Category Archives: Application Mgmt

June 3, 2009

Interesting links

A few interesting links I noticed tonight.

HP Delivers Industry-first Management Capabilities for Microsoft System Center

That’s not going to improve the relationship between the Insight Control group (part of the server hardware group, of Compaq heritage) and the BTO group (part of HP Software, of HP heritage plus many acquisitions) in HP.  The Microsoft relationship was already a point of tension when they were still called SIM and OpenView, respectively.

CA Acquires Cassatt

Constructive destruction at work.

Setting up a load-balanced Oracle Weblogic cluster in Amazon EC2

It’s got to become easier, whether Oracle or somebody else does it. In the meantime, this is a good reference.

[UPDATED 2009/07/12: If you liked the “WebLogic on EC2” article, check out the follow-up: “Full Weblogic Load-Balancing in EC2 with Amazon ELB”.]

Full Weblogic Load-Balancing in EC2 with Amazon ELB

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Filed under Amazon, Application Mgmt, Automation, CA, Cloud Computing, Everything, HP, IT Systems Mgmt, Manageability, Mgmt integration, Microsoft, Middleware, Oracle, Utility computing, Virtualization

May 21, 2009

Cloud APIs need to be complemented by Cloud processes

A lot of attention has been focused on technical standards for Cloud computing, especially over the last month (e.g. DMTF incubator announcement). That’s fine, but before we go crazy with detailed technical standards let’s realize that for Cloud computing (of the public variety at least) to take off we’ll need just as much standardization of non-technical interactions. Namely processes.

This, to me, is one of the most interesting angles on the recent announcement by Amazon AWS that they now support (in limited beta) the ability to load data from storage that is physically shipped to them. Have a look at this announcement and you’ll notice that it spends more time describing a logistical process (how to pack, how to ship…) than technical interfaces (storage device requirements, how to create a manifest…). It is still part of the “AWS Developer Guide” but clearly these instructions are not just for developers.

Many more such processes need to be “standardized” (or at least documented) for companies to efficiently be able to use public Clouds (and to some extent even private Clouds). Let’s take SLAs as an example. It sounds good when a Cloud provider says “we offer SLAs”. But what does it mean? Does it mean “we advertise some SLA numbers, you’re responsible for contacting us (trough a phone number hidden somewhere on our site) when you think we’ve violated them; if we agree with your measurements then you may get a check in the mail at some point in the future”? Not so useful. If, on the other hand, there is a clear definition of the metric that the SLA applies to, a clear definition of how it gets measured (do we trust provider performance reports, customer measurement, a third party monitor…), a clear process to claim refund, a clear process to actually provide the refund (credit for future service or direct payment, when/how is the payment made…), then it becomes more useful.

I picked the SLA enforcement example because it happens to be an area that the TMF (TeleManagement Forum) has made partially available as a teaser for its eTOM business process framework (aimed at telco providers). The full list of eTOM processes is only available to paying subscribers. One of the goals of the eTOM process framework is “to simplify procurement, serving as a common language between service providers and suppliers”. Another way to say it is that eTOM “recognizes that the enterprise interacts with external parties, and that the enterprise may need to interact with process flows defined by external parties, as in ebusiness interactions”. Exactly what we are talking about when it comes to making public Clouds easily consumable by enterprises. SLA management is just one small part of the overall eTOM framework (if you look for it in this eTOM overview poster it’s in purple, under “assurance”, in the first row).

My point is not to assert that Cloud providers should adopt eTOM. Nobody adopts eTOM directly as a blueprint anyway. But, while the cultures and maturity levels are sometimes different, it is also hard to argue that Cloud providers have nothing to learn form telco providers (many of which are becoming Cloud providers themselves). I shudder at the idea of AT&T teaching another company how to handle customer service, but have you ever tried to call Google?

Readers of this blog are likely to be more familiar with ITIL than eTOM (who, incidentally, incorporates parts of ITIL in its latest version, 8.0). For those who don’t know about either, one way to think about it is that Cloud providers would implement processes that look somewhat like eTOM processes, that Cloud consumers implement IT management processes that follow to some extent ITIL best practices and that these two sets of processes need to meet for public Clouds to work. I touched on this a few months ago, when I commented on the incorporation of Cloud services in an IT service catalog.

My main point is not about ITIL or eTOM. It’s simply that there are important process aspects to delivering/consuming Cloud services and that they have so far been overshadowed by the technical aspects. The processes sketched in the AWS import/export capability represent the first drop of an upcoming shower.

[UPDATED 2009/5/22: More on telcos becoming Cloud providers from EMC’s Chuck Hollis, with a retort by James Governor. Just listing these as FYI but my main point in this post is not about telcos, it’s about the need to clarify processes, independently of whether the provider is Amazon or AT&T. It’s just that the telcos have been working on such process standardization for a long time. Hoff provides another example of where process standardization is needed in Cloud relationships: right to audit.]

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Filed under Amazon, Application Mgmt, Business Process, Cloud Computing, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, ITIL, Standards, Utility computing

May 20, 2009

IT automation: the seven roads to management middleware

You can call it a “Cloud operating system”, an “adaptive infrastructure framework” or simply “IT management middleware” (my vote) as you prefer. It’s the software that underpins the automation engine of your Cloud. You can’t have a Cloud without an automation engine, unless you live in a country where IT admins run really fast, never push the wrong button, never plug a cable in the wrong port, can interpret blinking lights at a rate of 9,600 bauds and are very cheap. The automation engine is what technically makes a Cloud. That engine is an application whose business is to know what needs to be done to maintain the IT environment you use in a state that is acceptable to you at any point in time (where you definition of “acceptable” can evolve). Like any application, you want to keep its business logic neatly isolated from the mundane tasks that it relies on. These mundane tasks include things like:

  • collecting events and delivered them to the right place
  • collecting metrics of the different IT elements
  • discovering available resources and accessing them (with or without agents)
  • performing coordinated actions on IT elements
  • maintaining an audit of management actions
  • securing the management interactions
  • managing long-running tasks and processes
  • etc

That’s what management middleware does. It doesn’t automate anything by itself, but it provides an environment in which it is feasible to implement automation. This middleware is useful even if you don’t automate anything, but it often doesn’t get called out in that scenario. On the other hand, automation means capturing more business logic in software which makes it imperative to clearly layer concerns, at which point the IT management middleware can be more clearly identified within the overall IT management infrastructure.

This is happening in many different ways. I can count seven roads to IT management middleware, seven ways in which it is emerging as an identifiable actor in data centers. Each road represents a different history and comes with different assumptions and mindsets. And yet, they go after the same base problem of enabling IT management automation. Here is a quick overview of these seven roads.

Road #1: “these scripts have to grow up”

This road starts from all the scripts common in IT operations and matures them. It’s based on the realization that they are crucial business assets, just like the applications that they support. And that they implement reusable patterns. Alex Honor described it well here. Puppet and Powershell are in this category.

Road #2: “it’s just another integration job”

We’ve been doing computer integration almost since the second piece of software was written. There are plenty of mechanisms available to do so. IT management is just another integration problem, so let’s present it in a way that allows us to use our favorite integration tools on it. That’s the driver behind the use of Web Services for management integration (e.g. WSDM/WS-Management): create interfaces to manageable resources so that existing middleware (mostly J2EE application servers, along with their WS stack) can be used to solve the “enterprise IT management” integration problems in a robust and reliable way. The same logic is behind the current wave of REST-based IT management efforts (see this presentation). REST is a good integration approach, so let’s turn IT resources into RESTful resources so we can apply this generic integration mechanism to enterprise IT management. Different tool, but same logical approach. Which is why they can be easily compared.

Road #3: “top-down”

This is the “high road”, the one most intellectually satisfying and most promising in the long term. But also the one with this highest hurdle off the gate. In this approach, you create a top-down model of your system and you try to mediate management actions through this model. But for this to be practical, you need to hit the sweetspot in many dimensions. You need composable sub-models at a level of granularity that makes them maintainable. You need to force enough uniformity but not so much as to loose all optimizations. You need to decide which of the myriads of configuration variables you include in your model. Because you can’t take the traditional approach of “I’ll model it and display it to my user who can decide what to do with it”. Because the user now is a piece of software and it can’t make a judgment of whether it is ok if parameter foo differs from the desires state or not. This has been worked on for a long time (remember HP’s UDC?) with steady but slow progress. Elastra has some of the most interesting technology there, and a healthy dose of realism and opportunism to make it work.

Think of it as SCA component/composites but not just for software artifacts. Rather, it’s SCA for all IT elements, with wires and policies that are just rich enough to allow meaningful optimization but not too rich to be unmanageable. If you can pull off such model-driven IT management middleware, then the automation code almost writes itself on top of it.

