Smarter Cloud – Formulation of an answer

IBM, Oracle, SAP and MS all are gunning big for piece of enterprise cloud computing marketplace. But questions remained open “Why should one go for it?”. Virginia Sharma, Director @ IBM, attempted to answer in an impressive keynote speech during SOA India 2009. Here are my pickups:

IBM launched “Smarter Planet” marketing campaign last year to align its technology and consulting offerings with next generation solutions to revolutionize every aspect of life.  The main idea was to present smarter organization by Instrumentation, Interconnection and Intelligence to realize its meaning “Achieve more with less”. Her talk was not about SOA or Cloud, but about more wider concept of synergies between business, technology and people. She mentioned three major aspects to be a smarter organization with her case studies.

• Business can evolve better to adopt and respond to dynamics by smarter supply chain management, analytics systems and asset optimization mechanism.
• People can collaborate better to maximizing effectiveness by smarter collaboration system, resource allocation mechanism and product development environment.
• Technology can enable better to flexibility to meet business need by smarter network systems, business applications and production planning management.

In this session, she laid a foundation for decision makers to embrace cloud with their “Smart” offerings.

In another session, IBM folks presented “Cloud In A Box”, a packaged Websphere on to a server box to enable, control and manage a private cloud. It is called ” IBM Websphere Cloudburst” , a cloud infrastructure solution under Smarter Cloud program. In offline discussions during conference, many participants were not voting for private cloud as it is against the pure cloud concept and its benefits.

SOA enables Platform As A Service

Platform providers has unique opportunity to adopt SOA as business model by opening up their platform as web service and allowing developers and partners to build applications. Platform owners can leverage new avenue to monetize the API usage, share revenue for each transaction and sell advertisement as well.

It is win-win situation for all, it is hay days not just for platform builders but also for stakeholders like entrepreneurs, developers, aggregaters, end users and marketplace. Their way of cutting gold is by affiliations and partnerships, revenue sharing, advertisements and subscription.

Platform owner needs to formulates their SOA strategy to open-up platform using Web API analogus to Web Services.  Also needs to create evnironment for platform adaptation and creation of ecosystem around platform for easy entry.  In all this most challanging aspect of this offering is to address heterogeneous users and developers.

Marketing strategy is highly importent to give you edge in this PAAS game.

• Expand footprint of platform
• Drive traffic
• Innovation (Feature development)
• Support new business model
• Content acquisition (user generated)
• Co-branding

Designing the Web API(Web service) is an art and critical to success.  These API needs to support heterogeneous technologies and best way to adopt is is going for open standards like XML/SOAP.  Platform API should be architected with homogeneous and conceptual coherence like WS/REST. Also these must follow underlying domain semantics and should be easy to learn.

API need to have right granularity to provide comprehansive tools for app building. Meshup apps wants to control noun object and composite apps want access for verb actions. Fine grained API address coverage for noun object (Domain Objects) like Order/Customer etc as well as verb objects through course grained APIs.

After hammering API next come technology choices.

• Transport Protocol – SOAP vs REST
• Service Standards – WS *
• Data Structure Exchange – XML/JSON
• Standard – OASIS/W3C

How to solve evolving standard problems? Answer lies in Model Driven Development approach.

MS Azure – SOA India 2009

Sachin V. Rathi talked about Microsoft’s offering toward cloud computing. Personally, I don’t use any MS offerings except my 6 year old XP and a XP marked key chain from Microsoft 2001 seminar. Anyways, I must admit that Microsoft has transformed their all products towards cloud computing in applaudable manner.

MS Azure Services are very comprehensive stack for cloud transformation. Some of the notes from presentation about it.

