Samisa's Blog

Cloud Computing for Development Governance

2012-02-09T18:41:00.001-08:00

Development governance is a common problem for any organization developing applications to cater their business needs.

Any service or application that is being developed has a lifecycle. From development to being in production, we have various roles involved such as developers, testers (QA), IT folks (Dev Ops / Tech Ops). As the service or application propagates through the lifecycle, the related artifacts (code, configurations, etc.) as well as know-how needs to be propagated and handed over to related parties playing various roles.

One of the challenges in the management of this life cycle in development governance is to make sure that, we have identical setups across various environments used. For example, the QA setup, need to be similar to the staging. And if developers made assumptions that are way off to that of the production system, and they have no way to verify the real aspects, there will be loads of corrective fixes left off till late. In short, development testing, QA testing, staging and production should have identical, or at least near identical setups.

Another challenge is the propagation of artifacts. Where should the QA should pick what to be tested and where should the Dev Ops pick the artifacts to be deployed to staging and from staging to production.

To ensure that we maintain uniformity across environments, and we have means of enforcing the proper process and means of artifact migration and management we can turn to cloud computing.

The cloud environments cater for various roles, to deal with their activities in the respective lifecycle stages of the service or application. The cloud environments can be hosted with identical software. The Platform as a Service solutions such as WSO2 Stratos, can be used here. The PaaS solutions usually come with built in repository management mechanisms to help the users belonging to various roles to pick what they want from one environment from another.

For example, when the developer completes the development and is happy with the developer testing on the development cloud, he or she can raise a notification to QA folks indicating the readiness of the application or the service for QA. Then one of the QA folks, respond to the ‘ready for QA’ notification, picks those artifacts from development cloud and promote those to the QA cloud. If the tests fail, tester can demote the artifacts back to development cloud and raise a notification to developers mentioning that it needs more work. If the tests pass, the tester can raise a notification for Dev Ops indicating the service or application has passed QA and ready for staging. The Dev Ops then can promote the QA passed service/application artifacts to staging cloud and inform QA to run and verify automated tests on staging to ensure the service/application is ready to go into production.

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,Governance,PaaS

43 Things Tags: Cloud Computing

Three years of evolution – WSO2 Carbon

2012-02-07T08:39:00.001-08:00

It was three years ago that I blogged “Yes we did it!!!”

Yes we did it, three years ago. So WSO2 Carbon Middleware Platform is now three years old.

You can find what Paul & Sanjiva had to say about Carbon three yours ago, as I captured those links in that post.

I could also fin a blog by Isuru on this Carbon releases. That post shows the four main products we released with this Carbon 1.5 release. And yes, it was not Carbon 1.0 that we released three years ago, rather Carbon 1.5.

Even though the public got to know Carbon three years ago, WSO2 started discussing Carbon internally four years ago. It was discussed in the WSO2’s annual off-site planning meeting in 2008, under the title “product unification”. At that time, I was working with the C team, and the unification was discussed for Java based products such as WSAS & ESB. Myself and few others were also invited for this planning meeting, where this Java product unification was discusses, and to be frank, most of the discussion ideas “flew over” my head. However, the initiation to participate paid off few months later, as I ended up one of the drivers of this whole effort, towards the second half of 2008.

“Product unification” rationale was driven by simple rationale at the time, in 2008. We were building a middleware stack, but our own products did not work together. The products were in silos. The example used at the time to explain the problem was the way we secured a service. In WSAS, there was a nice UI that could be used to secure a service, but the ESB could not re-use the same as it was. Why not, why cannot we use the same technique? How can we make the cross cutting concerns available across the products rather than re-doing them over and over again?

These discussions, which started in the 2008 off-site planning meeting, evolved in the months to follow. OSGi came to the picture as a result. No one in engineering knew what OSGi meant for the platform at the time and there was none except Paul who believed that it would work. So there was resistance first, then fighting, and then came the CEOs verdict, lets just do it and see how it goes.

So we did, we just did it. And while doing, we figured how to do it, we brought in OSGi trainers, and we figured how to adopt OSGi into the product platform. And by fourth quarter of 2008, we had figured for the most part, the advantages of OSGi and how it is going to make our middleware platform a “platform”.

I consider the move from siloes of products into a product platform a key evolutionary step in WSO2 software. But over the past three years, we have evolved at an exponential phase. In 2009 February, we released only four products. Today, we have 14 products, and 12 Stratos services.

The invention of the Carbon platform made WSO2 DNA much more agile and adoptive to change. This is evident from what we have build on top of Carbon in the past three years. The most note worthy is the introduction of cloud native elements into Carbon and the creation of WSO2 Stratos. We started the cloud effort in Q4 2009. Today, using a single Carbon code base, you can use the same app on-premise, on private or public cloud using WSO2 platform.

In addition to cloud native aspects, there are many other enhancements on the platform, done over the past three years. P2 based dynamic provisioning, advanced governance capabilities, dynamic discovery, platform wide cashing, clustering, auto-scaling, advanced deployment synchronization, and Eclipse based tooling are just few of those advancements.

It took loads of team work, loads of hard work to build this unprecedented platform ground up. But all those hard work has paid off already, as you can see from the progress WSO2 has made in the past three years. And what is lined up for 2012 by WSO2, will still prove the power of this software masterpiece.

Stay tuned…!

Technorati Tags: WSO2,Open Source Software

Meeting Application Development Challenges in Today’s Environment with JavaScript

2012-02-05T18:40:00.001-08:00

Application development is a well known phenomena in computing today. Patterns, best practices, techniques and tips & tricks have been evolved over many decades. Yet, have we hit the sweet spot, yet?

Demand to deliver quality apps sooner, and keep them evolving every days is a norm today. Agile models promises to meet these demands. But the technologies for developing apps still are in question. For example, ease of development, faster to test, debug & fix are must, to deal with demands.