Road #4: “management integration is another feature of our management console”

That was the road followed by the Big Four. Buy enough of their products (CMDBs, network management console, operations console, service desk, etc…) and you’ll get APIs that allow you to leverage their discovery, collection, eventing and process management features. So you can write your automation on top. At least on paper. In reality, these APIs are too inconsistent and import/export-oriented to really support SOA-style (or REST-style) integration, even though they usually have a SOAP and/or plain HTTP option available. It’s a challenge just to get point to point integration between these products, even more a true set of management services that can be orchestrated. These vendors know it and rather than turning their product suites into a real SOI (Service Oriented Infrastructure) they have decided to build/buy automation engines on the side that can be hard-wired with the existing IT management products. That’s your IT management middleware but it comes bundled with the automation engine rather than as an independent layer.

Road #5: “management integration is another feature of our hypervisor”

If the virtual machine (in the x86 virtualization sense of the term, a.k.a. a fake machine) is the basic building block of your IT infrastructure then hypervisor interfaces to manipulate these VMs are pretty much all you need in terms of middleware to build data center automation on top, right? Are we done then? Not really, since there is a lot more to an application than the VMs on which it runs. Still, hypervisors bring the potential of automation to what used to be a hardware domain and as such play a big part in the composition of the IT management middleware of modern data centers.

Road #6: “make it all the same”

From what I understand about how Yahoo, Google (see section 2.1 “System Health Infrastructure”), Microsoft (see the “device manager” and “collection service” parts of Autopilot) and others run their Web applications, they have put a lot of work in that management middleware and have made simplicity a key design goal for it. To that end, they are  willing to accept drastic limitations at both ends of the IT infrastructure chain: at the bottom, they actively limit the heterogeneity of resources in the data center. At the top, they limit the capabilities exposed to the business applications. In an extreme scenario, all servers are the same and all the business applications are written to a few execution/persistence/communication environments (think GAE SDK as an example). Even if you only approximate this ideal, it’s a dramatic simplification that makes your IT management middleware much simpler and thinner.

Road #7: “it’s the Grid”

The Grid computing and HPC (High Performance Computing) communities have long been active in this area. There is a lot of relevant expertise in all the Grid work, but we also need to understand the difference between IT management middleware and the Grid infrastructure as defined by OGSI. OGSI defines a virtualization layer on which to build applications. It doesn’t define how to deploy, manage and configure the physical datacenter infrastructure that allows OGSI interfaces to be exposed to consumers. With regards to HPC, we also need to keep in mind that the profile of the applications is very different from your typical enterprise application (especially the user-driven apps as opposed to batch jobs). In HPC environments, CPUs can run at full capacity for days and new requests just go in a queue. The Web applications of your typical enterprise don’t have this luxury and usually need spare capacity.

All these approaches can complement each other and I am not trying to pin each product/vendor to just one approach. In this post (motivated by this podcast), Stu Charlton discusses the overlap and differences between some of these approaches. Rather than a taxonomy of products, this list of seven roads to IT management middleware is simply a cultural history, a reading guide to understand the background, vocabulary and assumptions of the different solutions. This list cuts across the declarative versus procedural debate (#1 is clearly procedural, #3 is clearly declarative, the others could go either way).

[UPDATED 2009/6/23: Stu has a somewhat related (similary structured but much more entertainingly writen) list of Cloud Computing approaches. I feel good that I have one more item in my list than him.]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Automation, Cloud Computing, Everything, Grid, IT Systems Mgmt, Mgmt integration, Middleware, Utility computing

May 4, 2009

Hyperic joins SpringSource

SpringSource’s Rod Johnson tells us today that his company just bought Hyperic. The press release is a bit more specific, announcing that SpringSource acquired “substantially all of the assets of Hyperic”, which sounds different from acquiring the company itself. Maybe not for SpringSource customers, but possibly for current Hyperic customers (and investors). Acquiring the assets of an open source company may sound like a bit of an oxymoron (though I understand it’s not just about the source code), but Hyperic is what’s called an “open core” company, which means not all the code is open source (see Tarus’ take on it). But the main difference between this and forking might be that you are getting the key employees; who are nice enough with their investors do to it in an orderly way.

Anyway, this is not a business or HR blog, it’s about the technology. And on that front, this looks like an interesting way for SpringSource to expand their monitoring from just the application down into some parts of the infrastructure, at least to some extent. SpringSource’s AMS (Application Management Suite) was already based on Hyperic, so the integration headaches should be minimal. And Hyperic has been doing some Cloud monitoring work too (see this podcast if you want to learn more about it), which if nothing else is PR gold these days (I am not saying it’s just that, but it is that for sure).

As a side note, it is ironic that Hyperic (which started inside Covalent until Javier Soltero spun it off and became its CEO) is now reunited with its mothership (SpringSource acquired Covalent last year).

I am a big proponent of management capabilities in application infrastructure. I applauded Rod Johnson for writing something along the same line last year and I am pleased to see him really push this approach with this acquisition.

Here are the questions that come to my mind when I read about this deal (keep in mind that this is competition from my perspective, so feel free to “question my questions” as you read):

I was going to ask whether this acquisition means that Hyperic users who don’t care for Spring are going to see diminishing value as the product becomes more tied to Spring. But if you look at what Hyperic gives you on the resources it manages, it’s mainly a list of metrics and a few control operations. These will still be there because they’ll be needed for the Spring-centric view anyway. It would be more of a question if Hyperic had advanced discovery features (e.g. examine all the config files of the managed resources and extract infrastructure topology from them). I would wonder if these would still be maintained/improved for non-Spring middleware. But again, not an issue here since I don’t think there is much of this in Hyperic today. And since presumably SpringSource made the acquisition in part to cover more resources types in their management offering (Rod talks about DB and VM management in his post), the list of supported infrastructure elements (OS, DB, VM, network…) will presumably grow rather than shrink. What may be trimmed down eventually is the list of application runtimes currently supported. If you’re a Hyperic/Coldfusion user you should probably attend the upcoming webcast to hear about the plans.

Still on the topic of Hyperic’s monitoring-only capabilities, it means that if Rod Johnson really wants to provide everything for Java developers to put “applications into production without the mediation of operations”, as he says, then he should keep his checkbook open (as a side note, if a developer puts “applications into production” then s/he doesn’t bypass operations but rather becomes operations; you may not think of yourself as one, but if you’re the one who gets called when the application crashes then you are in “operations”). SpringSource is still a long way from offering the complete picture. Here are my guesses for the management features on Rod’s grocery list:

  • configuration management -many potential acquisition candidates
  • in depth database management (going beyond the “you want metrics? we’ve got metrics!” approach to DB management) – fewer candidates

As far as in-house developement, I would expect this acquisition to first yield some auto-discovery of application (and infrastructure) topology in a Spring environment. Then they’ll have to decide if they want to double-down on Cloud support and build/buy more automation features or rather focus on application-centric management and join the fray of BTM / transaction tracing. Doing both at the same time would be very ambitious. This Register article seems to imply the former (Cloud) but my guess is that SpringSource will make the smart choice of focusing on the latter (application-centric management). I see in the Register that, “Peter Cooper-Ellis, SpringSource’s senior vice president of engineering and product management called management of the cloud and virtualized datacenters a strategic driver for the deal”. But this sounds more like telling a buzzword-hungry reporter what he wants to hear rather than actual strategy to me. We’ll see. I hope this acquisition and its follow-through will help move the industry in the right direction of application-centric management, something that will take more than one company.

[UPDATED 2009/5/7: A nice article on the acquisition by Charles Humble at InfoQ. Though I have to take issue with the assertion that “many aspects of monitoring that are essential in a data centre, such as OS and network monitoring, are irrelevant in the context of the cloud”.]

[UPDATED 2009/6/23: Via Coté, an announcement that shows that the Cloud angle might have more post-aquisition juice than I expected. Unless this thing coasted on momentum alone.]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Business, Cloud Computing, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, Manageability, Middleware, Open source, Spring, Utility computing

April 15, 2009

New release of Oracle Composite Application Monitor and Modeler

Version 10.2.0.5 of OCAMM (Oracle Composite Application Monitor and Modeler) was recently released. This is the ex QuickVision product from the ClearApp acquisition last year. It is doing very well in the Enterprise Manager portfolio. In this new release, it has grown to cover additional middleware and application products. So now, in addition to the existing support (J2EE, BPEL, Portal…), it lets you model and monitor deployments of the Oracle Service Bus (OSB) as well as AIA process integrations. Those metadata-rich environments fit very naturally in the OCAMM approach of discovering the distributed model from metadata and then collecting and reporting usage metrics across the whole system in the context of that model.

For a complete list of improvements over release 10.2.0.4.2, refer to the release notes, where we see this list of new features:

  • Oracle Service Bus Support: Oracle Service Bus (formerly called Aqualogic Service Bus) versions 2.6, 2.6.1, 3.0, and 10gR3 are now supported.
  • Oracle AIA Support: Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) 2.2.1 and 2.3 are now supported.
  • WLS and WLP Support: WebLogic Server and WebLogic Portal version 10.3 are now supported.
  • Agent Deployment Added: Agent deployment added to CAMM Administration UI to streamline configuration of new resources
  • Testing Added in Resource Configuration: Connectivity parameter testing added in resource configuration
  • Testing Added in Repository Configuration: Connectivity parameter testing added for CAMM database repository configuration
  • EJB and Web Services Support: EJB and Web Services Annotation are now supported

You can get the bits on OTN. Here is the installation and configuration guide and here is the user’s guide.

