Web Traffic Management in clouds

I’ve been hearing more about web traffic management products recently, and they’ve been of increasing interest to me as they seem to fit nicely with a cloud deployment model – e.g. if you’ve got your SaaS app deployed to your favourite cloud provider so that you can scale out quickly without large upfront capital costs, then you are probably going to need something infront of that deployment architecture to manage the incoming traffic. Hopefully (and this will become more common) your cloud deployment might auto-scale to increase its own capacity on demand, and so your environment will always be able to cope with demand, so you don’t need to manage the incoming traffic – right? Well, I’m not so sure – I can see some barriers to this:

1. Cloud auto-scaling implies unpredictable costs, and whilst maybe extra traffic = extra cost = extra revenue to offset it, I’d expect most SaaS providers would want to set a cap on costs and so any traffic exceeding that ‘cap’ still needs to be managed gracefully.
2. Traffic management allows finer grained control over where you deploy your valuable £/$, e.g. favouring response times for customers on the ‘buy’ pages of your app over those looking at ‘about you’. So in times of high traffic you don’t just keeping throwing virtual servers (and therefore cash) at the problem – you get more selective instead.
3. Finally, web traffic management products give some comfort as a ‘last resort’ in case auto-scaling etc goes wrong or is incorrectly set up etc – or your cloud vendor doesn’t meet their SLA

We’ve come across the following products in this space:

• Zeus ZXTM software appliance – I intend to delve into Zeus ZXTM in a little more detail in another blog post at some point…as it is a software appliance (as opposed to the next two products) it fits a public cloud model better.
• Big IP F5
• IBM WebSphere DataPower – this is not in exactly the same market as the other two products, but is capable of fulfilling this role (plus other things) and we have worked with customers to deploy it for this kind of ‘use case’

Maybe one day auto-scaling will be mainstream enough and incremental costs will be low enough that traffic management won’t be required – but we’re not there yet I suspect.

 

IBM WebSphere CloudBurst appliance launched

We first heard about this appliance at the UK WebSphere User Group meeting back in March although it was commercially sensitive at the time so I couldn’t blog about it, and we’ve been waiting for it to be launched. IBM are leveraging their acquisition of an appliance format with DataPower to bring other appliance products to market of which this is the first. It’s an interesting product, aimed at both those looking to create a private cloud and for the public cloud vendors.

It provides the ability to dynamically deploy and manage virtual machines including the new hypervisor version of WebSphere Application Server (which supports the OVF standard) including security and chargeback facilities.

I’m looking forward to our internal WebSphere practice finding out more and getting to grips/playing with it.

See http://www-01.ibm.com/software/webservers/cloudburst/ for more details. What’s the next functional area that is ripe for ‘appliancisation’ (if that’s a word…)?

 

UK WebSphere User Group March 2009 – Highlights

As promised, here’s some notes from yesterday’s UK WebSphere User Group meeting (combined with the UK WebSphere Integration User Group) – held at IBM’s offices at Bedfont Lakes.

First of all – let’s start with a picture of the happy crew at our stand. Rohima did an excellent job hunting down victims to force business cards upon, with me and David Taylor in support.

The keynote presentation was by Rob High, the IBM Chief SOA Architect, concerning the 2009 technical strategy and directions for the WebSphere portfolio. Unfortunately (for you – the reader), much of what he said came with a “not for the public domain” health warning. Interestingly he was still banging the SOA drum and when I asked him later in the Q&A session about it he was quite dismisive of all the recent ‘SOA is dead’ dicussions on the web – he gave the message that I wanted to hear which was essentially this – there’s nothing new under the sun, good integration practices are still good, and so the current hype cycle status of SOA should not stop us from still understanding the fundamental business services of an organisation and supporting them with technology in an agile way. I think there is some marketing difficultly with the term SOA now maybe but there was no hint of IBM moving away from it.

Rick Robinson presented on Web 2.0, going through quite a bit of background material and then mapping that on to IBM products, and their support for REST, OpenAjax and Dojo. Whenever I attend this kind of presentation I always pick up a few Web 2.0-ish sites/things that I hadn’t seen before – I guess this is the nature of the relatively viral nature of the subject itself. My favourite was http://www.twitscoop.com/ – which gives a real time view of Twitter topics that are being discussed as a tag cloud. Another one mentioned was http://brightkite.com/, a social networking site that was location-aware before Google Latitude came along.

