Category Archives: Platform as a Service

New IT model

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

Cloud Native PaaS Architecture

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

A New IT Plan: Enterprise DevOps PaaS, APIs, and Ecosystems

Posted on by

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?

Continue reading →

Accelerating Business Agility with App Factory DevOps PaaS

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

PaaS Services and Backend as a Service (BaaS)

Posted on by

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).

Continue reading →

Building a Cloud Ecosystem Architecture

Posted on by

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

Posted on by
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?

Posted on by

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.

 

Continue reading →

Actions To Take: Gartner’s SaaS Predictions for 2013

Posted on by

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.

 

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

Posted on by
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.

Sonic, Savvion, and Actional sold

Posted on by

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”

Source: Gartner Blog Network

 

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

Posted on by

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 →

Cloud aware applications and PaaS architecture

Posted on by

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.”

Continue reading →

Deploy ESB as a Service

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

Moving eGovernment to Cloud

Posted on by

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/moving-egovernment-to-the-cloud/

 

What is NoOps?

Posted on by

Make DevOps and NoOps a cornerstone of improving your software delivery; just don’t think NoOps PaaS entirely defines ‘What is True, Complete PaaS’.  The DevOps and NoOps movements promote quick project startup, rapid release iterations, and incremental solution testing. Lucas Carlson and Adron Hall post a good article on InfoQ describing how integrating development environments with runtime containers will accelerate iterative development tasks.  As teams incorporate provisioning and automation practices into the application platform, interest in NoOps and DevOps has grown.

Continue reading →

Cloud Native PaaS or Cloud Washed PaaS

Posted on by

With mainstream vendors (e.g. RedHat OpenShift, IBM Cloud Application Services, Oracle Public Cloud, ActiveState Stackato) promoting quickly pushing bits into the Cloud, smart development teams have established a clear Cloud Platform comparison criteria and a process to determine if the run-time PaaS will exhibit cloud characteristics and offer a Cloud Native instead of a Cloud Washed experience.

Continue reading →

Changing the Cloud Developer Experience; User, Workspace, API, Channel, and Service

Posted on by

PaaS and DevOps tooling is an opportunity to raise infrastructure abstraction.  DevOps tooling integrated with PaaS should shield developers from hardware infrastructure concerns and expose business entities.  The Cloud washed PaaS environments commonly do not shield application developers, integrators, and architects from infrastructure details (i.e. memory configuration, location, number of machine instances). While short-term benefit is derived by ‘quickly pushing bits into the Cloud’, the design and development experience remains the same.

Continue reading →

Cloud Native PaaS realizes Cloud Characteristics

Posted on by

Cloud Native PaaS run-time environments should significantly exhibit essential Cloud characteristics. The NIST Draft – Cloud Computing Synopsis and Recommendations defines Cloud characteristics as:

• On-demand self-service

• Broad network access

• Resource pooling

• Rapid elasticity

• Measured service

How do these characteristics influence run-time behavior and determine whether PaaS offerings are cloud washed or cloud native?

Continue reading →

Taming NoOps and Open Cloud Architecture with Cloud Governance

Posted on by

To serve enterprise organization needs, PaaS, NoOps, and fast code deployment must be grounded in effective automated governance. Automated governance enables application and infrastructure services to efficiently scale across numerous consumers and providers while effectively monetizing, maintaining, and securing consumer-provider interactions.  Effective automated governance mitigates risks, improves performance, and facilitates correct actions.

Continue reading →

Re-invent Software Delivery and Offer Your Business as a Service

Posted on by

As business leaders focus on growth during 2012, they are identifying business expansion and transformation opportunities.  The resulting IT mandate to rapidly evolve mobile and social interactions is forcing CIOs to re-invent their software delivery.  By following a straightforward four-step plan, CIOs can improve productivity, enhance agility, deliver timely solutions, and help fulfill strategic business growth goals.

Continue reading →

PaaS TCO and PaaS ROI: Multi-tenant, shared container PaaS

Posted on by

When investing in technology infrastructure, organizations commonly desire a positive return on investment (ROI) within six to twelve months and a lower PaaS TCO over the investment lifespan.  Does deployment topology sizing, tenant count, tenant density, and service mix significantly impact expense and influence ROI timeframe?

Continue reading →

Pinterest API and the Money Board

Posted on by

Pinterest is being touted as a web ecosystem platform that may potentially rival FaceBook.  To be a web ecosystem platform, an online website property publishes an API enabling an ecosystem of 3rd developers.   Once Pinterest publishes an API, 3rd party developers could extend core Pinterest functionality, enrich the user experience, and accelerate user adoption.    According to recent reports, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors are ready to ride user interest in Pinterest:http://www.amity.uk.com/Products/Details/702478

“When the API is available, Adam Ludwin at RRE, says he’s interested in entrepreneurs who can build on top of the platform, who can “close the loop” and figure out a way to monetize the interest around products on Pinterest. He’s interested in startups that will provide tools to facilitate transactions on and through Pinterest.”

But exposing an API can lead other companies capturing revenue otherwise directed to Pinterest.  As reported recently by Jay Yarow, Pinterest

“might not release it [API] for a while, says an industry source familiar with Pinterest’s plans. This source says that Pinterest fears having a ‘Twitter problem.’”

Continue reading →

How is PaaS changing application servers?

Posted on by

At Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit in 2011, SearchSOA.com’s own Jack Vaughan speaks with Chris Haddad, VP of technology evangelism at WSO2. Chris Haddad explains his idea of what real “cloud-native” cloud architecture means and how this varies from some vendors’ “cloud-washed solutions.”

