Third Generation Outsourcing – SIAM

It was great to see National Rail Enquiries (NRE) win an award at the European Outsourcing Association Awards in Amsterdam last Friday (26 April).

In recognition of their SIAM outsourcing strategy (Service Integration and Management), NRE won the award for Best Multi-sourcing Project of the Year , beating strong category finalists 60k and Centrica (Centrica won this category in 2012).

Smart421 is pleased to be a large part of that initiative, performing the Managed Services element on top of an AWS Cloud platform for several key NRE applications.

As customers struggle with the chains of traditional SI relationships, Smart421 is providing agile delivery and innovation methods in the IaaS world.

Many analysts see this as “third generation outsourcing” and a change for good – and so do I.

 

Please rate and Like this blog.  If you can, please leave a Comment.

 

SyncIpswich 2 brought us Continuous Delivery and Windows Azure Cloud

Wow! SyncIpswich’s second meetup and around 80 people crammed into the Eastern Enterprise Hub in the James Hehir Building at University Campus Suffolk. Many of the attendees were working for local behemoths like BT but there were also a good mix of bootstrappers, Start Ups and tech entrepreneurs with all kinds of backgrounds (even spotted a Chartered Accountant).

Organisers Carl Farmer (@CarlFarmer), supported by Anders Fisher (@atleastimtrying) and others have done a great job with SyncIpswich, which we are proud to sponsor. The focus of this meetup was on building software quickly with good practices as well as a nice introduction to the Windows Azure Cloud.

Talk no 1. Continuous Delivery

The first presentation by Chris O’Dell from 7digital (@ChrisAnnOdell) described how Agile practices (CI, Kanban, etc) combined with their architectural evolution to SOA have reduced code to deploy times to half a day  at 7digital.  And, by the sound of it, makes their developers more productive by getting away from “DLL Hell” that used to be the bane of any Microsoft Windows developer’s life towards a loosely-coupled set of services and a public API.

Chris raised some really interesting points around developing small fine-grained service components – not being that familiar with .Net myself this seemed to be similar to what we are doing in the Java world with OSGi and Service Component Architecture. I do like the policy of developing new features on the trunk (no feature branches) but making good use of feature flags rather than old-fashioned branch & merge.

They are also using Git for the code version control and Chris showed the inversion of the classic Unit Test, Acceptance Test, QA triangle. Some in our own organisation are raising question marks about the usefulness of very granular unit tests so the approach taken by 7digital of increasing the number of Unit tests is interesting.

There were a lot of questions from the floor, I was particularly interested in how the small kanban teams (about 6 or 7 members in 5 or 6 teams I think) interact when there are common services. This is a key problem that us SOA architects need to get right to get the best value on services. Feature Flags is something that we’ve also thought about in the context of simplifying application testing by, for example, switching off authentication for functional testing.

It’s great to see a company like 7digital competing successfully with iTunes and Amazon in the digital music space. I’ll be checking out their API (and their JLS back catalogue !) in more detail this weekend.

Talk no 2. Starting out in Azure

The second talk of the night was by Richard Astbury (@richorama) of Two10 Degrees ( @two10degrees). Richard gave a nice introduction to Cloud computing and in particular using Microsoft Windows Azure, showing a picture of a MS data centre under construction, which was something I haven’t ever seen before. I think it really brought home the sheer scale and commodity nature of the Cloud and these facilities being full of containers of kit that is just thrown away or recycled when it stops working.

Building a website on Windows Azure from scratch can use a few main pre-canned routes like the obvious “Website”, “Virtual Machine” and “Cloud Service”.

And it now includes a “Mobile Service” which is of particular interest to me. Sadly, I didn’t have time to chat to Richard about this but it’s on my “To Do” list to get a Hello Smartie mobile service up and running. In fairness, Richard did do two masterful demos for Website, including a node.js based site which he even launched from his home computer (a Raspberry Pi no less). As Carl tweeted:

Deploying to Azure from a remote RaspberryPi at home… Impressive stuff from @richorama !

— SyncIpswich (@SyncIpswich) April 25, 2013

Well done to the people of Ipswich for turning out and drinking all the sponsored free beer!
SyncIpswich will run and run.

Please Rate and Like this blog.  If you can, please leave a Comment.

 

If the world is going Big Data crazy then you need to know what it is, what it isn’t and what it means to your enterprise

The subcategory called Big Data is emerging out of the shadows and into the mainstream.

From left: Matt Wood, Chief Data Scientist at Amazon Web Services (AWS) with Robin Meehan, CTO at Smart421
Photo by Jim Templeton-Cross

What it is.