If you take the whole application development spectrum, including development, testing, as well as maintenance efforts, the choses available are limited, and often not ideal.

Programming language becomes a key to meet these expectations. Programing expertise and the ability to find programmers who can deal with the complexities involved is a major problem today. For example, not very many business software are being developed in C programming language. Even the available few are being migrated aggressively into languages like Java. Even though Java is simpler compared to C, is it agile enough or simple enough to develop apps at the rate the markets demand?

If you look around the Web today, vast majority of apps are Web based, and few are using Java technologies like JSP. The rise of scripting has won over and languages like PHP or Python, which are interpreted and easier to develop and test are dominating the space. These languages are used for MVC style, DB driven three tier apps and even for distributed EAI style apps. Simplicity with REST style integrations for enterprise apps have made the scripting languages the de-facto choice. So you no longer need “complex” languages like Java any more.

What is more interesting is the fact that, the use of JavaScript, as the client side language in the Web today to do magic on the browser. And people have used JavaScript, for back-end logic, in addition to use it only for client side logic. Rather than using two languages, one for server side scripting and another for client side logic, what if we use the same language? In other words, rather than using PHP + JavaScript for the application, we can use JavaScript + JavaScript, or just JavaScript.

The advantages of using just JavaScript for both front-end and back-end logic multi-fold:

Easier to develop, test & debug
Faster to develop & time to market
Easier to find skills to deal with JavaScript, wider developer community compared to Java, and even compared to PHP
Simple EAI with REST style, both consume REST & build REST style services

If needed, SOAP & WS-* is not impossible

Best of OO principles still can be leveraged using JavaScript
Leverage lightweight data-interchange formats such as JSON

Like the rise of the Web and use of HTTP + HTML influenced distributed computing technologies such as SOAP, the power of JavaScript today can lead to a whole new era of application development that are better suited to meet enterprise application development challenges.

Technorati Tags: JavaScript,Application Development,Jaggery

Writing Google Gadgets

2011-11-22T16:45:00.001-08:00

I wrote a four part tutorial recently on how to write Google gadgets. This tutorial expands beyond a simple “Hello World” sample, and dives into the key concepts of writing Gadgets. The tutorial uses WSO2 Gadget Server as the hosting engine for the sample gadgets.

When writing a Google gadget, you need to understand the anatomy of a gadget, and have a good idea of what each section of the gadget is meant to be, and how to use each section to maximize the utility of the gadget.

The tutorial explains the use of these sections in detail, and how to make use of each over the span of the sour parts of the tutorial.

Google gadgets can be used as a powerful tool, specially as a visualization and presentation tool in the SOA space. It offers features that can help you build versatile, productive and powerful dashboards for your day to-day monitoring as well as for data analysis for decision support.

The series of tutorials start simple and go on explaining how to build gadgets that can be re-used, and use various views and gadget and user preferences.

Here is the TOC:

Writing Google Gadgets - A tutorial - Part 01

Google Gadgets Basics

Anatomy of a Gadget

Basic Gadget Example - Hello Gadget

Hello Gadget in Action

Pulling Information from the Web into a Gadget

Content Type URL Gadgets

Content Type HTML Gadgets

Pulling Information into a Gadget with makeRequest

Dynamic Height with Google Gadgets

Writing Google Gadgets – A tutorial – Part 02

Processing Fetched HTML with JavaScript

Using TEXT vs DOM Content Type when Working with HTML

Using External JavaScript Libraries

Writing Google Gadgets - A tutorial - Part 03

Setting User Preferences

Using enum Data Type as an Options List

Using Boolean Data Type

Integer Settings with String Data Type

Setting Preferences from Within the Gadget

Dealing with Views

Writing Google Gadgets – A tutorial – Part 04

Versatility of Google Gadgets as a Presentation Instrument

The Complete Google Gadget Code

Tips and Tricks

Error Handling

Incremental Development

When Things go wrong: F12

Always Test with IE

Use an IDE

Technorati Tags: Google Gadgets

Internet and Tings – We are NOT Done Yet!

2011-11-04T20:42:00.001-07:00

Today, we live on the Internet.

Bin Laden was killed, and the news was broken out on Twitter, before any news channel did.

We search Google or Bing for anything. Even if you want to know right spellings for a word, you just enter something close to Chrome’s address bar, and Google will tell you the right spellings.

People share so many things on Facebook and stay connected.

It seems as if, we cannot live without it, the Internet.

But are we really benefited? Is there any use of this information overflow, overflow.

Lets step back for a moment, and see what is really going on.

Yes we tweet, and tweet and things get re-tweeted many times over. But how many do really sit down, and read all those stories that are being tweeted? We are busy tweeting, but do we really care reading. Many are just scanning the title and the first para, if at all. That is it. The rest hardly get read.

We Facebook, tons of pics, and tons of gossip. So what? Who will ever read again the status updates that were done yesterday? No time, as you got to watch what is on the walls that are scrolling at lightning rate. We keep on filling data bases with all this rubbish, but for what use?

We search for many a things, on a daily basis, and we go through the pile of search results that the search engines return. How do we know if the search engine included the right results at all? May be the best page that has the right info that I am looking for is not even linked by someone and is somewhere out there. The largest inbound links marks the best pages on Internet – that is a myth – yet you believe cause that is what Google delivers, or Bing delivers. If this theory was right, one would never have to search for anything over and over again, tuning the search terms to find what you are looking for. But when was the last time that you were looking for something and the first search hit was what you were looking for exactly, except for the case that you were looking for a company website?

We do not use printed books any more, because the internet has it. And printed books, they are not green! But the laptop, the ISP, the search engine servers, are they green? The dictionary I bought more than 10 years back is still on my table, but I do not use it. The internet is easier, just type it in, and the results come. How green is that? I am not sure.

