deciphering the great computing convergence
In this report, we take a look at current state of serverless architectures. We looked at the current activity level of AWS Lambda, Google Firebase and Facebook Parse. Despite their promise, we are at early days of serverless architectures and it is not yet considered mainstream. Read through the report for details ( Recommend viewing in full screen mode ).
In this briefing note, we will talk about CloudFabrix AppDimensions Platform. CloudFabrix is a new startup that is launching at the CiscoLive conference going on in Berlin. The founders of CloudFabrix are the same group of people who launched Cloupia and sold it to Cisco in 2012 (Disclaimer: I was an advisor to the executive team of Cloupia at the time).
As organizations steer their way through digital transformation embracing the idea of Modern Enterprise, they are using the Microservices architecture for developing modern cloud native applications. Even though Microservices is still at its infancy in terms of enterprise adoption, companies like Amazon and Netflix has shown shown a path for other organizations to follow. Along with other architecture and infrastructure challenges organizations may face in their push towards Microservices, application governance is a critical need.
Any enterprise embracing Microservices without a proper strategy for governance will increase their risk manyfold, resulting in a lower ROI with enterprise modernization. For small organizations with 50 or less Microservices, governance can be easily managed without any need for specialized tools but large organizations are going to be looking at several hundreds (or even thousands) of Microservices and, possibly, with a good mix of legacy applications. It is important for these organizations to use a standardized platform for application governance that could manage both the breadth and depth of their stack. Governance as a Platform is already a talking point among the CIOs and there are a few vendors who are trying to tackle this space.
CloudFabrix is a new entrant in the Governance as a Platform space and are trying to define a new category called GPaaS (Governance Platform as a Service). CloudFabrix AppDimensions is a platform for enterprise modernization where they define the application in terms of multiple governance related dimensions and then use this categorization to implement organization-wide digital governance (see the image below). This platform bridges the traditional and digital world, giving organizations seamless outcomes and insights driven governance, using Blueprints and through service discovery and data driven intelligence.
In the following section, we will do a SWOT analysis on their platform. This analysis is based on the demo they showed during the briefing session.
Strengths:
Weakness:
Opportunities:
Threats:
Competitors: Apcera, Weaveworks, Sysdig
Yesterday, Stephen O’ Grady from Redmonk wrote a great post addressing the role of foundations in the post Github world. He was trying to address the potential confusion among the role of open source foundations and version control systems. This reminds me of some of the arguments I heard from developers (and even some vendors) on open source.
I have come across some developers and vendors who think that dropping their source code on Github makes their project open source. In the early days of Web 2.0, we saw vendors opening up their APIs touting support for open APIs only to lock them down with restrictions once they realized that it costs money to open up their APIs or it even affects their own bottom-line. We have seen the drastic impact of unilateral changes made by them to address the issue on their ecosystem. People are slowly understanding that API dynamics involves much more than exposing their API over the internet. It involves cost, legal issues, etc. that comes along with exposing the API for any service. Though late, vendors are much more smarter on their API strategy these days.
It is even more important to consider such aspects when sharing the source code of a project. Before even sharing your code on Github, it is important to make sure copyrights are not violated and there are no legal issues associated with the shared code. After the source code is shared, apart from the license part of the code, it is also important to define the governance related to code. Governance is critical not only in protecting the source code but also in establishing trust with contributing developers and users.
Users?
In the past, with software like desktop operating systems, content management systems, etc., most of the end users of OSS were apathetic to the rights they had and, for most part, they were very happy with the availability of the source code. Some enthusiastic users participated in the mailing lists and forums suggesting features, promoting and helping fellow users. Even some contributing developers were apathetic to lack of any governance because, in the past, not many of the OSS projects ended up making money for the vendors. However, things changed drastically in the last decade.
More and more vendors realized that they can monetize open source and make a living out of it. Many other vendors were forced to embrace open source due to the market forces. More and more open source projects became vendor controlled OSS projects. Developers contributing to open source projects have started worrying about whether their contribution is at the mercy of the whims and fancies of the vendor controlling the project. They are also worried about vendor monetizing their hard work and cutting them off the loop (eg: issues related to MySQL acquisition).
