Realities of WebSphere CloudBurst

We’ve got a bit more under the skin of CloudBurst now and I wanted to post some info that’s not been written by anyone in Marketing…about the realities of the product (good or bad) rather than the saleman’s spin.

So what does it do? Well, in a nutshell it holds VMWare ESX and ESXi VM images of WebSphere Application Server (WAS) on disk and can install them to some IP addresses of your choice at your command and follows them up with some automated WAS admin scripting of your choosing. Some pre-created WAS Hypervisor Edition VM images exist (based upon Novell SLES 10 SP2) or you can create your own and package them, up using OVF (Open Virtualisation Format). There’s no runtime component to the product other than it’s VM management/deployment role, i.e. it relies on WAS XD if you want load balancing etc. There’s more to it than that but that’s the bare bones of it.

So what are the key use cases for CloudBurst – why would someone want one when they can install VM images themselves? Well, the key reason for use is to take the deployment cost out of an IT organisation. The creation of the OVF VM images is still going to be just as easy/traumatic as it was before, but once you’ve got a “pre-canned” environment setup in CloudBurst then you can roll that out repeatedly and with confidence with very little manpower required.

Who would use it? Well, if you get benefit from being able to ‘can a topology’ rather than just putting a single machine image ‘in a can’ then there could be real cost savings and agility/reproducibility benefits from being to roll out a defined topology to your private cloud very quickly and repeatedly. So if your organisation has many projects running throughout the year that need multiple dev, test, pre-prod, prod etc environments created and ripped down all the time, then you’d very quickly get a payback I suspect. It would also make you more likely to kill off an unused environment if you knew you could painlessly recreate it, allowing you to have less capacity needs overall.

The immaturity of the Open Virtualisation Format (OVF v1.0 was only released in March 2009) is a key constraint at the moment and this is an industry-wide issue – it’s early days. A key impact relating to CloudBurst is that each VM image is a bit of a beast at 20Gb minimum (not entirely clear why this is – maybe due to a WAS install being big anyway, due to the way virtual disks are managed in the OVF standard, and the images being uncompressed?). This directly impacts deployment times just due to the sheer volume of data to be shunted around, but it’s not immediately clear to me if this an OVF issue (it does have some compression support) or an issue with the implementation/use of the standard. If deployed more than once to the same hypervisor then deployment times can be accelerated as all this data doesn’t need to be provided a second time. It can take something like 7-15 minutes to deploy a VM image.

There are two key design approaches when creating your VM images (the best approach is probably a mixture of the two):

• use a ’stock’ WAS image and then customise it with your coifing/settings and your EAR files installed etc, and create a new OVF image for deployment
• use a ’stock’ WAS image and then do the customisation post-deployment using WAS admin scripting

So where’s it going from here…? Well support for Xen-based VM images must be likely as this is crucial for anyone who is going to ultimately deploy into Amazon EC2. Portal Server is already available on EC2 on a pay-as-you-go basis and WAS is coming. Also, it’ll be interesting to see if IBM support non-WAS images in later versions of the product.

 

WebSphere Integration User Group highlights

After a journey characterised by a conspiracy between parking meters and failed tube signals, I made it yesterday to IBM’s Hursley Park for the WebSphere Integration User Group meeting. Here’s the photo at a sunny Winchester station as proof…ok…so Jamie and I forgot to take any photos at the event.

The key note presentation was from Kevin Turner – ESB and Messaging Technical Strategy Manager. He covered IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative and then moved on to future architectural trends – the noteworthy points were:

• The 2nd wave of SOA is coming – there’s a significant number of ‘1st wave’ adopters out there now who have been through the joy and the pain, and have now fully understood the upfront investment required and the potential benefits. This 2nd wave is likely to consist of organisations trying to join up their islands of SOA (probably built along departmental lines due to a sensible pragmatic strategy of ‘baby steps’ SOA), and so federation of multiple ESBs will be a key theme. Governance will be crucial here if these islands are ever to be consolidated into a virtual enterprise bus that solves the problems of visibility of services across ESBs, end-to-end security and manageability etc.
• Patterns – IBM are working on building some integration patterns support into their tooling (presumably WebSphere Business Modeller, WebSphere integration Developer etc) to allow an expert from an organisation’s ICC/ICoE to define the standard ‘pattern’ and therefore accelerate the development of instances of that integration pattern. The integration developer might just have to supply the pattern parameters for example, with many of the decisions such as how to manage errors etc already consistently solved for them.