Definitions abound (who would have thought it? – quite usual in the technology market). For Big Data, we quite like the definition that originated with Doug Laney (@doug_laney), formerly META Group, now a Gartner analyst. It goes something like this:

 ” … increasing volume (amount of data), velocity (speed of data in and out), and variety (range of data types and sources)”

Gartner continue to use this “3Vs” model for describing Big Data.

Unsurprisingly, others are claiming Gartner’s construct for Big Data (see Doug’s blog post, 14 Jan 2012).

Still confused?

Put another way, Big Data is commonly understood to be:

“… a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools. The challenges include capture, curation, storage,search, sharing, analysis,and visualization. The trend to larger data sets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to “spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions.” read more on Wikipedia.

Big Data could be executed on-premise if you have sufficient compute and storage in your corporate data centre. And some do, especially some large banks, and with good success. Several solutions are already out there on the market;  Oracle’s Big Data Appliance is just one example.  But it does also beg the question “why would you” ?

If you don’t want the CapEx of purchasing more tin, or don’t want to gobble up capacity in your own data centre, then there are alternatives. For example, a cost model now exists with cloud-based compute and cloud-based storage (for example, think of Amazon’s announcement of 25 percent reductions in the price of Amazon S3, it’s storage solution) that puts Big Data in the Cloud well within the reach of all UK enterprises. A cost model like that islikely to win friends in procurement and in corporate governance as well as in IT.

Hinging on technologies including Apache Hadoop clusters, Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (Amazon EMR) and others, Big Data is delivering a degree of analytics and visualisation not previously possible at affordable levels.

Don’t just take our word for it, ask around. We could point you to other experts in Big Data, such Matt Wood ( @mza ), Chief Data Scientist at AWS.

What it isn’t.

Big Data isn’t business intelligence (BI). What I mean is that Big Data isn’t BI in any traditional sense of the term. It is altogether another level on from that. Granted that some tooling enterprises may own may be recycled for use in Big Data analytics. But it isn’t another species, it’s another race.

Big Data isn’t a lame attempt at reviving a management information system (MIS); those should be left to rest in peace.

What it means for you.

By now, if you’ve read this far, something should be niggling away at you that you could be missing a trick. I trust it won’t be those voices in your head again. But it might be your instincts telling you how Big Data could answer those tough business questions – y’know, those “I can’t be asked” questions that existing systems just cannot deliver.

Now, you would not necessarily get our CTO to come right out and say that Big Data is the next big thing. But evidence we are assembling so far does seem to point to a new capability to deliver. For those with an appetite to understand their business in new ways, Big Data is delivering tangible intelligence that lets them see new dimensions, new possibilities and new revenue streams.

I did get a full radar lock on something our CTO said in the summer. It was a throw away line at the time but it stuck with me and with others. So, when the time came to consider an appropriate go-to-market message for our quarter three (Q3) focus, we decided to wheel out his one-liner as part of our messaging.

“It’s not about survival of the fittest -
it’s about survival of the best informed”
Robin Meehan, CTO, Smart421 Ltd.

Making no apologies to Charles Darwin or evolutionists, the statement is resonating with decision makers in the enterprise space, not least those in the Insurance sector. Why?  Well, we think it is because a lot of the big insurers operate under many names in their brand portfolios.

The capability to see and understand impacts of brand activities, such as Insurance Quotes, delivered using Big Data analytics in the AWS Cloud, is illuminating new gains that would otherwise have remained out of reach.

Don’t forget – brand analysis is only one use case for Big Data in the Cloud.

If the world is going Big Data crazy then you need to know what it is, what it isn’t and what it means to your enterprise.

Agree?  Disagree?

UPDATE 05 Dec 2012 – Our economist friend Tim Harford  (@TimHarford) sent this hilarious tweet: The data do not lie. OR DO THEY? Muah huah huah! http://dlvr.it/2b2NS1

UPDATE 06 Dec 2012 – Robin and colleague Ben Baumguertel (@bbaumguertel) are attending the Big Data Analytics event in London today (organised by @WhitehallMedia ).

Please Rate this post and Like this post below. If you can, please leave a Comment.

 

Never mind the X factor – Cloud Computing showed it has the WOW factor at the UK IT Industry Awards

After all, there was really no need for our MD or our guests to become dispondent.

Having been named as a Finalist in the ‘Best Use of Cloud Services’ category, Smart421 may have been a tad surprised that the judges went for another Finalist at the UK IT Industry Awards.

In fact we were rather impressed with, and pleased for, The Met Office and PA Consulting who together saw off some pretty stiff competition to get the gong at the Awards Dinner in Battersea, London last Wednesday night (14 November).

