integration
There are 106 entries for the tag integration
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...
Examining architectures on which hybrid clouds are based… IT professionals, in general, appear to consider themselves well along the path toward IT as a Service with a significant plurality of them engaged in implementing many of the building blocks necessary to support the effort. IaaS, PaaS, and hybrid cloud computing models are essential for IT to realize an environment in which (manageable) IT as a Service can become reality. That IT professionals –65% of them to be exact – note their organization is in-progress or already completed with a hybrid cloud implementation is telling, as it indicates a...
Examining architectures on which hybrid clouds are based… IT professionals, in general, appear to consider themselves well along the path toward IT as a Service with a significant plurality of them engaged in implementing many of the building blocks necessary to support the effort. IaaS, PaaS, and hybrid cloud computing models are essential for IT to realize an environment in which (manageable) IT as a Service can become reality. That IT professionals –65% of them to be exact – note their organization is in-progress or already completed with a hybrid cloud implementation is telling, as...
Application delivery infrastructure can be a valuable partner in architecting solutions …. AJAX and JSON have changed the way in which we architect applications, especially with respect to their ascendancy to rule the realm of integration, i.e. the API. Policies are generally focused on the URI, which has effectively become the exposed interface to any given application function. It’s REST-ful, it’s service-oriented, and it works well. Because we’ve taken to leveraging the URI as a basic building block, as the entry-point into an application, it affords the opportunity to optimize architectures and make more efficient the...
The secret to live migration isn’t just a fat, fast pipe – it’s a dynamic infrastructure Very early on in the cloud computing hype cycle we posited about different use cases for the “cloud”. One that remains intriguing and increasingly possible thanks to a better understanding of the challenges associated with the process is cloud bursting. The first time I wrote about cloud bursting and detailed the high-level process the inevitable question that remained was, “Well, sure, but how did the application get into the cloud in the first place?” Back then there was no...
#v11 A robust and diverse set of management tools enabling a variety of infrastructure integration options is essential to architecting a dynamic data center In the continuing quest for a more dynamic data center, infrastructure integration must necessarily take center stage. While virtualization has enabled fluidity of server infrastructure, it has not done so for the network and may never be wholly suitable for the task for a variety of reasons. But the agility resulting from virtualization, the ability to manage resources on-demand, must be incorporated into the network infrastructure in order to scale...
When you get down to the architectures involving cloud – whether on or off-premise or hybrid – it’s really all about integrating infrastructure. It remains to be seen if network and operations are better off never using the word “integration” given the nearly violent negative reasons one sees in the development and architecture sides of IT to the word. Integration, even after the introduction of SOA and the nearly messianic view of the role of the enterprise service bus (ESB) in saving us from the horrors of traditional enterprise application integration (EAI), remains problematic for IT. Standards weren’t,...
#IPv6 Integration with partners, suppliers and cloud providers will make migration to IPv6 even more challenging than we might think… My father was in the construction business most of the time I was growing up. He used to joke with us when we were small that there was a single nail in every house that – if removed – would bring down the entire building. Now that’s not true in construction, of course, but when the analogy is applied to IPv6 it may be more true than we’d like to think, especially when that nail is named...
Five years ago the OpenAjax Alliance was founded with the intention of providing interoperability between what was quickly becoming a morass of AJAX-based libraries and APIs. Where is it today, and why has it failed to achieve more prominence? I stumbled recently over a nearly five year old article I wrote in 2006 for Network Computing on the OpenAjax initiative. Remember, AJAX and Web 2.0 were just coming of age then, and mentions of Web 2.0 or AJAX were much like that of “cloud” today. You couldn’t turn around without hearing someone promoting their solution by associating with...
The JSON Activity Stream specification could allow the (other and oh so soon forgotten side of) consumerization of IT to make its way into the data center. Remember when I posited that the Next-Generation Management of Data Centers Should be Modeled on Social Networking and introduced the concept of “Infrabook” – a somewhat silly-but-serious-at-the-time idea that infrastructure should get “social”? The recent publication of JSON Activity Streams – in addition to being very exciting from an infrastructure architecture perspective – may be exactly what is needed to bring this concept to life. ...
Tablets, smart phones and emerging mobile devices with instant access to applications are impacting the way in which IT provides services and developers architect applications.
When pundits talk about the consumerization of IT they’re mostly referring to the ability of IT consumers, i.e. application developers and business stakeholders, to provision and manage, on demand, certain IT resources, most usually that of applications. There’s no doubt that the task of provisioning the hardware and software resources for an application is not only tedious but time-consuming and that it can easily – using virtualization and cloud computing technologies – be enabled...
The economy of scale realized in enterprise cloud computing deployments is as much (if not more) about process as it is products. HP Cloud Maps simplify the former by automating the latter. When the notion of “private” or “enterprise” cloud computing first appeared, it was dismissed as being a non-viable model due to the fact that the economy of scale necessary to realize the true benefits were simply not present in the data center. What was ignored in those arguments was that the economy of scale desired by enterprises large and small was not necessarily...