There were a couple of presentations about specific MQ-related Supportpacs (MO71 and IH03) which I expected to be dull due to their nature, but the presenters managed to bring them alive – especially Paul Clarke. It was clear that he’d written and refined quite an impressive beast of an application over many years and was rightly proud of it.

Kevin mentioned CloudBurst during his keynote, and I managed to get some time with an IBMer later in a hastily arranged session to discuss it some more – I’ll post details in another blog post later as there’s quite a lot to report.

That means I missed the start of the next session about the developments in the WebSphere Process Server product to better support the human interaction aspects of BPEL processes (which have been sorely needed in our experience!). Paul Smith demoed the Business Space web app from WPS v6.2 which goes some of the way to addressing these shortcomings, with better human ‘override’ control of processes (skipping a step, repeating a step etc) and better visualisation tools for business users to use to understand where a particular process instance has got to, etc. This is clearly still a developing area of the product set though.

The last session I attended was a demo of rules from the recent iLog acquisition by IBM. An ex-iLogger Lenny Bromberg gave a very engaging demo which involved my colleague Jamie playing the role of “business user” to dynamically change rules that influenced the behaviour of a mock motor insurance quotation app. An interesting aspect of Lenny’s “pitch” was that essentially rules engines are 10 a penny, there’s several good open source ones out there if you want one, but what rules provides is a Business Rules Management System (BRMS), i.e. all the significant extras wrapped around the actual runtime rules execution environment that you need to make it really workable, manageable and governable. This includes rule development/editing environments (developer IDE and business facing), rule versioning, rule comparison tools, audit, simulation environments etc. Some other observations:

• Lenny’s experience from previous projects where they have integrated with BPM solutions (like WPS etc) is that they often find that the business process definition/BPEL has become ’spaghetti’ as the business rules are not clearly separated from the business process – and so the use of an external rules engine enforces a good business process automation design practice, and leads to more maintainable BPEL etc.
• This is related to BRMS’s in general and not specifically iLog rules, but a weakness that I could see is that the rules rely on a good, stable business object model and we know from experience with numerous customers how difficult it is to get enterprise data models together and agreed. This is the potentially shifting sand that the rules are all built upon.

Many thanks to Mike Wyvill and Keith Guttridge and others for organising the event. Well worth the £28… )

 

WebSphere Integration User Group tomorrow

Together with a colleague Jamie Milne I’ll be attending the next WebSphere Integration User Group (UK) meeting tomorrow at Hursley Park. Whilst these events tend to have rather an MQ-bias, I’m looking forward to hearing what the messages about the future are relating to ESBs and process integration technologies, and I’ve signed up for the “Business Process Integration” breakout sessions – the promise of an “process integration demo” was too much to resist

Will post more afterwards about what I heard…

 

Service management Outsourcing Seminar

Along with Karen, Zoe and Stuart, I attended the IDC Service Management Outsourcing seminar in London on 25^th June. http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=IDC_P18536 

Over 100 delegates attended from a wide range of companies, a few of them are existing customers such as BP and Morrisons. I gave a 30 minute presentation on the common pitfalls of outsourcing software along with some solutions to these problems with the aim of the presentation being that an equitable partnership between customer and supplier is the only sustainable arrangement in the long term.

This customer/supplier – win/win relationship message was echoed by a number of other suppliers who gave presentations. Other suppliers included Capita, Verizon, Google (and one of their customers), Wyless, Xerox, Cognizant and MEDZ. Presentations focussed mainly around traditional outsourcing and off shoring, some were incredibly dull; hopefully mine wasn’t!! 

Google’s presentation was related to their SaaS cloud offering and was definately food for thought for me. Very straightforward cost model and very competitive pricing for mail, calendar, office type tools, document sharing, anti virus, anti spam filtering and more.

One thing that struck me as pointless was how much time the large companies devote to talking about their own organisations. Some of the presentations wasted half of their slot on slides about how many employees they have, how many countries they’re in, how many offices… They could just say “we’re massive” and skip the whole intro. Conversely my presentation said very little about Smart421 which is a lesson for me next time.

Marketing and Sales will be following up the leads that we gathered during the day and also following up with the full list of attendees that IDC will send us.

 It was a very successful and well organised event and I am hopeful that some of the leads will be converted to real business in due course.

Thanks to Joseph for getting there early and organising and packing away our stand, collateral, champers etc.

 

BizTalk Server 2009 (2006 R2) Utilities

BizTalk Server 2009 was released end of April 2009. This tends to lead to  a natural  review of our internal handbooks and the utilities that complement our processes.

