An Insight into the Next Gen Application

 

Windows Petzold , VB , COM , .NET  the technology shift of Microsoft has been evolved or should I say innovative ways to adapt to industry trend. Now we are at a yet another paradigm shift we call it a Cloud.

This post is more oriented towards next gen application on public cloud.

The Cloud is adding an element into the DNA of the App Development. With this new paradigm the App Dev has be relooked into on various aspect, Below is a compilation of the some of the areas.

1)  There is more to  Cloud: The cloud is here most of the people think about cloud as Windows Azure or Office 365 or Amazon AWS there is not reason I cannot see why a customer in 5 years from now buy a customized data center with pre loaded application . The story for cloud is vast.

2) BI (Business Intelligence)

The developer is the key in Windows 8 but we need to concentrate on the back end applications. BI is an important game changer here.  The next wave of smart apps are insightful, inside fueled applications. We need to get the fundamentals in place for the same.

• Data is happening

Data is again a big area and its happening “Google ingest 10Petabyte / month”, so is bing so much of data to analyze and give better search results. There is so much of Data all over the place, Big Data is happening (Big Data will be covered in a different post.

3) Latency

In the cloud world latency has a totally paradoxical definition for example: A web application which runs on cloud is not necessarily going to have the database tier in the same cluster as app for all practical purpose the application can be hosted on a different fabric & database tier be it Sql Azure or Amazon RDS could and expectation of a millisecond response from the app to the database tier is irrational. So in principle applications have to be rewired with the asynchronous paradigm to really get going in cloud.  On an alternative note “Australian Stock Exchange on cloud has a requirement of have trade placement done in 7 micro seconds. Latency on one side is becoming shorter on one side and other side it can be really long.

3) Application Life Cycle Management (ALM)

This is a big theme within App Dev. Application Lifecycle Management for cloud based application changes and need to look into some very specific areas.

 

• User Experience

User Experience has never mandated to be more innovative easy to use “a classic example is Apple I Pad 55% of users of IPad in US are senior citizens. So this gives a sense the Apple has set some very high standards.  UX in collaboration with mobility can really may a key difference. Mobility bring real time knowledge in terms intelligence of Location. Applications are no more isolated they are more of connected entities which learn from information provided by other application and help in making the end user experience more richer and innovative. Its time that UX is proactively thoughts.

• Identity

For Identity Management in Cloud the mantra is to use the defacto standard LDAP, Active Directory.

• SDL

Security Development Lifecycle, the important aspect here is the concept of privacy. In public cloud application need to have a strategy in terms of how to deal with PII (Personal Identifiable Information). Its mandate to declare to users what is the information which is stored about them on the cloud. Another important aspect in case of an security breach how does the messaging go over to the end user.

• Testing

Testing Strategy for cloud application needs to be rethought. Debugging in cloud is a lot different especially in a case of 24X7 systems.

• Manageability & Operation

Very much based on ITIL. All cloud providers datacenters use ITIL or enhanced form of ITIL to manage. From an application developer stand point what does manageability mean to his/her application, “Application have to be build some manageability to function properly in a cloud based environment.

Cloud based application architecture mandate the theme of reusability to a high degree we live in asynchronous world (cloud) & we require a certain degree of standardization of applications being component & service oriented compliant. The drive to build reusable components in cloud can help faster deployment of applications into cloud. Doing it right is really what matters now unless companies don’t wont go down the path of rewriting cloud application in next 3 years time frame.

4) Fabric Based Computing

Azure is an SOA based infrastructure what we have done in last 10 years is what we see packaged all in Azure.  Lets take azure with a pinch of salt what we have on premise application lets not oversell telling the customers that on cloud we are going to great benefits.

“Fabric-based computing is the next-generation architecture for enterprise servers. It combines powerful server capabilities with advanced networking features into a single virtual server configuration. In fabric-based computing, resources are no longer tied to a specific physical machine. They can be reconfigured on the fly without adding software layers. Everything is done at the hardware level (CPU memory, network I/O, etc.). Reconfiguration doesn’t happen at the individual machine level but at the ‘fabric’ level,”. What does this mean to application placed on the public cloud?   We are typically talking about PAAS.  Fabric is computing is essentially where it is required to manage 1 to n servers, we should able re purpose virtual machines or workload resources at any point time and use the same for something different without having to think about it.

5) Architecting For Cloud: As we move into a stateless world and asynchronous modalities across all layers, the architectural discussion on cloud re-opened up for big debate what would a starting point be for an architect really be when he/she is migrating an existing application to a cloud. The slide gives a flavor on what would an architect really start pondering on.  Where does the Architect start?

 

Decompose application by Functions: First Principle “Decompose application by Functions example : Order Management.”

The requirement here is to build flexible components that understand how to work on multiple resources, essentially cloud is one big pool of resource, we call it the fabric.

We start with Infrastructure which is the fabric. Going back to Fabric which is a pool of resources where the cloud application is deployed.

For example the Inventory Application the Inventory System(App Fabric) is a fabric which is drawn on by structuring the components in line of stateless app , process and database. The first level optimized is done at application fabric level.

The Inventory System Fabric in turn talks to the Infrastructure Fabric for resources.

Fabric is a pattern of computing architects have to start thinking about & that’s what the cloud is all about.

Windows Server is doing a lot of work around the same.

As application developer we need to starting thinking about virtual machines, resilience, elasticity & homogenize resources as key concepts.

Azure is elastic in itself for its resource if your application is written in a monolithic manner God Save you, you as the developer needs to design & code for elasticity. The important message is to learn the principles.

Decompose function by roles:  example web role, worker role , database role , integration  … cont’d in next section.

6) Asynchronous Paradigm

  Azure is designed for load balanced, stateless in the middle tier and state tier, we assume that components can be killed at any moment assuming the fabric controller is doing an optimization algorithm and considering you have more then one instance, so  a lot of out design points like putting things into registry,  settings, color schemes, file system in a the new bad design principle in cloud.