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Filed under Application Mgmt, BPEL, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, Manageability, Mgmt integration, Middleware, Modeling, Oracle

April 10, 2009

Reality check on Cloud portability

SD Times recently published an interesting article about “cloud interoperability”. It has some well-informed opinions. But, like all Cloud-related discussions, it also suffers from mixing a bunch of things. The word “interoperability” is alternatively applied to the Cloud infrastructure services (in which case this “interoperability” is a way to provide application “portability”) and to the Cloud-hosted applications themselves.

Application-level interoperability (“look, my GAE-hosted app successfully sent an HTTP request to an Azure-hosted app, open the champagne”) is not very new or exciting anymore and is often used as an interoperability smokescreen (hello Salesforce.com). Many of these interop concerns are long solved and the others (like authentication and data migration) need to be solved in ways that don’t care whether the application is hosted in your Silicon Valley garage or near the Columbia river.

Cloud infrastructure compatibility (in other words application portability) is the more interesting discussion. I keep reading that it is needed (“no vendor lock-in, not ever again”) for enterprises to move to the Cloud. Being a natural-born cynic, I always ask myself whether those asking for it are naive (sometimes) or have ulterior motives (e.g. trying to catch-up with Amazon by entangling them in the standards net – some of my fellow cynics see the Open Cloud Manifesto as just this).

Because the reality is that, Manifesto or no Manifesto, you are not going to get application portability across IaaS-type Cloud providers. At least for production applications. Sorry. As a consolation prize, you may get some runtime portability such that we’ll be shown nice demos of prototype apps moving from one provider to another (either as applications or as virtual machines). Clap clap until you realize that they left behind their monitoring capabilities, or that their configuration rules don’t validate anything anymore. And that your printer ran out of red ink when printing the latest compliance report. Oops.

Maybe I am biased because they are both my friends and ex-colleagues, but the HP guys make the most sense in the SD Times article. Tim Hall has it right when he suggests “that the industry should focus on specific problems that it is going to solve around deployment and standardized monitoring”. And the other HP Tim, Mr. van Ash, rightly points out that we should “stop promising miracles”, which Forrester’s Jeffrey Hammond echoes, saying that there is a difference between a standard and “plug-and-play in reality”.

Tim Hall uses SQL as an example of a realistic common baseline. J2EE would be another one. They provide a good reality check. Standards are always supposed to prevent vendor lock-in. And there is a need for some of that, of course. But look at the track records. How many applications do you know that are certified and supported on any SQL database, any Unix operating system and any J2EE app server? And yet, standardizing queries on relational data and standardizing an enterprise-class runtime environment for one programming language are pretty constrained scopes in the grand scheme of things. At least compared to all the aspects that you need to standardize to provide real Cloud portability (security, monitoring, provisioning, configuration, language runtime and/or OS, data storage/retrieval, network configuration, integration with local apps, metering/billing, etc). And we’re supposed to put together a nice bundle of standards that will guarantee drag-and-drop portability across all these concerns? In how many lifetimes? By then, Cloud computing will have been replaced by the next big thing (galaxycomputing.com is still available BTW).

Not to mention that this standardization comes hand in hand with constraints on what you can do. That’s why I read Amazon’s Adam Selipsky’s comment that allowing customers to do “whatever they want” is vital as a way to say “get real” to requests for application portability, while allowing him to sound helpful rather than obstructionist.

This doesn’t mean that these standards are not useful. They make application portability possible if not free. They make for much improved productivity through generic tools and reusable developer knowledge. We still need all this.

Here is the best that can realistically happen in the “application portability across IaaS providers” area for at least 10 years:

  • a set of partial standards for small parts of the Cloud computing domain (see list above), many of which already exist.
  • a set of RightScale-like tools that do a lot of the grunt work of mapping/hiding/transforming between providers, with various degrees of success.
  • the need for application providers to certify their applications on Cloud providers one by one anyway and to provide cloning/migration as a feature of the application rather than an infrastructure-level task.

That’s assuming that IaaS providers become a major business, that there remains a difference between service providers and software providers. The other option is that the whole Cloud excitment goes back to SaaS only, that application creators are also hosting providers, that the only resource you get in a “utility” fashion is the application itself. At which point application portability is not a concern anymore and we go back to “only” worrying about data portability and application interoperability, an easier problem and one on which we have come a long way already. If this is what comes to pass then the challenge of Cloud portability may well be one of the main reasons. Along with the lack of revenue/margin potential for many of the actors in an IaaS world, as my CEO is fond of pointing out.

[UPDATED 2009/4/22: F5’s Lori MacVittie provides a very nice illustration of the same point, in her explanation of why OVF is not a cloud portability silver bullet.]

[UPDATED 2009/6/1: Soon after posting this entry I was contacted by people at SD Times about turning it into a “guest view” article in the June issue. It has just been published. It’s also in the paper version.]

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Filed under Amazon, Application Mgmt, Articles, Cloud Computing, Everything, Google App Engine, HP, IT Systems Mgmt, Mgmt integration, People, Portability, Specs, Standards, Utility computing

April 7, 2009

“Federationing”

I am glad to see that, as it inches towards standardization in the DMTF, the CMDBf specification is getting more visibility. Forrester’s Glenn O’Donnell recently wrote very positively about it on his blog, presenting it as a key enabler for a federation of MDRs (Management Data Repositories, a term introduced by the CMDBf specification so don’t look for it in ITIL). He argues this is the only way (rather than a single data store) to fulfill the ITIL-defined role of a CMS. Rob England (the IT Skeptic) has also shared his thoughts about CMDBf and they were noticeably less enthusiastic, to say the least. While Glenn calls the specification “profound”, Rob calls it “the most over-hyped vendor marketing smokescreen ever”. There is plenty of room in between them, which is where I sit. As I explained before, it does have real value (as a query language/protocol for system integration) but is nowhere near providing “federation” capabilities.

I am happy to see Glenn approve of CMDBf and I agree with him that accurate specialized MDRs are more useful than a single store that attempts to capture all the relevant data. As Glenn puts it, “pockets of the truth are far superior to unified ambiguity”. But I wasn’t very comfortable with the tone of his article, which seemed to almost encourage the proliferation of these MDRs. Maybe he was just trying to present a clean break with the “one big CMDB” approach and overreached. Or maybe I am just not reading properly.

Because while I agree that the answer is not “one and only one store” I also don’t want to loose the value of having as much unification of the IT model as possible. Both at the data level (i.e. same metamodel/model, consistent retention/roll-up policies…) and the access level (i.e. in the same physical store, with shared access control, accessible using a well-known DSL for data manipulation…). Metamodel transformation and model bridging are costly (in accuracy, maintenance, reliability). If your CMS does more than just support a  “model navigation” GUI it may then need to run large queries that go across several portions of your IT model, including multiple different domains (e.g. a compliance rule kicked-off at the app level based on the type of data it manipulates that ends up having to look at the physical location of the servers running the hypervisors for the virtual machines that power the app). Through such global queries you can apply configuration rules, do impact analysis, event correlation, provide context to your transaction tracing, etc. No consolidation means no such queries (or a very limited subset). Considering the current state of federation, there is a lot more that you can do with your CMS if you have a very small number of MDRs rather than a sea of “federated” MDRs. This is why, as Oracle acquires IT management companies, we deliberately integrate their repositories with Enterprise Manager.

[UPDATED 2009/4/8: More, along the same line, from Glenn and his co-author Carlos Casanova available here. And my CMDBf partner-in-crime Van Wiles also responded to Glenn, bringing a BMC perspective.]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Automation, CMDB, CMDB Federation, CMDBf, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, ITIL, Mgmt integration, Modeling, Query, Specs, Standards

April 2, 2009

Open Cloud Manifesto, circa 2004

The mini-scandal of last week was the manifesto-gate. The mini-scandal of this week is shaping out to be the Ulitzer-gate (if you want to make sure not to miss next week’s IT scandal, subscribe to the Register feed, ferreting these out and adding a bass-heavy soundtrack is their specialty).

Turns out I am one of these Ulitzer “unaware authors” through two articles I wrote a while ago for the Web services Journal, a paper publication by Sys-con (based on a request from HP PR) and a blog post I allowed Sys-con to republish. Looks like Ulitzer and Sys-con are one and the same. Three articles, spaced two years apart. That’s enough to earn me a dedicated home page at Ulitzer and a rank of 1,000 among their more than 6,000 authors. Makes you wonder how much the 5,000 “authors” behind me have (unknowingly) produced… Whatever. At least it’s all content that I authorized Sys-con to use, not something that was lifted from my blog as apparently happened to others.

