Tag Archives: Cloud architecture

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 →

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 →

Scale API infrastructure

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

Netflix Open Sources Cloud Service Registry and Cloud Load Balancer

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

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/

 

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 →

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 →

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 →

Will IT culture kill Cloud?

Posted on by

The doctors are circling.   My Gartner colleague Lydia Leong has an interesting Cloud prescription, ‘to become like a cloud provider, fire everyone here,’  and industry watchers are picking up the message.

In her post, Lydia describes a Cloud conversation with corporate IT stakeholders and diagnosing:

“If you’re going to operate like a cloud provider, you will need to be willing to fire almost everyone in this room.”

 

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 →

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 →