, and virtualization knows about and is probably planning some kind of presence at Interop. It is “the” event for a variety of inter-related industries, all revolving around network-something. For six years I attended Interop, but as a member of the press. This time, I’m on the “other side” with a vendor, and the view is very different. At a minimum, there’s a lot more planning that goes into exhibiting at such an event. There’s booth layouts to review and decisions on what kind of information...
Hint: It doesn’t actually have much to do with technology or products In case you hadn’t heard, a startup called Panda Security has introduced a cloud-based anti-virus offering. This set off a rift of articles and blogs discussing the solution itself and what it means and some who questioned whether ‘anti-virus’ even meant ‘security’ in the first place. But I’m not interested in that discussion except to say that folks need to be more careful about distinguish “cloud security” from “cloud-based security”. The former is about securing the cloud and its infrastructure, the latter about services hosted...
How to defeat the ancient Jedi mind trick known as HTTP Request Smuggling. HTTP Request Smuggling (HRS) is not a new technique; it's been around since 2005. It takes advantage of architectures where one or more intermediaries (proxies) are deployed between the client and the server. HRS is can be used to poison web-caches and bypass security solutions such as web application firewalls as well as for the delivery of malicious payloads such as worms, viruses, and those used to exploit known vulnerabilities in web and application servers. The good news is that to exploit HRS,...
Automation isn’t some special brand of soup and there’s no “automation nazi” who can deny access to its benefits. The recent McKinsey report on cloud computing has pundits everywhere choking on their donuts and scrambling to dispute the report’s findings, which essentially end up saying “cloud ain’t cheaper.” I’m not going to rehash the arguments. I’m not going to analyze the report. But I am going to dig into a few comments on the report by Thorsten at RightScale who started off by saying: “Its claim that cloud computing (in the...
What is this application delivery thing that everyone keeps telling me I need? Isn’t that just the latest marketing term for load balancing? A recently released Forrester report concludes that “firms must develop and integrated strategy for application delivery.” We don’t disagree with that, or with the Gartner report claiming that “Load Balancing is Dead, Time to Focus on Application Delivery.” Application delivery is the next step in the logical evolutionary path from the tactical solution of load balancing to a comprehensive application infrastructure strategy. Forrester’s research indicates that despite the fact that application...
Finding new life for SOA in the cloud We’ve been having quite a few discussions with analysts over the past few months on the subject of “cloud”. The interesting thing about these discussions is the vast array of points of view from which those analysts are viewing “cloud”. Some are focused on the network aspects, others on pricing/differentiation, and some are even very focused on what “cloud” means to applications – and the organizations that will, allegedly, take advantage of the cloud as a means of application deployment. One such analyst is Daryl Plummer of Gartner. Daryl...
Long URLs and variable names increase transfer size which wastes bandwidth and money
o3 magazine has a great article on the impact of long URLs on bandwidth; specifically on how much bandwidth is wasted by excessively long URLs and variable names within HTML, JavaScript, and CSS selectors.
What the author does not mention, and he really should, is that wasting bandwidth can translate into wasted dollars, as well. This is particularly true of applications that might be hosted in a cloud environment, as well as those delivered across WAN links provisioned with bursting capabilities above limits for which organizations are...
I admit it. I’m a load / performance testing junkie. During my years with Network Computing I burned through any number of solutions designed to throw more traffic at products than money Congress is throwing at failed banks these days. And I do mean burned, as the last time I was in the lab there were no less than three non-functioning Spirent Avalanche systems that had given up the ghost after being forced to their absolute limits over years of use and abuse.
When I received a note telling me about LoadImpact.com, a load testing as a service site, naturally...
One of the oft cited reasons in surveys that enterprises aren’t flocking to the cloud like lemmings off a cliff is “lack of control”. Problem is that articles and pundits quoting this reason never really define what that means. After all, cloud providers appear to be cognizant of the need for users (IT) to be able to define thresholds, reserve instances, deploy a variety of “infrastructure”, and manage their cloud deployment themselves. The lack of control, however, is at least partially about control over the infrastructure itself and, perhaps, complicated by the shallow definition of “infrastructure” by cloud...
ArsTechnica has an interesting little article on what Windows Azure is and is not. During the course of discussion with Steven Martin, Microsoft's senior director of Developer Platform Product Management, a fascinating – or disturbing in my opinion – statement was made: There is a distinction between the hosting world and the cloud world that Martin wanted to underline. Whereas hosting means simply the purchase of space under certain conditions (as opposed to buying the actual hardware), the cloud completely hides all issues of clustering and/or load balancing, and it offers an entirely virtualized...
What’s driving your organizational interest in cloud? Is it apathy or is it architecture? The whole debate surrounding the existence, or non-existence as it were, of “private” clouds seems to revolve around the definition of cloud. Yes, we’re right back at the beginning, Vizzini. The problem is that lots of folks want to focus in on the “apathy” inherent in cloud rather than the “architecture”. Yes, apathy. After all, that’s what we’re saying when we include as a key component of the definition of cloud “you don’t have to care about the infrastructure.” For example, Andrew...
Decisions about routing at every layer require context A friend forwarded a blog post to me last week mainly because it contained a reference to F5, but upon reading it (a couple of times) I realized that this particular post contained some very interesting information that needed to be examined further. The details of the problems being experienced by the poster (which revolve around a globally load-balanced site that was for some reason not being distributed very equally) point to an interesting conundrum: just how much control over site decisions should a client have? Given the...