Azure doesn’t do squat for you on elasticity if your applications are not composable and cannot put the application on top of multiple tiers it’s a bad design.

That’s why we come to composition by function and then roles.  Functional Decomposition is not by functions and then roles.

You can scale the tier individually. There is whole bunch of things which is abstracted based on roles for example web role will have IIS and worker role has TCP/IP as the base communication standard.

Asynchronous paradigm brings a new problem to the database example “ you are doing a ticket reservation on an application on the cloud you commit the transaction so how do you write to the database non relational does it wait all the memory or write back immediately another design change. There have to buffers put in the system to protect the database.  No Sql is the new mantra for the database for cloud. While this may sound exciting but a lot of discussions needs to understand what does it mean to an application developer, this will be covered in a separate post.

7) Management of Cloud Applications

Cloud applications are automated application and so is the monitoring and management needs zero human intervention that’s where we are getting to.Landscape of Monitoring and Management is really large now…..

8) Insightful & Adaptive Applications

People ready Application is something on the lines of Windows 8 Metro or iPad. There is need to design for different form factors with different environment.  HTML 5 can solve some problem but conditional aspect like speed , bandwidth need to paid attention.  Know your users better and give them what they are looking or will look at a future date or will be productive to the user.

 

The Last word on this Post Private Cloud is nothing but a Mainframe………..

Next Post on Big Data…….

Platforms in the Cloud

Where will your next Application run.

 

I usually keep track on some cloud celebrities “what are they talking about”. I caught the excerpts on David Chappel “Platform in the Cloud”

This is old conference held sometime June 2k11, theme is around resetting for applications. 

The application platform is at default reset. In the history of our industry we have had many different hardware platform have seen in business computing the mainframe , minicomputers, pc client, pc based server, mobile, 5 platform types. The cloud platform is the 6 platform type. We are poised at resetting our default.  This is not a silver bullet to solve all our current problems

 

Currently how does an on premise look like

 

Today when we talk about cloud computing this is what we mean

The definition are pretty much well understood by most folks.

So how does the world look like with cloud computing

Its unlikely in our lifetime we may see the complete organization ecosystem will be in cloud

Roughly below is what is going to transpire

1) Private Cloud

2) Public Cloud Platform

Public Cloud Platforms:

Framework for Comparison

What is cloud Platform?

• It’s a platform developers build, run & use application.
• It lets you/developer which allows them to have self service access to a pool of resource
• With those resources you can ask them in a granular way example a vm for a  days. Cloud Platform you get resources in a granular way.
• The resource allocation is elastic “What I get I give back”
• Typically you pay how much you use.

To Distinguish b/w Private & Public

Public Cloud : A cloud platform run by a service provider made available to many end user organization “shared public resources”

Private Cloud : A cloud platform run solely for single end user organization, such as bank or retailer. The technology for both public & private cloud are similar but the economics are very different.

The economics of private cloud platform are very different from public cloud.

Hybrid cloud is the most common theme we see.

Cloud Platform Technologies

• Computing
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Storage

• Relational Storage
• Scale out storage
• Blobs

Many more things

• Messaging, identity , caching.

Computing – Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

IaaS

IaaS is a virtual machine on the cloud with the desired operating system, can control can install application. The end user will have manage the VM and will need administrative skills.

Contrasting IaaS with Paas Iin conjunction with computing

As developer one would just give the application and let PaaS define when and where to run you application, there is no requirement of administrative knowledge.  You cannot control.

Which is better? It depends.

If I want to move from existing application from on premise to the cloud one may end up using IaaS.

IaaS is more widely use then PaaS ( 10 times more revenue then IaaS). The reason is IaaS is the closed to an on premise. In the long term its PaaS will win, for new application. Considering one would want to caught down on the last mile administration cost.

 

Storage

Relational very similar to SQL. On cloud the relational storage may not be always be good in cases where I have huge amount of data.

Most public platform provides today scale out storage. No support fo Sql

It’s a large name value store.  Scale out will not displace Sql in the short term.

The downside of scale out is unknown technologes, few tools, significant data lock in.

Blobs – Binary Large Objects.Good for storage of videos and backups

Summary

Basic distinction is public & private. Above the summarization.

Lets walk through for 5 major providers.

• Microsoft
• VMWare
• Amazon
• Google
• Sales Force

 

Important Scenario where a Public Cloud Platforms

• App development : VM based dev/ test environment -  Currently been offered by Amazon.
• Apps with variable load- classic case tax filing- use a public cloud platform pay only for what you use, pay for the spike.
• Apps that do parallel processing – financial modeling
• Apps that need massive scale – next face book.
• Apps that need high reliability
• Apps with a short or unpredictable lifetime
• Apps that must fail fast or scale fast
• Apps that don’t fit well in an organizations data center
• Example – a business unit that wishes to avoids its IT department
• Apps that can benefit from external storage

The major discussion today on cloud is security

 

Private Clouds – From Server Virtualization to Private Clouds. – Its VM’s on demand in your enterprise.

Microsoft does this with hyper V in the organization datacenter. Its after all for IaaS in public the same technology is used in public cloud – IaaS. For a pure public cloud Windows Azure is the PaaS technology.

Windows Azure Platform

 

Windows Azure MSFT PAAS offering has different roles the web role, worker role & coming vm role. It has a load balancer

Pricing on Windows Azure

Compute $0.05/ hour to – $0.96 for each instance a wall clock.

Storage

Blobs and tables

• Data : $ 0.15 /GB per month
• Access: $0.01 / 10k operations

Relational

• $ 9.99 / GB per month

Bandwidth: $0.10 /GB in ,$ 0.15 / GB out

VMWare

VMWare does the same vCloud in private cloud and the same offering i.e vCloud in public.

