After the AGM itself I’ll be doing a presentation called “An Exploration of Cloud Computing” with the following synopsis:
An exploration of Cloud Computing looking at an overview of the subject of and some of the current common definitions available. Looking at the current state of the Cloud Computing market place and Cloud Vendors, what is actually being sold to people. Will also look at the different types of clouds, the differing approaches to engaging with cloud providers, the business models, impact on Business, and how Businesses can exploit the ‘Cloud’.
Answers to key Cloud Computing questions I hope to address include:
What’s Cloud Computing?
What’s different to what we’ve seen before?
What’s driving Cloud Computing adoption?
What types of Cloud are there?
How can I engage with them and use in my Business?
What’s the overview of the Cloud Computing marketplace now?
How is Cloud Computing likely to change?
A number of the members of the Birmingham Committee will be standing down at the AGM so we are looking for volunteers to join the Committee to take part in planning our activities for the 2009-10 session. If you are interested in joining the Committee please contact John Chinn, Branch Secretary, at john.chinn@manchester.ac.uk or you can come forward at the AGM itself.
Details for the event are:
Date: Monday the 18th of May, 2009
Time: AGM at 6pm for 6.30pm, Presentation at 7pm
Location: Trophy Suite, Tally Ho Sports & Conference Centre, Pershore Road, Birmingham B5 7RN
Cost: Free, Presentation open to all (including non-members of BCS), no registration required although we would prefer that you contact the Branch Secretary, John Chinn, at john.chinn@manchester.ac.uk or 0161 306 3733, so that we can advise the caterers of the correct numbers for the buffet.
This Friday I’ll be presenting on the topic of ‘Enterprise Architecture Case Studies’ in Aberystwyth, in an event organised and hosted by the South Wales branch of the BCS.
For more information the event is advertised here with the BCS. The core details are:
Date: 8 May 2009
Time: 17:00 Refreshments / 18:00 Start
Location: The finger buffet is in the foyer of the Computer Science Building and the talk itself will be in Lecture Theatre `A’ in the Physical Sciences Building, both on the Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth.
Cost: Free, open to all (including non-members of the BCS or IET), no registration required.
Here’s what I generally say as an overview of this talk:
The case studies presented explore my experiences with Enterprise Architecture in three major customer engagements. They include an Enterprise Architecture team which led its company into a £70+ million ‘pitfall’; the use of Enterprise Architecture to define a Service Oriented Architecture; and an example of how much Enterprise Architecture is about achieving the proper governance model.
Key takeaways:
Enterprise Architecture best practices drawn from multiple engagements.
How to use good governance to avoid and limit the ‘Ivory Tower’ syndrome.
How to combine Enterprise Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture to deliver sustainable Transformation.
Given the current downturn I’ll also go into some of the issues facing EA programmes due to the credit crunch and what can be done to ensure that they continue to receive executive sponsorship and funding.
Happy to answer any and all questions; please consider that I’ll be attempting to condense three major and very large scale Enterprise Architecture case studies into a talk lasting an hour and a half or so, therefore I will definitely be around to speak with afterwards. ¨C13C
‘Many Thanks’ to Fred Long (of Aberystwyth University) for organising and co-ordinating this event and for Clive King (of Sun) for initially brokering the relationship.
Alan Mather has just released his excellent “Enterprise Architecture in Government” white paper from 2003. This white paper has mythic status in UK Government IT circles because of it’s visionary roadmap of an implementation for Enterprise Architecture (EA) for the UK. Pre-dating the “Cross Government Enterprise Architecture” (XGEA) work of the CTO Council (who hadn’t even been formed at the time, but nor had the CIO Council who commissioned them either) this is the earliest attempt at applying an EA vision to the co-ordination of the UK’s IT and IS portfolio.
Alan surely requires little introduction, and is a singularly authoritative voice, having been the been the Chief Exec. of the Office of the e-Envoy’s (OeE, then e-Government Unit, or eGU, and finally the CIO Council) e-Design Team (eDT, currently led admirably by it’s new Director, Chris Haynes, although the eDT itself is now part of DWP having moved there at the same time as the eGU transformed into the CIO Council). Alan spent a number of years at the heart of the Cabinet Offices push for ‘Shared Services’ and Government services online programmes, helping to instigate and then deliver the largest UK “Government to Government” (G2G) system, by volume and scale, the Government Gateway.
More than a few people are starting to get active again around shared services, enterprise architectures, shared data centres (and all of the SaaS, HaaS and maybe just plain old aaS that could bring). A while ago I wrote a document that I hoped would lead to a debate on delivering some or all of those things into UK government. The document largely languished on my hard drive gathering virtual dust like so many reports about what government should do to make things better. It never quite got finished although, looking through it now some 6 years after it was written, it still seems to hang together pretty well.
Alan’s being rather reserved here because I know it was released to a few, select, senior people across Government, and I genuinely credit this to having furthered, if not initiated, the conversation in Government about planning out it’s overall EA (both “as is”, “to be”, and strategy) in a much more pro-active manner. I’m glad to say I was one of the people Alan chose to review the document back in 2003, but frankly I thought it was excellent at the time and still do.
For the life of me I can’t understand why Alan isn’t at the epicentre of Government as an integral part of the UK Government EA programme, then again he is running a major programme at the moment, another large-scale system key to the future of the UK, so I imagine know he is kept pretty busy by that delivery.
Anyone and everyone interested in UK Government IT should read this document, I’m sure many of you would be shocked at how visionary the paper is, and how relevant it still is after six years. Alan Mather’s “Enterprise Architecture in Government” document is available from box.net (which opens in a new window): https://www.box.net/shared/ki3z6ejjiv
Récemment, Eric Bezille compris le modèle de mon “Cloud Relationship Model” article dans son blog “Sur les pas du premier Camp Cloud à Paris …».Recently Eric Bezille included the model from my ” Cloud Relationship Model ” article in his blog post ” Sur les pas du premier Cloud Camp à Paris… “. And I thought I’d translate the article into French for Philippe’s readers. Et j’ai pensé traduire l’article en français pour les lecteurs de Philippe. I’ve had to use electronic translation (Google, actually) as I’m afraid my written and spoken French isn’t quite good enough to be able to do it manually in a reasonable amount of time. J’ai eu à utiliser la traduction électronique (Google, en fait) que je crains que mon français écrit et parlé est pas tout à fait assez bon pour être en mesure de le faire manuellement dans un délai raisonnable. I haven’t had time to translate the model itself, but you are more than welcome to recreate, reuse and distribute it, although I’d hope you would attribute the original version to me at this site. Je n’ai pas eu le temps de traduire le modèle lui-même, mais vous êtes plus que bienvenu pour recréer, de réutilisation et de la distribuer, mais je l’espère vous attribuer la version originale pour moi à ce site. Please let me know if there are any outstanding translation issues and I’ll amend them when I can. S’il vous plaît laissez-moi savoir s’il ya des questions de traduction en suspens et je vais les modifier quand je peux.
This article was originally a guest post I did recently for Stewart Townsend over at Sun Startup Essentials describing the cloud relationship model I had developed as an artefact when discussing cloud computing. Cet article a été invité récemment post, je n’ai plus de Stewart Townsend à Sun Startup Essentials décrivant le modèle de relation de nuages j’avais développé comme un artefact de calcul lors de l’examen de nuages.
I wanted a simply model which I could share with people and use as a discussion point, whilst still capturing the major areas of cloud computing which I considered most pertinent. I developed this model about six months ago and have since found it useful when talking with people about cloud computing. Je voulais tout simplement un modèle qui je pourrais partager avec les gens et utiliser comme point de discussion, tout en capturant les grands domaines de l’informatique de nuages que j’ai jugé plus pertinent. J’ai développé ce modèle il ya environ six mois et ont depuis trouvé utile lorsque l’on parle avec les gens sur les nuages de calcul.
Here’s the model and I’ll go though it’s major elements below. Voici le modèle et je vais bien que les principaux éléments ci-dessous.
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Major Cloud Communities Major Cloud Communautés
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In the cloud there are three major participants: Dans les nuages, il ya trois principaux participants: ¨C22C
the Cloud Providers; building out Clouds, for instance Google, Amazon, etc. Effectively technology providers. les fournisseurs de Cloud, la construction des nuages, par exemple Google, Amazon, etc efficacement les fournisseurs de technologie. ¨C24C¨C25C
the Cloud Adopters / Developers; those developing services over the Cloud and some becoming the first generation of Cloud ISVs. I have included Cloud “Service” developers and Cloud ISV developers together. les adoptants Cloud / développeurs, ceux de développer des services sur le Cloud et de certains de devenir la première génération de Cloud ISVs. J’ai inclus Cloud “Service” développeurs et éditeurs de logiciels de développeurs Cloud ensemble. This group are effectively service enablers. Ce groupe de services sont effectivement des facilitateurs. ¨C27C¨C28C
Cloud “End” Users; those using Cloud provisioned services, often without knowing that they are cloud provisioned, the most obvious example of which are the multitude of Facebook users who have no idea there favorite FB app. Cloud “fin” des utilisateurs; ceux qui utilisent les services Cloud provisionné, souvent sans savoir qu’ils sont des nuages provisionnés, l’exemple le plus évident dont la multitude d’utilisateurs de Facebook, qui n’ont aucune idée de là favorite FB app. is running on AWS. est en cours d’exécution sur AWS. These are the service consumers. Ce sont les services aux consommateurs. ¨C30C¨C31C
¨C33C
I think it’s important to talk about these communities because I keep hearing lots about the Cloud Providers, and even more about the issues and ‘needs’ of the Cloud adopters / developers, but very little in terms of Cloud “End” Users. In a computing eco-system such as this where “services” are supported by and transverse technology providers, service enablers and service consumers an end to end understanding of how this affects these reliant communities is required. Je pense qu’il est important de parler de ces communautés parce que je continue à l’audience sur les lots Cloud fournisseurs, et plus encore sur les questions et les «besoins» des adoptants Cloud / développeurs, mais très peu en termes de Cloud “fin” des utilisateurs. Dans un le calcul de l’éco-système de ce genre où les “services” sont pris en charge par les fournisseurs de technologie et transversal, le service des facilitateurs et les consommateurs un service de bout en bout la compréhension de la façon dont cela affecte les communautés dépendantes est nécessaire. Obvious issues such as SLAs for end users and businesses which rely upon high availability and high uptime from there cloud providers come to mind; however other “ilities” and systemic qualities come to mind such as security, and that’s before looking at any detailed breakdown of functional services. Évidente des questions telles que la SLA pour les utilisateurs finaux et les entreprises qui s’appuient sur la haute disponibilité et haute disponibilité à partir de là, les fournisseurs de nuages viennent à l’esprit, mais d’autres “ilities” et systémique qualités me viennent à l’esprit, comme la sécurité, et que l’avant de chercher à tout ventilation détaillée des services fonctionnels. ¨C34C
The point here is that the cloud adopters / developers and interestingly the cloud “watchers” (ie the press, media, bloggers and experts) would be mindful to remember the needs and requirements of genuine end users; for myself it’d certainly be invigorating to hear more on this topic area. Le point important ici est que le nuage adoptants / développeurs et intéressant le nuage “observateurs” (c’est-à-dire la presse, les médias, les blogueurs et experts) sont conscients de se rappeler les besoins et les exigences de véritables utilisateurs finaux, pour moi ça sera certainement vivifiant pour en savoir plus sur ce sujet. ¨C35C¨C36C
Simon Wardley , a much more eloquent public speaker than myself, does a wonderful pitch which includes a look at the different “as a Service types” which he boils down to being a load of “*aaS” (very amusing, and informative, try and catch Simon presenting if you can). Simon Wardley, un public beaucoup plus éloquent orateur que moi, fait un merveilleux terrain qui comprend un regard sur les différents types de service »dont il se résume à être une charge de” * AAS “(très amusant et instructif, essayez Simon et les prises de présenter, si vous le pouvez).
