New IT models include providing a user-friendly experience commonly found in consumer app stores. The goals, challenges, and execution plan when creating an Enterprise App Store should be considered.
Why choose Apache Camel with Apache Tomcat
Apache Camel with Apache Tomcat provides a low-cost and lightweight integration framework. Is Apache Camel with Apache Tomcat a good fit for your project requirements?
New IT model
A New IT model is required to reduce delivery time and accelerate business agility. The New IT Delivery model strives to achieve open collaboration, micro-iterations, no wait states, and streamlined processes.
How are you building a pragmatic, open source driven game plan that incorporates New IT approach vectors?
The path to New IT requires incrementally moving away from traditional application platforms, traditional team structure, and traditional information flows. The New IT architecture underlying Responsive IT intelligently incorporates Cloud Platforms, BigData Analytics, Enterprise DevOps, and API first development.
Open Source Business Conference Impressions
At Open Source Business Conference 2013, conversations on innovation, disruption, and open source leadership dominated the sessions. The conference chair, Matt Assay, crafted a program where each presentation and conversation reinforced how traditional business strategies are being disrupted by new market dynamics. The dynamics are shifting power away from closed, proprietary corporate leadership towards open collaboration and user-led innovation. The shift is disrupting traditional business strategies, IT operation practices, and market dominance.
Open Source startups (e.g. HortonWorks, 10gen, Appcelerator, GitHub, Netflix, SUSE, and WSO2) are leading their respective technology domains by encouraging open collaboration, micro-iterations, and user-led innovation.
New Enterprise Drivers
The Breakup of the Corporation, Connected Business Strategies, The Now Generation, and The Long Tail are driving organizations towards a New Enterprise Future.
Traditional corporate structure is dissolving into flexible value-webs of business participants. The business participants dynamically band together on a project, disperse, and reform around new business opportunities. Because new discovery and connectivity mechanisms lower interaction cost, group formation and participation is fostered. Figure 1 below illustrates how organizational dynamics are changing and a New Enterprise is being born. Instead of all corporate functions being performed in-house, offshoring, outsourcing, temporary contractors, and dynamic partnerships drive today’s agile New Enterprise business.
Figure 1: The Breakup of the Corporation
DevOps Ticket Reduction
A reduction in DevOps tickets not only drives IT efficiency, but also creates a cultural shift where teams look forward to rapidly achieving accomplishments. Business stakeholders operate in an agile environment where no change request is too small, and rapidly testing business ideas is the new normal.
As a techie, I like to focus on the technology and IT process side of DevOps; bouncing around terms like ‘infrastructure as code’, ‘automated provisioning’, ‘continuous deployment’, and ‘continuous integration’. The value-prop is self-evident to me and many of my peers. Yet, for us to change corporate culture and rally around a New IT Plan, the main message focus must not be ’DevOps for DevOps Itself’, but to create a Responsive IT team that changes business-IT dynamics and accelerates business agility.
Cloud Native PaaS Architecture
Cloud platforms exhibiting Cloud Native PaaS architecture provide an opportunity to increase business innovation and creativity. Cloud native platform solutions shield teams from infrastructure details and inject new behavior into the application.
Cloud native PaaS architecture requires infrastructure innovation in provisioning, service governance, management, deployment, load-balancing, policy enforcement, and tenancy. Cloud native, innovative provisioning infrastructure increases tenant density and streamlines code deployment and synchronization. Multi-tenancy within middleware containers enables teams to customize applications and services per consumer by changing run-time configuration settings instead of provisioning new instances.
Step up to the open source major league
Many IT leaders prefer to buy their application infrastructure software from a single vendor. When I was at Burton Group, Anne Thomas Manes and I called the providers delivering comprehensive offerings ‘super-platform vendors’. In a recent report, Gartner helps teams understand the trade-offs associated with the super-platform vendor strategy, and summarizes the strengths and cautions of comprehensive application infrastructure vendors.