Cloud Foundry is a PaaS technology for compute and storage option its an open source PaaS platform

Designed to support diverse technologies

• Frameworks: Spring, Rail etc..
• Storage : Mysql, MongoDB

Not yet available as a service

• VMWare provides a public/ dev test service
• Partner will provide commercial public platform

VM ware is looking for hosters to run there PaaS offering.

Amazon

Public Cloud Offering

EC2 is IaaS service

Paas Service – Elastic Beanstalk

Storage

• RDS – Relational Storage Service
• Simple DB
• S3 – Blob

Broader View of IaaS/ PaaS

More than cloud compute can be viewed through the IaaS/ PaaS lens

Example Cloud options for relations storage

Runs a database server in AWS EC2 VM

An IaaS storage service

Use a managed database server with AWS RDS

Use a managed database service with Sql Azure

• A Paas Service

Amazon pricing

Compute : $0.02/ hour to $3.68/ hour for each VM ( depending on size and OS)

Storage ( blobs)

• Data: $0.14 / GB per month to $ 0.037 / GB per month ( depending on the data size and redundancy.
• Access: $0.01/ 1000 PUT, COPY , POST , LIST operations, $ 0.01/ 10000 GET operations

Bandwidth: $ 0.10 /GB in , $ 0.15/ GB to $0.08 / GB out (depending on the volume)

Amazon private cloud – Eucalyptus company has EC2 and S3 on private cloud offering.

Comment

Commodization of IaaS

Public IaaS compute service is widely available today

Providers include

• GoGrid Cloud Hosting
• Telemark vCloud Express
• IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise
• Rackspace Cloud Servers : Leader in creating OpenStack , open source IaaS private/ public cloud platform software with NASA.

Google

Totally public cloud

AppEngine is Paas , no Datastore , Blob Store no relational storage.

 

The bottom line for Google whom are they targeting with no relational storage.

Pricing is very different

Compute: $0.10 / CPU hour – compute time

Storage

• Datastore: $0.15 GB/ GB per month
• Blobstore: $0.15 / GB per month

Bandwidth: $0.10/ GB in , $ 0.12 / GB out

App Engine allows some free usage every day

Google has realized the need to a relational storage and now begun to revamp . Very tiny market share.

Sales force.com

App Force, VMForce: some what of a PaaS offering, Sales force has been made for a very different problem set. Database.com not truly relational more like object database.

Pricing of Sales Force

 

 

The complete video is at http://www.davidchappell.com/video/index.php

Microsoft 2k12 Technical Roadmap

 

Kind of put these slides together Microsoft 2k12 products roadmap. The not so good ones are for Windows 8 client & some clarity on Windows 8 server. Overall very sluggish on cloud Azure improvement. No clear dates on Visual Studio 2k11. This is Microsoft after all.

Find the attached slide show which will help in knowing what’s planned for 2K12

PPL in Windows 8

 

Asynchronous architectures may sound to be a good thing. This certainly changes the way we write traditional code in the earlier platform. A lot of argument may be focused on Windows 8 Metro UI build more around the cloud strategy so I guess the async architectures does make perfect sense out there.

If I were to look into the tons millions of dollars done by companies in the earlier platforms Win 7 etc.. Async overdrive may end causing a large enough disruption from a programming model. With Async Architectures comes a new set of challenges

1. API changes.

2. The Testing would be a very different conversation

3. Ability of the application to handle multiple call backs, the load scenarios will run into various permutation.

If  I look at a web application it would easier to support the async architecture to a large extent as they are already there.

Latency tolerance can only be achieved by introducing asynchronous interactions to your architecture. The challenge becomes determining the components that can be decoupled and integrated via asynchronous interactions. An asynchronous architecture is far more than simply changing the request/response from a call to a series of messages though. The client is still expecting a response in a deterministic time. Asynchronous architectures shift from deterministic response time to probabilistic response time. Removing the determinism is uncomfortable for users and probably for your business units, but is critical to achieving true asynchronous interactions.

 

Any aspect of your architecture that is ignored will become a problem. This is a simple rule of doing design. As discussed in this article, latency is one aspect that must be considered. Decompose your architecture, taking systemic qualities into consideration. Decompose data, and give up on ACID levels of consistency. Assume that you will have highly latent connections between your components. If you take this approach, the result will be an architecture that is not only tolerant of broad geographic deployments, but is more responsive to your customers and more resilient to disasters.

References- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh464924(v=VS.85).aspx

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Sep-15.html

 

A very good read is http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh781020.aspx

Windows 8–The Release Dates–Will they deliver as planned…

 

The windows 8 dates

All looks to good on paper we are currently at shipping the public beta test version sometime in Feb 2k 12.  The wait from the public beta all the way to RTM is long one 180 days which kind of takes it to FY 13 Q1, Q2. By the way there still continuing x86 & x64 bit versions, surprisingly true.

And I will not be surprised if the actually shipping slips by a quarter .

Ripping Apart The Cloud Computing Reference Architecture by IBM- WIP….

 

IBM has had this notorious reputation of trying to pull out something from thin air and call it “Reference Architecture” , twisted for the purpose of either embedding sales thought for there product without much rationale. This document is no different , they have taken SOA and extended to Cloud Reference Architecture. The feedback to the grey heads at IBM please smile you are on Jay Leno. The link to the document ARC 101 - Architecture Overview Diagram

IBM has been late to enter on the cloud bandwagon. It seemed to finally jumped in with its Smart Cloud Computing initiative pretty much piggy backing on Amazon suite. How could IBM stay away from writing a grand Reference Architecture which seemingly IBM’s sweet spot for last 3 decades.  Walking through the IBM’s Cloud Reference Architecture following some of my observations.

