The ITKO Blog: Service Virtualization and Application Lifecycle Optimization - CA Technologies

Cloud Insanity - Stop Repeating Mistakes of the Past

I enjoyed Mike Kavis’s post, Cloud Insanity - Focusing on all the wrong things, again, especially his definition: "Cloud Insanity - To repeat the same behaviors that caused SOA to fail and expect a different result." How true. We have written a good bit on this blog about how SOA can succeed if you pay attention to the right stuff, like the governance issues, the business issues over the tech issues, and change management (see for example, Avoiding SOA Disillusionment - eBizQ Panel Recap).

These are some of the issues that Mike also lists as things to address with both SOA and the cloud. He goes on to say that we should focus the cloud debate on how to "tackle security and compliance, how to manage hybrid solutions, how to provide reliability and scalability, how to prevent latency, and many other important topics. But enough of the Cloud Insanity."

As with any hot technology, we have many vendors and consultants repackaging their expertise as a "miracle tonic" for Cloud Computing, without regard for the drivers that determine where it makes the most sense for business. We should apply the lessons learned from successful SOA efforts to help ensure that cloud efforts are successful (see Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud Computing with Lessons Learned from SOA).

One of the additional lessons similar to service-oriented development is the need for systematic testing that makes use of automation and virtualization as much as possible, so we can validate changing cloud-based services as part of a continuous business process. In return, Cloud computing is a boon for test labs and virtualized service environments, adding a lot of flexibility and options in how these assets are deployed for the business.

Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud Computing with Lessons Learned from SOA

George Lawton recently provided a post describing how "as with SOA, some development costs obscured by cloud computing." He extensively quotes iTKO’s John Michelsen and this is greatly appreciated.

George writes that while cloud computing holds great promise, it will be filled with surprises, and some of these will reflect surprises encountered in the early going of SOA. The more loosely coupled and distributed the cloud based system becomes, the more moving parts you don't have control over -- and the more hidden development costs lurking within this loose coupling.

Much of cloud functionality is created and hosted outside the organization, which creates ideal "pay as you go, leave when you want" cost and agility advantages, but it still requires testing, perhaps more than ever. To compound the problem "after the application is deployed, the service provider can make changes that could adversely affect the application without notice."

These needs call for automated testing and continuous validation. Then new two needs emerge as George notes. "After an application has been tested and deployed, paying per-unit of service (storage, CPU time, and bandwidth) allows a new app to get deployed with minimal cost. But these fixed costs can take a hidden toll when a company has to do any sort of testing, and particularly load and performance testing of a new app."

For instance, take a firm we know, whose operations team needed to run a performance test to verify required Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to verify that customer response times would be within bounds. One routine test cost about $10K in access fees from the service provider - an unforeseen bill that wouldn't have appeared if the team was banging on their own servers. That inhibits the team from testing and adjusting their service appropriately.

In addition, there is lack of control and ready access over many of these external services, especially if they are still being developed. This is where service virtualization comes in. Now you can bypass costs and areas where you cannot easily set up test situations on dependent services. As George notes, the methodologies and tools that were developed for SOA testing and validation will come in handy to handle cloud applications.

Of course, none of these challenges mean Cloud-based development isn't a great thing. We love it for all the reasons we loved SOA, then SaaS-based models, because it gives the enterprise incredible flexibility and lower cost of entry for needed infrastructure and applications. We are also seeing a new level of quality by pushing Virtual Services to provisioned Cloud environments for testing and performance labs, in order to keep unexpected third-party costs under control and allow unfettered access to test and development teams.

Expect to hear much more on this front as Cloud Computing gets tapped for serious, distributed enterprise applications that need validation and virtualization.

Q&A with Butler Group's Rob Hailstone

We recently had an extensive briefing and demonstration process with UK-based analyst firm Butler Group's Rob Hailstone - Practice Director, Software Infrastructure, and his team, the result of which is their independent Technology Audit report covering iTKO. We paid for download rights to this analyst document for limited time from our site, and we'll cover the report in a future post.

So after much scrutiny of iTKO's LISA product on their part, I decided to turn the microphone around, and had some Q&A questions for Rob, which I think provide some insight into his perspective on the enterprise software space.