Turns out the oldest of these articles (“From Web Services Management to Utility Computing” , from 2004) is not that different from the recently-published (and amply maligned) Open Cloud Manifesto. I described my article at the time as “an attempt to explain how the different efforts going on in the industry around Web services, grid, SOA management, virtualization, utility computing, <insert your favorite buzzword>, fit together to provide organizations with the flexibility and efficiency they need from their IT in order to thrive.”

It ends with “while it would be easier to develop an end-to-end model specific to one company’s offering, standardization allows the integration of the management capabilities of all the components that compose enterprise services. We must keep the pressure on vendors to deliver modular and composable specifications (for format, function, and protocol) that expose management capabilities of infrastructure services, applications, and business processes in such a way that these capabilities can be composed by the next generation of management applications.”

Sure it has a lot more emphasis on WS-* specs than is compatible with the current zeitgeist, and it uses the now-obsolete term of “utility computing” rather than the nebulous alternative currently en vogue, but isn’t the main message there?

Just to be clear, I am not laying pretentious claims of prescience and vision (at least not in this entry). There are plenty of documents (e.g. from the Grid community) that make the same points in more eloquent terms and starting many years prior. It’s just fun to see this link from today’s scandal to the one from last week.

for old time sake, here is the content of the 2004 article:

From Web Services Management to Utility Computing
by William Vambenepe

Enterprise services are created by combining infrastructure services, applications, and business processes. To be able to adapt quickly to business changes, enterprise IT must evolve from management of individual resources to management of interrelated services. This will be achieved through the development of composable and modular standards that expose the management capabilities of the building blocks of enterprise services. The Web services platform is an enabler of this transformation: a Web services-based management infrastructure provides a channel that is appropriate for dynamic resource provisioning, allocation, and configuration – often called utility computing.

We can consider this management infrastructure as a four-layered architecture. Starting at the foundation layer, the work on the base Web services infrastructure is far from over. First, until WSDL 2.0 is widely deployed, designers have to compose around the deficiencies of WSDL 1.1, such as the lack of portType inheritance. Second, there is still no standard for referencing Web services. Finally, key specifications such as WSRF (Web Services Resource Framework) and WSN (Web Services Notification), without which people were left to reinvent Web services interfaces to access stateful resources, have only recently reached the standards community. These issues are being resolved and a set of building blocks for accessing resources through an SOA (service-oriented architecture) is shaping up. It is critical that these building blocks be modular and composable to allow incremental adoption and separation of concerns.

Moving from the foundation to the management protocol layer, the OASIS WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) technical committee, through its MUWS (Management Using Web Services) specification, is the key articulation point between the base Web services architecture and utility computing. Both the IT management community and the Grid community rely on MUWS. It defines how to express and exercise manageability capabilities through Web services, putting in place a management channel that is more interoperable and accessible than ever before.

Next is the modeling layer. Information models need to be composed so that a service can be represented based on the services that it is assembled from, be they peer or infrastructure services. Since these will be described by different models, the management channel (MUWS) needs to be model-agnostic in order to support a model-centric architecture. For example, CIM (Common Information Model) is a model that focuses on concrete resources. The DMTF WS-CIM subgroup must now open CIM to the Web services platform by developing a standard way to expose CIM-modeled resources through MUWS. Other models provide representations for service security, service-level agreements (SLA), etc. Only by composing these models will, for example, an auction service SLA be adequately managed as it depends on a combination of the performance of the servers on which the service runs, the application server that hosts it, the other services (authentication, billing, etc.) that it makes use of, and the business process engine that controls the bidding. Once this model-centric architecture is in place, management actions can be policy-driven through explicit constraints.

Finally, at the top layer, the architecture includes a set of common services for utility computing. They are being defined collaboratively by DMTF (Utility Computing working group) and GGF (OGSA working group).

All the pieces are falling into place but much remains to be done to allow comprehensive management of enterprise services in a model-centric way through Web services standards. While it would be easier to develop an end-to-end model specific to one company’s offering, standardization allows the integration of the management capabilities of all the components that compose enterprise services. We must keep the pressure on vendors to deliver modular and composable specifications (for format, function, and protocol) that expose management capabilities of infrastructure services, applications, and business processes in such a way that these capabilities can be composed by the next generation of management applications. These applications will use this to synchronize business and IT and to capitalize on change.

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Articles, Automation, Business Process, Cloud Computing, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, Mgmt integration, Modeling, Specs, Standards, Utility computing, Virtualization

March 17, 2009

It feels like an AON ago

Here is yet another reminder of the short attention span in our industry: in this week of all-Cisco-all-the-time coverage and commentary, induced by the Unified Computing announcement, not one article or blog posting mentioned AON (Application Oriented Networking). Remember AON, introduced by Cisco in 2005? If not you’re not alone. At least according to Technorati and Google News who don’t find a single mention of it in the Unified Computing coverage (until Technorati re-indexes this blog, at which point this entry will ironically make a liar of itself…).

If Cisco is not going to tell us how AON relates to Unified Computing it would be nice if some of the trade publications and analysts who covered AON at the time made an effort to update those of us who can’t remember the neighbor’s name but never forget an acronym. Wasn’t AON Cisco’s first attempt to move from the network layer to the application layer, which is what Unified Computing is also about? Is this the second step? A reset? What was learned from AON?

At least there are parts of Unified Computing I understand (Cisco selling blades. Check. Partnership with BMC for management software. Check. etc…). That’s more than I could say at the time for AON (even after moderating a panel at the IEEE ICWS 2005 conference in which a Cisco manager described it).

A search on the Cisco site seems to indicate that AON is indeed available for purchase. It looks like a DataPower-like XML network appliance (message security, routing and monitoring). If they had described it like that at the time I am fairly sure I would have understood. Especially since such appliances already existed. Let’s see if Unified Computing has more success as a bold vision for the programmable datacenter or if it too ends up as a lonely blade SKU in Cisco’s price sheet.

[UPDATED 2009/3/18: At least one analyst made the link. Congratulations to Eric Siegel from the Burton Group. But his linkage was too subtle for Technorati or Google to pick it up: he didn’t mention AON in his blog entry about Unified Computing. That post, titled “Cisco the Computer Company, Act IV” refers to “Cisco the Computer Company, Act III”, which refers to “Cisco the Computer Company, Act II” which refers to, you’ve guessed it, “Cisco the Computer Company” which covers AON. Bingo. Even though he doesn’t directly tackle the “how does Unified Computing relate to AON” question, Eric still gets the prize for follow-through. And for prescience. More Burton Group coverage of Unified Computing here and here. This is from the DCS (“Data Center Strategies”) side of the house, as opposed to the NTS (“Network and Telecom Strategies”) side where Eric lives. If nothing else Cisco is challenging one thing with this move: the organizational structure (DCS vs. NTS) of the Burton Group…]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Automation, Everything, Virtualization

March 13, 2009

Exploring “IT management in a changing IT world”

The tagline for this blog is “IT management in a changing IT world”. Of course nobody but their authors care about blog taglines. Still, in the unlikely event that I am asked to expand on the “changing IT world” part I would do it as follows.

The changes currently at work in the IT world can be organized along three axis:

  • IT infrastructure and management
  • Application development and delivery
  • Business and regulation

Each of these categories is ridiculously large. It’s only through the prism of the relationships between them that they provide any value. Think about three balls linked by coil springs.

If you give one of these balls a shake, you will start a hard-to-predict dance between them. This is similar to how the three domains above relate to one another. Changes in one (say a new focus on regulatory compliance in the “business” area, the emergence of virtualization technology in the “infrastructure” area or the appearance of Web 2.0 applications in the “application” area) start a complex movement involving all three. It takes a while to achieve a new equilibrium (and in practice it is never achieved since changes occur too often, adding stimulus to an already excited system). For a visual illustration, see this little YouTube video (but imagine that the three balls are arranged in a triangle rather than linearly and that every so often one of them gets pulled in a random direction).

This is not new of course. There have been changes in these three areas for as long as IT has existed (starting before it was called IT) and they have always driven changes in how IT is managed. To some extent they also have always influenced one another. The “new” part is that the connections are a lot tighter now, that the springs have a much higher force constant (the “k” in “F=-kx”). So here is my attempt at mapping today’s hot buzzwords on a map organized along these areas.

Before you ask: yes of course I have a very rigorous methodology, based on very precise quantitative data, to establish with certainty the exact x, y and z coordinates of each label. Buzzword topology is a precise science.