Live Services:

• User – online identity metasystem, directory, personal data storage & management
• Social – presence, communication, search, geospatial & mapping, media
• Devices – data synchronization across applications & devices; bridges cloud, client, and smart devices

.Net Service:

• Service Bus – connectivity to on-premises applications; secure, federated fire-wall friendly Web services messaging intermediary; durable & discoverable queues
• Access Control – rules-driven federated identity; AD federation; claims-based authorization
• Workflows – declarative service orchestrations via REST-based activities

SQL Services:

• Data – massively scalable & highly consistent distributed relational database; geo-replication and geo-location of data
• Processing – relational queries, search, reporting, analytics on structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data
• Integration – synchronization and replication with on-premise databases, other data sources

Azure Services:

• Compute – auto-provisioning 64-bit application containers in Windows Server VMs; supports a wide range of application models
• Storage – highly available distributed table, blob, queue, & cache
• Languages – .NET 3.5 (C#, VB.NET, etc.), IronRuby, IronPython, PHP, native Win32 code

Sachin also presented few case studies of their recent work in cloud computing services. What was interesting  for me their approach toward case studies. All of them presented in following fashion.

Build > Run > Consume > Monetize

Few of Cloud services build on Azure are:

• PhotoSynth: A cloud based 3D image processing application to recognize and synthesize picture of same object/location.
• Eve Online: A cloud based multilayer networking platform where server maintains the state of game for each player and notify intelligent client about state change of other players.
• eBooks - British Library: A cloud based eBook library which allows user to view and read British library book with windows 7 gesture technology.

Liked two of his suggestions for enterprise and architects:

• Enterprise needs to have clear emphasis on Web 2.0 to retain knowledge bank of their employee and let the intellectual juice flow through out organization.
• Devices are becoming powerful and enterprise needs to find innovative usage to use these in enterprise. Just like radio frequency emitter tag called RFID has found place in shipment and others services.

In another session, Ramkumar Kothandraman, from Microsoft, has talked about MS emphasis on interoperability since they received mail from Mr. Gate four years back. But their claim of interoperability has always seen with skepticism. Surely, Interop must be true for their own products but how well they operate with others has raised question marks in past. Mr Ramkumar claimed that they has a Vendor Partner Alliance to work on integration with many partners, open source and even competitor products but past experience has proved that their integration approach is to hamper the integrated product capability to the extend that the real essence of that product is lost and you land up replacing it with offerings. Their JVM version is a great example of it.

Cloud is for REST of the World

IT industry is always been hyped with ever growing buzzwords and its excessive usage. New entrant, Cloud Computing has been buzzing in Enterprise world and every IT company is try to get on to this bandwagon by positioning themselves with feature differentiators.

But I have been trying to find the mean of cloud computing for myself. I went to find out from a Architect view point for 5-W questions – What/Why/How/When/Where.

Lets find out what is the problem with current model?

A business owners cant anticipate the growth of their business and to choose a infrastructure scheme/architecture, they just have to rely on historical data or gut feeling. Later point, they meet with reality to realize that initial calculations were well below/above the reality mark  and forced to choose another scheme/architecture.  And it goes on.

But with advent of Cloud, above problem has been address to certain extend for time being.  Now their focus is just application not infrastructure or application/middleware server capabilities. Cloud will take care of these.  Enterprise can focus on application and can choose to go either conservatively or aggressively. This  allows them the flexibility of change depending upon response and requirements.

Cloud Computing is a IT Infrastructure utility model of  “Pay As You Go”. Till today, cloud has comes in many shapes. E.g

• Service Oriented Architecture
• Software As A Service
• Software + Service
• Rich Internet Applications

All these are certainly applications to use cloud as a base. Lets go to fundamental components of Cloud architecture.

Roles: In two-tier system architecture,  Web Layer and Business Layer are mapped to corresponding roles in Cloud architecture.

• Web Roles – Web Interface to system
• Worker Role – Business Logic implemented using Cloud APIs

Storage: All the data system generates and uses needs to be stored and keep it available all the time.

• Table/Blob/Relational – System data in many forms

Messaging: Asynchronous communication is the glue between Web and Worker roles to keep system connected as well as decoupled.

• Queue – Queue is preferred choice of communication between Web and Worker.

Technology: There are many competing technologies trying to provide “Right” solution, but my choice goes to RESTful Architecture.

Patterns: Recurring problems brings patterns of solutions. According to architect of cloud, there are five problem space in cloud.

Now, lets discuss about application designing in cloud.

