Posted by Jeff Papows on Mon, Jan 04, 2010 @ 04:12 PM
After a few days away from the office, I came back with renewed enthusiasm for 2010.
As I made my way through my inbox and got caught up on the latest industry news, I was surprised by David Linthicum's Infoworld blog entry titled, "Cloud Computing Will Kill These 3 Technologies." In his post, Linthicum states that cloud computing will kill design time governance.
What makes the blogosphere so great is that we're all entitled to voice our opinions. So I will now share mine in response to Linthicum's post because his view is a bit askew from what I know is happening in the real world.
Now if you've been reading any of my previous blog posts, you'll know that I believe nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, right before Thanksgiving I blogged about the importance of design time governance for cloud computing in the entry titled, "Governance: A cloud computing strategy's silver lining."
The bottom line is this: if we cut corners at the beginning of the development process, we will almost always create gaps in the cloud resulting in the proliferation of bad code and applications. If in fact more services are accessed, sometimes anonymously, from God knows where, in fact the quality of those services now destined to be used and reused must in fact of an even higher quality. Sounds like design time governance to me.
Now you're probably thinking, ‘of course he's going to push design time governance.' And that's true to a certain extent from the perspective of creating and distributing better software throughout our infrastructures especially as services make their way into the cloud. From a practical point of view, I'd tell anybody purchasing technology to select the vendor that's best suited to addressing his or her particular business needs.
But when it comes to the statement that cloud computing is the death knell for design time governance, I simply have a hard time believing this. Especially coming from Linthicum, the pragmatist.
Sure, aspects of design do go away by using cloud-related resources but it's unimaginable that most serious organizations will believe that run time is enough. On the contrary, utilization of cloud resources brings forward new design governance challenges. For example, when and how should cloud resources be used, do they support the proper technologies, functionality and performance we expect?
I'm not sure which ‘runtime SOA players' David is referring to when he says ‘many of the existing runtime SOA governance players support enough design and implementation capabilities that separate design-time tools are not required.' I'm quite frankly shocked at this statement because to the best of my knowledge, most of those runtime SOA governance players support little to no automated design time governance.
I suspect the theory that cloud computing will kill design time governance is up there with other marketing campaigns that declared XYZ technology is dead. Sure, they make great headlines and get some of us all worked up but they're not very practical or realistic.
If anybody knows who those existing runtime SOA governance vendors are that can supposedly obliterate separate design tools, please drop me a line at jeff@weblayers.com or comment below on whether or not you think the cloud will kill design time governance.
Posted by Jeff Papows on Tue, Dec 29, 2009 @ 01:19 PM
Like everybody else at this time of the year, we look backwith the hope that perhaps we've learned something in the past 12 months. And if you're like me, we're alsolooking forward in anticipation to a new decade.
The past year was certainly an interesting one and we havehopefully gotten through the worst of one of the worst recessions I canrecall. We were also witness tosome major industry shifts including Oracle's purchase of Sun,Microsoft's launch of Windows 7 and Twitter's ability to bea viable source for breaking news.
When I first started blogging last February, the talk around the water cooler was whether or not SOA was dead and when the economy would fullyrecover. The more things changethe more they stay the same.
As I thought about some New Year's resolutions, I started tothink about how we could all use a little more governance across theboard. Not just for ourinformation technology infrastructures but across all other aspects of ourindustry such as media, the blogosphere, the analyst community, and our overallapproach to mitigating all the potential risks in our business.
So here are three resolutions I've decided to adopt. All are relatively easy and are probablynot too far from what you're already thinking about as next year approaches. In 2010 I resolve to do the following:
1. In a recent conversation with industry analyst Dana Gardner from Interarbor Solutions, he aptlypointed out that you really can't successfully engage in cloud computing unlessyou have a sound SOA infrastructure so the notion that SOA is dead, is, well,dead.
2. Tocarefully evaluate every trend that seems to catch fire in the blogosphere andassess it on its own merits with regard to industry relevance and what actuallyconstitutes news. It's far tooeasy to read headlines without the actual story or take so-called news items atface value simply because they appear online. It seems to me that the blogosphere could use a set ofgovernance policies to better mitigate the risks of inconclusive reporting.
3. Along those lines, I resolve to also pay closer attention to critical issues andtrends that will have far reaching effects on our IT infrastructures. Infoworldactually did a great round up on "The Top Underreported Tech Stories of 2009" citing the issues around the wireless spectrum and broadband availability as well as the dark side of cloud computing and its legal ramifications along with eight other under reported stories that will most certainly be part of our conversations in 2010.
Ah, three simple resolutions and none of themrequire that I restrict calories. If you have some resolutions to share, drop me a line at:jeff@weblayers.com
Posted by Jeff Papows on Tue, Dec 15, 2009 @ 08:45 AM
David Linthicum's Cloud Computing blog over at Infoworld makes solid points about SOA governance's move into the clouds. As I've addressed in my November 18 post, "Governance: a cloud computing strategy's silver lining", the key to building a seamless enterprise architecture is through governance.
