Microsoft India is one of the sponsors of IndicThreads.com Cloud Computing Conference in Pune. I had the privilege of delivering the Keynote on day 2 (21^st August).

Windows Azure Keynote

I had about 40 attendees who were business decision makers, developers, architects and IT managers. My objective was to introduce Microsoft Windows Azure Platform and explain Windows Azure architecture. I covered the concepts of Windows Azure Compute and Storage services with a brief introduction to Web Role, Worker Role and Storage components like Tables, Queues and Blobs. I showed a quick demo of developing an Azure application using Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Azure Dev Fabric. The demo ended with a walk through of the Azure portal and deployment options. I thought this was the best way to introduce Windows Azure to attendees in the limited window of 45 min.

Simone Delivering the AWS Keynote

Right after my keynote, it was Simone Brunozzi (@Simon) from Amazon Web Services APAC who delivered his talk. AWS was one of the sponsors for this conference. Simone covered the key concepts of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and did complete justice to the topic within the limited 45 min. slot. His session was highly interactive and I realized that there quite a few AWS customers in the hall.

PuneTech has been live blogging this event and Arun Gupta (@arungupta), Java EE Evangelist from Oracle (who was one of the speakers) has a good coverage of this event on his blog.

The slide deck that I presented can be downloaded from here.

I have been associated with IndicThreads.com brand for the last 3 years as a speaker and like the professionalism of the organizers. I appreciate Harshad Oak and Sangeeta Oak for their passion in making these events a success!

All the presentations from this event are available from Slideshare and below is an embed of the same –

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Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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As a part of my job, I work with large enterprise customers trying to help them realize the potential of Cloud Computing. As much I believe in the benefits of Cloud, I also have a realistic discussion around the anti-patterns for Cloud and why certain applications may not be the great candidates to be moved to the Cloud. It makes it easy to have certain patterns in mind when discussing what kind of a line of business application can move to the Cloud for realizing the best return on investment.

In this article, I want to discuss the possible scenarios for getting the maximum value out of Cloud.

Periodic Processing

Periodic Processing – Every enterprise has at least one application that goes through the grind during a certain time of the month, quarter or year. A classic example of this pattern is employee performance review application. This app is not so much in use for most part of the year and becomes the most accessed and used application during the mid- year review or annual review. In the finance industry, Credit Card companies run their risk scoring during the month end. July is the busiest month for tax filing applications run by Chartered Accountants in India. The common pattern across all these applications is that they are inactive for most of the times but become the most resource demanding applications during a specific period. From the IT investment perspective, it doesn’t make sense to allocate resources for these applications that are inactive for most of the time. Instead of provisioning and de-provisioning the infrastructure, it is optimal to move such applications to the Cloud. If you have such an application, think how you can move it to the Cloud.

Start Small, Grow Fast

Start Small, Grow Fast – This is the proven mantra for many startups. Majority of the startups would be intimidated by the overwhelming cost of the infrastructure. Even within the enterprise, there is a certain class of applications that start small and after testing the waters, they either get killed or become mainstream. Classic examples of such applications are contests and new business processes. What starts as a pilot within a department may turn into a best practice that gets adopted by the entire organization. Since most of these applications are designed from the ground up, they can be provisioned on the Cloud from day one and based on the demand, it can be scaled further. If the pilot is not well received by the employees, the application can be de-provisioned with minimal cost.

Unpredictable Burst

Unpredictable Burst – This pattern is more commonly seen in consumer facing web applications. If a website’s link appears on Slashdot or New York Times, there is an instant deluge of traffic and unable meet this demand the website might just become unavailable. If the enterprise launches a new digital marketing campaign which becomes extremely popular and gets viral, there will be a sudden spike in the traffic. These digital marketing campaigns are the ideal candidates for the Cloud. The biggest advantage of moving to the Cloud is the auto-scale capability. By monitoring the patterns in the traffic and the utilization of the infrastructure, additional server resources can be dynamically added to the application. Once the traffic stabilizes and the environment is not so demanding, the extra servers that are added can be safely disposed. This ability makes Cloud Computing extremely lucrative.

