Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

Cloud Computing is clearly well into the hype cycle. Never being one to miss some good hype, I've been paying attention to advise my clients on whether and when to pay attention to this rising option. One of the big factors in consideration is my current location... I'm working outside the U.S. My local country is heavily wired, offers high speed broadband (2-10mbit) to 100% of the country, 50mbit home connectivity in the major cities (100mbit next year), and even offers cell based mobile internet connectivity at 2mbit or 3mbit (competing companies). Company and office connectivity is typically equal or better. The in-country data centers and backbones between them are very high speed. Ping times from in-country web sites typically run 30ms across the various data centers, backbones and ISP's / hosting sites. All in all, compared to the US that's seriously high speed. Yet, all of that is in-country. The one area where the local internet infrastructure is weak is t...

Governance (service governance, design time governance, run time governance) is not going away. There are some who are under the impression that as the tools become more sophisticated and become integrated into the environments, and as SOA progresses into a realistically deployable cloud computing model, that governance becomes part of the background operation. Todd Biske makes a very convincing argument otherwise ... The ...problem with (this, that governance is going away) statement is the notion that design-time governance is only concerned with service design and development. That’s simply not true. (There are) three timeframes of governance: pre-project, project, and run-time. There’s a lot more that goes on before run-time than design, and these activities still need to be governed. It is true that if you’re leveraging an external provider, you don’t have any need to govern the development practices... Todd has a lot more to say on the matter worth reading. But the point is, e...

As I talk about SOA future vision, the 'ultimate state' or end stage goal, I frequently speak of application assembly. Application assembly is a future state goal where services and components are linked / bound / process workflow managed by specialty environments (perhaps ESB's or more likely BPM suites) into 'virtual' applications. 'Virtual' because the components are being orchestrated into the common larger business processes and are not an actual single block of code working tightly together as a single application - the traditional big-box application. After having this conversation at some clients for about 2 years, many are starting to get it and express some of this future state vision as they work with the business on today's goals. And they are taking practical steps today that let them realize limited parts of the vision and/or take some steps towards the future. But the question is, what technologies are in place that actually are realizi...

While IT analysts and pundits are busy declaring SOA is dead, SOA has failed, and the downturn killed SOA, the hype of 2009 is Cloud Computing and the resurgence of Software as a Service (SaaS). ( Microsoft Azure being a prime example.) In my discussions with my corporate clients, as well as from my own extensive corporate history, I'm finding that allowing key corporate data and processes to leave the walls of the company controlled data center is the main mental barrier to SaaS and Cloud Computing. Even though companies are outsourcing business processes and the associated data that goes with them - as well as outsourcing some applications to hosting providers - the thought of deploying their applications to an amorphous cloud and depending upon the vendor to just "support and provision it appropriately" is a mental leap they're not yet prepared to make. Similarly, relying upon services that a vendor will just "support and provision appropriately" is a...