Category Archives: Application Mgmt

September 9, 2008

SOA management: round-up of recent news

It started with a checkpoint on “the state of SOA monitoring and management” by Doug McClure. A good set of questions and a good list of “usual suspects” (but how much did Actional pay to be listed twice?).

Then came this good article from AMIS’ Lucas Jellema reporting on what he learned during a recent Oracle SOA Partner event. He pokes fun at Oracle/BEA for conveniently tweaking their “this is what you need” story to align with the “this is what we offer” part (I am shocked, SHOCKED to hear that a vendor would do that, let alone my employer). But the real focus of his article is to describe the importance of design-time SOA governance (integrated with the other parts of the lifecycle). He does a good job at describing some of the value of the consolidated Oracle/BEA offering.

I couldn’t help smiling when I read this paragraph:

“It struck me that most of what applies in terms of Governance to SOA assets, also applies to other assets in any software engineering process. Trying to manage reusable components for example or even implementing a good maintenance approach for a non-SOA application is a tremendous challenge, that has many parallels with SOA Governance. And to some extent could benefit from applying a tooling infrastructure such as provided by the Enterprise Repository… Well, just a thought for now. I need to know more about the ER before jumping to conclusions.”

If my memory serves me right, the original Flashline product that BEA acquired (what became the Enterprise Repository) was just that, a generic metadata repository for software assets, not something SOA-specific. It’s ironic to see Lucas look at it now and think “hey, maybe this SOA repository can be used for non-SOA apps”. Back to the future. And BTW, Lucas is right about this applicability, as Michael Stamback soon confirmed.

Still in Oracle-land, a few days later came the news that Oracle is acquiring ClearApp. Doug’s post was more about runtime governance (which he calls monitoring/management, and I tend to agree with him even though this is fighting the tide) than design-time governance. In that sense, the ClearApp announcement is more relevant to his questions than Lucas’ post. The ClearApp capabilities fit squarely with Doug’s request for “providing the right level of business visibility into the SOA environment and more importantly the e2e business services, applications, transactions, processes and activities”, as I tried to illustrate before.

More recently, Software AG announced an OEM partnership with Actional (part of Progress) to bring runtime data to its CentraSite registry (which, I assume, comes from the Infravio acquisition by WebMethods before it itself was swallowed by Software AG).

Actional’s Dan Foody of course applauds and uses the opportunity to dispel some FUD (“Actional is tightly tied with Sonic”) and also generate some new FUD (“no vendor had even a half decent offering on both sides [design-time and runtime] of the fence”).

Neil Macehiter has a more neutral commentary on the Software AG news. His analysis ends with some questions about what this means for Amberpoint. Maybe it’s time to restart the “Microsoft might acquire Amberpoint” rumor.

Speaking of Microsoft, the drum roll is getting louder in anticipation for Oslo making its debut at the upcoming PDC. That’s a topic for another post though.

This Oslo detour is a little bit off topic, but not so much. The way Don Box and team envision that giant software model shaping up they probably picture what’s called today “SOA Governance” as just a small application that an intern can build in a week on top of the Oslo repository. Or I am exaggerating?

Unlike Dan Foody I like the approach of keeping SOA Governance closely integrated with the development and IT management infrastructures. At the cost of quoting myself (if I don’t, who will?) “it’s not just about managing Web services or Web sites, it’s about managing the whole SOA application”.

[UPDATED 2008/9/23: It looks like the relationship between CentraSite and Infravio is a little bit more complex than I assumed.]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Everything, Governance, IT Systems Mgmt, Manageability, Mgmt integration, Oracle, Oslo, SOAP

September 2, 2008

Oracle acquires ClearApp for composite application management

Oracle (and more specifically the middleware and applications management part of Oracle Enterprise Manager) has just acquired ClearApp. The company is based in Mountain View (California) and their QuickVision product is a very advanced management tool for composite applications, especially BPEL-based and Portal-based applications.

More information about the acquisition is available from this page and the press release. Information about the QuickVision product can be found on the ClearApp site.