Q: With economic pressure to optimize IT greater than ever, what issues are currently "top of mind" for your practice right now?

RH: My own practice area focuses on SOA. The most immediate impact of the global economic downturn is that organisations that don’t have a really concrete plan for how SOA is going to benefit the business are suspending or abandoning those plans. This is a good thing. Business benefits don’t automatically follow the deployment of SOA, they have to be targeted and worked towards. It is now more important than ever to understand exactly what has to be delivered in order to justify the cost of SOA deployment.

Q: What are your thoughts on the rate of innovation going on today in fields such as virtualization and cloud computing in the enterprise?

RH: Virtualisation has been central to IT ever since the first multi-tasking machines, but the apparent commoditisation of IT hardware caused us to lose focus. We are now much more aware of all the peripheral costs, such as management, power, floor space, etc., and it is obvious that the requirement for virtualisation has never really gone away.

Cloud has a different set of considerations. Some CIOs that will happily embrace virtualisation will think long and hard before relinquishing their physical resources. Cloud provides a great way for packaged application vendors to deliver the application as a service without having to make the heavy investment in scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure, and it also makes a lot of sense for smaller organisations who need cost-effective off-site backup or a full application platform. However, organisations with an established IT infrastructure that might look to the cloud as a top-up computing capability will probably find the cost of effectively managing a hybrid environment too high in the immediate future.

Q: You've conducted a number of Technology Audits with Butler. How do customers best leverage these documents?

RH: The obvious and most frequent use of Technology Audits is to provide enough information so that a subscriber can decide whether to include a particular product on an evaluation shortlist. They are also used as a reality check on a particular type of strategy to establish whether there is sufficient supporting technology in place to be worth persevering with a more detailed investigation. We try to ensure that we point out where a particular product is not likely to be appropriate as well as showing its strengths.

Q. Any other thoughts in terms of this report?

RH: SOA is all about enabling a higher rate of change, but just putting the architecture in place without the control mechanisms will ultimately lead to chaos. Implementing a change management process backed up with a sound set of testing technologies is an important part of building for long-term success with SOA.

Thanks for letting me ask some questions, Rob, and we had fun digging deep into LISA for the audit.

ebizQ Discussion on SOA & Cloud Computing - Everyone's got a point...

The eBizQ site recently hosted a discussion is based on JP Morgenthal's feature article, Differing Views on SOA & Cloud Computing, and the question, which seemed to cause a bit of disagreement between the old "gray hair" and new "newbie" schools of IT, is: SOA & Cloud Computing new and unique or a continuation of the same old stuff?

Occasionally you come across a topic like this that touches off a flood of responses from the community. There are a range of insights from a "who's who" of SOA and IT pundits on this particular topic worth looking at on the ebizQ discussion site: SOA & Cloud Computing: New & Unique or Continuation of the Same Old Stuff?

Here was my response:

The future risk of the cloud is the current risk of SOA. I agree with the above statements about the hype factor of cloud computing, however there's still one more challenge that both strategies will share -- dependency. In SOA engagements, we encouraged the importance of good architecture and governance, but often it was just too easy for companies to hook up a couple web services to a legacy system for a quick ROI.

Dependency didn't rear its ugly head in SOA until the services started to be used by multiple customers, each with their own needs, and then those services were connected with the services of business partners, and used in a variety of unintended ways. A lack of access to dependent services and systems throughout the development lifecycle created a constraint on the agility we expected from SOA.

Similarly, the true cost and complexity of using cloud-based solutions will become evident only at the point when companies rely on them for critical needs. The low cost of entry of the Cloud's easy provisioning and pay-as-you-use can end up costing more than expected once the solution reaches business volume. If I pay-per-use for a cloud-based solution, I am establishing recurring costs, and increasing dependencies in my testing, development and release of new functionality that need to be addressed. Hopefully this shared concern of dependency will encourage enterprises not to sacrifice good architecture, governance, and virtualization practices for short term ROI gains.

We see many companies getting past the hype of SOA to generate real value today by applying the approach with more discipline, and many of the same lessons will apply to cloud computing.