And I was surprised that there actually wasn’t more gloating by the victors. You know how some marketing types can behave when tanked up on too much champers.

The UK IT Industry Awards did a great job to properly recognise the role of Cloud Computing for the first time when they selected the Weather Observations Website (WOW) which is currently available online as beta. See http://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/

And we think that this actually bodes well for the entire IT industry in the near and long term. It means that Cloud has proven that it has learned to crawl, walk and run. In other words, it means that Cloud Computing is winning its place as a resilient and credible alternative to on-premise-only lock in. And at an enterprise level, we think that must be a good thing.

As our customer Haven Power will tell you, being selected as Finalist at all was very encouraging. Their Disaster Recovery system architected by Smart421 and built in the AWS Cloud drew some significant attention from the press when it was first announced and, most likely, gave The Met Office a fair run for its money in front of the judging panel.

But putting the industry high jinks aside, the real winners are our customers who have fully functioning Cloud DR in place today as part of their business continuity planning strategy. Stuff like this is the sharp end of the Cloud revolution.

It has to be said, attendees were also impressed with our colleagues at Kcom (neighbour brand in the KCOM Group stable) who sponsored the on-site Twitter Wall. It turned out to be the unexpected big hit of the night and Kcom ranked top for tweets.

Never mind the X factor – Cloud Computing showed it has the WOW factor at the UK IT Industry Awards.

 

Three and Out ! – online banking apps, mobile networks and broadband outages point to why more resilience is now needed

“outages with online banking apps, mobile networks and broadband point to why more resilience is now needed” Martin Brazill

I’m beginning to feel like I’ve had a glimpse of the Stone Age. My personal BT Broadband was down for eight days which left a surprising large gap in my life.

Why ? Well, I needed to pay my credit card bill which I always do on-line in the evening – very convenient. So without broadband I decided to fall back to my O2 smart phone and my Nat West Banking app. Ah – only to hit problems with the bank, which was off line due to the widely publicised RBS problems. So I decided to phone up my branch – ah [again] no mobile network was available.

OK, so I survived a few hours “off the grid” but it did make me think that with our dependency on technology and communications we need stronger resilience. Up until now the pace of change has been so great that it’s been [comparatively] uneconomic to build resilience.

Now with the maturity of the Cloud solutions there are fewer costs barriers and no excuses not to build that resilience. Smart421 is already helping our customers with this – so if you want us to help you please form an orderly queue here.

And yes, I managed to get my credit card paid off too – eventually.  Phew.

 

Smart421 achieves AWS Advanced Consulting Partner status

It is another exciting day for Smart421 with the news that we have been confirmed as the first UK enterprise to be confirmed on the Amazon Partner Network (APN) as an Advanced Consulting Partner by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

What does it really mean for Smart421 and our Customers?

In some ways, partner ‘labels’ are often seen as just that, labels, and can be given out like confetti. However, for Advanced Consulting Partner status, we had to put up some substantive evidence of various AWS capabilities including Customer references, minimum of $10,000 a month AWS billings, minimum of Business level AWS support (previously called Gold) and at least 10 trained AWS staff.

So before the cynics have a pop either at the program or at us, or both, I can reveal it does require proven AWS capabilities. That will sort the ‘wheat from the chaff’ so to speak

Does it change anything for us? – well yes and no…..

In terms of Operations, we already have a great relationship with AWS (since 2010 as an AWS Solution Provider and since 2012 also as an AWS Direct Connect Solution Provider) with access to a range of valuable contact points, from technical contacts through to Sales and up into Senior Management in the UK and USA. From my perspective as AWS Practice Manager, the existing relationship means regular face-to-face monthly meetings with our technical contacts in AWS, access to the product teams including ‘gurus’ based in Seattle, involvement in beta trials for new features etc. so the APN will just help reinforce those good relationships.

Perhaps the biggest change will be the impact of membership of the APN for our Customers. We are now able to be able to leverage a wealth of AWS resources on our Customers behalf. This translates into concrete deliverables as straightforward as documentation right through to support from technical architects during delivery engagements. It adds up to an improved level of confidence for our Customers that our proven AWS capabilities are fully backed by AWS and its rapidly growing global eco-system.

It means far more than a partner label to us and our Customers….

 

Impact of Amazon AWS IaaS* on Solution Architecture – bridging gaps between Application and Infrastructure Architecture

As Smart421’s partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) is slowly moving from pure infrastructure work into full cloud-based solution architecture design, I’ve recently spent some time analysing their IaaS platform from that angle.

My immediate goal with this was to better understand how the infrastructure side of my solutions are going to be affected by this paradigm shift moving forward. In other words, I was preparing myself to have a conversation with my infrastructure architect, let’s call him Jimmy, and not be caught showing my complete ignorance on the matter… again.