The Internet, as we know it, is so fabulous. But if you look at all these fabulous services, they are so dumb and sub-optimal in the way they are built and operate. It is a waste to keep the bulk of the tweets in the twitter database, as no one will ever look at those ever again, but we keep those. We keep all those rubbish state updates like ‘ate’, ‘slept’ and ‘so cute’ in Facebook DB that nobody would ever care about. And the search engine results are increasingly less relevant and less useful, but the bots keep indexing and we keep searching, scanning, clicking and discarding bulk of those results on a daily basis. On one hand, there is massive waste of resources, and on the other hand, we users get very little value out of that waste.

The good news though, is that, there is room for better technology, for better Google – better Bing – better Facebook – better Twitter.

So if you ever thought that Google is the best and can never be beaten, think again … the Internet could offer a much better experience - and two/three fresh undergrads might figure how in the future – hopefully!

Practical SOA for the Solution Architects

2011-10-16T18:34:00.001-07:00

Ganesh, has written an excellent white paper on SOA. This extended white paper is a retelling of the SOA philosophy in an easily understandable and practically applicable form, independent of the actual tools used to implement it.

The 31 page paper explores the 3 core Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology components and then dives deep into principles, patterns and techniques involved.

Here is a glimpse into the table of contents, that will tease you to download and read this educating paper on SOA:

Table of Contents
Part I – Why Practical SOA?
    Introduction
    How to be a SOA-Savvy Solution Architect
Part II – Practical SOA at the Technology Layer
    The Three Essential Building Blocks
        The Service Container
        The Broker
        The Process Coordinator
        Building with Blocks
    The Misunderstood Broker
        “When all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail”
        A Broker is not a singleton, centralised component
    Supporting Components at the Technology Layer
        Rules
        Data Access
        Registry/Repository
        Governance Support
        Activity Monitoring
        Complex Event Processing
        Presentation Support
        Identity and Access Management
        All Together Now!
Part III – Practical SOA at the Data Layer
    What is Wrong with this Picture?
    Why Data Design is Important
    Principles for Loose Coupling at the Data Layer
        Identify Implicit Data and Make It Explicit
        Eliminate Needless Dependencies Between Systems
        Keep Domain Data and Message Data Loosely Coupled
        Standardise Vocabulary Within a Logical Domain, Not Across the Entire Organisation
Part IV – Industry Examples
    Banking – Opening an Account
    Insurance – Providing a Quote
Part V – Conclusion, and Next Steps

Technorati Tags: SOA,Service Oriented Architecture

del.icio.us Tags: SOA,Service Oriented Architecture

Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T18:03:00.001-07:00

Cloud Computing - BPEL in the Cloud

2011-09-28T08:26:00.001-07:00

An article by Denis on WSO2 OxygenTank, discusses multi-tenancy aspect in a cloud computing environment and some of the concerns of hosting business processes in the cloud.

WSO2 Business Process as a Service supports development and easy deployment of business processes modeled using the WS-BPEL standard in a multi-tenanted environment. Also it provides functionality for business process management and hosting in the cloud.

According to this article, some advantages of hosting business processes in the cloud include

Enables users to deploy the business processes which run on-premise business process run-time environments like WSO2 BPS. So the users can deploy the existing business processes, manage and monitor them securely in the cloud in the same way they would do on-premise
Scalability - On demand scaling business processes within a set of nodes such that it can maintain the run-time of state-full business processes.
Tenants can ignore the burden of maintaining a business process run-time infrastructure. They can host their processes in cloud and only focus on maintaining the business-process logic.
Cost-effective way to deploy business processes with the means of pay-per-use.

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,BPEL,Business Process

WSO2Con 2011 – 5 Don’t Miss Talks by WSO2

2011-09-07T17:04:00.001-07:00

This years WSO2Con Agenda is filled with two tracks over three full days. The and a wide verity of topics and speakers will trouble the attendees in picking what sessions to attend.

I myself am still struggling to pick and choose what talks to attend. In addition to the user testimonials, It is a great opportunity to learn the past, present and future of SOA and Cloud Computing, by listening to speakers from WSO2.

From among the sessions by WSO2 folks, here are the top 5 I have picked to attend already and booked my calendar:

Keynote: WSO2 Vision and Roadmap by Paul Fremantle, Founder & CTO WSO2
Day 3, 4.15 pm
It is a joy to listen Paul talking. And he is a visionary. So there is nothing better than listing to Paul on WSO2’s future.
His thoughts on where the market is evolving is not only going to be useful to WSO2, but also to the industry in general, including our competitors.
Open Source Middleware for the Cloud: WSO2 Stratos by Afkham Azeez, Director of Architecture, WSO2
Day 2, Track 1, 11.00 am
Azeez is one of the Key architects in out architecture team. It is not exaggerating to say that Azeez is the one who knows both WSO2 Carbon product platform and WSO2 Stratos cloud platform to the extreme both at the code level as well as the overall architecture level. And he started and completed his masters thesis on cloud computing elastic scaling even before any other vendor in the space had started thinking about it. He would know cloud computing realities better than many experts in the space.
Building Cool Applications with WSO2 StratosLive by Selvaratnam Uthaiyashankar, Senior Software Architect,WSO2
Day 2, Track 1, 11.45 am
If Azeez is the “master architect” of Stratos, Shankar is the “master builder” of StratosLive, the public cloud computing Java PaaS by WSO2. Shankar leads the StratosLive team within WSO2 and works across development, testing, techops, devops of this cloud platform. So if you want to build an app for this platform, there is none who is better than Shankar who can tell you how to do that right.
Security in Practice by Prabath Siriwardena, Architect & Senior Manager – Carbon Platform & Security, WSO2
Day 2, Track 2, 3.30 pm
Prabath is one of the best presenters, if not the best, in WSO2 engineering team. He has his own style, and it is hard to loose your concentration while he is presenting. Thought that itself is a reason to attend this talk, there is another equally important reason to attend: Prabath is one of the few experts in the computer security space. Even if you do not know theory in this domain, you will learn what security means in practice.
Quality - The Key to Successful SOA by Charitha Kankanamge, Senior Technical Lead and Manager QA Team, WSO2
Day 3, Tack2, 11.45 am
SOA testing is tough; Need to balance the quick turnaround demands of the SOA world with sustainable QA practices. You cannot just follow the traditional testing. And it is a great opportunity to learn the tricks, tips and the realities of SOA QA from Charitha, who has experience in testing WSO2 SOA stack throughout the evolution of the stack.