Providing a who’s who in the vendor market, this research offers basic profiles for vendors that qualify to provide a comprehensive set of application infrastructure supporting an organization’s projects in the next three to five years.
Gartner cites WSO2 as a visionary in all three Magic Quadrants for Application Infrastructure including SOA Application Projects, Systematic Application Integration Projects, and Systematic SOA Infrastructure Projects. Of the vendors listed as options in the Comprehensive Application Infrastructure report, WSO2 is the only open source vendor included.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose
A New IT Plan: Enterprise DevOps PaaS, APIs, and Ecosystems
Open source PaaS, Open APIs, and Open Ecosystems are accelerating agility, empowering developers, and enabling innovative business strategies. In a recently published white paper, I describe how adopting a New IT plan can create a responsive IT team.
The path to New IT requires moving away from traditional application platforms, traditional team structure, and traditional information flows. Responsive IT teams are adapting their infrastructure, processes and tooling to re-invent the application platform and re-think application delivery. The New IT architecture underlying Responsive IT intelligently incorporates Cloud Platforms, BigData Analytics, Enterprise DevOps, and API first development.
How are you building a pragmatic, open source driven game plan that incorporates New IT approach vectors, Open DevOp PaaS, Open APIs, and Open Ecosystems?
Application Services Governance requires more than a SOA Registry
All SOA infrastructure products should participate in managing, storing, deciding, or enforcing policy. More than a SOA Governance registry is required. Application Services Governance Platforms provides advanced policy management capabilities across design-time, run-time, security, and lifecycle management focus areas.
Application Services Governance
Application Services Governance is a necessary step towards building a responsive IT organization and achieving business agility. By guiding teams through a streamlined application services development process, Application Services Governance Platforms optimize IT effectiveness, raise software quality, and reduce delivery timeframes.
Policy Management for APIs, Services, and Apps
Policy management is a governance cornerstone, and governance can serve as a foundation underlying an responsive IT organization and business agility.
Governance relies on policy, people, process and technology to guide business activity and deliver consistently positive outcomes. Effective governance channels business activity towards the ‘right’ path by making the right actions the path of least resistance. Policy management is used to specify the correct behavior, detail exception thresholds, and define corrective actions or notifications. Leading application services governance platforms deliver advanced policy management by conforming to a flexible architecture, covering significant policy categories, and spanning all lifecycle phases.
10 Ways To Participate In Open Source
I wonder why more open source users do not actively participate in the open source community and become committers or contributors.
After understanding a project’s capabilities and roadmap, anyone is able to start directly hacking the source code and contributing useful extensions. Because open source is a distributed, participatory meritocracy, the upside benefit is high and the barrier to entry is low—you don’t have to move, be employed by a Valley startup, give up your day job, or wait to obtain a 4 years for a degree.
A Path to Responsive IT
IT teams desire to gain an edge and improve their ability to grow business revenues, improve customer retention, and deliver timely and cost effective solutions. Often, outdated IT infrastructure, processes, and tooling impede efficient IT delivery; increases project delivery times, and inhibits business model flexibility. With disruptive New IT technologies (i.e. Cloud, mobile, social, Big Data, APIs), IT teams have a solid technology foundation that can transform business agility and build a more responsive organization. The path to a responsive organization requires empowering business teams to safely recognize business opportunity, adapt processes, and respond. A responsive IT team enables on-demand self-service, ticketless IT, a low cost structure, and widespread participation.
API and SOA convergence
As the technology discussion pivots to focus on APIs, teams are wondering how API and SOA converge. Are services simply being re-branded? Are APIs only good for mobile or external use cases? If we publish APIs, do we need SOA? Many architects believe that APIs do not apply to their projects or business use cases.
Accelerating Business Agility with App Factory DevOps PaaS
Queuing, waiting, and the status quo doesn’t fit well with today’s “now generation’. Business stakeholders, who drive revenue growth and customer retention, desire to rapidly seize opportunity and market share. They often view IT timeframes and capabilities as a poor match for today’s fast business-pace. A New IT model is required to reduce delivery time and accelerate business agility. DevOps PaaS brings no waits, faster phase execution, widespread accessibility, rapid grassroots innovation, and increased resource availability to IT projects.