As always the first thing I read in an IBM Reference Architecture(RA) document excerpt

“The Cloud Computing Reference Architecture is intended to be used as a blueprint / guide for architecting cloud implementations, driven by functional and non-functional requirements of the respective cloud implementation. Consequently, the CC RA should not be viewed as fine-granular deployment specification of just a single specific cloud implementation  “

As you dwell further in the document pass the initial sections suddenly out of the bolt of blue or the big blue throws in the old boys lingo “SOA” , Not surprisingly that’s one the favorite topic of IBM’s grey head “senior consultant” to go gaga over it. Having done the bit of lady gaga on SOA.

“Cloud and SOA Mix” Interesting weird.SOA has been around for a long time , a lot of organizations have implemented SOA within the ecosystem and outside to integrate with other partners, businesses so what’s the idea the IBM guys are trying portray here. Very confusing for any reader to understand but here the straight forward way of looking at what IBM grey heads are talking about

Most companies have built rich SOA based platforms buying IBM complete crap of ESB and the loads of products around that how do I see the vision in the cloud, So here is the answer the Hybrid Cloud Model will continue stretch your IBM ecosystem into cloud . Cloud computing enables this paradigm by adding cloud characteristics to the services being delivered & consumed.  So what’s the big difference the cloud “alities” have been introduced into the platform and given it back to the customer & IBM makes money, smart dollars oops sorry I meant smart cloud computing.

Please IBM give me something new…..

Next the document jumps on talking about definition of SOA from an open group stand point of view. How more confusing can you get……

The entire organization ecosystem would practice SOA, have ESB and have number of other business application, moving all of this to the cloud and assuming the platform has the cloud “alities” inbuilt can make some sense, but this is likely to be the focal point for most organization , they have the option to move to private, public cloud. So IBM by upgrading its product stack to the cloud “alities” has manage to make some sense. Big Blue there needs to a more precise approach to migrating on premise to cloud & that what would appeal to most of the crowd not some SOA cloud jargon,

The document further goes interject the idea of SOA into cloud a document excerpt “If you need to understand the CCRA its important you understand relationship between SOA & Cloud”. I would tend to agree to a certain degree the Cloud stack is been built on the idea “SOA – ESB implementation used with the principles of multi tenancy and throwing virtualization, this statement will really throw a lot of cloud expert ranting that “this is complete crap”.

CCRA uses SOA to build on the Cloud Story , the different service model IAAS, PAAS , SAAS , BPAAS. If do look at a classic SOA – ESB implementation for an enterprise organization introduce virtualization and throw all the alities of cloud it is indeed the cloud, no debating.

CCRA uses SOA Reference Architecture provided by the Open Group as basic Architecture Building Block story and expand on it further duh… tell me something which I don’t know.

Cloud The Past Present & The Future

 

It’s always good to roll back a little and see what the so called experts have told in the near past and how has it really turned out , I happen to reading the 2009 prediction by network on top 10 cloud companies to watch out http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2009/ndc3/051809-cloud-companies-to-watch.html for. Well when the article was written the outlook towards cloud was more around the providers so I cant really blame the author of things really not going as expected.

Come 2010, 2011 the cloud companies have had a lot of learning’s come by between the reel and real , the so called pretty business report vs the actual moolah making machine.

Some excerpts snatched from the internet…. Yawk its for 2012 only

As 2011 begins to wind down, we can look back on the progress made over the last 11 months with a lot of pride. The market stepped significantly forward with big gains in adoption by leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace, significant growth in the use of clouds for big data, training, test and development, the creation of landmark new services and the dawning of the App-Internet era. Cloud technologies matured nearly across the board as did transparency, security and best practice use and adoption. But there’s much more growth ahead as the cloud is no longer a toddler but has entered the awkward teenage years. And much as found in human development the cloud is now beginning to fight for its own identity, independence and place in society. The next few years will be a painful period of rebellion, defiance, exploration, experimentation and undoubtedly explosive creativity. While many of us would prefer our kids go from the cute pre-teen period straight to adulthood, we don’t become who we are without surviving the teenage years. For infrastructure & operations professionals, charged with bringing predictability to our company’s use of IT, this coming era of cloud computing will push us well outside of our comfort zone. We’ve all lived through market transitions like this one before but probably have forgotten that we were teens when the technologies we helped cement in place during that year were too. Cloud computing won’t play out exactly like client-server or the Internet era did, but there are strong similarities and the early years were the most painful. To that aim, it’s time to put our soothsayer’s hat back on and read the tarot for cloud in 2012. Here is what we expect over the next year and what you as the I&O parent should do about it.

1.       Shadow IT enters the light – deal with it. Tell me if this sounds familiar. A business leader invests in a new technology without the involvement of the IT team. He builds upon this investment creating new workflows, services and capabilities that become, he thinks, integral to doing business. Then the technology in question falls over. A frantic call comes in to the help desk that IT needs to take over the management and support of this “critical” application. Get ready for a lot more of this in 2012. Several I&O teams got this wakeup call in April 2011 when AWS had its well-publicized outage. While the I&O parent wanted to hold up this event and say, “See, I told you these services weren’t mature,” the developer's response was, “Well, I ain’t moving.” You can get ready for this by proactively engaging your developers and getting your hands dirty with these cloud services. Do it today.

2.       The uncool attempting to be cool – not cool. As a teen, you know it when you see it. Sadly many a marketer continues to try and latch onto a rebellious movement without the rebellion and just looks stupid. We have a name for this in the cloud market – cloudwashing. And sadly we’ve let more companies and I&O teams get away with this than we should. Expect that to stop in 2012 as the early adopters of cloud computing have enough experience now to see through these guises. In 2012, if your so-called cloud services aren’t highly standardized and automated capabilities delivering economies of scale, autonomy to the client and flexible cost control, you will become uncool. And in business that means unprofitable. Don’t let your private cloud efforts be uncool.