Apart from the above sessions, that I plan to attend, I will obviously attend my talk where I plan to speak on the “secret ingredients” that enabled WSO2 take over the middleware world.

Technorati Tags: WSO2Con,SOA,Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing Facts – IaaS is NOT Prime Time Yet!

2011-09-06T16:35:00.001-07:00

Very often, virtualization is mixed us with cloud computing. Running with the ability to provision and release set of virtual machines is IaaS? Not really.

The reasoning that people want machines, when they want, via a portal or through automated API is that, we need more computing capacity. Computing capacity, at the very basic is about CPU and memory. But with services like Amazon EC2, though you can allocate AMIs with nominal CPU and memory, when it comes to really running the system, the effective computation capacity that you can get is MUCH lower than what you actually get.

In short, Amazon EC2 sucks!

Amazon EC2 is good to run simple applications to off load sporadic traffic bursts. But NOT good for anything else.

At the top of Infrastructure as a Service list of problems is large and unacceptable I/O. We have tried using Amazon EC2 for various scenarios in the real world, and found that it is not really usable in real world for all those cases.

1. Running incremental builds for WSO2 Carbon.

This is a very CPU intensive as well as I/O intensive task. We use maven to build Java projects, and there are
- Downloads involved – uses network a lot – Amazon EC2 is not predictable when it comes to download and upload bandwidth usage
- CPU intensive compilation operations – Amazon EC2 AMI instance’s load average goes high like crazy and operations are very slow compared to native hardware
- Disk writes, lots of them, as compiled classes are written to the disk – Amazon EC2 is unbelievably slow

The observation is that, Amazon EC2 usage for this is two to three times slower compared to the same done on native hardware with an average Internet connection. The compilation that takes two to three hours in total on native hardware would take four to eight hours on Amazon.

2. Hosting WSO2 Oxygen Tank (OT) Developer Portal

We use Drupal, the PHP based CMS, for hosting OT. This involves three machines, two running httpd with Drupal, and the other with MySQL.
When we ran this Web site with Amazon EC2, we were facing service outages, at least three to four times a month. The main problem was that, the MySQL instance was not able to handle the queries. And the problem was that Amazon machine instance could not handle the the rate of I/O required by the queries run by the two Drupal instances on MySQL.
The simple decision of moving this hosting out of Amazon EC2 and hosting on much smaller boxes with native hardware, solved the problem, and we have had no issues with the Web site ever since.

3. Hosting WSO2 StratosLive PaaS

It is natural to assume that a PaaS should run in IaaS. But we have learned, with over two three of usage experience with Amazon EC2, that nominal cloud benefits like auto scaling and elastic computing is not really useful when it comes to running a powerful platform like the StratosLive cloud Java pass.
The biggest challenge, as we saw in Oxygen Tank hosting experience is that, I/O bottlenecks on Amazon IaaS is really prohibiting when it comes to running a decent database driven Application. Unlike in the case of OT, where we ran our own MySQL instance, we even tried to use Amazon RDS as our database solution for StratosLive and it terribly fails when it comes to enterprise PaaS aspirations.
To add to the troubles, on Amazon EC2, the network performance is quite unpredictable. We have experienced, for prolonged periods like 24 hours, the connectivity between services hosted within is breaking badly with read timeouts and broken pipes. Then suddenly it becomes, OK, and then fluctuates in an unpredictable manner. We have to spend a considerable amount of man hours to troubleshoot problems that were not really there in our software. Moving out of Amazon EC2 and hosting on native hardware showed that, our software was stable, rather Amazon EC2 was not. On top of the Amazon bill for using their computing resources to figure that they are broken, we also have a frustrated and tired team who spent tons of hours figuring out the unpredictable behavior in the Amazon cloud. The TCO is much more than the amount that Amazon deducted from our credit cards.

When people think of cloud computing problems, they think about the outage that happened in April 2011, etc. and think that they are being resolved. But outage is not the key problem. Rather the virtual availability. The sheer fact that the computing resources are up and running and that you can create and shutdown those at your will is NOT the real benefit of cloud computing. In fact, the Nagios based monitoring system is telling us all the time, that Amazon instances are healthy. But weather you get the real CPU time, if your disk I/O or network bandwidth is just trickling down, or if your application hosted can be really accessed by end users when they want it are real problems.

It is one thing that you pay for the CPU amount that you that you really use, and it is yet another that you really get the CPU capacity you need to serve your customers or users when they really need your service.

Why pay three times the money for an IT infrastructure that is three times slower? It got to be much much effective, and much much cheaper, to rationalize infrastructure on the cloud.

With all due respect to Amazon, for igniting and initiating cloud computing hype, I hope Amazon EC2 take this as real and positive feedback for the betterment of of cloud computing in the future!

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,IaaS

Apache Axis2 on Cloud Java Platform as a Service

2011-09-02T15:18:00.001-07:00

Apache Axis2 is now available on the cloud!

Well, the good news is that, you can run it on your own on the cloud! You can create your own tenant, upload the .war distribution of Apache Axis2 onto the cloud, and run your services in there.

The ability to get an existing Web application and deploy it as it is on the cloud, and getting that to work as a cloud application in minutes is a great feature of WSO2 Stratos cloud.