Similarly, a shift happened in the open source user landscape as well. As we move into the services world, the end users of open source software changed from the ordinary Joes and Janes to enterprise IT and service providers. Unlike the apathetic Joes and Janes of the traditional software era, the use of open source software by enterprise IT and SPs are driven by the motivation that the open source nature of the product/project will empower them to participate in the software development process and even help them to nudge the direction of the project in the right direction. More than anything else, enterprise IT and SPs rely on OSS these days due to the “power” they get in the design and development of the software they use.
The changed developer mindset and the newer end user requirements puts project governance at the center of any credible open source project. Everything else comes next to governance. Unfortunately, today’s mindset among some developers and vendors is that source code on Github alone will help them attain the open source nirvana. They are either ignorant about the importance of governance or willfully ignore its importance. It is going to hurt everyone involved in the project in the long term.
In short, if you are a developer wanting to contribute your time and sweat to any open source project or an end user (enterprise IT or SP) wanting to invest your money and time on an open source project, the first question you should ask is “Have you got governance in place?”. If the answer is no, my humble suggestion is “Run Forrest, Run”. Good night and good luck.
This is a briefing note prepared by Lori Macvittie on CloudVelocity, a company offering hybrid cloud automation software.
Abstract: Cloud Velocity technology is designed to manage automated migration of applications in hybrid cloud environments as well as on- boarding enterprise applications to public cloud computing environments.
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Download Link: http://rishidot.com/?s2member_file_download=RishidotResearchBriefingNotesCloudVelocity.pdf
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Rishidot Research and 6fusion (Disclosure: Rishidot Research Client) are hosting a series of webinars talking about federated clouds, usecases, unit of compute, the notion of marketplaces and how they fit in, etc.. The first webinar in this series will be held on June 5th 2013 and the second webinar on June 26th 2013. The topic for the webinars are given below:
You can register for these webinars using the form below and if you have any questions, please contact us.
If the above form doesn’t work, please click here for the registration form.
We are hearing about infrastructure commoditization for sometime now. We are hearing about how infrastructure will end up like dumb pipes and action is going to be on the layers above the infrastructure stack. On the other hand, we are seeing traditional infrastructure vendors confident about their future and even bullish about how they are going to dominate the future of IT. What is the reality? What is going to be the reality in the year 2020? As a rational person and someone who doesn’t believe in superstition, I am pretty sure we cannot predict how the infrastructure services will look like in 2020 but I am confident that with enough intelligent minds inside a room surrounded by machine gun toting ex-marines (yup, the event is going to be held inside Switch SuperNAP), we can come up with a decent theory on where things are headed.
Announcing Cloud2020 Summit, a congregation of smart minds in the infrastructure space talking about where infrastructure services are headed and, possibly, come to a conclusion on the topic. This is an invite only event where we plan to have equal number of vendors, customers and pundits so that we hear many different perspectives on this important topic. If you are interested in attending the event, I encourage you to apply here and our advisory committee will decide on the applications and send the invitations. Looking forward to seeing you in Vegas next month.
This is a briefing note prepared by me on Cloudsoft AMP, a DevOps platform services player offering autonomic management of applications.
Overview:
Cloudsoft AMP is an enterprise application management platform that helps automate the process based on business and performance needs. Deploying an application on any cloud or PaaS is just one part of the application lifecycle management. There are many other aspects of the lifecycle that are equally important. For example, management, monitoring, governance, portability, etc. play a critical role in enterprise IT. Cloudsoft AMP adds a layer of abstraction to platforms/platform services making autonomic management of applications much easier in enterprise IT environments.
Read the report below
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Download Link: http://rishidot.com/?s2member_file_download=RishidotResearchBriefingNotesCloudsoftAMP.pdf
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Deploycon 2013 is fast approaching and we want to build the necessary foundation for the conversation before we get together at Santa Clara Convention Center on April 2nd. We are in the process of preparing a research report on PaaS landscape and we want to talk about it before Deploycon. In order to do that, we are running a webinar based on the report. I will be talking about what we see in the PaaS landscape and help enterprise executives, IT and developers get a full understanding of the fast evolving PaaS landscape. If you are interested in getting the big picture of PaaS market segment, this webinar is suitable for you.
What: Webinar on Dissecting The PaaS Landscape
When: March 25th 2013 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM PST
Where: Register at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2088100473212175872 and you will be notified about how to access the webinar
Please note that the space is limited for this webinar. We will however try to post the recording on the Rishidot Research blog. All the attendees (you need to attend the webinar) will get a discount code for Deploycon after the event. Everyone who registers for the webinar will get a copy of our report when it is published on April 2nd 2013. Please note that the report will not be send to personal email addresses and we need the work email for sending the report. Please register for the webinar with your official email address. Looking forward to seeing you at the webinar.