QuickVision is a very complementary addition to our existing products and the acquisitions that we have made over the last year in the application management domain. Let’s take a performance management use case to see how they relate to one another conceptually (this is not an integration roadmap, just a comparison of the features of the existing products): Oracle Real User Experience Insight (from the Moniforce acquisition) will tell you that your users are seeing a performance degradation for a specific function of your Web application. If this is a stand-alone Java application, you can go straight into the Enterprise Manager App Server Diagnostic Pack to start from a URL and analyze where processing time is spent (servlet, JSP, EJB, JDBC…). AD4J (from the Auptyma acquisition) provides deep insight into the JVM. It will give you the line number and call stack of the slow methods. For example, it might lead you to a specific database call that is taking a long time to return. You can then follow the trail deep into the database using the Oracle Database Diagnostic and Tuning packs.

But if your application is a composite application (for example one that makes use of a BPEL process to orchestrate services deployed on different application servers), then you would have a hard time finding which application server to focus on. The QuickVision product fills that gap, taking a BPEL process from its invocation point into all its successive steps and into the code that the different steps invoke. So you can see if the problem is within the BPEL execution (e.g. you loop too many times) or inside an invoked Web service. In that case, QuickVision will lead you to the class that implements that service, at which point you have all the context that you need to fire off AD4J and do a fine-grained analysis of the problematic Java code as described above.

In this scenario (and assuming that the root cause is the slowness of a database query executed by a web services that has been invoked through a BPEL process), the chain of management capabilities goes something like this:

User Experience Insight
    -> QuickVision
        -> App Server Diagnostic Pack
            -> Database management packs

A variation on this would be if the service monitored was a SOAP service as opposed to a Web page. Oracle Web Services Manager could then be used as an alternative to Real User Experience Insight to alert you that something was amiss with the application performance. The rest of the flow would be the same.

At the end, it’s not just about managing Web services or Web sites, it’s about managing the whole SOA application.

Of course, QuickVision is not limited to performance analysis, even though that’s my favorite feature. For example, I could have picked a dependency analysis scenario.

To my new colleagues joining us from ClearApp, welcome!

[UPDATED 2008/9/9: InfoQ coverage of the acquisition by Dilip Krishnan.]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, BPEL, Business Process, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, Manageability, Mashup, Mgmt integration, Modeling, Oracle

August 27, 2008

BPEL as a source of application management metadata

Let’s put aside for now all the discussions about whether BPEL is an appropriate tool to capture a “true” business process, i.e. to implement the business logic understood by a business analyst (a topic that has been discussed at length already, including here, here, here, here, here, here and around the 5 minute mark of this podcast). Today, let’s look at it as simply another resource in a developer’s toolbox, alongside things like servlets and XML parsers. It’s a tool that can simplify the invocation of remote services (especially asynchronously), the parallelization of tasks, the definition of scoped compensation handlers, the transformation of XML, the encapsulation of key business logic and, most importantly, the reliable implementation of long-lived processes. If you need a few of these features, you might find BPEL a suitable programming tool. Plus, it refreshingly encourages handling of XML as XML (e.g. via XPath) rather than mindless code generation.

In addition to whatever developer productivity benefit you see in BPEL, there are other potential benefits form using it. They are the topic of this post and they relate to application management.

We all know that in an ideal world, no developer would release an application without providing a set of management capabilities that are carefully crafted to reflect the business logic of the application. Such that IT administrators can monitor, configure, optimize and troubleshoot the application in ways that are related to what the application really does (as opposed to generic metrics like memory, CPU and I/O metrics…).

