David Chappell's Blog :: Opinari

Upcoming Keynotes

2012-01-27T16:03:00.000-08:00

I'm speaking at a couple of interesting events in the near future:

On March 8, I'm keynoting TechDays 2012 in Helsinki, Finland. I'll be talking about Windows Azure, including a look at the pros and cons of PaaS and IaaS. I haven't been to Helsinki in several years--I look forward to returning.
On March 28, I'm keynoting the Microsoft Global Hosting Summit in Bellevue, Washington. This is an invitation-only event for people who run service providers. Hosting and cloud computing are merging--they're no longer two separate markets--and so I'll be looking at what this change means for hosters. I'll also give my perspective on today's most visible cloud platform technologiess, an area I've been focused on for several years.

Both of these talks are part of what look to be really good conferences. If you're in the area for either one (geographically and professionally), I hope to see you there.

Change, and Then Change Again, and Then . . .

2011-12-22T10:25:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine is a therapist, with a graduate degree in counseling and years of experience. All of this helps her be good at what she does. The thing she's working with--the human brain--doesn't change, and so the older she gets, the more she knows about how her clients think and feel.

But suppose the people she worked with today were twice as smart in two years--their brains could process twice as much information in the same period of time--and their memories also became twice as good. Then suppose their intelligence and memory doubled again two years later, and then two years after that. Would her training and experience be as valuable? I don't think so. These quantitative changes lead to qualitative differences. The way she worked with her clients would need to change enormously over time, and she'd constantly be trying to adapt to the growth in their capacity.

This is exactly what happens in our world, of course. Things that were impossible--incredibly capable smart phones, say, or cheap cloud platforms--become possible, then common, then part of the foundation we rely on, all within a few years. And we're just getting started--there's still a long way to go. Mark Andreessen's essay on why software is eating the world paints part of this picture, and it's well worth reading.

For an even better discussion, read Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. (It's a Kindle Single, so it's short and cheap.) One of their key points is the hard-to-comprehend power of exponential growth. Borrowing from Ray Kurzweil, the authors refer to the second half of the chessboard (read it to find out what they mean--it's worth it), their metaphor for the impact of continual doubling. The point is clear: We ain't seen nothing yet.

I wonder what my therapist friend's world would be like if her clients were software rather than people. How could she keep up with their endless evolution? Yet that's exactly the challenge all of us face in our careers. We're obligated to keep up with the relentless evolution of information technology--there's no alternative.

And there's only one way to do it. We have to change, and then change again, and then . . .

November/December Speaking Schedule

2011-11-16T06:42:00.000-08:00

Later this month, I start the second leg of a Microsoft-sponsored speaking tour focused on how SaaS changes an ISV's business. These events are once again aimed at ISV CEOs/CTOs--they're invitation-only--but I'm also doing other events in several of the cities. I've included links below for these events where I have them. Most of the stops are in Africa and the Middle East, with a final date in Zurich for a keynote at a more general cloud event.

As always, if you're in the area and these events sound interesting, feel free to stop by. The cities and dates are:

November 22: Istanbul (Discovering the Windows Azure Platform)
November 24: Johannesburg
November 25: Cape Town
November 27: Tel Aviv (Windows Azure: Cloud Revolution)
November 30: Dubai
December 5: Kuwait
December 7: Zurich (Cloud Computing: Seeing the Big Picture)

Speaking in Moscow (Again)

2011-11-01T15:57:00.000-07:00

I've spoken at the Platforma conference in Moscow for the last several years. They've renamed the event--it's now TechEd Russia--but they've kindly invited me to participate again this year. I'm giving talks November 9 on PaaS, private clouds, identity, and OData.

Moscow is a challenging city in some ways--the traffic is stunning. But the quality of the technical people is absolutely first-rate. I look forward to interacting with them once again.

The Microsoft Private Cloud: A Technology Overview

2011-10-14T12:15:00.000-07:00

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If I ruled the world, I'd make using the phrase "private cloud" illegal. Obviously, though, I don't rule the world, and so this term has (sadly) become the standard way to describe using IaaS technology in your datacenter.

Confusing as it is, however, I'd argue strongly that there's a clear definition of "private cloud" that pretty much all analysts and vendors in this space agree on. It's not the same thing as ordinary virtualization, nor is it legitimate to start calling your datacenter a private cloud without making any changes. Instead, the core of a private cloud is IaaS--VMs on demand--along with perhaps other services, such as deploying applications. Most people want to use private clouds in their own datacenters, although some also want to link up with IaaS offerings from service providers.

To help clarify at least part of this story, I've written a Microsoft-sponsored white paper describing the private cloud technology embedded in System Center 2012. I've come to believe that anybody interested in cloud computing shouldn't ignore private clouds, if only because they're likely to be where a majority of cloud-focused money gets spent in the next couple of years. If you're interested in learning more about this technology area and the Microsoft approach in particular, the paper is available here.