This article explaining how to run Apache Axis2 on the cloud, shows you the ease with which you can deploy the .war distribution of Axis2 onto a cloud setup, and use it on the cloud.

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,PaaS

Throttling in a Cloud Computing Environment

2011-08-29T17:47:00.001-07:00

Throttling is the key to making multitenancy a reality in cloud computing.

Multitenancy refers to a principle in software architecture where a single instance of the software runs on a server, serving multiple client organizations (tenants). Multitenancy is contrasted with a multi-instance architecture where separate software instances (or hardware systems) are set up for different client organizations.

Many cloud computing offerings are multi-instance, and not multitenant, as they lack the core platform capabilities to support true multitenancy.

However, to realize pay-as-you-go model of cloud computing, you need throttling as a key ingredient of the cloud platform. This article explains, what, why & how of throttling in a cloud computing environment.

Throttling is about controlling the usage of

Network bandwidth
Data storage
CPU usage
I/O operations

Throttling can be done to keep track of current usage of cloud computing subscribers – aka tenants, help in billing them and also help with determining to scale up or down the resources based on the usage of those by tenants.

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing

WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus Documentation

2011-08-29T06:06:00.001-07:00

Latest, wiki based, WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus Documentation is now available online.

The purpose of this documentation is to provide you with complete procedures for installing, configuring and implementing solutions with WSO2 ESB.

The documentation topics are provided on separate pages. All pages are organized into a hierarchy of parent and child pages.

To find a specific topic in a particular section, click on the topic name in the Table of Contents which is located on the left of every page. This TOC reflects a physical (tree) structure of pages in the "Enterprise Service Bus" space.

This documentation is expected to be updated for each release.

The documentation is equipped with clear images, loads of samples, crystal clear explanations of various routing and message mediation constructs.

The good news is that, we are already working on more product documentation. We will soon have other WSO2 products with this level of complete and comprehensive documents.

Technorati Tags: SOA,ESB,Service Bus

Cloud Computing Java Platforms as a Service and WSO2 Stratos Live

2011-08-25T17:25:00.001-07:00

Cloud Java Platform As a Service Comparison highlights the facts that make WSO2 StratosLive most comprehensive Java PaaS, far ahead from the rest in the space.

Many Java PaaS offerings support Web App Hosting as a Service.
WSO2 StratosLive supports Web apps and more.
In addition to Web App Hosting, StratosLive also supports hosting Apache Axis2-based Web services, mediation, and workflow hosting as a Service. WSO2 StratosLive is a real SOA platform as a Service and the only one of that kind.

Application transition from on-premise to cloud platform is solved in a unique way with WSO2 StratosLive. It lets you move Axis2-based Web Services (.aar files), Web applications (.war files) and workflows to the Cloud Java Pass without any changes to them. Yes, zero code changes required to go cloud.
If you have some Axis2-based services, you can upload them to WSO2 StratosLive and it will just work. Same with Web applications.
More importantly, deployments on StratosLive can be seamlessly migrated to an on-premise deployment environment or to a private cloud with minimum configuration effort, offering full freedom from cloud lock-in and remarkable deployment flexibility.

WSO2 Stratos provides real multi-tenancy support. That is, different tenants operate as if they have their own servers, but in fact, they are actually served from one Java Server.
In other words, tenant isolation is done at Java level, not at Virtualization level.
That means, Stratos provides greater sharing capability and "Pay as you go" and "Pay for what you use" better than a virtual machine based model. WSO2 Stratos is the only AppEngine that does this out of other Java PaaS offerings out there.

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,Java Platform as a Service

Metering, Throttling and Billing in Cloud Computing

2011-08-24T07:28:00.001-07:00

Pay-as-you-go is one of the key characteristics that makes cloud computing appealing for businesses. Hence, it is an essential requirement for a cloud computing service to support metering, throttling and billing.

WSO2 StratosLive has comprehensive support for billing and metering.

What is Metering?

Metering is the basis for throttling and billing. Metering measures levels of resource utilization, such as network bandwidth usage and data storage volume, consumed by the cloud services subscribers, aka tenants.

Resource utilizations (bandwidth and storage usage) are measured on the fly and the measured data stored for summarizing and analyzing.

What is Throttling?

Throttling is the process of access and usage controlling based on a set of rules. Throttling rules are run against the metered data. Throttling rules define the upper limits for resource utilization. Access control to cloud computing services will be governed by throttling module that evaluate throttling rules. If the current metered utilization is below the allowed upper limits, access will be granted, else revoked.

What is Billing?

Billing is the process where the cloud computing service subscribers are charged based on the metered data. Billing usually happens on a monthly basis. Billing uses pricing rates defined against usage plans and compute the invoice against the usage data.

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing

43 Things Tags: Cloud Computing,PaaS

Cloud Computing Security Challenges

2011-08-22T16:56:00.001-07:00

What are the key security challenges in the cloud.

Key challenges are:

Physical security
Non availability
Data isolation and protection
Execution isolation and logic isolation
Malicious code
Identity management

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,Security

WSO2 Stratos vs other Java PaaS

2011-08-20T16:48:00.001-07:00

Srinath, has blogged about WSO2 Stratos in contrast to Other Java PasS Offerings.