When approaching all BizTalk engagements we  initially consider the SOA Roadmap and development methodologies and test frameworks that support these approaches. The majority of the utilities/extensions mentioned here are available as open source, or free trial download, but rarely do I see these utilities combined. It is assumed that these are applied to the traditional base build of Windows, SQL Server, optional WSS and BizTalk.

WCF LOB Adapter SDK SP2 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=47AB6F21-0D8B-4C90-A8B9-E8647281B164&displaylang=en )

The LOB adapter pack has now been extended to support SQL Server and is worth considering when looking at using WCF bindings.

BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=76736ba7-3c05-4436-9353-1c33f9005194&displaylang=en ).

This is a 120 day evaluation extending the WCF LOB Adapter SDK, to enable the auto generation of schemas and ports for the additional new bindings. There is an additional cost for this pack, depending on the licence model of your client.

Nunit 2.5  (http://www.nunit.org/index.php?p=download ).

Still popular with clients and used  to manage BizUnit test cases. The more traditional option is mstest, but useful to include for completeness.

BizUnit 2.3  (http://bizunit.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=9001#DownloadId=23581 )  or 3.0 (http://bizunit.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=20013)

BizUnit is an excellent declarative test framework for managing test cases and for generation of automated regression test packs. The newer release 3.0.x.x has additional feature support. Some clients like to make use of the excellent BizUnit Designer, which provides a UI for test case generation over editing raw XML. This is useful for early adopters, helping with understanding of what features are initially available in the framework.

Microsoft BizTalk LoadGen 2007 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c8af583f-7044-48db-b7b9-969072df1689&DisplayLang=en)

An additional tool to coordinate the execution of performance and stress tests.

BizUnit Designer 1.4 (http://bud.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=12968#DownloadId=33409) used with BizUnit 2.3

 A useful tool providing a UI to assist with the initial creation of test cases.

BizTalk Deployment Framework  (http://biztalkdeployment.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=17826#DownloadId=54972 )

This is a must for any development team. Having used the older framework extensively, the new features support msbuild projects over nant. This is a real time saver when managing complex build and deploys.

HTMLHelp.exe ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=00535334-c8a6-452f-9aa0-d597d16580cc&displaylang=en )

A Pre-requisite for the HTML output of the following orchestration profiler/documentor

BizTalk Orchestration Profiler 1.1.1 ( http://biztalkorcprofiler.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=6375#DownloadId=17235 )

An excellent tool for verification of code coverage of orchestrations in BizTalk. Generation of a help file analysing orchestration performance. Used during test cycles for verification of regression test packs coverage.

BizTalk Documentor v3.2 (http://biztalkdocumenter.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=8689  )

A useful tool for documenting the configuration of a BizTalk implementation. Useful to include in the deployment and release cycles for configuration management issues and to share with support teams, to verify configurations.

BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyzer v1.2 ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=93d432fe-1370-4b6d-aaa8-a0c43c30f5ab&displaylang=en)

An essential tool for all client deployments to generate and understand compliance reports. The latest version supports BTS2006, 2006R2 and 2009.

MessageBoxViewer ( http://blogs.technet.com/jpierauc/pages/msgboxviewer.aspx)

An invaluable tool for querying and analysing system configurations, especially for warnings of potential performance issues. This is more of a dynamic analysis than best practices analyser.

 Each of the downloads provides excellent detail on how to use the individual utilities. These are the utilities that we use to support our SOA Development Methodology when implementing and supporting BizTalk Server implementations. They provide the basis for development, test and deployment frameworks.

 

A barrier to internal metering of service calls?

One trend that we’ve noticed is that organisations are typically very poor at organising themselves to create good cross-charging schemes for the supply of internal IT infrastructure or IT shared services, and often only have a very coarse-grained view of what the provision of these services really cost. At an individual change project level, this makes it impossible to make educated judgements about the likely ‘run’ cost of a solution, and so the architectural trade-offs that have to be made must be sub-optimal.

An explanation I’ve heard in the past for this is that the internal accountants just don’t “get it”, but that’s never rung quite true with me. I read an interesting suggestion on the cloud computing Google group for another reason – that if internal IT managers did accurately define the costs of internal shared IT service provision then they would be opening themselves up for direct comparison with external providers of equivalent services, so it’s a defensive mechanism basically. They don’t want a Cx0 coming to them saying “OK – you change me £x per service call, but I can get them for £y from [substitute your favourite cloud/SaaS etc offering here]“…

 

Watch this space?