October Speaking Schedule

2011-10-10T21:02:00.000-07:00

I'm speaking in a number of cities this month, mostly (but not entirely) in Europe. What's sending me to Europe is a Microsoft-sponsored speaking tour focused on how SaaS changes an ISV's business. These events are aimed at ISV CEOs/CTOs--they're invitation-only--but I'm also doing other events in many of the cities. The last event on the list is different: I'm keynoting a CIO conference in Mexico, doing a broad talk on cloud computing.

If you're in the neighborhood for any of these and would like to participate, I've included below all of the links I currently have to the public events.

The cities and dates are:
October 18: Warsaw (Microsoft Technology Summit)
October 19: Ljubljana/Zagreb (Advanced Technology Day)
October 20: Kiev
October 21: Moscow
October 24: Bratislava (Microsoft Global ISV Briefing)
October 27: Monterrey, Mexico (SoftMty Conference and Expo)

Adopting a Common ALM Foundation: Why It Makes Sense in a Heterogeneous World

2011-09-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

Application lifecycle management (ALM) is a complicated thing, with lots of moving parts. An important part of that complexity grows out of the diversity of tools and technologies that organizations use for ALM. One way to make ALM less complicated is to simplify this diversity.

Yet there's no way to eliminate it entirely. Even in the same organization, different people use different tools for different purposes, a reality that will never go away.

Still, it's possible to make things better by standardizing on a common ALM foundation that's able to interact with the variety of tools that people want to use. Two visible examples of this common foundation are Microsoft Team Foundation Server, part of Visual Studio, and IBM Rational Team Concert.

I've written a short white paper that looks at this issue. The paper was sponsored by Microsoft, although it doesn't focus on any particular product. Instead, my goal is to help people understand how moving to a common ALM foundation can help make their organization's ALM process better.

Complexity is the bane of our profession. Technologies that help reduce that complexity are definitely a good thing.

Cluster Computing Today: What's Changed and Why It Matters

2011-08-25T15:11:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't been paying attention, a lot has changed in cluster computing over the last few years. Rather than requiring you to create clusters solely with on-premises servers, for instance, newer technologies also let clusters include desktop workstations and virtual machines in the cloud. Just as important, the traditional cluster world of scientific and technical applications has expanded to include business-oriented applications, such as financial simulations, big data applications, and more.

I've written a short paper, available here, that looks at this transformation. Sponsored by Microsoft, it uses Windows HPC Server as an example, showing how the changes in cluster computing have been reflected in this product's evolution. The goal is to provide a short and simple description of what has changed and why you should care.

Video: Comparing Cloud Platforms

2011-08-01T17:19:00.000-07:00

I gave a one-hour talk comparing cloud platforms at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference last month. The conference organizers have now posted a video of the talk, available here.

It's a relatively informal conference session--I didn't know I was being recorded, so I was entirely focused on the hundred people in the room--and given the WPC audience, it's not deeply technical. As always, however, my goal was to give a balanced presentation, even though it was a Microsoft event.

An enterprise solutions architect from Amazon Web Services was in the audience, and he told me later that the talk seemed fair to him. Let me know what you think.

Introducing Windows HPC Server

2011-07-19T10:43:00.000-07:00

High-performance computing has traditionally been its own world. Applications are "jobs", programs are "codes", and people refer to problems as "embarrassingly parallel" without chuckling. Part of the reason for this insularity is that not too many people worked in this world--most organizations couldn't afford the big compute clusters it required--and so as with any subculture, a distinct language and world view emerged.

Today, however, public cloud platforms make important aspects of HPC accessible to everybody. This is definitely a good thing. Yet using these new capabilities requires understanding the space. What kinds of problems are right for clusters? When does it make sense to use HPC technologies, and how do those technologies work? And, of course, what exactly does it mean for a problem to be embarrassingly parallel?

To help answer these questions for people who work with Windows, I've written a Microsoft-sponsored introduction to Windows HPC Server. The paper's goal is to provide an up-to-date overview of this technology, including its support for HPC in the cloud. The target audience is pretty much anybody: It doesn't assume previous knowledge of cluster computing or HPC in general. If this sounds interesting, the paper is available here.

Jazoon Keynote Slides

2011-06-27T08:05:00.000-07:00

I love Zurich. It's incredibly expensive (my favorite Starbucks hot chocolate, $2.40 in San Francisco, is $8.50 here), but apart from that, it's a great city to visit. And the Jazoon conference was impressive: lots of sessions on lots of interesting topics.

The keynote I gave summarized my current perspective on today's most visible cloud platforms. If you're interested, the slides are here.

Update: And a video of the talk is here.

