Ben Reid: Head in the Cloud

Gianpaolo Carraro - "Build vs Buy" decision making for the Cloud

Ben Reid — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:19:00 GMT

Essential reading from Gianpaolo Carraro's blog on the "Build vs Buy" decision making process for enterprises faced with opportunities for moving from internal IT to hosted Cloud Services (or somewhere in between!):

Cloudy Future for the Enterprise and most likely for ISVs too

What will e-government in 2020 look like? NZ Government 2007 Progress Report

Ben Reid — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:14:00 GMT

(Of interest to those of us here in the South Pacific and hopefully beyond!)

The NZ Government has just released its "New Zealand E-government 2007: Progress Towards Transformation" report, which gives a broad overview of the progress which has been made towards reaching the E-government strategy goal that: "By 2007, information and communication technologies will be integral to the delivery of government information, services and processes".

The report is downloadable / viewable online at:

http://www.e.govt.nz/resources/research/progress/

In particular, the final section poses the question What will e-government in 2020 look like?, and contains a number of "think piece" contributions which explore issues grouped under:

Enhancing stakeholder engagement
Innovation
Trust and Accountability
International context
Information

Some of the key questions raised include:

Is 'eDemocracy' a new opportunity or simply shifting what we already do online?
Will "e-government" have become embedded in business-as-usual service delivery in 2020?
Innovating institutional processes: the distinction between institutional preservation and democratic transformation

Worth taking a read to get a handle on the most up to date thinking in government - also take a look at Yenping Yeo's blog post covering the report:

http://blog.e.govt.nz/index.php/2008/06/19/progress-toward-transformation/

McKinsey Enterprise Software Customer Survey 2008: SaaS and SOA the two major trends driving innovation

Ben Reid — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:21:00 GMT

My main takeaways from the McKinsey Enterprise Software Customer Survey 2008:

- SaaS and SOA are the two (convergent) major trends driving enterprise software innovation

- A battleground is emerging between traditional ("mega") enterprise software vendors and larger SaaS incumbents

- Discussion of the rise of "SaaS platforms" (3 archetypes: Delivery platforms (eg Amazon EC2), Development Platforms (Bungee Labs, Coghead), Application-led platforms (SalesForce, NetSuite and Cisco-Webex).

- Speedy deployment and easy integration with existing IT are most important when choosing a SaaS platform vendor

All pretty straightforward sensible stuff but a good overview of the current (2 months ago?) state of play.

(Thanks Rod for pointing this one out.)

Some "Nephological" terminology for the Cloud: Cloudlets, Droplets and Membranes

Ben Reid — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:27:00 GMT

Following on from Microsoft's Gianpaolo Carraro with his recent posting on Nephology (the study of Clouds) being the hottest job description in the software industry, I thought I'd introduce some terminology which I've been using to help to conceptualize and model the logical view of the Cloud of services:

Definition: “The Cloud”
“The Cloud” is defined as “The universe of all web services”. This includes all web services which are available across the public internet, as well as all web services which are only available on private networks.

Definition: “Cloudlet”
A “Cloudlet” is defined as a subset of web services within The Cloud. The intention of the term is to allow the encapsulation of somehow related services into a single collection. For example, a Cloudlet may be defined as containing all of the services implementing a given business process, or all the services provided by a particular company, as illustrated below.

Definition: “Droplet”

The term “Droplet” continues the Cloud metaphor deeper. A Droplet is defined as a conceptual wrapper around a web service or group of web services denoting a particular set of common policies or properties. For example, a Droplet may denote a particular Authentication or Authorization policy, a Transaction policy, a Service Availability policy or a Licensing policy. (I envisage that each Droplet could correspond to a policy expressed using the WS-Policy standard, although there may be Droplets formed using other policy or property conventions.)

Definition: Membrane

Finally, the surface of a Droplet is called its Membrane, and every web service message (request / response) needs to cross the membrane to reach the service. As such, the membrane can fulfil two functions:

- When a service message (request or response) attempts to pass through the membrane, the membrane validates that the message satisfies the relevant policy.

- Also, the membrane acts as an event surface within the Cloud: when a service message attempts to pass through the membrane, then a "Cloud Event" occurs which can trigger off other web services (for example metering the web service, or auditing security).