3.       A risky idea lands a big fish in jail. It’s a classic storyline that you can find any night on the Lifetime television network. A teen rebelling to show his independence pushes the limits going too far and ending up afoul of authority. Sadly, it’s the so-called good kids who draw the most attention when this happens. In 2012 we can almost count on the same playing out in the enterprise market. The most likely place will be an empowered business leader running afoul of compliancy laws which continue to evolve in arrears of technology advancement.  But that excuse won’t be a quality defense. You can prevent the two a.m. trip to bail out your empowered employees by getting in front of the issue through education and best practice sharing. Publish a cloud use policy today that states how your company can best use these new technologies, and write it using language that shows how to do it safely and encourages collaboration. Telling your teens don’t do cloud will just encourage misuse.

4.       Conservative leaders ban the cloud as unhealthy. Hollywood has taught us that you can’t ban dancing in rural Texas, but still conservative governments try. The reasoning is always the same – we are taking this action to protect our citizens and the community. While we don’t expect to see anyone try to outlaw cloud computing there’s already legislation underway in several countries to ban the use of cloud services not resident within that country. The USA Patriot Act had an initial chilling effect on international companies using cloud but led to strong overseas expansion in 2011. As the recession slides on, even the most successful cloud companies won’t be able to build data centers to bring their services into every country, and if your legislators think this means jobs then your country could be next. If your politicians start acting this way, make your voice heard. The Internet knows no bounds and neither should the cloud.

5.       The channel will face the music – reselling isn’t good enough anymore. For years I and my analyst brethren have been telling the value-added reseller market that they need to move away from revenue dependence on the resell of goods and services. Many have listened and now garner more revenue from consulting and unique intellectual property. Those who haven’t will get a serious wake-up call in 2012 – the cloud doesn’t need you. Cloud services are a direct-sell business and standardized, Internet-resident services don’t need local relationships to reach their customers. There’s nothing to install, customization is minimal and margins are thin and volume-based. For the channel to survive it must add value around cloud services and there’s plenty of opportunity to go around. As we’ve stated many times, while cloud services are standardized how each company uses them is not and that’s where all the opportunity lies. Just as I&O plays a role in supplementing the services provided by the cloud, the channel needs to provide expertise that’s hard to find (and hire) in-house.

6.       Cloud cred will matter. As we enter 2012 there are far more job openings for cloud experts than there are qualified candidates to fill them, and in 2012 this will become perhaps the biggest market growth inhibitor. And the hiring process is rapidly becoming untenable as hiring managers often don’t know what to look for and candidates are listing cloud experience on their resumes that they can’t actually back up. Businesses need signs of credibility and candidates need true training to fill this gap. HP and EMC have seized on this issue in Q4, both launching cloud training and certification programs for I&O professionals. A handful of universities have added cloud development courses (and even degrees) to their engineering schools. In 2012, get ready for an explosion in this market. But in the meantime, if you have true cloud credibility you will find other ways of telling the world...

7.       Cloud battles will showcase talent and advance best practices. You won’t have to go to 8 Mile to see it, but you won’t find it at CloudExpo either. Developers and operations professionals who are pushing the cloud limits are starting to show off their skills to their peers, but those who labor for brand names can’t do it in the public light, so they are finding other ways to showcase their skills. For every official corporate cloud project there is today, there are 2 to 3 innovative start-up or test and development projects being built by the same people. Some of these are simply showcases for their skills that can be shared with friends, built upon or attacked to make them better. They are often used as a test bed to drive enhancements to the corporate effort. But increasingly these micro-efforts are being used to back up claims on a resume or take its place. The biggest users of cloud computing are in the audience for these efforts and when they find one that is legit, the designer quickly finds a job offer in their in-box. These showcases are being privately shared today, and every talented cloud developer is looking to get noticed for their props. You can fuel this by sponsoring this activity in a hosted private cloud or within your public cloud tenancy. AWS  encourages it with its free-for-a-year very small VMs. The events market can fuel these efforts by creating unconferences for this purpose. Look for the first of these in 2012.

8.       Monkeys will go legit. Skateboarding used to be menacing to pedestrians and building managers until they built skate parks. Now Joe Citizen is safe to walk around and top skateboarders make millions. In the last several years, Netflix decided that disruptive behavior like this was a good thing and started menacing its developers with what it calls Chaos Monkeys, evil code crashers that invade its core services and take them down. These autobots got their thrill from goofy-footing over API calls, crashing executables and taking threads for thrill rides through endless loops. Its monkeys taught developers to code around the monkeys and the result was better code, higher uptime and leaner services. In the cloud, services are built over commodity infrastructure that is not only less reliable but expected to fail. If your code can’t handle this, it doesn’t belong in the skate park. In 2012, expect to see monkeys become a true part of the development process for cloud-targeted applications. Open source and at least one commercial monkey suite will come to market making all of us better and as a result...

9.       Your company will survive a major cloud outage. It happens to every cloud service. The sooner you learn to deal with cloud outages the better off you will be. If you have seen any Jackass movie you know that young people seem to be able to withstand an incredible amount of punishment. Put us old-line parents through the same and we might not come out of the hospital. Applications sadly hold to this metaphor. Pick up a traditional application from your data center and move it, unchanged to the cloud, and you are simply asking for trouble. This is why the cloud is dominated by new applications today. As you look to migrate more of your application portfolio to the cloud you will have to transition these applications to the new architecture, preparing them to survive component failures, service outages and “noisy neighbors.” As you gain experience with this you will start to identify the patterns of design and replication that get you past these annoyances. For every company that went down in the cloud last year there were a third as many who didn’t. Next year, that surviving company will be you. That’s when you will know you can invest more in the cloud. Which will mean…

10.   You will finally have to budget for public cloud spend. And this won’t be easy. Budgeting for your teen is a ridiculous challenge as you have to support their seemingly fickle swings between interests (basketball one day, band the next, a burgeoning rap career, then YouTube reality superstar after that) and the long-term costs of college and when they graduate and come home to live with you for ten more years. Budgeting for cloud is just as challenging  and requires I&O professionals to get comfortable with change. In IT we have had it easy thus far, as nearly every piece of technology could be bought outright or contracted long term – 3-5 years with a healthy discount for loyalty. Clouds are pay per use platforms and that’s a good thing as you don’t want to lock in your commitments to them because the use patterns will change over time. Long term, yes, you will be facing on-going cloud consumption bills and you can count on them being higher than you’d like. Right now, you can minimize costs by embracing cloud economics and working with your developers and business units to understand the cost models and how to leverage them most cost effectively. To do this, you have to engage with them on how they are using the cloud today, and through direct hands-on experience yourself, guide them on how to make better use of the cloud without incurring undo expenses.