An interesting look at how automation combined with cloud computing resource brokering could go very, very wrong Automation is not a new concept. People – regular old people – have been using it for years for tasks that require specific timing or reaction to other actions, like bidding on eBay or other auction-focused sites. The general concept is pretty simple as it’s just an event-driven system that automatically performs an action when the specified trigger occurs. Usually, at least when money is concerned, there’s an upper limit. The action can’t be completed if the resulting...
It’s not just cloud computing and virtualization that introduce volatility into the data center. The natural state of cloud computing is one of constant change. Applications and services and users interacting in ways that constantly change the landscape of the data center. But it isn’t just the volatility of cloud computing and virtualization that makes traditional data center architectures brittle and more apt to fail. It’s the constant barrage of users, devices, and locations against a static data center configuration that makes a traditional architecture fragile and inefficient. Pressures are mounting...
IT as a Service requires commoditization. Commoditization implies standardization. The network needs standardization, and that’s only going to happen via a common API and semantic model. Randy Bias of Cloudscaling apparently set off a firestorm at Cloud Connect 2011, stating with typical Randy forthrightness: “API's don't matter.” It’s not something we haven’t heard before. In fact, it’s not something I haven’t said myself, in a way. Randy wasn’t really questioning the need for APIs, that’s a given. What he was getting at was to question the need for standardization of APIs. Within IT,...
Managing the other kind of performance in a data center requires the ability to analyze a whole lotta data. Big operational data. “Big data” right now is nearly as hyped as cloud computing . The vast amounts of data collected that need to be shared, integrated, replicated, backed up, and managed is growing at a phenomenal rate. But when folks talk about “big data” they’re focused primarily on application data, on user-generated data, on business data. They are not generally concerned with the other “big data” that threatens to overwhelm data center operations on a daily...
Accelerating protocols via optimization is actually very different from accelerating the transfer of data. It is often the case that we, as an industry, use the terms “optimization” and “acceleration” interchangeably. Consider that solutions designed to improve the transfer of data across a WAN can be called WAN Optimization as easily as it is known as WAN Acceleration. Interestingly enough, solutions that make web applications specifically go “faster” were always termed Web Acceleration and never Web Optimization. The difference lies underneath, in what each focuses upon: optimization is almost always related to protocol efficiency and...
It’s called a feedback loop, not a feedback black hole. One of the key components of a successful architecture designed to mitigate operational risk is the ability to measure, monitor and make decisions based on collected “management” data. Whether it’s simple load balancing decisions based on availability of an application or more complex global application delivery traffic steering that factors in location, performance, availability and business requirements, neither can be successful unless the components making decisions have the right information upon which to take action. Monitoring and management is likely one of the least sought after...
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...
Aristotle’s famous four questions can be applied to infrastructure integration as a means to determine whether an API or SDK is the right tool for the job. While bouncing back and forth last week with Patrick Debois on the role of devops , vendors and infrastructure integration he left a comment on the blog post that started the discussion that included the following assertion: On a side note: vendors should treat their API's as first class citizens. Too often (and i personally feel iControl too) API's expose a thinking model based upon the...
Focusing on form factor over function is as shallow and misguided as focusing on beauty over brains.
The saying goes that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I suppose then that it only makes sense that if the only tool you have for dealing with the rapid dynamism of today’s architectural models is virtualization that everything looks like a virtual image. Virtualization is but one way of implementing a dynamic infrastructure capable of the rapid provisioning and configuration gyrations needed to address the fluidity of the “perimeter” of the network today.
Dynamic is not...
No one knows that better than a service provider. Remember when the iPhone launched? Remember the complaints about the device not maintaining calls well? Was it really the hardware? Or was it the service provider network, overwhelmed by not just the call volume but millions of hyper-customers experimenting with their new toy? Look – a video! Look a video and a call. Hey, I’m on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and streaming audio at the same time I’m making a call! How awesome is that? Meanwhile, there’s an entire army of operators at...
Like candy bars, it’s just a lot less messier than the alternative. Caramel. Chocolate nougat. Coconut. No matter what liquid, flowing, tasty goodness is hidden inside a chocolate bar, without the chocolate shell to hold it we’d be in whole a lot of trouble because your mom would so be on you for that mess, let me tell you. Every food-stuff that is liquid or gooey or both is encased in some sort of shell; even the tasty Swiss cheese and prosciutto hidden inside chicken cordon bleu is wrapped...
Automation implies integration. Integration implies access. Access requires authentication and authorization. That’s where things start to get interesting…
Discussions typically associated with application integration – particularly when integrating applications that are deployed off-premise – are going to happen in the infrastructure realm. It’s just a matter of time. That’s because many of the same challenges the world of enterprise application integration (EAI) has already suffered through (and is still suffering, right now, please send them a sympathy card) will rear up and meet the world of enterprise infrastructure integration head on (we’ll send you a sympathy card, as well)
I’m...
