Service Computing

A crude JMS performance comparison between different WebLogic server persistence stores

2013-12-16T13:33:00.002-08:00

When it comes to persisting service and subsystems data (i.e. JMS), WebLogic server offers customers a choice: filesystem or relational database using JDBC. Persistence store has implications on WLS performance and systems management. In this post, I will provide an unofficial JMS performance comparison using different persistence stores.

PLEASE NOTE: This is not an official Oracle performance benchmark. It is just intended as an example to give readers an idea about possible performance differences when considering different persistent stores.

WebLogic persistence store provides a high-performance and transactional store for those WebLogic services and subsystems that need to store their data. As an example, WebLogic JMS uses the persistence store for storing persistent messages and transmission of messages between Store-And-Forward (SAF) agents.

The persistence store plays an important role in performance and high-availability of WebLogic applications and topology. There are also considerations for management of the persistence store.

In this blog, I will be sharing metrics from the following scenarios:

WebLogic server JMS performance using default persistence store (filesystem)
WebLogic server JMS performance using a local DB persistence store
WebLogic server JMS performance using a remote DB persistence store

In all cases, WLS version 12.1.2 was running in a Windows 7 (64-bit) environment on a Dell Pecision M6600 with i7-2920xm cpu @ 2.5 and 16G RAM. I used the bundled, 64-bit Hotspot JVM with default heap: Xms256m Xmx512m.

In the second case, I used Oracle DB EE version 11.2.0.1 in the same Windows 7 environment as WLS. Again, all default settings.

In the third scenario, I used a remote Oracle DB EE version 12.1.0 on a 64-bit machine running OEL v5 under OVM. The average ping between the Windows and Linux servers was 45 ms.

For the testing, I used a standalone JMS client application to send WLS 1K, 4K, 16K, and 64K persistent messages. In each run, the client instantiated 4 concurrent threads to send 1000 messages to WLS (250 messages / thread). The client ran local to the WLS server, and between each test, all the messages in the JMS queue was cleared.

Here is a summary of average message throughput for each scenario:

So, what is the key take-away from the stats above? When using a local database, as the size of the message grows, you may see performance degradation of up 123.02% for a 64K message. When you compare this with the remote database, it took more than 3600 times longer to commit 1000 64K messages to JMS persistence store backed by the remote DB...

So, what is the right persistence store strategy for you? There are a lot of considerations. Please take a look at Using the WebLogic Persistence Store for considerations and limitations. Also, as I said, I used vanilla, out-of-the-box parameters for this test. You should consult Tuning the WebLogic persistence store for configuration and best practices.

WebLogic Server 12c RESTful Management Services

2013-12-09T07:15:00.000-08:00

WebLogic Server (WLS) 12c delivers over 200 new features and enhancements. With 12c, Oracle extended the WebLogic Management Framework with a set of RESTful management services. These services provide a light-weight and flexible interface for monitoring WebLogic Server. In this post, I will describe how to use this interface.

In 12c, Oracle added REST interface for managing WLS resources. In 12.1.2, this interface allows administrators to monitor WLS resources (servers, clusters, applications, datasources) in any environment where a basic HTTP library is available for communicating with WebLogic admin server, and a DOM or JSON library exists for handling request/response messages.

Please refer to Administering Oracle WebLogic Server with RESTful Management Services for an overview of this feature and how to enable it. If you don’t have access to the WebLogic admin console, refer to doc 1565067.1 to enable this using WLST.

Interface Design

WLS RESTful Management Service was designed based on a common REST design pattern (singular and plural nouns). In WLS RESTful interface, there are two types of resources: a singular resource (item) and a set of resources (collection).

As an example, if you want to see the collection of servers running in WLS, you'd use the following resource url: http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/servers

If you want to get information about a specific server, you'd use the following:

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/servers/AppServer1

Similarly, you'd use the same URLs to reference other resources:

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/clusters

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/clusters/{cluster name}

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/applications

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/applications/{application name}

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/datasources

http://localhost:7001/management/tenant-monitoring/datasources/{datasource name}

As of WLS 12.1.2, you can only use HTTP GET to retrieve information about resources described above. Compared to WLST, this is currently very limited. In future releases of WLS, the list of supported resources and types of operations by WLS REST Management Service MAY be expanded. This is not a guarantee or statement of product direction. If you are interested in this feature, please tune in to WLS product management blog for future announcements.

Media-Types & Usecases

WLS RESTful Management Service supports “representation” of resources in HTML, XML, and JSON. The representation refers to the format of the response message sent from WebLogic back to client.

In the request message, client uses the “Accept” HTTP header to tell WebLogic how to encode the response message. In the response message, WebLogic indicates the format of the response in Content-Type response header:

HTML Encoded Response

JSON Encoded Response

XML Encoded Response

So, what is the right format to choose? This is an important question which depends on your usecase and the programming environment.

At the most basic level, as an example, you may be in a situation where you need to provide WLS server status for "level-1" operations support team. All you have to do is to embed an HTML fragment in a custom monitoring dashboard to show the status of WLS servers. For this scenario, the HTML encoded response may meet the requirements without any programming efforts.

At the next level, the requirements may be a little more sophisticated. After you call the service, you may need to parse the response and show only the desired values, and in a specific format. In this case, you may choose the JSON format to be used in a Javascript environment.

Finally, the requirements may be more sophisticated in terms of parsing, data validation, programming environment... and the usecase/application may even involve receiving data from other enterprise IT resources with limitations on data formats... In this case, it may make sense to standardize on XML.

Sample Code

As I was getting ready to share some sample code in Python and Java to get you started, I found the following blog post http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/soa/oliveira-wls-rest-javafx-1723982.html. It provides an excellent programming reference with sample code.

Conclusion

With customers developing, testing, and managing applications and servers on-premise and in the cloud, WLS REST Management Service provides a uniform way for developing custom management solutions wherever the resources are running. The interface is easy to understand and use, and it doesn't require any WLS runtime jar files to run...

If you are interested to learn more about the new features in WLS 12c, take a look at this recent whitepaper by WLS product management.

Oracle Java Cloud Service SDK

2013-12-03T09:36:00.000-08:00

Oracle Java Cloud Service (JCS) is a Platform-as-a-Service built on top of WebLogic Server and other Fusion Middleware solutions (i.e. Identity Management). The platform is powered by ExaLogic and ExaData for elasticity, performance, and high availability.

You can build and deploy different kinds of enterprise java apps (i.e. servlets, web services) on JCS as long as you comply with its API restrictions. Since the foundation of Java Cloud Service is WebLogic, you can build and test your application locally in Eclipse (WLS 12.1.2 and above) and when ready deploy to JCS. JCS is part of a broader portfolio of Oracle’s Cloud offerings.

JCS offers a UI for application lifecycle management and monitoring. These capabilities are also available from Oracle Java Cloud SDK. After you download the SDK, take a look at its directory structure and content:

The samples directory contains a set of applications (based on JEE 6 tutorial) with instructions on how to build and deploy them on Oracle JCS. Take a look at readme.txt and ee-samples.readme.txt to get started.

Next, take a look at the doc directory to see how to use the SDK to build, deploy, and manage the applications locally and also on JCS.

The lib directory contains the SDK jar utilities to support application development and management tasks.
These include ANT tasks and Maven plugins to facilitate development automation. The SDK also provides a command-line interface to perform application development, lifecycle management, and monitoring.
It is important to note that these tools can also be run against a local WebLogic server to support typical cloud development and deployment scenarios.
Take a look at index.html in the doc directory to learn more about the tools and their usage.

After the installation of the SDK, you can invoke the command-line interface using java –jar javacloud.jar without specifying any parameters. This will print a list of available commands:

You can use java –jar javacloud.jar usage to print a help page about the tool:

Have a look at the page. It provides more details about the available commands, usage and parameters.
As an example, you can monitor the status of your jobs on the platform as follows:

-u specifies the userid when you registered with the service
-p specifies the password when you registered with the service
-identitydomain specifies the identity domain when the service was provisioned
-datacenter is the datacenter where your service was provisioned (i.e. us1, us2, em1, em2, ap1, ap2)

When you sign up for Oracle Java Cloud service and activate the service, you will receive a welcome email containing the information above.

The parameters above can be stored in a javacloud.properties under the user's home directory. The only exception is password. When you run the commands, the SDK will prompt you to enter a password:

Administrators can use the various commands to install/start/stop/delete or monitor the status of applications.

For developers, the SDK can be configured in Eclipse (OEPE), for application management and monitoring as follows.

Start by creating a new Oracle Cloud server:

JDeveloper and NetBeans are also supported. Refer to Oracle Java Cloud Service welcome email to specify the parameters.

If you specify the correct configuration parameters, you should be able to see your JCS environment under the server's tab as follows:

After the JCS environment is configured, you can publish your applications to JCS, manage them, and monitor statistics.

Oracle is making a lot of investments in cloud research and development. With WebLogic as the foundation of Java Cloud Service, and the common tooling that supports both on-premise WebLogic as well as JCS, customers can use their preferred IDE (OEPE, JDeveloper, NetBeans) to develop and test locally and deploy to JCS without any code changes - or - use JCS to do all the development and testing, and deploy to production servers on-premise. This brings cost and time efficiencies to development and testing. There are additional customer benefits, as JCS abstracts the underlying WebLogic and FMW stack taking the ownership and responsibility for installation, configuration, operations, patch management, performance, SLA, ... away from customers.

For more information about Java Cloud Service, visit Java Cloud Service documentation.

A review of Middleware Vendors Performance & Marketshare from 2004 to 2011

2013-03-11T10:38:00.000-07:00

[All content provided on this blog is mine and they do not represent the opinions of my current or previous employers. The content herein is based on public sources/websites and strictly for informational purposes.]

Over the last decade, middleware vendors’ product and growth strategies were fundamentally changed by JEE and SOA. Transaction/Database/Integration middleware vendors, both closed-source and open-source, standardized on JEE application servers or Java frameworks (AKA light-weight Java containers) as product foundation. This helped app-server agnostic vendors with new go-to-market opportunities and gave customers deployment flexibility. Vendors also embraced SOA principles of modular/self-contained services for product componentization, and standards-based implementation for product/vendor interoperability and extensibility.

According to Google Trends, interest in SOA began before 2004. A lot has changed since then. Different acquisition strategies have consolidated the MW vendor landscape (i.e. IONA, BEA, SUN, Cape Clear, FuseSource, JBoss, webMethods). The consolidation accelerated by new market trends such as Application Platform-as-a-Service (i.e. SpringSource, Heroku, Makara) and Integration Platform-as-a-Service (i.e. Cast Iron, Boomi). On the opposite side, some vendors changed product strategy of App+DB+Integration MW to refocus on their core strength (i.e. Progress Software sells off Orbix and Artix to Micro Focus)… Cloud, Big Data, and analytics continue to impact vendors product strategies and service offerings.

In this post, I am going to take a brief look at key MW vendors performance and marketshare based on revenues as reported in their annual reports. Different vendors have established different periods of their fiscal year. For example, IBM’s FY 2011 starts form Jan 1, 2011 to Dec 31, 2011. In Oracle’s case, FY 2012 starts from June 1, 2011 – May 31, 2012. So, in the following charts, when I list IBM and Oracle revenues for 2011, I am using numbers from IBM’s 2011 annual report and Oracle’s 2012 annual report. I will update this post with FY2012 / 2013 numbers once annual reports are available.