The Cloud Will Grow in 2009 - IDC

What IT sector goes up in an economic down turn? IDC answers the question with this report, Software as a Service Market Will Expand Rather than Contract Despite the Economic Crisis, IDC Finds.

Cloud Computing would have grown in a good economic environment - but this continued growth is a sign of the times. The cloud is good news for companies seeking faster ways to turn on revenue-generating functionality and save up-front costs.

Highlights of the report include:
1. By the end of 2009, 76% of U.S. organizations will have at least one SaaS-delivered application.
2. The percentage of U.S. firms that plan to spend at least 25% of their IT budgets on SaaS applications will increase from 23% in 2008 to nearly 45% in 2010.
3. This market's growth prospects will accelerate the shift to SaaS for the whole value chain as the promise of a recurring revenue stream, and the opportunity to tap OPEX and project-related dollars, will benefit the whole SaaS ecosystem.

These projections for the growth of the cloud are also consistent with our experiences with SaaS’s cousin, SOA. The cloud won't make complexity and risk go away, even if it seems to obscure much of the initial setup effort for end customers.

As companies increasingly rely on the cloud to support business processes, the interactions shared among multiple new services will need to be tested and validated. Per-use service costs and availability will also create significant constraints, and the need for service virtualization will become evident as a means of getting the best of the cloud while eliminating cloud dependencies.

SOA has been around longer than SaaS and is running ahead of it on the Gartner hype curve (See Will SOA Fold into SaaS? Will Quality Happen Along the Way? As I wrote then, one obstacle for the pure plays in the cloud to join SOA in the Gartner slope of enlightenment is to recognize and deal with the increased testing and validation of data from even more diverse sources, as well as the governance and validation of all the underlying technologies that contribute to specific business outcomes.

Chris Kraus Quoted in Processor Magazine on Cloud Computing

Processor Magazine published the article, Cloud & Virtualized Systems – Development and Testing Challenges, by Kurt Marko in today's (January 16) issue. Kurt interviewed several subjects for the piece, and it makes for an interesting blend of perspectives from the analyst and vendor community.

Kurt's article begins with the forecast, “The consensus forecast for cloud computing is definitely sunny” and adds, “After several years of hype, cloud computing is poised to make the jump from vaporware vision to mainstream IT solution; however, moving enterprise applications to the cloud is anything but a turnkey process.”  The article then goes into detail on the process of successfully implementing cloud computing.

One of the challenges covered in the piece is the difficulty of replicating the number, diversity, and geographic distribution of needed clients when testing. There are two strategies for solving this problem: behavioral simulation and synthetic virtualized test environments. The article mentions that Chris Kraus, product manager at iTKO advocates functional and load simulation of the application, as well as the 3rd party cloud services that represent costs and dependencies:

“You want something that looks enough like the cloud for your test purposes,” Chris says. These simulations can monitor the cloud vendors’ performance and service levels, but Kraus stresses that verification must be done regularly, if not continuously, to ensure vendors meet SLA uptime requirements and performance levels under all conditions.  There are more interesting ideas here and it is worth looking at the entire piece.

More on SOA & Cloud Governance from HP via Dana Gardner

Dana Gardner recently posted on Enterprises can leverage cloud models and manage transition risks using service governance, says HP.

Dana had a conversation on the role of cloud computing, services oriented architecture (SOA) and governance in exploring cloud opportunities with Rebecca Lawson, Director of Service Management and Cloud Solutions at HP; Scott McClellan, Vice President and Chief Technologist of Scalable Computing and Infrastructure in HP’s Technology Solutions Group, and Norman Lindsey, Chief Architect for Flexible Computing Services at EDS, an HP company. Dana provides highlights in his post and you can also read a complete transcript of the discussion.

The panel pointed out that virtualization and the associate cost savings are not dependent on cloud computing, but they are an enabler of it. The panel focused more on the cloud than SOA, but they had a number of useful thoughts. I liked the panel’s comment that -- “In the longer term, the more overarching impact of cloud comes when your IT department can deliver value back to the business, rather than just taking cost out."

That is more than a novel idea - for the past few years we've talked too much about driving cost out of IT, instead of driving value into the business.

