Skip to main content

(Some(what)) Clear Thinking on a Cloudy Thing.

Me and Ajay brainstormed on the dynamics of an ultimate cloud computing environment. And I extracted our ideas into this (cartoon) context diagram. We are dealing with daunting levels of complexity in this area today. So ‘Abstraction’ becomes the key with which we approached this subject. An ever expanding box with a dashboard and a toilet man are the subtle(?) visual cues that convey the abstraction and ease of use. The levels of technological maturity as we expect here are not available today. This is the ‘FUTURE’. A Nirvana in Cloud Computing. And it speaks thus:

  1. The Cloud is the new operating system.

  2. Elastically growing and shrinking hardware are achieved already. The Cloud Management platform will maintain an inventory of the hardware capability - updating it as the hardware had been consumed and released.

  3. We will not deal at the application servers, BPM engines, databases level anymore. The tools will not matter. ‘DIY Blocks’ here refers to a catalog of pre-built ensembles that include operating systems and all the middleware pre-deployed, configured and integrated. One or more ensemble will be available in the catalog for each scenario (transactional applications, social computing apps, BPM apps etc). The challenge for an IT Architect is reduced to choosing the right pattern/ensemble for the business requirement.

  4. IT Architects will be relieved from the pains of choosing tools, building operational models, selecting hardware platforms, sizing and dealing with non-functional requirements. Will be they become extinct? - have to wait to see that. But they will be given more room to evolve into 'Business Architects'. The hard core techies might become Ensemble Builders.

  5. The ensemble will expose 2 types of interfaces. One to develop and deploy applications on it. The second type of interfaces are to the Cloud operating system to scale up and down. There will be standards developed in this area in the future for interface definition and interoperability.

  6. Development tools will be re-engineered to develop and deploy at this elevated levels of abstraction.

  7. Monitoring and scaling will be managed by the Cloud platform itself automagically.
Labels:

Comments

  1. SMay 19, 2010 at 3:37 PM

    eep! You're such a geek!

    ReplyDelete
  2. sreekanthMay 19, 2010 at 3:40 PM

    The presentation was innovative. BTW, who drew the picture? Are you a cartoonist?

    Cheers
    Sreekanth

    ReplyDelete
  3. Raja SPMay 19, 2010 at 11:25 PM

    S, yes, a model citizen of geekdom! :))

    Sree, thanks. Its my sketch. Some day, hope to become a caricaturist. Some of my cartoons are in earlier posts here and in my facebook album. Here is my deck just using cartoons, presented in HK - http://www.slideshare.net/spraja08/nuts-and-bolts-of-it-agility

    ReplyDelete
  4. SMay 20, 2010 at 4:44 PM

    Checked out your slides - awesome! I wish more ppt presenters would think of something innovative like that - what was your audience's reaction?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Raja SPMay 21, 2010 at 7:52 AM

    S, thanks and that is very encouraging.
    I can just say that it was right after lunch and none of the audience fell asleep :))

    Yea, it was a hit but leaving all that, i had great fun :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Date - Part 1

“Good Morning. How is everything? Did you manage to have an early breakfast date with yourself?” I was on the bed in a hotel room in Jakarta when that SMS woke me up. I only managed to get a very few hours of sleep that night. Even in that, my mind went churning non-stop on some meaningless, unconnected things. I was literally aware of all that turmoil in the half sleep, twisting and tossing through it. Back to the SMS. All the SMS I get usually are with a single consistent purpose - my colleagues trying to find my whereabouts. Note - none of them is a hot babe. (This is altogether a different topic - how come no hot chick in this whole damn world manages to become an IT architect!!) Oh, for a change, I do occasionally get some irritating marketing campaigns. So, it is not a wonder that this message sprang me awake like a Maasai Warrior. (Maasai are an African tribe famous for their ability to rise from the deepest sleep to a state of total combat readiness in a matter of seconds)...
2 comments
Read more

Birthdays and Facebook

I read about a guy who had 400+ friends in Facebook. One day he woke up as a curious little wanker and wondered if he is really that sociable. So he organized a party and sent invitations to all his contacts over Facebook. 50% confirmed and another 20% were tentative. He was delighted - that’s one hell of a response, actually. The real day came. Our man waited at the venue, which happened to be a popular joint, but no single soul turned up. An hour later, one woman came but she also left in the next 30 minutes. He had 400 friends and yet he ended up drinking alone that night. So the question to ponder is how close are our virtual worlds to the reality? . But my case was quite not as somber. Yesterday was my birthday. Facebook reminded of it to a whole lot of my gang. Some of them have never wished me in decades and some are new. How exciting! So here is my big thanks to all my dear friends for the wishes over calls, sms and facebook. You made me feel special. Special thanks to cutie p...
9 comments
Read more

Sift Audience Data Query Language (DQL) – 1

I had been thinking long and hard on enhancing the Audience Management capability in Sift. Everybody seems to have it - from the mighty big players to the obscure ones. In such a crowded space, it is of prime importance to have a very clear and a striking "unique selling proposition" before you boast that you have this capability too. Basically, the tool shall solve a problem that was very challenging previously, in a cost effective way that was not thought of commonly. Now, Sift is a real time analytics engine. So obviously, the profiles it builds about individual entities are accurate - up to the second. That gets a lot of brownies to start with. And as Sift would limitlessly process data, the data points it can compute for a single entity would also be much wider in range. This is great too. But, 1. What if I add "relationships between the entities" into this mix? For example, retrieving " all customers who just visited a particular online storefront...
7 comments
Read more