Vendors Overview
I decided to look at historical numbers for BEA, SUN, Oracle, IBM, Progress, Red Hat, Software AG, and Tibco. I selected these vendors, because they were/are well established in the enterprise middleware software space and recognized as leaders in the market.
As stated above, I am using middleware revenues reported by vendors in their annual reports. In some cases, these numbers include vendors’ revenues on non-JEE transaction middleware (i.e. Oracle Tuxedo, IBM CICS) and / or license or subscription revenues from OS (i.e. IBM zOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux). Oracle numbers do not include revenues from Oracle Applications. They also don’t include vendor’s MW consulting or education services revenues.
Here are the vendors and their reported middleware revenues from 2004 – 2011:

In the total row, I have added up annual revenues by all vendors. I am using this number as a basis to approximate vendor’s marketshare. There are a couple of observations to make:

Since 2005, Red Hat, Software AG, and Oracle have grown middleware revenues by 319%, 169%, and 119% respectively. During the same period, Tibco increased revenue by 106%, and IBM by 54%. Progress takes the last place with 31%.
In the case of Red Hat, they have done a fantastic job of maintaining subscription renewals and signing new contracts. It is important to consider they are a new and different kind of software company, and also they don’t break down the revenues by product areas (i.e. RHEL vs. JBoss) . However, looking at their numbers prior to 2006 when they acquired JBoss, I am guessing Red Hat’s MW subscription revenue to be less than 20% of Red Hat’s revenue.
Based on revenues above, it is reasonable to assume that IBM and Oracle have a combined MW marketshare of ~ 92%. Since 2005, Oracle’s marketshare has been incrementally increasing while IBM’s decreasing:

In the next sections, I am going to look at individual vendors performance. I am excluding BEA and SUN, since they were acquired by Oracle.

Oracle

Oracle has come a long way. In 1990, Oracle's total revenue was a little over $916M. By 2002, Oracle had already expanded its software portfolio beyond database and database related middleware, with JEE transaction server and Apps. By then, its software revenues exceeded $7B.

Since 2005, Oracle’s software segment (MW+DB+Apps) has performed much better than its closet competitors with steady YoY positive, annual growth despite global financial troubles and dragging economic growth. Oracle’s vision and strategy of Fusion and its targeted acquisitions have worked very well.
Looking at Oracle’s current revenue mix, it still remains a software company at its core. Services, which include consulting, education, and on-demand hosting, contribute a smaller percentage to Oracle’s total revenue. With the acquisition of SUN, Oracle entered hardware business. This has enabled Oracle with better execution of its Engineered Systems and powers Oracle Cloud.

IBM

They key business segments in IBM are IBM Global Services (IGS) which includes Global Technology Services (GTS) and Global Business Services (GBS), Systems and Technology Group (STG), Software Group (SWG), and IBM Global Financing (IGF).

Looking at IBM’s revenue mix, IGS and SWG have been key to IBM’s revenue growth over the last 8 years. (Margins on SWG and IGS is about 85% and 30% respectively). More than 50% of IBM’s revenue comes from Services. SWG makes up > 20%, but increasing. N.B. In 2008, for the first time in IBM’s history, SWG exceeded STG in revenue.

Looking at IBM’s revenue by geography, the executive team has done a great job of shifting resources to emerging and developing countries now beyond BRIC. According to IBM’s 2011 annual report, more than 22% of IBM’s revenue is realized from growth markets.

Here is a breakdown of SWG revenue by product areas:

IBM SWG is made up of different key brands: WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli, Information Management, and Rational.
In the chart above, X-Brand MW (Cross-Brand middleware) refers to revenue from all SWG brands. IBM also sell software for mainframe. Other-MW refers to mainframe software for zOS (i.e. IMS, CICS). OS refers to zOS operating systems and AIX. In 2009, IBM sold off its PLM business to Dassault. And, “Other” refers to SWG lab services. When comparing IBM’s MW revenue with other vendors, all revenues except for Other and PLM were included.

In SWG, X-Brand MW has been growing while other segments have been declining. IBM doesn’t break down revenue by specific products, but attributes growth to specific acquisitions as follows:

iLog and the Smarter Commerce offerings (Sterling Commerce + Coremetrics + Unica) have been key to WebSphere’s growth.
In Information Management, FileNet, Netezza, and Cognos have fueled growth in that segment.
Telelogic continues to help the struggling Rational brand, and
Micromuse & MRO have been driving growth for Tivoli.

IBM doesn’t break down revenue by new license vs. renewals, but states that it is generally 2/3 and 1/3 of total revenue for maint renewals and new licenses respectively.

IBM’s SWG growth strategy is centered on Cloud, Mobile apps, Analytics, and generally new product bundles.
In 2012, IBM expanded its WebSphere product offerings with Mobile App Dev & Runtime with Worklight…”IBM Mobile Foundation” includes Worklight, Cast Iron, and EndPoint Manager for Mobile dev, runtime, & management.

In the late 90’s, IBM decided to exit the application market and focus on middleware. The strategy was to recruit business solutions providers (i.e. SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft) to build on top of IBM MW, and go-to-market as partners. Oracle took a different approach. Their view was that the application market is fragmented and customers require heavy investments in integrating products and business solutions from different vendors to deliver a complete solution (See Fusion Apps Strategy). Comparing Oracle’s MW revenue against IBM’s, Oracle’s strategy has worked out better.

Progress

Progress is a mid-size vendor with products & services segmented under Application Development Platform (PureEdge, Orbix), Enterprise Business Solutions (Sonic, Actional, Apama, Savvion) and Enterprise Data Solutions (DataDirect)…

N.B. I reviewed Progress in December of 2012. Since then, they have fundamentally changed company and product strategies by divesting from integration middleware and focusing on application development (OpenEdge).

Progress makes most of its revenue from its Application Development Platform. Half of the revenue is realized through indirect channel and OEM.

In 2012, Progress decided to exit the integration middleware business and refocus on application development in Cloud (Application Platform-as-a-Service). They made a strategic announcement to divest 10 non-core products: Actional, Artix, DataXtend, FuseSource, ObjectStore, Orbacus, Orbix, Savvion, Shadow and Sonic.

Progress sold FuseSource to Red Hat, and Orbix, Artix, and Orbacus to Micro Focus. In addition, it sold off Sonic, Savvion, Actional, and DataXtend to Trilogy enterprises.

Red Hat

Red Hat product lines include infrastructure, middleware, virtualization, Cloud, and storage offerings. More than 85% of Red Hat’s revenue comes from maintenance and support subscription fees. Since 2002, Red Hat has had double-digit annual growth. Between 2005 – 2011, Red Hat’s revenue grew by 319%. In FY2012, Red Hat reached a major milestone of revenues > $1B.

Red Hat’s strategy is continued expansion of middleware offerings, and revenue growth by establishing new routes-to-markets. They are doing this through investment in OSS, acquisitions, and partnerships. (Red Hat has a large indirect channel of distributors/resellers, hosting providers, systems integrators, and ISVs.)

Red Hat has an active M&A strategy. With such acquisitions as JBoss, Makara, and FuseSource, it should be on the radar watch for both other open-source vendors such as Novell SUSE, MuleSoft, Talend, … as well as closed-source commercial vendors such as IBM, Oracle, VMware…

Software AG

Software AG is a large, well-established vendor with products & services segmented under Enterprise Transaction Systems (ETS), Business Process Excellence (BPE), and IDS Scheer Consulting (IDSC)…For more information, click here.

Software AG has an impressive revenue growth particularly due to services and consulting. The acquisition of webMethod gave incremental growth in new licenses and maintenance revenues. And, the acquisition of IDS Scheer expanded their services and consulting business from 28% of the total revenue in 2005 to almost 40% in 2011.

Product Strategy: App-Server agnostic, SOA, Analytics, Cloud, and Mobile
Growth Strategy: M&A, Geographic Expansion, Strategic Partnerships

Tibco

Tibco is an established integration middleware vendor with a long history in messaging. Currently, Tibco groups its products along business integration & automation, Event Processing, Analytics (Enterprise, Operational, Big Data), Cloud, and Social.

Despite tough competition from IBM, Oracle with broader mw and infrastructure software portfolio, and open-source integration middleware, Tibco has done a good job of growing revenue in both new licenses and maintenance renewals. In FY2012, Tibco’s revenue exceeded $1B.

Summary
The middleware software market is split between IBM+Oracle vs. the rest. Over the last 7 years, smaller vendors like Software AG and Tibco have been able to perform well despite tough competition. On the open-source software side, Red Hat has been doing very well breaking the $1B revenue mark. Cloud (aPaaS, iPaaS), Big Data, Analytics, and Social are impacting middleware vendors product, service offerings, and go-to-market strategies.

From MVM to Multi-Tenant JVM

2012-09-20T16:45:00.000-07:00

Last month, at the JVM Language Summit, Ryan Sciampacone from IBM shared his experience with extending IBM J9 JVM to host multiple applications. You can view his talk on Oracle Media Network. You can also download a copy of his presentation here. Ryan goes into fairly good details about the challenges and lessons learned, so I recommend taking a look at it.
Across the world in Ireland, Waratek recently announced availability of Waratek Cloud VM for Java. This JVM extends OpenJDK (HotSpot VM) with a virtualization layer that isolates applications in Java Virtual Containers. In addition to application isolation, Waratek’s solution offers a container management interface based on Virsh, and resource monitoring… I think this is a very cool solution that could potentially shape ideas to JVM multi-tenancy implementation. You can watch a presentation on their solution here, and find more information on their solution here.
-----
Background: The current model of one JVM per application is inefficient. It leads to JVM sprawls and inefficient usage of infrastructure resources.
The JVM specification defines the JVM as an abstract computing machine. It describes the Class file format, machine instruction set, rules/constraints on class loading, etc., but contains no requirements or models for the implementation of the JVM’s internal processes, task management or resource management for secure sharing of the JVM by multiple applications.
Over the last decade, before multi-tenancy had become such a popular (and overused) term, there have been a number of related efforts to address the issues:

JSR 121: Application Isolation API – Proposes a language construct called “Isolate” as the means to instantiate isolated Java applications on the JVM. The spec also addresses isolate-to-isolate communication.
JSR 284: Resource Consumption Management (RCM) API – Since there will be different applications sharing a JVM, there needs to be a way to make sure a rogue app does not impact the performance of another app. JSR 284 proposes a standard API to bind RCM policies to applications running on the JVM. This JSR is quite interesting, as it has provisions for resource reservation as well setting constraints / quota for resource consumption.

Sun had a couple of reference implementations (MVM, MVM2). For a complete list of related papers, visit Project Barcelona.)
SAP also did its own implementation of application isolation scheme by implementing a pool of VMs and a dispatcher to schedule work in the VMs (see Process Attachable Virtual Machines, Virtual Machine Container).
-----
Java multi-tenancy
There are two usecases for JVM multi-tenancy:

N.B. In the diagram above, I specify App, but App Server should be implied as well.
In option B, you have multiple applications using the JVM. This is pretty straight forward. In option A, you have a situation where multiple customers or business units (i.e. shared services) need to share the application securely.
In the case of option A, let’s assume an application has been implemented as a multi-tenant solution using JEE framework. The App Server interfaces with the underlying JVM to provision new tenants (new isolates). As part of the tenant provisioning, the App Server uses the RCM interface to set tenant policies. The JVM monitors the RCM policies, and takes appropriate action. As application requests hit the App Server, the App Server uses some tenant context scheme to determine which isolate it should go to….As the request flows through the different tiers of the JEE solution, the App Server makes sure only the tenant only accesses the JEE resources that it is authorized to use. In case of an isolate loop or application runtime environment crash, the JVM applies RCM policies to handle the situation…
In the example above, we can see that there are requirements for the JEE framework as well as JVM runtime to support multi-tenancy. And, we also should not forget that there re other languages running on the JVM. Additional requirements may need to be considered.
-----
So, where are we now?
The JCP will standardize multi-tenancy in the Java Platform, but this will probably not happen in JDK8 given the current schedule and the focus for JDK8 (productivity, modularity, performance).
There should be more information available by Jan 2013.
-----
Final thoughts
With JDK8, there will be a new Java module system (Jigsaw) replacing the old JAR format and class loading from Classpath… The new format will contain metadata about the packages, classes, and dependencies using a new set of annotations (i.e. version, imports, exports, …), and reflection APIs to improve class loading and sharing, performance,… For some background, have a look at JSR 294 and JSR 277. This will play an important supporting role in implementing multi-tenancy support in the JVM efficiently.
Clearly, JVM multi-programming / multi-tenancy capabilities will bring economic benefits to both enterprise customers and vendors. It think it might also trigger a new wave of JVM innovations like Waratek.