Some examples? "Using aspects of social networking and other aspects of cloud computing, and the fact that cloud is delivered over ubiquitous media, the Internet, to increase 'wallet share,' increase market share, maybe bring higher margin to a business, and build ecosystems, and drive user communities for a business."

This allows cloud computing to be strategic and not simply tactical. As cloud computing becomes more strategic, it becomes even more important to have a solid governance model to make the decision on whether to move from the traditional deployment model to a cloud-delivery model. In the process of getting to a service-centric IT governance model, organizations are going to have to deal with the governance model for deploying new services (see also – Dana’s post on IDC research shows enterprise SOA adoption deepens based on certain critical practices).

These governance models can better sort through the risk/reward trade-offs on cloud computing. Of course a good testing and validation strategy takes out some of the risk side of the equation. The panel added that tougher economic conditions would heighten the acceleration of cloud computing, and not just because of the opportunity to save cost (see also Direct Insights Analysts identify IT winners and losers in global economic downturn). The panel said that opportunities for the cloud to bring value are high when it can drive user communities with users and consumers of whatever it is your business produces, using techniques of social networking and other web-based capabilities. In these strategic cases that directly touch your customers, having continuous validation of services is especially critical.

Real time from SOA/Cloud/Virtualization World - Plaques

Hey, we are here in San Jose for SYS-CON's "super connection" show of SOA World / Virtualization Conference / Cloud Computing Expo (and probably a few others). Rajeev is going on in about an hour to talk about "Peeling the Onion" of SOA.

I just got down to the booth and had 2 surprises:

• (uh-oh) Where's my signs? (I'm sure we'll sort that out in a bit.)
• (great) However, HEY, the nice folks here gave us 2 nice pieces of decor which really brighten things up - award nominations for LISA Virtualize:

- SOA World Show Awards 2008: Best Integration Solution
- Cloud Computing Show Awards 2008: Best Cloud Management Solution

Much thanks to SYS-CON for brightening our week here. We have been excited about the capabilites and future for LISA Virtualize - going far beyond our known presence in SOA testing & Validation.

iTKO talking at SYS-CON's SOA - Virtualization - Cloud Computing Event Nov. 19-21

SYS-CON Events announced today that more than 40 Cloud technology providers, as well as Virtualization and SOA companies will exhibit at the upcoming First International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo on November 19-21, in San Jose, California. It's co-located with SOAworld West and Virtualization Expo - so attendees can pick and choose topics from all three agendas. We will be there and we're looking forward to seeing how practitioners will bridge these three disciplines.

iTKO's Rajeev Gupta, Director, Solutions Delivery will present at 9:00 AM on Thursday, Nov. 20 - on "Peel the Onion, Lose the Tears: Test, Validate and Virtualize Every Layer of SOA" at the Virtualization Conference. The session will provide best practices and real-world examples of our customers that are testing, validating and virtualizing every component of the architecture, across multiple teams, on a continuous basis, to ensure trust and reliability.

A lot of the Cloud is seeping into the practice of both SOA and virtualization. This makes a lot of sense, as SOA is by nature decoupled and leverages distributed software components and logic, much of which will be hosted in the Cloud (see eBay, Google, SalesForce and others we use every day). At the same time we are seeing a need to Virtualize the behaviors of critical Cloud-based services such as transaction and inventory systems, to help teams reduce the cost and dependencies of developing and testing against them.

SYS-CON points to the growing market in cloud computing. Over the next five years, IDC expects spending on IT cloud services to grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012 and accounting for 9% of revenues in five key market segments. More importantly, spending on cloud computing will accelerate throughout the forecast period, capturing 25% of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of growth the following year.

Skytap Provides Cloud Access and Licensing for ISV Solutions; ITKO LISA is an Initial Partner

Skytap, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based virtual lab solutions, today announced its Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Alliance program to enable on-demand distribution of commercial software solutions through its Virtual Lab platform. Skytap's initial ISV partners include ITKO LISA. Skytap's Virtual Lab automation platform, combined with ITKO LISA, will enable customers to dynamically spin up entire IT environments for service-oriented testing or training labs.

I'm here at STARwest in hot Anaheim, CA, and a lot of the people I'm talking to are mighty curious about how Virtual Test Labs happen in the Cloud. For us, the ability to Virtualize a service-based application, and provision it with Skytap's virtual hardware, represents a great way to get the validation you need without the provisioning nightmare.