PaaS Services and Backend as a Service (BaaS)
During the API Strategy Conference panel discussion on Backend as a Service (BaaS), I was struck by the lack of clarity around BaaS market space boundaries and roadmaps. While BaaS is currently well tuned for mobile client backend use cases, the market definition is on a collision course with Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Cobiacomm Tag Clouds
Since re-starting my blog with a focus on architecture, PaaS, SOA, API Management, Big Data, and DevOps, I have seen increasing visitor interest in my content. With a super-majority of my visitors arriving via organic search, understanding how blog page meta-data and content aligns with referral search terms and page rank will help amplify my message. I’ve started to use wordle.net to analyze keyword distribution on my blog pages, and tagcrowd.com to analyze search referral term distribution. The tools generate tag clouds that visualize keyword/term distribution.
A first pass simply collates search referral terms and does not normalize the list by search referral count. A visitor search for PaaS 50 times is counted equally as a search for SOA five times. In the tag cloud, the tag size for the search term indicates how many times the keyword is used in combination with other search term modifiers. For example, PaaS architecture, PaaS TCO, and DevOps PaaS. Figure 1 below illustrates the search term distribution:
Across all search term phrases, the tag cloud identifies the following common terms: ‘API’, ‘architecture’, ‘cloud’, ‘Enterprise Service Bus’, ‘ESB’, ‘paas’, ‘products’, and ‘vs WSO2′.
I used wordle.net to generate a tag cloud by evaluating keyword distribution across the cobiacomm RSS feed. A first pass limitation, the RSS feed only feeds blog post excerpt text up to the ‘read more…’ section break. Figure 2. below presents a tag cloud illustring keyword distribution across the cobiacomm RSS feed.
In the excerpt text, the blog post content demonstrates a focus on ‘architecture’, ‘application’, ‘business’, ‘cloud’, ‘open’, ‘platform’, ‘PaaS’, ‘source’, and ‘WSO2′.
Next pass will be to analyze full blog post content and properly weight referral search terms by term count.
Open Source Community Participation
I wonder why more open source users do not actively participate in the open source community and become committers or contributors. My open source participation led to a cost efficient and adaptable infrastructure for my company, and useful trade experience skills on my resume. My open source contributions established a professional network of mentors and improved my understanding of the project. Becoming an open source committer enhanced by personal brand, increased business opportunities, and filled important open source project gaps.
Interacting with open source community committers and recommending source code hacks is a valuable experience. During 2001-2003, I had the opportunity to interact with many hard-core, professional open source luminaries (e.g. Sam Ruby, James Snell, Glenn Daniels, Dims, Steve Loughran, and Sanjiva Weerawarana) across multiple organizations while participating in the Apache Axis project. I watched the distributed Axis team advance the project via IRC, code check-ins, and mailing list interactions. After understanding the project’s capabilities and roadmap (by writing many sample code service clients and providers), I gained the knowledge to start directly hacking the source code and contributing useful extensions. My everlasting thanks to Glenn Daniels for nominating me to be a committer! The open source community and committer experience established my open source street creds, raised my personal brand, led to presenting from the OSCON stage (and others), and helped build my consulting business.
Building a Cloud Ecosystem Architecture
InfoQ has posted the presentation video for my Building a Cloud Ecosystem Architecture presentation.
The abstract for the presentation:
Offering a business capability as a one-size-fits-one solution is a typical IT solution trap. One-size-fits-one solutions do not exhibit the adaptability or agility required to fulfill new business opportunities. Teams are intrigued by the cloud’s promise to create a one-size-fits-ALL solution. Implementing Cloud architecture concepts to build an ecosystem platform and a vertical Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) will accelerate the IT team’s ability to deliver solutions that support business growth objectives. A cloud ecosystem platform enables teams to deploy context-aware solutions, rapidly provision 3rd party application projects, automate governance approval tasks, ensure regulatory compliance, monetize user interactions, and host applications that seamlessly extend the user experience. By hosting all business partners as tenant applications within a multi-tenant environment, the ecosystem environment more readily aggregate and share business information.
