Technical Evangelist, WebSphere Emerging Technologies at IBM
Dustin has held various jobs in software design and development at IBM including distributed system infrastructure development, and Web 2.0 runtime architecture design. Before joining IBM, he worked as a Lotus Domino application developer. In his current role, Dustin acts as a technical evangelist for emerging technologies in the IBM WebSphere software portfolio. His current focus is on WebSphere offerings that help users to leverage cloud computing.
I find that it is interesting and sometimes even helpful to sit down and reflect on past experiences. That's true for life and it's true for work. In my last post, I reflected on some of the common challenges I have seen in the rollout of enterprise cloud projects. In this post, I want to shift gears a bit and take one giant step back if you will. Let's talk about the common patterns for how organizations are adopting cloud in the first place.
It seems like the last several months have brought a rapid increase in the number of organizations getting serious, really serious, about private clouds in their enterprise. By this, I mean they are going beyond working on ROI documents, formulating strategies, and doing referential research. They are starting to put their preparation to good use in the form of implementation work. Maybe it just so happens that many of the customers I work with are arriving at this phase at the same time, but I would wager a bet that this is more or less happening in many companies.
APIs for cloud are important. Based on the number of writings, conference sessions, and Twitter blasts endorsing the cloud API movement, I think this is something on which we can all agree. However, I sometimes get the feeling that we just accept the fact that the API movement is important without really stopping to ask a very basic question: ‘Why are APIs for cloud important?'
One of the fundamental tenants of IBM Workload Deployer is a choice of cloud computing deployment models. Starting in v3.0, users will be able to deploy to the cloud using virtual appliances (OVA files), virtual system patterns, or virtual application patterns. The ability to provision plain virtual appliances is a way to rapidly bring your own images, as they currently exist, into the provisioning realm of the appliance. As such, I think the use cases and basis for deciding to use this deployment model are fairly evident. However, when comparing the two patterns-based approaches, virtual system patterns and virtual application patterns, the decision requires a bit more scrutiny
The platform services segment of cloud is multi-faceted… to say the least. Lately, likely spurred on by announcements like IBM Workload Deployer and VMware Cloud Foundry, I have been thinking quite a bit about one of those facets: environment management. To be clear, I’m not talking about management tools for end-users, though that topic is worthy of many discussions. Rather, I’m talking about the autonomic management capabilities for deployed environments.
I hate sitting on secrets. I always have. I understand that sometimes it's in the best interest of everyone (and your job) to keep tight lips, but that does not make it any more fun. Inevitably, the run-up to our annual Impact conference means everyone in the lab is doing their fair share of secret keeping -- just waiting for announce time. For a lot of us, that day ended Tuesday with the announcement of the IBM Workload Deployer v3.0.
I am a little fascinated at the preponderance of focus the industry sometimes puts on the cloud attribute of elasticity. Sure, it is important, and in fact, a necessary attribute to truly consider something a cloud. It also makes for cool reading in case studies where companies have successfully harnessed elasticity in the cloud to reap business value. However, in my experience with enterprise users, many would benefit from a couple of less sexy, but equally important attributes of cloud: standardization and automation.
Admittedly, when I was heads-down in code earlier in my career, I did not pay much attention to reference architectures. We had our own internal architectures that served as ‘the way and the truth’, and reference architectures for our product or solution domain were simply out of scope. Anyway, reference architectures are, by design, not detailed enough to steer someone implementing one out of hundreds of components that will fall under said architectures. So, for the most part I ignored them, even though I could hear rumblings coming from rooms full of folks arguing over revision 25 of the reference architecture for some problem domain or another.
In a recent post, I wrote about the importance of well-designed, well-constructed virtual images. To be clear, I am not promoting elegant virtual image design for the sake of art. Rather, if we can improve the state of the art in virtual image design and construction, there is a chance to significantly reduce image sprawl typical to many organizations today. Reducing virtual image sprawl will go a long way in reducing the amount of time and resources organizations dedicate to managing their image inventory.
Yesterday, I read the latest post on James Urquhart’s The Wisdom of Clouds blog. As I often do, I found myself nodding my head as I read James’ latest thoughts on cloud. In this particular post, James provided some thoughts on the types of applications for which we would see growing cloud-based deployments in 2011. I suggest you read the full post here, but I do want to identify the three application types James points out in his post.
The Cloud Computing Use Case group brought together cloud consumers and cloud vendors to define common use case scenarios for cloud computing. The use case scenarios demonstrate the performance and economic benefits of cloud computing and are based on the needs of the widest possible range of consumers. The goal is to highlight the capabilities and requirements that need to be standardized in a cloud environment to ensure interoperability, ease of integration and portability. It must be possible to implement all of the use case described in this paper without closed, proprietary technologies. Cloud computing must evolve as an open environment, minimizing vendor lock-in and increasing customer choice. Version 3 has additional security scenarios, requirements and use cases.
While some optimizations to code written in the imperative style can be inserted by a compiler, it doesn't lend itself to the same optimizations that code written in a declaritive style does. When coders tell a system what they want to do, as is the case in the declarative style, the system can decide the most efficient way to carry out the action. This programming model is particularly useful in the realm of cloud computing.
The Cloud Computing Use Case group brought together cloud consumers and cloud vendors to define common use case scenarios for cloud computing. The use case scenarios demonstrate the performance and economic benefits of cloud computing and are based on the needs of the widest possible range of consumers.
The goal is to highlight the capabilities and requirements that need to be standardized in a cloud environment to ensure interoperability, ease of integration and portability. It must be possible to implement all of the use case described in this paper without closed, proprietary technologies. Cloud computing must evolve as an open environment, minimizing vendor lock-in and increasing customer choice.