Introducing OData

2011-05-27T14:56:00.000-07:00

Every organization seems to have more data every day. But just storing data isn't enough--there also needs to be some way for diverse software to access that data. The goal of the Open Data Protocol (OData) is to allow this, providing a consistent way for many kinds of software to access many kinds of data.

Originally part of a project code-named "Astoria", OData is now a useful protocol in its own right. And while it was originally created by Microsoft, OData is used today by others as well--it's not Microsoft-only. To help people understand this technology, I've written a Microsoft-sponsored introduction, available here, that describes what OData is and looks at some of the most important scenarios for using it.

OData borrows from several other technologies, including REST, Atom/AtomPub, and JSON, which makes it easier to understand and use. It also adds significant value, however--it's not just a pastiche of existing work. If you care at all about how data is accessed--and you should--understanding the basics of OData is probably worth your time.

Introducing LINQ to HPC: Processing Big Data on Windows

2011-05-23T06:18:00.000-07:00

Big data is a big deal. Effectively processing large amounts of unstructured information can have real value, but doing it requires a technology focused on this problem.

If you're interested in the business value of big data, take a look at this recent McKinsey report, which walks through possibilities in several different areas. If you're interested in the technology, you might read the Microsoft-sponsored white paper I've written on LINQ to HPC, a new option for working with big data on Windows.

Part of Windows HPC Server, LINQ to HPC targets problems similar to those addressed by the open source Hadoop. And although it's just been released as a commercial product, LINQ to HPC is in fact a commercialization of Dryad, a technology created by Microsoft Research that's been used within Microsoft for several years. In a world full of big data, it's good to have options for how we make sense out of this sea of bits.

Keynoting Jazoon in Zurich

2011-05-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

On June 21, I'm giving a keynote on cloud platforms at the Jazoon conference in Zurich. Like its name, Jazoon is unique: It bills itself as "the international conference on the modern art of software", and it lives up to that description. There's a Java track, a Microsoft-oriented track, and a general track on software engineering today, along with perhaps the most diverse set of keynotes I've ever seen at a technical conference.

If spending the summer solstice in Zurich sounds appealing--and it should--you might find this conference worthwhile. I'm certainly looking forward to participating.

Cloud Platforms Today: A Perspective in San Francisco

2011-05-01T10:18:00.000-07:00

The Bay Area Azure Developers Group has invited me to give a talk later this month comparing cloud platforms. It's on Monday, May 23 at the Microsoft office in San Francisco, and if you're interested, you can sign up here.

Even though it's sponsored by an Azure group, the presentation is about cloud platforms in general. This includes the Windows Azure platform, but I'll also talk about Amazon Web Services, Google AppEngine, VMware, and others.

I love speaking to user groups--I'm really looking forward to the evening.

Claims-Based Identity for Windows

2011-04-15T04:54:00.000-07:00

The claims-based approach to identity keeps getting more popular. And as we all gain more experience, the technologies underlying this approach get better.

In the Microsoft world, for example, the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control service has become a fundamental part of the identity infrastructure. At the same time, an existing member of their technology family--CardSpace--has been dropped. (To me, Cardspace remains a good idea, one that might even re-appear at some point, but it doesn't solve an important problem that most people believe they have today.)

Reflecting these changes, I've written a new version of my identity overview white paper. Now called Claims-Based Identity for Windows: Technologies and Scenarios, this Microsoft-sponsored document provides a more up-to-date introduction to the topic. The goal of the paper, as always, is to help people understand and make better decisions about this important set of technologies.

Ireland in April

2011-03-15T09:12:00.000-07:00

As part of a week in Europe, I'm speaking in Dublin on April 13. The event is a half-day session on cloud platforms, and the topics include:

An overview of the Windows Azure platform: Technology and business model
Typical scenarios: A look at the kinds of applications that are and aren’t suitable for this new environment
The architectural choices required to achieve real return on your investment
The cloud platform landscape: A comparison of cloud platforms from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, and others.

The event is sponsored by Storm Technology, and if you're interested in attending, contact Rosemary Turley (rturley@storm.ie).

An update: I've posted the slides from this event here.

Virtualization Day Conference Keynote in Vienna

2011-02-10T19:59:00.000-08:00

I'm delivering the keynote at a Virtualization Day conference in Vienna, Austria on March 1. My talk will take a broad look at cloud platforms today, while the conference itself will include presentations from Citrix, HP, Microsoft, and others on various aspects of virtualization and cloud computing. If you're in the area and interested in the topic, feel free to stop by.

The Benefits and Risks of Cloud Platforms: A Guide for Business Leaders

2011-02-03T09:50:00.000-08:00

Most often, business leaders--people like CEOs or marketing VPs--don't much care what platforms their developers adopt. While they might have biases for or against a particular vendor, the pros and cons of, say, .NET vs. Spring are of limited interest. This makes sense, since making these fudamentally technical decisions isn't their job.