In this session, Chris will describe:
• Why ecosystem platforms and tenant personalization increase business agility.
• When to extend the user experience by architecting multi-tenant, context-aware cloud applications and APIs.
• How frameworks and containers are evolving to deliver a multi-tenant environment from data to screen.
• How a vertical Platform-as-a-Service ensures regulatory compliance, automates governance approval tasks, and more readily shares business information and capabilities.
PaaS Cartridges and Polyglot Programming
DevOp teams want PaaS service efficiency with customization flexibility. Rather than fit development teams into a one-size-fits-all platform box, teams desire to extend a PaaS foundation with best-of-breed components, frameworks, and languages. While early 1.0 PaaS offerings (i.e. Google AppEngine, SalesForce.com) prescribed a specific development model and framework set, next-generation PaaS offers a polyglot PaaS and polyglot programming experience, delivering the ability to mix-and-match application platform capabilities into an customized application Platform as a Service (aPaaS) cloud.
Does your PaaS architecture show a paradigm shift?
PaaS empowers and enables both enterprise IT and shadow IT to accelerate agility and effectively respond to business demands. Do you agree? Chris Keene (@ckeene) has been shaking up the blogosphere, twitterverse, by stating
For most developers, the value proposition articulated by PaaS vendors just doesn’t seem all that different from what they can get from internal IT or external IaaS.
Correlating agility and innovation with release velocity
When you evaluate infrastructure vendors, do you correlate their agility and innovation with release velocity?
Actions To Take: Gartner’s SaaS Predictions for 2013
Robert Desisto recently posted Gartner’s 2013 Software as a Service predictions, and an IT professional asked me for my opinion. Here are my thoughts on how the SaaS predictions impact enterprise IT strategies and tactics:
Key findings from the Gartner predictions include:
- [SaaS] Service-level agreements (SLAs) will continue to lag behind customer needs.
My Take: Most likely true for enterprise organizations that require significant availability, reliability, and performance. Inserting a gateway/proxy in between the enterprise users and the SaaS application can help organizations monitor SaaS compliance with SLAs.
- Platform as a service (PaaS) will become a must-have for enterprise-class software as a service (SaaS) applications.
My Take: I would moderate this statement and propose “Teams developing SaaS applications will gain greater productivity by building on top of PaaS platforms that internally manage multi-tenancy, tenant-aware and service-aware load balancing, resource pooling, and elastic scalability. SaaS applications built as cloud-aware applications on multi-tenant, shared container PaaS will maximize scalability while reducing cost per tenant. what is your evaluation criteria for selecting an appropriate PaaS platform?
- The role of Internal Cloud Service Brokers will become more important for Enterprise SaaS intiatives.
My Take: Internal Cloud Service brokers can overlay identity provisioning, security and service level management on external Enterprise SaaS offerings. An internal cloud service broker can be implemented in-house by deploying an API manager product that will monitor usage, enforce access policies, enforce subscription policies, and provide a single user provisioning console.
What are your SaaS predictions that impact application service adoption?
PaaS Performance Metrics
What PaaS performance metrics are you using to measure the success of your Cloud platform initiative? Adopting a few PaaS performance metrics can help you avoid the high-expectations, low-benefit trap that befalls many IT transformation initiatives. Rather than measuring for measurement sake, PaaS performance metrics can help you benchmark benefits, encourage adoption across the organization, and justify continued investment.
Open Source SOA or Open Source ESB
Many teams are actively refreshing their integration platform and evaluating open source ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) capabilities and benefits. Fewer are evaluating their SOA strategy and establishing open source SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) platform infrastructure, metrics, and measurements required to guide teams towards agility and responsiveness.
