March 8th, 2011

@ Cloud Connect 2011: Colin Clark introduces Cloud Event Processing

Session Abstract: In many ways, Big Data is what clouds were made for. Computing problems that are beyond the grasp of a single computer—no matter how huge—are easy for elastic platforms to handle. In this session, big data processing pioneer Colin Clark will discuss how to discover hidden signals and new knowledge within in huge streams of realtime data, applying event processing design patterns to events in real time.

Speaker – Colin Clark, CTO, Cloud Event Processing

Colin opens talking about high velocity, big data.  more >>

Tagged as: #darkstar, ccevent, colin clark, live coverage

Posted by brenda michelson at 7:29 pm in Big Data, Cloud Watch, data, event processing | Permalink | Comments(1)
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January 17th, 2011

Cloud Farms for the Farmer (really)

The WSJ published an interesting article on commercial farming advances in Japan.  According to the article, “The aim is to bring the concepts of lean manufacturing and continual improvement, or kaizen, to farming.”

The farmers are employing sensors, analytics, real-time location information and cloud computing to optimize planting time, crop rotation, worker productivity and threat (infection) detection.

“…Now the head of a commercial farm in the southern Japanese prefecture of Miyazaki, Mr. Shinpuku is back manning a desk with his eyes glued to a Web browser tracking every movement of his workers who handle 60 different fruits and vegetables across its 100 hectares.

"I don’t want to do this. My eyes will get bad," said Mr. Shinpuku, the 58-year-old president of his commercial farm Shinpuku Seika, which is comprised of 300 different plots of land. "I put up with it, because the benefits are obvious. Without this computer, I can’t do my job."

Shinpuku Seika is among the first farms to implement a Web-based "cloud computing" service developed by Japanese technology firm Fujitsu Ltd. Cloud computing is a loosely defined business term in which companies rent computing power from remote data centers via the Internet instead of buying machines to run software in house.

Shinpuku Seika has placed sensors out in its fields to collect readings on temperature, soil and moisture levels. Fujitsu’s computers then crunch the data and recommend when to start planting or what crops may be well-suited to a specific field.

In the past, farmers would make those decisions based on experience, but Mr. Shinpuku says a data-driven approach prevents younger, less experienced staff from making mistakes that could cost the bottom line.”

The pay-off?  Measured in cabbage of course:

“The system is already paying off for Shinpuku Seika, which generates about 1.5 billion yen ($18 million) in annual revenue. Last year, it doubled the size of its carrot harvest and raised its cabbage output by 12%.”

Read the full article.

 

Tagged as: Fujitsu

Posted by brenda michelson at 6:38 pm in adoption, analytics, Cloud Watch, event processing, use cases | Permalink | Comments(0)
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April 7th, 2010

Cloud Computing Environments, Events & Event Clouds: Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)

Here we go.  Event Processing and Cloud Computing are natural allies.  Events can be used in the monitoring, notification, and adjustment of cloud computing environments (CCE), and in the monitoring, notification, adjustment of, and in response to, the business capabilities running on those CCEs.   As I’ve mentioned numerous times, I believe event-based data integration will be critical to information, and therefore, business synchronization. 

In addition to being an event generator, and responder, cloud computing can also be a highly efficient, scalable, event processing platform.  For proof, just ask my friend Colin Clark at Cloud Event Processing.

So, it’s with no surprise, but great expectations, that I’m noting the beta release of Amazon’s Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).  From the Amazon service page:

“Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and send notifications from the cloud. It provides developers with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective capability to publish messages from an application and immediately deliver them to subscribers or other applications. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon SNS provides a simple web services interface that can be used to create topics you want to notify applications (or people) about, subscribe clients to these topics, publish messages, and have these messages delivered over clients’ protocol of choice (i.e. HTTP, email, etc.). Amazon SNS delivers notifications to clients using a “push” mechanism that eliminates the need to periodically check or “poll” for new information and updates. Amazon SNS can be leveraged to build highly reliable, event-driven workflows and messaging applications without the need for complex middleware and application management. The potential uses for Amazon SNS include monitoring applications, workflow systems, time-sensitive information updates, mobile applications, and many others. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.”

From the SNS Functionality Overview, the service appears to be cloud based publish-subscribe:

  • “Create a topic: A topic is an “access point” – identifying a specific subject or event type – for publishing messages and allowing clients to subscribe for notifications.
  • Set policies for your topic: Once a topic is created, the topic owner can set policies for it such as limiting who can publish messages or subscribe to notifications, or specifying which notification protocols will be supported (i.e. HTTP/HTTPS, email). A single topic can support notification deliveries over multiple transport protocols.
  • Add subscribers to a topic: Subscribers are clients interested in receiving notifications from topics of interest; they can directly subscribe to a topic or be subscribed by the topic owner. Subscribers specify the protocol format and end-point (URL, email address, etc.) for notifications to be delivered. Upon receiving a subscription request, Amazon SNS will send a confirmation message to the specified end-point, asking the subscriber to explicitly opt-in to receiving notifications from that topic. Opting-in can be done by calling an API, using a command line tool, or – for email notifications – simply clicking on a link.
  • Publish messages / send out notifications: When topic owners have updates they wish to notify their subscribers about, they publish those messages to the topic – which immediately triggers Amazon SNS to deliver this message to all applicable subscribers.”

Of the features list, “scalable” caught my attention:

“Scalable – Amazon SNS is designed to meet the needs of the largest and most demanding applications, allowing applications to publish an unlimited number of messages at any time.”

Largest and most demanding? Tweets, market data, click-stream, blue mussels, Internet of Things, … 

Amazon’s SNS is a springboard to industrial strength event processing and the active information tier.  As I said, “here we go”.

Tagged as: Amazon, AWS, SNS

Posted by brenda michelson at 3:41 pm in cloud offering, Cloud Watch, event processing, IaaS | Permalink | Comments(0)
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December 9th, 2009

@ Gartner AADI: Mastermind Interview on Event Processing – Roy Schulte & Mani Chandy

Cross posted from elemental links.  Commentary on Event Processing and Cloud Computing about midway through the post.  Personally, I see a big tie (opportunity) at the intersection.  I’ll share more on that another time.  Original post follows.

Session Abstract: Roy Schulte and Dr. Chandy released a new book on Event Processing in October 2009, aimed at business and system analysts, architects, application managers, CIOs, and technically-oriented business managers. This session will highlight the key points of the book and explain why and how mainstream IT departments will ramp their use of event processing up during the next ten years.

Dr. Chandy is the Simon Ramo Professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. He has received numerous awards including the CMG Michelson Award, the IEEE Kobayashi award, and the Babbage Award.

W. Roy Schulte is Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. He was the lead author of the 1996 Gartner report that introduced the term SOA to the industry. Mr. Schulte originated the research in the field of message brokers, coined the term business activity monitoring (BAM), and wrote the first analyst reports on the zero-latency enterprise and the enterprise service bus (ESB).

Yesterday, Roy did a rapid-fire session on Event Processing.  more >>

Tagged as: eventclouds, GartnerAADI, live coverage, ManiChandy, RoySchulte

Posted by brenda michelson at 1:10 pm in analyst positions, Blog, data, enterprise integration, event processing | Permalink | Comments(0)
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