William Vambenepe's blog

This Forbes article (via John) channels 3Tera’s Bert Armijo’s call for standardization of utility computing. He calls it “Open Cloud” and it would “allow a company’s IT systems to be shared between different cloud computing services and moved freely between them“. Bert talks a bit more about it on his blog and, while he doesn’t reference the Forbes interview (too modest?), he points to Cloudscape as the vision.

A few early thoughts on all this:

• No offense to Forbes but I wouldn’t read too much into the article. Being Forbes, they get quotes from a list of well-known people/companies (Google and Amazon spokespeople, Forrester analyst, Nick Carr). But these quotes all address the generic idea of utility computing standards, not the specifics of Bert’s project.
• Saying that “several small cloud-computing firms including Elastra and Rightscale are already on board with 3Tera’s standards group” is ambiguous. Are they on-board with specific goals and a candidate specification? Or are they on board with the general idea that it might be time to talk about some kind of standard in the general area of utility computing?
• IEEE and W3C are listed as possible hosts for the effort, but they don’t seem like a very good match for this area. I would have thought of DMTF, OASIS or even OGF first. On the face of it, DMTF might be the best place but I fear that companies like 3Tera, Rightscale and Elastra would be eaten alive by the board member companies there. It would be almost impossible for them to drive their vision to completion, unlike what they can do in an OASIS working group.
• A new consortium might be an option, but a risky and expensive one. I have sometimes wondered (after seeing sad episodes of well-meaning and capable start-ups being ripped apart by entrenched large vendors in standards groups) why VCs don’t play a more active role in standards. Standards sound like the kind of thing VCs should be helping their companies with. VC firms are pretty used to working together, jointly investing in companies. Creating a new standard consortium might be too hard for 3Tera, but if the VCs behind 3Tera, Elastra and Rightscale got together and looked at the utility computing companies in their portfolios, it might make sense to join forces on some well-scoped standardization effort that may not otherwise be given a chance in existing groups.
• I hope Bert will look into the history of DCML, a similar effort (it was about data center automation, which utility computing is not that far from once you peel away the glossy pictures) spearheaded by a few best-of-bread companies but ignored by the big boys. It didn’t really take off. If it had, utility computing standards might now be built as an update/extension of that specification. Of course DCML started as a new consortium and ended as an OASIS “member section” (a glorified working group), so this puts a grain of salt on my “create a new consortium and/or OASIS group” suggestion above.
• The effort can’t afford to be disconnected from other standards in the virtualization and IT management domains. How does the effort relate to OVF? To WS-Management? To existing modeling frameworks? That’s the main draw towards DMTF as a host.
• What’s the open source side of this effort? As John mentions during the latest Redmonk/Willis IT management podcast (starting around minute 24), there needs to a open source side to this. Actually, John thinks all you need is the open source side. Coté brings up Eucalyptus. BTW, if you want an existing combination of standards and open source, have a look at CDDLM (standard) and SmartFrog (implementation, now with EC2/S3 deployment)
• There seems to be some solid technical raw material to start from. 3Tera’s ADL, combined with Elastra’s ECML/EDML presumably capture a fair amount of field expertise already. But when you think of them as a starting point to standardization, the mindset needs to switch from “what does my product need to work” to “what will the market adopt that also helps my product to work”.
• One big question (at least from my perspective) is that of the line between infrastructure and applications. Call me biased, but I think this effort should focus on the infrastructure layer. And provide hooks to allow application-level automation to drive it.
• The other question is with regards to the management aspect of the resulting system and the role management plays in whatever standard specification comes out of Bert’s effort.

Bottom line: I applaud Bert’s efforts but I couldn’t sleep well tonight if I didn’t also warn him that “there be dragons”.

And for those who haven’t seen it yet, here is a very good document on the topic (but it is focused on big vendors, not on how smaller companies can play the standards game).

[UPDATED 2008/6/30: A couple hours after posting this, I see that Coté has just published a blog post that elaborates on his view of cloud standards. As an addition to the podcast I mentioned earlier.]

[UPDATED 2008/7/2: If you read this in your feed viewer (rather than directly on vambenepe.com) and you don't see the comments, you should go have a look. There are many clarifications and some additional insight from the best authorities on the topic. Thanks a lot to all the commenters.]

I just found out that I completly missed some interesting information about Oslo-related efforts at Microsoft. Back in February, Mary-Jo Foley reported on a new modeling language (code-name “D”, apparently) that is part of this initiative. And more recently she reported that David Chappell gave a presentation about Oslo (and more generally Microsoft’s SOA plans) at TechEd. He reportedly said that we should expect a new “schema language” (which Mary-Jo thinks is “D”). What I want to know is what its relationship is with SML/SDM and SCA.

