Tag: software as a service

Adam & Krishan Got Me Motivated Today… to toss the trash conversations

I was speaking with Krishan Subramanian (@krishnan) and Adam Seligman (@adamse) today. I love talking to these guys. They’re both smart, intelligent and upbeat guys. They see the positive things we’re all working toward and accomplishing in the technology space, specifically around PaaS, Cloud Computing and around the cultural implications of stronger technology communities, involvement of individuals. We all can see the positives, of how the industry is moving forward so that corporations aren’t the only enablers that are juxtaposed against developers or consumers but instead act to serve consumers based on the progress that individuals make themselves. There’s so much to do and so much progress to be made, the venders can simply follow the community and step up to provide points of leadership.

Absolutely great talking with these guys…

On that topic, what is it that we discussed that has me so motivated? Well there’s a few things that I’m done with and I’m going to make every effort to just throw away the trash. Here’s a few of these things that we discussed and I challenge everybody out there, drop the trash talk and let’s move forward because there is a LOT of awesome things to accomplish. Here’s the two things I’m just dropping…  cold. No reason to discuss them anymore.

  • Toss the language and framework religious wars. It is far simpler than it is sometimes perceived. We have a polyglot industry now where we can easily use the right tool for the job, the right framework, or the language that handles our particular domain the best. There is literally no reason to argue about this anymore. Of course we can talk semantics, debate best use cases, and of course we’ll talk accomplishments and what various things do well. That’s exactly what the focus should be on, not the harping on my X is better than your Y nonsense.
  • The culture war is basically over. Sure there are the hold outs that haven’t gotten a clue yet. But it’s an open source world at this point. Even the dreaded and horrible Oracle has generally conceded this and is frantically waving its marketing arms around trying to get attention. But at the core, mysql, java and the other things that they’ve purchased they’re keeping alive. They’re active participants in the community now, albeit in a somewhat strange way. Considering that even Oracle, Microsoft, Apple and so many others contribute back to the open source community in massive ways, that war can be considered won. Victory, the community and every individual in that community!
  • Lockin is basically dead. The technological reasons to lock in are gone, seriously. There’s some issues around data gravity that are to be overcome, but that’s where a solid architecture (see below) comes in. Anything you need can be contributed to and derived from the development community. Get involved and figure out how technology can be a major piece of your business in a positive way. If you design something poorly, lock in becomes a huge issue. Use the rights tools, don’t get into binding contracts, because in the polyglot world we’re in now there’s no reason to be permanently locked in to anything. Be flexible, be where you need to be, and make those decisions based on the community, your support systems, and your business partners. Don’t tie yourself to vendors unless there is mutual reasons to do exactly that. Lock in is a dead conversation, just don’t, time to move on.

So what are the key conversations today?

  • Ecosystem Architecture – If you’re deploying to AWS, Heroku, Tier 3, AppFog or Windows Azure it all boils down to something very specific that will make or break you. Your architecture. This is where the real value add in the cloud & respective systems are, but there are many discussions and many elements of the technology to understand. This is a fundamentally key conversation topic in the industry today. Pick this one up and drop the other trash.
  • Movement & Data Gravity – How do you access your data, how do you store it, where and how do you derive insight from that data? This is one of the topics that came up in our discusssion and it is huge. The entire computer industry basically exists for the reason of insight. What should we eat today, how do I shift my investments, how is my development team doing, what’s the status of my house being built, where is my family today and can I contact them! All of these things are insights we derive from computer systems. These are the fundamental core reason that computers exist. As an industry we’re finally getting to a point were we can get some pretty solid insightful, intelligent and useful information from our systems. The conversation however continues, there is so much more we can still achieve. So again, drop the wasteful convo and jump on board the conversations about data, information and insights!
  • Community Involvement – I’ve left the key topic for last. This is huge, companies have to be involved today. Companies aren’t dictating progress but instead the community is leading as it should. The community is providing a path for companies to follow or lead, but the community, the individuals are the ones that are seen and known to be innovating. This is so simple it’s wild that it is only now becoming a known reality – companies don’t innovate, people do. Companies don’t involve, people do. Individuals are the drivers of companies, the drivers of Governments, they’re the ones driving innovation and progress. The focus should now and should have always been on the individuals and what they’re working toward to accomplish. So get involved, get the companies involved as a whole and keep the semantic ideal of individuals and the progress they can make core to the way you think of communities. The idea of the “company” innovating is silly, let’s talk and build community with the people that are working around and innovating with these technologies.

Of course there are more, I’d love to hear your take on what the conversations of today should be about. What do we need to resolve? How do we improve our lives, our work and the efforts we’re working toward on a day to day basis?

The Confusions of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS

IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS stand for Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service respectively.  But what exactly is the context & definition of each of these acronyms?  The simple definitions I have included below.

  • IaaS – A service provided by a company, group, community, or government that provides basic computer networking, load balancing, content delivery networks, routing, commodity data storage, and virtualized operating system hosting.
  • PaaS – A service provided by a company, group, community, or government that provides a platform in which to develop software applications, usually web based, with immediate abstractions of the underlying infrastructure.
  • SaaS – A service provided by a company, group, community, or government that provides a software solution to the system clients.  The software may be internal to a business, delivered by other means, or most commonly delivered over the Internet.

IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are heavily used acronyms in the cloud computing industry.  These three acronyms describe services in particular, but not cloud computing specifically.  It just happens that cloud computing is often broken down into these three segments.  From here on though, I will use IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS in relation to cloud computing.

Windows Azure is highly focused around being a platform.  It has often been said internally and externally at Microsoft that Windows Azure is not infrastructure or software that you can buy, but a platform that software is built to without a need to think about the infrastructure.  Recent events and changes have cast a shadow of doubt on Microsoft’s intentions toward the infrastructure and services aspect of this.  I’ll cover more specifics as I break these services apart.