View the video explain How PaaS is changing application servers?

 

What is Cloud Foundry?

Posted on by

The PaaS on PaaS marketure has me confused.  The ecosystem surrounding Cloud Foundry demonstrates how PaaS, the middle level between SaaS and IaaS is actually a multi-layered market space.  A way to unwind the recursive relationship between Cloud Foundry and ecosystem partners is to first start calling the technology a ‘cloud-enabled platform’, and limit PaaS as an instantiation of the cloud-enabled platform delivered as a service.   The CloudFoundry ecosystem partners (e.g. AppFog, Stackato, Uhuru, Tier3) seem to be competing on ease of use enhancements, bundled technology (e.g. language support, cache support, database support), or managed hosting.

Continue reading →

How to simplify Platform as a Service complexity

Posted on by

Ben Kepes posted a good discussion on LinkedIn, Cloud computing and the concealment of complexity..  . Ben summarizes his position in a call to action at the end of the post:

 “Let’s make this stuff as simple as possible, articulating complexity does much to build barriers to cloud adoption….”

Continue reading →

Selecting Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Posted on by

This blog post describes the Selecting a Cloud Platform White Paper.

Cloud benefits are compelling, and your peers are starting to demonstrate successful test projects, but you realize slick product demonstrations often do not mirror real world complexity.  You find your personal Cloud experience challenged by disconnected platform silos, complicated application architecture, diverse infrastructure technologies, and cloud washed services.  How can Cloud and Platform as a Service (PaaS) improve a development team’s ability to rapidly deliver high value business applications and meet user demand?

Continue reading →

Cloud languages and me-too vendors

Posted on by

Sinclair @sschuller has triggered a lively debate over at Cloud U on Linkedin.   Sinclair’s blog post questions why PaaS providers “want to add as many languages as possible as quickly as possible. ”   Sinclair questions the business value obtained by polyglot language support and whether development teams will see through the hype and “walk away disenfranchised.”

Continue reading →

Learn about Hybrid PaaS and Cost Optimization

Posted on by

WSO2 is sponsoring two educational webinars (i.e. Building a Hybrid Platform as a Service, Develop a Cost Optimization Strategy) and an all day on-site workshop (i.e. Introduction to Cloud middleware; WSO2 Carbon and Stratos).   I am creating the content this week, which provides you an opportunity to pose your questions early and influence the content.   If you miss the webinar dates, register to obtain the presentation deck and recording.  If you aren’t visiting Orlando on the 15th, send me a note on your interest.  We will be delivering more workshop events in 2012, and your vote could add your city to the list.

Continue reading →

Searching for Cloud Architecture….

Posted on by

Does Platform as a Service (PaaS) exhibit a distinct cloud architecture model?  What specific cloud reference architecture components are required?

The WSO2 vision of Cloud-aware applications and WSO2 Cloud Reference Architecture is found in a blog post here.  Read this blog post to review cloud architecture alternatives.

Continue reading →

Ghost in the machine

Posted on by

What PaaS capabilities and components are required to migrate your application into the Cloud?  WSO2 announced the  WSO2 Stratos cloud middleware platform version 1.5.2 release.  Besides enhancements to 12 service components (i.e. application server, data service platform, enterprise service bus, identity service, governance service, gadgets, business activity monitoring, business process, business rules, mashups, message broker, complex event processing),  core platform enhancements include an innovative service-aware load balancer and ghost deployer.

Continue reading →

Is Cloud app dev going private?

Posted on by
David Linthicum posted thoughts on  Cloud app dev going private.   He is seeing teams desiring a “private PaaS removes you from the details of the infrastructure and renders it irrelevant.”  I agree abstracting private infrastructure is beneficial.  Do you feel private PaaS offerings adequately raises the level of abstraction?

PaaS Evaluation Framework for CIOs and Architects

Posted on by

An evaluation framework can help enterprise architects and solution architects evaluate and select PaaS offerings.  The evaluation framework can be used to shortlist PaaS providers, build questions posed in a Request for Proposal (RFP) document, or generate use case scenarios.   This blog post provides an overview of the PaaS Evaluation Framework published in the Selecting a Cloud Platform White paper.

At QCon International Software Development Conference 2011 and Gartner’s Application Architecture Development Integration Summit 2011, WSO2 will be distributing evaluation matrixes comparing Platform as a Service offerings.   We compiled scores of detailed requirements and attributes relevant to developers and project architects, and then we distilled the evaluation criteria into seven categories:

  • Cloud Characteristics
  • Cloud Dimensions
  • Production Ready
  • DevOps Activities and Phases
  • Cloud Architecture
  • Platform Services
  • Programming Model

Cloud Occupies Wall Street

Posted on by

The lifeblood of the financial services industry is information, and I have found financial services firms to be early, innovative technology adopters.  Electronic trading exchanges have delivered business services ‘in the Cloud’ for many years, and financial specific compute grids deliver actionable market intelligence (e.g. piCloud, RiskMetrics).  As Cloud computing moves beyond the definition phase and technology infrastructure vendors deliver viable products, advanced Cloud computing concepts are starting to Occupy Wall Street.

Continue reading →

Imitation is Flattery – PaaS styles and architecture options

Posted on by

Within the span of two weeks, I have seen Richard Watson’s PaaS style framework posted twice on the Web.  In one case, the text was copied verbatim from Richard’s research report. In the other instance, a self-described technocrat artfully repurposed the concept without attribution (http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/2024287 ).

Continue reading →