You may have heard the term “full-proxy architecture” or “dual stacks” thrown around in the context of infrastructure; here’s why that distinction is important. When the terms “acceleration” and “optimization” in relation to application delivery are used it often evokes images of compression, caching, and similar technologies. Sometimes it even brings up a discussion on protocol optimization, which is really where things get interesting. You see, caching and compression techniques are mostly about the content – the data – being transferred. Whether it’s making it smaller (and thus faster) or delivering it from...
Do we need Three Laws of Cloud? Not yet. Neither should we be overly concerned regarding reports of cloud leading to the elimination of IT. Every time a technological innovation has spurred automation – since the time of Henry Ford right up to a minute ago – someone has claimed that machines will displace human beings. But the rainbow and unicorn dream attributed to business stakeholders everywhere, i.e. the elimination of IT, is just that – a dream. It isn’t realistic and in fact it’s downright silly to think that systems that only a few years...
Devops and infrastructure 2.0 is really trying to scale the last bottleneck in operations: people. But the corollary is also true: don’t think you can depend solely on machines. One of the reasons it’s so easy for folks to fall into the “Trough of Disillusionment” regarding virtualization and cloud computing is because it sounds like it’s going to magically transform operations. Get rid of all those physical servers by turning them into virtual ones and voila! All your operational bottlenecks go away, right? Nope. What the removal of physical devices...
Deploying a virtual network appliance is the easy part, it’s the operational management that’s hard.
The buzz and excitement over VMware’s announcement of its new products at VMworld was high and for a brief moment there was a return to focusing on the network. You know, the large portion of the data center that provides connectivity and enables collaboration; the part that delivers applications to users (which really is the point of all architectures). Unfortunately the buzz reared up and overtook that focus with yet another round of double rainbow guy commentary regarding how cool and great it’s going to...
If you’re replicating session state across application servers you probably need to rethink your strategy. There’s other options – more efficient options – than wasting RAM and, ultimately, money. Although the discussion of Oracle’s “cloud in a box” announcement at OpenWorld dominated much of the tweet-stream this week there were other discussions going on that proved to not only interesting but a good reminder of how cloud computing has brought to the fore the importance of architecture. Foremost in my mind was what started as a lamentation on the fact that Amazon EC2...
The underlying premise of delivering information technology “as a service” is that the services exist to be delivered in the first place.
Oh, it’s on now. IT has been served with a declaration of intent and that is to eliminate IT and its associated bottlenecks that are apparently at the heart of a long application deployment lifecycle. Ignoring reality, the concept of IT as a Service in many ways is well-suited to solving both issues (real and perceived) on the business and the IT sides of the house. By making the acquisition and deployment of server...
Web 2.0 is about sharing content – user generated content. How do you enable that kind of collaboration without opening yourself up to the risk of infection? Turns out developers and administrators have a couple options…
The goal of many a miscreant is to get files onto your boxen. The second step after that is often remote execution or merely the hopes that someone else will look at/execute the file and spread chaos (and viruses) across your internal network. It’s a malicious intent, to be sure, and makes developing/deploying Web 2.0 applications a risky proposition. After all, Web 2.0...
An IDC survey highlights the reasons why private clouds will mature before public, leading to the eventual consistency of public and private cloud computing frameworks
Network Computing recently reported on a very interesting research survey from analyst firm IDC. This one was interesting because it delved into concerns regarding public cloud computing in a way that most research surveys haven’t done, including asking respondents to weight their concerns as it relates to application delivery from a public cloud computing environment. The results? Security, as always, tops the list. But close behind are application delivery related concerns such as availability...
What goes up, must come down. The question is how much it hurts (the user).
An oft ignored side of elasticity is scaling down. Everyone associates scaling out/up with elasticity of cloud computing but the other side of the coin is just as important, maybe more so. After all, what goes up must come down. The trick is to scale down gracefully, i.e. to do it in such a way as to prevent the disruption of service to existing users while simultaneously trying to scale back down after a spike in demand.
The ramifications of not scaling down are...
An impassioned plea from a devops blogger and a reality check from a large enterprise highlight a growing problem with devops evolutions – not enough dev with the ops.
John E. Vincent offered a lengthy blog on a subject near and dear to his heart recently: devops. His plea was not to be left behind as devops gains momentum and continues to barrel forward toward becoming a recognized IT discipline. The problem is that John, like many folks, works in an enterprise. An enterprise in which not only the existence of legacy and traditional solutions require a bit more...
Discussions on scaling are focused on the application, but don’t forget everything else. And I do mean everything. You played with dominos as a child, I’m sure, or perhaps your children do now. You know what happens when...
Bottles, birds, and packets: how the message is exchanged is less important than what the message is as long as it gets there.
I heard it said the other day, regarding the OpenStack announcement, that “the world does not care about APIs.”
