Eric David Benari contributed a post to MIT CIO Symposium’s CIO Corner blog on Building Sustainable IT ROI:
“When analyzing IT ROI, the ROI-sustainability factor is often overlooked. A frequent scenario involves architecture plans that call for multiple diverse technologies that may each be practical choices on their own, but are virtually incompatible together or require completely different skills/teams to integrate and maintain. To build IT ROI that proves itself beyond the planning stage it is critical that the entire IT-infrastructure, including the human-resources that interact with it, are analyzed as a whole.”
I constantly soapbox on understanding and accounting for the value of IT investments over time, so I enjoyed the entire post. One point though, the essentialness of planning (architectural planning) is especially pertinent to cloud computing. [Emphasis is mine.]
“Fundamental to sustainable IT-project ROI is the concept of more >>
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Posted by brenda michelson at 11:05 am in Blog, fundamentals, performance & reliability, software architecture | Permalink
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On Friday, David Linthicum invited me on his cloud computing podcast to chat about what we heard, and didn’t hear, at the Cloud Connect conference. Naturally, our discussion wound its way to the connections of cloud computing, enterprise architecture, service-oriented architecture and data architecture.
Our podcast is Picking Apart Cloud Connect. Check it out.
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Posted by brenda michelson at 10:11 am in Blog, enterprise architecture, enterprise integration, pundit positions, services architecture, software architecture | Permalink
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Although Software Design is further down my enterprise considerations list, when Gojko Adzoc’s post on lessons he has learned developing in Amazon’s AWS environment, I knew I had to pass it along. The post describes new challenges for developers who have previously worked in a purpose-built, directly controlled, infrastructure environment. These challenges range from server reliability to storage speed. After articulating the challenges, Adzic offers advice on “How to keep your sanity”:
“It took me a while to understand that just deploying the same old applications in the way I was used to isn’t going to work that well on the cloud. To get the most out of cloud deployments, applications have to be designed up-front for massive networks and running on cheap unstable web boxes. But I think that is actually a good thing. Designing to work around those constraints makes applications much better – faster, easier to scale, cheaper to operate. Asynchronous persistence can significantly improve performance but I never thought about that before deploying to the cloud and running into IO issues. Data partitioning and replication make applications scale better and work faster. Sections of the system that can work even if they can’t see other sections help provide a better service to customers. This also makes the systems easier to deploy, because you can do one section at a time.
To conclude, there are three key ideas to keep in mind:
- Partition, partition, partition: avoid funnels or single points of failure. Remember that all you have is a bunch of cheap web servers with poor IO. This will prevent bottlenecks and scoring an own-goal by designing a denial of service attack in the system yourself.
- Plan on resources not being there for short periods of time. Break the system apart into pieces that work together, but can keep working in isolation at least for several minutes. This will help make the system resilient to networking issues and help with deployment.
- Plan on any machine going down at any time. Build in mechanisms for automated recovery and reconfiguration of the cluster. We accept failure in hardware as a fact of life – that’s why people buy database servers with redundant disks and power supplies, and buy them in pairs. Designing applications for cloud deployment simply makes us accept this as a fact with software as well.”
In the post, Adzic maintains that he is a cloud computing advocate, his goal of the post, and the presentation it came from, was to “expose some of the things that you won’t necessarily find in marketing materials.”
Read Adzic’s post. Remember the 4th Enduring Aspect of Cloud Computing.
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Posted by brenda michelson at 5:28 pm in 100-days, Cloud Watch, networks, performance & reliability, readiness, software architecture, storage | Permalink
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The next survey on my list from MWD Advisors, a UK based IT Advisory group, specializing on issues concerning IT business alignment. Neil Ward-Dutton was kind enough to share this premium report with me. This survey was conducted in partnership with the IASA (International Association of Software Architects), and had a diverse sample (organization size and geography) of 358 architect-type respondents. From the report overview:
“In September 2009, MWD worked in conjunction with our partners at the IASA to discover how IT architects view Cloud Computing – what the current challenges are, who is committed to using Cloud Computing – and to gain an insight into what is needed to make Cloud Computing compelling for organisations. The resulting study shows that there are strong levels of Cloud Computing activity being driven by IT architects – but at the same time, that some of today’s vendor marketing drives are missing the mark.”
Out of respect for the premium nature of this content, I’m going to limit this post to a few points.