Back in the real world, this is of course rarely the case. Enters BPEL. Just by virtue of using it in a reasonable way, and without any “just for the ops guys” metadata, BPEL provides a management model for the application. Sure it’s not as good as a hand-crafted management model, but at least it’s there. And it has some pretty compelling properties:

  • It feeds directly from the metadata used by the runtime, so it is guaranteed to be accurate (unlike metadata that is created specifically for management but has no role in the actual runtime).
  • It shows what external services the application depends on. Of course there is no guarantee that all remote invocation will be represented in the BPEL process, but since that’s a strength of BPEL it is reasonable to expect that it provides a good view of application dependencies (to be complemented, of course, by the application infrastructure dependencies like the database and the BPEL engine itself…). Remote invocations are a common point of failure and/or performance problems so they are a first class citizen of an application management model.
  • It explicitly captures process instances. No more jumping from one database table to another (assuming you even know where to look) to try to get a sense of the current overall status. The BPEL instances show the number of in-flight transactions in the application. It is also easy to compare the initialization and termination rates to see the trend.
  • It provides a horizontal segmentation of the processing tasks (via the BPEL activities) that is a good complement to the vertical segmentation often offered by application management tools (e.g. time spent in the database, time spent waiting on I/O, etc…).
  • It makes explicit certain exception conditions.

All these only make use of very basic aspects of BPEL: the enumeration of PartnerLinks, the notion of a process instance, the existence of activities, the fault/compensation/termination handlers. A fair amount of visibility into the health of the application can be derived form this alone. I am not making fancy assumptions about the management tool being able to make sense of the routing logic in the process or of the correlation rules. I am not assuming that the BPEL engine provides ways to control individual process instances. I am not assuming that the name attributes of certain elements (e.g. PartnerLink, variable) convey semantics that could help the administrator understand some of the semantics of the application.

At the end, it’s not about managing BPEL, it’s about managing an application that uses BPEL.

My point is not to push everyone to write any application as a BPEL process (or a set of them) as a way to get a great management infrastructure for free. But if BPEL is a potential choice for the application, then it’s worth considering those extra benefits in the “pros and cons” analysis. And if you have already decided to use BPEL, it may be worth looking into what management dividends you can harvest from this choice. Of course your mileage may vary depending on how manageable your BPEL infrastructure is. Hint hint…

A few related links. Todd Biske has also written about the management value of BPEL, here and here. A similar analysis can be applied to SCA, but at this point in time there are many more applications out there that use BPEL than SCA, making the former more relevant. I briefly described the SCA side of the equation in an earlier exchange with David Chappell. That discussion is summarized here (including a pointer to David’s original piece). In an earlier post, I touched on the manageability potenial of other sources of application metadata, like OGSi and Spring (in addition to SCA and BPEL). Jean-Jacques Dubray provided additional context at InfoQ.

[UPDATED 2008/9/2: Based on this announcement, I can add one more hint.]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, BPEL, Business Process, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, Manageability, Modeling

July 15, 2008

Forrester report on Oracle’s Enterprise Manager

Forrester’s Jean-Pierre Garbani wrote a short report last month about the current offering and future plans of Oracle’s IT management group (where I work).

As the report points out, Oracle’s IT management products don’t always enjoy a level of industry attention commensurate with the value they deliver. This report will hopefully help fix this.

Forrester: “Oracle Focuses On Business Value”.

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

June 18, 2008

SaaS management: it’s MUWS and MOWS all over again

One of the most repetitive tasks when I was evangelizing WSDM was to explain the difference between the MUWS and MOWS specifications (the sum of which composes the entire WSDM body of work). MUWS (management using web services) describes how to use Web services to expose manageability capabilities of potentially any resource (a server, an application, a toaster…). MOWS (management of web services) defines a monitoring and control model for resources that are Web services themselves (so you can measure the number of messages received for example).

I ended up sounding like a cow when I was presenting. A retarded cow even, since my French accent forced me to say it slowly so people could hear the difference.

In retrospect, we should not have tried to tackle both in the same group. And not just because my dignity was bruised. It was a distraction inside the working group, and a source of confusion outside of it. We should have focused on MUWS (as WS-Management did) and possibly created a protocol-independent monitoring/control model for Web services separately. Something that, BTW, is still missing today.

I am being reminded of this MUWS vs. MOWS state of affair these days, when the topics of SaaS and IT management meet, often under the term “SaaS management”. By that, some people mean “delivering IT management as a hosted service, rather than running the management software in the same datacenter as the application”. Other mean “managing, using an on-premise deployment of the management software, a business application that is being delivered as a service (e.g. Oracle CRM On Demand), along with other local IT resources”. The latter is what I was talking about in this post. And sometimes it’s both at the same time (the business application is delivered as a service along with a hosted management console for status/issues/requests…). Not to mention the extra dimension of providing IT management to the administrators in charge of running a multi-tenant application in a SaaS scenario (instead of meeting the needs of their customer’s administrators).