Mary-Jo might not know about SCA and SML but I know that David does. He wrote this white paper about SCA and an article arguing that “Microsoft Should Not Support SCA” (based on an a questionable assessment that SCA is only about portability). He and I also had a little back-and-forth about SCA, SML and Microsoft in the comments section of his post. Unfortunately, David hasn’t blogged about Microsoft’s SOA strategy for a while for us non-TechEd people.

In addition to Mary-Jo’s report, the only information I was about to quickly dig out about David’s presentation is this blog post on Microsoft’s Israel site. Looks like David gave the same presentation at TechEd Israel 2008. Anyone who understands Hebrew cares to translate the blog? Fortunately there is a two-minutes video (also available here) in which we can hear David talk (in English). During the second of the two minutes you’ll hear and see something that could come straight out of a SCA presentation…

For some reason, David’s TechEd Israel presentation doesn’t seem to be listed here and TechEd online tells me that “Featured videos are unavailable at this time”. That’s both for IT Professionals and Developers. But of course they forced me to install Silverlight before telling me that.

I got a sneak peak at CMDBf v2 today.

I am calling it v2 based on the assumption that the one being currently standardized in DMTF will end up being called 1.0 (because it’s the first one out of DMTF) or 1.1 (to prevent confusion with the submitted version).

At the Semantic Technology Conference, David Booth from HP presented his work (along with his partner, Steve Battle from HP Labs) to provide a SPARQL front-end to HP’s Universal CMDB (the engine under what was the Mercury MAM product). Here are the slides.

The mapping from SPARQL to TQL (the native query interface for UCMDB) was made pretty easy by the fact that TQL is a graph-oriented query language. How much harder would it be to similarly transform a CMDBf (v1) query interface into a SPARQL query interface (and vice-versa)? Not much. The only added difficulty would come from the CMDBf XPath constraints. TQL has a property value mechanism that is very similar to CMDBf’s “propertyValue” constraint and maps well to SPARQL functions. The introduction of XPath as a constraint language in CMDBf makes things harder. It could be handled by adding XPath support to the SPARQL engine using function extensibility. Or by turning the entire XML into RDF and emulating XPath in SPARQL. But in either case, you’ll have impedence mismatch at some point because concepts such as element order that exist in XPath have no native equivalent in RDF.

The use of XPath in selectors on the other hand is not a problem. HP’s prototype uses Gloze (available as a Jena package) to turn the XML returned by UCMDB into RDF. An XSLT transform could turn that same XML into a CMDBf-valid XML response instead and that XSLT could easily handle the XPath selectors from the query request. This is another reason why constraints and selectors should remain separate in CMDBf (fortunately the specification is back to doing this properly).

Here is why I call this prototype CMDBf v2: The CMDBf effort (v1 or 1.1), in its current form of re-inventing a graph query, can succeed. Let’s assume the working group strikes a reasonable balance between completeness and complexity, and vendors choose to compete on innovation and execution rather than lock-in (insert cynical comment here). CMDBf may then end up being supported by the main CMDB vendors. It wouldn’t provide federation capabilities, but having a common CMDB query interface supported by the Big Four would help with management integration. And yet, while the value would be real, it would only provide a little help to solve a larger problem:

• As a technology limited to IT systems management, it would be unlikely to see widely available tools (e.g. user consoles and language-specific libraries).
• It wouldn’t get the kind of robustness and interoperability that comes from wide adoption. While pretty similar, there might be some minor differences in the various implementations. Once your implementation has been tweaked to work with the implementations from the Big Four, you’ll call it done. Just like SNMP, another technology that is specific to IT systems management (see it happen here).
• Even if it works perfectly at the query level, it will just hasten the time when developers run into the real problem, model interoperability. CMDBf doesn’t help at all with this. In fact, it makes it harder by hard-coding some dependencies on an XML back-end (the XPath constraints).

In the long run, IT management has to become more automated and integrated. That’s a given. The way it happens may or may not go through CMDB-like configuration stores. But if it does, we’ll have to eventually move beyond CMDBf (v1) towards something that addresses the three requirements above. And federation. I don’t know if it will be called CMDBf v2, and/or if it will come from the DMTF (by then, the CMDBf brand might be an asset or a liability depending on developer experience with the specification). But I strongly suspect (”probability 0.8″ as a Gartner analyst might put it) that it will use semantic technologies. Because the real, hard, underlying problem is a problem of semantic integration. In that sense, David and Steve’s prototype is a sneak peek at what will come after CMDBf v1/1.1.

Pretty much since the beginning of CMDBf I have been pushing for it to ideally embrace SPARQL (with no success) or to at least stay close to it conceptually in order to make the eventual mapping/evolution smooth (with a bit more success). This includes pushing for a topological query language, trying to keep XML idiosyncrasies at bay and keeping constraints and selectors cleanly separated. Rather than working within the CMDBf group, David took the alternative approach of simply doing it. Hopefully this will help convince people of the value of re-using semantic web technology for IT systems management. Yes semantic technologies have been designed for a much more general use case. But the use cases that CMDB systems address are a subset of the use cases addressed by semantic technologies. It’s hard for domain experts to see their domain as just a subset of a larger problem, but this is the case here. Isn’t HTTP serving the IT management community better than a systems management-specific alternative would?

By the way, there is no inferencing taking place in the HP prototype. We are just talking about re-using an existing, well though-through graph query language. Sure OWL inferencing and some rules could be seamless layered on top of this. But this is in no way required to do (better) what CMDBf v1 tries to do.

And then there is the “federation” question. Who do you trust more to deliver this? A bunch of IT system management architects in DMTF or the web and query experts at W3C, HP Labs etc who designed and implemented SPARQL over many years? BTW, it sounds like SPQARL federation was discussed at WWW 2008, based on these meeting notes (search for “federation”).

Somewhat lost in the news about Oracle’s recent earning report is the announcement that Oracle just purchased e-TEST suite from Empirix. We are not purchasing the company, just some of their products (they also sell VoIP testing tools, for example, which will stay with Empirix). Most importantly, we are also getting the people who made the product, not just a code dump. They’ll join the Enterprise Manager team (my group). Welcome aboard!

The e-TEST suite is made of three integrated components (I am describing the current e-TEST suite, not necessarily the resulting Oracle offering):

• e-Manager Enterprise is a process management application for application testing.
• e-Tester lets you easily create sophisticated tests for functional and regression testing.
• e-Load is a load and performance testing framework.

(these product names make me feel like I am back in HP’s e-speak team)

This is a mature product suite that will increases the scope and depth of EM’s application testing capabilities. It extends the existing EM recorder/beacon infrastructure. It offers a sophisticated test transaction model (remember VBA?). It offers load testing capabilities. Not to mention the process management capabilities around test cases.

My toddler daughter loves her book about the solar system. She has learned to say “hot!” whenever we look at Mercury. Tonight I’ll have to teach her to say “feeling the heat” instead.

More info here. That is probably also where specific product plans will be released.

If you’ve ever been to an Oracle Open World presentation, you won’t be surprised to see that this post ends with a disclaimer that:

It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality and should not be relied upon in making a purchasing decision. The development, release and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

I heard tonight for the first time of a company called Elastra. It sounds like they are trying to address a variation of the data center automation use cases covered by Opsware (now HP) and Bladelogic (now BMC). Elastra seems to be in an awareness-building phase and as far as I can tell it’s working (since I heard about them). They got to me through John’s blog. They are also using the more conventional PR channel (and in that context they follow all the cheesy conventions: you get to “unlock the value”, with “the leading provider” who gives you “a new product that revolutionizes…” etc, all before the end of the first paragraph). And while I am making fun of the PR-talk I can’t help zeroing on this quote from the CEO, who “wanted to pick up where utility computing left off – to go beyond the VM and toward virtualizing complex applications that span many machines and networks”. Does he feels the need to narrowly redefine “utility computing” (who knew that all that time “utility computing” was just referring to a single hypervisor?) as a way to justify the need for the new “cloud” buzzword (you’ll notice that I haven’t quite given up yet, this post is in the “utility computing” category and I still do not have a “cloud” category)?

The implied difference with Opsware and Bladelogic seems to be that while these incumbent (hey Bladelogic, how does it feel to be an “incumbent”?) automate data center management tasks in old boring data centers, Elastra does it in clouds. More specifically “public and private compute clouds”. I think I know roughly what a public cloud is supposed to be (e.g. EC2), but a private cloud? How is that different from a data center? Is a private cloud a data center that has the Elastra management software deployed? In that case, how is automating private clouds with Elastra different from automating data centers with Elastra? Basically it sounds like they don’t want to be seen as competing with Opsware and Bladelogic so they try to redefine the category. Which makes it easier to claim (see above) to be “the leading provider of software for designing, deploying, and managing applications in public and private compute clouds” without having the discovery or change management capabilities of Opsware (or anywhere near the same number of customers).

