I have to confess to being a little ring rusty as this is my first post in over four months. It turns out that running a company can be something of a preoccupation at times. That said, here goes ...
Location, Location, Location
I’m impressed by the staying power of property shows like Location, Location, Location (UK Channel 4) which have managed to re-invent themselves as an essential property guide in these stressful times. Their point is simple: Now more than ever identifying the right location is key if you intend to move house or invest sensibly in property. The same could be said for Utility Computing which after something of a false dawn has been re-invented as Cloud Computing.
Utility Computing, to paraphrase another popular reality TV concept, has had a make over and is now 10 years younger! However, although related, there are significant differences between the two concepts.
Utility Computing #fail
Utility Computing drew heavily on the analogy with traditional utilities such as water, gas and electricity companies, the implicit assumption being that it was the commoditized raw resources – compute, storage and networking - that enterprises were interested in consuming on-demand and which they expected to be available on-tap, as it were. This turned out to be unworkable in practice and it wasn’t until virtualization went mainstream around five years ago that managed services providers were finally able to package these raw resources and, more importantly, manage them effectively in a multi-tenant environment. Cloud Computing on the other hand took it as read that tools like virtualization and automation were readily available and instead focused on what was needed to enable enterprises to develop, deploy and run their applications given the increasing availability of utility computing infrastructure. It quickly became apparent that being able to provide this infrastructure and – if you’ll excuse the pun – knowing how to utilize it were totally different things.
Opportunity Knocks
Over the past few years the managed services providers have been slow to address this issue instead focusing on providing ever more exotic flavors of infrastructure-as-a-service – everything from community cloud offerings through to bare metal cloud and more recently virtual private clouds. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream may be the greatest but it will never beat an ice cream sundae which is the reason that Amazon Web Services has become such a dominant cloud computing player. Amazon understood from the outset that to get the most out of a utility computing infrastructure you need to augment this with application building blocks.
More recently large companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce and Google as well emerging players like Gigaspaces and my own company Cloudsoft have taken this a step further by focusing on providing application developers with application delivery platforms. These provide them with the support they need to develop, deploy and ultimately manage their applications so that they can take full advantage of the cloud computing model. This neatly brings us full circle – it turns out that understanding location, location, location is fundamental to achieving this goal.
Application Mobility is Key
There are many factors that contribute to the efficient delivery of an application or service but of paramount importance is its location. This is not something that should ever be exposed to the consumer of an application or service but the hooks for managing location and the ability to dynamically migrate an application or one of its components from one location to another at runtime are essential tools for the developer. Without application mobility it is impossible to optimize the delivery of an application or service and meet its regulatory or compliance requirements regardless of whether the goal is to deliver optimal performance for end users (follow-the-sun); minimize the cost of delivery (follow-the-moon); or avoid cross-border issues (follow-the-data).
The Future is ... Content Processing Clouds
Since the optimal location for an application or service can vary dramatically over the course of a 24 hour cycle, application mobility needs to be baked into the application delivery platform as a key component of its runtime architecture. What application mobility essentially lets you create is a Content Processing Cloud (CPC).
Companies like Akamai have pioneered the concept of the Content Delivery Network (CDN). In a CDN you optimize for the location/distribution of caching in a network whereas in a CPC you optimize location/distribution of processing in the cloud. Not only are these complementary concepts but I can envisage a future where content processing clouds will be hooked up to both content delivery networks and able to exploit advances in Complex Event Processing (CEP) technologies. Personally I can’t wait.
Comments