While the idea of corporate IT being invaded by a bunch of teens may sound daunting, remember that you once were one yourself, as were the technologies you take for granted today. Think back on how you survived then, and making the most of cloud in 2012 will become clear and a lot less scary.        

Cloud Continuation Series

 

Towards Consumerization is mantra from Gartner for 2k12 Cloud specific. Although the IT & P&L is moving out of the hands of the CTO's and is infact hottest topic of the debate - http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2011/20tech/index-252234.html. So whats the trend really looking like, This what Gartner has to say,

1)Low-cost cloud services will cannibalize up to 15% of top outsourcing players' revenue by 2015.

Just as low-cost airlines disrupted the transportation industry, the projected $1 trillion IT services market is facing further disruption from industrialized low-cost IT services (ILCS), which Gartner describes as "an emerging market force that will alter the common perceptions of pricing and value of IT services." Vendors will need to invest in and adopt a new cloud-based, industrialized services strategy, the research firm says.

I think this is wishful thinking,Airline is a bad example Gartner’s incomplete research really shows up here.

 

 

2. The investment bubble will burst for consumer social networks in 2013, and for enterprise social software companies in 2014.

In the consumer social network space, there's a large crop of vendors with overlapping features competing for a finite audience. In the enterprise market, small vendors are struggling to grow, consolidation is imminent, and big players such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google and VMware are muscling in on the action, Gartner says. "While substantial excitement will be raised by private firms going public, valuations of smaller independent vendors will diminish as recognition sets in that the opportunities for market differentiation and fast growth has eroded."

Gartner is typically missing out the investment bubble pie includes the System Integrator’s & Services companies which indeed have the bulk of business in form the business ip. So kind of short sighted

 

3. At least 50% of enterprise email users will rely primarily on a browser, tablet or mobile client instead of a desktop client by 2016.

As the options for email clients continue to grow, the need for mobile device management platforms will soar and suppliers will be pressured to support more collaboration services, including instant messaging, Web conferencing, social networking and shared workspaces.

Missing again how many folks would want a limited capability on Single Window Interface like browser , MDI is something which will continue to connect with mainstream, what can happen “ I don’t care where my mail server is cloud or on premise I just need to access it from various clients”

 

4. Mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4-to-1 by 2015.

"Smartphones and tablets represent more than 90 percent of the new net growth in device adoption for the coming four years, and increasing application platform capability across all classes of mobile phones is spurring a new frontier of innovation, particularly where mobile capabilities can be integrated with location, presence and social information to enhance the usefulness," Gartner says.

Murphy’s Law If Mobile Smart Phone is the way then it is & so is slate leading to displacement of PC’s

5.)40% of enterprises will make proof of independent security testing a precondition for using any type of cloud service by 2016.

Third-party testers won't be the only way for enterprises to evaluate cloud services for their security capabilities. Inspectors' certifications will become a viable alternative or complement to third-party testing, Gartner says. "This means that instead of requesting that a third-party security vendor conduct testing on the enterprise's behalf, the enterprise will be satisfied by a cloud provider's certificate stating that a reputable third-party security vendor has already tested its applications."

This is a good area for security companies to come up and sign for liability appetite. CA may sign up for the security SLA.

 

6. More than 50% of Global 1000 companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in the public cloud by year-end 2016.

Under pressure to reduce costs and operate more efficiently, more than 20% of organizations are already selectively storing customer-sensitive data in a hybrid cloud environment, Gartner says.

I think more than 50%

7. 35% of enterprise IT expenditures for most organizations will be managed outside the IT department's budget by 2015.

Business managers and individual employees are demanding more control over the IT expenditures related to their jobs. "CIOs will see some of their current budget simply reallocated to other areas of the business. In other cases, IT projects will be redefined as business projects with line-of-business managers in control," Gartner predicts.

I think more than 50%

 

8. 20% of Asia-sourced finished goods and assemblies consumed in the U.S. will shift to the Americas by 2015.

Many companies that serve the U.S. market will shift their sources of supply from Asia to the Americas, including Latin America, Canada and the U.S., thanks to political, environmental, economic and supply chain risks, Gartner says. "Except in cases where there is a unique manufacturing process or product intellectual property, most products are candidates to be relocated."

Wishful thinking Gartner please consider the cost of shifting these operations.

 

9. The financial impact of cybercrime will grow 10% per year through 2016, due to the continuing discovery of new vulnerabilities.

Growth in consumerization and cloud computing will lead to the introduction of new software vulnerabilities and attack methods by financially motivated hackers, Gartner warns. "The combination of new vulnerabilities and more targeted attacks will lead to continued growth in bottom-line financial impact because of successful cyber attacks."

Stricter SLA’s for security means high risk insurance and 10% cybercrime is kind of low.

 

10. The prices for 80% of cloud services will include a global energy surcharge by 2015.

Some cloud data center operators already include an energy surcharge in their pricing package, and Gartner expects to see more providers follow suit. Business and IT leaders should be prepared to see it included in future cloud service contracts.