This isn't true for cloud platforms, however. Moving applications and (especially) data into the public cloud brings new kinds of benefits and risks to an organization. Accordingly, the decision to adopt a cloud platform needs to have buy-in from business leaders, not just people in the IT organization. For example, deciding how much risk to bear is fundamentally a business decision. IT leaders can help their business counterparts understand cloud risks, but they shouldn't make the choice on their own.

To help business leaders understand the benefits and risks of cloud platforms, I've written a short paper (available here) that examines this topic. The paper is sponsored by Microsoft, so examples tend to use the Windows Azure platform. Still, the main topics aren't specific to Microsoft or the Azure world--they're relevant for any business leader trying to understand this new world. The paper's goal is to help this audience make better decisions about using cloud platforms.

What is PaaS?

2011-01-31T09:00:00.000-08:00

Getting people to agree on the meaning of IaaS--Infrastructure as a Service--isn't hard. Prerty much everybody seems to view it as the ability to get VMs on demand, have root access to those VMs, and pay for them by the hour. In other words, IaaS is what Amazon EC2 does. Amazon invented this market, and their core technology still defines what this term means.

With Platform as a Service, though, there's less agreement. My favorite way to think of PaaS is as something where a developer just supplies an application, then lets the platform run it. Unlike IaaS, there's no need to create the foundation--the infrastructure--on which the application executes; it's already there. Give a PaaS platform an app, and it runs that app.

This definition applies to Google App Engine, Microsoft Windows Azure, Salesforce.com Force.com, and even Amazon's recently announced Elastic Beanstalk.It also provides a straightforward way to differentiate PaaS from IaaS.

Look a bit deeper, though, and things get more complicated. PaaS platforms can provide a variety of features, and they vary quite a bit. Here are some examples:

Auto-scaling: When the load on an application increases, such as a spike in the number of users, a PaaS platform that provides auto-scaling will automatically increase the number of instances of the app that are running. When the load decreases, the platform will shrink this number. Google App Engine provides this, as does Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, but Windows Azure doesn't. Force.com offers this to an extent, but with built-in governors that limit the resources an application can use.
Updates with no downtime: Can I update a running app without taking it down? I can do this on App Engine and Windows Azure, but I can't on Elastic Beanstalk.
Root access to the underlying VM: Elastic Beanstalk offers this, and Windows Azure offers a form of it with VM roles, but neither App Engine nor Force.com let developers do this.
Charging: Windows Azure and Elastic Beanstalk both charge per VM per hour, while App Engine charges per hour of CPU time. Force.com, however, charges per user, per month--your bill isn't explicitly based on the compute resources your app uses.

Are any of these qualities part of the definition of PaaS? Given the variations across the different PaaS platforms, it's hard to see how they can be. Yet lumping together cloud platforms that vary in all of these ways under a single label is bound to be confusing. Add to this other uses of "PaaS", such as Oracle's cynical attempt to apply the "Private PaaS" label to its existing on-premises middleware, and the water gets even muddier.

All of this reminds me of the Enterprise Service Bus debacle. There was never any widespread agreement on what an ESB was, and so every vendor defined the term to match its own offerings. It wouldn't surprise me to see "PaaS" become this year's "ESB", i.e., a term that each PaaS vendor tries to define in its own way. Whatever happens, it's important to understand that there's lots of variation in the diverse technologies grouped under this single label.

Windows HPC Server and Windows Azure: High-Performance Computing in the Cloud

2010-12-01T07:33:00.000-08:00

One of the most obvious uses of cloud platforms is in high-performance computing. In many ways, HPC is all about processing power, and so using the cloud to provide CPUs on demand is attractive.

In the Microsoft world, high-performance computing is supported by Windows HPC Server, while processing power on demand is provided by Windows Azure. It shouldn't be surprising that these two technologies have been brought together. To explain this combination, I've written a Microsoft-sponsored paper that describes high-performance computing in the cloud using Windows HPC Server and Windows Azure.

Available here, the paper doesn't assume prior knowledge of either technology. Instead, the goal is to provide a big-picture introduction to using the two together, giving you a sense of what the combination allows and why it's interesting.

The Windows Azure Programming Model

2010-11-11T19:47:00.000-08:00

Writing an application for Windows Azure is much like writing one for Windows Server. But it isn't exactly the same. In fact,Windows Azure is different enough to qualify as having its own programming model.

I've written a Microsoft-sponsored white paper, available here, that describes the Windows Azure programming model at a high level. There's no code in the paper; instead, I've tried to explain the concepts that underlie the model.

The paper lays out three rules that Windows Azure applications should follow:

A Windows Azure application is built from one or more roles.
A Windows Azure application runs multiple instances of each role.
A Windows Azure application behaves correctly when any role instance fails.

You don't absolutely have to follow all of these rules when you create a Windows Azure app. But if you don't, you probably won't be happy with how your app behaves--this isn't the familiar Windows Server world.

Getting a handle on this new programming model isn't hard, but it does require learning a few new things. As the Windows Azure platform gets more important, both in the cloud and on-premises, more and more apps will be built on it rather than on Windows Server. If you plan to build apps on Windows Azure--that is, if you plan to continue developing in the Microsoft environment--I encourage you to read this paper.

Speaking in November: Moscow and Athens

2010-11-08T14:12:00.000-08:00

I'm participating in a couple of European events this month. On November 17, I'm speaking at Microsoft's Platforma conference in Moscow, something I've done for the last several years. It's a great event, full of smart people, and I'm happy to be returning. Later that same week, I'm keynoting an invitation-only November 19 cloud conference in Athens. I haven't been to Greece in something like ten years--I'm excited to be coming back.

If you're in either city and you're interested in cloud computing or other new technologies, I look forward to seeing you there.

Good Book: Hadoop: The Definitive Guide

2010-10-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

Applications and data are the yin and yang of information technology. For a long time, it seemed like there wasn't so much new going on in the data world--just more ways to use SQL and traditional relational databases.

But those days are over. Data and how we work with it are changing in all kinds of interesting ways. Much of this change (although not all of it) has been driven by the advent of cloud computing, giving us a whole new way to create and work with really big data.

Part of the foundation for this was laid in two papers published by Google describing internal technologies: one on the Google File System (GFS) and another on a programming model for working with big data called MapReduce. Once this knowledge went public, people began building their own implementations. The most important of these is surely the open-source Hadoop, which includes a GFS-like technology called the Hadoop Distributed Filesystem (HDFS), an implementation of MapReduce, and lots more.

Understanding a chunk of new technology that solves lots of new problems isn't always so simple. Getting a handle on Hadoop is straightforward, though, because there's a great introductory book: Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, by Tom White. I liked this book's first edition, and the second is even better: clear, complete, and compelling.

It's a significant time in the data world, with new problems and new solutions. Hadoop is clearly part of this, and I'd encourage anybody interested in this area to read White's book. It's a great introduction.

Videos on Visual Studio 2010

2010-10-21T20:24:00.000-07:00

Software development is anything but simple, and the tools developers use also aren't simple. There are lots of problems to be solved and lots of tools to solve them with.

Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 targets a whole bunch of these problems in one integrated tool set. (In fact, given the range of tasks it addresses, probably no other Microsoft product has as many competitors.) I wrote a Microsoft-sponsored introduction to VS 2010 earlier this year, and more recently, I recorded a series of videos based on that paper. If you're interested in VS 2010, and you'd rather watch than read, the videos are here:

Videos on Application Lifecycle Management

2010-09-27T16:11:00.000-07:00

A while ago, I wrote a set of short papers on various aspects of ALM. I've now recorded a set of equally short videos on the same topics. They are:

Like the papers, these videos were sponsored by Microsoft. Also like the papers, though, they're not product-focused. My goal is to talk about ALM in a broad way, not to describe any particular vendor's products.

GIS in the Cloud

2010-09-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

Geographic information system (GIS) technology has gone mainstream--it seems to be everywhere. Cloud computing has also gone mainstream, becoming a bigger part of our lives every day. It shouldn't be surprising that these two technologies are being used together.

I've written a white paper on this combination, sponsored by ESRI. It's called GIS in the Cloud: The ESRI Example, and it illustrates some ways in which ESRI is applying cloud computing to GIS. The paper's goal is to give anybody interested in this area a big-picture view of how one GIS provider is exploiting the possibilities of the cloud.

IT Innovation: A Presentation and an Interview

2010-08-09T06:41:00.000-07:00

It's undeniable: The bulk of today's most important innovations are rooted in IT. But what is IT innovation? And how can we get more of it?

I've gotten deeply interested in these questions over the last couple of years. As a result, I've begun giving talks on IT innovation, one of which is available in slides-and-audio form here. I also recently recorded a short, informal interview with Bob Familiar that summarizes some of my perspectives.

Innovation is what moves the world forward. In recent decades, nothing has been more important in doing this than IT-based innovation. And yet while innovation in general is a hot topic, IT innovation gets less attention than it deserves. It's time to change that.