Predictable Burst

Predictable Burst- Ecommerce sites experience the predictable burst all the times. When Apple opens up pre-ordering for their next gen phone, they get ready to handle the peak loads. Because of the predictability, it is fairly common for the business to have a ball-park budget figure of the infrastructure cost. In public sector, there are many events that experience predictable bursts. Electoral results, examination results and publishing of latest census reports will result in this pattern. Sports sites know this better during a popular event like the world cup. Within the enterprise, these patterns are visible during a virtual company meeting or introduction of a mandatory online training for all the employees. The difference between this pattern and the first pattern, Periodic Processing is that there may not be a periodic recurrence of this pattern. The utilization of the resources is influenced by external parameters but the IT decision makers are usually aware of this burst ahead of the actual deployment.

What is your experience of moving an application to the Cloud? If you think there are more patterns, please do share with me by dropping a comment.

[This article was originally published in the Cloud Computing Journal]

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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A couple of weeks back, at the IBF Panel discussion on PaaS, we were discussing the opportunity for a Private PaaS. While a Private Cloud is typically associated with IaaS, I started to ponder on the value of a Private PaaS offering.

Microsoft’s announcement of Windows Azure Appliance at WPC underscores the significance of the Private PaaS. This appliance will remove the overhead of maintaining and running an environment to host applications. VMware is aggressively positioning it’s Spring framework on both Private and Public PaaS offerings. AppScale, the open source implementation of Google App Engine on EC2 and other standard VMs has a huge potential to become a Private PaaS. IBM WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance is another implementation of the Private PaaS. These appliances come with complete self-service capabilities and reduce the provisioning of development, test and production environments from days to few hours.

Let’s take a look at the scenarios and potential customers for the Private PaaS –

• Service Providers / Managed Data Centers – These are the next generation ISPs and companies who are into managed data center operations. By deploying PaaS in a box, they can focus on delivering the service to its customers vs. managing it. The multi-tenant capability which is core to the PaaS appliance will provide an isolated snapshot of the environment to the PaaS consumers.

• System Integrators – Large System Integrators who offer turnkey IT solutions can now offer PaaS to their strategic customers. This will enable SIs to deliver an end to end solution to the customers. System Integrators can now offer SLAs which are covered by the PaaS appliance providers. Customers will see value in this deal because the SI will own the entire lifecycle of the solution. This will also address the data security and compliance issues by keeping the sensitive data within the political boundaries of the country. I personally see this as a huge opportunity for the System Integrators in India.

• Large Enterprises – Large automotive, manufacturing and finance companies with presence all over the globe will be able to benefit from these PaaS appliances. By deploying a few in strategic locations, they will be able to reduce the maintenance cost of running Line of Business applications.

• Government – One of the niche customers of the PaaS appliance would be Government. By deploying state level appliances, the government will be able to create a secure Government Private Cloud. Since this runs within the premises of the government data centers, compliance and regulatory issues will not be a concern. Government can confidently store the data and run applications running a set of appliances deployed across the country.

This is an interesting space to watch. Do you see the potential for Private PaaS?

[This article was originally published in the Cloud Computing Journal]

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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It is a good sign that Google has decided to expose their Storage API based on Amazon S3 API. Eucalyptus Walrus Storage API is completely compatible with S3.

There has been a discussion on standardizing the API for the Cloud Storage. What fueled this discussion further is a poll that ReadWriteWeb.com ran on their site.

Poll from readwriteweb.com (as on 7/15)

Let’s get back to the original discussion on Cloud Storage API standards.
If we look back in history, the industry faced exactly the same challenge in the late 80s when the RDBMS market started to explode. Businesses didn’t want to suffer from lock-in and developers wanted flexibility at the API level. During the transition from monolithic to Client / Server, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) became the de-facto standard. Every DB vendor shipped their own libraries that adhered to the ODBC standard and developers could switch the libraries at runtime to talk to multiple databases. The front-end applications were completely insulated from the back-end.

For Cloud, we fortunately have the standards as the Lowest Common Denominator. What is common across all the APIs is that they are based on HTTP, REST, XML and SOAP. That makes it easy for abstractions to surface. What we need now is a Cloud version of ODBC. Let me take the risk of calling this as Open Cloud Storage Connectivity API. I am visualizing an architecture that looks something like this:

Open Cloud Storage Connectivity

This is based on the factory method pattern which is used by many enterprise architects. With this, a change in the configuration file will load the appropriate library for the target Storage service. This will be transparent to the Cloud Storage Consumer.

I already see this coming! Take a look at jClouds and Apache libcloud . The future of Cloud Storage is bright and exciting! What do you feel about the standardization of the Cloud Storage API?

