The Question Without an Answer

What exactly is “Cloud Computing?” The term will probably never be fully fleshed out in terms of a common definition, and at the end of the day that’s fine with me. Yes, we need to put structure around the term and the industry, but as we noted earlier in the year with a post about cloud maturity models, we run the risk of painting ourselves into a corner if we try too hard to make things fit neatly into buckets that we can easily classify and categorize. Taxonomy will be key to understanding and adopting cloud computing, but I’ve become convinced that in order to truly embrace the cloud, we must…

Embrace the Abstract

I had the opportunity to speak at Interop Las Vegas this year with Rick Nucci of Boomi and R. “Ray” Wang of Forrester Research, and when I made the statement that “cloud computing is the technical manifestation of Service Oriented Architecture,” I realized that I had found the unifying principle of cloud-based solution design; unifying both in the sense that the promise of SOA finally has the technology behind it to transform it from philosophy to practical design pattern, as well as in the sense that the term “cloud computing” itself was being co-opted in much the same way that traditional software vendors co-opted the entire concept of Service Oriented Architecture to sell middleware throughout the decade.

Cloud computing may mean many things to many people, but in the end its full potential can only be realized if we stop trying to think of it in terms of the “known known” and embrace the the “known unknown.” More importantly, when we think about the cloud and applying SOA design principles, we cannot continuously innovate and drive value if we are traversing connections inward to rationalize patterns and explain the abstract with the known; we must restructure our patterns and embrace the abstract in an attempt to forge new connections by moving outward beyond our comfort zones. The next generation of system design is less about creating code, and more about assembling services – innovation through extending value in what already exists rather than inventing new sources of value. In terms of practical application, this means moving up the stack and…

Learning to Describe Rather Than Prescribe

An interesting pattern that I observed throughout 2009 is the continuing tendency to try and reinvent the wheel despite the fact that not only has the wheel already been invented, but it’s right in front of our eyes and meets our needs 99 times out of 100. I saw this over and over with Salesforce CRM and Force.com projects; the value of using Platform-as-a-Service is that someone else (or more accurately, thousands of other people) has already thought about just about everything you could possibly need in a data model, user interface, and business rules. And not only have they published just about everything you could possibly want in an easily configurable platform, they host it and manage all of the operational details such as backups, upgrades, and security. Yet time and again I encountered teams that thought that their way of doing things was better, and would go down the path of trying to build Salesforce on Salesforce before realizing that the same outcomes could have been achieved by spending a little more time upfront optimizing business processes and making minor configuration changes than going down the path of creating complex custom workflows, classes, and user interfaces to achieve the same end.

Some case studies are extreme, such as the support manager that duplicated Contacts across multiple accounts and assigned multiple portal logins to customers – in one extreme case 101 times – rather than setting up sharing rules properly; I don’t have to tell you what a data quality nightmare that ended up being. In other cases, it’s simply a matter of building rather than reusing what’s already there, resulting in hard-coding of attributes and logic that should be dynamic and extensible.

What I’ve come to realize is that there is a conceptual barrier that we need to overcome when it comes to metadata and other abstracted entities; because multitenancy architecture and SOA are reaching such a pervasive state, we must shift our thinking to describe what already exists rather than trying to recreate it. Entities exist once and in perpetuity – for example, there is only one of you in the entire world and you cannot be recreated on demand – thus our ability to provide context necessarily requires us to describe the entity in a manner that provides value to the application; the ability to describe entities with deep domain knowledge and create relationships to other entities that enrich the value of the data set will become an important competitive differentiator.

This will take time and a great deal of trial-and-error until we get it right, but in the end it is the only way to leverage the tremendous potential of core cloud computing architecture patterns; our entire concept of producing and consuming services has to change, which leads me to the conclusion that…

SaaS is Dead…Long Live SaaS

Granted, the title of this blog predicates from the acronym for Software-as-a-Service, but as cloud services mature and the traditional technology stack gets blown up and reassembled, the entire concept of “software” shifts from the self-contained, monolithic packaged application to that of a delivery framework. Software was invented to make hardware useful; hardware is abstracted in the cloud and we no longer write code down to the kernel level – we assemble, configure, and code to the layer of abstraction of the specific cloud platform. The term “software” will gradually fade from our lexicon.

