Enterprise Clouds

Posted by TomRose on February 6, 2010 under EA, Innovation, Virtualization | Be the First to Comment

Cloud Computing is starting to mature, and evolve into something that brings tremendous value not only to companies but consumers. Amazon and Google have their offerings, then others like Cloud Foundry extending on Amazon’s cloud easing the deployment of Java, Spring, and Grails based applications.

Regardless of outsourced infrastructure or in-house organizations, Cloud Computing is the model to embrace. Setup, configuration, and deployments have to be compressed from months, weeks, days to hours and minutes. Configuration, utilization, as well as system and application monitoring has to be standardized instead of a one-off for every solution that is deployed. The technology designs that are deployed today are already complex, and making each one do the basics different every time, is just too costly in terms of setup, and ongoing support. So internal private clouds or outsourced private/public are where the world is evolving.

Now up through the infrastructure world, and into software applications. I have never embraced the Ruby, Rails, and now Grails models, as I felt the scripting languages loose typing and constrained development models could only work for a small set of applications, and fell apart on more complex applications. However, after working with Groovy and Grails for about a year now, I have to say I was wrong. Obviously, one can hack around in these dynamic tools and create a mess, but that can be said for just about any software technology. I like the ease of use in development, added capabilities like closures and GORM, and then having all of Java available anytime it’s desired or needed. Maven and Grails together is still a bit cumbersome, but its moving in the right direction.

Because of cloud computing and these new software tools, the complexity of solution development, deployment, and support is coming down significantly, this should give new ideas a quick path to availability. Getting new consumer services to market faster, and more importantly, on the downside, getting them to failure as quick as possible without significant capital expense. Finding out what does not work quickly, then being able to move on to what does at a much faster clip.

Take a good look at Grails and Cloud Foundry, it’s the future unfolding.

http://www.cloudfoundry.com/

http://www.grailspodcast.com/

http://aws.amazon.com/

http://code.google.com/appengine/

Cheers!

Tom

Follow-up to XML Appliances

Posted by TomRose on August 5, 2009 under EA, SOA, Virtualization, XML | 2 Comments to Read

As a follow-up to “XML Appliances – Strategic Shift or Tactical Technology Flash”, I’m leaning toward a flash. Having purpose built hardware appliances for very specific needs can make sense, but as general middleware integration devices, I’m not buying into it.

For instance, physically hardened appliances as application level perimeter security devices seems to make great sense, as they have a very specific purpose in terms of application level logic they perform (security), plus their physical security attributes. Quickly, vendors move beyond specific purpose and start to position these devices as general purpose devices for enterprise integration, by definition, it’s no longer specific purpose, and the benefit/cost curve starts heading in the direction of zero fast.

As an industry we have moved away from purpose built hardware in the enterprise for decades, as the support cost is high for this model. As we move to virtualized environments and cloud computing, we are actually accelerating our move away from purposeful built hardware devices. So if these devices start popping up in the general purpose integration space in support of SOA, think long and hard about where your organization is headed in terms of infrastructure virtualization, and where these devices would fit in that strategy.