Mashed Articles

When the Amazon Simple Queue Service appeared about 2 years ago, I looked into it as a solution of message exchange between business partners. With its limited message size (only 4K) and message retrieval based on simple Amazon user accounts, I put the offering aside. The Amazon offering did however trigger me into wondering when the big Internet players (Google, Microsoft, Salesforce or Amazon) would enter the integration market.

But the ‘big’ players aren’t entering the integration world (yet?). Alternatively, software vendors could cloud-enable their software. Or anyone could leverage the cloud and develop an integration system on system on top of it.

Some scenario’s that I can envision, probably lacking some imagination here

• upload messages to the cloud from which they can be polled and retrieved (e.g. some central FTP or JMS server)
• service composition (something like Splice)
• business processes managed in the cloud through BPEL process engine (like RunMyProcess)
• service enabled integration solution (like Grand Central Communications once tried)
• XML gateway/firewall that filters traffic, enforces policies and forwards requests to different back-ends
• B2B hub (re-invention of the VAN)
• SOA governance as a service (sharing services within a community)
• Centralized SAML provider used by federation(s) of business partners
• WS-Trust Security Token Service (STS)

To learn about cloud computing and see how it could be used for cloud based integration solutions, I went through the book “Programming Amazon Web Services” by James Murty.

Initial conclusion/impression after reading the book was that Amazon services still lack some important features. Some limitations of the Amazon services:

• no fixed IP addresses, use of dynamic DNS required; with no URL pointing to the Amazon servers, own server in own data center required as main entry point
• EC2 instances loose all state when they stop or die (partially addressed with backups at short intervals)
• no SLA (except for S3), EC2 and SimpleDB are still “beta” (but so is gmail)
• payment via credit card (no formal ordering/invoicing)
• only forums to report and track problems, no formal communication channels
• propagation latency of newly or updated S3 objects (without even guarantee that you retrieve the latest document yourself because there is no guarantee that S3 requests will be directed to the same location)
• no transactions, e.g. when retrieving messages from SQS service
• no relational database
• no guarantees, everything on best effort

But since the publication of the book, a number of shortcomings were already addressed.

• Elastic IP addresses now offer fixed IP addresses and do away with dynamic DNS. A single EC2 instance can load balance request to other instances.
• Availability zones allow instances to be started in specific zones (read data center).
• Persistent storage for EC2 now provides a real file system for EC2 surviving restarts (although file system can only be mounted by 1 instance).
• And AWS Premium Support starts addressing the support issue.

So it seems that AWS can be used for some of my envisioned scenario’s. Open source project will definitely offer their integration solution As A Service on the Amazon cloud. I’m curious to see if and when the 1st closed source integration vendor takes the same step.

Don’t you just hate it when another woolly ambiguous term is forced upon us? When I was approached by yet another journalist the other day asking me my thoughts on the impact of cloud computing, I simply sighed and told them it is a bit like Web 2.0. In itself, it is difficult to pin down exactly what is meant by it. The best you can do is say that both of these terms refer to a general direction in which the industry appears to be moving.

In the case of Web 2.0, it is about the Web becoming a generally more interactive medium. This can manifest itself at a technology level through everything from Ajax through mash-ups to SOA, and at a behavioural level through social media and the simple fact that websites are generally now more geared up to a two-way dialogue than they used to be.

In the case of cloud computing, it is about the evolution of dynamic virtualised infrastructure that allows us to think more in terms of resource pools than individual IT components. This in turn opens the door to delivering computing resource on a utility basis, which is equally applicable both internally (i.e. with regard to the way you use your data centre) and externally – which takes you into the realm of utility computing and software as a service.

The point about both Web 2.0 and cloud computing is that they both sprung up arbitrarily on the evolutionary timeline, and seeming embraced anything and everything that could be thrown into the mix. While the very specific phenomenon of social networking is certainly noteworthy, this bears little relationship to evolution of rich user interfaces and composite applications, in fact many social networking sites have appalling UIs by traditional standards. Yet Web 2.0 can mean either of these things, and, confusingly, lots of other concepts too.

Similarly, we have been talking about virtualisation ultimately leading to computing grids and utility computing for years, and giving it a new name doesn’t actually change anything in terms of the underlying trend. In fact, you knew where you stood much better when you could talk about virtualisation and grid technology as the enabling stuff, and utility computing and application services as what it enables. As everyone jumps onto the cloud computing bandwagon, it all gets mixed up and confused, just like Web 2.0.

So, if you are one of those people wondering what cloud computing is really all about after listening the IBM explanation, the Microsoft one, and the evangelical rhetoric we have heard recently from the Google and Salesforce.com camp, don’t worry, you are not alone. The trick is to think of it as a label for a trend at one level, and an industry bandwagon at another, and keep your expectations pretty low in terms of clarity and consistency for the time being. Don’t however, dismiss the underlying trend it itself. While we are not looking at a revolution here, some of the developments in this general area are really quite interesting and valuable – though, you probably knew that already, even before the marketing hype was thrust upon us.