This was the philosophy that drove the Java language and multi-platform virtual machine concept, and will continue to evolve with next generation rich Internet application frameworks such as Adobe Flex / AIR. What we will see moving forward is the continuing shift from desktop software that interacts with the cloud, to ubiquitous frameworks that consume data and logic services from the cloud and leverage the processing capacity of the local machine to enhance the user experience.

2009 and its economic and sociopolitical malaise are now behind us, and by all accounts 2010 will be the year of the cloud. While the technology and the terminology of the cloud have permeated the mainstream, it will take significant shifts in thought processes and design patterns before the cloud can be fully leveraged. Here’s to a great New Year and the hopes that the likes of Microsoft and other relics will accelerate their fade into obscurity and stop trying to steer the cloud discussion back into a box. Until next time, here are some…

Other 2009 Wrap-ups and 2010 Predictions

Jeff Kaplan: Key Challenges Facing Cloud Computing in 2010 and Beyond
Phil Wainewright: Tips from 2009 for a prosperous 2010
Dave Barry’s year in review: 2009 (Humorous, non-cloud related)

When I first read the OpSource Cloud announcement, I can’t say that the concept moved me to want to shout it from the rooftops; part of the reason is that I spent the first 10 years of my career managing IT infrastructure and I lost my passion for it long ago. Another reason is that my company, Delivered Innovation, lives in a different part of the cloud “stack” and we leave the management of platforms and databases to our partners such as salesforce.com. But I’ve followed Treb for the past few years, and I knew that someone with his vision had a grander plan than just building a better Amazon EC2.

While OpSource Cloud will of course be widely compared to Amazon and RackSpace at a technical level, what I was looking for from Treb during his demo was whether he attacked the major concerns, real and otherwise, that enterprises have about moving IT resources beyond the walls of their corporate data centers. The web-based management and provisioning interface had a clean look and feel, the process of setting up an account and system users was straightforward enough, and getting up and running with a standard Red Hat image took all of a few clicks and about 8 minutes of processing on the back-end. I was extremely impressed, although admittedly I don’t have enough experience with other services to provide any type of competitive benchmark. But what I did come away with was a sense of Treb’s laser-like focus on the key barriers to enterprise adoption that have caused cloud computing services to be regarded more as curious novelties than real drivers of value in the corporate IT world: security, performance, and management control. And it was this focus that got me excited about OpSource Cloud, because I see this service offering as being a key step forward in driving the legitimacy and acceptance of cloud computing in the enterprise.

My key takeaways from the demo and my discussion with Treb:

1. OpSource isn’t reinventing the wheel here – rather than using a proprietary virtualization technology, they are leveraging VMWare, which already has a significant foothold in the enterprise. This has its pros – namely that IT organizations are already familiar with VMWare and OpSource Cloud gains instant credibility by leveraging the VMWare brand equity. It also has its cons – Oracle, for example, has chosen not to embrace VMWare and does not openly support its products when installed on the platform.
2. The user security appears to provide granularity and control far beyond what Amazon provides. While I don’t think many IT folks would run off and “spend all the money on XBoxes and flat screen TV’s” as Treb joked about, the enterprise IT market demands the same type of access control that it has for its in-house platforms.
3. When I pressed Treb about my concern that despite the 100% uptime SLA and the guaranteed latency between systems, we were still talking about the same public Internet and OpSource would be in the position of having to defend itself from user dissatisfaction over any performance degredation regardless of the location or source of the issue, he laid out a very compelling vision of leveraging MPLS between the corporate site and the OpSource Cloud to provide quality of service over the public network. I’ll leave this up to folks smarter than myself to determine the feasibility of this, but I like that there was a solution in mind even though the problem may not necessarily be within the sphere of OpSource’s control.
4. Customers have complete control of private VLAN’s and network address translation (NAT), allowing them to determine which servers can be accessed over the public Internet, and which ones stay completely private.
5. A complementary storage offering is in the works, and is expected to be released in about two months.
6. OpSource Cloud will provide burstable CPU, allowing enterprises to scale computing capacity on demand.
7. Customers will be able to leverage dedicated firewall options.
8. The service touts SAS-70 compliance.
9. VMWare images will be portable between customer on-premise systems and OpSource Cloud instances.

It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to the OpSource Cloud. It’s a step in the right direction from the perspective of addressing core concerns that have dogged enterprise adoption of cloud computing services. We’ll definitely keep an eye on it and the press reaction over the coming days and months.