Enterprise Architects should consider multi-tenancy design patterns & best practices to deliver better shared solutions

2011-07-31T19:09:00.000-07:00

Recently, I came across a few good research papers on Cloud and Multi-tenancy design patterns. Typically, the primary audience for such articles is architects and technologists working for service providers (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BPaaS…) or software vendors. However, enterprise architects can also apply these architectural principles and patterns to build more cost-effective and easier-to-maintain shared solutions.

In this post, I won’t bore you with an introduction of different Cloud services and taxonomy. I assume you’ve heard it all already. If not, have a look here or just google “Cloud Computing”. My intention is to explain multi-tenancy and key characteristics, review some of the patterns and organize them in logical groups, and provide some references for further examination.

Background
For the last decade, large multi-national enterprises have progressively consolidated IT organizations / functions into Global Shared Services. This is a common strategy to reduce costs by eliminating redundancies, improve operational efficiencies by reducing technology stacks, vendors, and required skills through portfolio rationalization and standardization.

In such organizations, Enterprise Architects are routinely involved in building cost-effective shared solutions. These solutions are used by different business units around the globe requiring BU-specific look & feel, application behavior, and compliance with local customs & regulations.

In the enterprise, a common approach to building shared solutions involves deploying multiple instances of an application or package to accommodate BU-specific functional customizations and non-functional requirements (i.e. load, performance, security…) on a shared infrastructure.

Instances are typically separated in different logical partitions or virtual machines, have their own dedicated resources (application server, middleware, database…), and are configured to meet BU-specific requirements.

Over time, what started out as a common code-base application supporting all BUs diverges into multiple code branches, sometimes so different, that they essentially become different applications. In this case, while infrastructure costs are contained, operational and maintenance complexities and costs grow.

There is a better approach. If applications are designed based on multi-tenancy, the level of “sharedness“ moves higher in the stack. The higher it moves, the better efficiency and asset utilization is gained.

It should be noted that this is appropriate for those organizations that operate at a higher level of IT maturity, as change and release management, and availability and scalability, get more complex.

What is a multi-tenant application?
A multi-tenant application is a shared solution (i.e. CRM) used by different tenants (organizations, BUs). It is a single application with scalable resources to meet the performance demands of tenants.

As each tenant has its own specific functional requirements, the single multi-tenant application can support tenant specific customization at different layers of the architecture (persistence, workflow, component integration, security, UI).

Since multi-tenant applications run on shared infrastructure, it is important to isolate tenants from each other to protect information security, and prevent rogue actions or failure in one tenant’s execution environment does not impact other tenants’ availability.

Finally, since we’re talking about a single code-base running in shared environment, maintenance and updates must be continuously performed without requiring any downtime.

[Note: These are the key concepts behind multi-tenant applications. I am not going to include things like subscription-based licensing or utilization-based billing. Those are in the realm of Software-as-a-Service offering and operation.]

So, the main idea behind multi-tenancy is to provide a single code-base, polymorphic application that is customizable and scalable to meet the demands of different tenants:

In the diagram above, on the left (A) we have a single code-base, single instance, and single DB application supporting different tenants. On the right (B), we have a single code-base and single DB, but multiple instances supporting different tenants. This is not the same as an enterprise deploying multiple instances in their shared solution implementation.

In this case, the reason for “multiple instances” is related to the underlying infrastructure hosting the multi-tenant application. It is related to how its request handling, provisioning, and scalability strategies have been implemented.

In A, there is probably a cluster or grid of compute nodes powering the application. In B, as new application requests arrive, the underlying infrastructure provisions an execution environment (i.e. servlet container) and dispatches the request to the container to run the requests.

Here are some references which you might find useful:
· http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/CEC-EEE.2007.4
· https://www6.software.ibm.com/developerworks/offers/techbriefings/cc4d-replays/session2_dcarew.pdf
· http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-multitenantpart2/index.html

Multi-Tenancy Design Patterns & Realization
In this section, I am going to describe some of the key multi-tenancy design patterns and organize them into logical order:

Requirement	Description	Patterns, Approach, and Techniques
Tenant Isolation (Infrastructure)	Tenant isolation is quite broad and multi-dimensional. It is primarily motivated by security and tenant availability and performance.	At the infrastructure layer, tenant execution environment may be separated by virtual machines Higher up, in the application server layer, each tenants may get their own server (Take a look at this WSO2 paper) In the future, OSGi bundles? (See OSGi4C – RFP 133) SOA provides a natural choice for multi-tenant and cloud applications (i.e. reusable components, composite apps). Take a look at this paper by Frank Leymann, et al on combining different multi-tenancy patterns in Service-Oriented applications.
Tenant Isolation (Data)	In a multi-tenant environment, a single database contains data from multiple customers. Tenants should only be able to see their own data.	SQL operations are qualified using *tenant_id* to return only tenant-specific data. For added security & audit, another field such as *user* may be required to for authorization and logging. References: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479086.aspx
Customization	As previously discussed, the single code-base multi-tenant application must provide some degree of customization and use extension to facilitate adoption. The customizable configuration items range from UI to workflow to database schema. For different layers, different techniques are applied to make the changes. Here is a good reference on approach / methodology including assessing customization needs for a multi-tenant application.	Most SaaS solutions offer a metadata repository and a configuration service. A self-service UI panel is provided to the administrator on the tenant side to make the configuration changes. Wizards are also provided to constrain / guide configuration changes. For most configuration items, change is automatic. On the fly code generation techniques (i.e. templates), and dependency injection are also used to create tenant-specific code at runtime.
Maintenance & Upgrade	Applying patches or system upgrades for a single instance multi-tenant solution running on a shared platform gets quite complex. In the enterprise, change management and release strategies must factor in availability SLAs.	The same principles and best practices as continuous integration and delivery apply here Force.com development lifecycle offers good best practices for release testing and promotion which can also be applied to a multi-tenant solution in the enterprise. Obviously, it is important to be able to roll back to a previous stable point if things go wrong, so here are some general tips: · An on-demand provisioning infrastructure provides an important capability for multi-tenant operation and management. Now, for an enterprise it doesn’t have to get as sophisticated as Amazon or Google, but try to understand the gaps, build a business case, and take appropriate steps. · Similarly, investment in a CMDB solution also plays an important role in developing capabilities to manage change requests effectively and reduce deployment errors and others… · Template-based configuration and deployment…This is an important configuration and change management best practice. · Regular incremental backups (i.e. system snapshots) are also important to enable recovery in the event of rollbacks….

The above have direct linkage to the solutions that are built in enterprise shared services. BUs must be isolated for both technical operational and regulatory reasons. Enterprise architects must find ways to design solutions that share more and cost less in ongoing operation and maintenance. And, the systems typically have high availability requirements.

What’s also important to note is that the there is often no reference model for building shared solutions. This is a big gap. Multi-tenancy patterns and principles can be a big help.

Final thoughts
This is quite a fluid area. Multi-tenancy is still relatively a new concept. The ideas There are a lot of open questions from design -> operation. Enterprise Architects should have this on their radar, as they engage with new projects – or – refactor old implementations.

What do you think?

Google excludes scheduled maintenance from its Google Apps SLA, but not Google App Engine

2011-01-16T11:25:00.000-08:00

Back in July of 2010, I wrote about how Cloud Service Providers exclude scheduled downtime from their service level agreements. Last Friday, Google made a significant change to their SLA for Google Apps by removing scheduled downtime from their Google Apps SLA:

Exclusion of scheduled downtime from availability SLA
Exclusion of intermittent downtime (periods of less than 10 minutes) from availably SLA

Obviously, it is good news for Google Apps customers. It highlights Google’s infrastructure & operational maturity (in this case, for Google Apps specifically).

I also think the announcement is important, because it sets a higher standard for service delivery. By raising the bar, Google also intensifies competitive pressure on service providers such as Microsoft to offer more robust Cloud services. Ultimately, both customers & the industry should benefit from this.

However, as I discussed in my July post, for infrastructure & platform services such as Google App Engine for Business, scheduled maintenance still remains excluded in all SLAs:

It is 2011. If we mark the beginning of Cloud Computing by the initial public release of EC2 (2006), I think enough time has passed for Cloud service providers to do a better job of managing planned outages in a non-service-disruptive way.

--------
Sidebar - I am a regular user of AWS, GAE, Force.com… I have been using these services for more than a couple of years. To be fair, I have never received any emails from any of the major cloud for scheduled downtime. I have received a few from other service providers. So, I would say that they are all doing a pretty good job operationally (a lot better than probably what most enterprises would do), and make sure the services are always up, and almost always perform well :-]. So, they just have it in the SLA agreements for legal protection & liability.

Never-the-less, when it comes to migrating or designing enterprise solutions, depending on the application type and use-case, this can become an issue, and require both technical implementation & operations planning.

A quick & dirty look at web traffic trends on AWS, Azure, Force.com, GAE, and IBM Dev/Test cloud

2010-12-29T14:55:00.001-08:00

Since the introduction of EC2 in 2005/2006, a lot has happened. New service providers such as Google App Engine (GAE) and Force.com have emerged. Existing hosting providers such as GoGrid & RackSpace have transformed to cloudify their service delivery model. And, existing platform vendors such as IBM and Microsoft have raced to implement or acquire solutions to respond to this fundamental shift.

Different types of vendors are competing for market positions. Some are new: Abiquo, Nimbula, Cloud.com (formerly VMOps)… And, some are mature: VMware, Novell/Attachmate, CA, BMC, DELL, … [The vendor landscape is big and complex, and includes other types of vendors including systems integrators…]

As we close 2010, I thought it would be interesting to look at some usage trends of the big names in the Cloud market.

The statistics come from Alexa. It uses its own methods for capturing HTTP traffic, and normalizing the data. As such, it is important to note that it does not include non-web app workload deployed on these cloud services. In addition, it is common for enterprises to use DNS aliasing (CNAME) to map to a custom URL. So, it is important to consider traffic to custom URLs would not be included in the following presentation.

Comparing aws, azure, force, gae, and ibm

View more presentations from babak hosseinzadeh.

The intent is to provide some ideas about usage and future trends, as these vendors battle it out for dominance and market share.

Please send me any comments or questions at babakh@yahoo.com.

Wish everyone a Happy New Year!

More on VMforce - Part Deux

2010-11-16T06:23:00.001-08:00

I blogged about VMforce a couple of times back in April. In August, VMware/SpringSource and SalesForce.com provided more details about this service in a couple of webinars to introduce Spring framework to Force.com developers, and Force.com & VMforce to Java developers:

VMForce–Cloud Computing for Java Developers

Basically, VMforce enables developers deploy JEE webapps on Force.com, and access Force.com database to persist data using standard JEE interfaces (JPA):

SpringSource offers the tooling (STS) to easily build and deploy Spring-based applications to VMforce. Force.com implements a JPA adapter to provide secure, multi-tenant access to Force.com database.

