Monthly Archives: May 2009

Economist: Unlocking the Cloud

Posted on May 29, 2009 | Leave a comment

The Economist is now reporting on the cloud. They’ve picked up on the very real concern of vendor lock-in because of proprietary standards. The article focuses on data portability between SaaS apps, but the same issue arises in IaaS (different proprietary virtualization formats, despite what the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) promises), and in PaaS (google app engine extensions to Python which are hard to ignore and lock you into their platform).

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Video 1/4: The Challenges of Web 2.0 Security

Posted on May 29, 2009 | Leave a comment

I did a series of videos in the fall of 2008 about Web 2.o, SOA, entitlements, etc. These were on the Layer 7 home page until recently, when we went through another re-design. The videos still exist on YouTube, but we did nothing to promote them so they haven’t been seen by too many people. I’m going to re-post them here over the next week for posterity.

This is the first time I had done this kind of media. I spent the day down at Media2o in Gastown. Bradley Shende and his crew are real pros, and I really enjoyed the whole experience. But I do have to confess: it’s a lot harder than it looks. I’ve done loads of talks at conferences, web casts, etc, and I honestly went in believing that I would knock it off in one take each and be out in time for lunch.

Was I ever wrong. Even with the aid of a teleprompter, it took hours of video to get these four short pieces. We were all pretty tired by the end of the day. I learned an important lesson here. You just can’t underestimate how a different media will impact how you perform. I can still barely watch these without cringing.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to do this again. And I’m going to practice a lot more in front of a mirror this time…

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NIST Perspective on Cloud Computing

Posted on May 29, 2009 | Leave a comment

Earlier this month, NIST went public with their perspective on cloud computing. This is important because NIST is a well-respected, public standards organization, and there is still a lot of confusion about what cloud really is (the *-aaS affect).

They released only  a short, two page document and a longer, 72 slide PowerPoint (you can find their main page here). They are offering a broad definition based on essential characteristics, delivery models, and deployment models:

Essential Characteristics:

On-demand self-service

Ubiquitous network access

Location independent resource pooling

Rapid elasticity

Measured Service

Delivery Models:

Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS)

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Deployment Models:

Private cloud

Community cloud

Public cloud

Hybrid cloud

There’s not really anything new here, but that’s fine; it’s more important as a validation of the emerging models and ideas from a public standards body. I do like the three pronged approach, acknowleding that cloud is a lot of things but at the same time keeping it simple and concise. Brevity is the soul of great standards.

It’s worth keeping an eye on this effort.




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OMG SOA in Healthcare Conference

Posted on May 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

I’ll be speaking next week at the Object Management Group’s conference on SOA in Healthcare. It’s next week, June 2-4 at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago.

I’ll be presenting a case study of a deployment we did with the University of Chicago Medical Center. I’ve spoken at a few OMG meetings in the past and they are very good. It kind of feels like a return to my roots. I started my career in a medical imaging research group at the University of British Columbia.

Hope to see you in Chicago.

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Upcoming Webinar with David Linthicum

Posted on May 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

Dave and I are co-presenting a webinar this Thursday, May 27th at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern. The title is Cloud Control: Reducing the Risk for Cloud Deployments.

It’s going to be great to share the stage with Dave, whose work I have followed for a long time and is truly one of the great thought leaders in the SOA and cloud computing space.

Dave is going to introduce the key issues in cloud governance, and I’m going to present some concrete technological solutions that should be the foundation of your cloud governance program.

I hope you can join us. Register here.

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Governance in the Cloud White Paper Now Available

Posted on May 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

We’ve released the first in my series of white papers on cloud governance. This is the high level overview of issues and solutions, titled Steer Safely into the Clouds. You can download it from the Layer 7 website.

I’d love to hear your comments about it.

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GigaOm Piece – SOA Governance Determines Success in the Cloud

Posted on May 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

I just wrote a short article about SOA Governance and its applicability in the cloud for GigaOm. This is a very influential blog and I’m excited to publish with them.

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AWS Implementing a Drive Shipping Service

Posted on May 22, 2009 | 2 comments

From the  Wired.com article here.

Looks like Amazon read the Berkeley cloud paper where they spent a lot of time dissecting the economics of physical shipment of cheap disk drives versus the still high cost and relatively constrained (compared to USB, at least) bandwidth of WAN links.

Never underestimate the simplicity and potential data transfer rates of sneakernet. I was reminded of this when I saw the Western Digital WDTV recently at Costco. It’s basically a digital media player with HDMI that you plug portable USB drives into. At first I thought it was dumb, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is a pretty pragmatic solution. what they did right was keeping the price way down (they are something like $129 CAD at Costco). I’m trying to talk myself out of buying this and waiting for the inevitable cheap version with USB and Wifi plus the ability to wirelessly mount disks from various servers.

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The 101 Electronic Kit

Posted on May 22, 2009 | Leave a comment

Remember these?

I spent hours pouring over Radio Shack catalogs thinking about which one I should get (calculating a careful balance between cost and potential). When I finally did get one of these kits (actually, I think it was this one–it looks eerily familiar), it was cool but very cookie cutter, and didn’t really teach anything about electronics. Somehow I never made the conceptual leap into circuit hacking that seemed so easy when confronted by a computer language. I don’t think I really understood circuits until I took 2nd year electrical engineering courses, and that was 100% theoretical–no soldering required.

I’ve always puzzled over why programming triggers such powerful attraction with so many people, but other disciplines, which are arguably similar, don’t. Electronics is one of these. Like programming, it’s component-based and consists of puzzles and features (relatively) instant feedback. But it doesn’t quite engage the same broad section of people.

A more extreme case is math. I’ve always been much more respectful of strong, natural math skills (which I have to work hard at) than of programming or general computing skills (which I find comparatively easy).

Check out the wired article about great 80s geek toys.

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A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Posted on May 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

Alex Cruise (who is obsessed with Scala) sent me this awesome history of programming post by James Iry.

I think my favorite entry is this one:

1972 – Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.

I really found the time line interesting. I honestly wouldn’t have guessed Ruby was that old. Everyone thinks of the 70s as such a fertile time in language development (everyone who was anyone came up with a language), but we easily forget the important milestones in the 50s. Half a century later we are still dealing with some of the decisions made in this time.

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