I wholeheartedly agree that there is a large amount of befuddlement when it comes to the differing “aaS” types and sub-types, and new ones are springing up relatively frequently, however I also think it’s important to not ignore the differences between them. Je suis entièrement d’accord qu’il ya une grande quantité de befuddlement quand il s’agit de la différence “ AAS” types et sous-types, et de nouveaux voient le jour assez fréquemment, mais je crois aussi qu’il est important de ne pas ignorer les différences entre eux. ¨C40C
For me, and many others, I think first popularised by the ” Partly Cloudy – Blue-Sky Thinking About Cloud Computing ” white paper from the 451 Group, the differing “aaS” variants are identified as billing and engagement models. That white paper also postulates the five major Cloud Computing provider models, into which the majority of minor “aaS” variants fall. They are: Pour moi, et bien d’autres, je pense que le premier popularisé par “Nuages épars – Blue-Sky Thinking About Cloud Computing” livre blanc de la 451 groupe, les différents “* AAS” variantes sont identifiées comme étant des modèles de facturation et d’engagement. Ce livre blanc aussi les cinq principaux postulats Cloud Computing fournisseur de modèles, dans lequel la majorité des mineurs “* AAS« variantes automne. Ce sont: ¨C41C
Managed Service Provision (MSP); not only are you hiring your service from the cloud, you’ve someone to run and maintain it too. Fourniture de services gérés (MSP), non seulement vous votre service de recrutement des nuages, vous avez quelqu’un d’exécuter et de maintenir aussi. ¨C43C¨C44C
Software as a Service (SaaS); pretty much ubiquitous as a term and usually typified by Salesforce.com , who are the SaaS poster child. Software as a Service (SaaS), un peu comme un terme omniprésent et souvent caractérisée par Salesforce.com, qui sont les affiches SaaS enfant. ¨C46C¨C47C
Platform as a Service (PaaS); the application platform most commonly associated with Amazon Web Services. Platform as a Service (FQA), la plate-forme d’application les plus couramment associés à Amazon Web Services. ¨C49C¨C50C
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS); ¨C52C¨C53C
Major Architectural Layers Major couches architecturales
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Also included in the diagram are the major architectural layers that are included in each of the above billing / engagement models offered by the Cloud providers. Également inclus dans le diagramme sont les principales couches architecturales qui sont inclus dans chacune de ces facturation / l’engagement des modèles offerts par les fournisseurs de Cloud. They are: Ils sont: ¨C64C¨C65C
Operations; and this really is operations supporting functional business processes, rather than supporting the technology itself. Opérations, et cela est vraiment fonctionnel des opérations de soutien des processus d’affaires, plutôt que de soutenir la technologie elle-même. ¨C67C¨C68C
Service layer; made up of application code, bespoke code, high-level ISV offerings. Service couche composée de code, code sur mesure, haut niveau de l’offre des éditeurs de logiciels. ¨C70C¨C71C
Platform layer; made up of standard platform software ie app. Plate-forme couche composé de plate-forme standard des logiciels c’est-à-dire environ. servers, DB servers, web servers, etc., and an example implementation would be a LAMP stack. les serveurs, les DB serveurs, serveurs Web, etc, et un exemple de mise en œuvre serait une LAMP pile. ¨C73C¨C74C
Infrastructure layer; made up of (i) infrastructure software (ievirtualisation and OS software), (ii) the hardware platform and server infrastructure, and (iii) the storage platform. Infrastructure couche composée de (i) des logiciels d’infrastructure (ievirtualisation OS et logiciels), (ii) la plate-forme matérielle et infrastructure de serveur, et (iii) de la plate-forme de stockage. ¨C76C¨C77C
Network layer; made up of routers, firewalls, gateways, and other network technology. La couche réseau, composé de routeurs, firewalls, passerelles, et d’autres technologies de réseau. ¨C79C¨C80C
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This rather oversimplifies the architecture, as it’s important to note that each of the cloud billing / engagement models use capabilities from each of the above architectural layers; for instance their can be a lot of service simply in managing a network, however these describe the major architectural components (which support the service being procured), not simply ancillary functions, effectively what are the cloud providers customers principally paying for. Cet excès de l’architecture, plutôt, comme il est important de noter que chacun des nuages de facturation / d’engagement de l’utilisation des modèles de capacités de chacune de ces couches architecturales, par exemple, peut leur être très simplement dans la gestion de service d’un réseau, mais elles décrivent les principales éléments d’architecture (qui soutiennent le service d’approvisionnement), et non pas simplement des fonctions auxiliaires, de manière efficace ce que les nuages sont principalement les fournisseurs de clients pour le paiement. ¨C83C¨C84C
Delta of Effort / Delta of Opportunity Effort de Delta / Delta de chances
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This is much more than the ‘gap’ between the cloud providers and the cloud users, wherein the cloud adopters / developers sit, the gap between the cloud providers and the end cloud users can be called the delta of effort, but also the delta of opportunity. C’est beaucoup plus que le «fossé» entre les nuages et les nuages des utilisateurs, que le nuage adopteurs développeurs s’asseoir, l’écart entre le nuage et les utilisateurs de la fin des nuages peut être appelé le delta de l’effort, mais aussi le delta du occasion. ¨C88C
It is the delta of effort in terms of skills, abilities, experience and technology that the cloud adopter needs to deliver a functional service to their own “End Users”. This will be potentially a major area of cost to the cloud adopters. Il est le delta de l’effort en termes de compétences, les capacités, l’expérience et de la technologie que le nuage adoptant doit fournir un service fonctionnel à leur propre “End Users”. Ce sera peut être un domaine majeur de coût pour le nuage adoptants. But it’s also the delta of opportunity;in terms of ‘room’ to innovate. Mais c’est aussi le delta de l’occasion, en termes de «chambre» à l’innovation. ¨C89C
The more capability procured from the cloud provider (ie higher up the stack as a whole), the less you have to do (and procure) yourself. However the less procured from the cloud provider the more opportunity you have engineer a differentiating technology stack yourself. This itself has it’s disadvantages because the cloud adopters / developers could potentially not realise the true and best value of their cloud providers infrastructure. La capacité d’approvisionnement plus le nuage de fournisseur (c’est-à-dire en haut de la pile dans son ensemble), moins vous avez à faire (et acheter) vous-même. Toutefois, le moins obtenus à partir de la nuée fournisseur le plus vous avez la possibilité de différenciation ingénieur technologie pile-vous . Ce qu’il est lui-même a des inconvénients car les nuages adopteurs développeurs pourraient ne pas réaliser la véritable et la meilleure valeur de leur nuage les fournisseurs d’infrastructures. ¨C90C¨C91C
I suspect that there is an optimum level, around the Platform Layer, which abstracts enough complexity away (ie you don’t have to procure servers, networks, implementation or technology operations staff), but also leaves enough room to innovate and produce software engineered value. Arguably the only current successful cloud provider, based upon market share, perception, revenue and customer take up, is Amazon Web Services (AWS) who provide a PaaS offering. Je pense qu’il ya un niveau optimal, autour de la plate-forme de couche, qui résumés complexité assez loin (c’est-à-dire vous n’avez pas à acheter des serveurs, des réseaux, la mise en œuvre des opérations ou de technologie), mais laisse aussi assez d’espace pour innover et produire de l’ingénierie du logiciel valeur. doute le seul fournisseur actuel succès des nuages, sur la base de la part de marché, la perception des recettes et des clients de prendre place, est Amazon Web Services (AWS) qui fournissent une offre Paas. ¨C92C¨C93C¨C94C¨C95C
Summary Sommaire
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Hope you enjoyed the article, in summary if developing cloud services or even building out a cloud infrastructure I would recommend that you focus on your users and if your a cloud provider, your users’ users; remembering that only a certain percentage of those users will be customers (I won’t getting into discussing Chris Anderson’s 5% recommended conversion rate for the long tail , however I would recommend understanding what some of those calculations might be). Espérons que vous avez aimé cet article, en résumé, si le développement des services ou encore des nuages à la construction d’infrastructures d’un nuage, je vous recommandons de vous concentrer sur vos utilisateurs, et si votre fournisseur d’un nuage, vos utilisateurs, les utilisateurs; de se souvenir que seul un certain pourcentage de ces utilisateurs être des clients (je ne vais pas entrer dans la discussion Chris Anderson recommandé 5% du taux de conversion pour la longue queue, mais je recommande la compréhension de ce que certains de ces calculs pourraient être). ¨C99C
If you’re looking to develop services over the cloud, think carefully about where you and your teams skills lie, and where would you most want them focusing there efforts; working on installing and tuning operating systems and application platforms or writing business value focused applications and services, before choosing at which level to engage with your cloud provider(s). Si vous cherchez à développer des services sur le nuage, la réflexion sur l’endroit où vous et vos équipes les compétences se trouvent, et où vous le plus envie de les y concentrer les efforts, le travail sur l’installation et le réglage des systèmes d’exploitation et plates-formes d’application ou de rédaction de la valeur axée applications et des services, avant de choisir à quel niveau de dialoguer avec votre fournisseur de nuage (s). ¨C100C¨C101C¨C102C¨C103C
I haven’t mentioned enterprise adoption of cloud based services, and that’s because I’d like to post that in the near future in a different article. Je n’ai pas mentionné l’adoption d’entreprise de services basés sur les nuages, et c’est parce que je voudrais pour écrire que dans un avenir proche dans un autre article. ¨C104C
Hope you enjoyed the article and all the best, Espérons que vous avez aimé l’article et tous les meilleurs, ¨C105C¨C106C
Kürzlich Philipp Strube meiner ursprünglichen genannten “Cloud Betreuungsmodell” Artikel in seinem Blog-Post “Paas, IAAS, Saas: Den Überblick zu behalten ist wie immer ein Problem für sich”.Recently Philipp Strube mentioned my original ” Cloud Relationship Model ” article in his blog post ” Paas, Iaas, Saas: Den Überblick zu behalten ist wie immer ein Problem für sich “. And given all the traffic it’s generated I thought I’d translate the article into German for Philippe’s readers. Und da der gesamte Verkehr ist es, die ich dachte, ich übersetzen den Artikel in Deutsch für Philippe Leser. I’ve had to use electronic translation (Google, actually) as I’m afraid my written and spoken German isn’t quite good enough to be able to do it manually in a reasonable amount of time. Ich habe die Verwendung elektronischer Übersetzung (Google, eigentlich), wie ich fürchte, mein Wort und Schrift Deutsch ist nicht gut genug sein, um es manuell in einer angemessenen Höhe der Zeit. I haven’t had time to translate the model itself, but you are more than welcome to recreate, reuse and distribute it, although I’d hope you would attribute the original version to me at this site. Ich habe nicht genug Zeit hatte, um das Modell selbst, aber Sie sind mehr als willkommen zu neu, Wiederverwendung und zu verteilen, auch wenn ich hoffe, Sie würden Attribut der ursprünglichen Version für mich auf dieser Seite. Please let me know if there are any outstanding translation issues and I’ll amend them when I can. Bitte lassen Sie mich wissen, wenn es alle noch ausstehenden Fragen und Übersetzung ich ändern, wenn ich kann.