On the development/tooling side, it doesn’t seem the Force.com Eclipse Plug-in can be installed on STS (yet). Once they work this out, both sets of developers can install one Eclipse to implement either JEE/Spring apps or Apex.

I think the significance of VMforce is beyond merely extending Force.com with Java EE support or providing extensibility for Apex applications. VMforce is significant, because it will support the most common approach to Cloud migration by customers. Customers need a reliable service from a reputable, enterprise-ready service provider to move their existing applications to the cloud as is without much re-factoring. This is going to be the trend for the next few years. VMforce is a key strategy to meet that need.

And, of course with Spring framework programming model (abstraction, dependency injection), there is a good story for platform lock-in and change management.

What is not completely clear so far is how VMforce will meet monitoring and on-premise integration requirements for customers.

----

Side note:

As I am writing this, I can understand how Google and SalesForce have partnered with SpringSource today to enable implementation of Cloud apps using the framework (i.e. skills). However, this framework is based on “legacy Java EE” development and deployment. Java EE, as it exists today, does not cover Cloud distributed programming model and patterns, and I don’t know if it could be easily extended to support them. The problem here is that customers may have to invest in migration in the future.

However, there is no practical alternative available today. Until there is standardization around Cloud development, deployment, and interoperability, Spring-based development seems to be a logical approach.

----

Thoughts/Comments?

A brief look at Oracle and its Cloud Strategy

2010-10-17T16:09:00.001-07:00

For the last couple of years, Oracle has shown a consistent strategy to Cloud Computing. It has made strategic acquisitions such as Virtual Iron to gain x86 virtualization management software, and has also made investments in new products such as Virtual Assembly Builder to facilitate configuration and governance of virtual environments.

Oracle has made clear that it intends to be a provider of technology to both enterprise customers and service providers. That it does not plan to be a public cloud provider/operator like AWS or Savvis. Instead, Oracle works with public cloud services as a distribution and delivery partner.

[Note: See AWS/Oracle announcement of support for Oracle middleware and apps on EC2 using Oracle VM images.]

---------

This post is a brief look at Oracle and its cloud strategy. First, I will review Oracle business, financial, and what it brings to Cloud Computing. Next, I will provide a 5-minute SWOT analysis of Oracle Cloud Strategy.

Oracle business

Oracle’s goal is to be the world’s most complete, open and integrated enterprise software and hardware company. In FY2010, it booked more than $26B in revenue. The company breaks down its revenue as follows:

Software

New software sales
Software license renewals & support contract

Hardware

Hardware sales
Hardware support & maintenance contract

Services

Consulting
Education
On Demand

Here is their revenue trend for the last 5 years:

Oracle made over 32% of its 2010 total revenue ($26,821 million) from database & middleware renewal, and about 16% from Fusion apps renewal. This is due to the fact that almost 90% of Oracle customers renew contracts. [Renewal has a margin of 85%, and is the key factor to Oracle’s overall profitability.]
Oracle’s On Demand, which is where it offers hosted Fusion application, has also contributed to about 3% of total revenue. This segment has shown steady growth. In fact, since 2005, it has grown almost 3 times. [This is a key area to future growth for Oracle especially considering all the investments they have been making to standardize Fusion apps on Fusion middleware and continue to “SaaSify” the applications.]

Oracle Cloud Business Strategy

As stated earlier, Oracle intends to be primarily a Cloud technology provider/enabler as opposed to a service operator. This was further evidenced as it halted the rollout plans for Project Caroline after the Sun acquisition.

For enterprise customers, Oracle is addressing the needs for private cloud by providing integrated machines such as Exadata and Exalogic. These machines help customers consolidate workloads and scale up/down as demand grows. Oracle also continues with new products and enhancement of its middleware and enterprise management solution to enable customers build private clouds on their own hardware.

I think Oracle will be forced to change their cloud strategy for the following reasons:

According to analysts, about 10% of IT budget is spent on external cloud services and that percentage will keep growing (see Gartner’s survey). Oracle needs to pay attention to this shift in enterprise IT spending, if it plans to increase marketshare and revenue. Large customers struggle with supporting workloads in the cloud, so they look for a vendor to not only help them move workloads to the Cloud, but also provide support and management. So, they look for hosted managed private clouds. Oracle could address this need by leveraging Sun assets such as Caroline to offer such services. This would position it well for future growth.
It is common knowledge that Oracle wants to reach $100B in revenue in the next 10 years. Cloud Computing, including integrated systems, is a key growth strategy for Oracle. Oracle needs to diversify to reach that level of revenue in the next decade. It can’t rely on acquisitions to make that happen. Let’s assume Oracle acquires CA. That would only boost Oracle’s revenue by $4B.

Sidebar: Let’s play the following scenario. Let’s assume that on average with every Exalogic Oracle charges $1M for hardware and $3M for software. Furthermore, let’s assume a %20 maintenance revenue per box / year. If Oracle sold 1000 units every year for the next 3 years, they would book a total of $12B in combined new hardware and software + $4B in maintenance. Everything else constant, by 2014, Oracle’s revenue would grow by $16B to $42B. Can they do that?

Oracle Cloud Solution

The following diagram describes Oracle’s cloud solution model:

Oracle models its solutions based on different Cloud service offering. The diagram is pretty self-explanatory. At the IaaS level, Oracle Sun hardware, and virtualization technologies (Virtual Iron + Sun). Oracle offers other capabilities that are not listed in this diagram such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Oracle VM Virtual Box.

In the PaaS layer, Oracle uses a combination of virtualization to isolate workloads and management deployment + grid technologies to enable dynamic resources and scaling for applications.

At the top layer, Oracle and non-Oracle apps can be deployed on this platform. Oracle Fusion apps are optimized for Oracle Fusion middleware.

Finally, on the right hand side, there is the management layer…The slide is a cut and paste of Richard Sarwal’s presentation at Oracle OpenWorld. In that presentation, Richard also mentioned that there other capabilities and solution that Oracle will be offering in the next year (i.e. self-service portal, metering & charge-back, etc)

Oracle Cloud SWOT

In terms of integrated systems, Oracle will face competition primarily from IBM CloudBurst and Acadia. On the middleware side, IBM offers a similar set of offerings based on WebSphere and Tivoli (i.e. WebSphere CloudBurst, WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, Tivoli Cloud Management stack). Oracle will face competition from VMware vFabric. IBM has embraced VMware as a virtualization partner (on x86)whereas Oracle decided to acquire its own virtualization. That has been a source of friction between the two vendors.

In terms of deployment and support, IBM offers more choices than Oracle:

IBM & Oracle both offer enterprise-owned cloud
IBM offers managed private cloud services (using customers assets), but Oracle does not. A customer would have to get a managed services contract from an Oracle partner like Wipro.
IBM offers IBM-hosted private cloud, but Oracle does not. A customer would have to sign a contract with an Oracle Cloud provider like Savvis that offers both hosting and support services.
IBM offers a public cloud where multiple tenants share the same infrastructure. This is useful for certain workloads (i.e. email, public website) and cloud scenarios (development and testing). Oracle doesn’t offer that. A customer would have to find a Pay-As-You-Go provider like AWS.

So, here is a quick SWOT of Oracle Cloud:

Let me know what you think?

Do you think Oracle can reach $100B in the next 10 years through an acquisition only strategy? What other challenges do you see in Oracle’s cloud strategy, and selling its middleware machine into the enterprise?

Cloud Services & Availability SLA – Should scheduled maintenance be excluded from the measurements?

2010-07-31T08:03:00.001-07:00

Availability SLA is an important criterion to enterprise customers when selecting a Cloud service provider. If the service provider doesn’t offer appropriate SLAs, they often don’t even make it to the “short list”.

As an example, Amazon’s EC2 availability SLA is 99.95%. Amazon also offers transparency by providing a website that publishes up-to-the-minute status on their services and any related issues. In the case of AWS, Amazon makes the following exclusions:

Amazon EC2 SLA Exclusions

The Service Commitment does not apply to any unavailability, suspension or termination of Amazon EC2, or any other Amazon EC2 performance issues:

(i) that result from Service Suspensions described in Section 7.1 of the AWS Agreement;
(ii) caused by factors outside of our reasonable control, including any force majeure event or Internet access or related problems beyond the demarcation point of Amazon EC2;
(iii) that result from any actions or inactions of you or any third party;
(iv) that result from your equipment, software or other technology and/or third party equipment, software or other technology (other than third party equipment within our direct control);
(v) that result from failures of individual instances not attributable to Region Unavailability; or
(vi) arising from our suspension and termination of your right to use Amazon EC2 in accordance with the AWS Agreement (collectively, the “Amazon EC2 SLA Exclusions”).

If availability is impacted by factors other than those explicitly listed in this agreement, we may issue a Service Credit considering such factors in our sole discretion.

Here is section 7.1 from AWS agreement:

“…suspended for the duration of any unanticipated or unscheduled downtime or unavailability of any portion or all of the Services for any reason, including as a result of power outages, system failures or other interruptions…”
we shall also be entitled, without any liability to you, to suspend access to any portion or all of the Services at any time, on a Service-wide basis:
- (a) for scheduled downtime to permit us to conduct maintenance or make modifications to any Service;
- (b) in the event of a denial of service attack or other attack on the Service or other event that we determine, in our sole discretion, may create a risk to the applicable Service, to you or to any of our other customers if the Service were not suspended; or
- (c) in the event that we determine that any Service is prohibited by law or we otherwise determine that it is necessary or prudent to do so for legal or regulatory reasons (collectively, “Service Suspensions”).

…To the extent we are able, we will endeavor to provide you email notice of any Service Suspension in accordance with the notice provisions set forth in Section 15 below and to post updates on the AWS Websites regarding resumption of Services following any such suspension, but shall have no liability for the manner in which we may do so or if we fail to do so.

So, if there is any outage unintended or intended by Amazon, those numbers may not be included in their service availability measurements. In fairness to Amazon, I haven’t experienced much outage or remember any notices for scheduled maintenance. Never-the-less, if it occurs, it won’t be counted as an outage.

You can find EC2's SLA at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/.
--------------------------------
The other day, I received the following notification from GoGrid:

In this case, customers basically had no administration access to their running servers for 4 hours.

GoGrid claims to offers 100% uptime in their SLA, but there are some exclusions as follows:

downtime during scheduled maintenance or Emergency Maintenance
outages caused by acts or omissions of Customer, including its applications, equipment, or facilities, or by any use or user of the Service authorized by Customer
outages caused by hackers, sabotage, viruses, worms, or other third party wrongful actions
DNS issues outside of GoGrid's control
outages resulting from Internet anomalies outside of GoGrid's control
outages resulting from fires, explosions, or force majeure
outages to the Customer Portal
failures during a "beta" period

According to item #1, scheduled maintenance is not included as part of their availability SLA.

Rackspace also claims to offer 100% availability in their SLA, but they also exclude scheduled maintenance from their availability measurement.

So, I appreciate the difference between scheduled maintenance and an unexpected outage. However, from an availability perspective, I think scheduled maintenance should be included in the availability measurements and reporting. Otherwise, it is misleading clients.

The Cloud service provider has options to manage for continuous availability. That is under their control. Regardless of scheduled vs. unscheduled service outage, the business impact may be no less even if the subscriber is aware of an outage in advance.

What is your experience with Cloud service providers? Do they explain the SLAs clearly? Do you think scheduled maintenance should be included or excluded?

Are you considering your application migration options carefully when moving to the Cloud?

2010-07-31T07:07:00.001-07:00

So, you’ve heard about the Cloud. You’ve done some prototyping on AWS, Rackspace, GoGrid, Joyent, GAE, Force.com, Engine Yard,…

You show it to your boss. Bada Bing Bada Boom!