All of these scenarios are valid. So far, we don’t have good names for them. And the MUWS/MOWS experience shows that good names matter. IMaaS (IT Management as a Service) and MoSaaS (Management of Software as a Service) won’t cut it.

[UPDATED 2008/6/23: This seems to be an example of MoSaaS (or rather MoIaaS) delivered through IMaaS. I am subjecting you to such an awful-sounding sentence as a way drive home the need for better names. The real value of course will come when these capabilities are delivered alongside (and integrated with) all your IT management capabilities. John has a nice analysis that lets some air out of the fluff.]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, SaaS, Standards, Utility computing

June 17, 2008

BMC acquires ITM Software

Another BMC acquisition today: ITM Software. Their software suite is designed to help drive IT decisions from the point of view of their business impact.

This is important, of course, for all the reasons that BMC, HP, Oracle and others have been explaining for a while (how often have you heard the word “alignment” over the last three years, compared to the previous thirty?). It’s becoming even more important now, as the options for IT sourcing (from the traditional “give it all to Unisys”, to SaaS, to running your own apps in a utility computing environment…) are multiplicating. Choosing between Intel and AMD CPUs in your datacenter is a technical decision, but choosing between an on-premise application, a SaaS application and running your application on EC2 is driven by business considerations of cost, risks, control, flexibility, etc. And it’s not just a one-time decision, it’s the day to day management that follows these decisions.

I don’t know much about the current ITM offering, but it was never clear to me how much they could deliver as a narrow layer, separate from the heavy-duty IT management stack (I can see how they would deliver financial and project management tools, but what about *really* linking day to day IT administration decisions to the business impact). Being part of BMC, presumably allowing deeper integration into real IT management operations, seems to make sense.

I just wish they didn’t make it sound so easy: “BMC’s purchase of ITM Software creates a unique, integrated solution that provides customers with a single comprehensive view into…”. So just signing the check creates the integration? Now I am going to get calls from our execs asking why it takes so much work to integrate acquired products, if BMC can do it the same day they sign the deal…

While I am at it, here is the press release that HP put out to list the announcements at their Software Universe conference this week. I notice that it’s all about new versions of ex-Mercury products. No OpenView, Peregrine or Opsware content, as far as I can tell. Without looking at it in more details I don’t know how different these new versions really are. What appears pretty new is the SaaS offering (also based on Mercury products) at the end of the press release. On the nitpicking side, can anyone tell me what these “static configuration management databases” are that are “unable to support the real-time needs of today’s complex technology environments”? I can see how a “static” database would be hard-pressed to help, but I haven’t noticed any vendor selling read-only config stores.

[UPDATED 2008/6/18: More details about the HP announcement at InfoWorld. Including quotes from my ex-boss Ramin. Congrats on getting UCMDB 7.5 out of the door!]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, BSM, Business, CMDB, Everything, HP, IT Systems Mgmt, ITIL, Mgmt integration

June 14, 2008

More clues on the Oslo/SCA/SML trail: it’s “D”

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

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

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

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

[UPDATED 2008/8/11: Here is a 14 minutes video interview of David Chappell providing an update on Oslo.]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Automation, Conference, Desired State, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, Mgmt integration, Microsoft, Modeling, Oslo, SCA, SML, Tech

June 11, 2008

Oracle is now a leading vendor of application testing tools

The e-TEST suite (previously from Empirix) has turned into a set of Oracle products for application testing (sorry, application quality management). Ever since the announcement of the deal, a couple of months ago, Oracle sales reps have received many unsolicited requests for that product, validating its good reputation in the market. If you have spent any time around sales reps, you know that for them to tell their customers that for the time being they should purchase from Empirix was about as pleasant as for Hillary Clinton to endorse Barack Obama. Fortunately, this awkward period is over. Not only can people buy the products from Oracle, all the technical support (even for people who bought from Empirix) is now provided by Oracle.