Cloud Computation:

A system which require heavy data crunching on continuous basis. E.g. search engine indexing. MapReduce has been the solution to do this in grids but throws a challenge of managing grid’s growth.

Cloud Solution: Cloud provider will take the responsibility to managing Grids.

Cloud Storage:

A system where data keeps growing, storage longevity becomes critical factor and data type can range from Blobs, Tables to Relational.  It also throws another issue of tight affinity between logical data and actual hardware storage.  To add to more complication, architect assess distance of Data Access Layer(DAL) between client and server.

• Code Near – Data is controlled by Client’s DAL and generally has large data upload. E.g. offline data
• Code Far – Data is controlled by server DAL and generally smaller chunk of contiguous data. E.g. Browser, Chat.

Cloud Solution: Data in cloud is logical entity defined in URL style. Cloud uses REST data modeling to address any type of data. This releives Cloud Infrastructure Provider to manage affinity of storage and hardware independently. REST lets designer define the a logical business data expressed in terms of URL. Client Applications can perform CRUD operations directly through these URL.

Cloud Communication:

A system which requires to talk to multiple external systems to perform their operations in coordination. But this poses the of negotiation on infrastructure and security and protocol. Preferred choice is HTTP but custom solution needs to be implemented.

Cloud Solution: Cloud wraps REST service over messaging solution to provide uniform communication between multiple parties without any overhead or responsibility on either parties.

Cloud Scalability:

A system where user base is very large and traffic load is not uniform. To bear the burdan of heavy loads, Network Load Balancers are called in service but still either does not fit the required bill and keep both architect and Sys Admin on toe all across.

Cloud Solution: Cloud provides will manage it with elastic computing and storage capacity depending on load dynamically.

Cloud Multi-Tenancy:

A system which provides services to multiple business partners. E.g B2B model. In this each partner demands its own data schema and UI customization on their choice. Providing this service from one setup is not advisable but it can be done with proper design consideration.

Cloud Solution: Cloud provider can provide multiple entry point to this system, but design and identity consideration needs to be looked carefully  by system architect.

Opening doors to Open Source

Effected by recession swine flu, giants have been looking for a medication to save few pennies and cut any long tails. With immediate effect, all execs did gone on hunting for that big or small idea, but with no avail. One major possibility, which was overlooked for very longtime, was IT department budget. It has been deeply entrenched perception that only licensed software are the best and safe bet. Definitely, we all have become so obsessed about licensed software world, we have forgotten to google with words like “Free Software” or “Open Source Software”. Understandably, Freeware software still does not excite many due to their restrictive, close system and monetary approach (behind free).  But, on other side, white swan, Open Source movement, has emerged from so called “software for academic” to “software for everyone” in slow but steady manner. All this while, open source revolution maintained its consistent turtle pace to offer a viable alternative to all the sophisticated and expensive licensed software.

Voila, with this realization, CTO execs must have taken sign of relief that instead of their pay-check coming under botchers knife, it is Sys Admin dept budget which is being shaved using OSS branded blade.

In this fast age of hip-hype, even consumer are demanding Linux over glossy Vista,  because all they bother is Browser on a decent OS. Seriously, Open Source movement has come of age.

Keeping up with OSS spirit, GigaOM has initiated a visionary venture called OStatic to bring a highly reputated blog about open source software, which will allow brainforming between differnt OSS communities to one place for e all news, views and reviews.

Few of my favorites OSS:

• Portal Development: Life Ray Standard Version
• Reporting Tool: Jspaer, iReport
• OS – Linux, Solaris,
• DB – MySQL
• Office – Open Office
• ESB – JBossESB, OpenESB
• Content Mgmt – Drupal, Alfresco, Oomla
• BI Mgmt – SAP/Congnus (IBM) -> Pentaho BI System
• Website Development – LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP)
• Mobile – Android, Limo
• Website Content Platform – OSCommerce

Now they are even talking about Open Source Hardware… It is very interesting to know how they have taken OSS to OSH.

Cisco’s Videotic Future

Few months back, I viewed Cisco CTO Ms Padmasree Warrior Keynote presentation to Mobilize. I found her very impactful and commanding lady. She has very impressive outlook at Cisco’s future technology directions. I term her talk as “Videotic Future”. Padmasree’s talk was about learning of past and comparing it with present and future dynamics.