This is very timely, because the boss has just come out of a meeting with IT finance. He’s got a big problem justifying the cost of running the company’s website for $2M / year. He’s also pounded daily by business, because he has been unable to meet the availability and performance SLAs despite spending a lot on the infrastructure... So, you’ve just given him a brilliant idea. He checks with Legal, and asks you to look into moving the website to the Cloud.

As an experienced architect, you lift up the hood to take a good look inside the WebApp. You familiarize yourself with the code, dependencies, packaging, etc… After your analysis, you break down the options as follows:

Options	Pros	Cons
Option 1: Move the application as is	Quick	Inherits the issues that already exist with the application The performance of the application may just marginally improve due to the application architecture & implementation
Option 2: Re-factor the application; then move	Potentially fixes some of the application issues Potentially fixes some of the application infrastructure issues	Takes more effort than option 1, and requires more time May introduce some dependencies on the target Cloud Will probably require learning a few new things
Option 3: Rewrite à Redesign/rewrite the application	Full application refresh: New application & infrastructure architecture & design, and implementation Removes the implementation constraints that existed in previous options thereby allowing to leverage/offer new capabilities (i.e. social computing)	May be more involved than the previous options (time, cost)

In option1, you settle on an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider, and just move the application as-is over. Unfortunately, the issues that had already existed with the application will be all propagated (i.e. poor image loading / bundling, deprecated code, unsupported utility jars, packaging). However, in option1, you’ll be able to reduce the infrastructure and operations costs dramatically, and improve SLAs (i.e. availability, auto-scaling) quickly without a lot of efforts.

In option2, you’d still subscribe to an IaaS. You will have the opportunity to clean up the application a little. You might even re-factor the application to use Cloud services (i.e. persistence layer). If time permits, you might even make some changes in the infrastructure in term of content caching & media delivery (i.e. CDN). With this approach, you will have an opportunity to make quick, incremental improvements to the existing application without spending too much money.

In option3, you might consider an IaaS or a PaaS. In this context, the selection is primarily dependent on the application requirements, control over the infrastructure, execution environment customization, etc

With option3, the approach may range from just rewriting the application using its existing design to complete re-implementation. In the case of just rewrite, it can be very straight forward and relatively quick (using the right frameworks, reusing existing components and graphics, etc). The disadvantage is that you’re constraint by the original design, and will not be able to introduce any enhancements or new capabilities.

With redesign/rewrite approach, you’ll need more time to design the solution, but you’ll be able to introduce new capabilities.

So, here is a diagram to summarize:

The Time axis is self-explanatory. It reflects effort and costs. The Value axis is an indicator of business value. That ranges from cost-effective & enhanced IT service delivery to offering new business capabilities and possibilities.

I am leaving some details out, but you get the idea. Let me know what you think. Tell me about your experience.

A review and analysis of IBM Test & Development Cloud, and opportunities

2010-06-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

IBM finally GA'd its Development & Test Cloud last week: http://www.ibm.com/cloud/enterprise
In addition to a public cloud service offering, IBM is also providing an option to deploy such an infrastructure-as-a-service model on-premise (private cloud): http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/offering/midware/a1030965

I believe Cloud Computing is critical to IBM’s future growth. It may even be the only solution to declining revenues in some of IBM’s business segments. I will share some opinions below after a quick solution review.

The IBM cloud is built on Rational & Tivoli components. Rational provides design, development, testing, and application lifecycle management & governance, and Tivoli enables automated resource provisioning & service management (self-service request management, performance monitoring, usage metering, billing):

IBM Test & Development Cloud

I think there is an opportunity for IBM’s Cloud to be a huge success for the following reasons:

Virtualization
For IBM public cloud, KVM powers the virtualization layer. The on-premise solution is virtualization technology agnostic: KVM, PowerVM, and VMWare.

In a previous post, I made the observation that most large enterprises cannot standardize on a single virtualization infrastructure. They have to deal with multiple virtualization technologies. While there seems to be some gaps in IBM’s on-premise solution (ex. no Xen or Hyper-V support), I think IBM is in a much better position than VMWare or Oracle to unify management across different virtualization technologies. This would be a a big competitive differentiator and value to the enterprise.
Secondly, in the world of Cloud Computing, vendors are primarily focused on x-86 platform. All other platforms are ignored. If IBM can extend their public cloud to support pSeries and maybe even zSeries (mainframe-as-a-service ?), this would also be a huge competitive differentiator. This would allow more workloads to be moved to the Cloud and benefit customers. As an example, customers would be able to move some of their mainframe batch jobs to the Cloud to save MIPS.

OS Coverage
The initial set of OS images are limited. In the initial public offering, IBM only offers Red Hat & Novell images. There are no Windows images (yet ?). I think it is just a matter of time for IBM to offer Windows images on their public cloud.

As I said above, the on-premise solution can support AIX images now, and maybe zOS in the near future (why not?). If IBM were to offer AIX & zOS VMs in the Cloud, it would not only be able to realize a new revenue stream and possibly revive that segment, but keep customers from migrating to other platforms. I think this could open new opportunities. The challenge is how to do this in a balanced way without cannibalizing the existing customer base, and creating incentives for IBM sales teams to execute after those opportunities.

Pricing
IBM’s cloud “infrastructure pricing” is competitive to AWS. However, for IBM software, there are different licensing & subscription options:

Customer scenarios Software Infrastructure

Charge Charge

You "bring your own IBM license" ("BYOL") Prepaid for software license Per VM per hour

You own an IBM software license and can use the pre-built IBM images in the portal catalog

You "pay-as-you-go" ("PAYG") Per Image per hour Per VM per hour

You choose the desired software, accept the license terms online, and receive a monthly usage bill

You "bring your own software and licenses" Prepaid for software licenses Per VM per hour

You bring your own software or software for which you hold valid licenses and install them on the servers you provision

You want to test "pre-release" software No charge for restricted use Per VM per hr

From time to time, pre-released software images will be made available on a temporary basis for test (non-productive) use

You are an eligible ISV/SI developer No charge or by usage Per VM per hr

You can use selected IBM "development use only" ("DUO") software for development, test, proof of concept and sales demos on the IBM Cloud

Options available vary by software package.

IBM hasn’t published detailed pricing on their software subscription pricing (PAYG), but it would be a fair to assume it will be less than what they charge on Amazon. [N.B. on AWS, IBM only offers a very small subset of its software primarily targeting ISVs for development & testing as opposed to enterprise customers.]
Now, let’s talk about the market and the opportunity for IBM.

Market maturity, opportunity & customer addressability
Since the recession a couple of years ago, Cloud Computing has gained more momentum in the enterprise. IDC estimates spending on Cloud services in the range of $42B by 2012.
If you look at early Cloud providers such as Amazon or Google, while I have enormous respect and appreciation for the innovation and technical design and delivery of the services, I argue they haven’t been able to gain traction in the enterprise space. The only exception is SalesForce.com [take a look towards the bottom of this post.]. They have done well, because the founder had an enterprise software background.

As an example, if you look at Google’s enterprise business in 2009, it booked around $209M (that includes revenue from their search appliance + Google Apps). In a previous post, I estimated AWS revenue to be around $200M / year. If you compare these numbers with IBM SWG, MSFT or Oracle software revenues, I think it would be easy to conclude they haven’t captured a big marketshare in the enterprise space. I think this is fundamentally due to their lack of business relationship, partnerships, and investments in sales & marketing.

So, I think this is a good time for IBM to enter the market.

In terms of opportunity and access to market, IBM is a global company with delivery centers around the world. It has business segments that align well with customers considering or transitioning to Cloud Computing. To understand the potential opportunity for IBM better, let's look at some numbers.

IBM Development & Test Cloud is an offering from Global Technology Services (GTS):

The numbers above are in millions. In 2009, GTS revenue was around $37B with a gross margin of around 35%.

There are several business lines in GTS:

Strategic Outsourcing (SO) – This segment offers outsourcing services to commercial and public sector. In 2009, IBM’s SO revenue was $19.3B.
Integrated Technology Services (ITS) – This segment offers different IT services (project based) from IT strategy –> middleware services –> infrastructure services. In 2009, ITS’ revenue was $8.7B.
Business Transformation Outsourcing (BTO) – This segment focuses primarily on business process outsourcing (BPO), and “IT transformation” services. In 2009, BTO’s revenue was $2.2B.
Maintenance – This segment offers product maintenance and support services. In 2009, GTS maintenance revenue contribution was almost $7B.

IBM has C-level relationships in Fortune companies in all industries. Some of these companies have already entrusted IBM with their IT infrastructure and mission critical systems. This puts IBM in a huge advantage over other service providers.

As SO contracts are renewed, and as ITS engages customers in IT strategy and middleware services, IBM should also be able to harvest opportunities for both private cloud as well as public cloud.

[N.B. The cool thing about Cloud services is that they are not like SO contracts (i.e. fixed). Once you sign up a customer, as long as you’re meeting your SLAs, and manage the offering in terms of features/capabilities, you should be able to maintain a profitable recurring revenue stream (i.e. reduced sales & marketing costs, reduced infrastructure costs through efficient multi-tenant delivery).]

Consider this....If IBM were to convert 10% of 2009 GTS revenue from existing base to Cloud, let's say over the next 3 years, they would make about $3B in Cloud revenue by 2013…Now, that’s revenue & marketshare.

Here is another reason why Cloud could help IBM. IBM Software Group booked $22B of revenue in 2009:

SWG revenue breaks down as follows:

Cross-brand middleware: This is combined revenue from WebSphere, Tivoli, Lotus, Rational, Information Management worth over $12B. IBM doesn’t break down the revenue by brand.
Other middleware: This include legacy middleware such as CICS & IMS. IBM made over $4.6B there.
Operating Systems: This includes software such as zOS, AIX, AS/400, & TPF. In 2009, the OS revenue was > $2.1B. This is dependent on how IBM’s hardware group (Systems & Technology Group) performs.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM): I think it is a joint venture with Dassault Systems.
Other: This includes all IBM Software Group services (aka Lab services). In 2009, the revenue for this part was $1.4B.

As you can see above, except for lab services, x-brand middleware is the only segment that’s been reporting growth. There are two reasons for this:

Acquisitions: IBM has made some big acquisitions in this space: (i.e. Cognos for $5B, FileNet for $1.7B, Sterling Commerce for $1.2B…). Acquisitions help IBM book new business.
Renewal rates: This is recurring revenue from existing customers. I was told by a software sales exec, average renewal rates for a successful enterprise software company is around 98% (depending on the product, maturity, etc). So, this is helping IBM SWG maintain revenue and marketshare.

I haven’t heard of any new notable products out of SWG lately. So, looking at the above, I think it is fair to conclude acquisitions have been the primary vehicle for growth in SWG. So, with Cloud Computing, SWG should be able to develop a new revenue stream.

So, for SWG, I think Cloud Computing can offer the following benefits:

Use Cloud as a sales & delivery channel for SMB. This would be very helpful to IBM.
Offer a viable alternative to clients looking at other sourcing options
In the beginning, I think Cloud can offer a parallel revenue stream for SWG particularly for WebSphere, Tivoli, and Rational
Compete with other private cloud vendors and public cloud service providers
Partners and alliances help IBM realize almost a third of its total revenue. SWG gains a lot from these GSIs and ISVs. SWG can offer new solutions to these partners to help grow its revenue. Also, help ISVs cloudify their solutions.

All of the above should help IBM sustain growth.