Scale API infrastructure
API usage and demand may be unpredictable. Can you scale API infrastructure to meet unexpected peak loads? While you scale API infrastructure, can you guarantee availability and meet service level agreements? Building API solutions on a scalable API management platform will address demand challenges and ensure your API fulfills business demand.
What is an API Management Platform?
Teams use an API Management Platform to increase developer engagement, manage service levels, protect back-end systems, and grow development partnerships and interactions across internal and external teams. When you select an API Management Platform, look for a solution enabling developers to rapidly find, subscribe to, and evaluate the APIs that enterprises make available. The development tools should provide on-demand self-service subscription and collaboration channels, rapidly reducing the time and effort required to integrate and evaluate available API resources.
An API Management Platform contains five architecture components:
Netflix Open Sources Cloud Service Registry and Cloud Load Balancer
Netflix recently announced an open source Cloud service registry and Cloud load balancer project called Eureka. Eureka provides NetFlix’s public Cloud movie service with required PaaS framework components that every Cloud-Native environment requires. The service registry component tracks dynamic run-time Cloud instances as the PaaS controller spins instances up or tears them down. Client applications or PaaS framework components may access the REST based Eureka discovery service and learn where to direct Cloud service requests, proactively re-configure and optimize Cloud service connections, or reactively re-establish service after component failure. Eureka includes a simple load balancer algorithm providing round-robin traffic balancing.
DevOps meets ALM in the Cloud – Cloud DevOps Factory
Since teams started creating applications and services, significant challenges have continually hindered effective delivery and diminished development team’s reputations. Common challenges include:
- Long IT solution lead times leading towards an inability to capitalize on business opportunities
- Complex and disjointed development processes hindering IT agility and degrading ability to meet business demand
- Inaccurate project forecasts, non-repeatable processes, and rudimentary performance metrics leading to a persistent Business-IT perception gap
- Perennial tension between management compliance mandates and development approach, which prevents improving app delivery
How do we change development processes, development tooling, and run-time infrastructure to decrease time to market, streamline development processes, deliver on-time and budget, and meet compliance mandates?
Sonic, Savvion, and Actional sold
Progress Software recently unloaded Sonic, Savvion, and Actional to a niche enterprise software development company, Trilogy Software. Recognizing the poor brand fit between enterprise software development and enterprise application middleware, Trilogy will form a new entity, Aurea Software, to re-introduce the acquired portfolio into the market.
According to the press release, Scott Brighton, Aurea’s new CEO, will focus the company on a goal
“to take these market leading, enterprise-class products and place a renewed focus on creating the next generation iBPMS – with a specific emphasis on enabling critical, high-value business processes in key vertical markets.”
According to Jim Snur at Gartner, an iBPMS:
“allows organizations to have more intelligent processes that can be aimed at better operations minimally and innovative processes easily. The iBPMS does this by enhancing a businesses situational awareness by seeking patterns of interest, enabling quicker / more effective decisions through poly-analytics and rapid adaptation for appropriate actions through flexible processes”
An iBPMS focus is significantly different from the legacy standalone product lines focus on
- Develop high-quality, service-based applications
- Minimize downtime
- Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and enterprise messaging
- Rapidly and flexibly integrate services and applications across the enterprise
We will see if Progress’ decision to divest their on-premise integration portfolio was “the right thing for our customers and our partners that rely on them.” as stated by Progress VP Colleen Smith. How Aurea’s corporate focus will serve current customers using Sonic ESB or Sonic MQ as the cornerstone for their integration platform or SOA strategy remains to be seen. Whether development teams will embrace multiple best-of-breed vendors for iBPMS, aPaaS, iPaaS functionality also remains an open question.