Last year we ran Deploycon for the first time and it was a great success. For the first time in the industry, we had a good collection of vendors, pundits and enterprise buyers getting together in a room and discuss Platform as a Service seriously. Before that, I literally begged various conferences to run an exclusive track on PaaS but no one cared about my request. If no one is ready to try something, I really want to try that and the end result was Rishidot Research running Deploycon solely focussed on PaaS. Deploycon 2012 brought to focus that enterprises are not just interested in PaaS but they are actually testing it out for their mission critical apps.
The conference was well received for the content which, in turn, added tremendous pressure on us to do it right again. This year we are going to offer high quality content again for the conference attendees and I hope the planned agenda speaks about what every attendee can expect. I am pretty confident that they will not go out disappointed and our moderators are going to make sure that every single session offers only valuable content and no marketing pitches. We believe that vendors gain maximum value by being thought leaders than marketers and it is going to reflect in our sessions at Deploycon 2013.
This year we have partnered with Cloud Connect, a premier conference organized by UBM Tech around the world, and it will be held at Santa Clara Convention Center on April 2nd 2013. Our registration form is live on Deploycon website now. Deploycon attendees will get great discounts on the full Cloud Connect conference pass. Also, if you are a developer, please get in touch with us. We can offer 50% discount on the Deploycon conference pass (not the Cloud Connect pass). We were the first to tell the world that developers are the face of modern IT before many other analyst firm even woke up to that fact. We were the first to run a conference focussed on PaaS. We want to salute the developers who are going to unleash a service centric world which will change business and personal lives in ways that we can’t even imagine today. As a result, we want to go out of the way to make it easy for developers to attend the conference. Get in touch with us and we will work with you to get you to Deploycon on April 2nd.
Looking forward to see you all at Deploycon 2013.
Image Source: Successful Workplace
Recently, a startup called Rap Genius and Heroku went back and forth on whether Heroku intentionally misled their customers about the resources underneath their PaaS platform. Having known Heroku for a long time and the fact that Salesforce will not want a PR mishap on such an issue, I personally feel that Heroku may not have intentionally misled their customers. Without going into the validity of claims and counterclaims in this case, I want to use the story to talk about a bigger point, i.e. hosted PaaS visibility.
The idea behind hosted PaaS to abstract away all the complexities of the infrastructure and give developer one push access to deploy their applications. By using hosted PaaS, developers need not worry about provisioning and management of the underlying infrastructure and focus just on application development and deployment. It was very appealing to many developers wanting to go from idea to production faster than anytime in the past (agile development). However, this level of abstraction comes at a cost to developers. They have very little leverage when it comes to knowing what is under the hood. For some organizations, this lack of transparency can be frightening.
Let us now shift gears and go back in time by few years. In the early days of cloud computing, lack of transparency on the part of cloud providers were cited as one of the concerns against public clouds. Those concerns were mainly from the security angle, lack of transparency was worrisome for many in IT. To help ease those concerns, a group of security pundits headed by Chris Hoff came up with the idea of CloudAudit. In my opinion, it was a great idea with a potential to make public clouds more palatable to the enterprises. But they were little bit early in the game and it eventually lost traction and got folded into Cloud Security Alliance.
I see similarities between the lack of (performance related) transparency in PaaS and lack of (security related) transparency in clouds (in general). Yes, Heroku was offering monitoring services as an add-on which could help their customers gain more visibility into the service. Other hosted PaaS vendors offer similar solutions. However, as seen in the Heroku-Rap Genius flap, it doesn’t always help. It is difficult for PaaS customers to bring in their own monitoring tools so that they can trust PaaS completely. Such a trust is critical for large scale adoption of hosted PaaS offerings. Especially for enterprises, PaaS visibility is one of the key requirements (both in terms of performance and security) for the use of hosted PaaS offerings for mission critical applications.
At Deploycon 2013, we are dedicating a session to discuss PaaS visibility with some of the hosted PaaS vendors and industry leaders. If you are a startup or enterprise wanting to use PaaS for your IT needs, it is important you think about PaaS visibility as a part of your platform strategy. The session at Deploycon will help customers understand the issue better and also learn about the right strategy going forward. Check the Deploycon website early next week to learn more and register.