[N.B. There is some difference between private and public clouds in terms of revenue.
Software is a high margin business. In the case of IBM SWG, the gross margin for SWG was 86%. The reason for this is software licensing & maintenance costs. With public clouds, this is radically different. It is a volume business. For IBM to be profitable in the public cloud space, they must sign up more and more customers. On the private cloud side, they should be able to do better.]
----------------------
IBM is building a good story here. From SWG side, with WebSphere CloudBurst, the recent acquisition of Cast Iron, and Rational Software Delivery Services, IBM is putting together all the asset to enable Cloud Computing for the enterprise. On the GTS side, IBM is in a good position to create opportunities, and work with enterprise customers to help transition to Cloud.

Finally, from a competitive perspective, in the enterprise space (as opposed to consumer space), I don’t think IBM needs to worry too much about AWS or Google. As long as IBM prices its public cloud offerings from GTS, Lotus, etc competitively, and maintain a close relationship with enterprise accounts, I think they should be able to do OK.

In the enterprise space, I think SWG should keep an eye on Oracle and VMWare on one side, and MSFT on the other. GTS will have to worry about the usual competitors such as CSC, HP/EDS, etc...

Chatter has a good potential to increase Salesforce average revenue per customer

2010-06-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

Salesforce.com is extending their SaaS CRM with a whole new suite of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration capabilities called Chatter.

From design perspective, Chatter looks a lot like Facebook, and is fully integrated with Salesforce.com. It provides features such as Profiles, Groups, Document Sharing, Feeds, Subscription/Notification, etc:

Chatter will also provide a set of APIs to enable existing or new developers to integrate Chatter in their applications.

I believe Chatter is a smart idea, and should be well-received by customers and developers. I say this, because it raises enterprise collaboration to a new level. Unlike other enterprise collaboration tools which lack business context out of the box, Chatter’s integration in the CRM system should readily demonstrate a quick boost to the sales/marketing and customer service teams. This is a deeper level of business integration. It should also be able to enhance Salesforce revenue stream.

Salesforce.com is an impressive company. When you look at their financials, they have executed well:

They have not only shown solid growth with respect to # of customers & subscribers, but for the most part been able to maintain a positive ratio in terms of Average Revenue Per Customer (ARPC) & Average Revenue Per Subscriber (ARPS). However, it has taken a lot of investment to grow, and they need to improve margins.

At this point, Salesforce is not planning to charge for Chatter. Their strategy seems to be using Chatter to attract new developers, and new breed of applications to expand the usage of the platform (currently there are 911 apps listed in AppExchange). Given growing demand for collaboration in the enterprise, I think Chatter should be successful and make a big contribution to Salesforce.

The GA announcement for Chatter is expected to be June 22 at Cloudforce 2 Tour.

More on VMForce

2010-04-28T07:37:00.001-07:00

As expected, VMware and Salesforce unveiled more details on VMForce offering yesterday:

VMForce is a service that allows developers write any Java applications using SpringSource framework (AOP-based programming model and reflective abstraction, SpringSource Tool Suite, SpringSource TC Server), and deploy to a virtual environment using vCloud. The deployed code runs on Force.com infrastructure and virtualized and managed using vSphere.
You can read the key announcements at the following:

At first glance, the model looks very similar to SpringSource CloudFoundry offering which facilitates implementation and management of application on AWS. There is a difference. With CloudFoundry, VMware virtualization is not involved, as Amazon uses Xen.
This is good for VMware and SpringSource. With such moves, they are aggressively moving to position SpringSource as a “common application stack”. As enterprises increase the migration of their workloads to the Cloud, VMware/SpringSource can be a great enabler offering value-adds such as preventing vendor lock-in, code & skills portability, etc…
As I mentioned in my previous post, this is also good for Salesforce, because it enables them to host non-CRM related apps on their platform.
The only question that I am struggling with is the revenue model/rev share. Force.com pricing is clear and VMForce should help them increase subscribers. However, I am not sure how VMware will be able to make a sustainable business out of this, especially since SpringSource (open-source, cloud infrastructure, etc). As far as I know, the CloudFoundry pricing is still unknown.
How do you view in comparison to Azure and GAE? Microsoft & Google own both the infrastructure and the application middleware. It seems to me that application framework and tooling would not be the major revenue contributors. Thoughts/comments?

vmforce: Is Salesforce getting into IaaS?

2010-04-13T07:37:00.001-07:00

VMware and SalesForce.com have scheduled a joint webcast on April 27th. Rumors are circulating that Salesforce is planning to offer IaaS based on VMware virtualization platform.
If true, this would be a good move for Salesforce for the following reasons:

Currently with Force.com, you can build and deploy only a limited set of applications (i.e. CRM centric, business process-based/case-management types of apps). With IaaS, it will possible to deploy all sorts of applications on their platform.
Building on top of VMware virtualization stack (i.e. vSphere), Salesforce should be able to facilitate integration and management of hybrid computing environments for those enterprises that have already invested in VMware. This would be a huge advantage over competitors such as Amazon & Azure.
Azure already offers hosting (Windows). In some cases, an IaaS from Salesforce may be viable alternative to MSFT.
Obviously, an IaaS Cloud Service offering enables Salesforce to engage enterprise customers on multiple levels thereby increasing marketshare.

So, what about VMware? How would this help them?
VMware wants to be the technology backbone for all IaaS providers. This is evident in their vCloud initiatives, and investments in vCloud Express and Terremark. Salesforce.com is a key player in Cloud computing. Enabling Salesforce deliver an IaaS on top of their virtualization stack is a major deal for them. If the model proves successful, it can become a big headache for Amazon, Azure, and GAE.
VMware also sees itself as a platform for hybrid Cloud Computing:

At this point, this is all speculation. We should find out more on April 27th.
What are your thoughts about vmforce? Do you think VMware would be able to strike a similar deal with Google, eBay or Yahoo to offer an IaaS?

IBM POWER7: Smarter Systems for Smarter Planet

2010-03-19T07:13:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I attended an IBM event on POWER7 in Los Angeles. The event was designed to show how POWER7 is a game changer in terms of form factor, massive parallelism and performance, virtualization, workload consolidation, integrated systems management, high availability, energy consumption, and overall costs.

First, Ross Mauri gave an introduction to POWER series and innovation over the last decade. He shared a lot of interesting metrics in terms of clients, migration patterns and experiences, key aspects of the system and overall score relative to competition… and he also shared some information on POWER7+, and POWER8 roadmap. Next, John Shedletsky (VP, IBM SWG) gave a presentation on how IBM software is integrated and optimized on POWER7, and shared some case studies and competitive analysis in terms of workload performance and scalability, and cost. Finally, Stan Pachura (CIO, The PMI Group) shared his experience with POWER7. He described how PMI had been able to upgrade to POWER7, and consolidate iSeries & BI workloads without incurring any additional costs.

Some of the vendors mentioned in the presentations included HP, SUN (Oracle), and VMware :-) Here is a link to the presentations:
https://www-950.ibm.com/events/wwe/grp/grp017.nsf/v16_agenda?openform&seminar=584RYCES&locale=en_US

Technology-centric approach to Enterprise Cloud Computing doesn’t work

2010-03-09T06:01:00.001-08:00

There is a lot of Internet chatter and conversation on Cloud Computing. Since 2007, Google Trends shows growing increase in Cloud search keywords:

Majority of these articles and posts though are primarily focused on technologies (i.e. virtualization, dynamic provisioning, security, management & automation, metering & chargeback) that enable building a Cloud infrastructure or platform. Technology decisions and effective implementation are absolutely necessary, but building, operating, offering, and managing a Cloud transcend technology.

Cloud Computing doesn’t arrive in a box of CDs. It is an evolution in IT competency and operational model (i.e. Incident Management, Asset Management, Configuration Management, Change Management, Performance & Capacity Management, SLA Management). A technology-centric approach to Cloud Computing does not address IT operational gaps.

One of the fundamental requirements for Cloud transition is IT standardization. Standardization is key to IT simplification and cost reduction, and requires an analysis of both IT and application portfolio. In this regard, an analysis of the various workloads, performance characteristics, HW/SW compatibility & infrastructure requirements, application strategy such as any decommissioning, re-hosting, or outsourcing plans,… and review of enterprise architecture are necessary to establish standard configuration templates. Without such an analysis, it would be very difficult to determine the right set of services to offer in the enterprise. A technology-centric approach to Cloud Computing does not address IT standardization.

As I said in a previous post, there are different entry-points to Cloud Computing. There are a couple of implications here. First, organizations choose different strategies and approaches for IT cloudification based on their priorities. Second, organizations are at different levels of IT maturity. Some may have experience building and running CoEs. Some may have experience operating & managing shared services centers. Finally, some may already be running a Cloud (or have already implemented an on-demand and utility-based shared infrastructure way before the term “Cloud” was in vogue.) So, there is a lot of considerations in terms of organizational maturity, alignment, change management that are essential to a successful Cloud transition. These are not addressed by a technology-focused approach to Cloud Computing.

These were just some examples. So, next time when you get a visit from a vendor, showing you a quick demo of 1000-node cluster, with dynamic scaling may be including spillover to EC2, a nice management interface, etc, a question to consider is how do I operationalize this?

Oracle, AmberPoint, and the SOA Management ecosystem

2010-02-08T08:16:00.001-08:00

Earlier this morning, Oracle announced it had entered into an agreement to acquire AmberPoint. AmberPoint will be integrated and managed under Oracle’s Enterprise Manager division, and over time will be ported to the EM management framework.

For both existing customers and new prospects, this is positive news on many levels (i.e. broader/deeper capabilities after integration with EM, removing any doubts or concerns over vendor financial stability, product viability, solution’s strategic fit in the enterprise, etc). AmberPoint will fill the gaps in Oracle’s SOA management capabilities today, and should play a key role for Oracle Cloud management in the future. With Oracle’s sales and distribution channels, AmberPoint will be able to reach new markets and extend market share.

In SOA management business, AmberPoint and SOA Software were the only key niche players left. This acquisition puts Oracle in direct competition with SOA Software. It will end the Oracle and SOA software partnership. Looking forward, SOA Software is likely either going to get acquired – or - has to figure out a different product and partner strategy to compete.

In terms of acquisition, the usual suspects for SOA Software include IBM, Microsoft, CA, HP, BMC or possibly even SAP. Any of these vendors should be able to take their solutions and integrate them as part of a broader ESM/BSM solution. SOA Software assets could help accelerate with that. As far as product strategy, I think SOA Software will have to break away from just “SOA management” targeting enterprise customers into broader Cloud management also targeting Cloud service providers: self-service, asset/portfolio management, Cloud operational governance (quota, policies, SLA, billing, …) configuration, provisioning, automation… They can do some of that on their own or go to market with new partners.

In summary, Oracle’s acquisition is definitely good for customers. It also forces the other player to consider solutions and strategies.

Oracle unveils its plans for Sun

2010-01-31T17:55:00.001-08:00

Last week, Oracle held a series of webcasts to communicate details on their product strategy with regards to the Sun acquisition. They unveiled plans for hardware, software, systems, industry solutions, and partner strategies. The webcasts were delivered by some of the most senior folks in Oracle and Sun, and they disclosed a lot of specific information, which was necessary for both customers and partners after nine months of uncertainty and speculations.

The webcasts followed a similar format. First, they began with Oracle’s strategy and approach to acquisition. In this section, they emphasized the following points:

Oracle’s strategy of providing complete, integrated “systems” based on open standards
Oracle’s commitment to protect and enhance existing customer investments
Fast transition and integration of systems, processes, and relationships to better serve customers

Next, they reviewed existing Oracle assets and product strategy in the specific technology domain, and Sun’s relative fit.

The following provides a summary from Oracle’s software strategy webcasts.