Here are the highlights:

	App Engine	Amazon beanstalk	CloudBee's Run@Cloud	WSO2 Stratos
What is it?	Users can upload servlets. AppEngine hosts them and manage them.	Managed Tomcat Expensive	Tomcat, load balancer. Integrated with SVN. Can change source code and update all deployment aspects.	SOA middleware platform as a service. Support both Java Web apps and Web services
Java support	Yes, does not support some I/O and network operations	Full java	Full Java	Yes, but File access is limited
Outbound connections	Time out in 10 seconds	OK	OK	OK
Support for standard java Libs	Have problems when they use unsupported APIs	Yes	Yes	Yes (java security manager limits file accesses)
Performance and scalability	Auto scale, High scalability, but have bit high latency. Swapping the app out might slow down first request	Auto scale by creating EC2 instances	Can swap unused processes out of JVM. Can load balance multiple tomcats in the same EC2 instance	Auto scale (up & down) by monitoring the load and creating/shutting down new nodes. Load Balancer route the requests. Can lazy load services and other artifacts.
Storage	Support Big Table and Hosted MySQL. However, search support in BigTable case is limited. e.g. Each query can only have 100 results.	Support RDS (relational) , SimpleDB (NoSQL) or can run with your own DB	Has managed MySQL databases and provide a console to manage them	Support Cassandra as a Service, managed MySQL, and HDFS. Cassandra and HDFS support native multi-tenancy
Import/ export data	No (hard due to 30 sec limit)	Can write code to automate	Can write code to automate	Can write code to automate
Integration with others	Integrate well with other Google services	SQS, SES (email service), payment APIs	S3, SQS, SES etc.	With Google auth model and other WSO2 services. Also S3, SQS, SES etc.
Session handling	Store sessions to storage and handles them seamlessly	Only sticky sessions	Transparent session management	Only sticky sessions
Multi-tenancy	Yes	No	No	Yes

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing

WSO2Con 2011 – 10 top reasons to attend

2011-08-18T17:43:00.001-07:00

Sanjiva has blogged about the why one should attend WSO2Con 2011.

Here are the top 10 reasons:

Keynotes by, IBM, eBay, Google, Congnizant, Paul and Sanjiva
Speakers from all over the world – 14 countries
Agenda includes solutions and use cases by the users themselves
Talks by WSO2 folks on the future of the product and cloud platform
Panel discussions with superb combination of panelists
Pre and post conference tutorial sessions
Wide variety of topics, including SOA, cloud computing, applications security and more
Being held in Sri Lanka, #1 travel destination in the world in 2010
Meet some great people, the geeks, the famous and of course the WSO2 Team that build the great enterprise platform
Attractive deal

Technorati Tags: Conference

Enterprise Ready Java PaaS

2011-08-18T10:19:00.001-07:00

Pradeeban, one of the core members of the WSO2 Stratos team has written an excellent introductory article on WSO2 StratosLive, the enterprise Java PaaS.

Key Points to note from this article on WSO2 StratosLive :

is an open Java PaaS
is the public cloud deployment of WSO2 Stratos, operated by WSO2
complete enterprise SOA middleware platform is available as a service, on the cloud

ESB as a service
Application server as a service
Business process server as a service
altogether 12 services

migration of your applications between the PaaS, and the middleware platform that powers the PaaS is simple
released with noteworthy features such as

billing
metering
throttling
load balancing
elastic auto-scaling
logging as a service
business activity monitoring (BAM) as a service

mainly targets

enterprise architects
SaaS developers
researchers

BuzzNet Tags: Cloud Computing,PaaS

Cloud Computing – Why PaaS?

2011-08-17T18:18:00.001-07:00

Because no one wants to FAIL!

In the “as a Service” space in cloud computing, Infrastructure, Platform and Software are the three main areas that services are available.

They are known as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

Why would one worry about a platform as a service (PaaS) if software is available as a service (SaaS)?

The key is competitive advantage! How can businesses and states be better if they use the same software that the rest of the world uses? Is it the implied notion that with SaaS, everyone gets to use the best software, yet the same software the same way? What can make you different and stand out from the rest of the bunch with SaaS? One could argue, that it could be the “way” that you use the software available as a service, and not the software itself, that makes the difference. Yet then, why do the IT departments all over the world spend millions of dollars to implement, integrate and enhance systems? In other words, the software that an organization use, need to be in sync with the “way” they operate. To be more precise, be in sync with the business processes the organization uses.

So the extent to which SaaS can meet the needs of business process dynamics to help organizations stay ahead is limited.

SaaS could have the best software, yet everyone has access to it; everyone can do the same things with it
SaaS offers packaged software, hence for the service consumer room to customize is limited

PaaS provides a platform on top of which the service consumers can implement their own solutions. Implementing niche IT solutions is the key to stay ahead. IT is NOT the differentiator. It is the solutions that you implement with IT that makes the difference.

When organizations are implementing IT solutions, they hardly go green field. Yet they reuse existing assets, expose legacy as new services, integrate old apps and new services together and sometimes even make use of SaaS as part of the EAI. But the heart and sole of the solution is not dependant on SaaS, nor on IaaS for that matter. The natural fit is PaaS:

PaaS allows consumer controlled applications to be run on the platform provided
Can meet the business process dynamics with the ability to customize the consumer owned applications deployed on PaaS

PaaS takes away the complexities of configuring, administering managing and monitoring the platform, thus allowing the organizations to focus completely on the business solutions.

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing

A Blog about Blogging

2011-08-16T17:14:00.001-07:00

Reading habits:

People scan web pages

Reading quickly

Write to people to sync with their reading habits

Be concise! But note that it takes time:

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time!” Blaise Pascal

Jacob Nielsen’s writing tips:

Picture your readers, their background, and interest in your topic
Write a clear, meaningful title that will help the user decide if the post is relevant (see world’s best headlines)
Include typical search terms into the title or first sentence
Begin with a short summary of your conclusions – what will users find in this post and how it is relevant to them?
Keep the post short – use links for detail
Be sure a sentence or bullet point with a link gives an accurate picture of what it leads to – don’t waste the reader’s time
Include an image, table, or list to make it visually interesting and focus on key information
Stay above the scroll if possible
Write the post early then let it cool off and read it aloud

Benefits of blogging:

Backlinks

A powerful ingredient in Search engine optimization (SEO)

Increased Web traffic to your site

Traffic == sales leads

Publish content easily
Ping search engines quickly
Establish credibility as an expert

Some advice:

Frequency is important

Write often

Be yourself, follow your style
Be creative

Gather content ideas, then build your own

Follow hot topics

Comparisons
How to
Top 10 lists (or top 5)
Industry trends

Do not over do

No repeats of the same things
No “release notes”
No “link farms”

Use links and cross reference

Link others, other blogs
No “click here”
Use internal links to link your won stuff

Use tools

I used Windows Live Writer for this blog

Blog!