As mentioned in the April Forrester and Gartner notes, the time is now to:
- Develop an exit strategy and limit new investments in Sonic and Actional products
- Implement exit strategies and reduce integration project investment on Sonic and Actional products
WSO2 stands ready to assist you in migrate away from legacy products and embrace open source innovation. WSO2 is the only open source company that has been industry recognized for delivering enterprise-ready middleware platforms spanning integration, service oriented architecture, application, and business process platform. Enterprise development teams use WSO2 enterprise middleware platforms to build traditional on-premise solutions or incorporate Cloud service characteristics (i.e. on-demand self-service, elastic scalability, resource pooling, consumption based pricing) and Cloud service capabilities (i.e. DevOps tooling, automated governance, service level management, metering and billing).
Hybrid cloud use cases
A client posed the following hybrid cloud use case and question:
An customer would have most (if not all) of their back office on-premise currently (i.e. in an data center). Over the next ~5 years, we expect three new scenarios to emerge:
1) back office functionality could move to SaaS (pure public cloud) where the function (billing, inventory management) is delivered as a SaaS resource
2) back office functionality could move to a hosted environment where the back office vendor hosts the application for
3) back office functionality could move to a colo facility where deploys servers in a neutral data center
Continue reading
API Evangelist Founder Will Co-present Webinar on the Building Blocks and Business Value of API Management
WSO2 Webinar on October 9, Will Examine API Management Best Practices for Extending Business Value Across Mobile, Cloud, Web 3.0, and Digital Business Ecosystems
The API management landscape is rapidly evolving to embrace mobile, cloud, Web 3.0, and digital business ecosystems. Increasingly, development teams are accessing API management tools and crafting strategies to realize business value. To share best practices for API management, WSO2 will present a webinar that examines the core features and advantages of managed APIs and how to optimize business value using the WSO2 API Manager.
The interactive session will feature Chris Haddad, WSO2 vice president of technology evangelism, and Kin Lane, founder of API Evangelist. Together they will explore:
- Emerging API economy and digital business ecosystems.
- How to assemble the building blocks of a successful API.
- When a complete open source API management platform delivers business value.
- Future trends in maximizing the value of APIs.
The one-hour technical webinar, “WSO2 Case Study – API Management Building Blocks and Business Value,” is being held on Tuesday, October 9, at 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. PDT. For more information, visit http://wso2.org/library/webinars/2012/10/wso2-case-study-api-management-building-blocks-business-value.
Webinar Presenters
Chris Haddad with
Kin Lane, founder of API Evangelist, brings a unique blend of IT, data, programming, product development, business development, and online and social media marketing. Kin specializes in API best practices, focusing on helping application developers understand what is possible with mobile and Web application development using APIs.
ESB use cases driving a successful ESB PoC
An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) may serve as the cornerstone of your Service Oriented Architecture infrastructure, or you may feel an ESB is unnecessary and cumbersome. Many integration projects contain simple requirements and use cases that warrant including an ESB, integration framework, or alternative platform components in the integration solution. Selecting the appropriate solution mix requires integration reference architecture guidelines that include a comprehensive decision matrix. Team members strive to avoid complexity and inefficiency by specifying an optimal platform component mix, defining ‘the right tool for the job’, and developing scalable, agile integration solutions.
Do you have clear architecture, solution, and ESB PoC guidelines describing how your organization can wisely select integration infrastructure components and products? Successful enterprise architects and solution architects create an integration reference architecture decision framework, ESB use cases, and product selection guidelines containing:
- ESB use cases driving integration platform component and integration framework selection.
- Common Request for Proposal (RFP) categories and line items.
- Tools describing when to include an ESB, integration framework, or alternative integration platform components (i.e. Data Services Server, API Manager, Governance Registry).
Join me for a WSO2 webinar describing ESB use cases, an ESB reference architecture framework, ESB adoption patterns, and ESB PoC success stories.
Cloud aware applications and PaaS architecture
David Linthicum has an excellent post bashing vendor-driven Cloud ‘thought leadership’ and Cloud offerings. Dave’s summer 2012 outlook on the Cloud Platform market:
“What’s missing is innovation and creativity. There are many problems that still need solving in the cloud computing space, and new approaches should be created to solve them.”