 

We think this is a great application for where the cloud is going - just like SOA, it is going to need better ways to test and validate the infrastructure (even if virtual) for expected business outcomes. Joe McKendrick mentioned my last post on this in his Service-Oriented blog on ZDnet: "SOA soon part of the Cloud: Hold that thought." The great thing is, if providers and customers are already thinking about these quality issues up front, the adoption of the Cloud model will catch up (and become part of) the wave of SOA.

Skytap allows companies to run their existing applications and virtual machines unchanged to take advantage of cloud economics without a major application rewrite. The company's Web services API and one-click VPN functionality allow organizations to create a "hybrid" IT model whereby cloud resources can be used and managed as an extension of existing onsite IT environments. With the introduction of the Skytap ISV alliance program, customers can now also access software from leading ISVs within the Skytap environment and gain the benefits of a pay-as-you-go model for the ISV software.

Jim Mackay, our CMO, said, "The cost model for using LISA Virtualize as a test and validation environment in the cloud makes perfect sense. In addition to offering Skytap customers complete SOA testing capabilities, LISA Virtualize abstracts away the actual system under test from dependencies on partner systems and third party resources, which means huge cost savings, as well as a much more rapid way to stand up a complex SOA environment."

Validation of cloud services makes them reliable for business. Virtualization of cloud services makes them available throughout the lifecycle. It's like two waves coming together for a bigger, stronger wave. Who can argue with that?

Will SOA Fold into SaaS? Will Quality Happen Along the Way?

I'm on my way to STARwest in Disneyland, CA today, and since it's been a little while since my last software quality-focused conference, I'm particularly interested to see how these testing experts and vendors are addressing the needs of a more distributed computing environment. Our own expert Rajeev Gupta is coming in to present "Building the SOA Quality Center of Excellence" at 11:30 PT on Thursday Oct. 2.

Joe McKendrick recently posted, CTO Predicts SOA Will Fade into SaaS.  He quoted Ron Huxter, CTO of the provincial government of Ontario, “Over the last ten years, we’ve got most of the common business practices identified. The issues that we’re coming into now are sourcing the actual services -- in two to three years, SOA will fade into yet another sales banner like everything else has and it will transform into software-as-a-service (SaaS).” Ron acknowledges that new issues in cost structures and security will go along with this transition.

Joe concluded that, “Every paradigm, every change that sweeps the IT space promises greater integration, ease of use, and cost efficiencies. However, they also introduce new vulnerabilities that need new types of solutions. The rise of SOA, and now melding with cloud computing, is no exception.”

This is certainly the case, whether or not SOA is a leading indicator of SaaS.  However, it will take a while for SaaS in a Cloud Computing model to catch up with SOA  (see ReadWriteWeb’s post -  Fastest Growing US Companies are Rapidly Adopting Social Media for a presentation of this particular Gartner Hype Curve.) One obstacle for the pure plays in the cloud to join SOA is to recognize and deal with the increased testing and validation of data from even more diverse sources, as well as the governance and validation of all the underlying technologies that contribute to specific business outcomes.

SOA and Cloud Computing Both on the Rise but at Very Different Parts of Gartner Hype Curve

ReadWriteWeb recently posted an interesting piece on a research showing that the Fastest Growing US Companies are Rapidly Adopting Social Media. What interested me the most was the Gartner Hype Curve for Emerging Technologies 2008 that was presented at the bottom of the post.  It has a July 2008 date. As most of you know the curve starts with the rapid climb to the peak of inflated expectations, followed by a dive into the trough of disillusionment, and those that have market legs get up the slope of enlightenment and reach the plateau of productivity. A technology can fall off at any point.

Both SOA and cloud computing are on the rise. However, SOA, having been around much longer is climbing the slope of enlightenment. Cloud computing is still on its way up to the peak of inflated expectations. They are both given a 2-5 year to mainstream adoption. I think that cloud computing can learn from SOA, its more advanced technology cousin.  They are starting to become connected and one lesson is the importance of testing and validation as I wrote about recently, continuous testing and validation of all these combined data sources from the cloud mitigates the risk of invalid data getting mashed up in your workflows, and your business rules going off track. It will be interesting to see how the cloud adopts this SOA quality lesson.