To my surprise I’ve found out that AWS, and IaaS in general, has a much more profound effect on my end to end solution design than just infrastructure, the key being how the “Servicelisation of Infrastructure” (sorry) provides a great mechanism to finally comprehensively address NFRs at the application view and close what I use to call “the leap of faith into the iron”… let me explain that.

We all know by now that our solution design is always going to start by a business architecture exercise that will feed the solution requirements, including functional and data requirements but also those dreaded non-functional requirements (NFRs)**, to our data and application architects, who in turn will produce the data model and component view, and that will be followed by our infrastructure architect, who will come up with the technical platform all those application components will run. Fine and dandy, but…

Dreaded NFRs? Why? Well, while it is quite straightforward for our data architect to create a logical data model out of the data requirements, or it is just BAU for our application architect to derive the system capabilities to cover the functional requirements, it is not easy for any of the two to cope with those NFRs… How does our data architect react to a NFR such as “the system shall process 2 million transactions per day”? Or what does our application architect think of the NFR “the site will provide the same response times independently of the location of the user”? Well, in most of the cases the reaction will be “Well, that’s for infrastructure to answer, isn’t it? Let’s pass those ugly things to Jimmy, he’ll know what to do with them…”.

So that leaves us with that situation we’ve been so many times, in which we provide a very detailed application architecture to Jimmy alongside a very long list of performance related requirements, hoping, and here’s the leap of faith I was referring to earlier, that our infrastructure hero will know how to put a lot of heavy equipment together that somehow magically will achieve those very ambitious performance goals…please raise your hands if that has never happened to you, or if that hasn’t inevitably ended up in all sort of performance issues detected just too late down the line, maybe a couple of weeks prior to go-live? Anyone?

Well, let’s see how Infrastructure as a Service may come to our rescue. Just do this simple exercise: go to the Amazon Web Services site and read all the documentation of the offering, all of it, trying to ignore the fact that it describes an infrastructure platform and rather set your mind-set as if you were looking at the functionalities of just another software system that needs to be part of your component architecture… Interestingly enough this made a “magic click” in my head, and suddenly I was thinking about my solution and my application architecture*** in terms of capabilities, functionalities and features that elegantly addressed all those long hated NFRs!

I’ve put this idea to test for a CMS solution I’ve been playing around with recently; I would have never typically defined capabilities such as a “Fast Access Data Access Layer” or a “Low Latency Distribution of Content” in my capabilities inventory, but suddenly my understanding of those AWS services such as ElastiCache or CloudFront made it dead simple to think about the NFRs and translate them to discrete solution components.

And what’s even more interesting is my design is not immediately coupled to the given IaaS platform as a result, not at all. As with the rest of the solution, these components and capabilities allow for a fit-gap exercise against the available options to be answered by my infrastructure architect: Do we achieve global performance by deploying the servers in our corporate data centres or maybe by deploying them in the AWS regions in the cloud? Or do I just keep my platform in a single location within my premises and use a CDN pull-zone for low latency delivery of static content? Quite a different proposition for Jimmy than the old “make it quick, boy”!

Now the problem is addressed where it should be in the design process, at the logical level, and decomposed into a set of features that achieve full traceability from the business into the application and then into the infrastructure layer and then back up again… the work of our infrastructure architect is now so much easier, as it is the predictability of our design exercise! Life is good!

Well just a thought in any case… I guess most of you were already through this learning, but just in case you had your own Jimmy’s suffering, this is a nice mental approach to try to bridge the gap.

* Infrastructure as a Service; I’ve focused this analysis to this type of cloud offering as it is probably where the biggest gap between architecture practices exist. In big organizations with dedicated software, middleware or platform architecture functions a similar situation will probably exist in which we could follow a similar approach with SaaS (eg. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online) or PaaS (eg. Microsoft Azure)…

** It’s worth mentioning the usual problem of the business architecture exercise not really producing NFRs other than maybe a couple of fuzzy “it must be like really really fast” or “the site needs to look gorgeous”… this article is working on the bold assumption that our business analysts have been able to get blood out of stones and have coaxed the business into expressing real tangible NFRs to come along with the rest of requirements.

*** After all aren’t we solution architects just application architects with a good working knowledge of the other disciplines? At least I’ll confess that’s my case…

 

Microsoft Cloud Day

Organised by the UK Windows Azure User Group, this free all day conference provided a great opportunity to catch up on the latest developments, particularly given the Microsoft announcement a couple of weeks back.