Unpossible! How could the world not care about APIs? After all, it is APIs that make the Web (2.0) go around. It is APIs that drive the automation of infrastructure from static toward dynamic. It is APIs that drive self-service and thin-provisioning of...
If you thought the integration and collaboration required new networking capabilities, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Anyone who has ever configured a network anything or worked with any of a number of cloud provider’s API to configure “auto-scaling” via a load balancing service recognizes that it isn’t simply point, click, and configure. Certain steps need to be configured in a certain order (based entirely on the solution and completely non-standardized across the industry) and it’s always a pain to handle errors and exceptions because if you want to “do over” you have to backtrack through the completed...
The grab bag of awesome that is network-side scripting is, in general, often overlooked. Generally speaking “network gear” isn’t flexible, nor is it adaptable, and it certainly isn’t extensible. But when you put network-side scripting into the mix, suddenly what was inflexible and static becomes extensible and dynamic. In many cases if you’ve ever said “I wish that thing could do X” well, in the case of application delivery it probably can – you just have to learn how. The how, in the case of F5, is iRules. iRules is network-side scripting, so...
Google’s latest offering is a hint of things to come and indicates a recognition of devops as a real discipline Interestingly enough devops is comprised of two disciplines: development and operations. The former traditionally solve problems and address challenges through development, through coding, through a programmatic solution. The latter, operations, is often more administrative focused and its solutions to the same issues and challenges will also be programmatic, just on a different level – that of scripting. There is no right or wrong answer to this one; in fact the concept of devops is about...
I’m sure you’ve noticed that there have been quite a few posts on the topic of automation, orchestration, and infrastructure 2.0. Aside from the fact that an integrated, collaborative infrastructure is necessary to achieve many of the operational efficiencies associated with cloud computing and highly virtualized data centers, it’s also a fascinating topic from the perspective of understanding how network and infrastructure providers are dealing with some of the same issues that enterprise software has long had to face while navigating the enterprise application integration (EAI) landscape. One of the ways in which vendors like...
Cloud and virtualization share a common attribute: dynamism. That dynamism comes at a price… Let’s talk about management. Specifically, let’s talk about how management of infrastructure impacts the network and vice-versa, because there is a tendency to ignore that the more devices and solutions you have in an infrastructure the more chatty they necessarily become. In most organizations management of the infrastructure is accomplished via a management network. This is usually separate from the core network in that it is segmented out by VLANs, but it is still using the core physical network to transport data between devices...
Ask and ye shall receive – F5 joins Microsoft’s Dynamic Data Center Alliance to bring network automation to a Systems Center Operations Manager near you
You may recall that last year Microsoft hopped into Infrastructure 2.0 with its Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit (DDTK) with the intention of providing a framework through which data center infrastructure could be easily automated and processes orchestrated as a means to leverage auto-scaling and faster, easier provisioning of virtualized (and non-virtualized in some cases) resources. You may also recall a recent F5 Friday post on F5’s Management pack capabilities regarding monitoring and automatic provisioning based...
Three simple action items can help ensure your next infrastructure refresh cycle leaves your data center prepared and smelling minty fresh*. Most rational folks agree: public cloud computing will be an integral piece of data center application deployment strategy in the future, but it will not replace IT. Just as Web 2.0 did not make extinct the client-server model (which did not completely eradicate the mainframe model) neither will public cloud computing marginalize the corporate data center. But it will be a part of that data center; integrated and controlled and leveraged via the new...
In cloud computing environments the clock literally starts ticking the moment an application instance is launched. How long should that take? The term “on-demand” implies right now. In the past, we used the term “real-time” even though what we really meant in most cases was “near time”, or “almost real-time”. The term “elastic” associated with scalability in cloud computing definitions implies on-demand. One would think, then, that this means that spinning up a new instance of an application with the intent to scale a cloud-deployed application to increase capacity would be a fairly quick-executing task. ...
Infrastructure can be a black box only if its knobs and buttons are accessible I spent hours at Interop yesterday listening to folks talk about “infrastructure.” It’s a hot topic, to be sure, especially as it relates to cloud computing. After all, it’s a keyword in “Infrastructure as a Service.” The problem is that when most of people say “infrastructure” it appears what they really mean is “server” and that just isn’t accurate. If you haven’t been a data center lately there is a whole lot of other “stuff” that falls under the infrastructure moniker in a...
Are you scaling applications or servers? Auto-scaling cloud brokerages appear to be popping up left and right. Following in the footsteps of folks like RightScale, these startups provide automated monitoring and scalability services for cloud computing customers. That’s all well and good because the flexibility and control over scalability in many cloud computing environments is, shall we say, somewhat lacking the mechanisms necessary to efficiently make use of the “elastic scalability” offered by cloud computing providers. The problem is (and you knew there was a problem, didn’t you?) that most of these companies are still scaling...