The guiding principles of SOA and all out efforts to break down the silos we've inadvertently created over the years has led us to a point where governance can no longer be an afterthought as it is in so many instances. As more applications and services are opened up to a greater amount of users - many of whom may not have been anticipated when the original architecture was being sketched - there needs to be a more concerted focus on the way governance is introduced and carried throughout the software development life cycle.
This is most evident in a company's decision to solely focus on a run-time governance approach. Now there are certainly places where runtime governance is most relevant and necessary - to gain better control of the runtime environment - and when it's equally critical to enforce governance at the very beginning design stage. While each approach, runtime and design time, brings value to the architecture and are complementary to each other, what is becoming most relevant and critical as companies move to cloud computing is the distributed governance model.
To this end, WebLayers announced in July the industry's first fully distributed policy management platform. As more companies start to roll out products in this arena, I suspect that we may no longer be differentiating between distributed governance and non-distributed governance. It will simply be that distributed governance will be the de facto approach due to the fact that nearly all architectures will be distributed to some degree as we continue to extend our applications and services to other departments and divisions as well as external customers and partners.
photo by pink princess
Posted by Jeff Papows on Mon, Nov 09, 2009 @ 10:21 AM
We should have known that it wouldn't be long before the term cloud computing would encounter some industry backlash. To some degree, we could have expected this from Oracle based on their history of adopting trends. Yet now it looks as if HP and IBM have joined the fray with Sam Palmisano referring to cloud computing as an unfortunate name. The folks over at InformationWeek have gone so far as to offer a $100,000 prize to the best alternative term.
But what this really comes down to is not so much a debate over semantics as much as it is about applying a new term to an existing architectural approach. Infoworld's Eric Knorr puts it this way, "Cloud computing is such a big tent that it has become a three-ring circus bursting with any new technology or service, old or new, that touches the network. Is there anything revolutionary about software as a service? Or a host that lets you upload your virtual machines over the Internet and run them remotely?"
While the marketing people clearly had a ball with the term cloud, the architects and developers are pretty much ignoring those messages and remain focused on the IT foundation.
Call it what you will, there will always be an interest in creating an architecture that provides greater visibility into the infrastructure while mitigating business risks. This applies whether or not applications and services are located in public or private clouds or remain fixed on premises. The combination of both of these approaches currently goes by the catchy (?) name of hybrid computing.
You'll likely start to see this term pop up more over the coming year as companies look at the value of putting some services and applications in clouds - public or private - and keeping others fastened to the corporate infrastructure.
And as the hybrid model comes into play, there will be more discussions about the role of governance across these mixed computing environments. To get a jump on this, Interarbor Solutions industry analyst Dana Gardner is actually leading a live webinar and Q&A discussion with WebLayers on Tuesday, November 10. The session, "How governance gets you more mileage from your hybrid computing environment" is geared toward architects and developers and presents an opportunity to discuss and debate the role of governance in hybrid environments.
Do you think hybrid computing will go the way of the cloud or is the next big thing? Post your thoughts below or join the conversation tomorrow.
-jeff
Posted by Jeff Papows on Mon, Oct 19, 2009 @ 08:28 PM
As you probably know, IBM just rolled out its biggest release of middleware ever with the introduction of WebSphere 7.0. It's been a while since we've seen such a massive, full scale WebSphere upgrade with 6.0 versions of various flagship products dating back to 2004.
While the IT community may be closely evaluating the new version of WebSphere ESB or the DataPower security appliances, this latest release actually speaks to three significant business challenges that are affecting many organizations today and that are being addressed by SOA, cloud computing and BPM.
The first challenge is the architecture itself. Remember that SOA is an architecture and not a product. Think of it as the foundation to a house - without a sound architecture, it's impossible to build anything on it. Given the amount of mergers, acquisitions, consolidations, global expansion and/or contraction that has occurred in the past year alone, the IT architecture really is the foundation that will help sustain the organization as it evolves.
For those considering venturing into the cloud, there are still a lot of discussions around security and standards. However, if executed properly, a hybrid computing model that supports some applications and services in the cloud could significantly reduce costs.
The third challenge, where BPM is most valuable according to IBM, is in helping the line of business respond more quickly to real-time events. From my experience and I'm sure IBM would agree, these real-time events can range from executing millions of financial transactions per second to establishing the processes that keep a hospital emergency room up and running 24/7, for example.
Within the BPM suite, IBM has upgraded its integrated governance and policy management tools. As a long time IBM business partner, WebLayers will continue to complement the WebSphere governance offerings including the latest release of WebSphere Registry and Repository. The Channel Insider story sums it up well, "IBM tapped a small group of select software and business partners to build out development tools and application management governance products that round out its BPM and SOA life cycle management offerings."
Obviously, what really stands out for me in this new WebSphere stack are the governance offerings. Much like the house metaphor, governance across the entire infrastructure will help create a more solid foundation - one that will accelerate the speed at which way that SOA, cloud and BPM address business issues. Of course, selling these IT concepts and products to the business is a matter of articulating the business benefits and steering away from the jargony dialog.
Regardless, IBM's WebSphere 7.0 is big news indeed and speaks to the strength of the entire middleware portfolio - which is probably why not many folks were too surprised to learn about WebSphere's 14 percent growth in sales as reported in this past week's earnings announcement.
-Jeff