»
S
I
D
E
B
A
R
«
Life in the Clouds: how to migrate
Oct 26th, 2010 by evereq

Recently the term “Cloud–computing” (or more easy and quick “Cloud”) become not just a modern “buzz” word!
Whole a lot of companies start moving they business into the cloud(s) or plan to do so.
Many start ups initially build they solutions specially to run in the cloud.

It seems like if you working in some management position, and must predict technical future for you company (or your own) business, it’s very high probability that you already start thinking same way like companies / start ups I describe above or at least start doing huge research in that direction!

But as Mark Twain said “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”, simply follow “everybody” movements can lead to significant issues in the future!

So let’s quickly discuss following questions:

(1) when and why it make sense to move into the cloud from technical / business point of view
(2) how to do migration right and “safe” way

There are a lot of well known publications about (1), because every Cloud supplier (Google, Amazon or Microsoft for example) describe that in details to gather potential customers from regular hosting / collocation providers or to push customers that own already some server farm to migrate into the Cloud. Usually answer will be something like “you should do it as soon as possible, because it increase ROI, increase scalability, decrease maintain costs … bla .. bla.. bla..” Sure in some way they are right, i.e. for most of small / middle size businesses it’s DO make sense to migrate into clouds, unless they already invest a LOT into existed infrastructure (both hardware and software). But what is not acceptable is fact that some people (management, but not without pushing from low levels sometimes, i.e. from engineers) start really think / believe that (2) really does not make any big difference! I.e. just fact that you start migration and understand why to do it ASAP (ROI, bla bla bla) will lead your business to new levels, will save you a lot of money, will scale you to Google scale etc!
WRONG! It make absolutely critical difference HOW you migrate (2)!

Why its SO important HOW to do it? Lets give few reasons:

a) Most of cloud solutions require payments BY amount of requests (see Azure, Amazon RDS, Google storages etc), not just hourly rates!
And this can KILL some kind of businesses, if not to say MOST of the businesses!
It simply keep telling you something like: “you can’t scale PER customer actions because for each action from now on you should PAY”!
You pay when your customer come to each page that require trip to the database! Its not, it’s ABSOLUTELY different to situation that you have with hosting / collocation! From now on, you should optimize you data access, message queues not just to be able to scale, but to save COSTS for requests! Yep, most of clouds give you very CHEAP storage space, but they get much more from you because of millions of requests you get from customers that do not pay you PER page view in most of the cases!
Think for example situation that you have jobs board and your customers (companies usually) pay you when they add new vacancy! Does it make sense for you to pay for millions of search (browsing) users (you pay per each request to Cloud supplier), if you get money only from few people who post vacancies? And you should pay not only traffic (like it was with hosting providers), from now on in the cloud you should pay for search engine queries (requests to Solr / Lucene on multiple nodes for example), for MapReduce engine, for requests into database storage  (distributed hashtable or SQL database engine.. you still pay PER request) etc!

So? Before even consider moving into cloud you should think about all above and check is it will work for you! Even if you absolutely sure that it will, you anyway should care A LOT about code quality and additional features like distributed caching, replication effectiveness, traffic compressions etc! You should in most cases avoid many of such “hard” things in regular applications, but you simply can’t ignore them for most of real life application that should work in the Cloud!

b) You should migrate (or develop from begging) systems the way that they will be able to work OUTSIDE cloud! Why? Easy!

You do not have FULL control over your cloud supplier:

- It possible that supplier (Amazon, Google, MSFT or any other) will change prices or add additional fees
- It’s possible that you will want to migrate to different supplier tomorrow because it’s cheaper, or buy your own servers farm or / and even want to run OWN cloud (see Cloud.com).
- It’s possible that you will figure out that you was wrong with (1) above, i.e. you was think that you CAN afford to pay PER request, but was wrong and your servers get so huge traffic that your bills to cloud supplier quickly become not acceptable!
- etc

In all situations like above, it’s CRITICAL to be able to made a SWITCH! And that is what most of companies MISS! They simple couple technology into one Cloud supplier and did not have “back door” to quit!

From technical point of view (but sure it’s theme for different, dedicated post) you should design your architecture the way that your solution will work at least on dedicated servers farm in addition to selected Cloud. If you start using Azure Table Storage, Amazon SimpleDb or another other “cloud” specific data storage, make sure that you can execute your code on for example MongoDB, RavenDB or Cassandra and only then add support for Cloud storage! In case if you already have system that work locally (i.e. on regular dedicated server), you should make sure that you do not “broke” this functionality when start migration! And so on…

Sure it’s not all, I have much more to say about it. But it’s just enough to start at least think right way about life in the Clouds :)

Digital distribution platforms vs SaaS business models
Oct 20th, 2010 by evereq

Mozilla enters App Stores battle with Open Web Applications architecture – https://apps.mozillalabs.com/

So now we have whole a lot of different app stores to publish our apps from all major players like Google (Android, Chrome coming etc), Microsoft (WP7 for example), Apple (iPhone / iPad etc), Mozilla (coming), etc…

Interesting enough that most of them are big enough to take our (developers) attention because of really wide audience of potential app users!
It simply does not make sense anymore to ignore ANY of them :)

And what is interesting that “App Store” (or better to say “digital distribution platforms” as “App Store” actually Apple trademark…) business model (i.e “software FROM web to your device or specific OS or specific browser”) actually looks orthogonal to SaaS (i.e. “software as a service” or “software IN the web”, i.e. software that works in almost ANY browser powered device) model! Or not!??

Should we go in both directions together? Yep :)
But… How hard to grow in both!!!???