There is no evidence, no research, no surveys that indicate the cloud is, or ever will be, ready to completely outsource an organization’s data center. There’s no reason to even believe that’s the goal of cloud providers, though it might seem a logical conclusion. So making outrageous claims about the capabilities of the cloud, and the relevance of the data center, does no one any good. What’s got me so riled up? This particular statement from a prediction for 2009 from Appirio: But all this talk about “private clouds” is a distraction from...
According to the definition of cloud computing used by Avanade for a recently released and often cited study on the use of cloud computing, I could claim to be a cloud computing provider. And so could you. Basically, so could just about everyone who happens to run web-based applications accessed over the Internet. From the summary of the report: In the midst of widespread economic turmoil, this global survey of C-level executives and IT decision-makers shows a clear, collective mandate: use technology to cut the cost of doing business. ...
Owning the stack is important to security, but it’s also integral to a lot of other application delivery functions. And in some cases, it’s downright necessary. Hoff rants with his usual finesse in a recent posting with which I could not agree more. Not only does he point out the wrongness of equating SaaS with “The Cloud”, but points out the importance of “owning the stack” to security. Those that have control/ownership over the entire stack naturally have the opportunity for much tighter control over the "security" of their offerings. Why? because they...
Cloud computing and virtualization promises to revolutionize the architectural principles of the data center. Shared resources enable efficiency, but ultimately the dynamism required to achieve such gains in efficiency will cause chaos in a variety of other functions throughout IT. The CIO is in for a rocky road unless a broader set of IT management vendors pave the way for a smooth ride. The (In)accuracy of Forecasting in a Dynamic Environment Organizations rely on the ability to forecast project costs and anticipated ROI in order to prioritize and set budgets for coming years. Many IT project management...
If you’re looking at standardization and interoperability efforts only as they relate to providers or end-users then you’re not thinking long term nor are you really considering the potential of cloud computing and virtualization to revolutionize data center architectures. In a nutshell, if you equate “cloud” with “providers like Amazon and Google” then you don’t really get the big picture. While the ultimate goal of cloud specifications and standards is to enable interoperability and ease of migration for the end-user, approaching the creation of such standards from the point of view of the end-user will result in a...
The focus of cloud and virtualization discussions today revolve primarily around hypervisors, virtual machines, automation, network and application network infrastructure; on the dynamic infrastructure necessary to enable a truly dynamic data center. In all the hype we’ve lost sight of the impact these changes will have on other critical IT systems such as network systems management (NSM) and application performance management (APM). You know their names: IBM, CA, Compuware, BMC, HP. There are likely one or more of their systems monitoring and managing applications and systems in your data center right now. They provide alerts, notifications,...
Rich Miller, in response to some questions I maintain on meta-data ownership and interoperability with regards to the CCIF's efforts in defining a cloud interoperability specification, had some questions of his own: The part I'm itching to ask her about ... or start a more open conversation: the possibility of "a specification regarding application network delivery metadata" which, if properly (??) abstracted and generic, could "allow the meta-data policies to be transported and applied across different cloud implementations while preserving the specific details of implementation within the cloud computing infrastructure." Whoa!! Tall order, isn't it? ...
While the vast majority of folks are still debating what is or is not "cloud computing", there are already groups trying to get ahead of the curve by focusing on broader issues such as interoperability and portability. Indeed, by addressing the potential pitfalls associated with portability across cloud implements now rather than later, it is hoped that there won't be as many problems when it does finally become an issue. There is a very real danger, however, that cloud interoperability and portability specifications will fail to address the very real need to include all the relevant application and...
Open APIs are a matter of much discussion these days in the realm of cloud computing. Just take a peek at the discussion that occurred via Twitter during Cloud Connect. Many folks were not shy in putting forth the notion that cloud portability and interoperability can only be achieved through accepted "cloud" standards. Integration standards, for the cloud, if you will. The fear is that any emerging standards will focus only the portability of the application or virtual container environment. They are likely to ignore the fact that no application is an island, and that the application delivery...
After talking about data integration being the Achilles heel of cloud computing I had a chat with Informatica, who is not only providing a solution for data integration for the cloud, but is leveraging the cloud to do it. While we at F5 are focused on tearing down the silos that exist in IT to support the delivery and management of applications both internal and external (SaaS, cloud), Informatica is looking to tear down the silos in the cloud that currently exist as Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. Integration, always a painful subject, has become...
When SOA was the hot topic of the day (not that long ago) everyone was pumped up about the ability finally align IT with the business. Reusability, agility, and risk mitigation were benefits that would enable the business itself to be more agile and react dynamically to the constant maelstrom that is "the market". But only half of IT saw those benefits; the application half. Even though pundits tried to remind folks that the "A" in SOA stood for "architecture", and that it necessarily included more than just applications, still the primary beneficiary of SOA has been applications...
How the cloud acts and is used is more important than where it physically resides Cloud computing and SOA suffer from the same lack of prescriptive architectures. They are defined by how they act rather than what they are, or from what they are composed. They are, in a way, existential technology that cannot be confined to a simple architectural diagram but require instead a set of properties or ways of acting in order to be recognized. To over simplify and paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre's concepts of existentialism, we define ourselves (mankind) through our actions. To apply this to...