Core to this announcement was Microsoft’s move into Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IaaS), and the key note by Scott Guthrie positioned IaaS (described as Virtual Machines) alongside Microsoft’s current Cloud offerings which to date has focused on Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS – now labelled Cloud Services by Microsoft) and Software-As-A-Service (SaaS – Office 365 for example).

Despite the lack of internet connectivity for a large part of the presentation (what is it with Cloud demos and loss of connectivity?!?) Scott did a great job talking through the slides, clearly describing the alignment of each of the deployment options: On-premise vs Virtual Machines vs Cloud Services vs SaaS.

In addition to Virtual Machines, the new Web Sites service was also discussed which gives Azure customers up to 10 web-sites and 1GB of storage for free (whilst in preview period, see here for further details). The demonstration showed how easy it is if you simply want to re-host an existing web-site on Azure whether it be ASP.NET, Node.js, PHP or even classic-ASP. So the new Web Site and Virtual Machine services provide a simple route to hosting applications on the Azure platform, but there is the added benefit of the Azure management aids, real time statistics and in the case of Web Sites incremental deployments and continuous integration (through TFS or GIT) too.

So where does this fit with Paas? Well Steve Plank from Microsoft provided some answers with another demonstration. With Cloud Services you get host of services to call upon including Storage, Database, Identity, Caching and Service Bus and the demo showed that if you design your application from the ground-up utilising these services, you benefit from an end-to-end application architecture that can be deployed and running in minutes at the click of a button. It is this architecture that really gives you the elasticity and flexibility in the places you need it.

A good day and exciting times with the options and landscape constantly changing. Nicely summed up by another Smartie (Andy Carter), ‘I guess there’s a load more stuff I need to learn about’, when a couple of days after passing the Azure certification MS announced the new services…(Well done btw!)

 

Internet of Things at CloudCamp

I managed to make it to the CloudCamp London meeting at St James Church last night having missed the previous one (which was on the subject of Big Data). This time the theme of the evening was the Internet of Things (IoT), which was a bit further “out there” than the usual discussion topics but really interesting all the same.

The key thing I took away from the evening (apart from some beer and jelly beans from one of the sponsors) was to have been reminded about what incredibly revolutionary times we are living through (it’s easy to forget or take it for granted) – when we look back in the future, the Internet revolution and the democratisation of mass communication will just be seen as the first steps on the road.

The evening started with an intro from Simon Wardley, which was as usual, excellent and engaging. This was followed by an overview of the history of IoT – the first webcam’d coffee pot etc – which set the scene nicely, and then the rather more random lightning presentations kicked off. Here’s a few notes on the more interesting of them:

• Open source hardware – very interesting stuff from Paul Downey – discussing 3D printing and various open source hardware projects. The key takeaway for me here relating to IoT was that these various projects (e.g. Arduino and variants forked from it) will be a key driving force in keeping costs and IP barriers down, and so therefore will enable the creation of massive volumes of “things” in the IoTs.
• Cookie Law – Kuan Hon revisited a subject that I’ve seen her speak on before. The previously delayed so called “cookie law” now comes into force on 26th May and Kuan reviewed what it means, it’s breadth and impacts – which are SIGNIFICANT. The key point I think is about enforcement – it has significant implications for advertising/marketing sectors, but it all depends on whether non-compliance is publicly tackled and punished. The relationship to the subject of IoT is that the law uses the term “terminal equipment” to define its scope – and so that can include pretty much anything – apps on mobiles, maybe RFID, maybe NFC (that’s not clear yet it seems) as well as the standard web apps, HTML5 storage etc. So, many of the things in the IoT would be within scope and therefore require explicit customer permission to be granted for data storage etc – e.g. your Internet-enabled TV.
• IoT and Science Fiction – OK, this was a bit “out there”, but there were a few interesting takeaways/provocations. Firstly, IoT is going to make IPv4 address exhaustion an even more critical issue. Secondly, security of IoT devices is going to be a key battleground of the future – as more and more devices become “connected” we will become more dependant upon them and so any failure or virus attack will be utterly devastating, e.g. if you come to rely on your Google Project Glass specs to find/do/remember anything, you’ll be pretty screwed when they bluescreen on you

 

G-Cloud

Great news for Smart421 – we have been awarded a Framework Agreement on the new UK Government G-Cloud. This adds to our stock of real-world Cloud credentials – - but I was pondering what this means for us ?

Am I confident that the G-Cloud is going to change minds about the security of Cloud deployments – so opening the flood gates of opportunities?   No, of course not, but it’s certainly another step closer to making Cloud mainstream for public sector as well as private sector.

We’re probably not going to see adverts for the G-Cloud “CloudStore” on the TV for a while either.

But watch this space.