I am developing this model further: I think that a lot of the complexity which the Cloud brings with it by virtue of being a "wide area service oriented architecture" can be simplified by breaking the Cloud down into smaller chunks. Any comments or suggestions are welcome!

Nicholas Carr's blog: Microsoft to put "many millions" of servers in cloud

Ben Reid — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:39:00 GMT

Nicholas Carr, outspoken author of Does IT Matter? and The Big Switch - Rewiring the world from Edison to Google comments on Bill Gates' farewell speech to Microsoft TechEd - Microsoft will be putting millions of servers into big data centres - the huge investments required will limit the construction of cloud-computing centers to just a handful of companies.

Read the article at http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/06/microsoft_to_pu.php, and read his books too!

Cisco open sources Etch: an alternative to SOAP?

Ben Reid — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:07:00 GMT

This is a really interesting development: Cisco has announced an alternative to the web-services protocol SOAP — and made it open source. The Etch messaging protocol was introduced at a developer's conference covering the new 2.5 release of the Cisco Unified Application Environment (CUAE), and Cisco says Etch will be more efficient than the SOAP standard. Further, the company will release the source code. Etch is slated to go into beta release this (Northern hemisphere) summer.

The story is covered on Builder AU: http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Cisco-cleans-up-with-SOAP-alternative-/0,339028227,339289365,00.htm - initial reception has been mixed. Obviously folks at W3C won't be particularly warm given the amount of work put into the SOAP / WSDL stack adoption. That said, if Cisco can claim a performance result which manages 50,000 Etch messages per second compared to only 900 SOAP calls, then there is a story to tell here. I wonder how the performance stacks up against other bindings (for example RESTful services over Http)...

Most interestingly, Cisco are driving Etch's presence into the market using an open source strategy. CNET news commentator Matt Asay has it spot on: "Proprietary software is a way to guard one's position. Open source is a way to create a new position."

Cloud storage pricing - article comparing Google's BigTable and Amazon SimpleDB

Ben Reid — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:13:00 GMT

As the options increase for storing structured data in the cloud, the current two largest players Amazon (SimpleDB) and Google (BigTable) have their pricing compared in this article: Google's BigTable Costs 10 Times Less than Amazon's SimpleDB. According to article author Todd Hoff, the price point is now at a point where a 1TB BigTable database will now cost about $180/month! Interestingly, Google's pricing for BigTable is the same range as Amazon's S3 service (unstructured "blob" storage) which points to Google's BigTable architecture being based upon the Google File System and effectively built around a blob storage economic model. Anyway, with pricing this competitive, the economics of the Cloud just took another step forward - even though at this stage these services do not have the feature richness of major enterprise database platforms, or evidence of robustness to operate within an enterprise context: however, how long can it be before they are....?

Blog migrating - comments down until June 1

Ben Reid — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:32:00 GMT

Just a quick note to say that HP blogs will be migrating to a new platform over the next week. As of tomorrow, May 23, I won't be posting to my blog and won't be able to receive any comments submitted. Please hold your comments until June 1 when the new site will be live.

Computerworld: Strong growth for SOA in Australia and NZ

Ben Reid — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:17:00 GMT

Computerworld recently reported that the SOA market in Australia and New Zealand will grow from an estimated A$221.3 million (US$207.2 million) in 2006 to reach A$748 million by 2010, representing a 36 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) between 2006 and 2010, according to research from Springboard Research.

In particular: "SOA has made remarkable inroads in the public sector. These SOA projects have been driven by governments' desire to better serve citizens, increase their level of transparency, and improve information-sharing across various agencies".