How should auto-scaling work, and why doesn’t it? Although “rapid elasticity” is part of NIST’s definition of cloud computing, it may be interesting to note that many cloud computing environments don’t include this capability at all – or charge you extra for it. Many providers offer the means by which you can configure a load balancing service and manually add or remove instances, but there may not be a way to automate that process. If it’s manual, it’s certain “rapid” in the sense that’s it’s probably faster than you can do it (because you’d have to acquire hardware...
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...
What makes a cloud a cloud? The ancient Greek philosopher Plato might tell you“cloudness”, but what exactly does that mean? Long before human scientists figured out that DNA was the basic building block of everything living, philosophers spent long eons being satisfied with Plato’s (and his equally famous student Aristotle’s) explanation that there is some inherent “ness” in everything that makes it what it is. One of Aristotle’s dialogues deals with the answers to questions like, “What makes a cat a cat? And why does a kitten never have a duck?” as he explains the concept. Retroactively...
The future of application performance management is in real-time visibility, action, and integration. For a very long time now APM (Application Performance Management) has been a misnomer. It’s always really been application performance monitoring, with very little management occurring outside of triggering manual processes requiring the attention of operators and developers. APM solutions have always been great at generating eye-candy reports about response time and components and, in later implementations, dependencies on application and even network infrastructure. But it has rarely been the case that APM solutions have really been about, well, managing application performance. Certainly...
Think that your image heavy site won’t benefit from compression? Think again, because compression is not only good for image heavy sites, it might be better than for those without images. jetNEXUS has a nice post entitled, “What does Application acceleration mean?” Aside from completely ignoring protocol acceleration and optimization (especially good for improving performance of those chatty TCP and HTTP-based applications) the author makes a point that should have been obvious but isn’t – compression is actually good for image heavy sites. It’s true that images are technically already compressed according to their respective...
I recently read a strategic article about how networks were getting smarter. The deck of this article claimed, “The app-aware network is advancing. Here’s how to plan for a network that’s much more than a dumb channel for data.” So far, so good. I agree with this wholeheartedly and sat back, expecting to read something astoundingly brilliant regarding application awareness. I was, to say the least, not just disappointed but really disappointed by the time I finished the article. See, I expected at some point that applications would enter the picture. But they didn’t. Oh,...
The virtualization fairy won’t create APIs out of thin air, but a visit from her may kick-start a necessary (re)evaluation of the role of the API in the new network. The way some people talk about the “virtualization of the network” and how it’s necessary for cloud computing and automation and creating a flexible infrastructure you’d think that the transformation from physical form factor to virtual form factor was a magical one that conferred not only the ability scale on-demand but the APIs, as well. There are actual two misconceptions here that need...
Never never trust content from a user, even if that user is another application.
Web 2.0 is as much about integration as it is interactivity. Thus it’s no surprise that an increasing number of organizations are including a feed of their recent Twitter activity on their site. But like any user generated content, and it is user generated after all, there’s a potential risk to the organization and its visitors from integrating such content without validation.
A recent political effort in the UK included launching a web site that integrated a live Twitter stream based on a particular hashtag....
Talking about standards apparently brings out some very strong feelings in a whole lot of people. From “it’s too early” to “we need standards now” to “meh, standards will evolve where they are necessary”, some of the discussions at CloudConnect this week were tinged with a bit of hostility toward, well, standards in general and the folks trying to define them. In some cases the hostility was directed toward the fact that we don’t have any standards yet. [William Vambenepe has a post on the subject, having been one of the folks hostility...
What does a 2-year old and cloud-based applications have in common? The Toddler has recently decided that he can navigate the stairs by himself. Insists on it, in fact. That’s a bit nerve-wracking, especially when he decides that 2:30am is a good time to get up, have a snack, and recreate a Transformers battle in the family room. It’s worse when you’re asleep and don’t know about it. Oh eventually you hear him and you get up and try to convince him it’s time for sleep (see? all the...
What is needed to customize the cloud is a pair of data center ruby slippers called Infrastructure 2.0. Frank Gens of IDC discussed the “New IDC IT Cloud Services Survey: Top Benefits and Challenges” in his blog and what is not surprising is that security continues to top the challenges associated with cloud services. What may be surprising to some is the increasing focus on customization. It shouldn’t be. As customers continue to push at the boundaries of the cloud computing model they will inevitably find it unable to meet some need they have, such as customization....
Managing a virtual machine is not the same thing as managing the stuff inside it. I’ve been noticing a disturbing, though not unexpected, trend in the world of virtualization and cloud computing around management of infrastructure, particularly around virtual network appliances (VNAs). Specifically this trend is claiming the ability to manage virtualized infrastructure. You’d think I’d be happy about that. I probably would - if the solutions were actually capable of managing the infrastructure. Digging into these management solutions shows that for the most part the definition of the term “manage”...