“Write something”

Cloud Computing for e-Government

2011-08-16T06:57:00.001-07:00

Delivering citizen services to all citizens with ease has been a long standing challenge for all governments all around the world. The primary reason being the channels of access for all regions of a country are not equally developed. This lack of development, specially for the rural areas in terms of IT accessibility has been a challenge to implement e-Government solutions.

For example, if you take Sri Lanka as an example, the more populated districts like Colombo, Kandy or Galle has more access to Internet bandwidth, while less populated districts like Polonnaruwa, Mannar or Monaragala has less access to Internet bandwidth. This is mainly because of the fact that the Internet service providers are more focused on more populated areas rather than less populated areas.

However, if the government is considering providing citizen services via e-Government, it is a must that there is opportunity for all citizens all over the country to have some form of access to these e-Government services. Thus one of the key considerations would be to have the ability to deploy the IT assets that are required to power the e-Government solutions with limited Internet bandwidth and sometimes with limited IT resources. Yet all those isolated deployments got to be able to be connected to a central system and run with a unified data model.

For example, the central government would want all the local government entities to deploy and operate a unified set of applications for all citizens across all local government entities. Though it is a unified set of applications, there need to be clear boundaries as each local government operate on its own. The unification comes as a form of regulating standards across all local government entities by the central government. At the same time, each local government entity could have their own custom applications too.

Cloud computing model can offer an easy means of achieving the unified application model across all local government entities with multi-tenancy. The central government can deploy a public cloud, operated by the central government, where each local government (LG) entity can be treated as a tenant. The unified set of applications can be deployed into an app store, where they can be easily deployed across tenants, on other words LG entities. Thus each tenant becomes an e-Local-Government, and the whole setup consist of the overall e-Government solution.

Having one public cloud could be challenging for those rural local government entities with limited Internet access. This is because, for the users, be it the local government employees or the citizens of that local government, to access the e-Government applications, they need proper Internet connectivity. If the connectivity is not readily available, what could be done is to deploy the same applications deployed on the cloud locally and time to time sync those up with the central public cloud. This hybrid cloud deployment is depicted in the following deployment diagram.

The key elements of the cloud computing based e-Government solution deployment are:

Central operations

This is a public cloud deployment by the central government
All local government entities have a tenant each in the cloud, e-LG1 to e-LGn
e-Government applications run under each tenant for every local government, isolated from other local governments

e-Local-Governments with good Internet connectivity (for example e-LG(n-1) and e-LGn)

Access the applications deployed within the e-LG tenant within the central cloud over the Internet
There are no local deployments
Application state and data for the e-LG tenant within the central cloud always reflect latest state

e-Local-Governments with poor or no Internet connectivity (for example e-LG1 and e-LG2)

Access the applications deployed locally on-premise
The e-LG tenant applications deployed within the central cloud are synced with the equivalent applications deployed locally on-premise over the Internet time to time
Application state and data for the e-LG tenant within the central cloud always reflect last synced state
Application state and data for the e-LG on premise always reflect latest state

Note that, in the deployment diagram, you see WSO2 Stratos being used for the central cloud deployment and WSO2 Carbon used for local setups to deploy the same applications locally. Being able to deploy the same applications both on cloud as well as on premise, with zero code changes, is one of the key value propositions of the WSO2 middleware platform, that is leveraged in this e-Government solution.

del.icio.us Tags: e-Government

Technorati Tags: e-Government,Cloud Computing

What is Java Platform as a Service (Java PaaS)?

2011-08-15T17:00:00.001-07:00

Java is the top programming language of choice used to develop enterprise and business applications these days.

But enterprise applications are hardly green field and ground up. Rather they are more into evolutionary nature, reusing existing IT assets, aiming to leverage best of breed technologies to the maximum benefit. In short, it is about spending least amount of money and effort and gain the maximum benefit.

The advent of cloud computing, has made many cloud venders to claim support for Java on the cloud. On one hand, we have the design, development and testing of the applications. On the other hand, there is the need to be able to easily deploy, mange and maintain those applications in production. Then there is yet another angle, where it is ideal if we can deploy the existing applications as they are into the cloud.

Java application design, development and unit testing, and sometimes even integration testing, are best done on premise. We do not want the engineering team to face the network latency bottlenecks when they are in high gear to meet the release timelines.

On the other hand, staging and production deployments can leverage the cloud.

Existing Java Web Applications on to the Cloud

The most common form of enterprise business applications are Web applications, often backed up by a database (the so popular MVC applications). It is ideal if we could have the traditional Java Web applications in a cloud setup to benefit from the elastic auto scaling capabilities. It is a fact that most Web applications would have occasional or seasonal peaks and it is at that time, that the applications has to perform the best – but unfortunately, it is when the traditional applications break, without being able to scale.

The good news is that, with the Applications Server as a Service, you can deploy the exiting war files, in other words, Java Web applications, on to the cloud. The advantage is that, with just a click and upload of the war file, you can enter the cloud era. And it will auto scale, be deployed multi tenanted, billed & metered for usage and be able to monitor with platform monitoring tool. Your WebApp is running on a Java PaaS.