There will be a Green Tax coming soon

11. More than 85% of Fortune 500 organizations will fail to effectively exploit big data for competitive advantage through 2015.

Most organizations are in no shape to handle the technical and management challenges posed by big data, Gartner says. "Collecting and analyzing the data is not enough -- it must be presented in a timely fashion so that decisions are made as a direct consequence that have a material impact on the productivity, profitability or efficiency of the organization." As a result, most won't be able to exploit available data for competitive advantage.

Big Data – Please analyze it in context with realism

 

For more details, check out Gartner's report, "Gartner's Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2012 and Beyond: Control Slips Away."

Worst Kept Secrets of the Big 4

The headline told the story, as good headlines often do. "What Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and SAP (NYSE: SAP) Don't Tell Customers" identifies, in Gaughan's opinion, the primary strategies or approaches to the market employed by the big four software companies. There's room to quibble with this, but there are also elements of truth. I hope you'll click the link and read the rather short piece; here are the major takeaways:

• Microsoft mainly wants to protect its Windows and Office franchises.
• Oracle products don't really work well together.
• IBM wants to take over your IT strategy.
• SAP confuses customers with pricing.

Complete article - http://www.technewsworld.com/story/73816.html

Domain Design- Finally getting a greater Adoption

Domain Design & Architecture have been a avid follower on this topic some good work coming our way
http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/domain-driven-design-quickly


http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd419654.aspx

Lync Mobile on Android

Free Lync Mobile Clients on Android , Apple iOS, finally the inevitable is happening acknowledging Android & Apple iOS step one MSFT seems to the first thing correct.
http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/product-roadmaps/15-enterprise-software-roadmap/3345-template-for-new-article-brief.html

Windows RunTime–Windows 8

 

With the launch of Windows 8 comes a new disruption for developer they call it the Windows RunTime(WRT). A decade ago we worked on Win 32 API as years progressed .NET came in & with it came a host of easier language C# , VB.NET.  Microsoft has continued to keep Win 32 API usable via .NET via P/Invoke and some directly via .NET with additional supportability.

There has been an oblivious thought process to keep Win 32 alive since its early days till now & reason to , Architecturally speaking the paradigm shift to richer UI with slate, tablet as next gen users, it was poised to look at something new faster using Win 32 native system via inbuilt plumbing for the .NET user enabling them to build Metro Style Application.

The need of the hour has been to simplify Win 32 layer to introducing WRT layer simplified and can be used by C#, VB.NET developer.

To know more about WRT refer to these session

 

Key Take away

1) It is not based on .NET, only exposed to it (a bit like COM interop, but much more seamless... e.g. no interop assemblies)..

2) At the lowest level, WinRT is an object model defined on ABI level. It uses COM as a base (so every WinRT object implements IUnknown and does refcounting), and builds from there. It does add quite a lot of new concepts in comparison to COM of old, most of which come directly from .NET - for example, WinRT object model has delegates, and events are done .NET-style (with delegates and add/remove subscriber methods, one per event) rather than the old COM model of event sources and sinks. Of other notable things, WinRT also has parametrized ("generic") interfaces.

3)One other big change is that all WinRT components have metadata available for them, just like .NET assemblies. In COM you kinda sorta had that with typelibs, but not every COM component had them. For WinRT, the metadata is contained in .winmd files - look inside "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Windows Metadata\" in Developer Preview. If you poke around, you'll see that they are actually CLI assemblies with no code, just metadata tables. You can open them with ILDASM, in fact. Note, this doesn't mean that WinRT itself is managed - it simply reuses the file format.

4) Does WRT interact with CLR – No Something which I am not sure still hunting answers but my hunch is no.

Couple of other important links

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/19/programming_for_windows_8/

From the looks of WRT its likely to future programming considering the form factor is the slate & the tablet, I’m quite sure the WPF to build the Metro Style UI would be sucking on performance big time so the brain wave why don’t we rewire & use com with win 32 to do the same job.

How long does this idea go well with the developers is shaky.

Managed Extensibility Framework in .NET 4.0

 

Had a lot of catching up to do on .NET 4.0 & .NET 4.5, I stumbled upon the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) new to .NET 4.0.  A good start to understand the MEF would be to run through the channel 9 series of videos at

• http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/kreekman/TechDays-2010-Managed-Extensibility-Framework-MEF-through-Silverlight (.NET 4.0)
• http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/NET-45-Oleg-Lvovitch-and-Kevin-Ransom-Managed-Extensibility-Framework-MEF-20 (This is more of .NET 4.5 pitch)

In case you want to run through a sample look at Visual Studio 2010 Training KIT - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=23507

MEF derives a lot of its thought process of the classical design problem statement “ My client application need certain features down the line I’m sure there are licensed at a premium price but I’m not sure if I will be include this in my deployment kit”.

Or in other word look at the USB its plug an play can accept any kind of devices on the fly as long it adheres to USB standards.  This is a classical interface based designing where one may go define a standard operating interface for USB ( its related operations).

Obviously if a designer intends to solve this problem the interface design way he/she would publish a standard interface have every new component implement this interface & write the binary locations in the config file and have the code load up this assembly.

Interestingly MEF encapsulates the assembly loading part but it does have all components honor the Interface Definition Commitment no moving from this.

What it means for the .NET world I can add new functionality to the client application without having to change the client codebase, just copy paste the new assembly which implements the new interface in the application bin directory and you are pretty much done.