Emerging architectures are conflating responsibilities up and down the application stack. Who is responsible for integration when services reside in the network? While preparing for an upcoming panel I’m moderating at Cloud Connect (in the “New Infrastructure” track), the panelists and I had a great discussion on the topics we wanted to discuss in the session. During that discussion it became increasingly clear that an interesting phenomenon has been occurring: the conflation of network and application responsibilities in the traditional “stack.” Much of this inversion is absolutely necessary for emerging models of networking and computing...
The benefits of automation and orchestration do not come solely from virtualization. Virtualization has benefits, there is no arguing that. But let’s not get carried away and attribute all the benefits associated with cloud computing and automation to one member of the “game changing” team: virtualization. I recently read one of the all-too-common end-of-year prediction blogs on virtualization and 2010 that managed to say with what I think was a straight face that virtualization of the network is what makes it “fluid”. From: 2010 Virtualization Predictions - The Year the Network Becomes Fluid and Virtual ...
Should the enterprise standardize on JSON or XML as their lingua franca for Web 2.0 integration? Or should they use both as best fits the application?The decision impacts more than just integration – it resounds across the entire infrastructure and impacts everything from security to performance to availability of those applications.
One of the things a developer may or may not have control over when building enterprise applications is the format of the data used to communicate (integrate) with other applications. Increasingly services external to the enterprise are very Web 2.0 in that they provide HTTP-based APIs for integration that...
Sometimes the best answer to a problem is to hit the reset button, but it should probably be the last answer, not the first. My cohort Pete Silva attended the 2009 Cloud Computing and Virtualization Conference & Expo and offered up a summary of one of the sessions he enjoyed (‘Cloud Security - It's Nothing New; It Changes Everything!’ (pdf)) in a recent post, “Virtualization is Real” One of the sessions I enjoyed was ‘Cloud Security - It's Nothing New; It Changes Everything!’ (pdf) from Glenn Brunette, a Distinguished Engineer and Chief...
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...
Infrastructure 2.0, from a purely developmental standpoint, is about APIs. It’s about offering up the functionality and capabilities of a wide variety of infrastructure – network, storage, and application network – to be externally controlled, integrated, and leveraged for whatever purpose a developer might dream up. It enables providers and enterprises alike to turn infrastructure functionality into services. Need compression? Caching? Routing? Load balancing? Via service-enabled management APIs these can become services, provisioned and released through the invocation of a service. When expanded to include the sharing of actionable data – performance statistics, status, availability of application...
Vertical scalability used to require optimizations inside the application, at the code level. Cloud computing changes the nature of vertical scalability and, one hopes, will lead to a new model of scalability based on the capabilities of Infrastructure 2.0 and increasingly granular resource management capabilities. RightScale recently offered up its own analysis of Amazon Usage Estimates and while the details they provide on Amazon usage from their vantage point is very interesting I found one of their related observations even more fascinating: In earlier days the predominant method of scaling was by...
There is a common myth that the reason legacy code continues to run in businesses around the world is that no one understands it; that IT and businesses are afraid to replace it because they don’t know what it does. Once again, living in the mainframe capital of the world (the insurance industry heavy midwest), I get to talk to IT folks who deal with legacy software and hardware all the time. Do not doubt that they know exactly what that legacy software does and how it works, and perhaps frightening to proponents of change and the...
All the applause over Google’s Data Liberation Front announcement and blogs is making my head hurt. Or maybe that’s the lack of sleep. Either way, it’s disconcerting to me that so many bright people are choosing to make much of what is just a baby step – if that - toward a much larger, much more difficult goal. After all, data without an application to interpret and make use of it is about as useful as a Netbook without a network connection. There seems to suddenly be a lot of focus on “data” and the ability for...
Amazon’s ELB is an exciting mix of well-executed infrastructure 2.0 and the proper application of SOA, but it takes a lot of work to make anything infrastructure look that easy. The notion of Elastic Load Balancing, as recently brought to public attention by Amazon’s offering of the capability, is nothing new. The basic concept is pure Infrastructure 2.0 and the functionality offered via the API has long been available on several application delivery controllers for many years. In fact, looking through the options for Amazon’s offering leaves me feeling a bit, oh, 1999. As if load balancing hasn’t...
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...
The term “Infrastructure 2.0” seems to be as well understood as the term “cloud computing.” It means different things to different people, apparently, and depends heavily on the context and roles of those involved in the conversation. This shouldn’t be surprising; the term “Web 2.0” is also variable and often depends on the context of the conversation. The use of the versioning moniker is meant, in both cases however, to represent a fundamental shift in the way the technologies are leveraged by people. In the case of Web 2.0 it’s about the shift toward interactive, integrated web applications used to...
Steve (apparently yes, we are on a first name basis) offers up his thoughts on developing APIs for the Cloud in “A Cloud Tools Manifesto.” While the inclusion of the word “manifesto” in the title raised quite the stir (“Manifestogate” is still fresh on the minds of many cloud-oriented people), what really caught my eye is his inclusion of a “mock endpoint” primarily for testing of API based integration and development. This is something that’s increasingly important not just to cloud but to Web 2.0 and social networking sites that provide APIs via which other sites and client applications can...