I then attended another session from Rob High about EA (enterprise architecture) and the relationship with BPM (business process management). For me this was more of an EA revision session (an IBM view on TOGAF to some extent) and I didn’t get so much from it, except the IBM roadmap for their recently acquired TeleLogic System Architect product and how that fits into the roadmap for WebSphere Business Modeller. The vision is that they will remain separate tools but eventually with a shared repository. Interestingly none of the Rational modelling tooling was mentioned apart from saying that it was focused on software rather than business modelling, so there was no vision to merge System Architect into Rational Software Architect in anyway.

One other thing Rob mentioned was an expansion of that massively overused phrase “IT-business alignment” (doesn’t every IT initiative that comes along promise this?!?) into more several more defined levels of alignment – this rang a bell for me and it’s something I’ll look into a bit more I think…

Whilst my colleague was presenting a DataPower case study from a customer project in another room, the final presentation I went to was a full on techy session from David Currie of IBM about the new features in WebSphere Process Server (WPS) and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB) v6.2. I wanted to keep on top of where these products are going at a detailed level. The degree of change in each release is pretty amazing, but also leaves a slightly sour taste in your mouth as you realise that IBM are plugging feature gaps in the product that sometimes you knew about (e.g. code assistance to help deal with the SDO model) and sometimes you didn’t (ability to act as a service gateway – which seems a pretty fundamental thing for an ESB to offer). Apart from the fairly extensive changes to support service gateways (a number of new mediation primitives etc), the developments in the human tasks aspect of it are the most interesting to me. You can now attach documents to business processes, and users can override a business process flow (sounds dangerous! – but intended for those processes where business exceptions/interruptions can occur at any time). Sorry to finish on a negative, but one obvious gap was that SOAP 1.2 is now supported, but not for SOAP over JMS – purely due to them running out of time to get it into the release AFAICT.

So – all in all, a good user group meeting, especially as it finished with beers. Many thanks to Rick Smith and co for organising it.

 

WebSphere User Group meeting

Today the UK WebSphere User Group meeting at IBM’s offices at Bedfont Lakes took place, and I attended some interesting sessions – I’ll post more about this later on.

I picked up three interesting quotes today…mainly from Rob High (IBM Chief SOA Architect)…

• “67% of business processes fail” (due to insufficient business resources)
• “It costs five times less to reuse some functionality (from a legacy system) than it does to recode it”
• “IT is a fashion industry”

One of my colleagues, Stuart Smith, flew in from Edinburgh today to give a presentation on a novel use of DataPower from a customer project, and then flew back again. This was particularly dedicated as he’s just had a knee operation, which he was nice enough to share with us…including the piece of string that still seems to be connected to something inside his knee…yuck.

 

Presentation at the WUG about an innovative use of DataPower

A quick blatant plug – my colleague Stuart Smith is going to give a presentation at the forthcoming UK WebSphere User Group meeting on the following theme:

DataPower XI50 has a broad set of features. By using them in innovative ways, Smart421 built an electronic form submission solution for a national revenue collection service which consisted of only one component: the XI50.

Utilising existing features of MS Excel, backing spreadsheets with XML schemas, and then using DataPower to service and accept submissions of the document, a ‘one box solution’ was created for the client allowing extremely quick development and delivery of a live solution (less than 1 week).

This presentation will talk through the design of the solution, concentrating on separation of concerns, reusability and maintainability. A design pattern around 2 step validation (schema XSD level, and business level) will also be discussed.

Should be interesting – this will definitely be about capability rather than a tedious sales pitch…or else I’ll be walking out

 

IBM DataPower – I take it all back

I’ve been involved in a project for a client recently that uses WebSphere Process Server and a DataPower XI50 to service enable a legacy system. Maybe I’ll post something about the fun and games I’ve had with Process Server v6.1 some other time… – for now I want to talk about DataPower.

For those that don’t know, it’s a 1U hardware integration appliance that performs functions what may have traditionally been done with an app server, e.g. secure service exposure, XSLTs etc. It does lots more than this which I won’t go into now – really quite a powerful beast.

Anyway, when Smart421 first got into DataPower and got a number of staff certified in its use – I must admit to being rather sceptical. Having now used it on a project though I have seen the light – looks like my colleagues were right all along! Easy and quick to setup, lower TCO, great performance, and good sales organisation support also.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens )