Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

I’m sitting at CloudCon III – SaaSCon 2011.  It’s “a Cloud Conference with a focus on Software as a Service.”  Sadly the presentations are of limited value, with the same confusion I noted in my “Impressions” article (i.e. every IT business marketing department is trying to take advantage of it and rebrand their abilities “Cloud”). While not of particular technical knowledge value, they to tend to result in humorous statements by the presenters… IBM   “80% of Fortune 100 companies are using IBM cloud capabilities.”  Wow, you’ve got 80 customers?  Really?  (Those Fortune 100 companies, that spent from $200 million to $1 billion per year on IT costs, are generally using some of every capability of every major IT vendor.) Google “4 million businesses have gone Google.”  As of 2007, the US Census Bureau reported there are 29,413,039 businesses in the U.S.  Assuming Google’s talking just about the U.S. (and I don’t think they were), that’s a 13% market penetration!  Wow!  (Not!

I’m sitting at CloudCon III – SaaSCon 2011.  It’s marketed as a Cloud Conference with a focus on Software as a Service.  Here’s what I’m seeing… a.  Computer hardware vendors selling small footprint office workstations.  It’s not a surprise that computer vendors for the office have finally decided to abandon the standard desk-drawer PC box for a cigar sized box.  (Anyone who opens a standard PC box will find the components would fit in a cigar box anyway, the rest is open space or fans.)  The surprise is it took so long and that they’re selling them as “cloud workstations” and spending their money trying to market them at a Cloud Conference. b.  Network hardware vendors selling the next speed in network infrastructure, 10 gigabit.  Apparently since everything’s “in the cloud” you need yet more network bandwidth to get to it.  This is some nice marketing fluff since Cloud doesn’t increase your bandwidth needs, it just shifts it from inside your internal network to some exter

Calling web services from the mainframe has become a frequent question.  But as applications (and data) may be migrated off the mainframe to apps now hosted on Linux or Windows servers, the old trustworthy batch jobs may suddenly need to access remote systems and web services to do their job. Here’s how one person phrased their problem… We are currently looking at doing a partial migration away from a MainFrame.  S ome of the functionality written in Mainframe Cobol and is called from Mainframe Batch programs.  We would like to move these cobol programs off the mainframe.  Question - If we moved the functionality in the cobol programme to a Java or .Net web service, is the a way to call this web service from a Mainframe batch programme? Technically this is an easy answer.  Yes, web services can be invoked from the mainframe.  They can even be directly invoked from CICS and from IBM Enterprise COBOL (as of CICS TS 3.1).  There are some technical limitations to this, Enterpr