Traditionally, and even today and ongoing tomorrow, there are a number of existing infrastructure, platforms, and software solutions that are provided in the context of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.  These solutions are not always cloud technologies, and can be provided in a number of ways.  Let’s break out the three into the traditional environments that would provide these services.

Traditional Infrastructure

Traditionally infrastructure was, and still today, often provided to companies internally and by 3rd party providers.  These providers, such as small businesses or internal IT Departments, would deliver actual hardware including cabling, architectural design, network configuration & setup, load balancing, hosting of physical servers, data storage in arrays, and other services.  Some examples would be a traditional RAID array with multiple disks, and storing dedicated single copy data as a backup on that array.  Another is documents stored on a file server and backed up to a tape drive.

For further context, take this working example of a very common infrastructure scenario.  An industrial company that makes, manages, and operates the manufacturing of widget X.  The company has a primary office space in an office building in a major metropolitan area.  In that office there are approximately 90 employees.  There is a satellite office with another 25 employees in another part of the city, located about 6 miles from the main office.  These two offices have a combined total of 115 PCs & Laptops.  These machines are interconnected on a network that connects to a collocation facility where the servers are stored & connected to a large pipe on the Internet.  This collocation facility provides the access for all customers via the Internet and also all the access for employees to their internal servers.

In this example we have a number of systems & networking interconnects needed for day to day operations.  This is a very common, and often a rather complex array of services.  This scenario is one that requires a moderate need for Internet infrastructure, but needs mount for file sharing, backups, redundancies, a the ability to startup new servers easily for usage, testing, development, or day to day operations.  The purchase cycle for additional hardware to bulk up this infrastructure isn’t measured in minutes, but is measured in days, weeks, and all too commonly months.

Take another example using a software game company.  This company traditionally delivers games via boxed medium to stores like Target, Wal-mart, or Gamestop.  The game shop is primarily located in a single office with 45 employees.  They have Internet access that connects them to their partners that handle graphics rendering compute time, e-mail & communication server hosting, & other sources.  The backup and storage for their work is on-premises with tape backups, file servers in building, and other equipment for the day to day operations of game development.

This company has needs for a large pipe to their rendering farm partners.  The file servers are local and also require a fair sized pipe to the workstations and huge disks for storing rendered images.  The rendering farm partners have appropriate networking connections on their end for uploading and downloading of their content to this company.  At the end of the development cycle when the game is ready for release they send off the gold copy of the build to manufacturing which is also in another geographic location.  This company then prints the boxes & discs and sends the game out through logistical distribution companies to the stores that will sell the product.

A Traditional Platform

Traditionally a platform was something that consisted of Ruby on Rails, the .NET Framework, Java Server Pages, or PHP.  One had to be responsible for the deployment of these platforms to infrastructure, and all the configuration, maintenance patches, updates, software installation, and other work required staffing at appropriate levels to handle the workload.  The .NET Framework is an example of developing to a platform, and then installing Windows Server (or running it on Mono under Linux), setting up the IIS Server on Windows, then appropriately installing updates, patches, fixes, and other pieces of software.

A great example of real world platform usage is alive in almost all companies to some degree.  Take Visual Basic for Office as an example.  This is often used in offices that have no dedicated development teams, nor any real trained developers.  Visual Basic for Office allowed almost anyone to get up to speed and use very simple programming concepts to get something built using the Microsoft Office Suite as the platform.

A great scenario, and extremely common, is a mid-size enterprise at approximately 170 employees.  In the main office there are a number of people in accounting, sales, support, logistics, marketing, advertising, and other departments.  Each of these departments often have custom needs to deal with their specific business needs within the enterprise.  Sales may want to have an ongoing list of customer contacts and their relation to particular sales people, so one of the sales guys hacks together a solution with Microsoft Office Access.  The next thing everyone in sales is using it.  Going beyond that someone in accounting figures out some cool tricks with Visual Basic for Applications and builds a way to keep in progress work in balance to simplify the daily tracking of numbers.  Again, the next step is other people in the department start using that same application.  Visual Basic for Applications, and the later incarnation Visual Studio Tools for Office is a great example of a software suite that had a platform built on it.

Another common scenario is the business that has grown to about 320 people and starts to migrate some of the rogue databases or custom Visual Basic for Application tweaks into applications that can be formalized and setup for use more easily within the enterprise.  Visual Studio and SQL Server are purchased and development work begins on the .NET Framework to codify these solutions.

The last example is one of the newer platforms out today.  Ruby on Rails started out as a platform to build on that did things in a very simple, minimalistic, rapid manner.  Development was started on the platform by people that eventually formed 37signals.com and built the tools that company sells; Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire.  The Ruby on Rails Platform makes web development faster and easier than it ever has been with traditional software platforms.  It has had such a huge impact that Microsoft has even released competing offerings such as ASP.NET MVC to counter the development patterns and style of the Ruby on Rails patterns.  This platform has some notable applications including Twitter, Yellowpages, Scribd, Hulu, Slideshare, Medhelp, Github, Odeo, Jango, Ravelry, MTV Style and many more.

A Traditional Software Solution

This is the point of all the other layers, the ability to provide software that clients can use to complete daily work, communicate, and create solutions for their business needs.  This traditionally has been provided by installing tools like Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, WordPerfect, Lotus, or other software packages.

This is probably the easiest service type of the “as a Service” differentiations to describe.  It is what is commonly seen by end users.

One of the most common software solutions that is used throughout the world is the Office Suite.  Microsoft’s Office Suite being the most common at this time.  Another great example of a software package commonly used is CAD & Photoshop.  There are literally thousands of other software offerings that are used at home, in the enterprise, or in small businesses every day.