The VMforce announcement is a great step for SalesForce, in large part because it lets them address a recurring concern about the force.com PaaS offering: the lack of portability of Apex applications. Now they can be written using Java and Spring instead. A great illustration of how painful this issue was for SalesForce is to see the contortions that Peter Coffee goes through just to acknowledge it: “On the downside, a project might be delayed by debates—some in good faith, others driven by vendor FUD—over the perception of platform lock-in. Political barriers, far more than technical barriers, have likely delayed many organizations’ return on the advantages of the cloud”. The issue is not lock-in it’s the potential delays that may come from the perception of lock-in. Poetic.
Similarly, portability between clouds is also a big theme in Steve Herrod’s blog covering VMforce as illustrated by the figure below. The message is that “write once run anywhere” is coming to the Cloud.
Because this is such a big part of the VMforce value proposition, both from the SalesForce and the VMWare/SpringSource side (as well as for PaaS in general), it’s worth looking at the portability aspect in more details. At least to the extent that we can do so based on this pre-announcement (VMforce is not open for developers yet). And while I am taking VMforce as an example, all the considerations below apply to any enterprise PaaS offering. VMforce just happens to be one of the brave pioneers, willing to take a first step into the jungle.
Beyond the use of Java as a programming language and Spring as a framework, the portability also comes from the supporting tools. This is something I did not cover in my initial analysis of VMforce but that Michael Cote covers well on his blog and Carl Brooks in his comment. Unlike the more general considerations in my previous post, these matters of tooling are hard to discuss until the tools are actually out. We can describe what they “could”, “should” and “would” do all day long, but in the end we need to look at the application in practice and see what, if anything, needs to change when I redirect my deployment target from one cloud to the other. As SalesForce’s Umit Yalcinalp commented, “the details are going to be forthcoming in the coming months and it is too early to speculate”.
So rather than speculating on what VMforce tooling will do, I’ll describe what portability questions any PaaS platform would have to address (or explicitly decline to address).
Code portability
That’s the easiest to address. Thanks to Java, the runtime portability problem for the core language is pretty much solved. Still, moving applications around require changes to way the application communicates with its infrastructure. Can your libraries and frameworks for data access and identity, for example, successfully encapsulate and hide the different kinds of data/identity stores behind them? Even when the stores are functionally equivalent (e.g. SQL, LDAP), they may have operational differences that matter for an enterprise application. Especially if the database is delivered (and paid for) as a service. I may well design my application differently depending on whether I am charged by the amount of data in the DB, by the number of requests to the DB, by the quantity of app-to-DB traffic or by the total processing time of my requests in the DB. Apparently force.com considers the number of “database objects” in its pricing plans and going over 200 pushes you from the “Enterprise” version to the more expensive “Unlimited” version. If I run against my local relational database I don’t think twice about having 201 “database objects”. But if I run in force.com and I otherwise can live within the limits of the “Enterprise” version I’d probably be tempted to slightly alter my data model to fit under 200 objects. The example is borderline silly, but the underlying truth is that not all differences in application infrastructure can be automatically encapsulated by libraries.
While code portability is a solvable problem for a reasonably large set of use cases, things get hairier for the more demanding applications. A large part of the PaaS value proposition is contingent on the willingness to give up some low-level optimizations. This, and harder portability in some cases, may just have to be part of the cost of running demanding applications in a PaaS environment. Or just keep these off PaaS for now. This is part of the backward-compatible versus forward compatible Cloud dilemma.
Data portability
I have covered data portability in the previous entry, in response to Steve Herrod’s comment that “you should be able to extract the code from the cloud it currently runs in and move it, along with its data, to another cloud choice”. Your data in the force.com database can already be moved somewhere else… as long as you’re willing to write code to get it and perform any needed transformation. In theory, any data that you can read is data that you can move (thus fulfilling Steve’s promise). The question is at what cost. Presumably Steve is referring to data migration tools that VMWare will build (or acquire) and make part of its cloud enablement platform. Another way in which VMWare is trying to assemble a more complete middleware portfolio (see Oracle ODI for an example of a complete data integration offering, which goes far beyond ETL).
There is a subtle difference between the intrinsic portability of Java (which will run in any JRE, modulo JDK version) and the extrinsic portability of data which can in theory be moved anywhere but each place you move it to may require a different process. A car and an oak armoire are both “portable”, but one is designed for moving while the other will only move if you bring a truck and two strong guys.
Application service portability
I covered this in my previous entry and Bob Warfield summarized it as “take advantage of all those juicy services and it will be hard to back out of that platform, Java or no Java”. He is referring to all the platform services (search, reporting, mobile, integration, BPM, IdM, administration) that make a large part of the force.com value proposition. They won’t be waiting for you in your private cloud (though some may be remotely invocable, depending on how SalesForce wants to play its cards). Applications that depend on them will have to be changed, at least until we have standards interfaces for all these services (don’t hold your breath).
Management portability
Even if you can seamlessly migrate your application and your data from your internal servers to force.com, what do you think is going to happen to your management console, especially if it uses operating system agents? These agents are not coming along for the ride, that’s for sure. Are you going to tell your administrators that rather than having a centralized configuration/monitoring/event console they are going to have to look at cute “monitoring” web pages for each application? And all the transaction tracing, event correlation, configuration policy and end-user monitoring features they were relying on are unfortunate victims of the relentless march of progress? Good luck with that sale.
VMWare’s answer will probably be that they will eventually provide you with all the management capabilities that you need. And it’s a fair one, along the lines of the “Application-to-Disk Management” message at the recent launch of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11G. With the difference that EM is not the only way to manage a top-to-bottom Oracle stack, just the one that we think is the best. BMC and HP aren’t locked out.
VMWare and SpringSource (+Hyperic) could indeed theoretically assemble a full-fledged management solution. But this doesn’t happen overnight, even with acquisitions as I know from experience both at HP Software and currently at Oracle. Integration (of management domains across the stack, of acquired application management products, of support data/services from oracle.com) is one of the main advances in Enterprise Manager 11G and it took work.
And even then, this leads to the next logical question. If you can move from cloud to cloud but you are forced to use VMWare development, deployment and management tools, haven’t you traded one lock-in problem for another?
Not to mention that your portability between clouds, if it depends on VMWare tools, is limited to VMWare-powered clouds (private or public). In effect, there are now three levels of portability:
- not portable (only runs on VMforce)
- portable to any cloud (public or private) built using VMWare infrastructure
- portable to any Java/Spring Cloud platform
Is your application portable the way cash is portable, or the way a gift card is portable (across stores of a retail chain)?
If this reminds you of the java portability debates of the early days of Enterprise Java that’s no surprise. Remember, we’re replaying the tape.