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...
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...
There’s more than one way to address the rapid rate of change in infrastructure supporting a dynamic environment. We spend a lot of time talking about how software and systems and standards are the ultimate solution to addressing the rapid rate of change in the association between applications and IP addresses in a dynamic infrastructure. But sometimes you have look down the stack to find a simpler, more economical and honestly, elegant, answer to the challenge of managing the problem associated with virtualized and cloud computing architectures. We need to take another look at the link layer...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The importance of a full-proxy architecture to application delivery, security, cloud computing, and virtualization People often describe the act of changing focus from one related but distinct task to another as “wearing two different hats.” Like moving from “developer” to “administrator” when you’re trying to deploy an application in a testing environment. You’re the developer, but then you have to “switch gears” and become a server administrator in order to ensure that the application server and its environment is configured properly before you can actually test the application you just wrote. But the metaphor...
Is ESB just an expensive integration hub or is there more to the story than we heard… In the beginning, the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), was marketed as much more than an integration technology. While the core of an ESB is certainly about connectivity between services, there was – and still is – so much more to an ESB than just integrating disparate protocols and technologies. Transformation, parallel processing, content based routing, and service orchestration are among the more useful and beneficial capabilities of an ESB. That’s why it was somewhat surprising to see the CTO of...
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...
When SOA was declared dead there was a spate of articles and blogs on why the architecture “died.” Most pundits came to the conclusion that like many innovations it wasn’t the technology to blame but rather people. Architects lacked the skills to properly leverage SOA; business stakeholders failed to look at SOA as a strategic architecture, choosing instead to use it as a tactical integration-solving solution; network and systems’ administrators did not understand the unique characteristics and issues a well-designed SOA raised within the network and on systems; and developers were loathe to “reuse” and “share” services despite alternate...
Attackers say, we can go where we want to; we can leave our code behind… There’s probably a raid going on right now in Naxxramas and the attackers are almost certainly doing the Safety Dance. They probably learned the Safety Dance the same way I learned about it; from someone well-versed in its intricate steps. See, if you don’t know the Safety Dance and you come up against Heigan the Unclean, well… he’s not called Heigan the Unclean for nothing. You will not survive. Not even if you happen to have a Holocaust Cloak at...
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...
Why architecture matters not only to security but to the future of cloud computing It seems the phrase “in the cloud”, sadly, has become a marketing-hyped euphemism for “the Internet.” I say sadly because the use of cloud to refer to every and any service delivered over the Internet dirties up the cloud. It obscures the intent of cloud computing and makes it difficult for technologists in the trenches to get a handle on how cloud – both external and internal – can provide benefits and solutions to problems they have right now. The very loose use of the...
You can’t afford not to invest in technologies that leverage virtualization to improve data center efficiency There’s an old adage that says you have to spend money to make money. In the data center these days this is more true than ever. You have to invest in technology capable of making your data center more efficient in order to make (save) money. A recent Robert Half Technology survey of 1400 CIOs indicates that data center efficiency and virtualization are top priorities. *CIOs were asked, "Which areas, if any, will your IT department be investing...
Infrastructure 2.0 is, at its core, about evolving to a new level of interconnectedness, one in which the underlying infrastructure becomes as flexible and adaptable as the applications and virtualization infrastructure it is responsible for managing and delivering. In order to be connected, however, you need a way in which disparate infrastructure components can communicate, either directly or via a third party (coordination | management | orchestration) server. That communication is almost certainly going to take (and in many cases has already taken) the form of service-enabled control planes. These "services" are necessary in order to provide the...
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...
The spirit of SOA and its core principles are still very much alive, but we can't call it SOA any more because, well, SOA is (pretty much) officially dead, at least according to folks on the tubes and we all know that if you hear it on the tubes it must be true. Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group declared SOA officially dead on January 1, 2009, but maintains that "although the word “SOA” is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever." Ms. Manes blames the death of SOA on the failure to...
VM sprawl is predicted to be one of the outcomes of early adoption and excitement over virtualization. Just as IT struggled to manage the explosion of PCs and servers across the enterprise, it is predicted that now it will need to find a way to manage the explosion of virtual machines as they pop up all over the enterprise with surprising alacrity. Part of the difficulty in managing new technology is the rogue deployment of X. Whether that's physical or virtual servers is irrelevant, the challenges associated with managing what are essentially unmanaged applications and servers deployed outside...
The INTERNET, December 18, 2008 - In what is certainly a blinding epiphany for some it was suddenly realized today that some applications are not well suited for deployment in a public cloud computing environment. With all the hype surrounding cloud computing these days it is easy to forget that there's more to enterprise applications than just some code and a database. It is a rare application that is an island in the data center, and the more integrated with other systems a given application is the less likely it is that the application will be well suited...