This article was originally a guest post I did recently for Stewart Townsend over at Sun Startup Essentials describing the cloud relationship model I had developed as an artefact when discussing cloud computing. Dieser Artikel war ursprünglich ein Gast-post Ich habe vor kurzem für Stewart Townsend über auf Sonntag Startup Essentials beschreiben die Wolke Modell hatte ich als ein Artefakt bei der Erörterung Wolke Computing.
I wanted a simply model which I could share with people and use as a discussion point, whilst still capturing the major areas of cloud computing which I considered most pertinent. I developed this model about six months ago and have since found it useful when talking with people about cloud computing. Ich wollte ein Modell, das einfach konnte ich mit Menschen und die Verwendung als Diskussion, während die Aufnahme noch die wichtigsten Bereiche der EDV-Wolke, die ich als besonders wichtig. Ich habe dieses Modell an etwa sechs Monaten und haben gefunden, da es für sinnvoll, wenn im Gespräch mit Menschen über Wolke Computing.
Here’s the model and I’ll go though it’s major elements below. Hier ist das Modell, und ich gehe auch wenn es die wichtigsten Elemente aufgeführt.
Major Cloud Communities Major Cloud Gemeinschaften
In the cloud there are three major participants: In den Wolken gibt es im wesentlichen drei Teilnehmer:
the Cloud Providers; building out Clouds, for instance Google, Amazon, etc. Effectively technology providers. die Cloud Provider; Gebäude aus Wolken, zum Beispiel Google, Amazon, etc. effektiv Technologieanbietern.
the Cloud Adopters / Developers; those developing services over the Cloud and some becoming the first generation of Cloud ISVs. I have included Cloud “Service” developers and Cloud ISV developers together. die Wolke Adopters / Entwickler, die Entwicklung von Diensten über den Wolken und einige werden die erste Generation der Cloud ISVs. Ich habe Cloud “Service”-Entwickler und ISV-Cloud Entwickler zusammen. This group are effectively service enablers. Diese Gruppe tatsächlich Dienstfunktionen.
Cloud “End” Users; those using Cloud provisioned services, often without knowing that they are cloud provisioned, the most obvious example of which are the multitude of Facebook users who have no idea there favorite FB app. Cloud “End”-Nutzer, die mit Cloud bereitgestellten Dienstleistungen, oft ohne zu wissen, dass sie Wolken vorhanden, das offensichtlichste Beispiel für die sich die Vielzahl der Facebook-Benutzer, die keine Ahnung haben, es Lieblings-FB App. is running on AWS. läuft auf AWS. These are the service consumers. Es handelt sich um den Dienst der Verbraucher.
I think it’s important to talk about these communities because I keep hearing lots about the Cloud Providers, and even more about the issues and ‘needs’ of the Cloud adopters / developers, but very little in terms of Cloud “End” Users. In a computing eco-system such as this where “services” are supported by and transverse technology providers, service enablers and service consumers an end to end understanding of how this affects these reliant communities is required. Ich denke, es ist wichtig, darüber zu sprechen, weil diese Gemeinschaften ich viel über die Anhörung Cloud-Provider, und noch mehr über die Probleme und Bedürfnisse “der Wolke Anwender / Entwickler, aber nur sehr wenig in Bezug auf die Ableitung von” End “-Benutzer. In einer Eco-Computing-System wie diesem, wo “Dienstleistungen” werden von Quer-und Technologie-Anbietern, Service-Enabler und Service der Verbraucher ein Ende zu Ende zu verstehen, wie sich diese auf dieser Reliant Gemeinden erforderlich ist. Obvious issues such as SLAs for end users and businesses which rely upon high availability and high uptime from there cloud providers come to mind; however other “ilities” and systemic qualities come to mind such as security, and that’s before looking at any detailed breakdown of functional services. Offensichtliche Fragen wie SLAs für Endnutzer und Unternehmen, die sich auf hohe Verfügbarkeit und hohe Verfügbarkeit von dort Wolke Anbieter kommen in den Sinn, aber andere “ilities” und systemischen Eigenschaften kommen in den Sinn wie Sicherheit, und das ist, bevor man eine detaillierte Aufschlüsselung der funktionsfähigen Dienste.
The point here is that the cloud adopters / developers and interestingly the cloud “watchers” (ie the press, media, bloggers and experts) would be mindful to remember the needs and requirements of genuine end users; for myself it’d certainly be invigorating to hear more on this topic area. Der Punkt hier ist, dass die Wolke Anwender / Entwickler und interessanterweise der Wolke “Watchers” (dh der Presse, Medien, Blogger und Experten) würden darauf achten, nicht vergessen, den Bedürfnissen und Anforderungen der Endnutzer echten, für mich würde es sicherlich belebend zu hören, mehr zu diesem Thema werden.
Simon Wardley , a much more eloquent public speaker than myself, does a wonderful pitch which includes a look at the different “as a Service types” which he boils down to being a load of “aaS” (very amusing, and informative, try and catch Simon presenting if you can). Simon Wardley, eine sehr viel beredter Redner als ich, hat eine wunderbare Tonhöhe, die einen Blick auf die verschiedenen “als Service-Typen”, die er läuft darauf hinaus, dass eine Last von “ Aas” (sehr witzig und informativ, versuchen Fang und Simon, die, wenn Sie können).
I wholeheartedly agree that there is a large amount of befuddlement when it comes to the differing “aaS” types and sub-types, and new ones are springing up relatively frequently, however I also think it’s important to not ignore the differences between them. Ich voll und ganz zustimmen, dass es eine große Menge von befuddlement, wenn es darum geht, die unterschiedlichen “ Aas” und Sub-Typen und neue Boden relativ häufig, aber ich denke, es ist wichtig, nicht über die Unterschiede zwischen ihnen.
For me, and many others, I think first popularised by the ” Partly Cloudy – Blue-Sky Thinking About Cloud Computing ” white paper from the 451 Group, the differing “aaS” variants are identified as billing and engagement models. That white paper also postulates the five major Cloud Computing provider models, into which the majority of minor “aaS” variants fall. They are: Für mich und viele andere, ich glaube, von der ersten popularisierte “teilweise bewölkt – Blue-Sky Thinking About Cloud Computing” weißen Papier aus dem 451-Fraktion, die unterschiedlichen “* Aas” Varianten sind als Rechnungs-und Engagement Modelle. Das Weißbuch postuliert auch die fünf größten Anbieter Cloud Computing-Modelle, in denen die Mehrheit der minderjährigen “* Aas” Varianten fallen. Sie sind:
Managed Service Provision (MSP); not only are you hiring your service from the cloud, you’ve someone to run and maintain it too. Managed Service Providing (MSP), nicht nur die Mieten Sie Ihren Service aus der Wolke, die Sie jemandem zu laufen und sie zu pflegen.
Software as a Service (SaaS); pretty much ubiquitous as a term and usually typified by Salesforce.com , who are the SaaS poster child. Software as a Service (SaaS), so ziemlich allgegenwärtig als Begriff und in der Regel gekennzeichnet durch Salesforce.com, wer sind die SaaS-Poster Kind.
Platform as a Service (PaaS); the application platform most commonly associated with Amazon Web Services. Platform as a Service (Paas); die Anwendung Plattform am häufigsten im Zusammenhang mit Amazon Web Services.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS);
Major Architectural Layers Major Architectural Ebenen
Also included in the diagram are the major architectural layers that are included in each of the above billing / engagement models offered by the Cloud providers. Auch in der Grafik sind die wichtigsten architektonischen Schichten, die in jedem der oben genannten Billing / Engagement Modelle von der Cloud-Anbieter. They are: Sie sind:
Operations; and this really is operations supporting functional business processes, rather than supporting the technology itself. Operations, und das ist wirklich funktionellen Maßnahmen zur Förderung von Geschäftsprozessen, sondern als Unterstützung der Technologie.
Service layer; made up of application code, bespoke code, high-level ISV offerings. Service-Schicht, aus der Anwendung Code, maßgeschneiderten Code, High-Level-ISV-Angebote.
Platform layer; made up of standard platform software ie app. Plattform Schicht; aus der Standard-Plattform-Software, dh App. servers, DB servers, web servers, etc., and an example implementation would be a LAMP stack. Server, DB-Server, Web-Server, usw., und ein Beispiel dafür wäre eine LAMP-Stack.
Infrastructure layer; made up of (i) infrastructure software (ievirtualisation and OS software), (ii) the hardware platform and server infrastructure, and (iii) the storage platform. Infrastruktur-Schicht, die sich aus (i) Infrastruktur-Software (ievirtualisation und OS-Software), (ii) die Hardware-Plattform-und Server-Infrastruktur und (iii) die Speicherplattform.
Network layer; made up of routers, firewalls, gateways, and other network technology. Network Layer; aus Routern, Firewalls, Gateways und andere Netzwerk-Technologie.