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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IBF Media has been running a series of events called Capital Connection 2010 which is focused on serving the needs of entrepreneurs looking to connect with participants in the venture capital eco-system, technology executives, and to get access to capital and resources to help build their growing enterprises.

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

The latest in the series was a panel discussion on ‘Cloud Platforms and Solutions: Business Models and Architectures for Value Creation in the Enterprise’. The emphasis was more on the value that Platform as a Service (PaaS) brings to an enterprise. The organizers managed to get the best PaaS providers in the business – Google, Microsoft and OrangeScape. While I represented Microsoft Corporation as the subject matter expert on Windows Azure, we had Rajdeep Dua from Google to provide the Google App Engine context. Suresh Sambandam, CEO of OrangeScape PaaS (which incidentally supports both GAE and Azure) was also one of the panelists. The session was moderated by Raghavan Subramanian from Infosys who did a great job of asking very relevant questions to the panel and driving a meaningful discussion.

The discussion was very lively and made it interesting and valuable for the attendees and panelists. I want to share the answers to the questions that were asked in the panel. This represents only the points that I shared and not the views of other panelists in the discussion.

Q) What does your company offer in terms of PaaS? What are the key differentiators?
A) Microsoft’s PaaS offering is called Windows Azure Platform.

There are three key services within this –

• Windows Azure – The Cloud OS from Microsoft
• SQL Azure – Relational Database for the Cloud
• Windows Azure AppFabric – Bridge between on-premise and Cloud Services

Key differentiators –

• Based on familiar .NET Platform
• Great integration with Visual Studio and 3rd party tools
• Reliable SLAs for the enterprise
• Integration with on-premise assets
• Choice of storage between relational (SQL Azure) and non-relational (Azure Storage)

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

Q) What is the threat faced from the layers above (SaaS) and below (IaaS) PaaS?
A) I believe the line drawn between IaaS and PaaS is blurring slowly. Windows Azure is clearly a meta-platform and customers can run Java, PHP, Perl along with .NET applications. Worker role and Native Execution mode enables to port legacy applications to Azure. Since Microsoft also plays in the SaaS layer through the Microsoft Online services, it is an opportunity for us rather than threat. We encourage ISVs to build SaaS offerings on Azure.

Q) Who is the target audience? Is it ISVs or enterprise?
A) Our target audience is the following –

• ISV – Offer SaaS based solutions of their existing or new applications
• Enterprise – Move seasonal and on-demand Line of Business (LoB) applications to Azure
• Start-up – Go live quickly by avoiding up-front investment in infrastructure
• System Integrators – Offer migration and integration of Cloud Services

Q) What is the role of standards for lowering the entry barrier?
A) Standards are applicable at multiple levels. Here are a few

• Security Standards – Azure is SAS70 complaint
• Industry Standards – Supporting industry specific standards like HIPAA
• Open Standards – Azure storage, compute and management APIs are based on open standards like HTTP, XML and REST.

Q) Are there Cloud friendly languages? Do programming languages need new constructs to target cloud capabilities like multi-tenancy?
A) Developers interact with the Cloud in one of the two ways –

• Consume APIs and interact with the Cloud through the management API
• Develop applications that get deployed on the Cloud platform

For consuming the APIs, any language with support for HTTP libraries will work. More than languages the frameworks like .NET and Java need to evolved to support Cloud. For example .NET developers are able to leverage the LINQ constructs to interact with the Cloud storage efficiently.

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

Q) How do you assure continuity of business? Are you a viable and reliable vendor for the enterprises to bet their business on your Cloud platform?
A) Microsoft has been in the data center business for 15 years. Hotmail was acquired in 1977, Outlook Web Access (OWA) was launched 11 years ago. Hosted Exchange processes more than 1 billion messages per month. More than 2000 institutions signed up for Live@Edu with millions of email accounts. Enterprise customers trust us as we have been a credible player for more than a decade. Windows Azure has the right level of SLAs defined which raises the confidence level of our customers.

Q) How about 3rd party components and licensing on the Cloud?
A) Most of the component vendors are aligning with the Cloud. Players like PayPal started to offer services for the SaaS developers by collaborating with PaaS providers. Companies like Twilio are bringing telephony to the Cloud. Most of the components will evolve to support the new paradigm.

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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