Changing Landscape of Middleware

Changing Landscape of Middleware:

Lately I have been engaged with many clients that are maniacally focused on reduced costs by means of reduced footprint. This post, I attempt to discuss some of my thoughts and experiences towards this trend:

1. Growth poses a problem: As business grows so does the resulting infrastructure and primarily the middleware which houses the business logic and in some cases this tier shares the presentation or the store front with business logic. So with growth in business either due to larger client base or new business model implies similar growth in middleware. This consistent growth poses a few challenges some obvious ones include costs – not only of software but also hosting infrastructure and hardware. Some non obvious challenges include manageability of platform i.e. general administration, handling performance and Service level agreement (SLA) and addressing scalability.

2. Consolidation – an Answer? - Many clients have taken an approach of consolidation to address this issue. Now this consolidation can come at many levels including (but not limited to) data center consolidation, IT & middleware virtualization, automation – for installation and configuration. Many clients are even as bold in claiming this effort towards the goal of being ‘cloud’ ready. However, I think that virtualization can only offer so much, at some point to achieve better resource economies clients and leaders have to think about a better design, understanding of business and user behavior and promoting design that not only appeals to the end user but also nudges the user towards a certain desired behavior.

3. Design: I have always advocated dedicating significant amount of time in design phase. While a design phase may not produce a sizable amount of tangible application artifacts, but it does enable a better design pattern for future improvements and upgrades. (More on this in later).

4. Changing Landscape of Middleware: What I am seeing and we have enabling technologies seeping into enterprise infrastructure to make this possible is the Movement of content in the outer tiers. So one way to address the scalability of middleware processing is to not let the request traverse to middleware tiers until absolutely necessary. This can be done in many ways, and one can be creative on how they accomplish this – this is where the application design comes in. Here is an example
1. Many clients push as much content to ultra edge or the public accessible content domain. For example Akamai content network. An example of this type of content is generally static content. This enables faster access to site and catalog content, and has a high user satisfaction rate. This also enables the ‘window shoppers’ from consuming your precious middleware cycles.
2. Caching at edge tier – now not all content can be cached or served from ultra edge, and some content such as domain specific content, some page fragments and jsps etc can be cached at the edge tier (which is usually behind the firewall), this does a great deal in saving processing costs of middleware presentation tier.
3. Caching at middleware tier: Patterns like side cache and in-line database cache are further instrumental in reducing resource usage such as a db lookup, db connection and in-memory access enables faster access to various type of content.

5. The Idea: By caching strategically at many tiers, we are trying to offload processing to various tiers and ONLY dedicating processing in middleware when it is most important or the ‘window shoppers’ now mean business, we will dedicate our cycles to those business meaning clients and service them better with an enhanced experience.

Challenge: I discussed the Design phase, the challenge is to ensure the application design that is modular enough to enable these various tiers of caching and still present a unified front, where the end user is oblivious of the inner working of the application that has its content derived from various layers. An intentional design will enable the content and business logic to be isolated, thus enabling caching at various tiers.

Enabling technologies:

1. Ultra Edge caching – Akamai content network
2. Edge caching – edge caching appliances ( such as IBM XI50, XC10), in memory data grid at the edge (IMDG – such as WebSphere eXtreme Scale (IBM) , Coherence (Oracle)
3. Side Cache and Inline database buffers - such as WebSphere eXtreme Scale (IBM) , Coherence (Oracle)
4. Smart Routing – IBM XI50, IBM AO, F5, Cisco etc.

Thoughts?

J

Nitin

Understanding Mobile Landscape -- Let's Dissect it! AND what is MEAP?

Last week post, I mentioned:

Mobil Space– This is an interesting space, and I think we are rightly focused on this space. From middleware perspective, I think our focus should be on including numerous mobile based services such as a location based service/Mobile payment and mobile gateway services, security.. And more. I will continue to focus on this space, as I think this is current, relevant and area where we still have time to make our mark with respect to Application infrastructure.

This week I would like to focus on Mobile Space, in this post my attempt is to dissect the mobile space and open a dialog that fosters an understanding of mobile landscape and how and where I think we fit in…. and as always I welcome your comments and thoughts:

But before I jump into dissection and deconstruction of various components of enterprise mobile landscape, here are some compelling stats that will force us to think:

1. Over last year alone 3000% of WW mobile traffic ballooned. – Includes Voice and data
2. This space is expected to grow 40X over next 5 years
3. 11% of the world owns a tablet ( now we have 89% of 6+ billion and growing)
4. 90% of the world has access to the mobile networks ( well this amazed me as 90% of world does not have access to clean water and food, but has access to mobile network)
5. 2/3 of us get most of our news on mobile devices
6. 76% take pictures and video on mobile devices
7. in past 2 years mobile ready sites have grown from 150,000 to 3 million
8. 11 billion apps in 2010
9. On commerce front – this year $6.2 billion purchase were made from Mobil device --- compare that to $54.2 billion black Friday sales
10. If mobile users would be nation, it would be largest nation….. And I could go on…

The point : Mobile space is disruptive, engaging, controversial, interactive and international all the same time. Given the reach of mobile devices and recent innovation in this space, has certainly got the attention of business leaders and entrepreneurs alike. So let’s take some time and understand various components.