I probably don’t need to say it (since the products were created by an independent company) but just to be clear nothing in these products require the target Web applications to use Oracle infrastructure (e.g. DB, Middleware) or to be otherwise managed by Oracle Enterprise Manager. They will work happily with your Ruby-on-Rails application hosted on RedHat or your .NET Web application.

And it’s not just for HTML-driven, user-facing applications: XML-producing web services can also be tested that way.

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

May 28, 2008

RESTful JMX access from someone who knows both sides

Anyone interested in application manageability and/or management integration should read about Jean-Francois Denise’s prototype for RESTful Access to JMX Instrumentation. Not (at least for now) as something to make use of, but to force us to think pragmatically about the pros and cons of the WS-* stack when used for management integration.

The interesting question is: which of these two interfaces (the WS-Management-based interface being standardized or the HTTP-centric interface that Jean-Francois prototyped) makes it easier to write a cross-platform management application such as the poker-cheating demo at JavaOne 2008?

Some may say that he cheated in that demo by using the Microsoft-provided WinRM implementation of WS-Management on the VBScript side. Without it, it would have clearly been a lot harder to implement the WS-Management based protocol in VBScript than the REST approach. True, but that’s the exact point of standards, that they allow such libraries to be made available to assist implementers. The question is whether such a library is available for your platform/language, how good and interoperable that library is (it could actually hinder rather than help) and what is the cost to the project of depending on it. Which is why the question is hard to answer in absolute. I suspect that, even with WinRM, the simple use case demonstrated at JavaOne would have been easier to implement using straight HTTP but that things change quickly when you run into more demanding use cases (e.g. event notification with filters, sequencing of large responses into an enumeration…). Which is why I still think that the sweetspot would be a simplified WS-Management specification (freed of the WS-Addressing crud for example) that makes it easy (almost as easy as the HTTP-based interface) to implement simple use cases (like a GET) by hand but is still SOAP-based, which lets it seamlessly enter library-driven territory when more advanced features are added (e.g. WS-Security, WS-Enumeration…). Rather than the current situation in which there is a protocol-level disconnect between the HTTP interface (easy to implement by hand) and the WS-Management interface (for which manually implementation is a cruel – and hopefully unusual – punishment).

So, Jean-Francois, where is this JMX-REST work going now?

While you’re on Jean-Francois’ blog, another must-read is his account of the use of Wiseman and Metro in the WS Connector for JMX Agent RI.

As a side note (that runs all the way to the end of this post), Jean-Francois’ blog is a perfect illustration of the kind of blogs I like to subscribe to. He doesn’t feel the need to post all the time. But when he does (only four entries so far this year, three of them “must read”), he provides a lot of insight on a topic he really understands. That’s the magic of RSS/Atom. There is zero cost to me in keeping his feed in my reader (it doesn’t even appear until he posts something). The opposite of what used to be conventional knowledge (that you need to post often to “keep your readers engaged” as the HP guidelines for bloggers used to say). Leaving the technology aside (there is nothing to RSS/Atom technologically other than the fact that they happen to be agreed upon formats), my biggest hope for these specifications is that they promote that more thoughtful (and occasional) style of web publishing. In my grumpy days (are there others?), a “I can’t believe United lost my luggage again” or “look at the nice flowers in my backyard” post is an almost-automatic cause for unsubscribing (the “no country for old IT guys” series gets a free pass though).

And Jean-Francois even manages to repress his Frenchness enough to not take snipes at people just for the fun of it. Another thing I need to learn from him. For example, look at this paragraph from the post that describes his use of Wiseman and Metro:

“The JAX-WS Endpoint we developed is a Provider<SOAPMessage>. Simply annotating with @WebService was not possible. WS-Addressing makes intensive use of SOAP headers to convey part of the protocol information. To access to such headers, we need full access to the SOAP Message. After some redesigning of the existing code we extracted a WSManAgent Class that is accessible from a JAX-WS Endpoint or a Servlet.”