You may notice that the buzziest buzzword (at least currently), “Cloud”, does not appear on the map. It’s because it buzzes so much that it would be all over it, engulfing what currently appears as “virtualization”, “datacenter automation”, “Iaas”, “PaaS”, “SaaS” and “opex/capex”. There are two main parts in the “Cloud” buzzword: the “Technical Cloud” and the “Business Cloud”. The “Technical Cloud” is where we take virtualization and standardization (of machines, networks and application infrastructure) and turn that mind-boggling complexity into a manageable system that can be programmed to deliver applications (Cisco recently called it “Unified Computing”; HP, IBM and others have been trying to describe and brand it for a long time). Building on these technical capabilities comes the second part of “Cloud”, the “Business Cloud”. It is the ability to use infrastructure owned by a third party (presumably one able to leverage economies of scale) and all the possibilities this opens in the business realm. That’s what “Cloud” started as, back when it was known as “Utility Computing” and before it was applied to everything under the sun. A recent illustration of the relationship between the “Technical Cloud” and the “Business Cloud” is the introduction of vCloud by VMWare (their vision includes using VMotion technology, a piece of the “Technical Cloud”, not just to move machines between neighboring hypervisors but between organizations, enabling the “Business Cloud”). Anyway, that’s why “Cloud” it’s not on the map. It is actually all over it.

The system displayed on the map is vibrating very intensely right now, and I don’t see this changing anytime soon. Just for fun, here are candidates for future boxes on the map:

  • In the “IT infrastructure and management” category, maybe one day we’ll get to real metadata-driven management integration across the stack (as opposed to the more limited “application modeling” area listed above), whether through RDF or not.
  • In the “application development and delivery” category, maybe Doug Purdy’s vision “to make everyone a programmer (even if they don’t know it)” will be realized, whether through Oslo or not.
  • In the “business and regulation” category, maybe one day corporations will actually start caring about the customer data they are entrusted to (but only if mishandling it finally costs them more than “sorry about that, here is a one year credit monitoring subscription now go away”).

In summary, the evolution of IT management is driven not only by changes in IT technology but also by changes in two other fields (“application development and delivery” and “business and regulation”) with which it is tightly connected. Both of these fields are also in a very dynamic state. And they also influence one another, resulting in a complex three-way dance. You can’t understand the trajectory and moves of one dancer without seeing the others.

That’s what I mean by “IT management in a changing IT world”. Thanks for asking.

[UPDATED 2009/6/25: For more on the “technical cloud” versus “business cloud”, go read Neil Ward-Dutton’s nice explanation. He actually breaks down the “business cloud” in two (separating the economic aspect from the strategic aspect).]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Automation, Big picture, BPM, BSM, Business, Cloud Computing, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, ITIL, Mgmt integration, Open source, Utility computing, Virtualization

March 11, 2009

Cloudman to the rescue?

GMail had a hiccup last night. Last month it had a more serious outage and so did AWS.

In the movie:
Superman: Easy, miss. I’ve got you.
Lois Lane: You’ve got me? Who’s got you?

In the IT world:
Cloud provider: Easy, CIO. I’ve got you.
CIO: You’ve got me? Who’s got you?

With apologies to Werner Vogels.

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Filed under Amazon, Application Mgmt, Cloud Computing, Everything, Google, IT Systems Mgmt, Utility computing

March 4, 2009

Managing the stack from top to bottom, including virtualization

The press release for the release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 came out yesterday, but that’s not all: the Oracle VM Management Pack for Enterprise Manager was also announced yesterday. What this illustrates is that, in addition to the commonly-cited “one neck to choke” benefit of getting the entire stack from one vendor (from the hypervisor to the application, including the OS, DB and MW), there is also the benefit of getting a unified management environment for the whole stack. Here is how my friend and Oracle colleague Adam Hawley (director of product management for Oracle VM and previously with Enterprise Manager) describes it in more details:

So what’s so big about it and why does this give us a clear advantage over others?

  • No other company can offer management of the virtualization AND the workload that runs inside the virtualization at this depth and scale: not anyone. We now offer a single management product…Enterprise Manager Grid Control…that manages your entire data center from top-to-bottom:  from the packaged application layer (Siebel, PeopleSoft, Beehive, etc.) through all the middleware and database layers to the OS and virtualization itself. And we do that for the both physical and virtual worlds together seamlessly.

    • Other virtualization vendors either ONLY do virtualization management or to the extent they do anything else, it is typically one other category in the stack…virtualization plus the OS or virtualization plus some very specific applications (but no OS…), etc.
    • No one else can provide the entire picture the way we can with Oracle VM
  • So what does that mean for users?
    • It means Oracle VM is virtualization with a difference:
      • It is virtualization that makes application workloads faster, easier, and less error prone to deploy with Oracle VM Templates as pre-built, pre-configured VMs containing complete product solutions maintained in a central software library for easy re-use:  download from Oracle, import the VMs, use the product.  Simple.
      • It is virtualization that makes workloads easier to configure and manage:  Automate deployment of the VMs, installation of the management agent, and enable powerful, in-depth monitoring of guests and Oracle VM Servers including configuration management…
        • Set-up configuration policies to track how your VMs and servers are configured and to alert you if that configuration changes or “drifts” over time
        • What about if you have one VM running perfectly and another supposedly identical one not doing as well?  Run a configuration compare to check for differences not only in packages or application versions in the VM, but also down to OS parameter settings and other key items to rapidly identify differences and address them from the same console
      • It is virtualization that makes workloads easier to troubleshoot and support:

        • Not only is Oracle VM support very affordable compared to anyone out there, management of Oracle VM servers in Enterprise Manager makes it so much easier to rapidly track down issues across the layers of your data center from one UI With other vendors, to troubleshoot an issue with applications or the database, you have to trace it down through your environment, possibly to the virtual machine, but then how do you get all the info about the VM itself like its parameters and which physical server it is hosted on?  You have to jump to another tool entirely… whatever stand-alone tools you are using to manage the virtualization layer… to get the information and then go back-and-forth:  tedious and time consuming With Enterprise Manager, it is all there in one UI.  Need to tweak the number of virtual CPUs based on your database performance analysis report indicating a CPU bottleneck?  Navigate from the performance page for the database to the home page of that virtual machine and adjust the configuration in the same UI.  Done.  Well, OK, you may have to restart the application for the new vCPU setting to take effect but you can do still do that all within Enterprise Manager, saving time and minimizing risks.
        • This can dramatically reduce the time to troubleshoot as well as reduce the chances of human error navigating between multiple products with different structures and concepts to help you maximize your up-time.

So this is where it starts to get interesting. This is where the game starts to really be about not just the virtualization itself, but how it makes the rest of your overall data center better and more efficient.  The Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Oracle VM Management Pack is a huge step forward for users.

[UPDATED 2009/3/21: An Oracle Virtualization blog has recently been created. So now you can hear directly from Adam and his colleagues.]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, Manageability, Mgmt integration, Oracle, OVM, Virtualization

February 27, 2009

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g R5

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g R5 (a.k.a. 10.2.0.5) is coming out. It will be announced by our SVP on Tuesday (subscribe to the Webcast). InfoWorld got a preview. From the application management perspective, it includes new management capabilities for middleware products that came from BEA (WL and OSB) and for several Oracle applications (Siebel, EBS, PeopleSoft, Beehive, BRM). And lots of goodies in other areas (virtualization, database, automation…).

[UPDATED 2009/3/3: bits! bits! bits!]

[UPDATED 2009/3/4 (and later): My colleague Chung Wu provides more details, followed by drill-downs into specific area. I’ll add links here as they become available:

Thanks Chung!]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, Oracle

February 4, 2009

Oracle acquires mValent for application config management

mValent will become part of Enterprise Manager. It comes to complement other recent acquisition in the application management space: Auptyma, Moniforce, Empirix, ClearApp.

The announcement and FAQ are here.

More details about the acquired product and technology are on the mValent site, including here and here.

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Filed under Application Mgmt, CMDB, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, Mgmt integration, Modeling, Oracle

December 12, 2008

HP introduces “Operations Manager i”

If you’ve seen a lot of news articles about HP’s IT management software this week (e.g. through Cote or Doug) it’s because the company held its Software Universe conference in Vienna this week and timed a bunch of announcements and PR events to match.

Most of the articles linked above just paraphrase the press releases and talking points. So if you’re going to get the company line, might as well get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Which we can now do through a new HP blog about BSM. The first article was penned by Mike Shaw and that’s enough for me to want to subscribe (I worked with Mike a few times when I was at HP and he is very sharp). I think Mike also wrote the other entries but since they are not signed (and the account name, “adsey007”, is pretty opaque) I am not sure. In any case, they are pretty good. This one gives an overview of the Vienna announcements. The next one describes in more details the OMi product. I am not in position to know how well it works but, according to the article, OMi takes the important step of modeling and managing events in the context of the overall model in the CMDB. Such that the event management features (e.g. correlation) can use the already-discovered relationships between the IT elements involved in the events (e.g. dependencies). The article also implies that the CMDB has been integrated with NNM (OpenView), Service Manager (Peregrine) and Server Automation (Opsware). Which is a lot of progress in 16 months since I left HP, so I am taking it with a grain of salt (we all know there are different levels of integration). The press release says that the CMDB is now integrated with 17 HP BTO applications, so you may need a whole salt shaker. In any case it’s great to see that Ramin and team are forging ahead, delivering products and driving the integration of the BTO portfolio.

The last paragraph (“OMi actually sits on top of existing HP Operations Manager installations…”) is intriguing and may provide a clue about the depth of the integration. In any case, OMi is something to keep an eye on as it is positioned to leverage a lot of the key strengths of the HP BTO portfolio.

BTW, this OMi product has nothing to do with this OMI which was a precursor to WSMF, WSDM and WS-Management. And which most people currently working in HP Software have never heard of.

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Conference, Everything, HP, IT Systems Mgmt, Mgmt integration, Modeling, People

November 17, 2008

IT management and Cloud: now some products

Many of us have been thinking (a bit) and talking (a lot) about the relationship between Clouds and good old IT management.  John understands both sides and produced a few good posts (like this one).

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that both Hyperic and CA recently made such announcements. In any case, it gives the impression that time has come for some actual product capabilities in the area of managing Cloud-based systems.

I haven’t investigated either, so keep your slideware shields up, but this is what I read:

From Javier Soltero’s “Announcing HQ 4.0”: “It also provides the first cloud-friendly management agent which allows users to manage cloud based virtual machines securely and reliably from either inside the cloud, or from HQ 4.0 installations inside your datacenter”. John approves.

And at CA World, according to InformationWeek, “CA will announce a partnership with Amazon to provide management capabilities around Amazon’s EC2 utility computing platform, potentially including discovery of software running on EC2 instances, performance monitoring, configuration management, software deployment capabilities and provisioning”.

When someone looks into these two products (and others, soon to follow or alrady out and that I have missed), it will be interesting to see how these Cloud-friendly capabilities relate to the good old capabilities of management products: “software discovery”, “perf monitoring”, “config management”, “software deployment”, “provisioning”. That all sounds pretty familiar. Is it just a matter of pointing the old tools to an EC2 IP address? Is it all new capabilities, done in a new way? Or, more realistically, where does it land between these extrems? Where do you want them to land? It’s not so obvious.

Utility computing comes with an expectation of additional flexibility (now that is obvious). When tweaking IT management tools to address the domain, does one leave “in datacenter” capabilities the same and branch off to do cool things in the new land? Or do you raise the level of flexibility accross the board?

In other words, rather than snickering at them, maybe we should praise IT management vendors for whom the “look, I do Clouds” marketing spiel is just a repackaging of normal IT management features. Because it may mean that they’ve raised the bar on “in datacenter” automation capabilities. These Opsware and BladeLogic acquisitions have to come in somewhere, don’t they?

BTW, both of the announcements above also perpetuate the confusion between providing utility services (CA’s extended SaaS offering, Hyperic’s release of a pre-packaged Hyperic AMI) and the ability to manage Cloud-based systems. It’s all crammed in the same announcement/article because, hey, it’s all Cloud stuff.

Speaking of CA World, if I was there I would go to this session. At least for old time sake, and maybe to get some interesting ideas. Hopefully Don will blog about it after he is done presenting later today.

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Filed under Amazon, Application Mgmt, Articles, CA, Conference, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, Open source, Standards, Utility computing

October 30, 2008

First in-depth look at Microsoft’s Oslo and the “M” modeling language

Microsoft’s PDC is taking place this week and more details were shared with the attendees about project Oslo, an effort announced last year to drastically improve the use of models across the application lifecycle. Some code is available (I think the Quadrant code is only for PDC attendees but the Oslo SDK is available to everyone). I am not at PDC, I didn’t see any presentation and I didn’t download any code. But Microsoft has also posted technical details on MSDN and, as far as I am concerned, that’s the most time-effective way to spend a couple of hours learning about Oslo. BTW, the way they share these early design descriptions and accept to make their evolution public is admirable.

For those who only want to spend 10 minutes rather than 2 hours, here are the thoughts that came to my mind as I was reading.

Overall I am somewhat underwhelmed, but not necessarily in a bad way. I know that’s a little schizophrenic so let me explain. After hearing a lot about how Oslo was the next big thing in modeling, it is a little surprising to read a document that can be summarized as “modeling is good, so go create some SQL tables and store them in a RDBMS”. That’s the underwhelming part. But on the other hand, it is more down to earth and practically-minded than I feared. And this is just a summary, in truth there is more than just “use SQL”.

Half of the MSDN documentation basically explains how to use SQL Server to store application models (as of today, the “Developing Models for the Metadata Store” section has only one sub-section, “SQL Server Guidelines for Modeling in the Oslo Repository“). Does this mean that all .NET applications will eventually have to carry with them a deployment of SQL Server 2008 even if they don’t use it to store the their operational data? Sure there are a few extra repository services (e.g. finer-grained change auditing) but most Oslo repository services are generic SQL Server features. That section has quite a lot of T-SQL, but it’s pretty readable. It also has a lot of dependencies on following naming conventions which makes me think that directly creating T-SQL code is not the best approach.

Fortunately there is an alternative, the “M” language. It’s a schema language with a built-in constraint mechanism. I found it more data-oriented (as opposed to resource-oriented) than I expected. Even though “each model is really a set of data structures, relationships, and constraints in serialized form“, there is a lot more support for data structures and constraints than for relationships. It’s just a foreign key. Relationships aren’t items and don’t have any property (or “field” as they’re called in “M”). For example, the relationship between a student’s enrollment record and a given class can’t have, as property, the grade that the student got for that class (as in the example in section 4.1.4 of the second LC of SML). To model this in “M” you need to create another item (e.g. “courseEnrollment”) and have a relationship from the student to that item and another one from that item to the “course” item itself. Or to replace the foreign key in the student table with a complex structure that contains both the foreign key and the properties of the relationship. At the end it has the same expressiveness potential, but in a less streamlined form. I assume Microsoft took this approach for performance reasons.

I am going on a limb here, but it may also be a difference between development-time concerns and operation-time concerns. During development (all the way to testing and packaging), you can still mostly get away with a relatively simple containment structure. You care about the components of your application and how they are packaged inside or next to one another. Sure you care about who calls who outside of the deployment unit but that’s not as core a concern as getting your class dependencies right, your tests in order and your installer configured. In fact, some of the “who calls who” bindings will be only be realized at runtime. Oslo, at least so far, clearly seems more focused on development time than operations so support for a relationship-rich model may not seem critical. At operations time, on the other hand, you don’t really care so much about how things were packaged before installation. You care a lot more about who invokes who (especially for modern distributed applications), what the network layout is, what resources a ticket is attached to, etc. The model looks a lot more like a graph with complex relationships. Something that “M” doesn’t seem ideally suited for.

Except for this caveat, I like “M”. It’s not anti-XML (you can represent values as XML if you’d like) but it avoids the “the answer is XML/XSD what is the question” approach to modeling that is sometimes a little too prevalent. “M” is a much better schema language for IT systems than XSD. I especially like its approach to types. A value is not intrinsically of a given type. A type is a condition that you happen to meet or not at the current time (“take heart little field, you can be anything you want when you grow up”). As such, you can be of several types at the same time. Refined types are potatoes inside potatoes (not sure if “M” supports definition of types as unions and/or intersection of existing types, for intersection I want to write something like”type NewType : OldType1 where this in OldType2” but there is no “this” in “M”). That approach to types (and the way constraints leverage types) is reminiscent of RDF/OWL. It’s a classification more than a typification, but I understand why they didn’t want to call it “class”. The similarities with RDF/OWL don’t go any further. As I wrote earlier, “M”is very data-focused and not resource-focused: as far as I can tell “M” types are defined syntactically, not semantically (the semantics come as a consequence). For example, I don’t think that you can assert that a given item representing a person is of type “friendly” if there is no corresponding data in the item. You’d have to first create a boolean field called “friendly” and define that those that have that field set to “true” are of type “friendly”. Unlike in RDF/OWL where you can just assert that a subject is “friendly”.

Here is another reason why you can’t have “semantics-only” types: “if you do not specify the type of a field or value, M infers a type for it“. Two things don’t sound quite right to me here. First a detail: the sentence (like others in the doc) talks about “the” type of a field of value, while there can be more than one. More importantly, what’s the point of this feature? How does it help me to have my IRC nickname classified as a post code or as a password just because it happens to be made of a compatible combination of letters and numbers? Maybe it makes sense as a storage optimization, but why does it make sense to expose this to the user?

I also like the way “extents” work. The current description of that feature is pretty limited, but based on how it is used in other parts I think one of its usages is to support a non-OO equivalent to inheritance: create two extents, one for the “superclass” and one for the “subclass” where each only contains the properties/fields defined at that level. You should get both of them in order to have the full picture (all the fields). This is, if I understand it correctly, similar to something I have been (unsuccessfully so far because “XML doesn’t do it this way”) trying to sell to the DMTF CMDBf working group: model inheritance through a set of non-overlapping records rather than dealing with a type hierarchy on record types. It’s not just that it makes relational storage easier (even though it does and that’s probably why “M” does it this way), it also makes your query/select operations a lot easier to specify and implement.

All in all (and without having gone through the exercise of defining actual models in “M”), it seems like a fine schema language (except that its dependency on the CLR base types is unpractical for users outside of the Microsoft universe) but I am not sure if it is beefy enough to be a good IT management metamodel. When the document says that “the Oslo repository provides open and flexible access to the data it contains, which enables direct access to SQL Server views of the underlying data. There are no complex data access layers or APIs” it sounds better than saying “it’s just SQL, so map your model to it and if you want relationships or type inheritance just build it on top of it and quit whining”. But it is an admission of limitation at the same time as a claim of simplicity. I also smell an assumption that LINQ will provide enough hand-holding that non-SQL-savvy developers will be ok. We’ll see.

And then there is MGrammar. Things get a little confusing at that point if you try to relate MGrammar to “M”. Actually, the FAQ states that “the M language consists of three parts: MGraph, MSchema and MGrammar“. This came a bit as a surprise to me since at that point I had finished reading (not in details but not too quickly either) the “M” documentation and I hadn’t seen these names mentioned once. Looks like there is some documentation consistency issues here, but that’s hardly surprising considering this is a “hyper-early (pre-alpha)” release as Doug Purdy puts it.

I think that everything that I have referred to as “M” above is MSchema.

MGrammar is something different altogether: it’s the source of the Domain Specific Language (DSL) references we’ve been hearing in relationship with Oslo. Technically, MGrammar is a BNF on steroids plus an automatically generated parser for your syntax. Cute. I assume that “M” (i.e. MSchema) is built as MGrammar-defined DSL but I am not sure why I would care. I am all for reuse and if someone at Microsoft thought that there was something reusable in the way they defined MSchema then it’s a good thing to expose this tool. But where does it come into play in application modeling? The last thing I want is people inventing completely independent languages to describe different domains. I am all for specialization, but a common underlying metamodel is pretty nice when you have to make sense of a whole system. I don’t see any such commonality in MGrammar: as far as I can tell it can be used to define anything from PostScript to sonnets.

From the FAQ, the connection point between MGrammar and MSchema is MGraph (MGrammar languages are parsed into an MGraph, MSchema “builds on MGraph”). That’s nice, but since neither the MSchema nor the MGrammar documentation mention MGraph I don’t really know what to make of this. David Chappell’s white paper also mentions MSchema and MGrammar but not MGraph. The introduction to the MGrammar Language Specification states that “the data that results from Mg [a.k.a. MGrammar] processing is compatible with Mg’s sister language, The Oslo Modeling Language, M, which provides a SQL-compatible schema and query language that can be used to further process the underlying information“. Compatible? I need more information here. In any case, MGrammar sounds like a fun project for a techie. Who am I to deny Microsoft engineers their fun. Jokes aside, I am probably missing something here seeing how prevalent the DSL message is in all discussions of Oslo. Look at the “highlights of this book” section for the upcoming Oslo/M book from the creators of the “M” language: half of it is about the DSL support and there must be a reason beyond pure geekery. As a side note, if you buy this book you need to understand what little shelf life it will have (I can give you a good price on a lightly-used Hailstorm/”.Net my services” specification book).

Aside from the “M” language itself, there are a few models described in the documentation. One corresponds to BPMN (actually, it says that it “closely aligns with” BPPMN 1.1, does this imply that they are not quite the same?). The fact that this model supports imports from Visio is a nice feature.

The Application model (one of the places where you can see “extents” in action) scares me a little bit because I doubt that two different people would use the same “extents” to describe the same software elements. Unless of course that’s being done for them by a pre-defined mapping to their development framework (.NET) enacted by their common development tool (Visual Studio). Which may be the assumption. Yet, the Application model is defined in generic terms, not Microsoft-specific (with a couple of slip-ups, like a WebApplicationModule being defined as a “Web application (module) implemented by IIS or WAS“. Maybe I’ll feel better about the generic applicability of this Application model when I see a full-fledged description (e.g. including relationship semantics as captured in foreign key field names) and an example.

At the bottom of that Application model, there is a lonely “Manageable” type to use if you have a LifecycleState field. This reinforces my impression that despite the claims to link development time with operational time, a lot of the focus to date has been on the former rather than the latter.

The ServiceModel model will look familiar to people familiar with SCA and is presumably complementary to the WorkflowModel and WorkflowServiceModel models, both of which are directly mapped to Windows Workflow Foundation. I guess that’s where Oslo and Dublin touch one another. I am still glad they are now clearly separated.

There is also a “Quadrant” model which concerns me a bit (it seems to be used to store customization of the Quadrant UI which, while convenient to store straight in the repository, doesn’t strike me as necessarily belonging there).

At this point, the question is not whether Microsoft can build Oslo as it is currently defined. SQL Server 2008 already exists, the usage guidelines aren’t unrealistic and even the “M-to-T-SQL” translation doesn’t seem too hard for Microsoft to implement (the SDK presumable already contains an implementation). I have no doubt they can deliver the system they describe. What I don’t know is whether and how it will be actually useful.

Describing “M” in details is good. Describing how the repository is implemented on top of SQL Server 2008 is interesting but not so relevant. What I’d like to see is a description of how all this gets used. How does it change the Visual Studio experience? How does it change the installation process/format? How does it support round-tripping between lifecycle stages (e.g. if the developer changes the workflow model, does that original BPMN model get consequently updated)? How does it relate to SLAs and policies? How does it apply to application monitoring? How does it apply to configuration management, to the change process? Etc. In short, what’s the Oslo ecosystem going to be.

These questions aren’t completely ignored in the MSDN documentation, but they are dispensed with in a couple of pages: “Application Development and Lifecycle Improvements” and “IT Operations Benefits“. The former states, for example, that “having the Oslo repository act as a central location for these models also enables a connection between the design and implementation models. This connection helps prevent these models from becoming disconnected during the development process“. Which all sounds good but is just a set of assertions that we have heard many times before (not just from Microsoft). How do “M” and the Oslo repository really make this true?

On the “IT Operations Benefits” side, things are equally blurry: “the Oslo repository can store all types of machine and application configuration data. When consistently updated, this configuration data is a catalog of the current state of all monitored machines and applications in the environment“. Notice the “when consistently updated” hand wave. That’s kind of the crux if you really want to manage across the lifecycle. How will they achieve this consistency? By centralizing all changes through a model-driven controller a la SDM/SML? Through ongoing discovery and/or change notifications? By relying on good old ITIL/MOF processes?

The FAQ declares that “having a common approach does not necessarily correlate to one physical store, but more of a federated model and we believe that some of the new Repository, along with existing investments in both Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and Team Foundation Server (TFS), will form the foundation for a common Microsoft metadata strategy and should be supported across our set of products“. OK, but who is the source of truth for application configuration data? The Oslo repository or the CMDB? Is one the desired state and the other the observed state? Does the CMDB go back to simply being a Service Desk (and if so, does the Oslo repository take on the responsibility to enforce change processes, something that requires more than the security model in Oslo)? If the CMDB is still going to use SML as its metamodel, how do you efficiently federate across such different metamodels as SML (i.e. XSD + schematron + relationships) and “M”?

Lots of questions remaining. What will Oslo have turned into in a few years? A business process design/implementation/monitoring suite (there is a strong workflow feel to many parts)? A generic drag-and-drop programming environment (“the fact that entire features are already described by models means that for a wide array of application and component categories you can start using visual tools to design and implement your components“)? A control center for end to end application management? All of the above? Nothing?

This was just a quick brain dump after reading the documents. Actually, I just realized it somehow got pretty long (congrats if you’re still reading). I hope this post is not too disorganized. Oslo is an interesting effort, but, as Microsoft is first to admit, it’s at a very early stage. I am just surprised that this first release spends so much time on the “how” rather than the “what”. Maybe it’s just because I only got my information from the MSDN documentation. We’ll see when more content from PDC finds its way online. I just want the slides, watching recorded presentations is rarely time-efficient (and you can expect them to require Silverlight).

Speaking of Silverlight, there is this new site on Oslo if you think watching some videos is worth installing Silverlight. Those screenshots don’t motivate me sufficiently.

[UPDATED 2008/10/30: Rather than going to bed I Googled around a bit and found a  post by Martin Fowler that answers some of my questions about MGrammar, MGraph and MSchema. MGraph is for instances, MSchema is for types. It answers some plumbing question, but I still have questions about expected usage and relevance to applications modeling.]

[UPDATED 2008/10/30: I also found the recordings and slides from past PDC sessions. Nice job Microsoft for this quick turnaround time, even if you require Sliverlight and/or the PPTX viewer. The sessions are:

  • TL23 A Lap around “Oslo” (Doug Purdy, Vijaye Raji)
  • TL27 “Oslo”: The Language (Don Box, David Langworthy)
  • TL18 “Oslo”: Customizing and Extending the Visual Design Experience (Don Box, Florian Voss)
  • TL28 “Oslo”: Repository and Models (Chris Sells)

The first two sessions (deliverd Tuesday) have a replay and slides, the others should, I assume, follow soon.]