Integration White Papers for IT Leaders

2010-08-06T13:18:00.000-07:00

A couple of short papers that I wrote a while ago have just been made generally available. Both target IT leaders, and both were sponsored by Microsoft. The papers are:

Integration Software: Build or Buy? When does it make sense to build your own integration server, and when are you better off buying a commercial product? This article takes a vendor-neutral look at this question from the point of view of an IT leader trying to understand the trade-offs.
Creating Business Value Through Integration: What BizTalk Server and SQL Server Provide The only reason organizations care about integration is because of the business value it offers. But categorizing potential integration solutions and understanding the value that each can bring takes some thought. This paper walks through one approach to doing this, using Microsoft's integration technologies as examples.

Good Books

2010-07-31T18:20:00.000-07:00

Even though so much is available on the Web, I still find the best stuff in books. This shouldn't be surprising, I suppose, since the subjects I'm most interested in right now are bigger than a few blog entries can handle.

This summer, there have been three books that really made a difference in how I understand the world:

Adventures of an IT Leader, by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, and Shannon O'Donnell. How many people who work in IT really understand the challenges a CIO faces? How many business leaders have any sense at all of what that job entails? Whatever that number might be, it's not big enough. This book, a business novel reminiscent of Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal, is by far the best thing I've seen for filling this gap. Anybody who works in IT, at any level, needs to read this book. And since one of the authors is a former playwright, it's compulsively readable.
The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics, by Eric D. Beinhocker. Okay, I know it's a strong statement, but this just might be the best non-fiction book I've ever read. As a one-time economics student (in fact, my first professional job title was "Economist"), I found this book's analysis of what's wrong with conventional economics absolutely compelling. And that's just the first half--it gets better from there. The first chapter is available for free here; read and it see what you think. For me, just this part of the book rocked my view of the world. (Actually, I suspected that I'd like it right from the start: The book's epigraph is a quote from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, my all-time-favorite play.) Thanks to my Dutch friend Dik Bijl for pointing me to this great, great book.
The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, W. Brian Arthur. A bit more academic than the other two I've listed here, this book takes a serious look at a topic that's close to all of our hearts: technology. I always like to have a big-picture view of a topic, a frame to surround the details of the picture in my head. Until I read this book, I hadn't realized that I was missing a frame for thinking about technology itself. Brian Arthur provides that frame, and it's remarkably useful. His work is also cited in The Origin of Wealth--he's a smart guy--and this book offers a lot to anybody who works with technology.

Introducing Visual Studio 2010

2010-06-16T21:06:00.000-07:00

Software development depends on tools, all kinds of tools. Architects use visual tools to design code, developers use IDEs to write code, testers use various tools to test code, and everybody uses reporting and tracking tools to stay up to date on how the project is doing.

Given this diversity of tools, it makes sense to tie them together around a common repository for source code, builds, and other project information. Both Microsoft and IBM offer tools today that take this approach: Microsoft's are built around Team Foundation Server (TFS), while IBM's rely on the analogous Jazz Team Server.

Just last month, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010, the latest version of its development tool family. I've written a Microsoft-sponsored white paper that walks through this product. The goal is to provide a big-picture overview of the whole thing--TFS, architecture tools, testing tools, reporting tools, and more--that's approachable even by people without much background in Visual Studio. If this sounds interesting, the paper is available here.

A note about terminology: In previous releases, Microsoft called its full suite of integrated development tools "Visual Studio Team System", while the name "Visual Studio" referred to just the IDE. In this latest release, the "Team System" label has been dropped; the name "Visual Studio" is now used to refer to everything. Accordingly, this paper isn't focused on the Visual Studio IDE. Instead, it describes the current release of what was previously known as Visual Studio Team System.

This product contains lots of technology, and where to start in understanding it isn't obvious. The intent of this paper is to provide an approachable entry point into this broad space.

Another Interview on Cloud Platforms

2010-05-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

I spoke in London earlier this month, and so I once again had the chance to sit down with my friend David Gristwood to talk about cloud platforms. The last time he and I talked, our conversation focused on the most visible cloud platforms from various vendors. This time, we discussed IaaS and PaaS, private and public clouds, scenarios for using the Windows Azure platform, and the impact of cloud platforms on internal IT organizations.

It's always a pleasure chatting with David (who was also the photographer for the event). If you'd like to listen in, the interview is here.

Introducing Windows Server AppFabric

2010-05-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

I know some application developers who really enjoy creating general infrastructure for their apps. My guess is that these people would be happier working for a software vendor--they shouldn't be application developers. Developers who get paid to write applications should write application code, not infrastructure. Software that provides general-purpose support for application logic--operating systems, database systems, and much more--should be provided by vendors.

Windows Server AppFabric is an important example of this. By providing caching and hosting services for Windows applications, it can reduce the amount of general-purpose infrastructure that app developers must write. I've written a Microsoft-sponsored introduction to this technology, available here, that provides a big-picture view of what it is and why you'd use it.