In one paragraph he describes how to do something that IBM has been claiming for years can’t be done (implement WS-Management on top of JAX-WS). And he doesn’t even rub it in. Is he a saint? Good think I am here to do the dirty work for him.

BTW, did anyone notice the irony that this diatribe (which, by now, is taking as much space as the original topic of the post) is an example of the kind of text that I am glad Jean-Francois doesn’t post? You can take the man out of standards, but you can’t take the double standard out of the man.

[UPDATED 2008/6/3: Jean-Francois now has a second post to continue his exploration of marrying the Zen philosophy with the JMX technology.]

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Filed under Application Mgmt, CMDB Federation, Everything, Implementation, IT Systems Mgmt, JMX, Manageability, Mgmt integration, Open source, SOAP, SOAP header, Specs, Standards, WS-Management

May 20, 2008

JSR262 public review ballot

The Public Review Ballot for JSR #262 that took place in the Executive Committee for SE/EE has closed. I am not familiar enough with the JCP process to know exactly what this milestone represents. But the results are interesting in any case.

The vote narrowly passed with 6 yes, 5 no and 1 abstain.

The overiding concern listed by the “no” voters (and several of the “yes” voters) is the fact that JSR262 uses WS-Management (a DMTF standard) which itself makes use of specifications that have been submitted to W3C but are not currently in the process of standardization (WS-Transfer, WS-Eventing, WS-Enumeration). And that it uses an older version of a now-standard specification (WS-Addressing).

SAP makes the most insightful comment: that this is not really a JCP problem but a DMTF problem. Hopefully the DMTF (and Microsoft, since it controls the fate of the specifications in question) will step up to the plate on this. This is likely to happen. Even if the DMTF and Microsoft didn’t care about making the JCP happy (but they do, don’t they?), they will run into similar issues if/when they push WS-Management towards ANSI/ISO standardization.

Next to this “non-standard dependencies” issue, there is only one technical issue mentioned. As you guessed, it’s IBM whining about the lack of a WSDL to feed their tools. This is becoming so repetitive that I may eventually stop making fun of it (but don’t hold your breath, I am not known for being very good at ending long-running jokes). It is pretty ironic to hear IBM claim that without that WSDL you can’t implement the spec on JAX-WS when you know that the wiseman reference implementation by Sun and HP is based on JAX-WS…

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Everything, IBM, Implementation, ISO, IT Systems Mgmt, JMX, Manageability, Microsoft, Specs, Standards, WS-Management, WS-Transfer

May 15, 2008

Various IT management stories

Apparently Coté’s upstairs neighbors were having a party last night and he could not sleep. That’s good for us because as a result he bookmarked a long list IT systems management stories. Several of those picked my interest:

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Articles, Everything, HP, IT Systems Mgmt, Manageability, Microsoft, Open source, Oracle

May 13, 2008

Oracle Enterprise Manager in the news

I missed this good review of Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) by eWeek’s Cameron Sturdevant that came out almost two months ago. It is “good” in the sense that it is well researched and well written but it is also “good” in the sense that it is a very positive review. The only drawback listed is the price of some of the features. But you have to evaluate these numbers in comparison to productivity gains of your IT management staff. Or, even more compellingly, in comparison to the cost of business disruption that can result from insufficient management insight into the applications.

I got to this review through this very nice blog post in which my colleague Chung Wu (a director of product management for OEM) describes step by step the key role that OEM plays in effectively managing Oracle technologies and in allowing a smooth and controlled evolution of the deployed portfolio.

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Articles, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, Manageability, Mgmt integration, Oracle

April 10, 2008

Between skinny and bloated

Spring’s Rod Johnson writes today about the future he sees for Java Bloatware (his unkind term for Java EE middleware). Of course, as Mr. Spring, he is far from neutral. Of course he is focusing on a certain class of applications (web-centered, mostly greenfield, which is a huge – and sexy – segment, but not in any way the only kind of applications). Of course he underestimates how established technology that works remains used long after it may have ceased to be the optimal solution for new developments. But even taking all that into account, he makes some good points about the proliferation of rarely-used capabilities in Java EE and the associated cost. Most of those points are well understood and are driving the more modular approach taken by Java EE 6. As well as the adoption of OSGi (see here and here for BEA’s example). In addition, as Rod mentions, the JCP now has to share the playground with other framework standardization efforts like SCA.