In short the key take away from .NET developer

• Use MEF pattern for extensibility of components, which can go in as separate deployable unit on demand or at a later stage.
• You can go Dependency or IOC this is a lot cleaner
• Singleton is good to use in the application what about scenario where I may want to move to Multi instance if lifetime management behavior is embedded in the core application I need rewrite it would be good to abstract the lifetime management outside of the application by going MEF using PartCreationPolicy
• Dependency Resolution: Good part of under the hood MEF has been written to load up all the related dependencies to the new type loaded.
• Modularity: MEF allows for modularity by allowing you to separate functionality into different modules and load them dynamically as needed.  Imagine a large application that has ten menu items, but users typically may only go into one.Only when the user needs a piece of functionality will their application download the extension and make it available. This allows them to get up and running faster and conserves resources by only supplying what is needed.

In short life for a .NET developer is highly simplified with MEF as compared to the earlier options for building composable apps. Leaving with

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee291628.aspx – a good read for a finish.

To make things better in scenarios one can end up using Lazy Loading as the data loading can be deferred to point of usage. Multiple Implementation Pattern of  Lazy Loading

• Lazy Initialization
• Virtual Proxy
• Ghost
• Value Holder.

 

Using MEF for unmanaged world is still a thought , some answer could be reasoning out of introduction of Windows Runtime in Windows 8 which in a way is more closer to un managed world, so there is likely possibility in the future using Windows Runtime with MEF.

Cloud - The Happening

I was walking by a cafe in New York in the nineties and could'nt help noticing my dear indian friend who was about to have a coffee was slightly hesitant to use his credit card in the small outlet. About 15 years down the line I see the same outlet and the so called magnifiicent use of credit cards is roaring. What does this have to do with Cloud well similar situation lets talk 15 years down the line, companies confidence in using Cloud will only go up.
Like credit cards has seen its phase from non acceptance to daily cant live without item so will cloud.
Most companies today have gone past the definition phase of cloud and thats good. Most SI, software consulting companies have begun to invest a huge in building cloud expertise. While SI incubate and build the capacity I think they are also cognizant to the fact that the cloud discussions with the customer will be very different.  What's is it in for the SI who brings the organizations to cloud a lot , one time migration cost, annuity based business for next 20 years.
Here comes the catch - The discussions with CxO's of the companies is going to very different somewhat like "Can you take my an entire ecosystem into cloud in agile manner within next 6 months & reduce my IT cost by 30% YOY", What does mean to the SI " moving a hybrid ecosystem to a hybrid cloud and taking complete ownership of the SLAs and making dollars at the end of the day. While cloud provider make there bit on low hangers its the SI who will make the bulk of the money and pass a smaller pie to the Cloud provider.
The discussion is really not going to be around "Can you move 1 application to azure , aws etc..." Its a one bullet agenda "Can you move my ecosystem to cloud and give a 30% savings on IT costs, so that I go home on a larger bonus".

Duqu / Stuxnet are Real

Built on Stuxnet code, the strategic new variant appears to have been developed for espionage but researchers are squabbling over the real target of the virus, while still trying to understand how it spreads and who or what it targets.

One security company says it is also designed to attack Certificate Authorities (CA), the very institutions that issue the digital certificates that make up the trust base of the internet. It creates a certificate from the companies CA. What an innovative idea.
Stuxnet which was specifically designed to take over industrial control systems – mainly by Siemens - used in critical infrastructure installations such as nuclear facilities
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/new-virus-a-cyber-attack-in-the-making-20111020-1m8t2.html#ixzz1cOJLm9rN

Oracle - Sun Accquisation

With Oracle's Sun Accquisation a lot of questions come around with Java JDK and one which often kicked Sun hard was support . Oracle seems to have got that working http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/173782. Oracle will be releasing Java 7 officially this year soon and have a clear support agreement for the same. While this brings in a lot more credibility to Java a Platform and silences a lot of critics on Java Open Source Areas.

Who will IBM Accquire Next -

Who Will IBM Acquire Next?

• Eucalyptus
• RightScale
• Cloud.com
• AppDynamics
• New Relic
• Appirio
• Xorbix
• GenPact
• Cognizant
• ManageEngine
• NetSuite
• Salesforce.com
• Work Day
• Juniper
• Brocade
• Citrix
• EMC
• Tintri
• Informatica
• SAS

Oracle - Heading towards a Unique Value Proposition

Browsing the list of Oracle's Accquisation the last one been Right Now Technology Cloud CRM as of Oct 24th 2011, Oracle seems to moving up the ladder of having everything under the sun for the customer. One Stop Shop.
The next best guess is likely to be its accquisation in the Mobility Market. With all the forces getting aligned it for a one stop shop it will be interesting to watch the mobile space now...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle.

For its competitor I;m sure everyone is building  COMBAT strategy soon.

Product Roadmaps Microsoft

http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/product-roadmaps.html

Sync fw Toolkit 4.0 very interesting - " extends Microsoft's data synchronization platform to non-Windows devices such as the Apple iPhone, and mobile devices based on Google's Android OS, substantially expanding the reach of the technology"

Forrester: Tech Changes to Expect in Next 3 Years

Forrester: Tech Changes to Expect in Next 3 Years

Business Intelligence tools, mobile apps and cloud application platforms are areas that will evolve and create significantly more business value between today and 2014

In the article http://www.cio.com/article/692280/Forrester_Tech_Changes_to_Expect_in_Next_3_Years
Forrester speaks on 3 tech changes. For each of these areas

• BI - this has always been a area of interest across verticals. Companies have brought some great tools in this area, The question remains provision of the intelligence at the speed of light. Very few platforms can deliver this kind of performance. We are moving into an era where a micro second can be decider for the company to be make money , a government to response to a possible terrorist attack.
• Mobile Apps; With Android & Apple war heating up , Mobile does take the centre stage of revenue making for most software companies, The trend of software companies possibly buying out a mobile companies and the equation of for every PC in the world there 50 mobiles, a 1:50 ratio is definitely where most companies will making profit. The PC era is over.
• Cloud: Very confused is the state of most companies, The trend of moving to cloud is slow. The offerings from most IT software cloud specialization companies are highly obscure and for the end customer it only leaves confusion.