Promoting Service Reuse and Maximizing SOA Success
API management complements SOA Governance, drives service reuse, and maximizes Service Oriented Architecture success. Many development teams publish services, yet struggle to create a service architecture that is widely shared, re-used, and adopted across internal development teams. SOA governance programs often fall far short of encouraging consumer adoption, tracking service consumption, and illustrating business value. Too often, there is little or no insight into service reuse and:
- How to enable business functionality as an API
- Who is writing re-usable APIs and services
- Who is consuming APIs and services
- How APIs and services are being used
Managing API use case complexity
Will API adoption collapse as vendors push organizations towards managing API use case complexity? REST and API simplicity has driven interest in the emerging API management market. API management infrastructure smartly delivers RESTful interfaces, on-demand proxy provisioning, self-service key management, embedded usage tracking, and business focused API monetization But as vendors search for market messages and competitive advantage, and as customers search for a next-generation SOA middleware to drive legacy service adoption, will the original REST way be lost in use case complexity?
Free API Management with limits, or Freely Open API Management
The technorati and press are touting Apigee’s recent announcement, which declares a free API management offering. The Apigee announcement does offer significant end-user value, unless you want to run the API management infrastructure on-premise, or reach critical business mass.
API integration with no meetings
Can organizations perform API integration with no meetings? Moving at agile, startup speed requires auto-operations (auto-ops) and reducing human negotiations.
API security is a small piece of the API strategy puzzle
API security extends web application and web service security practices (e.g. SSL/TLS) to include access key management and OAuth2 authorization. When establishing an API strategy and comparing API management products, evaluate more than just API security. Important API strategy building blocks include:
- API security: includes access key management, authentication, authorization, audit
- API monitoring: subscription tracking by API version, usage by version, service level agreement violations, exceeding rate thresholds
- API governance: lifecycle activities related to version management, deprecation tactics, retirement strategies, and service tiers
- API monetization: includes establishing API billing rates, usage monitoring, API business value reports
- API publishing and provisioning: rapidly deploy managed interfaces onto the network
- API Store: self-service discovery, exploration, subscription, and evaluation
- API analytics: review API portfolio, usage patterns, and business optimization targets
Use Little Data analytics and make better business decisions
The University of Central Florida Business Incubation Program hosts CIO Community of Practice meetings, which provides a Big-Enterprise view of leading technology focus areas. CIOs and key IT representatives from leading Central Florida companies including Darden Restaurants, Harris Corporation, HD Supply, Siemens PG, The Boeing Company, and Walt Disney World Company met this week to discuss Big Data and analytics.
Use Business Activity Monitoring and Gain Business Visibility
Many organizations struggle to understand how their business performs. In an attempt to gain operational visibility and situational awareness, teams have created multitude reports, spreadsheets, key performance metrics, portals, and dashboards. Business analytics attempts to increase event correlation, enhance presentation, and increase business insight, but analytics often does little to increase real-time visibility. In between weekly, monthly, or quarterly analytic execution cycles, business managers guestimate how to increase supplies, adjust marketing campaigns, offer sales discounts, or hire additional resources.
Create a Comprehensive Business Visibility Environment
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Complex Event Processing (CEP) augments business analytics by contributing a high performance data capture framework, in-stream event correlation, alerts and notifications, knowledge mapping, flexible data storage, scalable Big Data processing, and real-time dashboards. By readily composing advanced middleware capabilities into a unified solution, teams are able to enhance information relevance and improve informational delivery. The middleware enables filtering, aggregating, mapping, and reducing large, multi-faceted datasets over greater temporal ranges with analytical processes composed using statistical languages, event correlation languages, and MapReduce script languages.
Open Source API Management
WSO2 has released the first open source API management platform. The platform is a complete solution for publishing APIs, creating and managing a developer community, scalably routing traffic, and securing API content. WSO2 API Manager is released under the Apache Software License 2.0.