Following the recent acquisition of Sun by Oracle an interesting discussion kicked off via email within our WebSphere practice. The general consensus was that it probably wouldn’t change things that much but that it would be interesting to see how they handled their new toys while the BEA ones were still pretty shiny.

Today I came across this article http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/g1-paid. Whilst consisting of nothing more than speculation it raises some questions and elevates this a little higher up my list of things to keep an eye on.

Is there anything in this? Have Oracle got a masterplan to make money out of Java where Sun failed?

 

Modeling the Business using Archimate

I am continuing to build business models using Archimate, but I am getting bogged down in functions, processes, services and interfaces,

To my mind Archimate seems to move the modeling of the Business (ie that which is not IT see Tom Graves ) only a little way on from the practice of Business Process Modeling.

Archimate still seems to have a “start with IT and from an IT perspective” feel to it. Or put another way “how can we answer the what & why IT is needed”.

This may be the result of my mind set, however it may also be a result of trying to make Archimate compatible with UML, so that for instance an existing class model can be referenced in an Archimate model.

What I am trying to imagine, is how to represent say a centralized hierarchical organization as opposed to a decentralized flat structured organization. Can a decision be represented as a function, process or an interaction?

 

Using Archimate

I have been looking a little more deeply at Archimate 0.1 to see if it will give a useable off the shelf meta model.

The 1st reaction that I have had from a real customer, is that we EA’s may understand it – but not his business managers and executives.

How much time and effort do we expect customer’s staff to put into understanding our EA models?

I guess that it depends, but for the at a most 20 minutes attention span of busy a CxO the answer is that there is not much time and energy available for learning to understand different graphical representations. Indeed it is not just the symbols, but the juxtaposition of them and of the relative diagrams. By which I am thinking in particular of the representation of layers within Archimate.

Coming from a Zachman filled culture the layers are troublesome, and mentally I tip the diagrams on their side! I cannot get my head round the implied hierarchy within the Archimate meta model, after all if a task or activity can be performed by hand, by IT system or by machine where is the hierarchy?

I have been searching for some real life examples of Archimate, and I have not found any. My efforts so far tend to look a little between a process model and a tiered application architecture.

Does any one have any reviews / articles that will shed more light on the use of Archimate?

I think that we could start a thread or discussion on this, if there is sufficient interest. For instance what do we make of the “layering” of Business, Application and Physical dimensions?

May be this has all been discussed at length in the Archimate forum?

Is there a place for peer review of models on the web?

 

Summary of pros and cons for cloud deployment model

This must be one of the most over-blogged topics in the known universe – but this subject keeps coming up in discussions both internally with in Smart421 and externally, so I thought I’d post a summary for reference purposes…

Pros

• Agility, e.g. don’t have to wait for your infrastructure team to try something out on a dev server, or get a trial of a SaaS app up and running etc
• Elastic – can have 20 servers up and running inside an hour and then turn them off 2 hours later after a performance run
• Scale – scale as your business/demand grows without having to plan in detail
• Linear cost – Pay for what you use, no upfront investment at all – can even pay by the hour for WebSphere Portal server now on Amazon (WAS coming soon)
• A way of having a DR/business continuity strategy cost effectively
• Flexible – want to host in the US? Then change your mind and want to host in Europe? Or both for resilience? Fine with Amazon for example…
• Access – have access from more locations without putting additional infrastructure in place
• Control – control your entire deployment from a single browser console (e.g. with Amazon)
• Greener – maybe…fewer bigger and more efficient data centres rather than everyone having their own
• Stick to the knitting – do what you do (insurance etc) not running data centres

Cons

• Loss of control – security etc is in your service providers hands, do you really know they are backing up your data ok? Data separation in a multi-tenancy architecture? SLAs defined? Is the availability really good enough etc? Can you export your data for backup and/or reporting purposes?
• Regulatory – e.g. the Data Protection Act requires that data is secure and “not transferred to other countries without adequate protection”
• Maybe more costly if you know your demand (i.e. if elasticity is not a big requirement for you – as you potentially pay a premium for it – someone has to build the data centre…)
• Limited choice of environments – cannot have a non-standard deployment so easily, best to stick to LAMP etc
• Very hard/impossible to migrate from one cloud provider to another I suspect at the mo – so a new form of vendor lock-in basically
• Real risk of business users buying their own SaaS apps without any governance – and creating another generation of silo’d business apps (just this time hosted outside rather than inside!)
• Performance/latency – not as quick if your components are hosted “not on your doorstep”
• Extra bandwidth costs incurred
• Is your cloud provider’s business stable – will they be there is 2 years time?