Java Web Services on the Cloud

Web services, implemented as Apache Axis2, based on JAX-WS APIs are popular forms in Java. Another form of Java Web services is to reuse existing applications developed as Spring applications or plain old Java application and expose them as a service. All these forms of Java Web services can easily be deployed, managed and monitored with an Application Server. But it is an added advantage if you can use the same application server as a service. Like in the case of Web applications, you can use the Application Server as a Service to deploy existing Java Web services into the cloud and leverage the cloud advantages offered by the Java PaaS.

Data on the Cloud

It is an advantage to be able to deploy the existing Web applications or Web services as they are and reap the benefits on the cloud. However, what if we want to develop the next new application on the cloud, and where would my data be? Well, you can have the data on the cloud, created, managed, billed metered and monitored on the cloud. The Data as a Service allows you to create the database on the cloud, then use that database as the data store for the applications deployed on premise or on the cloud.

If you want to be all cloud, one of the options you have is to have the database on the cloud with Data as a Service and develop and deploy a Web application that uses that database on to the Application Server as a Service. You can have the travel logistics application or the team allocations application on the cloud with this model.

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,Java,PaaS

del.icio.us Tags: Cloud Computing

Service Governance and Lifecycle Management with Cloud Computing

2011-08-15T07:28:00.001-07:00

In a recent post, I explained the ease with which the WSO2 cloud computing strategy help you go from on premise to cloud with minimal effort.

The design of this philosophy is based on the SOA governance and service lifecycle management principles.

The service development lifecycle is based on the simple principles of evaluating existing services to identify design improvements, then design, implement, test, deploy, use the services and then again evaluate the usage, to reach the design improvement decisions.

The advent of the cloud computing principles and tools help with this service governance lifecycle. Obviously, the IT and business users of services use on premise resources to evaluate the services, that may run on public, private or hybrid clouds. The feedback is picked up by software architects to analyze the new evolution requirements for the services and then design the service enhancements or new services based on the feedback.

It is natural and easy to use the design tools on a desktop or a laptop and then use development tools on premise by software engineers to realize the designs. The implementations done are then developer tested by the developers themselves. It is ideal when the developers can test the developed artifacts on premise, to save time.

Then comes integration and system testing, done ideally by a testing team, in other words, a dedicated QA team. For this, they could use a staging environment, based on a private or a public cloud setup. To achieve this, there needs to be ability to deploy the same artifact on premise as well as on cloud, without any modifications to the service artifacts developed by the engineers.

Once the service artifacts gets approval by the QA to be graduated to the production system, the artifacts can go into production. The production system could be using a private or a public cloud, to leverage the cloud computing benefits, such as multi tenancy and elasticity.

A hybrid cloud setup could lead to ideal utilization of IT assets, enhanced productivity both on the part of developers and testers, minimal effort in terms of system setups required for testing, verification and staging. The ease with which the cloud computing setups enable to self provision and replicate the machine instances with pre-configured setups of platforms (also known as Platform as a Service – PaaS) make sure that the engineering team are not blocked on non-essential activities such as installations, rather focus on core business service realization.

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,PaaS,SOA,Governance

From on-premise to cloud computing – WSO2 Carbon, Stratos and StratosLive

2011-08-04T17:49:00.001-07:00

WSO2 Carbon is the world renowned middleware platform. It is an open source project with a complete and comprehensive set of features that can address all the expectations of the enterprise, from data to screen.

Here is the source code: https://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/trunk/carbon/

WSO2 Stratos is the open source software project, that adds cloud native attributes and features into the WSO2 Carbon middleware platform.

Here is the source code for Stratos components: https://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/trunk/carbon/components/stratos/

If you happen to notice, it is the same source tree. In fact, the WSO2 Carbon products and WSO2 Stratos services are built using the same pom, based on the same set of components.

For e.g. WSO2 Application Server product and service are both built using the maven pom: https://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/trunk/carbon/products/as/pom.xml

WSO2 StratosLive is the public cloud operated by WSO2, and provides a platform as a service (PaaS), based on WSO2 Stratos.

WSO2 Carbon middleware products can be deployed on-premise on native hardware or on a cloud environment on virtual machines.

The same WSO2 Carbon products are made available as cloud services, quipped with the cloud native capabilities, with WSO2 Stratos. WSO2 Stratos cloud middleware services can be deployed either on a private cloud operate by an your won organization or on a public cloud operated by a cloud service provider, such as Amazon EC2. With WSO2 StratosLive, you can enjoy the luxury of using all the WSO2 Carbon middleware products on the public cloud as a PaaS, deployed and operated by WSO2.

One of the key values of the use of WSO2 platform for your enterprise solutions is the ease with which you can transition and operate in a hybrid mode. This is where the real value of the same code base comes. The benefit to the user is the fact that the same artifact can be delayed on premise, on the private cloud as well as on public cloud. Zero code changes on the part of the user when going from on premise to cloud or from cloud to on premise. Because it is the same battle tested product, that is available on the cloud as a service, not something new or alien. This is one of the fundamental barriers to adopt cloud computing, namely transition, that WSO2 has addressed and solved, with its unique design of the platform.

And if you relate this to the lifecycle and governance aspects, now you can leverage the capabilities of the platform to manage develop, test, staging and production states of your solution artifacts with ease and with less management and administration costs with a hybrid setup. For example,

Developers can try out and PoC stuff on the public cloud, using a tenant on StratosLive
Developers can develop and test the artifacts on the WSO2 Carbon product instance, say WSO2 ESB, running in their laptops or desktops
Then deploy the same artifact, to a private cloud, running the WSO2 Stratos service, WSO2 ESB as a service, where the test environment is setup
Testers can test the artifact on the test setup running on the private cloud setup
Once QA passes, the same artifact can be deployed to the staging environment, running on a public cloud, operated by the same organization
Once acceptance tests pass, the same artifact can be deployed to the production environment, running on the public cloud, operated by the same organization on StratosLive

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,PaaS

BuzzNet Tags: Cloud Computing