This rather oversimplifies the architecture, as it’s important to note that each of the cloud billing / engagement models use capabilities from each of the above architectural layers; for instance their can be a lot of service simply in managing a network, however these describe the major architectural components (which support the service being procured), not simply ancillary functions, effectively what are the cloud providers customers principally paying for. Diese eher übermäßige der Architektur, wie es ist wichtig zu beachten, dass jeder der Wolke Abrechnung / Engagement Modelle verwenden Fähigkeiten aus jedem der oben genannten architektonischen Schichten, zum Beispiel ihre kann eine Menge Service einfach in die Verwaltung eines Netzes, aber diese Beschreibung der wichtigsten Architektur-Komponenten (die Unterstützung der Service werden soll), nicht einfach Nebendienstleistungen Funktionen, wirksam sind, was die Wolke Anbieter hauptsächlich Kunden bezahlen.
Delta of Effort / Delta of Opportunity Delta Aufwand / Delta von Opportunity
This is much more than the ‘gap’ between the cloud providers and the cloud users, wherein the cloud adopters / developers sit, the gap between the cloud providers and the end cloud users can be called the delta of effort, but also the delta of opportunity. Dies ist viel mehr als die “Lücke” zwischen der Wolke und den Wolken Benutzer, dass die Wolke Anwender / Entwickler sitzen, die Kluft zwischen der Wolke und den Ende Wolke Benutzer kann die Delta-Aufwand, sondern auch das Delta der Chance. ¨C88C
It is the delta of effort in terms of skills, abilities, experience and technology that the cloud adopter needs to deliver a functional service to their own “End Users”. This will be potentially a major area of cost to the cloud adopters. Es ist das Delta der Anstrengungen im Hinblick auf die Fertigkeiten, Fähigkeiten, Erfahrungen und Technologien, dass die Wolke Anwender braucht, um eine funktionale Service für ihre eigenen “End User”. Dies ist möglicherweise ein wichtiger Bereich der Kosten für die Wolke adopters. But it’s also the delta of opportunity;in terms of ‘room’ to innovate. Aber es ist auch das Delta der Möglichkeit, im Hinblick auf die “Zimmer”, zu innovieren.
The more capability procured from the cloud provider (ie higher up the stack as a whole), the less you have to do (and procure) yourself. However the less procured from the cloud provider the more opportunity you have engineer a differentiating technology stack yourself. This itself has it’s disadvantages because the cloud adopters / developers could potentially not realise the true and best value of their cloud providers infrastructure. Die Fähigkeit, die aus der Wolke-Anbieter (z. B. die weiter oben in der Stack als Ganzes), desto weniger müssen Sie tun (und Beschaffung) selber. Doch die weniger die aus der Wolke Anbieter die Möglichkeit haben Sie ein Ingenieur differirende Technologie-Stack selbst . Dieses selbst hat seine Nachteile, weil die Wolke Anwender / Entwickler möglicherweise nicht, die wahre und beste Wert ihrer Wolke Anbieter Infrastruktur.
I suspect that there is an optimum level, around the Platform Layer, which abstracts enough complexity away (ie you don’t have to procure servers, networks, implementation or technology operations staff), but also leaves enough room to innovate and produce software engineered value. Arguably the only current successful cloud provider, based upon market share, perception, revenue and customer take up, is Amazon Web Services (AWS) who provide a PaaS offering. Ich vermute, dass es ein optimales Niveau, um die Plattform-Layer, die Abstracts genug Komplexität entfernt (dh Sie müssen nicht beschaffen Servern, Netzwerken, der Durchführung oder der Technologie Operationen Mitarbeiter), aber auch genügend Spielraum für Innovation und Herstellung von Software-Engineering Wert. die wohl nur die aktuellen erfolgreiche Anbieter Wolke, die sich auf Marktanteil, Wahrnehmung, Einnahmen und Kunden nehmen, ist Amazon Web Services (AWS), die eine Paas bieten.
Summary Zusammenfassung
Hope you enjoyed the article, in summary if developing cloud services or even building out a cloud infrastructure I would recommend that you focus on your users and if your a cloud provider, your users’ users; remembering that only a certain percentage of those users will be customers (I won’t getting into discussing Chris Anderson’s 5% recommended conversion rate for the long tail , however I would recommend understanding what some of those calculations might be). Hoffen, dass Ihnen die Artikel, in der Zusammenfassung, wenn die Entwicklung Wolke oder sogar Ausbau der Infrastruktur eine Wolke Ich würde empfehlen, dass Sie sich auf Ihre Benutzer und wenn Ihr Provider eine Wolke, die Benutzer “Benutzer; Erinnerung, dass nur ein bestimmter Prozentsatz der Nutzer Kunden werden (ich werde nicht immer in der Diskussion Chris Anderson, 5% empfohlen, Conversion-Rate für den langen Schwanz, aber ich würde empfehlen, zu verstehen, was einige dieser Berechnungen werden könnten).
If you’re looking to develop services over the cloud, think carefully about where you and your teams skills lie, and where would you most want them focusing there efforts; working on installing and tuning operating systems and application platforms or writing business value focused applications and services, before choosing at which level to engage with your cloud provider(s). Wenn Sie zur Entwicklung von Diensten über den Wolken, sich genau überlegen, wo Sie und Ihre Teams Fähigkeiten liegen, und wo würden Sie am meisten wollen, dass sie sich es Bemühungen, auf die Installation und Tuning-Betriebssysteme und Plattformen Antrag schriftlich oder geschäftlichen Nutzen sich Anwendungen und Dienstleistungen, vor der Wahl, auf welcher Ebene, sich mit Ihrem Provider Wolke (n).
I haven’t mentioned enterprise adoption of cloud based services, and that’s because I’d like to post that in the near future in a different article. Ich habe nicht erwähnt Unternehmen Annahme Wolke Dienste, und dass deshalb, weil ich möchte, dass die Post in der nahen Zukunft in einem anderen Artikel.
Hope you enjoyed the article and all the best, Hoffen, dass Ihnen die Artikel und alles Gute,
Sun’s Dynamic Infrastructure is a Suite of Services, enabled by technology, and is just one of the ways that we can help you move toward a virtualized datacenter platform that fully exploits our expertise in IT architecture and process automation, enabling agility through the extremely flexible, efficient and secure deployment of the IT infrastructure.
It’s being going for at least three or four years, possibly even longer, and is led by Jason Caroline, who also spent time looking after Sun’s “Solution Delivery Network” (SDN, or what Scott used to call “a great big freking web tone switch”), and is currently involved in some of the work around Sun’s Cloud Computing offerings. You can learn a whole lot more about Sun’s Dynamic Infrastructure initiative here: http://www.sun.com/service/dynamicinfrastructure/
You’d probably be unsurprised to find that our Datacentre Virtualisation, Consolidation and Efficiency practice is one of our most repetitively successful lines of business in the UK and Ireland; and is enabled by the great delivery team that have assembled over the years in the UK Sun Services organisation (I even worked with them myself more than a few times whilst I was part of Sun’s Professional Services organisation).
Over the last couple of days I’ve been getting more than a little bored by all the articles on the Register going on about IBM’s Dynamic Infrastructure initiative, especially as if you’d imagine from the articles no-one had ever combined the words “Dynamic” and “Infrastructure” before and because of the relative closeness of some of the messaging (and yes, you could argue the initiatives are totally different but my gripes are to do with the above).
You may think I’m going over the top here, but really, six articles in the last two days, each mentioning “Dynamic Infrastructure”, is going a bit far. I couldn’t resist leaving the following comment on the article most focused upon the initiative in the hope that that leaves the aforementioned a little more balanced…
…Sun have been talking about ‘Dynamic Infrastructure’ for a few years now, in a similar light, you’d almost imagine someone might have read their press releases and material too.
Simon Wardley, Software Services Manager at Canonical UK and noted Cloud Computing expert and public speaker, responds to my article “Cloud Relationship Model“, with specific mention of my paraphrasing of a talk I saw him give; and thereby explains the history behind the “*aaS” double entendre.
Seriously though, the number of heads on the “*aaS” Hydra continues to grow, and Simon’s comment soon focuses upon the genuine need for a stable and standardised taxonomy, something I agree with wholeheartedly, along with a little bit of temperance and cool-headedness when it comes to thinking up and announcing more “*aaS” classifications…
Back in early 2007 when I gave a talk at ETECH, I described the changes in the industry as a continued shift of the computing stack from a product to a service based economy.
At that time I often categorised the computing stack into three layers – software, software platform and hardware (back from 2006). Whilst I had made comments that the software layer was really about applications and therefore SaaS should have had a more unfortunate acronym, this was not my true crime nor the origin of the joke.
The problem was that whilst SaaS and HaaS had been in common usage, the mid layer was known as SaaS Platform. This neither fitted neatly into the naming convention nor was it correct, as this layer of the stack contained many framework elements. So I started to describe this as the framework layer and FaaS seemed to be the obvious choice.
Hence at OSCON in Jul’07 I described the stack as a trio of SaaS, FaaS and HaaS.
Robert Lefkowitz (in a later talk at OSCON’07) warned us that this trio of “oh so wrong” nomenclature would lead to a whole lot of “aaS” and hence the joke was born.
Well Robert, as always, was spot on. In the last few years we’ve seen a plethora of different “aaS” terms (at last count it was about 16, including multiple versions of DaaS). The last few years has seen a constant exercise in revisionism.
Whilst the distinction between the layers of the computing stack is valid and meaningful, especially in context of the shift from products to services, what is not meaningful is the constant creation and recreation of terms.
Fortunately we now seem to be settling down to a three layer stack of application, platform and infrastructure – though I’m sure there is going to be more arguments.
This is why I argue the one thing we need in cloud computing today is a stable taxonomy.
Read an excellent article the other week in the IEEE’s Communications Magazine on the UK’s contribution to early packet switching and what would evolve into Ethernet and the Internet.
At the moment you have to be an IEEE member to view the article, however it’s an excellent piece, especially for those interested in the history of communications and technology, as well as the UK’s contribution to the field.
I was particularly interested to read about the barriers the UK teams had, especially when it came to support from the UK communications and technology ecosystem of the time and the incumbent Government. Despite the gap in time some of the issues were surprisingly similar to those present today.
Here’s the abstract from the IEEE site:
In this issue of the History Column we bring you an article by Prof. Peter Kirstein, one of the original contributors to early packet switching. We are probably all familiar with the history of the Internet, beginning with its genesis in the American-developed ARPAnet of the late 1960s and early 1970s. We may be less familiar with the contributions of British researchers, as well as those in other countries such as France, at about the same period of time, who worked closely with American researchers as well as independently in developing the packet-switching technology so fundamental to the Internet. Prof. Kirstein recounts the early activities by British engineers, led by Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory, the British Post Office, those of his own group at University College London, and others as well. He also ties this work into ongoing activities in the United States at the time. In future History Columns we plan to have similar articles by U.S. packet-switching pioneers on their own early activities in the field. This series of articles on the genesis of the Internet should be of great interest to all communication engineers. We commend the article following to your attention.