1. Basics : 3 components :

Device -<-------> Network <-----------> Enterprise
OS ATT/Verizon Design/develop/emulate
Install app Content gateway Host/push updates
Updates/transactions Carrier Services enablement

If we look at core components, we as application infrastructure/middleware folks fit into Enterprise space, however, there are a few things to ponder:
a. With Tight integration between the device manufacturer and service provider there is a set of dependency and new value propositions that is fulfilled by the Network or service provider. So for instance ATT/Verizon/Vodaphone/Orange etc are in better position to provide value add services as they are closest to the clients or end user, and have a larger degree of control. It is therefore conceivable that these service providers will also be in business of mobile application hosting space and other value add services – security etc. – We have seen this with UPS/FEDEX – with our laptop/system repair and parts replacements.
b. So we can see ourselves - middleware folks/vendors working with service providers and helping enterprise to position themselves to take advantage of the new markets created.
c. And if we are innovative with our offerings we can also envision the service providers the ATT, Verizon’s of the world partner with us to better enable the enterprise reach their target audience in Ocean of new consumers and services.

2. Players and Technology : So this newly emerged market also have new and non traditional players that can potentially compete with us or provide technology and services that we have traditionally enabled.

a. Google/Motorola /Apple etc– Are not only in device making business but also provide the software, applications and services on the mobile devices.

b. ATT/Verizon/Vodaphone/Orange etc – Carrier and service provider now also into application hosting and service delivery, since they are closest to the network and client.

c. iPass, ATT Mobile solutions, Mobileron etc are relatively new players that provide the services, ‘cloud’ based hosting and access --- so this gets even interesting as many of these new services are a marriage of “cloud paradigm” and “Mobility platforms”.

d. Technology: Now few things we all should know as middleware professionals are terms like HTML5, DOJO Toolkit, REST, dojox mobile, java scripts, and optimized solutions such as the device and how things like local storage can assist with asynchronous communication with application hosted in enterprise or cloud.

e. Discerning between UI and back end technology – we as technical sellers/consultants should be able to discern between what is on the device that is UI, Type of application – native/hybrid and web based and the back end technology or engine that supports the application. This also means now our sizing, network estimates etc are not traditional conversation.

3. What is MEAP ? - MEAP stands for Mobile Enterprise Application Platform So I think it is important to understand this Device and carrier agnostic framework which is recently adopted term and quite popular on the Mobile street! I also think this framework will allow us to break ice, demonstrate understanding of mobile enterprise space, and above all help discern where we stand. From all my readings MEAP has 5 elements:

a. Defining Development Environment – Application development for enterprise and device app.
b. Connector for Integration with other services – Allows for specific data models.
c. Application Management Infrastructure – Traditional environment
d. Runtime on SmartPhone/Handheld device -
e. Gateway Infrastructure -- This sits between device and back end systems

I think, and would love to hear your thoughts that we fit in at Application Management Infrastructure and Possibly in Gateway infrastructure is we partner with the service providers.

I think this is a good start for discussion on Mobile landscape, and Please add to this discussion.

:)
Nitin

WXS competes with Oracle Coherence

The purpose of this discussion is to compare the IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale (WXS) product with Oracle Coherence, specifically their architectural differences. While on the surface they may seem interchangeable, digging beneath to understand the fundamental architecture is required to make a better choice and decision

Basically:

I do not focus on feature gap, sooner on later we catch up and one up each other.

I focus on core architecture differences such as

a. Server to Server Communication - WKA - Well Know Address/design based on multicast which is more of an after thought. WKA disables multicast which limits scalability in Coherence architecture.

so while performance should be comparable we all access data from memory, but where we should differ due to architecture is scalability, we should scale easier and painlessly than oracle coherence... which is an important yet subtle distinction.

b. Client to Server Communication : Oracle Coherence requires gateway processes for TCP Extend to work that incurs significant CPU and network latency hops. Also this is more of an after thought.

c. I would ignore any performance claims, because at the end of the day we all access data from memory, --- If someone presents this to me, I would want details and would want to know why? What is so special that gives anyone the X perf advantage?

Coherence one up WXS with C++ integration– which WXS will soon address, however I still think that a common grid between Java/.Net and C/C++ application is utopian, and not practical.

Net-Net : WXS competes on Scalability claims and NOT Performance, Superior Architecture and feature comparison, and Thought leadership and not historical presence.

Thoughts?
:)
Nitin