With regards to the testing aspect of Force.com application development and delivery, I have observed some emerging patterns that warrant further study and discussion:

1. Unit testing is real-time and automated. The Force.com IDE for the Eclipse SDK has been a solid development tool for some time, but the real-time feedback that you get using version 16.0 (Summer ‘09) of the IDE with the Eclipse Ganymede release (3.4.x) is of tremendous value. Granted, the Salesforce API will let you know if there is a problem with your code, but now we’re seeing potential issues called out in Eclipse prior to pushing code to Salesforce. If you think of unit testing in the traditional sense, where you are testing the validity of snippets of code, the very act of the Salesforce API accepting code that you push to the environment provides immediate validation in an intelligent and automated fashion. And with the line-item feedback provided by Eclipse, you can catch code validation issues long before saving to the server, significantly reducing the time required to track down and fix invalid code.
2. Integration testing has combined with QA to become a metafunction. I will be the first to admit that I initially viewed the Apex 75% code coverage requirement imposed by salesforce.com as more of an annoyance than anything. Now I have come to see test classes not as a necessary evil in deploying apps to production environments, but as a tremendous opportunity to bundle elements of integration testing and end-to-end application QA into a single overarching process. While most developers dread having to write Apex test classes, we include them in our design specifications as a best practice. If you think about it, what we are doing is taking the use cases that are fleshed out during the design process and building out test cases from the onset of the development effort; this is a fundamental shift from the traditional role of QA in outdated waterfall-based methodologies that build and execute test cases and QA plans only after development, unit testing, and integration testing are completed. I have worked with far too many organizations where QA was considered an albatross – the development effort was complete for all intents and purposes, the finish line was in sight, and here comes QA adding weeks, if not months, to the Gantt chart right before that final milestone. By making QA an iterative process that is tightly integrated with development processes, there are no downside surprises at the end of the development cycle; QA is already done along with integration testing, and it can be argued that the most important aspect of this is that QA is no longer a discreet process – it becomes a living, breathing overlay of the entire development methodology, producing test classes that live alongside the production Apex classes.
3. User Acceptance Testing is a combat sport. What we have found with many Delivered Innovation clients is that if a prototype meets functional requirements, it’s considered “good enough” at that point. The reality of the situation, 9 times out of 10, is that “good enough” is not quite good enough for a number of reasons. Namely, demonstrating a prototype in a controlled environment with use cases that are designed to show successful outcomes does not flesh out the true functional capabilities of the app; only when users start beating on an app do we start to see where the stress points are in the functioning of the application. This is why we encourage what we half-jokingly refer to as “break testing” – we encourage users to “break” the app by any reasonable means. Realistically, we want this to happen upfront and not two months after production deployment. Another reason why UAT becomes critically important in the testing process is because the execution of test classes is constrained by governors and limits far more conservative than production governors and limits. For example, while you can retrieve 10,000 records in a production (non-trigger) SOQL query, you are limited to 500 records when executing tests. While you may be able to write test classes that execute within governors and limits, once you release the app into the wild you just never know when Salesforce users will find the “unknown unkowns” and use the app in a way that could not have been anticipated…followed by the dreaded ‘Script Exception’ email alert showing up in your Inbox.

How has Force.com, or PaaS in general, impacted your testing and QA processes?