For those not in the IEEE, who are thus excluded from reading this excellent article, the BBC has a nice online piece about the UK’s contribution to early packet switching technology, with particular reference to British mathematician Dr. Donald Davies at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL), accompanied by some nice video clips too.
Many thanks to all those that attended last night, it was extremely encouraging for me as a speaker to see such a large turn out. We had around seventy people at the event, which was extremely good going and as well as the nature and content of the presentation I attribute the large participation to two factors; (1) the IET and BCS working together to deliver joint events, to the credit of the two organisations, and (2) the excellent and very professional publications and marketing capabilities of the IET and BCS. Many of the attendees were neither members of the IET nor BCS and it was really good to see so many potential members come along.
Also attending the event were Sun Microsystems only Fellow of the IET, Mike Ashton, one of our leading Programme Managers world-wide, a Sun “Principal Project Manager”, Anthony Harrison of the BCS’s newest ‘Speciality Group’, that of Enterprise Architecture itself, Andrew Mohan, Chairman of the BCS Manchester Branch, and Paul Ashmore, Leader of the IET Manchester “Engineering, management and manufacturing technical group”.
Special thanks to both Andrew and Paul, as well as Arvind Sud (of Sun Microsystems), for setting up and co-ordinating the event with participation and involvement from both the IET and BCS. At the end of the presentation I was extremely surprised, and pleased, to be presented with a pair of crystal flutes, so many thanks for that.
As usual afterwards I stayed around to speak with the attendees, and answer their questions, I even got a pint of Guinness too! I’ve included the follow up information that people either asked or emailed about here:
Lot’s of people have asked for a copy of the slides, although as I said during the presentation it’s not much use without the Brummy at the front because this demonstrates my current preference on slides (i.e. not a lot on them except for a few key data points whilst I concentrate on giving an informative and interesting presentation), however a copy is available here (in PDF format): http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/resource/presentation/Enterprise-Architecture-Case-Studies-2009-Manchester-0.1.pdf
The Thoughtworks article, by their then CTO, Rebecca Parsons, entitled “Enterprise Architects Join the Team”, which contains probably the earliest suggestion of rotation of staff to and from project teams to help minimise ‘Ivory Tower’ syndrome is available here (in PDF format): http://martinfowler.com/ieeeSoftware/enterpriseArchitects.pdf
Francis Heyligen’s paper on the subject of increasing system complexity and information overload caused by the Ephemeralization of systems, and how this complexity can negate some of benefits of that Ephemeralization (a key problem I see in the proliferation of complexity of large scale IT estates), entitled “Complexity and Information Overload in Society: why increasing efficiency leads to decreasing control” is here (in PDF format): http://web.archive.org/web/20070103091059/http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/Info-overload.pdf
Some research into the comparative effectiveness of Project Management methodologies can be found in “Business Focused IT and Service Excellence” by David Miller, specifically the section entitled “Learning from the past” (figures 1.1 and 1.2 particularly pertinent).
The first pass review that I did of TOGAF 9 at it’s release, including some of it’s major issues and why I am wholly supportive of the standard despite these, as well as links to number of other reviews of the standard, is here: http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/open_group_release_togaf_9
The blog article I wrote which captures the response to the Capgemini CTO blog that included quotes from the above article, which I had replied to, looking at some of the challenges still facing TOGAF 9 is here: http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/capgemini_cto_blog_togaf_9
The Open Group’s “IT Architect Certification” (ITAC) programme is probably the most mature, objective and framework neutral certification programme for IT Architects. In my opinion ITAC is easily the best of the Architect Certification programmes at the moment, and is based upon demonstrable examples of your work as an Architect; along the vein of ‘implementation matters’, which for me is the only valid current metric. What’s especially good is that it is not biased towards TOGAF whatsoever. Sadly, when I last looked, I found that it was rather expensive and this is the primary reason I believe that it’s adoption has not been as successful as one might have liked. I was hoping that the newly inaugurated BCS Enterprise Architecture Speciality Group might work towards getting the ITAC standard adopted in, or at least integrated with, the BCS and SFIAplus, the IT Skills Framework published by the BCS with support from the IET and the UK e-Skills Council (the sector skills council for IT and Telecoms skills). And I further hoped that at some time in the future we might even see a “Chartered IT Architect” qualification similar to “Charted IT Professional” (CITP) and the beginnings of genuine recognition for the Business and Technology Architectural profession, something I know the IET have already started to persue. Perhaps with the joint effort of the IET and BCS we might see this come about in the relatively near future. The link to the ITAC main page is here: http://www.opengroup.org/itac/
Finally no UK wide Sun Tech Days event this year instead we in the UK have decided to host the Sun UK Developer Update, on Thursday the 19th March 2009 (which is tomorrow I’m afraid to say), where there will be the latest news, reviews and updates from Sun’s Java Evangelists and the James Gosling, the original designer behind Java (both Language, Compiler and Virtual Machine): http://uk.sun.com/sunnews/events/2009/mar/developer_conference/
If any more questions come through I’ll make sure that I post my responses in the above list as well as respond directly so that everyone has access to my responses.
Last nights presentation went well, which is always a relief, especially as my sat-nav had sent me ’round the Wrekin’; we had good attendance and it was great to see so many people I know come along too. …..
For more information the event is advertised both with the IET and BCS. The core details are:
Date: 17 March 2009
Time: 18:00 Refreshments / 18:30 Start
Location: Conference Room 6, The Manchester Conference Centre, Sackville Street, Manchester M1 3BB.
Cost: Free, open to all (including non-members of the IET or BCS), no registration required.
The case studies presented explore my experiences with Enterprise Architecture in three major customer engagements. They include an Enterprise Architecture team which led its company into a £70+ million ‘pitfall’; the use of Enterprise Architecture to define a Service Oriented Architecture; and an example of how much Enterprise Architecture is about achieving the proper governance model.
Key takeaways:
Enterprise Architecture best practices drawn from multiple engagements.
How to use good governance to avoid and limit the ‘Ivory Tower’ syndrome.
How to combine Enterprise Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture to deliver sustainable Transformation.
Although given the current downturn I’ll probably also go into some of the issues facing EA programmes due to the credit crunch and what can be done to ensure that they continue to receive executive sponsorship and funding.
Happy to answer any and all questions; please consider that I’ll be attempting to condense three major and very large scale Enterprise Architecture case studies into a talk lasting an hour and a half or so, therefore I will definitely be around to speak with afterwards.
The nice people at the IET have also created a flyer for the event, which is available here.
And I’d just like to say ‘Many Thanks’ to Arvind Sud (of Sun) for originally helping to organise this event with the Engineering, Management and Manufacturing Technical Group of the IET and especially for co-ordinating the initial joint participation of both the IET and the BCS at this meeting.
I’ll be speaking about Futurology, how Sun sees the future of the technology industry, the trends in the industry, what the implications are for the UK and the wider World given the expected changes, and how they are set to impact us in both our personal and professional lives.
Here are some more details about the event:
Date: Monday, 16th March 2009
Time: 7.00pm (refreshments available from 6.30pm)
Location: Novotel, Bostock Lane, Long Eaton, Nottingham NG10 4EP (map)
Price: Free and non-members are more than welcome! (reserve a place)
And for those of you interested in attending any of the other locally hosted events a full list of the branches events schedule for 2009 can be found here: http://nottmderby.bcs.org/events09-mar.php
As usual I’d be delighted to see you there and will stay around a little while afterwards if anyone would like to talk over any of the contents.
In an odd moment of synchronicity our next door neighbour has just been round and I happened to mention the talk on Monday. Saying that I’ll probably talk about Ray Kurzweil and might even speak about Toffler (often credited as the ‘Father of Futurology’). My neighbour, who spent many years in the Army, went on to say that he’d met Alvin Toffler many years ago when Toffler had been commissioned to speak with the US and UK military about the future of warfare and the impact advancing technology would have on it. Given that anecdote it seems appropriate to quickly cover Buckminster Fuller, as well as more modern, British, futurologists like James Martin and Peter Cochrane too.
About five weeks ago, on the 3rd of February (2008), I celebrated the launch of the Open Group’s TOGAF version 9, with a short review of the new Enterprise Architecture (EA) Framework standard.
Afraid to say I couldn’t help responding to the author of the article, Ron Tolido (VP and CTO Continental Europe and Asia Pacific at Capgemini and Director at the Open Group), by adding a comment to it.
Being so busy I didn’t give it much thought after that, however last night, whilst at the inaugural meeting of the BCS Enterprise Architecture (EA) Speciality Group (SG) I met up with Matt Armstrong-Barnes, Chief Architect for the NHS Data SPINE Programme at BT, and a peer Chartered Fellow of the BCS (FBCS CITP), whom I haven’t seen since we worked together at HMRC.
Speaking with Matt we covered the release of TOGAF 9 and the article I’d written. He hadn’t seen the response I’d left at the Capgemini CTO Blog and guessing that you probably haven’t seen it either and, as it contain some further insight into my opinions on the latest release of TOGAF, I thought I’d repost it here too:
Hi Ron,
Many thanks for the mention; very kind of you.
When I last worked with Capgemini using the IAF I remember it being very much Zachman influenced, dare I say derived, in fact I recall the main overview diagram was extremely similar to the classic Zachman ‘framework’ diagram (a layered approach incorporating the six serving men model).
It’s a good job you guys have donated so much of your time and experience to the TOGAF standard, because frankly the Content Framework (or lack thereof) was the most obvious gap in the TOGAF portfolio. However I look forward to that particular area maturing because it is still only the first iteration. I believe that weaknesses in that particular area are the no.1 reason that Enterprises are still having to adopt more than one EA Framework to achieve a realistic EA.
There is one major gap still in TOGAF of course, but it shares this particular issue with all the major EA frameworks. And that is if only TOGAF could teach one how to architect then we might be getting somewhere!
Then we get down to the ‘minor’ practical areas that still need to be addressed, i.e. addressing ‘Ivory Tower’ syndrome, maintaining programme sponsorship and support, delivering an inclusive EA Governance structure that includes vendors and partners, rotation of EA staff into delivery programmes to maintain estate awareness, maintaining programme relevancy during the current economic downturn (when the Enterprise will be forced to focus on tactical issues), compartmentalising EA delivery into individual ‘steps’ which deliver incremental tactical advantage, getting the EA team to deliver value quickly, avoiding excessive focus on EA tools when the focus needs to be on defining a shareable and readily communicable EA, approaches to delivering an agile EA and derived estate which can readily adopt and react to industry and other outside pressures (such as radical innovation and ‘disruptive’ technology, changes in legislation, the effect of acquisitions and mergers, or new business stream and extreme business change). I would go on, but I’m sure you can think of many more yourselves.