Here are my keynotes from her keynotes:

Today’s revolution of mobile and internet has brought true globalization by bring human innovation to The Flat World. With time rolling, mobile and internet mashup will soon become pervasive in our way of life. Result is Globalization 2.0, which is allowing seamless flow of capital and innovation between Developed world and Emerging economies. With this we see innovation is flourishing with solid collaboration across the borders. Today, innovation is not the means of solitary genius and large corp, it is oozing from all over places. Put your idea on blog/twitter and you will see people start ideating with you right from all corners of planet. This is indicative of transition from Brainstorming to Brainforming.

At Mobilize, she expressed her concerns regarding numerous mobile platforms, both open and proprietary, which are making mobile app developers very confused. There are still no standards  in mobile world and radio frequency not yet regulated across the world. But it is the time to bring internet to mobile to realize its full potential.

Some more retrospective comparisons:

• Customer behavior is moving from “Ideation and Selection” to “Try and Buy it”.
• World has moved from consumer and enterprise worker to just “user”.
• From Public and private network of past, today we talk about “the network”.
• Having compartmentalizing our past life, it is now about anytime anywhere, “Online”.
• In the past creating and consuming were two different things and today we are talking about collaboration and sharing.

Every technology evolution has its shelf life, so as Internet, which has reached its threshold. According to her, future trends will be Video, Collaboration and Virtualization. With promising fattening pipes with 10 TBPS by 2010, it will change game the way we see it today. These bigger pipes will lead more demand for visual applications and visual network which will spread into Enterprise to Social through existing internet applications. Video Collaboration will be much bigger. That is why, Cisco is gunning for Videotic future with its products like TelePresence and MediaNet.

Final incarnation of “Web as OS”

Foolishly, I always dreamed that Google Pack should be complete OS, eventually it is ready to become that.  “Google Chrome OS” was an expected announcement for me. Google actually built Chrome just like an OS under hood. Remember, Chrome presentation of internal architecture where they say that very tab, JS engine, Image render engine and video player all will be running on separate processes.

I think it is a step in right direction. MS has not changed in last two decades from their approach of “everything is OS dependent”. Unwillingly, they tried to sallow hard pill of “Network is OS”, but their every attempt has same flavor to tie it same old boat “OS”.

All the more, it was expected to be Linux only, as they embrace Open Source in most of their approach. E.g Android, AJAX, Java on App Engine/Android etc. Yes, Linux has more adaptations than total numbers of Michal Jackson songs till his heart attack. I hope Chrome will finally put it to rest.

Only fear I have is that I hope that Google will not follow two OS (Chrome and Android). If yes, that will be a big disaster for this effort.

I always believed that mankind will move to have single brain and Google is on that path by making web as a center.

Cheers to Chrome ….. will be waiting for this final incarnation of “web as OS”.

Wolfram answers to organize information

Since college, passion for mathematics has transformed into daily Product Engineering solutions. Certainly, I miss that Math world, but staying happy with parallel world of Engineering. Yes, I think, both help in solving a problem-space by computational; engineering its about solving practical problem and math its about proving theorems.

Yesterday, stumbled upon YouTube presentation by known scientist Stephen Wolfram who has been involved in huge project of  Mathematica and written a book. Recently, he has has gone ahead to answer the problem of organizing/computing world’s information.

Wolfram|Alpha is very fascinating project to create first computational knowledge engine to do sophisticated computations, both pure computations involving numbers or formulas, and computations applied automatically to data called up from its data sources.  This answers very computational requirement to turn generic information into specific answers where present search engine has been struggling.

When we develop software, we also deal with this info but these IT data is very structure as it is directly meant for that targeted system. There is still no system which can read and comprehend any data and make sense out of it.

I was more interested in the internal organization of his answer to semantic search. In this presentation, he describes his system in four major components.