Java Strategy: Hasan Rizvi (Oracle SVP Fusion Middleware) & Jeet Kaul (Sun VP of Software Group)

There were no surprises here. The importance of Java (JVM platform, Java language, dynamic languages, Java SE, Java EE, Java ME…) including some interesting facts/figures vis-a-vis industry adoption rates and usage were highlighted.

Key points:

Continued support for Java, JCP, and developer community
Continued investment in Java across different servers and devices
Sun Java HotSpot & JRocket will continue to be strategic JVMs
GlassFish will continue as a reference implementation and open source project
Oracle plans to offer GlassFish as part of multiple commercial Java EE server offerings
JavaOne will be co-located with Oracle OpenWorld, and will also be offered in Brazil, Russia, India, and China

Operating Systems: Edward Screven (Oracle Chief Corporate Architect) & John Fowler (Sun VP of Systems)

As of a year ago or so, Oracle started offering its own Linux distro. The Oracle Enterprise Linux is positioned at the bottom of Oracle’s integrated stack, the infrastructure layer, sitting next to its Oracle VM. with the acquisition of Sun, Oracle now adds another operating system to its portfolio (Solaris) running on SPARC or X86 hardware.

N.B. Solaris also has some unique virtualization capabilities that will be integrated/consolidated in Oracle VM solution.

The key points in this webcast were as follows:

Oracle’s commitment to Oracle Enterprise Linux and community
Oracle’s commitment to Solaris and community
Platform choice and flexibility ==> customer value
Long history of collaboration between Sun and Oracle. Now united as one, they can work more effectively, share IP and accelerate innovation

Virtualization: Edward Screven (Oracle Chief Corporate Architect)

Back in May of 2009, the acquisition of Virtual Iron enabled Oracle to enter the server virtualization market. Now, with the acquisition of Sun, Oracle expands its portfolio to new technologies in server virtualization, desktop virtualization, and storage virtualization.

In this category, Oracle plans to consolidate/integrate virtualization technologies from Sun with Oracle VM. It will continue investment and support for Solaris virtualization (i.e. logical domains, containers). It will enhance Oracle VM Manager to monitor and manage virtual Solaris environments. (In the future, the plans are to fold Ops Center with Enterprise Manager). In addition, Oracle VM hypervisor will be enhanced to support Solaris guests on X86 platform.

In terms of provisioning support, Oracle VM templates will be enhanced to support Solaris virtual images.

On the desktop side, Sun’s VDI solution will be renamed to Oracle VDI. Oracle VM will be updated to support Oracle Virtual Desktops. Also, Oracle plans interoperability enhancements between Oracle VM and Sun VirtualBox (Oracle VM VirtualBox).

The key points in this webcast were that Oracle plans to integrate and rationalize virtualization technologies from Sun with Oracle VM. It will continue investment in Solaris and SPARC virtualization, but plans to consolidate virtualization management on Oracle VM as a strategic product. Finally, Oracle VM is the only certified and supported server virtualization platform for all Oracle software.

Cloud Computing: Richard Sarwal (Oracle SVP Enterprise Manager)

In this webcast, Richard Sarwal described Oracle’s view of Cloud Computing, and their strategy. Here are the key points in this webcast:

There is an enterprise maturity model or approach to Cloud Computing:
- Siol’d: Physical/Dedicated Resources
- Grid: Virtual, shared services, dynamic resources, standard appliances
- Private Cloud: Self-service portal, policy-based provisioning and resource management, chargeback
- Hybrid Cloud: Federation with Public Clouds, interoperability, bursting…
Oracle is a technology provider to customers to enable Cloud journey
Oracle is also a technology provider to service providers
Sun’s Public Cloud (Project Caroline) is terminated immediately, but some of the assets will be rolled other products (i.e. Q-layer into Enterprise Manager)

Enterprise Manager & Ops Center: Richard Sarwal (Oracle SVP Enterprise Manager) & Steve Wilson (Sun - VP Engineering, Ops Center)

In this webcast, Richard Sarwal & Steve Wilson laid out the integration strategy and consolidation of Oracle Enterprise Manager and Ops Center. Here are the key points:

There is little overlap between two products
Oracle Enterprise Manager is Oracle’s strategic product
In the short-term, Oracle plans to support and maintain both products and provide connectors to integrate the two. Over time the products will be integrated into one systems management offering (Enterprise Manager)

Application Server: Hasan Rizvi (Oracle SVP Fusion Middleware)

Here are the key points:

GlassFish will continue as the Java EE reference implementation & open source project
Oracle will continue to support GlassFish for an extended period
Oracle’s strategic app server is Oracle WebLogic
GlassFish Enterprise Server and WebLogic are expected to share core components
Oracle plans to license GlassFish Enterprise with WebLogic Server Offerings
Oracle Web Center is Oracle’s strategic portal offering
Oracle will continue to support GlassFish Web Space Server and Sun Portal Server, but plans to provide an upgrade path for Sun Portal Server and Web Space Server to Web Center
All existing customers will be fully supported according to their existing support agreements

N.B. In one of the slides, it seemed that Oracle was positioning GlassFish for development and testing, and WebLogic for production environment.

SOA and integration strategy: Hasan Rizvi (Oracle SVP Fusion Middleware)

Here are the key points:

Oracle SOA Suite continues as the strategic product

Sun JCAPS will be supported and maintained

GlassFish ESB continues as an open source project

Oracle will port some of the capabilities of Sun SOA products to SOA Suite

From an MDM/Data Integration perspective, Oracle Customer Hub, Oracle Product Hub, Oracle Site Hub, Oracle Supplier Hub, and Oracle Data Integrator continue as strategic products

Identity Management: Hasan Rizvi (Oracle SVP Fusion Middleware)

In the area of security, there were a lots of changes:

Directory Server

Sun Director Server EE and Oracle Internet Directory will co-exist as strategic products
OpenDS will continue as open source project
Oracle Virtual Directory is the strategic product for directory integration

Access & Identity Management

Oracle Access Manager is the strategic product for SSO
OpenSSO continues as an open source project
Oracle Identity Federation combined with Sun’s Fedlet is the strategic product for federated SSO
Sun’s Secure Token Service is added to Oracle Access Management Suite
Oracle Identity Manager is the strategic product
Oracle plans to enhance OIM with Sun Identity Manager, and plans to provide upgrade path to OIM
Sun Role Manager is the strategic product for identity governance, and will be renamed to Oracle Identity Analytics

Developer Tools: Ted Farrell (Chief Architect & SVP)

In the area of developer tools, Oracle has two offerings: JDeveloper & Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. JDeveloper is Oracle’s primary developer platform across all Oracle solution. With the acquisition of BEA, Oracle has had to support Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse to support its Java developer community.

With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle gains additional developer tools. The main developer tool is NetBeans. Oracle will continue support and investment in NetBeans as well as NetBeans community to foster innovation (plug-ins, dynamic languages etc). Sun also has other development tools such as Keani. Oracle intends to use Kenai internally, and will discontinue its public interface.

StarOffice: Michael Bemmer (Sun VP StarOffice)

Finally, in terms of StarOffice suite, it will be supported and folded under Oracle applications division. Renamed to Oracle Office Product, it will be integrated with other Oracle products (i.e. developer tools, content management, BI…)

---------------------------------

Overall, the webcasts offered a lot of specific details about Oracle’s product plans except for MySQL. With the Sun acquisition, besides hardware, Oracle has picked up a lot of complimentary software assets in the area of virtualization, systems management, security, and of course Java. There still remain some gaps in their offerings (i.e. systems management). It will be interesting to see how quickly they can make all the necessary technology integration and consolidation and transform to a “systems” company.

What apps are likely to move to the Cloud…

2010-01-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, IDC published an interesting survey on what applications are likely to move to the Cloud. I thought about blogging about this, because they made some good points & observations in their analysis, and it also follows my previous post on application and workload analysis for Cloud Computing nicely.
I am not going to repeat what’s said in their survey, but wanted to add a couple of points before moving any application to the Cloud:

Cost: What is the current annual cost of maintaining and running the existing application? For most enterprises, cost reduction is the key driver for Cloud, so establishing the cost should probably be one of the first activities in any migration. [N.B. If the Cloud is considered for new applications, a similar cost analysis should be performed to estimate the initial cost of building the application + estimating the annual ongoing maintenance and operation. It would be best to breakdown the costs in terms of infrastructure, operation, and solution development & maintenance.]
Cloud Selection: Different Clouds offer different capabilities and different charge-back models. As an example, with Google App Engine, you can upload your web app to Google’s infrastructure. You’re not charged unless the application serves requests. Now, contrast that with EC2. Obviously, you must launch your AMI to start your application, so you’re billed for CPU usage even if the application is sitting idle. Please note that I am not suggesting GAE is better than AWS. They are different platforms for running different types of applications, and offer different capabilities. So, Cloud selection is a very important consideration not only with regards to costs, but also in terms of building, delivery, and management of the target solution.

There are many other considerations such as service provider’s alignment with the enterprise in terms of operations, support, compliance, SLA, and technical fit of the Cloud service vis-a-vis the application, etc…
Finally, in the overblown world of Cloud Computing where “Cloud” is myopically restricted to only a few forms such as AWS, GAE, Force.com, etc, it should be noted that many companies have already been using Internet-based services routinely for more than a decade. These services have been used to fulfill simple functional requirements such as address normalization or tax calculation to more complex business processes (i.e. risk analysis) or business process outsourcing (i.e. order fulfillment) where enterprise data is typically hosted on an external service provider or tightly integrated with the service provider. So, in addition to the list of application types that IDC has presented in their survey, hosted solutions and/or BPOs represents another class of candidate applications for “Cloud Computing”.

Workload Analysis in Cloud Computing

2009-11-10T07:21:00.001-08:00

Not all workloads are the same, and not all Clouds are the same!

Different applications have different set of requirements and characteristics. Some Clouds (i.e. GAE or Heroku) are natural fits for certain class of workloads (i.e. WebApps) whereas for other types of workloads (i.e. batch), other Cloud services (i.e. AWS) are more appropriate. In some cases, the business operation and/or legal requirements may require a completely different deployment (i.e. private Cloud). In a previous post, I referred to workload analysis in the context of approach to Cloud adoption. In this post, I thought to share some ideas about it.

The aim of Workload Analysis in Cloud Computing is to look at different aspects or characteristics of an enterprise application to determine the feasibility of moving or porting the application to the Cloud. This analysis also provides input to implementation approach, Cloud service selection, and an initial business value assessment (i.e. cost reduction, IT simplification)…

The following proposes some guidelines in workload classification & characterization:

Workload Category: At a high-level, there are two kinds of applications in the enterprise:

Custom Applications – This class of applications are developed and maintained by the enterprise. The enterprise has control over its design, technology selection, implementation, infrastructure requirements, maintenance, and overall portfolio roadmap.
Packaged Apps – For this class of application, the respective vendor is in control of its implementation, packaging, release, supported configurations, product plans, etc.

In the case of Custom Apps, If an enterprise is considering to deploy an application to the Cloud to achieve cost reduction or simplifying IT by delegating the infrastructure operation/maintenance to an IaaS, there is flexibility from simply taking the application pretty much as is to the Cloud –> re-factoring the application to leverage Cloud services (i.e. RDS). In the former, the potential is substantial savings in infrastructure cost and business value in terms of new hardware & software purchase avoidance –> potential for much better SLAs and a lot more cost savings by reducing or totally eliminating the burden of additional FTEs (i.e. Database Administrators).

