Has cloud lost its buzz?

After doing a presentation the other day I joked to someone from IBM that the WebSphere 'Cloudburst' appliance was one of the silliest names I'd heard.  An appliance that was tagged as cloud.  He then informed me that its not called that anymore but is now called the much duller, but more accurate, Workload Deployer.  Now I'm still not sure as to why this is a piece of physical kit rather than a virtual machine but its an interesting shift in marketing over the last few years that now people are taking the word 'cloud' OFF products.

Now this could be because the definition of cloud is now clearer and marketing departments don't want to confuse people, or (and more likely) its because cloud isn't seen as 'shiny' any more and therefore has lost much of its ability to entice clients.  In the later case shifting to a more prosaic name makes sense.

This would be a good thing as it means we've got beyond the peak of the hype cycle and are now getting towards cloud becoming an important technical approach but not being the solution to world hunger or having value as a 'badge' to slap on something to make it more attractive.

Why would a cloud appliance be physical?

IBM often lead in technology areas and with the history of LPAR on the mainframe they've got a background in virtualisation that most competitors would envy. So clearly with cloud they are going to go after it. Sometimes they'll do what they did with SOA and tag a (IMO) dog of a product with the new buzzword (MQSI = Advanced ESB - I'm looking at you) and other times they will actually do something right.

Now a product that can handle the deploy and manage instances sounds like a good idea. IBM have created just such a product which basically acts as a dispenser and manager for WebSphere Hypervisor edition images. The WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance will deploy, it will reclaim, it will monitor and it will manage. Very nice for people who have large WebSphere estates.

And this is what the product looks like

Yes I did say look like because IBM have built this cloud manager into a physical box. Now appliances for things that need dedicated hardware acceleration I understand, but why on earth is something that is about managing virtual machines, something that might be doing bugger all for large periods of time not in itself a virtual image?

Given that the manager is unlikely to be a major CPU hog it seems like an ideal thing to be lobbed into the cloud itself (yes I know its not really a cloud, but lets go with the marketing people for now, they've made a bigger mistake here IMO). If it was in the cloud then you could add redundancy much more easily and of course it would require its own dedicated rackspace and power.

Like I said I can understand why you might like a virtual machine to do what the CloudBurst appliance does, but I have no idea why you would want a dedicated physical machine to work on a low CPU task. As IBM expand this technology into DB2 and other WebSphere elements you could end up with 20 "Cloudburst" appliances managing and deploying to a single private cloud. How much better for these to be cloud appliances in the truest sense and to be virtualised within the cloud infrastructure itself.

A physical box to deploy virtual images makes no sense at all.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Have Microsoft got serious about Enterprise Software?

Reading over on infoq I came across this interesting article about one of the most senior, if not the most senior, person from IBM Software leaving to join Microsoft. Don Ferguson is pretty central to lots of things that IBM have done and is extremely important in the overall picture at IBM. From his old IBM blog

Don chairs the SWG Architecture Board, which oversees the architecture and integration of WebSphere, DB2, Lotus, Tivoli and Rational products. Don was the original Chief Architect for the WebSphere family of products.

Which sort of scopes out the sort of calibre that Microsoft have got themselves here. I've been concerned in the last few years that Microsoft just don't appear to be focused on the enterprise market. It was clearly going to take a pretty heavy hitter to move them forwards and most importantly give them the clarity they need to build a full enterprise ready stack of products.

With Longhorn Server and the revision of most of the enterprise stack that it requires being scheduled (according to rumour) for next year this gives Don only a short time to implement the complete overhaul of how they work. As a champion of SCA at IBM it will be interesting how ideas like that are either used, or replicated, in side of Microsoft. It will be interesting how much of the current Vista and .NET 3.0 pieces make it into the enterprise stack or whether Don will decide that something better is required.

From the post I referenced above I said that Microsoft need to Buy BEA, or get a vision for SOA that allows the enterprise to evolve at a different pace to the operating system. at least now they've hired someone with a good track record in proper enterprise software. Maybe there might be competition from Redmond after all.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Predictions for 2007

Okay its time to don my cap of predictions for 2007, the following should be thought about as reliable as the average horoscope, i.e. I'm making them up off the top of my head.

Products and vendors

1. First off 2007 will the year of the SOA technical "platform" not exactly news as quite a few people are claiming this today, but 2007 will be the year that really sees this become useful. With Oracle, BEA and IBM all looking like having pretty major releases next years its going to be an entertaining marketplace.
2. Smaller vendors will struggle even more, the justifications for picking niche products will increase.
   
3. The "rich and fat" ESB model will die on its arse. Products will start to clearly split the communications infrastructure from the application infrastructure.
4. Microsoft will slip further behind in the enterprise space while they wait for Longhorn server
5. IBM will finally admit that it does have a cohesive strategy based around J2EE and that the non-J2EE bits are going to EOL.
6. Rumours of BEA being bought out by Chelsea FC will abound, then die away once Roman Abramovich realises they don't posses a top quality international striker.
7. SCA will become the "accepted" enterprise way of doing things
8. REST will be delivered into the stacks so they can remain buzzword compliant, REST advocates will denounce them both as heretics and as proof that REST is the "answer".
   
9. Business level modelling will continue to be a pipe dream, filled either with overly complex tools or insanely technical ones.
10. Oracle will buy some more companies, probably including some sort of registry
    
11. IBM will buy some more companies, probably focused around provisioning and management
    
12. Windows Workflow exploits will show up in the wild
13. Some product vendors will finally get the difference between product and application interfaces and stop confusing the two.
14. Questions will be asked about why you have to pay so much money for an invoicing process in an ERP.
15. Java being Open Sourced will not be the big "wow" that Slashdot predicted
16. ERP vendors will start to get their heads around SaaS licensing models
17. Hardware virtualisation will become the "norm" for new deployments
    

WS-*

1. WS-Contract and WS-SLA will remain in the future while WS-* concentrates on more technical challenges.
2. WS-* will continue to be plagued by insanely simple bugs in various implementations, but vendors will hopefully each have just one WS stack (rather than all having multiples like they do now).
3. BPEL 2.0 will go up a hype curve like almost no technology in history... people will then complain about their visual COBOL applications being unmaintainable.
4. WS-* will split into competing factions, those that think everything must be done in "pure" WS-*, and those that think that sometimes its okay to not use the standard way if its actually simpler.

REST

1. REST will start re-creating the sorts of things that WS-* has, so await "RESTful security" and "RESTful reliability" as well as "RESTful resource descriptions" being bandied about.
2. REST will aim for a MIME type explosion, this won't get very far and lead to lots of "local" standards that are nothing of the sort.
3. REST will split into competing factions, those that hold to the "literal truth" of the REST paper, and a more progressive sect who treat it as a series of recommendations that are to be applied with thought.

IT/Business

1. IT will continue to not care about the TCO and will focus on the cost of development
2. Some major IT horror stories will emerge based on SOA and REST "failures" the reality will be that the project was screwed from the start but it was a damned fine scapegoat
3. More engineering and measurable solutions will be required by the business
4. Business will demand more visible value from IT
5. Offshoring will continue, and South America will rise further as an offshore location
6. The business will want to see IT clearly split the utility from the value
7. IT will continue to focus on technical details and miss the business big picture
   

Well that is it for starters like all good horoscopes there are some specific elements that won't come true and a bunch of generalities that I can claim did. But my big prediction for 2007?

1. Sun will finally get their act together and pull all those brilliant minds into a cohesive enterprise strategy and ditch all the fan-boy bells and whistles that have dogged their recent past.

Well I can dream can't I?

Technorati Tags: SOA, 2007,Service Architecture