First building block is “Curated Data”, a data set which is derived from  different data sources and mapped into structures like XML/RDF.  Second is “Algorithm Computing”, a set of methods based on mathematical formulas to drive a scene out of this Curated Data. Third is “Linguistic Analysis” which interprets the human inputted question/queries and map it into one of the appropriate Algorithm to compute. And Final one, “Automatic Presentation” to judge the user interface required for a given query.

Wolfram gave his previous experience with Mathematica to answer open source. In past, he has made huge effort to put the code of Mathematica but he sadly admits there was hardly any interest due to its complexity.  I think he is right, this work may not be easily comprehensible at this stage, but may be in future, a better language will represent these scientist code in simpler fashion.

Wolfram way of monetization is very similar to Google propagated Adverts, relevant Ad per query. He also pointed out that he has been successful to bring collaborations with lots of major industry players. He accepts there is still lot of work to be done in machine’s Cognitive Reasoning to normalize data issues like juxtaposition and anthology queries.

As a whole, I still believe,  Wolfram can’t be a Google Killer but it can augument “expert answring” space where Google has not impacted yet. At the end, Google should either catch up to it, or least, gulp & burp on it.

Great Indian Developer Summit 2009

Yesterday, I was at GIDS (Great Indian Developer Summit)  in Bangalore. There was massive developers attendance and enthusiasm could be felt in air itself.  Due to office schedule, I could only opt for Java track. All of the session were very well placed with interesting subject lines. There were all flavors of sessions, from my view point, I could grasp some of them instantly, some I attended reluctantly and some I ignored due to my lack of insight in those. Here are few sessions which I classify digested well and been satisfied.

Fairly Satisfied:

• COBOL in the 21st Century : Blending the Past with Future Opportunities – Ashish Masand
• IEEE’s Initiatives for the Developer Ecosystem – Dr. Rangachar Kasturi
• Guerrilla SOA – Dr. Jim Webber
• The Next Generation of Java EE – Mike Keith
• Crystal Reports for Java Developers – Vijay Nag

Digested Well:

• Computing in the Cloud – Craig McClanahan
• Know your Java? – Venkat Subramaniam
• Unleashing the Power of Java on Intel – Mukesh Gangadhar

Shortly, I will be blogging on few of these subjects on my tech insight blog.

OnLive – a Halo of Future

I have always been suspicious on game console because I felt it is still the old style. Just like, my father’s time TV, my time of PC and today time of Mobile, you just can’t buy and stay-happy-ever-after, instead you live in constant worry to compete with your neighbor upgraded and newer box/station/stick. Can you imagine who enjoy this vicious social circle, yes, its console vendors like MS, Sony and Nintendo. It is very well happening in my game life, I don’t wanna even dust off my 3 year “new” XBox as it does not sex me up anymore.

Anyways, what is more depressing from creative game industry point of view that game developers have to either stick to a walled garden or spend all life porting its electronic art. The end result, cant play Halo my PC or PS3 Or Cult of War on XBox. That is BAD!!!

Stumbled upon OnLive, that is a game changer idea. I found its On Demand game and no-platform features most exciting. This is the future of the game, an open world of gaming.

But, how the hell it works???  Gold jargon “Its Cloud Computing baby”!!! Term has been tossed around in every nook and corner of computing industry today. So here it is in your game too.

OnLive brings one of major differentiator that I can state: Actual game runs on server instead of expensive console.

Result: Makes  coordinate/action response come from server not from console.

Benefits:

• Console independence
• No hard disk limitation
• Resume game from anywhere (Home PC or Office PC;)
• Multiplayer game will be better coordinated with lesser lag time

Above observation came from my past attempt of writing my first network based multi-player game in 1996  using Java 1.0. Did make success, but could not build career out of it.

Coming back to point, all you need to go OnLive is a great broadband connection and you are free from the fortress of walled garden of consoles. All the more, with 4G phones, hope OnLive will bring the experience there too. These disruptive ideas revolutionize the way we think.

Game Shopping, I am sure it will be cost effective as it is catering to everyone on Net compared to just handful who can afford a shining expensive console (unless you are fortune CEO to buy all).

This is missing bow in Google arsenals, I think Google should take it.

Can you beat it, Box/Station/Stick!!! No, because they believe in keeping you dearly in a cage.