The full list of contributors include:
Contributors: Dustin Amrhein, Patrick Anderson, Andrew de Andrade, Joe Armstrong, Ezhil Arasan B, Richard Bruklis, Ken Cameron, Reuven Cohen, Andrew Easton, Rodrigo Flores, Gaston Fourcade, Thomas Freund, Babak Hosseinzadeh, William Jay Huie, Pam Isom, Sam Johnston, Ravi Kulkarni, Anil Kunjunny, Thomas Lukasik, Gary Mazzaferro, Craig McClanahan, Walt Melo, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Dirk Nicol, Lisa Noon, Santosh Padhy, Greg Pfister, Thomas Plunkett, Ling Qian, Balu Ramachandran, Jason Reed, German Retana,
Dave Russell, Krishna Sankar, Alfonso Olias Sanz, Wil Sinclair, Erik Sliman, Patrick Stingley, Robert Syputa, Doug Tidwell, Kris Walker, Kurt Williams, John M Willis, Yutaka Sasaki, Eric Windisch and Fred Zappert.
There's been much debate over public versus private cloud and the number of solutions in both spaces increase every day. Here is a look at the top five most common reasons why consumers would choose to implement private clouds over their public counterparts.
The Cloud Computing Use Case group brought together cloud consumers and cloud vendors to define common use case scenarios for cloud computing. The use case scenarios demonstrate the performance and economic benefits of cloud computing and are based on the needs of the widest possible range of consumers. The goal is to highlight the capabilities and requirements that need to be standardized in a cloud environment to ensure interoperability, ease of integration and portability. It must be possible to implement all of the use case described in this paper without closed, proprietary technologies. Cloud computing must evolve as an open environment, minimizing vendor lock-in and increasing customer choice. Contributors: Dustin Amrhein, IBM, Joe Armstrong, Ezhil Arasan B, Richard Bruklis, Reuven Cohen, Enomaly, Rodrigo Flores, Gaston Fourcade, Thomas Freund, William Jay Huie, Sam Johnston, Ravi Kulkarni, Anil Kunjunny, Gary Mazzaferro, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Dirk Nicol, Lisa Noon, Santosh Padhy, Balu Ramachandran, Jason Reed, German Retana, Dave Russell, Krishna Sankar, Patrick Stingley, Robert Syputa, Doug Tidwell, Kris Walker, Kurt Williams, John M Willis, Yutaka Sasaki, and Fred Zappert.
WebSphere CloudBurst provides self service access with controls. A common feature of cloud computing solutions is that they enable self-service access to the services they provide. But cloud solutions shouldn't provide their services in a free for all maner, letting any user take any action within the system. There should be strict controls over the services users have access to and the actions they can perform. The WebSphere CloudBurst strikes a nice balance between self service access and security.
Defining cloud computing has proven to be nearly impossible. Ask ten different people and you'll get ten different answers. Countless discussion groups, blogs, and articles have attempted to give their own take on cloud computing, and all to no avail. The industry just can't agree on a common definition. Perhaps it's time to move past trying to define the cloud and look into the common characteristics of cloud solutions.
Much like governance in a SOA, governance in the cloud helps to ensure that dynanicism and agility don't mean chaos. Dustin discusses the importance of cloud solutions that are organized as services.
Using th WebShere CloudBurst Appliance for custom clouds. When looking at creating a cloud of application environments, private clouds are attractive to many users because of the control, insight, and security they offer. However, besides these things, there is another benefit afforded by private cloud application environments: customizability. Custimations are important because they represent a competitive differentiation.
An introduction to cloud computing for developers. Some may say that cloud computing doesn't affect the developer in any way, while others will say developers need to totally revamp their skill set to cope with the new landscape proffered by cloud computing. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
A closer look at the IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance The WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance has the ability to create, deploy, and administer private Websphere cloud environments and gives customers the ability to create and manage a services oriented cloud. Dustin discusses it's creation, deployment, and administration capabilities and what they mean to the user.
New WebSphere offerings address private and public clouds Two new offerings, the WebSphere CloudBurst Application Server Hypervisor Edition and the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, help users construct private WebSphere cloud environments. In addition, more WebSphere offerings are being made available in the form of Amazon Machine Images. This allows users to utilize WebSphere enterprise class software in the Amazon Elastic Cloud.
Distributed Management Task Force tackles open cloud standards. It's time to acknowledge that open standards are not an inhibitor to innovation, but instead they facilitate the kind of technology adoption that makes innovation both possible and profitable.
Services must scale in the cloud A lot of discussion is given to providing virtualized, dynamically scaled resources such as servers, processors, and operating systems. By optimizing the usage and consumption of these infrastructure resources, IT operations can be significantly enhanced.
Enhancing Development and Test with Cloud Computing The more dynamic, autonomic capabilities promised by cloud could relieve some of the burden in managing large, complex IT infrastructure operations. Dustin discusses five different ways in which cloud computing strengthens development and test groups.
Looking back to the recent technology past, it's clear that the cloud computing movement has been coming in the time since distributed computing and its related technologies (like grid computing and SOA) gained widespread adoption. Cloud computing is now here, but many still have questions about this new technology. Part 1 of this article series discusses cloud computing in general, then disects the layers of the cloud, presents the different cloud types, along with their benefits and drawbacks, and explains why this movement is important for enterprise developers.
This article walks users through securing WebSphere sMash applications deployed on the Amazon Elastic Compute Grid. It illustrates how to secure applications using both HTTP basic authentication and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) methods.
IBM leverages Amazon's EC2 to deliver software. This article discusses the public cloud and how the WebSphere sMash and DB2 Amazon Machine Images can be used to deliver rich Internet Applications.
This group exists to define use cases for cloud computing. It is a collaboration of cloud consumers and cloud vendors, and is another step towards keeping cloud computing open.
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