Great post by the way, I enjoyed it a lot and agree wholeheartedly with much that you’ve captured here, especially around standardisation and having a common language across the EA community.
All the best,
Wayne
Since writing this a number of people have added comments, some of them quite informative, and this and the Capgemini CTO blog article itself are well worth five minutes investment if you’re interested in EA or TOGAF:
I posted the following comment in response to Jonathan Schwartz’s latest blog post and vlog “Sun’s Network Innovations (3 of 4)“, however Jonathan and his blog pixies can’t be up and reviewing this yet because it’s awaiting moderation (and too right too, it’s the dead of night in California, and frankly I’m happy Jonathan is keeping busy running Sun, as he’s our CEO, if you didn’t know).
Hi Jonathan,
In 1998 I was involved in building Harrods Online as Chief Architect (employed by Harrods). We used a heavily Netscape based stack, using both Netscape Web Server and Netscape Application Server. And at the time Netscape had over 56% of the Enterprise Web Server market-share as well as being some of the best available technologies at hand.
Both of these technologies were available under free to use licenses from Netscape, with payment for support on top. Well I have to tell you in three years running this stack in production we never once paid for support, not a bean, nada, not on Christmas day, not on any day. Why? Because these were such stable technologies performing in their core capabilities that we knew from direct experience that very little would go wrong and because we architected a fully redundant and highly-available architecture based around horizontal scaling, network load-balancing, and avoiding session persistence where possible.
Looking back I would have liked to have paid Netscape something, even a token amount, because they were a great company, sadly missed, and perhaps if they’d been able to generate more revenues they’d still be with us. However this was a completely economic based business decision so we didn’t. Of course Sun eventually acquired these technologies through the iPlanet Alliance and we were able to integrate some of the innovation, robustness and domain knowledge into our own technologies.
I really wish at the time MySQL had been available, because we wouldn’t have had to pay Oracle either (our biggest license cost outside of Vignette, which was a core component). And before you ask, no, Harrods Online never went down because of any of the Netscape components, if anything by far the biggest problem areas were Vignette (esoteric, overtly Vignette specialised skill set required) and Oracle (connectivity to Vignette, Netscape, the other technologies we used, a number of content version issues, and it’s applicability as a web-scale technology). I know that some of these issues in these technologies have been resolved, but in both cases this was true then.
What’s cracking is that Sun has some of the best Architecture Services for Open Source deployments, especially large-scale implementations. Sun have a genuine sweet spot in the three areas needed to get these to work in the most cost efficient manner: Open Source Software (low barriers to entry, low barriers to exit, ease of availability, applicability to function), cost effective and highly price performant Hardware (Servers and Storage, both Open Source and Open Standards based), and the Professional and Managed Services needed to tie it all together and ensure operational effectiveness.
Frankly, I suppose we were ahead of the pack in many ways at Harrods Online, because the architectural principles used there are precursors of the one’s you’d see in a modern web-tier architectures, such as Flickr or Delicious. I know that if I was building that now not only would we have a near on 100% Open Source stack, but I’d also be looking at how I could offload some of our costs (especially in terms of low level and non-functionally focused skills and technologies) by utilising a Cloud Computing based infrastructure and platform provider.
All the best,
Wayne
If, and when, it gets authorised I’ll add a link here.
Checkout YouNoodle, a new service which measures the “buzz” surrounding a company via blogs and media reports along with a variety of factors including website traffic. So far it’s providing coverage of nearly 30,000 start-ups, ranging from biotechnology to gaming software.
I’ve just signed up and I’m checking out some of my favourite start-ups already; it’s very interesting reading.
During the recent ‘Entrepreneur Country’ event hosted by Ariadne Capital I took part in a Cloud Computing panel interview session on behalf of Sun Microsystems, I was able to capture some notes after the session and have replicated them here.
The “Does every cloud have a silver lining?” session was hosted by Ric Francis of Ariadne and taking part alongside me were Charles Black, CEO and founder of Nasstar (a highly successful provider of ‘Desktop as a Service’ capabilities), and Kolvin Stone, Corporate Partner at Fox Williams (we were due to be joined by Joe Drumgoole, CEO, CTO and founder of Put Place, who I’d liked to have met, but sadly he couldn’t make it).
Surely we’ve heard all of this before in various forms and guises? What is different this time? Why will it work? …response #1
For this stuff to become truly embedded it will need to move from the man in the street to the corporate. Corporate CIOs are a risk averse bunch especially when you move into some sectors (e.g. Financial Services). What will influence the CIOs’ buying decision? …response #2
It was all very easy when you went out and bought or developed software, installed it yourself, ran it yourself, etc. Does working in the cloud bring new issues with regards to data ownership, IP rights, other legal issues, etc.? …response #3
What is your vision for the future and where this goes? …response #4
An audience driven Q and A session including responses to “What do you think of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud initiative?” and “What is Sun’s Cloud Computing strategy?” …response #5
I’ve divided the responses into roughly three sections; what I said at the time, what I captured from the other panel members, and any thoughts I have now reflecting on the responses we originally gave.
Surely we’ve heard all of this before in various forms and guises? What is different this time? Why will it work?
WTH: Yes we have, we have heard a lot of rhetoric in a similar vein for a long time now, promises have been made about similar initiatives in the past without the ability to deliver in a holistic manner. However four major reasons are creating a cadence around ‘Cloud Computing’ which indicate it is coming of age. Those are:
Convergence – both Technology convergence and convergence ‘in the round’ bringing all these other elements together. A number of technologies have matured both individually and together to the point that this is technically feasible in a manner that is consumable by the ‘long tail’ and now the Enterprise.
Economy – the current recession and downturn, coupled with the fact that this is technically achievable, demand that new models of accessing computing services are accessible to consumers and organisations.
Familiarity – people are familiar and open to the idea of using services and infrastructure ‘on the cloud’.
Openness – approaches to sharing, open standards, open source and ‘vendor neutral stacks’ are all key elements to why the technology is accessible and why adoption has become compelling and interest is being driven out.
CB: Felt that High Speed Broadband was key to the adoption of Cloud Services and that the lack of further investment in Broadband would inhibit take up.
KS: Re-iterated that maturing technology and convergence meant that the time was right for Cloud Computing.
Now: I see now that when I talk about Cloud Computing, I generally mean application level IaaS and PaaS, i.e. development and engineering platforms, whereas a lot of people are including SaaS into the cut. I’ve had a number of conversations where the person I’m speaking with sees little, if no, distinction between Google App Engine (a PaaS play) and HotMail (a SaaS play). High speed Broadband is important, but, for me, in the context of the critical national infrastructure of the UK and important for the economic viability of the UK. For Charles high speed broadband is critical for Nasstars service because their customers depend on the reliability, level of concurrency, and latency, of the network connectivity provided to access that service.
For this stuff to become truly embedded it will need to move from the man in the street to the corporate. Corporate CIOs are a risk averse bunch especially when you move into some sectors (e.g. Financial Services). What will influence the CIOs’ buying decision?
WTH: Two pressures, one internal and one external, I feel will primarily drive adoption, and that they are both analogous to previous ‘waves’ of innovation:
Internal Demand; the PC revolution compared to the Cloud revolutionOne of the biggest drivers of the PC (and Windows) revolution had been the dichotomy, and apparent poor relations, between Business Departments and IT Departments within Enterprises. Prior to the PC revolution when a Enterprise’s Business Unit requested new electronic and computer enabled services there was a perception, real or imagined, that they would be given a straight “No” to their request, or at least a hefty price tag and possibly a long wait for the service to be enabled, plus there was always the added danger of the project not completing at all. Frustrations ran high amongst Enterprise Business departments when the advent of the Micro-computer lead to Business Department managers realising that for relatively little cost they could introduce computers onto people’s desks and use them to fulfil their own IT needs. For the first time users had access to technology without a central IT department dictating to them how they should use that technology. And so begin the proliferation of Desktop and Workgroup ‘server’ bound applications that as an industry we’ve only really rolled back into the Enterprise IT estate through rigorous integration and standardisation.The ease of Business departments in accessing cloud based computing facilities with a simple credit card transaction was very similar to the PC revolution when the growth in local applications first exploded across corporate. I see this as a significant internal pressure on the IT department and CIO driven by their own Business departments.
Competitive Pressure; the Internet revolution and the Cloud revolutionWhen I was first involved with building out web infrastructure I recall that they were a large number of Enterprises that considered the Internet a ‘fad’, a temporary and passing fashion; who could blame them when even IT industry business leaders like Bill Gates didn’t understand what was going on with the Internet until as late as 1995. We all watched masses of corporates being over taken by the new pure play Internet companies, before elephantine they started to build their own web brochure ware and e-commerce sites. I expect this pattern to play out again and see small start-up organisations which embrace the cost saving and time to market advantages of Cloud Computing to ‘out compete’ many of the legacy businesses.
The progressive and savvy CIOs are beginning to understand these pressures, and some do already, they will be starting to do R&D; around adopting Cloud services and developing their Cloud Compute strategies. Early adopters will be looking to sign up cloud providers as partners to use by the business departments and, where possible, avoiding having to integrate services deployed across multiple dissimilar Cloud providers (with differing stacks and engagement models). Some will looking at providing internal cloud services to avoid many of these problems completely (and to be seen as providing future proofed and strategic capabilities to the business).
More reactionary CIOs will wait until they are forced to adopt the technology; sadly some of them even to the point at which it is too late and they are being driven out of business by the competition (as in the initial phases of the Internet revolution).
I don’t want to give the impression that the more cost conscious CIOs won’t be amongst the group leading the charge to adopt Cloud services, because they are genuinely going to be at the fore front of looking at how to get the best business value to IT spend ratios.
It was all very easy when you went out and bought or developed software, installed it yourself, ran it yourself, etc. Does working in the cloud bring new issues with regards to data ownership, IP rights, other legal issues, etc.?
WTH: I think this is very much an “undiscovered country”; I don’t think we’ll know much until we’re there. Legislation appears to me to be reactionary, and often set after the event.
What we know about doing business on the Internet will still remain as good experience when it comes to adopting Cloud models. Additional areas that the new Cloud adopter may want to consider are: privacy and privileged user access (who has access to your data? and what can they do with it?), regulatory compliance, data location, data segregation (and ‘sharding’), Recovery, Investigative Support, Long term viability (is your Cloud provider about to be bought out by your competitor?), competing with your Cloud provider (does part of your business compete with part of your Cloud providers?), Technical Implementation (what security technology do they have ‘baked’ in?), and Service levels (is the service available when you need or are legally responsible to be?).