What we've found is that there is a bigger constraint to establishing complex, critical business workflows, whether you are calling it SOA or considering a cloud model. The bottleneck for SOA is one of availability. What do I do if I cannot develop and test my intended functionality against the services I depend on? I need a virtualized model of the services, mainframes and data I depend on to build my own successful workflow.

Here again, SOA's need for Virtualization of application behaviors is a canary in the coal mine for Cloud concerns, where your dependencies are even more abstract and ephemeral. In relying on Cloud resources, there is a lot of variability of data - making it hard to hit development targets without a "virtual cloud" model in place. We'll address this topic in more detail soon.

Parsing The Cloud – Adding a Fifth Dimension

Dan Woods provides an interesting analysis in Forbes, Parsing The Cloud, on where Cloud Computing may be going next.  He makes a good case that the cloud will become more complex and diverse. He offers four drivers of this diversity.

First, compliance is going to happen. Governments have already stepped in. The Swiss banking laws dictate that computers storing customer information must be housed inside its borders. Other countries may follow so they can tax, inspect, or otherwise exert control.

Network topology will also affect the speed of data access. Different industries have different speed requirements and this may lead to the market verticalization of clouds.

Levels of services and associated costs will be another driver. Dan suggested that it is even possible that companies wanting the highest quality of service and the least risk of failure will hire a cloud company to create a private label cloud for them.

Dan suggests that a fourth driver will be application and tool expertise. Clouds will develop to run specific types of applications, such as CRM, ERP, supply chain, manufacturing, retail applications, etc. This would further enable teams to move focus away from managing applications, and focus on managing the processes themselves.

However in reading this I would add a fifth item to the menu for cloud apps: reliability. What is the level of testing and validation? How do your know the data coming in is accurate? Are continuous tests part of the process?

With Cloud Computing thought already spanning to government compliance issues and "right sizing" on a per-industry, and possibly per-organization basis, we are going to see a much stronger need to verify that our use of cloud resources is meeting specific business needs in a responsible fashion.

More on Cloud Computing from Dion Hinchcliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe recently provide a comprehensive overview of the status of cloud computing for the enterprise in his post, Enterprise cloud computing gathers steam. It is a good article for spinning your knowledge up on what this trend means today.

He starts with the comment, “The days when organizations carefully cultivated vast data centers consisting of an endless sea of hardware and software are not over, at least not yet. However, the groundwork for their eventual transformation and downsizing is rapidly being laid in the form of something increasingly known as “cloud computing … The promise of cloud computing has captured the industry’s imagination this year for two big reasons. The first is the growing realization that cloud computing can successfully be used to strategically cut costs and drive innovation. And the second is that current offerings are getting very close to being ready for prime-time use in enterprise environments.” 

Dion writes how cloud computing can address the two main challenges facing IT today, cutting costs and supporting innovation, issue that are often at odds with each other.  He goes on to list a series of benefits around the cloud such as reduced capital expenses, scalability and performance, security, and service orientation.  Dion then predicts that ultimate future of cloud computing will be with an increasing emphasis on switchable, federated services and less on proprietary, centralized services.  At iTKO we have long been fans of the Federated approach to IT and SOA Governance.

I think that Dion is making some very valid points. However, the benefits of the Cloud are also balanced by the risks of ensuring quality in the lifecycle, and potential costs and dependency. For this discussion, we're more concerned with the applications and business workflows we are supporting, and not necessarily the value of shared computing resources, which are more self-evident.

Quality and Validation in the Lifecycle of the Cloud: The use of data from multiple sources through the cloud raises the issues of testing and validation in spades.  This goes beyond security and raw performance/uptime concerns. As with SOA, continuous testing and validation of all these combined data sources from the cloud migrates the risk of invalid data getting mashed up in your work flows and your business rules going off track. In addition, when you have a malleable set of data and services, it makes finding a "control group" for your own development far more difficult -- how can you test against a changing baseline of data? Virtualization of realistic cloud behaviors and data lets the team get through the lifecycle, to the point of implementation testing in isolation of all that chaos.