A while back Joe blogged about some Twitter integration he'd done around monitoring of BIG-IP. He's got a PERL proxy that monitors the BIG-IP and sends out notifications and alerts to a specified Twitter account. But I wanted something more interactive, something more social. I wanted to be able to send a tweet to my BIG-IP and have it respond; a BIG-IP Twitter bot, if you will. So Friday I finally decided it was time to do it. I set up a Twitter account for my BIG-IP and started coding. Luckily, the Twitter API is pretty straight-forward and...
Wesley: Now, there may be problems once our app is in the cloud.
Inigo: I'll say. How do I find the data? Once I do, how do I integrate it with the other apps? Once I integrate it, how do I replicate it?
If you remember this somewhat altered scene from the Princess Bride, you also remember that no one had any answers for Inigo. That's apropos of this discussion, because no one has any good answers for this version of Inigo either. And no, a holocaust cloak is not going to save the day this...
Amidst the hype of cloud computing and virtualization have been the publication of several research notes regarding SOA. Adoption, they say, is slowing. Oh noes! Break out the generators, stock up on water and canned food! An article from JavaWorld quotes research firm Gartner as saying: The number of organizations planning to adopt SOA for the first time decreased to 25 percent; it had been 53 percent in last year's survey. Also, the number of organizations with no plans to adopt SOA doubled from 7 percent in 2007 to...
According to Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion, I must be way more geeky than your average consumer. (Thanks, Steve!) That's because I'm using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Google to peruse myriad feeds in my daily quest to "read the Internet." Steve comments on a recently released Forrester report citing the adoption of RSS as low with no real indication it will get any better in the future. According to the research, of the 89% of those who don't use feeds only 17% say they're interested in using them. In fact Forrester...
One password to fool them all One password to find them One password to steal them all and in the ether become them [with many apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien] For years we've had it beat into...
In reading through ZapThink's latest post regarding the "Great ESB Controversy of 2008" it occurred to me that it is quite possible, and probably likely, that the issue of ESB use primarily revolves around whether you're doing SEA or SOA. Yes, I know. You've never heard of "SEA" before. That's because I just made it up to describe the difference between a service-enabled architecture and a service-oriented architecture. And there is a difference. A SOA (service oriented architecture) implies that an architecture has been designed around the concept of services. A SEA (service enabled architecture) implies...
CNet is reporting that Google is ditching XML for a faster, more compact alternative known as ProtocolBuffers. I'm going to type this post really fast before Don finds out and starts laughing at me because he's always had this thing against XML, claiming it was too bloated and slow. Apparently Google, the 800-pound gorilla, is on Don's side of this argument, as it just blogged about its newest creation, ProtocolBuffers. From CNet's Blog PostGoogle thought of using XML as a lingua franca to send messages between its different servers. But XML can be complicated to work with...
Web 2.0 is built on primarily two technologies: AJAX and RSS. AJAX is used to develop interactive, real-time applications while RSS is primarily used as for integration and syndication. Import a feed, share a feed, drag-n-drop a gadget, widget, or component. It's all RSS (XML) today. It's further becoming a requirement of Web 2.0 sites that they provide some sort of API through which developers can write add-on applications. Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook. They all offer APIs that are quite heavily used at this time and startups are following suit. Other sites offer richer media, like video or slideware,...
At Web 2.0 Expo Microsoft essentially stole the show with the introduction of its Live Mesh platform. Live Mesh is, essentially, an integration hub that incorporates and manages Internet connected devices that today are unrelated and managed individually using open standards. Microsoft might not like the term "integration hub", but that's basically what it is. Yes, on the surface it's a platform that enables inter-device communication and seamless access to a variety of services, but under the hood it's got to be doing some pretty complex integration work. While Microsoft plans on using open standards, that doesn't mean...
History says integration wins, will that trend continue? Andrew Storms has a nice writeup on PayPal's recent decision to limit the supported browsers used with its service (i.e. this is a one browser site, buddy) in an effort to "protect customers". This isn't just a case choosing IE over Firefox, or vice-versa, this move is about requiring a certain set of security functions to be available and active in a browser, and will not necessarily block out the major browser vendors - just older versions of those browsers. Apparently one of those features required will be EV SSL...
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Integration isn't a four letter word, but for many hapless IT folks stuck with the chore of integrating applications, it probably should be. SOA promised to make the world of application integration a painless, happy process in which the traditional basement sacrifice of live chickens and wild gyrations near a glowing rack of servers were no longer necessary. In many cases, the live chicken sacrifice was no longer necessary, but the wild gyrations were still a fact of integration experts' lives, mostly executed out of pain and frustration when systems failed...
Over the past three weeks Don and I have had a lot of time to chat whilst making the trek back and forth between home and the hospital where the newest member of our family was keeping residence. Mostly we talked about our new son and speculating as to when he might be allowed to come home (Feb 17), but as is our wont we often ended up talking about work. That's one of the benefits of working "together" and in the same field, at least we think so. One of those discussions revolved around iControl and the fact that...
