Back in October (see “there should be a word for this” part 1) I listed a few concepts (related to twitter and/or blogging) for which new words were needed. Since it’s such a rich field, I barely scratched the surface. Here is the second installment.
#9 The temptation to repeat a brilliant tweet of yours that [...]

There is always a temptation, when facing a hard design decision in the process of creating an interface or a protocol, to produce two (or more) versions. It’s sometimes a good idea, as a way to explore where each one takes you so you can make a more informed choice. But we know how this [...]

For all its goodness, REST sometimes feels like trying to fit a square peg in the proverbial round hole. Some interaction patterns just don’t lend themselves well to the REST approach. Here are a few examples, taken from the field of IT/Cloud management.
Long-lived operations. You can’t just hang on for a synchronous response. Tim Bray [...]

When I lamented, in a previous post, that I couldn’t tell you about recent submissions to the DMTF Cloud incubator, one of those I had in mind was a submission from HP. I can now write this, because the author of the specification, Nigel Cook, has recently blogged about it. Unfortunately he is isn’t publishing [...]

Events/alerts/notifications have been a central concept in IT management at least since the first SNMP trap was emitted, and probably even long before that. And yet they are curiously absent from all the Cloud management APIs/protocols. If you think that’s because “THE CLOUD CHANGES EVERYTHING” then you may have to think again. Over the last [...]

Then: Web services standards
One of the most frustrating aspects of how Web services standards shot themselves in the foot via unchecked complexity is that plenty of people were pointing out the problem as it happened. Mark Baker (to whom I noticed Don Box also paid tribute recently) is the poster child. I remember Tom Jordahl [...]

Have you noticed the slow build-up of business process engines available “as a service”? Force.com recently introduced a “Visual Process Manager”. Amazon is looking for product managers to help customers “securely compos[e] processes using capabilities from all parts of their organization as well as those outside their organization, including existing legacy applications, long-running activities, human [...]

Oracle just announced that it has purchased Amberpoint. If you have ever been interested in Web services management, then you surely know about Amberpoint. The company has long led the pack of best-of-breed vendors for Web services and SOA Management. My history with them goes back to the old days of the OASIS WSDM technical [...]

What makes one Web applications “Software as a Service” (SaaS) and another a “plain old Web application” (POWA)? Or is there no such distinction?
Wouldn’t it be convenient if we had an answer that has some functional relevance? Here are the different axis on which I (unsuccessfully) tried to project Web applications to sort them between [...]

There have been some interesting discussions recently about the relationship between Cloud management and SOA management/governance (run-time and design-time). My only regret is that they are a bit too focused on determining winners and loosers rather than defining what victory looks like (a bit like arguing whether the smartphone is the triumph of the phone [...]

There is the Cloud that provides value by requiring as few changes as possible. And there is the Cloud that provides value by raising the abstraction and operation level. The backward-compatible Cloud versus the forward-compatible Cloud.
The main selling point of the backward-compatible Cloud is that you can take your existing applications, tools, configurations, customizations, processes [...]

One of the heavily discussed Cloud topics in early 2009 was a  Cloud Computing taxonomy. Now that this theme has died down (with limited results), and to start 2010 in a similar form, here is a proposal for a taxonomy of the benefits of Cloud Computing.
Just like the original Cloud Computing taxonomy only had three [...]

My colleagues (and Enterprise Manager experts) Debu Panda and Arvind Maheshwari have a very handy book out, titled Middleware Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR5 (that’s the latest release of Enterprise Manager). The publisher sent me a copy of the book. It illustrates well that Enterprise Manager does a lot more than just [...]

Lots of communities think of Cloud Computing as the realization of a vision that they have been pusuing for a while (“sure we didn’t call it Cloud back then but…”). Just ask the Grid folks, the dynamic data center folks (DCML, IBM’s “Autonomic Computing”, HP’s “Adaptive Enterprise”,  Microsoft’s DSI), the ASP community, and those of [...]

Communications as a Service

[Preface: a few months ago I shared some thoughts about how REST was (or could) be applied to IT and Cloud management. Part 1 was a comparison of the RESTful aspects of four well-known IaaS Cloud APIs and part 2 was an analysis of how REST applies to configuration management. Both of these entries received [...]

I almost titled this entry “Cloud + Tivoli = $” in reference to the previous one (“Cloud + proprietary software = ♥”). In that earlier entry, I described the opportunity for Cloud providers to benefit themselves, their customers and software vendors by drastically reducing the frictions involved in using proprietary software (rather than open source [...]

When I left HP for Oracle, in the summer of 2007, a friend made the argument that Cloud Computing (I think we were still saying “Utility Computing” at the time) would be the death of proprietary software.
There was a lot to support this view. EC2 was one year old and its usage was overwhelmingly based [...]

Oracle just released version 6.0 of Real User Experience Insight (friends call it RUEI), which is part of the Enterprise Manager portfolio. As the name indicates, it captures and presents in great details the experience of actual users interacting with your application. This is real traffic, not synthetic probes. It’s is a mature product, which [...]

William Vambenepe's blog

Chuck Shotton recently made a compelling case (“Twitter with a Brain“) for Twitter tools to allow the user to change the protocol endpoint. That is, instead of always going to twitter.com, you can tell your Twitter client to send all requests to myTweetInterceptor.me.com. Why would you do this? You should read his blog entry, but [...]

As I was reading about Microsoft Azure recently, a military analogy came to my mind. Hypervisors are tanks. Application development and runtime platforms compose the air force.
Tanks (and more generally the mechanization of ground forces) transformed war in the 20th century. They multiplied the fighting capabilities of individuals and changed the way war was fought. [...]

We've just published a new paper that explores the area of risk and cloud application optimization. Does it make sense to refactor that existing application? Should I make it run on the cloud or optimize it? What is cloud computing application utopia?

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to Architectural Risk and Cloud Application Optimization

The Sun Desktop as a Service solution, part of Sun's education solutions portfolio, is a subscription-based service available for purchase immediately for as little as $1.00 per day per user.

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to Cloud-Based Desktop as a Service voor Onderwijs: 1$ per dag bij Ashbourne Technology Group

Things are heating up in the DMTF Cloud incubator. Back in September, VMWare submitted its vCloud API (or rather a “reader’s digest” version of it) to the group. Last week, the group released a white paper titled “Interoperable Clouds”. And a second submission, from Fujitsu, was made last week and publicly announced today.
The Fujitsu submission [...]

I recently attended Gartner IAM in San Diego and the topic of Cloud Computing permeated the titles of presentations throughout the conference.  Eric Sachs, from Google gave a good presentation on applying IAM principles to applications in the cloud.  RSA talked about network based security detection for companies leveraging the cloud.