Incremental Cloud Costs? The benefit of incremental and subscription-based software in the form of SaaS is very appealing compared to the big bang implementation. However, once you actually achieve a business dependency on the Cloud, the odds can shift in the favor of the supplier. If every transaction or access point represents an incremental cost, what happens if those costs are exceeding estimates, or if your transaction costs for testing and developing against the cloud exceed the cost of ownership in today's model? Here again, we need to consider how to pay for the transactions that make money (through a paying customer), while reducing the costs of transactions that cost us money (during our own dev, test and monitoring lifecycles). Behavioral virtualization of Cloud services and data addresses this risk, and we'll address this in further detail in relation to Cloud Computing.

I would add these issues to Dion’s list and to the list of concerns that IT departments need to address as they consider a move to the cloud.   

Blowing Smoke? 3 Tests for the Cloud's Future

We couldn't help but notice how fast Cloud Computing has gone to the top of the hype cycle over the last month. You could say the Cloud is "the internet" in general and it has been there all along, and in fact it may have been referenced 10 or more years ago. This time it is new and improved, and it is really getting attention as a philosophy that is broader than SOA - you can't click twice in your IT news feed without sniffing this version of the Cloud.

Alas, this is probably the time that the big SaaS and internet platform providers like eBay and Amazon, Google and Salesforce, really come of age. Joe McKendrick recently put out some good coverage on this on his FastForward blog, "Cloud Computing: Uh Oh, Now It’s Getting Serious".

To us, this is not a mind-blowing concept -- it is a natural move for services, and applications to "live" in the cloud. However, there are 3 tests that Cloud Computing will need to overcome if it is indeed going to become the air we breathe:

1. There is no "free beer" for consumption of the Cloud.
Just like we saw a few years ago in SOA, there a perception that Cloud resources will be freely available for use in designing and building your architectures. But that is not a sustainable model. And no it's not going to be supported by advertising (on your iPhone for Facebook, etc.). If someone is offering an application that we rely on, they will need to ensure that they cover those support costs, and that the consumers are using the applications in ways that can be supported without unduly impacting other users of the cloud. Strong Validation of new offering and intended uses puts responsibility for reliability on both the producer, and consumer of Cloud resources. If there is healthy competition in the Cloud Computing market, the most reliable applications will win the most subscription dollars or usage fees.

2. There is still dependency, in fact, dependency may increase.
So if you are relying on the Cloud to provide data, transactions and other services, how can you test and validate your own business workflows and continue to evolve, if the Cloud may either not be available or ready to take your team's test and development transactions? Lack of ability to validate your own business applications against Cloud resources creates a huge bottleneck to productivity and agility. This is where behavioral Virtualization of the Cloud becomes of primary importance. If you could capture and simulate your expected interactions with the Cloud, that would eliminate a lot of the dependency and bring back the agility you expected.

3.  Fad resistance. (Uh, what were we talking about again?)
When the Cloud hype dissipates, how will this IT approach be driven by business, and not by the "coolness" of the technology? The world's leading companies will be taking more cautious wing-flaps into the Cloud - after all, they are still working on integrating and consolidating their most critical live applications for end customers. Vendors will continue to attempt to assert dominance over the definition of Cloud Computing - you might call it a shared Grid for a variety of apps, or a suite of apps running as a SaaS on a hosted provider's servers. Interoperability definitions and standards will be in flux. Nobody wants to be left behind when the definition and practice continues to change, and it certainly will continue to evolve.

We have been asked about this a lot lately, in terms of how to test, validate and virtualize Cloud Computing environments. And what we've found is that most of the same concepts that we saw in SOA apply to the Cloud - if you are going to rely on these services and apps for business, the risks have to be mitigated with continuous testing, and you need to isolate your own teams from dependency on the Cloud by virtualizing those behaviors. In this way, you can reap the benefits of ubiquitous availability of Cloud resources (services and data) as a platform for your apps, while still being able to productively design, test and develop (and keep working) when the cloud isn't available.

Anyway, this is just an initial take on the topic. We will be there at SYS-CON's first "cloud computing expo" in San Jose in November, and talking much more about how cutting edge companies are making the cloud work for business in the future.