• The folks that put Interop together did a nice job, as always. The thing that I found interesting about the SaaS panel that I participated in though, and the entire SaaS track for that matter, is that it was mutually exclusive of the Cloud Computing track. In my mind SaaS and cloud computing are not only inextricably linked, but one and the same. SaaS is just one of many services provided in the cloud, so from a context perspective it seemed like SaaS should have been a subset of the Cloud Computing agenda; after attending a number of sessions and the Cloudcamp unconference, it became apparent that most of the attendees were focusing on cloud computing as not much more than an infrastructure paradigm, which misses the point completely. Obviously “the cloud” needs infrastructure to operate, but after watching a presentation where Sun jockeyed for positioning in the cloud infrastructure space, I realized that I was probably in the wrong conference.
• Continuing with the infrastructure focus, I noticed a troubling theme in presentations and private discussions that I had throughout the day on Monday and Tuesday – far too many IT folks are slapping the “cloud” term on anything and everything, following the lead of vendors that are co-opting the term to describe traditional technologies and services. Having been an IT manager for the better part of 12 years, I’m familiar with how the game is played when it comes to justifying the existence of IT; in this case what I saw was the “lipstick on a pig” approach where projects were re-branded with the cloud moniker to get budgetary approval and organizational prioritization, but at the end of the day were still infrastructure projects that added little business value. The other pattern I noticed was the “if you build it, they will come” approach to IT projects, where folks were discussing their “private cloud” strategies and on-premise SaaS (oxymoron) solutions; the long and the short of this tactic being that IT goes off and stays busy implementing new technology without a clear business directive, and then tries to get business function and process owners to buy into the new infrastructure by shoehorning systems into whatever IT has run off and built on its own. I’ve been guilty of that one, too. 9 times out of 10 a vendor is the culprit, having done a great job selling wares to an IT director who then has to go off and find a way to justify the expenditure after the fact.
• When I put my agenda together for Interop, the session with Treb Ryan of OpSource and Narinder Singh of Appirio sounded like a must-see, and it didn’t disappoint. Although I have heard Narinder speak numerous times at salesforce.com events, he was as good as usual. But I had never heard Treb speak, and he stole the show. Very entertaining and insightful, and his assertion about the majority of new SaaS applications not offering API access was fairly shocking because it flew in the face of my assumptions about the openness of SaaS and cloud computing. Treb also eluded to how the next generation workforce will expect more openness, which he wrote about in his Sandhill.com piece.
• Jeff Kaplan moderated a session in the SaaS track that focused on taxonomy and defining terms associated with SaaS, PaaS, and cloud computing. This was also my first time hearing Jeff speak, and he lived up to his reputation. There was a point in the session where a question from the audience regarding service level agreements (which I will talk about in the next bullet) threatened to derail the momentum of the session, but Jeff masterfully captured the spirit of the question and wrapped it in a more philosophical question regarding the impact of SaaS on IT resources. My takeaway from Jeff’s session is that IT is still fighting SaaS tooth and nail, and that the remaining bastions of resistance are trying to project unrealistic expectations on SaaS providers in order to set SaaS up to fail – as if this will somehow delay the inevitable transformation of IT service delivery.
• After having joked to a colleague not a half hour before about how IT managers throw out “five 9’s” requirements to SaaS providers despite the fact that 99.999% of them have never achieved the metric themselves, when the SLA question was brought up during Jeff’s session, I almost spit out my coffee; not just because of the coincidence, but because it was being brought up in a session that was designed to define key industry terms, not define performance or availability targets. The paranoia in traditional IT circles is pervasive, but it misses the bigger picture completely; IT jobs are not going away, they’re just changing with the shift in service delivery models. But this SLA discussion was particularly fascinating because it focused on punitive measures for service disruption, which in itself is misguided; we are talking about a maturing but still relatively new technology, and although availability metrics from providers like salesforce.com have been excellent, as Jesse Robbins made abundantly clear during his 5-minute lightning presentation at Cloudcamp the night before, failure happens. But rather than encouraging SaaS providers to improve service availability through adoption and innovation, there is a weird tendency to use negative reinforcement as a means to enforce compliance. Is this a survival tactic for the status quo? Is it just small minded thinking? I don’t know for sure, but unfortunately as strong as Peter Coffee’s presence was on this panel, I think he missed a golden opportunity to deliver a knockout blow to this tired argument by taking a somewhat confrontational approach and expecting saleforce.com’s numbers to speak for themselves, which despite their consistent excellence obviously still are not enough to convince the skeptics. I think as a community, we need to attack the SLA / five 9’s argument and put it to rest – it’s still killing deals despite the fallacious roots of the logic.
• I used to be a huge Microsoft proponent…ten years ago. Now I find myself asking, “Are they serious?” anytime I hear someone from Microsoft speak to their “cloud computing” strategy. It’s the most aloof and dismissive messaging I have ever heard, and the Cloudcamp presentation and SaaS track that I attended where Microsoft gave their “vision” of Azure were agitating.
• The entire concept of an Expo Floor will be dead in five years.

There were some very thoughtful and insightful questions posed to the panel that I participated in, and I will write about some of these topics in subsequent posts – namely “The Cloud” as the technical manifestation of Service Oriented Architecture, and reconciling the “stickiness” of service offerings to monetize intellectual property with the openness of the cloud. Right now I’m looking out the window at a beautiful day on St. Pete Beach realizing that despite my promises to myself, I’m working on vacation…

Michael Topalovich