Read the full article at http://www.infoworld.com/news/feeds/08/05/11/Strong-growth-for-SOA-in-Australia-and-NZ.html

Obstacles to Cloud Computing discussed

Ben Reid — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:25:00 GMT

OK, so there's a lot of hype around at the moment around "Cloud computing", and as with any hype comes the backlash - yesterday Infoworld ran an article entitled "Cloudy picture for cloud computing" which discussed the (by now pretty well rehearsed) reasons why all applications are not moving from the corporate data centre just yet:

1. Data privacy
2. Security
3. Licensing
4. Applications
5. Interoperability
6. Compliance
7. SLAs
8. Network monitoring

Read the full article at:

http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/04/30/Cloudy-picture-for-cloud-computing_1.html

New Zealand Government launches igovt : trusted secure online services

Ben Reid — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:54:00 GMT

Interesting development in the field of citizen-facing Government services from New Zealand. The NZ Government State Services Commission (SSC) has (re-)launched the Government Login Service (GLS) as the first of a suite of "trusted secure" online services under the moniker "igovt".

For more information see https://www.i.govt.nz/

There is also an interesting background blog post from Vikram Kumar of SSC at http://blog.e.govt.nz/index.php/2008/04/23/why-igovt/

NZ has the advantage of being small and relatively isolated - only 4 million people at the last count, which makes the development of these services a little less involved than for larger states. I'd be interested if anyone has any direct comparisons with other countries around the world - who is currently leading with online Government services?

Views of the Cloud (2): A topology of submarine cables

Ben Reid — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:42:00 GMT

Physically, the Cloud is made up of the massive datacenters which provide processing capacity, together with all of the network connections in the world which provide the bandwidth to make it all work. Take a look at this map from the UK Guardian which illustrates how all the submarine cables in the world are arranged. According to this diagram, the world's total cable capacity is a staggering 7.1tbps (terabits per second) - and growing. Compare that image with the images of the logical topology of the internet at http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/2007/images/ascore-simple.2007_big.png and http://mundi.net/maps/maps_020/ - these are fascinating visualizations of the (early) infrastructure of the Cloud.

Views of the Cloud (1): Shipping container datacenter Lego

Ben Reid — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 06:55:00 GMT

In an ongoing attempt to make talk about "the Cloud" more tangible, here's the first in an occasional series looking at different "Views".

This time around a physical view: simply put, we know that the physical Cloud is a collection of massive data centres connected by massive bandwidth. Microsoft, Google, Amazon and many others (including HP) have been building out their data centres for a few years now. However, a post which caught my eye recently involves Microsoft's recent announcement that they will build their new datacentre in Chicago from up to 220 shipping containers, slotting them together in a modular fashion as needed. According to director of data centre services, Michael Manos: Microsoft are "trying to address scale with the cloud level services...trying to figure the best way to bring capacity online quickly." Basically, you can build your Cloud out of shipping-container sized Lego bricks!

Alternatively, you could actually float your data centre directly on the sea: International Data Security are opening the first of 50 (it says) ship-borne floating datacentres in San Francisco. In particular the floating datacentres require less planning constraints, and use sea water for cooling resulting in 30-40% power reductions.

Recently I read the sci-fi novel Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan which predicts that all manufacturing would be carried out on massive "raft" statelets which float offshore just outside international boundaries.

Someone out there's got to be planning that right now. ;-)

Shane Robison, HP CTO, talks about "A Bright Future in the Cloud"

Ben Reid — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:14:00 GMT

I get pretty excited about the strategic movement towards Cloud-based services happening right now in IT and all industries - there is a fundamental transformative shift going on which will affect the way we work, the way we do business and the way we live. This week in the UK Financial Times, Shane Robison - HP executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer - articulates some of his future vision of how everything, from work life to entertainment to communities, will be delivered "as a service" in the Cloud. In particular, he points out 5 trends to watch closely:

1. The digital world will converge with the physical world
2. The era of device-centric computing is over. Connectivity-centric computing will take centre stage
3. Publishing will be democratised
4. Crowd-sourcing is going mainstream
5. Enterprises will use radically different tools to make key business decisions, including systems to predict the future.

However, in order to realise this potential a new level of intelligence must be built into devices, networks and software.

You can read the full article at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f9950212-ea02-11dc-b3c9-0000779fd2ac.html

Steve Ballmer on Cloud Computing

Ben Reid — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:08:00 GMT

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, has an interview in the UK Financial Times today, in which he outlines Microsoft's Cloud Computing future vision, where a small "super group" of big technology companies run vast datacentres and the distinction between software, hardware and internet companies falls away.

Read about it at
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/013a4f44-e2f2-11dc-803f-0000779fd2ac.html