General SOA
Thoughts on SOA, happenings in the SOA market, and the technology that makes it possible.
#mobile #fasterapp #ccevent Today, at least. Tomorrow, who knows? Some have tried to distinguish between “mobile cloud” and “cloud” by claiming the former is the use of the web browser on a mobile device to access services while the latter uses device-native applications. Like all things cloud, the marketing fluff is purposefully obfuscating and sweeping under the rug the technology required to make things work for consumers, whether those consumers be your kids or IT professionals. Infrastructure is not eliminated when organizations take to the cloud nor do the constraints of web-based protocols and methodologies become...
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...
#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...
It’s kind of like thinking globally but acting locally… While I rail against the use of the too vague and cringe-inducing descriptor “workload” with respect to scalability and cloud computing , it is perhaps at least bringing to the fore an important distinction that needs to be made: that of the impact of different compute resource utilization patterns on scalability. What categorizing workloads has done is to separate “types” of processing and resource needs: some applications require more I/O, some less. Others are CPU hogs while others chew up memory at an alarming rate....
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 dynamic data center of the future, enabled by IT as a Service, is stateless. One of the core concepts associated with SOA – and one that failed to really take hold, unfortunately – was the ability to bind, i.e. invoke, a service at run-time. WSDL was designed to loosely couple services to clients, whether they were systems, applications or users, in a way that was dynamic. The information contained in the WSDL provided everything necessary to interface with a service on-demand without requiring hard-coded integration techniques used in the past. The theory was you’d find an appropriate...
Infrastructure 2.0 ≠ cloud computing ≠ IT as a Service. There is a difference between Infrastructure 2.0 and cloud. There is also a difference between cloud and IT as a Service. But they do go together, like a parfait. And everybody likes a parfait… The introduction of the newest member of the cloud computing buzzword family is “IT as a Service.” It is understandably causing some confusion because, after all, isn’t that just another way to describe “private cloud”? No, actually it isn’t. There’s a lot more to it than that, and it’s very applicable...
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...
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...
Those eight bits in the IP header aren’t doing much of anything these days, perhaps it’s time to put them to work Back in the early days of bandwidth management, when quality of service and prioritization of traffic were on everyone’s minds because we were stuck with low throughput connectivity, there was a brief discussion about the use of IP’s TOS (Type of Service) bits as a means to meet specific application performance needs. I say brief because, well, it never really got anywhere. See, even though the creators of the IP specification had looked into the...
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