Tag Archives: PaaS

Cloud Native PaaS Architecture

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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.

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Accelerating Business Agility with App Factory DevOps PaaS

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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.

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PaaS Services and Backend as a Service (BaaS)

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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).

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PaaS Cartridges and Polyglot Programming

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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?

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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.

 

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Actions To Take: Gartner’s SaaS Predictions for 2013

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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

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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.

Netflix Open Sources Cloud Service Registry and Cloud Load Balancer

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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.

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Sonic, Savvion, and Actional sold

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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).

 

 

 

Cloud aware applications and PaaS architecture

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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.”

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Deploy ESB as a Service

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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.

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Moving eGovernment to Cloud

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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?

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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.

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Cloud Native PaaS or Cloud Washed PaaS

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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.

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

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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.

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Cloud Native PaaS realizes Cloud Characteristics

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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?

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Taming NoOps and Open Cloud Architecture with Cloud Governance

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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?

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Pinterest API and the Money Board

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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.’”

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How is PaaS changing application servers?

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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?

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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.

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How to simplify Platform as a Service complexity

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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….”

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Selecting Platform as a Service (PaaS)

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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?

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Gartner AADI Summit: Impressions from a civilian

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I have been participating in Gartner (and Burton Group) conferences since 2003, and this year was my first time participating as a civilian (e.g. a non-Gartner attendee).  I found myself continuing to direct attendees to relevant analysts, and I enjoyed chatting with my colleagues (i.e. Roy Schulte, Dan Sholler, Jim Duggan, Anne Thomas Manes, Richard Watson, Kirk Knoernschild, Sean Kennefick, Danny Brian, Donna PK, Kirsten Moran, Jeff Schulman, and Val Sribar) face to face.

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Searching for Cloud Architecture….

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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.

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Ghost in the machine

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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.

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Is Cloud app dev going private?

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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?

Cloud Occupies Wall Street

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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.

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Imitation is Flattery – PaaS styles and architecture options

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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 ).

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