For Packaged Apps, the enterprise may or may not be able to move the solution to the Cloud due to licensing restrictions, technical infrastructure requirements, complex integration issues with other back-ends, etc… [it is good to check the packaged vendor for any existing or future plans for SaaS offering…]

Next, there are a set of general characteristics or attributes to consider when analyzing the applications:

Workload Type: In general, there are two types of workloads: Batch or Online. It is important to consider this differentiation for the following reasons:

There are different resource requirements and considerations. As an example, batch workloads may require specific capacity in terms of storage and compute resources (i.e. vCPU, memory) to finish the job in a timely fashion whereas for online workloads network bandwidth may be more critical…
There are differences in programming models. As an example, some batch jobs may be implemented over a framework like Hadoop whereas for some online workloads a PaaS like Force.com may be the best choice.

Workload Frequency: Sometimes, a workload may run at month-end or every quarter. I like to note this attribute in the analysis for investment cost / benefit analysis.
Workload Cost: It is important to capture the total cost of workload including hardware, software, application maintenance and support, etc. I think it would be even more useful to develop a cost allocation model reflecting percentages in infrastructure, software, application development, support and maintenance, etc… This information is useful in Cloud service selection.
etc…

So, in summary, it is good practice to develop a consistent approach/process for analyzing workloads in Cloud Computing adoption. This analysis has a range of use from business case justification to Cloud service selection.

Also, as described in previous post, there are several sources of information to aid in workload analysis (i.e. Project Portfolio Repository, any existing server/application consolidation or decommissioning analyses, issues log or problem management database, etc).

Finally, I highly recommend an excellent presentation that David Chou posted on his blog on patterns of moving to the Cloud…

The enterprise has to deal with a mixed bag of virtualization vendors…

2009-11-05T05:01:00.001-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was at Oracle Open World and attended a good session on JRockit (JRockit: What’s new & What’s coming). The presenters were from JRockit lab in Sweden, and they presented many things from new features, JVM performance, JRockit Mission Control (JRMC), JRockit Real Time (JRRT), and JRockit Virtual Edition (JRVE). JRVE is a JVM that sits directly on bare metal hypervisor (it eliminates the OS layer, thus offering better performance, and simplification in terms of installation, configuration and maintenance).

Back in the BEA days, they showed a prototype of WLS VE running on JRVE at VMWorld in 2007. That version was running on VMWare’s ESX. With this version, it only supports and is certified on Oracle VM… Not a big surprise, if you think about it. Since Oracle’s acquisition of Virtual Iron, Oracle has been optimizing its stack on its own virtualization infrastructure…

I was talking to a customer the other day to ask them about their Virtualization strategy. This is large company that has deployed different types of servers and OS for different kinds of workload. Currently, for Microsoft platform, they are using VMWare (when I asked him about Hyper-V, he said no plans yet). For Linux, they are standardizing on RHT Enterprise Virtualization (KVM)… Oh, not to forget, on the mainframe, they are using zVM.

It occurred to me there is already a myriad of different virtualization tools and technologies deployed in the enterprise. With Oracle’s solution strategy, there will be compelling reasons for many to deploy yet another virtualization technology in their environment (i.e. Oracle PaaS). Furthermore, in addition to virtual machines and appliances deployed within the enterprise, many enterprises that adopt Cloud computing (hybrid clouds) will have to deal with additional virtualization infrastructures (i.e. EC2), their set of provisioning APIs and other management interfaces…

The good news is that major virtualization vendors already support DTMF standardization efforts (i.e. OVF, VMAN) in their solutions or plan to support it. There are also new standardization efforts around open APIs (i.e. vCloud) to abstract the virtualization technology, and provide a standard programming model to provision and consume virtual resources as well as support those interoperability use cases in the hybrid Clouds… On the other side of spectrum, there is a growing number of virtualization vendors with provisioning solutions to facilitate packaging, grouping of related VMs (i.e. vApp) for multi-tiered applications.

So, I don’t think most enterprises can standardize on a single virtualization vendor. The trick is to figure out a virtualization management strategy that provides unified visibility and control in terms of asset & configuration management as well as infrastructure operation and governance. Let me know what you think…

The future of SOA is Cloudy…

2009-11-04T06:38:00.001-08:00

A couple of months ago, I was at an Oracle event in Redwood Shores. The event brought together some of Oracle’s marquee customers & Fusion middleware product management team to discuss challenges/issues with regards to SOA, BPM, infrastructure management... and provide an opportunity to learn more details about FMW roadmap and offer feedback…

I seized the opportunity to talk to several customers about their SOA implementation. Most of the customers (small –> large) had passed the initial stage of SOA readiness assessment, transition planning, and initial service portfolio development. They had already implemented and deployed multiple enterprise services into production. The most common issue related to SOA infrastructure management, and making sure it offers the level of resiliency and availability their customers demanded.

SOA introduces additional layers in the already multi-tier distributed applications. First, you have the SOA management layer that handles performance management and policy enforcement. Next, you have the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that abstracts service endpoints, and offers integration logic intermediation between service consumers and providers. Finally, there may be integration adapters used to facilitate semantic and protocol integration with backend applications (i.e. SAP). During a service request, all of these components must be available and fully functional. Otherwise, the request fails and either the infrastructure must handle automatic management of the exception and re-routing of the service request message to maintain SLAs or the client must re-try the request upon receiving the exception.

Another area of concern is related to capacity management. It is common practice to use high volume / peak load metrics to calculate capacity. The result is over-provisioning of resources (AKA server proliferation) and low utilization of assets. In terms of IT financial management, the impact is monumental from increased hardware and software licensing costs to additional FTEs to configure & maintain the assets, and finally data center floor space, power consumption, …

So, many customers are already in their next level of SOA maturity. They are focused more sharply on SOA operational governance. This is where “Cloud” and SOA converge.

Before we get to that, let’s do a quick review of “SOA business value”.

SOA promises lower IT costs, reduction of IT complexity, business agility, etc… However, rarely is SOA business value measured against metrics related to the above. The universal measurement for SOA in many organizations continues to be “service reuse”. The more reuse, the better…Often, it is not even clear at what level of the organization reuse occurs to map and measure the value more clearly, but that’s a whole different blog…

For SOA to deliver lower IT costs, reduction of IT complexity, and agility, it is required to change the infrastructure to be more adaptive and resilient. Unfortunately, in my experience, this is often not properly considered in SOA programs. The vendors give you an ESB, and you’re good to run :-[

The “cloudification of SOA” involves the following capabilities:

Dynamic Resource Management – Rather than over-provisioning to meet peak demand, a private Cloud infrastructure can enable demand-based provisioning. This enables the enterprise to utilize IT assets more effectively and realize reduction of IT costs in terms of HW/SW/datacenter. For some workloads, policies can be established to spill over to public Clouds like Amazon (hybrid Cloud).
Automation – Automation is a key component of Cloud infrastructure. Automation is used in a variety of scenarios from automatic scaling to align with resource demands as well as automatic error/exception recovery. This is a key enabler for service level management.
Performance Management – Performance visibility and management across different layers of the stack is fundamental to any Cloud infrastructure. Without it, there is no DRM or automation. Once the organization is able to capture and correlate performance metrics across different layers and map them to a service request, they can do a better job of capacity management. This also helps SOA with service performance management and SLA.
Self-Service capabilities – Finally, this is an area that may not be readily consumable in all organizations, but it is a vision. The idea is simple. The goal is to bring the same self-service capabilities available in public Clouds to the enterprise (i.e. self-service service registration, self-service provisioning, self-service resource configuration and policy specification, etc…) Imagine an environment where you can go to a self-service portal and request a server from a list of pre-configured images, click a button to provision a server in a few minutes rather than a few weeks that typically takes for IT request review/approval, procurement, HW installation and configuration, and delivery… Many companies are looking at this approach or have already implemented initial self-service portals to enable self-service capabilities. In this scenario, it is possible to communicate IT agility using concrete metrics (i.e. average time to provision a server, # of demands serviced / week, etc)

Here is a conceptual diagram to illustrate the above:

So, to summarize, SOA operational governance and management poses difficult challenges in the enterprise. The common approach to SOA does not address infrastructure issues to enable realization of SOA business values. A Cloud Computing approach can help organizations with that.

I would be very curious how many are looking at Cloud as a progression of their SOA programs, and if they are looking at self-service capabilities. Look forward to comments or questions.

The economics of multi-tenancy and its effect on the overall service offering…

2009-11-03T15:34:00.000-08:00

One of the key design decisions for Cloud Computing implementers is multi-tenancy. The idea is to abstract a pool of sharable resources (i.e. server, database) at the right layer, and to the right degree to optimize the number of tenants served by the resource. Obviously, this needs to be done in balance to the particular service offered, the context in which the service is used, and challenges in terms of ongoing Cloud infrastructure/platform operation and maintenance, Terms of Service, etc…
Multi-tenancy has broad impact on the overall service offering from architecture and operation to financial management. For service providers (including private Clouds implemented by shared services in many large organizations), it bears direct financial impact with regards to level of asset utilization and return-on-assets [i.e. total revenue from all tenants / (assets costs + asset operation & maintenance)]. It also effects software licensing costs, resources required for ongoing service operation and configuration management, support, etc…
There is a spectrum of multi-tenancy:

At the server level, the unit of deployment is Virtual Machine (VM). Each tenant is offered a VM to provide isolation and protection from other tenants. So, a key question in this shared tenancy model is VM density. How many VMs can be carved out on a physical server resource? Other key considerations involve service provider's average cost of a VM (i.e. power, cooling, hardware and software costs, ongoing support and maintenance, etc)…
At the next level, there is platform as a service. Examples of that would include Google App Engine (GAE) or Force.com. On these platforms, unit of deployment is an application. As an example, on GAE, tenants are provisioned their own application server (Jetty) running on Google’s infrastructure. Similarly, on Force.com, each developer is provisioned a Resin app server in the to prevent tenants from stepping on each other…
At the top, a single code-base application is shared by multiple tenants. A well-known example would be SalesForce.com. Depending on the service implementation and tenancy model, as new tenants are provisioned, different levels of resource sharing may occur… [Please have a look at the following MSDN article on Multi-Tenant Data Architecture.]
At each level, the following issues should be continually considered:

Tenancy Density: How many tenants can be instantiated on a physical unit of deployment?
Cost / Tenant: What is the average cost / tenant? The cost includes everything from infrastructure costs (i.e. facilities, power, cooling, Telco provider) to hardware components including server, storage, network to software licensing costs, service maintenance and support…
Service Design: Does the tenancy model enhance the service for the target customers? For example, many organizations are looking at the Cloud to simplify their IT by offloading infrastructure operation and maintenance costs to Cloud service providers. In the lower level, organizations are still required to staff for operation, monitoring, and support of their applications on the Cloud infrastructure…
etc…

So, the design decisions and technology selections around multi-tenancy should not be approached casually, as it has fundamental impact on the service, its profitability, as well as operation and maintenance.

Customer scenarios	Software	Infrastructure
	Charge	Charge
You "bring your own IBM license" ("BYOL")	Prepaid for software license	Per VM per hour
You own an IBM software license and can use the pre-built IBM images in the portal catalog
You "pay-as-you-go" ("PAYG")	Per Image per hour	Per VM per hour
You choose the desired software, accept the license terms online, and receive a monthly usage bill
You "bring your own software and licenses"	Prepaid for software licenses	Per VM per hour
You bring your own software or software for which you hold valid licenses and install them on the servers you provision
You want to test "pre-release" software	No charge for restricted use	Per VM per hr
From time to time, pre-released software images will be made available on a temporary basis for test (non-productive) use
You are an eligible ISV/SI developer	No charge or by usage	Per VM per hr
You can use selected IBM "development use only" ("DUO") software for development, test, proof of concept and sales demos on the IBM Cloud
Options available vary by software package.