The most interesting part of Rod’s post from my perspective, is this prediction:

“The market will need to address the gap between Tomcat and WebLogic/WebSphere. Currently an important part of the market is neglected. The majority of Java web applications are most at home on Tomcat. A minority actually want some of the more esoteric functionality of a full-blown application server, such as JCA, or specialized capabilities such as distributed transaction management. But a larger minority need some of the operational and management features of those products, but are not interested in the esoteric APIs and the bloat they bring along with them. As more and more end user companies look to phase out legacy application servers in favor of better suited technologies, there will inevitably be a response to market demand, with products that hit the sweet spot and bridge this gap.”

Right on. This is the second time in a week that we see an acknowledgment of the importance of application manageability coming from SpringSource. Whether this mid-point demand will be met from the top down by a more modular Java EE stack or from the bottom up by building on top of Tomcat (or some non-Java HTTP server) remains to be seen. The two aren’t exclusive either.

I expect that the hosted application frameworks like the recently announced Google App Engine will also aim at that “more than Tomcat, less than J2EE” sweetspot. But the cost/benefit formula of a more full-featured (or “bloated” if you prefer Rod’s terminology) environment might turn out to be different in a “hosted framework” situation.

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, JMX, Manageability, Spring, Tech

April 3, 2008

SpringSource Application Management Suite

SpringSource has made some recent announcements, in an effort to build up its commercial offering on top of the open source Spring framework. There is now a SpringSource Enterprise subscription which gives you access to an “enterprise” edition of the framework, some support and the SpringSource Performance Suite.

The first two components (enterprise edition and support) are common approaches to commercial open source.

The performance suite is a new product, comprised of the Tool Suite (for development), an Advanced Pack for Oracle (for better use of Oracle RAC features) and the Application Management Suite (AMS). Application and middleware management is what I care most about, so AMS is the part of the announcement that caught my attention.

The only publicly-accessible source of meaningful information about AMS that I could find is this blog post by Jennifer Hickey. AMS is built on Hyperic. The monitoring is based on collecting, through instrumentation, entry and exit times for monitored methods. The agents then reports this to a server. Add to this some discovery capabilities and the console can then report observed metrics on the discovered/selected resources.

The blog post ends by saying that “we’d like to make it as powerful and easy to use as possible for both Developers and Operations staff”. At this stage, I think it’s a lot more likely to be used for development than for operations. The instrumentation overhead is supposed to be “very slight” but, as always with monitoring, this warrants more precise data. Also, it is not clear if/how AMS can integrate with other management tools.

In any case, it’s encouraging to see an open source application development framework which doesn’t entirely focus on ease of development but also acknowledges the full lifecycle of an application (and concerns such as monitoring, as addressed here, but also configuration management, governance, business activity management…). That’s the difference between “the best framework to create an application” and “the best framework to create an application that is expected to be used”. Before open source became a business strategy, a defining characteristic was that the developers where also users of the product. Which naturally meant that it was heavily biased towards developers and development tasks.

From an operations perspective, the AMS team should focus its efforts on application modeling, metric collection and management integration rather than the dashboard. A simple specialized console is great for application developers. The ability to discover, model, configure and monitor applications in conjunction with the other elements of the IT system (e.g. underlying infrastructure, end user experience, business processes and other forms of application integration, etc) is what operators really need.

In any case, it will be interesting to test the practical value of “Spring-aware” application management, above and beyond generic Java application management.

Bonus question: the enterprise edition of the Spring framework is “warranted to be virus-free”. Since the enterprise version includes the base framework, to the extent that the enterprise version is virus-free then mustn’t the base logically be “virus-free” as well? And what does “virus-free” mean anyway?

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Filed under Application Mgmt, Everything, IT Systems Mgmt, JMX, Mgmt integration, Spring