Around privacy I have some specific concerns, for instance, laws governing the wholesale manipulation of large scale amounts of personally referable data is only really being worked out now. While certain companies promise to “do no evil” who is privy to how the information they are able to gather is used? And some of the largest Social Network sites in the World have still yet to find revenue generating business models, there are plenty of people who are uncomfortable not knowing what they might do to achieve profitability and what implication this will have legally. Similarly laws around copyright, distribution and ‘ownership’ are being put under significant pressure by the way people and organisations now have access to information and share data across the Internet.
CB and KS: Both of the other panellists believed that the Cloud model would make compliance easier; centralization of data away from a localized pc hard drive model will help the business manage compliance (please note both responses where much longer and complete than this, but I didn’t capture them as well as I’d have liked).
What is your vision for the future and where this goes?
WTH:There’s two parts to this; the evolution of Cloud Computing and the evolution of the Web itself.
Firstly around Cloud Computing there’s a great deal going on at the moment, including conversations around standardisation and integration of Cloud services. Early drivers include organisations like the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) who are looking at interoperability across Cloud providers. For the most part I think were going to see standardisation around the virtual stack and platform offered to the developers much sooner than any actual standardisation between interfaces and meta-interfaces. That’s the advantage of the virtualised and vendor neutral stack; it’s inclusive, well known by the developer community and a ‘level playing field’. Increasingly we’re going to see services and capabilities built straight over the Cloud, with fewer and fewer infrastructure build-outs, certainly amongst the start-up community.
Unfortunately Cloud Computing hasn’t quite hit the peak of it’s hype curve yet and is certainly “No Silver Bullet” to peoples problems; however it is a fresh approach at how they can procure Service, Platform and Infrastructure capability and, to an extent, allowing them to reduce overall CapEx and offset some of that CapEx for OpEx.
Secondly around the way in which the Web is changing; I think that there is going to be two major technology revisions and one major technology improvement. One of the these technology revisions is that of combinative approaches to deliver functionality; real “Mash up”s that deliver genuine functional benefit, effectively the complex web stack. You could see this as a continuation of the Read Write Web and Web 2.0 but the multi-service enabled applications being greater than the sum of their parts, and although we’ve seen a little of this in Google Maps, etc., I think that it still due to deliver unexpected functionality. The next major technology revision is that of the semantic web, or rather more tagging, tagged data and micro-formats, will lead to an ever increasingly linked and related web, one the pundits are calling web 3.0; whilst this is interesting and will of course generate a variety of useful, innovative and supporting technologies it will actually act as a leap pad to another significant technology plateau. The major technology improvement is that of ubiquitous ‘agent based computing’; once the Internet is much more easily transposable, due to the semantic web and the wholesale tagging of unstructured data across it these agents will be able to ‘scuttle off’ and work for you in the background. At the moment search engines and their ilk use spiders and web crawlers to gather data, but imagine that Google’s web crawlers worked for you, coupled with improvements in analytic processing, doing tasks related to your workload and preceding it. For instance imagine the time when your ‘agent’ will access your diary, interpret your meeting and work needs, go off and collate data, distilling it down as research and presenting it for you in the appropriate format prior to your schedule; this will be the next great lead forwards enabled by computing and networking technology.
These are the major items, of course there’s loads more to come; from the evolution of Social Networks, the new approaches to “Web Science”, the coming explosion of analytic processing across the Web and Enterprise, how Enterprises will evolve due to the new architectural models driven from the web, how computing and computer science will combine with other disciplines and scientific branches to create exponential benefit, and, if it comes to it, the ‘Singularity’, a technology epiphany implied by a long-term pattern of accelerating change.
An audience driven Q and A session including responses to “What do you think of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud initiative?” and “What is Sun’s Cloud Computing strategy?”
Audience: What do you think of Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy?
WTH: Personally I think it’s an interesting, and yet difficult (for MS) play. There are two major issues that MS have to address; firstly public perception of MS as a Monopoly and someone they don’t feel comfortable sharing information with, never mind their corporate data on the ‘Cloud’, and secondly the apparent complexity of the Azure architecture. The early slides I saw showed a four layer architecture, but with each layer having four layers, so sixteen layers before you even look at how you deploy your services – ouch. I can see why they’ve done some of this, basically to make it easy to adopt existing .Net Client-Server applications in Azure and to provide a whole suit of capabilities, but this assumes that the majority of early Azure developers are going to be ones with existing applications and that Cloud developers don’t care about vendor neutral stacks, something I believe they do.
Audience: What is Sun’s Cloud Computing strategy?
WTH: Frankly I’m not party to the conversations around setting our Cloud Strategy, although I have been giving feedback from the field organisation and influencing where possible; my remit is the UK and Ireland and how Sun addresses that marketplace. However I think that our Cloud strategy will map to and exceed customer expectations. Customers in the UK are asking for three things when it comes to Cloud Computing and I expect Sun to have a way to engage at those three points of opportunity. They are:
Cloud “web” services; i.e. people are asking if we have an online Cloud service that they can use, like Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine. Lew Tucker, CTO of Sun’s Cloud Computing business unit, has already confirmed that Sun is building an online ‘pay by the sip’ Cloud; and Dave Douglas, EVP for Cloud Computing at Sun, is due to deliver a major status update at CommunityOne.
Cloud build outs; i.e. people are asking if we can help build Clouds with them, whether this is internal or external, public or private, or hybrids of these. We can help them with Professional Services to build these Clouds, Managed Services to operate them, and technologies at all layers of the Cloud stack, such as infrastructure, hardware, operating systems, databases, open storage, platform, applications, virtualisation, systems management, and automated provisioning.
Cloud technology innovation adoption; i.e. I hear plenty of customers say that they are not ready to use external clouds, nor build one themselves, however these customer are saying that they’d really like to use certain components of our Cloud technologies. Virtualisation and automated provisioning are two of the most frequently spoken about, along with large scale and highly available MySQL installations, and again we can help them with a full range of Services and Technologies that meet these requirements. I expect that there will be increasing demand for the Q-Layer technologies in this space as people look at virtualising the ‘vertical slice’ (the complete set of components needed to provide an end to end transaction).
At Sun UK we recently supported and attended “Entrepreneur Country” a major European Start Up and VC event.
Acting as a rallying cry to the entrepreneurial, VC and Start-up communities, the event affirmed that now is the best time to start your own company and that entrepreneurs were key to the recovery of the economy from the recession. Almost 300 of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs, including Caffè Nero founder Gerry Ford and Betfair co-founder and Chairman Edward Wray, shared stories of success at the event. Roman Stanek, a founder of NetBeans, and now founder and CEO of Good Data Corp and successful serial entrepreneur, said “tough times create tough companies”, whilst Gerry Ford, urged us to “be restless and relentless” in the pursuit of success. The seminars were held at the Institute of Directors (IoD) in central London and coincided with the official launch of Entrepreneur Country online.
Other highlights of the day included keynotes from Sir Paul Judge (from the Enterprise Education Trust on ‘Risk and Enterprise’), Glen Manchester (Founder and CEO of Thunderhead), Ed Wray (Co-Founder and Chairman of Betfair), Niall Harbison (Founder and Chef at iFoods.tv), and David Courtier-Dutton and Paul Brown (from SliceThePie).
The event was organised and hosted by Ariadne Capital, an entrepreneurial investment and advisory firm. Ariadne was set up by current CEO Julie Meyer; probably best known as being a founder of First Tuesday, the largest global network of entrepreneurs (which many credit for igniting the Internet generation across Europe).
The agenda also included two panel sessions discussing Online Gaming (and virtual worlds) and Cloud Computing (and, to an extent, it’s impact on the entrepreneurial, VC and Start-up communities and how they might best capitalise on it). The later of which I had been asked to take part in of behalf of Sun. Cannily I kept mental notes and have been able to write the session up as a separate blog post “Cloud Computing panel interview with Sun Microsystems at ‘Entrepreneur Country’“.
To whet your appetite for the article above the questions we were asked included:
Surely we’ve heard all of this before in various forms and guises? What is different this time? Why will it work? #
For this stuff to become truly embedded it will need to move from the man in the street to the corporate. Corporate CIOs are a risk averse bunch especially when you move into some sectors (e.g. Financial Services). What will influence the CIOs’ buying decision? #
It was all very easy when you went out and bought or developed software, installed it yourself, ran it yourself, etc. Does working in the cloud bring new issues with regards to data ownership, IP rights, other legal issues, etc.? #
What is your vision for the future and where this goes? #
An audience driven Q and A session including responses to “What do you think of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud initiative?” and “What is Sun’s Cloud Computing strategy?” #
I really enjoyed the day and had a productive time networking and meeting people, all of whom shared with me their vision, enthusiasm and wonderful business ideas. I met people from MovieStorm, TechnologyDen, NewVoiceMedia, Broadcom UK, SaaSPlex, Spinvox, Teamer, and a quite a few others too. Some of these companies had been funded by Enterprise Ireland and it was very good to see them there as well as representatives from the UK’s Technology Strategy Board.
On the night we went to an associated networking dinner where I fell deep into conversation with a number of people including Paul Flanagan, Executive for Digital Entertainment at Ariadne, Declan Cunningham, Director at Ariadne, and Tom Salmon, founder of AfterShow and Traffic Digital.
The event was supported by the Sun UK Internet Business team, led by Paul Tarantino, with additional support from Simon Culmer, Director of Sales from the UK executive management team, as well as myself. Here’s the official write up, a variety of photos taken and also a selection of video recordings.
Thanks to Rebecca Temple, Manager of Portfolio Marketing at Ariadne, here’s a variety of some of the other coverage of the day, much of it focused on the business messages we heard:
The last of the three articles discussed the UK G2G systems and how they might end up being integrated together, I postulated that there were two major approaches a point-to-point “Mesh” approach or a master G2G “Hub” approach. I also mentioned the “Decentralised” Hub model brought to my attention by Simon Freeman, ex Chief Architect of the Government Gateway, a major UK G2G system. The “Decentralised” Hub is a model whereby one of the existent G2G systems effectively evolves into the master G2G Hub.
Mesh
Hub
Decentralised Hub
I agreed with Simon that the most likely candidate was the Government Gateway because of it’s dominance in terms of volume and variety of data in comparison to the other UK G2G systems. Every day this becomes more and more likely as the number of messages originating from non Gateway sources increases.
Following the post Simon was kind enough to respond to the article and a couple of the comments that had been posted there. He makes a number of points specifically about identity and how it it is managed in the UK, as well as the Data Protection Act and it’s effect on UK Government IT planning, which I think are interesting enough to repeat here.