Don't confuse Windows Server AppFabric with Windows Azure AppFabric. Both have "AppFabric" in their names, and both provide infrastructure for applications, but they currently have no technologies in common. Microsoft tells us that this will change in the not-too-distant future, with the Windows Server AppFabric technologies appearing in Windows Azure AppFabric. You shouldn't let this throw you, though: the caching and hosting services of Windows Server AppFabric can be useful for Windows apps today.

Visiting Mexico City for the SG Cloud Conference

2010-05-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

I'll be in Mexico City on June 3 to give a keynote at the SG Cloud conference. As usual, I'll be talking about cloud platforms, with an overview of the whole space followed by a closer look at the Windows Azure platform. It looks like an interesting event, and I'm happy to be participating.

I'm also scheduled to give several talks in Sao Paulo earlier that week, but I'm afraid that all of them are invite-only. If you're on the list, though, I look forward to meeting you. It's great to be returning to Brazil.

Talking about Cloud Platforms in Brussels on May 12

2010-05-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

If you're in Belgium next week and you're interested in cloud computing, feel free to sign up for the Architect's Forum being held in Brussels. I'm giving a broad talk about cloud platforms that looks at today's most visible options--public and private--showing how they relate to one another.

I'm also speaking in Tel Aviv and London on this same trip, but I'm afraid that all of the events in both cities are invitation-only. If you're on the invite list, I look forward to seeing you there.

A Short Interview on Cloud Computing

2010-04-27T04:51:00.000-07:00

In Singapore earlier this month, I recorded a short interview with Zafar Anjum of MIS Asia. As has become typical for me lately, we talked mostly about cloud platforms. If you're interested, our discussion is available as a podcast here.

Platforms in the Cloud: Where Will Your Next Application Run?

2010-04-07T20:41:00.000-07:00

ESRI has posted the slides from the keynote I gave at their Developer Summit last month. The talk takes a big-picture view of cloud platforms today, providing a taxonomy for thinking about the leading offerings (both public and private). It ends with a look at what ESRI is doing in the cloud, but most of the talk isn't specific to the GIS world.

After resisting it for quite a while, I've given in to using the IaaS/PaaS categorization for public cloud platforms. I still think it's full of problems, but whether I like it or not, this way of talking about the space has become almost universal.

And I'm still not crazy about the term "private cloud". Technically, a private cloud is essentially IaaS in your data center, but the large scale and pay-as-you-go economics of public clouds aren't available in typical private clouds. This makes them different in fundamentally important ways. Still, it's clear that private clouds are what most people think of as the evolution of today's virtualized data centers, and the term is clearly here to stay.

As these slides suggest, we're seeing some convergence of what cloud platforms provide. This is a good thing--it's what happens as markets mature--but there's still a long way to go. As I'm so fond of saying, big platform shifts like this happen rarely; it's a great time to be alilve.

Presentation Integration and Blue Prism

2010-04-05T19:50:00.000-07:00

Remember screen scraping? It's grown up into something else entirely. That something else, now known as presentation integration, provides an alternative to the more common approach of business logic integration.

While there aren't many big vendors selling products that do presentation integration today, there are some smaller firms in this space. One of them, UK-based Blue Prism, hired me to write a white paper describing their technology and presentation integration in general. It's an effective approach in quite a few situations, and if you're interested, the paper is available here.

Azure Speaking Tour: Asia/New Zealand Dates

2010-03-25T17:45:00.000-07:00

My long-running Windows Azure speaking tour takes me back to Asia next month, then on to New Zealand. The cities and dates are:

Kuala Lumpor: April 12 (as part of the Visual Studio 2010 launch event)
Singapore: April 13
New Delhi: April 15
Manila: April 19
Auckland: April 22
Wellington: April 23

As always, feel free to stop by if you're in the area and interested in the topic.

Good Book: Development with the Force.com Platform

2010-03-11T11:10:00.000-08:00

Force.com is a truly interesting technology, and I've spoken with plenty of happy customers. Yet I've always been challenged by the way Salesforce.com talks about it. Even in what's supposed to be technical documentation, I feel like I'm being marketed to. This makes the technology harder to understand, and it also hurts their credibility.

Jason Ouellette's book Development with the Force.com Platform goes a long way toward fixing that problem. It's the first clear, complete, and trustworthy description I've seen of the Force platform. The writer does a first-rate job of explaining the technology, showing its strengths and (sometimes) weaknesses. Anybody who's interested in Force.com or cloud platforms in general should buy this book.

ESRI Developer Summit Keynote

2010-03-01T15:19:00.000-08:00

The people at ESRI have kindly invited me back to keynote their Developer Summit in Palm Springs later this month. I'll be talking about cloud platforms, describing and comparing some of the most visible examples, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft's Windows Azure platform, and Google AppEngine.

I also keynoted last year's event, and it was a great pleasure--it's a first-rate conference. If you work in the world of geographic information systems, this sure looks like the place to be for the last week of March.