Google “Go” become “issue 9″
Nov 19th, 2009 by evereq

Today I get a talk with my friend regarding new programming language emerged by Google with “interesting” name  “Go”.

Actually we both agree that we don’t see any reason to invent another “low level” / “middle” level compiled programming language… with Nothing NEW inside (see notes at the end of the post)! Just reuse of best practices, but with a LOT of limitations compared with C++ for example  (just take a look here for some comparison information – most impressive that Google decide: “Go does not have classes with constructors or destructors. Instead of class methods, a class inheritance hierarchy, and virtual functions, Go provides interfaces, which are discussed in more detail below. Interfaces are also used where C++ uses templates.”… very strange for me… I can agree with C# approach for such details, but seems Google approach is too much!!! I note sure is it really OOP  or not if you have only interfaces in hands…. when I do everyday development in C#, at least few times per day I not happy that I don’t have true multiple inheritance, what developers will say about “Go” if they start use it everyday??? )!

Personally I think that if Google want invent some “own” programming language (and only in case if they really want OWN…) they need to take a look into high (or very high) level multi paradigm languages like  F# or Scala (or at least on Groovy with his meta programming features for example) and does not invent another “c/c++” or “Python” inspired language !

But what is most interesting and curious is that Google give the name for new language exactly same like another person name his language few years ago!  To be more concrete, go to the issue 9 page in google issues tracking page for new language:

“Issue 9: I have already used the name for *MY* programming language”

Amazing! Just read comments! Ha ha ha! Never see something like this before regarding programming languages! Google took this name and even not “google” for it ;-) ! Amazing stupid mistake! Yes, even companies like Google with best and talented people made such stupid mistakes! Actually, I not sure that name “Go” anyway is a good name for such language (and not only me think this way – read comments to issue 9 to get many examples!)…

Even for me, with average (or even low) level of English it looks strange that something that they promote as “fast” have the name “Go” (as we all know most of things that “Go” is slow by default)… Why they not name it “Run” , if they want that this language actually “run” ?! Or like many people suggest “Goo” (from Google) ?

Anyway, it looks really curious…….. :)

Hope this will just “push” Google to develop BETTER OWN language (it MUST be HIGH level or VERY HIGH level language for sure!!!) and probably select for it BETTER name!

Notes:
1) in this post I follow latest definitions for  “low level” and “high level” languages… Sure long time ago, “low level” was assembler and C was “high level” language! But currently, it looks like languages like C become really “low level” also! You can check for example following Wikipedia article to get more information).  After reading most of information on Go language website, I still not sure can we call this language “Object Oriented” for example… In most areas approach of Google looks minimum “strange”… Except maybe how they implement concurrency… Maybe I just need to try to code something on it to get  better understanding?)
2) Please note that I DON’T describe “Go” language as “bad” language. Instead I just put it to “low level” or “middle level” where it looks perfectly!  Sure Google will found A LOT of ways how to use this language (and I think maybe already found such ways – for example to embed it in Chrome – read more here) and will “push” usage of  this language inside Google and sure outside! And Google really have resources to do this! And some people will probably LIKE new simple but speed language! What I just NOT happy is that this language is NOT really high level language (NO Generics for example, at least by now!). Sure it’s just first release, maybe Google will improve it… but  Google likes “minimalism” style, so….. Anyway, let’s just wait a little! Maybe they change language name and Universe! ;-)

Amazon AWS Big News for developers
Nov 13th, 2009 by evereq

Because I build some projects with support of Cloud deployment scenarios (currently for Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure) and I am sure that best Web software must be ready to be deployed in Cloud(s), it was very interesting to read latest announcement from Amazon: “… AWS Software Development Kit (SDK) for .NET Now Available… “.

Sure it’s just a beginning for Amazon in development of real .NET SDK, but even with this version we can quickly build .NET applications that tap into AWS Cloud.   Yes,  even before developers have good libraries to build such applications, but now looks like we have first “standard” API from Amazon and this fact is very important!

For example, for Ruby there is no such official SDK (or Ruby gem), and developers can choice from few available gems (right_aws, amazon-ec2 or AWS:S3 to name just few).  The same situation for Java - available a lot of “community” libraries, but no official SDK… (ok, ok, for Java we have at least official AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, but Toolkit it is not SDK!!!).

But why it is important to have official “language specific” SDK?

Well, first of all, now because Amazon have few BIG rivals, like Google App Engine (and we know that Google DO have official SDKs, more so, for both Python and Java!) and Microsoft Azure (sure Microsoft always have SDKs – it a BIG plus for Microsoft!).

Also it is important for developers, so they know that if they take some library and put this library as “base” for communications with a Cloud, they will not need to dial with changes in API in case of library author decide to drop development! It is important to have SDK that will be up to date with company services (Amazon in our case), just because we developers want to be SAFE! Sure it is good if there are a lot of open source libraries that EXTEND SDK some way, but it’s just “add-ons” and can’t replace real official SDK!

So it is really BIG day for Amazon and .NET developers – first official “language specific” SDK, and for .NET!!! What will be answer from Microsoft Azure that is still in “Beta”? ;-)

Note: in this post I mean “language specific” SDK, not just common SDK that list API for Web Services  with samples how to use them for example, etc… Because most of they time developers dial with some specific language, it is important for services like AWS to provide language specific SDKs so developers can really quickly and “safely” create applications using such “language specific” SDKs! Hope you understand what I mean ;-)

»  Substance: WordPress   »  Style: Ahren Ahimsa
© Copyright 2008–2010 EvereQ.com All rights reserved. Logos, company names used here if any are only for reference purposes and they may be respective owners right or trademarks.