John seems impressed by their “public cloud” capabilities (I don’t think he has actually tested them yet though) and I trust him on that. Knowing the complexities of internal data centers, I am a lot more doubtful of the “private cloud” claims (at least if I interpret them correctly).

Anyway, I am getting carried away with some easy nitpicking on the PR-talk, but in truth it uses a pretty standard level of obfuscation/hype for this type of press release. Sad, I know.

The interesting thing (and the reason I started this blog entry in the first place) is that they seem to have created structures to capture system design (ECML) and deployment (EDML) rules. From John’s blog:

“At the core of Elastra’s architecture are the system design specifications called ECML and EDML. ECML is an XML markup language to specify a cloud design (i.e., multiple system design of firewalls, load balancers, app servers, db servers, etc…). The EDML markup provides the provisioning instructions.”

John generously adds “Elastra seems to be the first to have designed their autonomics into a standards language” which seems to assume that anything in XML is a standard. Leaving the “standard” debate aside, an XML format does tend improve interoperability and that’s a good thing.

So where are the specifications for these ECML and EDML formats? I would be very interested in reading them, but they don’t appear to be available anywhere. Maybe that would be a good first step towards making them industry standards.

I would be especially interested in comparing this to what the SML/CML effort is going after. Here are some propositions that need to be validated or disproved. Comparing SML/CML to ECML/EDML could help shade light on them:

• SML/CML encompasses important and useful datacenter automation use cases.
• Some level of standardization of cross-domain system design/deployment/management is needed.
• SML/CML will be too late.
• SML/CML will try to do too many things at once.

You can perform the same exercise with OVF. Why isn’t OVF based on SML? If you look at the benefits that could be theoretically be derived by that approach (hardware, VM, network and application configuration all in the same metamodel) it tells you about all that is attractive about SML. At the same time, if you look at the fact that OVF is happening while CML doesn’t seem to go anywhere, it tells you that the “from the very top all the way down to the very bottom” approach that SML is going after is very difficult to pull off. Especially with so many cooks in the kitchen.

And BTW, what is the relationship between ECML/EDML and OVF? I’d like to find out where the Elastra specifications land in all this. In the worst case, they are just an XML rendering of the internals of the Elastra application, mixing all domains of the IT stack. The OOXML of data center automation if you want. In the best case, it is a supple connective tissue that links stiffer domain-specific formats.

[UPDATED 2008/3/26: Elastra's "introduction to elastic programing" white paper has a few words about the relationship between OVF and EDML: "EDML builds on the foundation laid by Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) and extends that language's capabilities to specify ways in which applications are deployed onto a Virtual Machine system". Encouraging, if still vague.]

[UPDATED 2008/3/31: A week ago I hadn't heard of Elastra and now I learn that I had been tracking the blog of its lead-architect-to-be all along! Maybe Stu will one day explain what a "private cloud" is. His description of his new company seems to confirm my impression that they are really focused (for now at least) on "public clouds" and not the Opsware-like "private clouds" automation capabilities. Maybe the "private clouds" are just in the business plan (and marketing literature) to be able to show a huge potential markets to VCs so they pony up the funds. Or maybe they really plan to go after this too. Being able to seamlessly integrate both (for mixed deployments) is the holly grail, I am just dubious that focusing on this rather than doing one or the other "right" is the best starting point for a new company. My guess is that despite the "private cloud" talk, they are really focusing on "public clouds" for now. That's what I would do anyway.]

[UPDATED on 2008/6/25: Stephen O'Grady has an interesting post about the role of standards in Cloud computing. But he only looks at it from the perspective of possible standardization of the interfaces used by today's Cloud providers. A full analysis also needs to include the role, in Cloud Computing, of standards (app runtime standards, IT management standards, system modeling standards, etc...) that started before Cloud computing was big. Not everything in Cloud computing is new. And even less is new about how it will be used. Especially if, as I expect, utility computing and on-premise computing are going to become more and more intertwined, resulting in the need to manage them as a whole. If my app is deployed at Amazon, why doesn't it (and its hosts) show up in my CMDB and in my monitoring panel? As Coté recently wrote, "as the use of cloud computing for an extension of data centers evolves, you could see a stronger linking between Hyperic’s main product, HQ and something like Cloud Status".]