First, the key findings point out the importance of IT architect involvement with cloud computing initiatives. However, the reasoning differs from the Forrester findings. The MWD survey emphasizes “cohesion between on-premise systems and those in the Cloud". Cohesion includes “ensuring that applications are robust enough to deal with changes to the physical environment that may happen at any time.” [This aligns with one of my 5 Enduring Aspects of Cloud Computing]
Second, despite the rampant hype surrounding cloud computing, only 9 respondents agreed with the statement: “Cloud Computing is all hype and no substance”. The majority of the sample believes “Cloud Computing is fundamentally about service delivery and consumption, not technology”. [So, for everyone who believes service management practices go away with the cloud, think again.]
Third, respondents perceive cloud computing’s greatest value to be “Access to scalable resource with no capital expenditure required – pay as you go”. This differs from the Forrester survey results that ranked “Speed up application delivery” (63%) well over capex avoidance (30% for production, 28% for test).
There are many good insights in the MWD Advisors and Forrester reports. Each paints a picture of cautious optimism for cloud computing, recognizing business benefits and risks, and the need for thoughtful adoption strategies.
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Posted by brenda michelson at 5:30 pm in 100-days, Cloud Watch, adoption, enterprise integration, software architecture | Permalink
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Forgoing the hyperbole of cloud computing predictions – sensational outages to a cloud-in-every-pocket – I want to start 2010 discussing the enduring aspects of cloud computing on enterprise business-technology. Regardless of the final manifestation of cloud computing, and the tally of deployments, successes and failures, I believe cloud computing will influence the expectations and practice of enterprise business-technology throughout the decade.
I have identified five enduring aspects from a practitioner perspective. Certainly, there are enduring aspects on the provider side as well, such as advances from Infrastructure 2.0 and disruptions created by new economic and pricing models. However, I will leave that list for provider-side specialists.
The first three enduring aspects focus on the expectations from business-technology organizations.
1. Resource Optimization – Cloud computing has raised Executive awareness to the disproportion of installed versus utilized computing capacity, along with the requisite expenses of space, power, software licenses and support personnel.
If they have not already, Executives will mandate infrastructure ecology initiatives, starting with the consolidation and pooling of compute and data resources, and progressing to software execution efficiency.
more >>
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Posted by brenda michelson at 5:59 pm in Blog, economics, elasticity & scale, fundamentals, infrastructure 2.0, performance & reliability, platform, pundit positions, software architecture | Permalink
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Gartner Fellows Neil MacDonald and David Mitchell Smith spoke with Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, “to discuss his vision for cloud computing, and the impact on enterprise computing and the IT industry.” Their conversation has been published as a Gartner RAS Core Research Note (G00172235), and made available for public consumption via a Microsoft reprint.
Published Key Findings:
- “Ozzie’s (and thus, Microsoft’s) vision of cloud computing emphasizes hybrid enterprise/cloud computing, where organizations choose when and where computing takes place locally versus in cloud-based infrastructure, and emphasizes that the on-premises and cloud-based solutions work seamlessly together.
- As with early encryption issues, Ozzie believes that security and privacy issues will be addressed as the industry matures in a combination of legislative advances, as well as industry cooperation.
- Ozzie’s vision for cloud computing includes system infrastructure, an application platform and finished applications being delivered as a service.
- Microsoft is investing in its own data centers because it must in order to provide its consumer-based services. It believes it is helping to lead the industry in providing innovations in data center architectures.
- Ozzie believes the future of cloud computing is in the experience delivered via a browser across multiple devices — mobile, PC and TV-type screens — which is a vision he refers to as "three screens and a cloud." “
The entire report is well-worth the read.
A quick excerpt on Ozzie’s hybrid model vision:
"Ozzie: I believe in a hybrid model. I fundamentally, deeply believe in a hybrid model at the experience side and at the back-end side.
At the back-end side, it depends on the size of enterprise and the workload, as well as the segment of the enterprise and whether it is highly regulated or whatever. The decisions regarding what to keep on-premises versus what to distribute into the cloud will vary dramatically. Very small businesses will put almost everything into the cloud. Very large businesses will put all their infrastructural systems, such as mail, phone systems and document management, into the cloud. Enterprise applications that have high integration requirements and a lot of legacy issues will stay on-premises. What happens in the middle is a mix."
“…But again, it’s a hybrid architecture. If you don’t have the center, then you can’t rendezvous. You can’t find each other. You can’t connect in any way, shape or form. However, if you don’t have the edge, then you don’t have the agility. You pay for ingress and egress when you don’t have to.”
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Posted by brenda michelson at 9:32 am in Cloud Watch, cloud computing environment (cce), data center advances, provider positions, software architecture | Permalink
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