[UPDATED 2008/11/3: A nice overview of Oslo by Aaron Skonnard. Unlike most other Oslo articles over the last week, this one tries to paint the (yet-to-be-realized) full picture of the Oslo ecoystem. He mentions that “other Microsoft products and technologies are expected to build on Oslo to provide other runtimes. A few that have already been announced include Microsoft System Center (Operations Manager) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) in Visual Studio Team System”. It’s interesting that he qualifies System Center to be more specifically “operations manager” rather than “configuration manager” but I wouldn’t read too much into it at this point.]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, BPM, Business Process, CMDB, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, Manageability, Mgmt integration, Microsoft, Middleware, Modeling, Oslo, SML, Specs, Tech

October 7, 2008

HP Systinet 3.00: now with more significant digits!

My ex-colleagues at HP have just released a new version of the HP Systinet SOA governance product. Congrats guys.

Just a question. What’s up with the “version 3.00” thing? We used to talk about “v1” and “v2”. Then came the whole “Web 2.0” silliness and we all replaced the “v” prefix with a “dot oh” suffix. Fine. But am I now supposed to say “dot oh oh”? And, more important, where will it stop? Is Santa Claus going to be bellowing “dot oh oh oh” later this year?

Or is it the price? Three dollars?

Since versioning is a big part of SOA management, I guess HP wanted to show that they had thought extra hard about the question and reflect this in their product name. In any case, no-one beats Oracle for granular version number (for example, JDeveloper 10.1.1.0.0 was released today).

More seriously, I noted with interest mentions of BPEL and SCA support in Systinet 3.00, but I couldn’t find any specific about what this means on the HP site. Anyone has more info? Also, no mention of GIF in the release announcement?

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Everything, Governance, HP

September 19, 2008

Application management roundtable

The Oracle Enterprise Manager team is inviting customers to an application management roundtable next week in San Francisco. You’ll learn about recent application management acquisitions (Moniforce, ClearApp and e-TEST), product direction and integration strategy. What we’d like to learn in return is your thoughts, needs and requirements for application management. To that end, we’ll need you to RSVP and to prepare a 5-10 minutes presentation about your application management challenges.

Here is the agenda:

  • Introduction
  • Customer Presentations on Application Management
  • Oracle’s Approach to Application Management
    • Real User Monitoring (Moniforce)
    • End2end Performance Monitoring (ClearApp)
    • Application Quality Management (e-TEST)
  • Breakout Sessions
  • Composite & SOA Application Management
    • E-Business Suite Application Management
    • Siebel Application Management
    • BRM Application Management
    • PeopleSoft Application Management

It will take place at the Four Seasons Hotel (757 Market St) from 9:00AM to 1:00PM (but don’t forget to RSVP before showing up).

You don’t have to be registered for Oracle Open World (OOW) to attend, but of course it’s been timed to be convenient for people who come to OOW.

Speaking of OOW, here is a list of all the sessions about Enterprise Manager from the conference agenda search engine. Also packaged as a nicely-formatted and chronologically-ordered PDF. For those interested in the recent application management acquisitions, check out these sessions:

About Moniforce

  • S298518 (Improve Performance of Your Oracle E-Business Suite and Siebel Applications with Oracle’s Real User Experience Insight)
  • S298536 (Go Beyond Web Analytics: Build Business Intelligence with Oracle Real User Experience Insight)
  • S298516 (How Real User Monitoring Can Improve Application Performance: Go Beyond Web Analytics and Systems Monitoring)

About ClearApp

  • S298534 (Application Transaction Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager: The Key to End-to-End Monitoring)

About e-TEST

  • S298707 (Application Testing Best Practices: Real-World Customer Testimonials)
  • S298706 (Optimizing Application Performance: Application Testing Suite to the Rescue)

About Auptyma

  • S298534 (Application Transaction Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager: The Key to End-to-End Monitoring)
  • S298524 (Application Diagnostics for DBAs: Visibility into Your Application That the Middle-Tier Administrator Cannot Provide You)
  • S298525 (Diagnosing Java Application Issues in Production: Gaining Performance Insight That Even Developers Do Not Have )
  • S300236 (Oracle Enterprise Manager Hands-on Lab: SOA Management and Java Application Diagnostics)

Just for fun, check out Chris Muir’s 10 things we probably wont see at OOW08. The scary part is that of these ten unlikely things the least unlikely is item #1…

BTW, I’ll be at OOW next week (probably Wednesday and Thursday) so if you plan to be there and would like to meet let me know.

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Conference, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, Manageability, Mgmt integration, Middleware, Oracle, Oracle Open World, Trade show

September 10, 2008

Oslo, blog posts and my crystal ball

There is more and more information coming out about Oslo in anticipation of the Microsoft PDC in October.

David Chappell recorded a video about it last month. More recently Doug Purdy and Don Box each posted a short description of Oslo. Don describes the goal of Oslo as “simplify the process of developing, deploying, and managing software”. But when he lists ancestor technologies to illustrate that “Microsoft has been moving in this direction for over a decade now”, they are all about development, not management: COM type libraries, .NET metadata attributes, XAML. Interesting that neither SDM nor SML gets a mention. Neither did SCA by the way, but I wasn’t really expecting that one… :-)

Maybe the I am the only one looking for a SDM/SML echo here, just because I came to hear of Oslo through the DSI angle. Am I wrong to see Oslo as an enabler for DSI? This eWeek article doesn’t have anything to do with IT management. Reading it, Oslo is all about allowing people to write code through drag and drop. Yawn. And Don Box endorses the article.

Maybe it’s just me (an IT management guy more than a software development guy) but I don’t care so much about how the application model is created. I care a lot more about what it allows you to do in terms of IT management. Please don’t make me pull out the often-quoted figure about the percentage of IT budget spent on operations versus development/licensing. The eWeek piece fails to excite me, but fortunately David Chappell’s video interview is a lot more aligned with my thinking, so I still hold hopes for Oslo as an IT management enabler. Here is my approximate transcript of an example that David provides (at around 4:20) in the video:

“If someone comes to you and says i’ve got this business process and the SLA is not being met, what do you do? You’ve got to trace this through the right business process and the right application that supports that part of the process and find the machine it runs on and maybe look at the workflow that implements it and maybe look at the services that it provides. This involves talking to business analysts, or the IT pros or the architect or the developer, all of whom have their own view of the world, their own tools, their own prospective. The repository provides a common place to store all this stuff, to link it all together, and with a visual editor to have a common tool that lets you actually go through and answer this kind of questions.”

Now you’re talking.

And if Oslo is not the new blood of DSI, then what is? The DSI story is getting dated, SML is fading in our memories and of the three parts that supposedly compose DSI (“virtualized infrastructure, design for operations, and knowledge-driven management”), only virtualization is actually represented on the list of technologies on the DSI home page. Has DSI turned into just allowing System Center to manage a hypervisor? I still hold hopes that the Oslo data is going to spice things up there. It would be good for the industry at large, not just Microsoft.

I won’t be at the PDC but it will be interesting to see what filters out of these sessions. The first session in the list adds management of hybrid application systems (hybrid as in “cloud/on-premise combination” or “software+services” as Microsoft calls it), to the long “can do” list for Oslo. Impressive, if there is some meat behind the abstract. I think this task is often overlooked in discussions around management aspects of Cloud computing (see “the new, interesting thing is going to be the IT infrastructure to manage your usage of utility computing services as well as their interactions with your in-house software” in this previous entry).

Yes, I am reading way too much into session abstracts, but while I am at it I can’t help noticing that there is a lot of SQL and very little XML/XSD/XPath mentioned there. Even though one of the presenters is Gudge, the only person I have ever met who fully understands XSD (actually even he doesn’t, I’ve seen him in the WS-I days have to refer to… his book).

Even though I am sure we’ll be told that SML can be built on top of Oslo, the SQL orientation won’t make that so easy (I want to see how to build XSD+Schematron validation on top of a relational store using Oslo’s drag and drop development tool). And it puts Microsoft on a different architectural direction from IBM, who, as far as I can tell, thinks that the world is a big XML document. Neither is the most appropriate for IT management models. I prefer a graph model and associated graph queries along the lines of SPARQL or CMDBf.

But that’s just late-night idle speculations on my part (aka “blogging”). Let’s see what comes out in October.

[UPDATED 2008/9/10: Interesting timing. Microsoft is joining OMG, home of UML and BPMN. Coming next: a submission of a “new version” of UML and BPMN that happens to contain the extensions and tweaks that Microsoft made to them in the process of implementing Oslo. This, BTW, is the final nail in the SML coffin (SML isn’t even mentioned in the press release).]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, CMDBf, Conference, Desired State, Everything, Graph query, IT Systems Mgmt, Mgmt integration, Microsoft, Middleware, Modeling, Oslo, Query, SaaS, SCA, SML, SPARQL, Specs, Tech, Trade show, Utility computing, Virtualization