Here’s his post in full:
Hi Wayne,
Thanks for pointing out my new found fame on your blog. I would point out these views below are mine and not government’s, not least of all because I don’t work for gov any more. I must admit that it amuses me a great deal when identity is discussed by IT suppliers. In fact I had a good laugh when Mr XYZ representing IT suppliers of Gov came on Radio 4 on Sunday and moaned about the lack of requirements on the identity programme. I would be interested to hear your views. And to Miles Peters’ comment above, I think it important to note that SUN provided a ‘hub’ to the Home Office some time back and despite the fact that Gateway is all built on Wintel, Wayne consistently has supported its use.
One of the issue facing government on identity is that it is not a technical problem. If gov takes forward a huge programme of IT without solving the business issues it would surely be guilty of not learning past lessons. As far as I can see, they have taken a look at what is needed in gov from a identity perspective and realised that there is plenty there to be getting on with.
Identity cards are continually focused on anti-terrorism devices. This position has no credibility because the focus is on ‘card’ and not the wider identity needs. A card carrying population will still have terrorists.
So IMHO the way to look at ID is to look at the outcomes gov needs to achieve and then look at the best way to achieve them.
So let’s have a go.
1) Reduction in fraud in benefits
2) Immigration controls
3) Reduction in tax fraud and avoidance
4) Entitlement to other Gov servics (NHS etc)
In the UK there is a basic set of issues to do with benefit and tax. There are 4 key categories
1) The people who knowingly defraud tax and benefit system
2) The people who defraud tax and benefits by accident because the system is hard.
3) The people who pay the right tax and benefits by accident because the system is hard
4) The people who pay the right tax and benefits because the know what they are doing.
To help 1-4 above, identity management needs to ensure that each person who is liable for tax and benefits has one identity tied to one human being. I suspect that what government has realised is that a huge % of our population has an NI number but until now HMRC would not allow the number to be used for wider purposes. This seems to be changing. Once we are in a position where each taxpaying person or benefit receiving person is identified consistently by a single number such as NI it means that better detection of fraud can occur and save the UK a huge amount of money. The second issue once you have all these NIs is to tie a single human being to its ownership and ensure that there are ways to detect if any given human is attempting to get two identities. Thats where the biometrics come in. So I suspect that the reason the big IT approach for identity cards is being revisited is that by simply widening NI usage across Gov and reusing the database already in existence in DWP the Gov can go a long way to achieving some of its goals. Introduction of biometrics is a harder problem to solve technically but we can start to reap big benefits from just the first step.
I won’t go into the other points in the initial 4 as this is already way too long. I would however counter the position on DPA. It is by far the biggest excuse I have heard in gov for not solving these problems and yet has very few grounds. I firmly believe that if you want services from gov then you need to accept a certain loss of privacy. It is a difficult pill to swallow but ultimately there are lots and lots of bad people out there who are robbing hard working tax payers of lots and lots and lots of money. Why is it unreasonable to ask people to prove their identity. We should also note that the privacy being fought for is only perceived anyway. If gov wants to cross check your details because of fraud suspicion then data can be shared. It is just unreliable ad costs money (us money).
Let me put this another way. If we assume benefit and tax fraud costs the UK (guess only) 4 billion pounds per year. Now lets say that the average tax payer pays about 20K per year in total taxes (its probably far less). That means that 200,000 people’s hard earned tax cash will simply walk out the door this year. Let’s put it another way. That means that for a working life of 30 years over 6000 people will work all their lives paying tax to cover 1 year’s losses to people who think it is ok to defraud the UK tax and benefit system. Now put yourself in one of those 6000 people’s shoes. You will pay taxes all of your life for nothing and so will every one you know, and probably most of the people you will ever know. Next year, another 4 billion will go missing.
Data protection should not be an excuse for such haemorrhaging of cash.
The one final point which I think demonstrates the real issue to be sorted out by ID. The guy on Radio 4 said that even if ID agency gets the solution on there is no obligation for any Gov department to sign up and use. I am not sure what is more outrageous, the possibility that they may not sign up or that they are given an option at all.
So let’s not get to wrapped up in tech on ID. There’s load’s to be done with what we have if the right policy and delivery was put in place today. Further IT spend is just a red herring. A very expensive red herring.
IMHO
PS. You can tell this is a techie blog as you have to type in BR in the text to get a new line!
I really should reply to Simon’s request to hear my views on the identity programme and the relationship to and opinions of the vendor community of the programme (as I see it); I’ll try and do this soon for the readers of this blog. I’ve spoken to Simon a number of times since he posted the above and we’ve talked about the subject of this post, so really I’ll be using the upcoming response as an opportunity to state my opinions.
One of the highlights of the UK technology calendar, the jointly hosted BCS and IET Turing Lecture, takes place over the coming week. Sir Michael Brady FRS FEng, BP Professor of Information Engineering, Keeble College, University of Oxford, will be presenting his lecture “Information Engineering and it’s future”. Summarising his knowledge in the areas of mobile robotics, computer vision, signal processing, medical image analysis and artificial intelligence, Professor Sir Brady will then examine what information engineering really means and the possibilities for the future of the field.
This article was originally a guest post I did recently for Stewart Townsend over at Sun Startup Essentials describing the cloud relationship model I had developed as an artefact when discussing cloud computing.
I wanted a simply model which I could share with people and use as a discussion point, whilst still capturing the major areas of cloud computing which I considered most pertinent. I developed this model about six months ago and have since found it useful when talking with people about cloud computing.
Here’s the model and I’ll go though it’s major elements below.
Major Cloud Communities
In the cloud there are three major participants:
the Cloud Providers; building out Clouds, for instance Google, Amazon, etc. Effectively technology providers.
the Cloud Adopters / Developers; those developing services over the Cloud and some becoming the first generation of Cloud ISVs. I have included Cloud “Service” developers and Cloud ISV developers together. This group are effectively service enablers.
Cloud “End” Users; those using Cloud provisioned services, often without knowing that they are cloud provisioned, the most obvious example of which are the multitude of Facebook users who have no idea there favorite FB app. is running on AWS. These are the service consumers.
I think it’s important to talk about these communities because I keep hearing lots about the Cloud Providers, and even more about the issues and ‘needs’ of the Cloud adopters / developers, but very little in terms of Cloud “End” Users. In a computing eco-system such as this where “services” are supported by and transverse technology providers, service enablers and service consumers an end to end understanding of how this affects these reliant communities is required. Obvious issues such as SLAs for end users and businesses which rely upon high availability and high uptime from there cloud providers come to mind; however other “ilities” and systemic qualities come to mind such as security, and that’s before looking at any detailed breakdown of functional services.
The point here is that the cloud adopters / developers and interestingly the cloud “watchers” (i.e. the press, media, bloggers and experts) would be mindful to remember the needs and requirements of genuine end users; for myself it’d certainly be invigorating to hear more on this topic area.
Billing / Engagement Models
Simon Wardley, a much more eloquent public speaker than myself, does a wonderful pitch which includes a look at the different “as a Service types” which he boils down to being a load of “*aaS” (very amusing, and informative, try and catch Simon presenting if you can).
I wholeheartedly agree that there is a large amount of befuddlement when it comes to the differing “*aaS” types and sub-types, and new ones are springing up relatively frequently, however I also think it’s important to not ignore the differences between them.
For me, and many others, I think first popularised by the “Partly Cloudy – Blue-Sky Thinking About Cloud Computing” white paper from the 451 Group, the differing “*aaS” variants are identified as billing and engagement models. That white paper also postulates the five major Cloud Computing provider models, into which the majority of minor “*aaS” variants fall. They are:
Managed Service Provision (MSP); not only are you hiring your service from the cloud, you’ve someone to run and maintain it too.
Software as a Service (SaaS); pretty much ubiquitous as a term and usually typified by Salesforce.com, who are the SaaS poster child.
Platform as a Service (PaaS); the application platform most commonly associated with Amazon Web Services.
Also included in the diagram are the major architectural layers that are included in each of the above billing / engagement models offered by the Cloud providers. They are:
Operations; and this really is operations supporting functional business processes, rather than supporting the technology itself.
Service layer; made up of application code, bespoke code, high-level ISV offerings.
Platform layer; made up of standard platform software i.e. app. servers, DB servers, web servers, etc., and an example implementation would be a LAMP stack.
Infrastructure layer; made up of (i) infrastructure software (i.e.virtualisation and OS software), (ii) the hardware platform and server infrastructure, and (iii) the storage platform.
Network layer; made up of routers, firewalls, gateways, and other network technology.
This rather oversimplifies the architecture, as it’s important to note that each of the cloud billing / engagement models use capabilities from each of the above architectural layers; for instance their can be a lot of service simply in managing a network, however these describe the major architectural components (which support the service being procured), not simply ancillary functions, effectively what are the cloud providers customers principally paying for.
Delta of Effort / Delta of Opportunity
This is much more than the ‘gap’ between the cloud providers and the cloud users, wherein the cloud adopters / developers sit, the gap between the cloud providers and the end cloud users can be called the delta of effort, but also the delta of opportunity.
It is the delta of effort in terms of skills, abilities, experience and technology that the cloud adopter needs to deliver a functional service to their own “End Users”. This will be potentially a major area of cost to the cloud adopters. But it’s also the delta of opportunity;in terms of ‘room’ to innovate.
The more capability procured from the cloud provider (i.e. higher up the stack as a whole), the less you have to do (and procure) yourself. However the less procured from the cloud provider the more opportunity you have engineer a differentiating technology stack yourself. This itself has it’s disadvantages because the cloud adopters / developers could potentially not realise the true and best value of their cloud providers infrastructure.
I suspect that there is an optimum level, around the Platform Layer, which abstracts enough complexity away (i.e. you don’t have to procure servers, networks, implementation or technology operations staff), but also leaves enough room to innovate and produce software engineered value. Arguably the only current successful cloud provider, based upon market share, perception, revenue and customer take up, is Amazon Web Services (AWS) who provide a PaaS offering.
Summary
Hope you enjoyed the article, in summary if developing cloud services or even building out a cloud infrastructure I would recommend that you focus on your users and if your a cloud provider, your users’ users; remembering that only a certain percentage of those users will be customers (I won’t getting into discussing Chris Anderson’s 5% recommended conversion rate for the long tail, however I would recommend understanding what some of those calculations might be).
If you’re looking to develop services over the cloud, think carefully about where you and your teams skills lie, and where would you most want them focusing there efforts; working on installing and tuning operating systems and application platforms or writing business value focused applications and services, before choosing at which level to engage with your cloud provider(s).
I haven’t mentioned enterprise adoption of cloud based services, and that’s because I’d like to post that in the near future in a different article.