Red Hat Enterprise Middleware comparison with Cloud-Native Middleware
Red Hat Enterprise Middleware delivers an open source platform supporting web applications, integration, Service Oriented Architecture, and data services. The Red Hat platform is missing many leading edge Cloud, mobile, Big Data, and API management components.
ESB Comparison
Can an eight year old product category, which is hotly contested by every middleware vendor, deliver unique and differentiating product offerings? When performing an ESB comparison, you will notice almost all Enterprise Service Bus products support enterprise integration patterns, deliver all required ESB features (i.e. web services, message transformation, protocol mediation, content routing), and offer a graphical development workbench. When technical evaluations focus on core performance and quality of service (i.e .reliability, availability, and scalability), proof of concept workloads must closely mirror expected production profiles and the evaluation effort ideally includes vendor participation.
Deploy ESB as a Service
In today’s business environment, increasing agility and lowering cost is a business imperative. Forward thinking development teams are deploying shared services (e.g. ESB-as-a-Service) instead of traditional middleware silos. Our total cost of ownership calculation indicates organizations can save significant software subscription cost, operations management effort, and infrastructure expense when deploying multi-tenant, shared container based application platform middleware services.
Many WSO2 clients run several WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus instances in production today, and we encourage our clients to evaluate how implementing ESBs within a Cloud Platform-as-a-Service environment reduces time to market and decreases ownership cost.
API Mutiny on Web 3.0
API developers are ready to stage a mutiny. Will the captains of Twitter, LinkedIn, and NetFlix make developers walk the plank?
During early market colonization days by Twitter, LinkedIn, NetFlix, Pinterist, and Instagram, the companies prioritize customer land grab over trade and commerce. Web 2.0 companies often choose to build distribution channels first. The accepted navigation route includes courting third party developers with Open APIs and pseudo Open Data. The data is freely available, readily accessible, and governed by limited commercial terms of service. The corporate path to monetization is through advertising and light data API linking rather than building a deep ecosystem platform. However, with smart API developers creating better customer experiences and challenging revenue growth, the company captains have decided to change the terms of service and limit third party API developer participation. All actions show the companies attempting to monetize their valuable asset and gain more gold coin, while limiting access by privateers.
Five Actions for Maximizing Your API Value
Software architects and developers can take five actions to avoid common API pitfalls, create business value, and monetize API assets:
- Embrace the Managed API
- Establish a Monetization Model
- Make APIs Easy for Developers to Access
- Employ Governance
- Monitor API Use
IT Briefcase has posted my article where you may read more about the five actions.
API Manager infrastructure delivers the tools you need to effectively perform the actions. The short video below explains the features and capabilities.
More resources (i.e. articles, videos, webinars, getting started guides, and downloadable bits) are available on our WSO2 API Manager product page.
Moving eGovernment to Cloud
For any Government organization needing to do more with less, eGovernment is the answer. eGovernment solutions cost effectively deliver information and enable transactions among citizens residing within a local geography. An eGovernment solution may also link various governmental groups supporting constituents. However, the role of eGovernment has been traditionally limited by the inherent cost and complexity of developing, integrating, and managing traditional server-based systems. To overcome these hurdles, government agencies are looking to cloud solutions as a way to radically scale service delivery while simultaneously minimizing the expenses related to IT infrastructure, application development and deployment, and operations. WSO2 has published a white paper examining demands faced by government agencies and how the cloud-native WSO2 eGovernment solution provides a powerful, highly flexible, and extensible platform that addressing eGovernment requirements in a cost effective manner.
For more information, download the paper at http://wso2.com/whitepapers/
Extending Node development with Jaggery framework
By itself, Node is not a complete web application development platform and only delivers half a solution. To create business applications, developers must add node modules to persist information (e.g. jQuery), create HTML views (e.g. Jade.js), model views (e.g. Ember.js, SproutCore), RESTFul services (e.g. ActiveJS, Backbone,js).