Azure Speaking Tour: Australia Dates

2010-02-18T11:00:00.000-08:00

I'm still flying around talking about Windows Azure and platforms for cloud computing. My next stop is Australia:

Sydney: February 23
Melbourne: Feburary 24

If you're in the area and interested in the topic, feel free to stop by.

Providing Single Sign-On to Amazon EC2 Applications from an On-Premises Windows Domain

2010-01-11T16:28:00.000-08:00

Cloud platforms bring new challenges for handling identity. One important example of this is the need to give users in an on-premises Windows domain single sign-on to applications running in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). If we want to make cloud platforms a natural extension of our on-premises world--and we absolutely do--solving this problem is important.

Fortunately, there are a few different ways to do this. I've written a short white paper, jointly sponsored by Amazon and Microsoft, that gives an architectural overview of today's options. The paper won't walk you through the details of how to implement a solution, but it will give you a sense of what the options are.

Cloud platforms are quickly becoming part of our world. Anybody thinking about identity issues today who's not considering the cloud is missing something big.

Virtualization for Windows: An Update

2009-12-29T12:52:00.000-08:00

Even though the technology has been with us for some time, virtualization remains a big deal. And while hardware virtualization still gets most of the attention, other aspects also matter, including desktop virtualization and application virtualization.

I wrote an overview of Windows virtualization technology a couple of years ago. An updated version of the paper, once again sponsored by Microsoft, is now available here.

Virtualization is fundamental to how data centers--both on-premises and in the cloud--are structured today, and so it's also fundamental to modern computing. Everybody needs to know at least the basics.

Interviews from Berlin

2009-12-01T08:13:00.000-08:00

I spoke at TechEd Europe in Berlin last month, which was really a pleasure. While I was there, I sat down for two short interviews with Dutch IT students. Rather than asking me about technology, as people usually do, they wanted to talk mostly about the work I do: speaking and writing.

As a result, the interview isn't at all technical, but they certainly asked some original questions. I enjoyed the conversation, and if you're interested, the two segments are here and here.

An Interview on Cloud Platforms

2009-11-03T09:18:00.000-08:00

In London on my recent Azure speaking tour, I sat down with my friend David Gristwood from Microsoft for a conversation. We talked about a range of things, focusing mostly on what companies other than Microsoft offer in this space.

It's hard to compare cloud platforms. They're all different in significant ways, and they all focus on their own set of problems. Despite this, I tried in this interview to give short summaries of my perspective on some of today's most visible options, including Amazon Web Services, Google AppEngine, and Force.com. If this sounds interesting, you can watch the interview here.

The SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform

2009-10-27T18:52:00.000-07:00

The popularity of SharePoint continues to amaze me. It's a useful technology, so I'm not surprised that people like it. What I marvel at is how rapidly it's spread. Are there any Windows customers left who aren't using it in some way?

SharePoint is a platform for building applications as well as an application itself, but its platform aspect hasn't gotten as much attention. At least in part, this is because the SharePoint development environment hasn't been as easy for .NET developers to use as it might have been.

Yet a SharePoint app is fundamentally an ASP.NET app, so the two worlds have a good deal in common. With the 2010 release, Microsoft has put a significant amount of effort into making SharePoint a better development platform for creating what might otherwise be straight ASP.NET applications.

If you're interested in this area, I've written a Microsoft-sponsored white paper titled The SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform: An Introduction for ASP.NET Solution Architects. The paper's goal is to provide a big-picture view of SharePoint as a platform for creating applications. It's clear to me that with the advent of SharePoint 2010, a significant number of applications that might have been built using plain ASP.NET will instead be built on SharePoint. If you're interested in why, you might find the paper useful.

Azure Speaking Tour: Asia Dates

2009-10-01T04:23:00.000-07:00

It's taken a while to come together, but the Asian cities and dates for this tour are now firm. They are:

Tokyo: October 13-14
Singapore: October 19
Bangalore: October 21
Mumbai: October 23

I'm really looking forward to returning to all of these cities.

Azure Speaking Tour: Europe Dates

2009-09-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

Here are the European cities and dates for my fall Windows Azure speaking tour:

London: October 6
Munich: October 7
Paris: October 8

It's going to be a busy week.

Updating the Windows Azure Story

2009-09-14T17:43:00.000-07:00

If you're paying close attention, you already know this, but it's still worth pointing out that Microsoft has changed various aspects of what was called the Azure Services Platform. It's now known as the Windows Azure platform, and some pieces have been deleted, such as the Workflow part of .NET Services. For a current description, take a look at the updated version of my paper Introducing the Windows Azure Platform (formerly called Introducing the Azure Services Platform).

Is this the end of changes in this technology? Probably not--there may well be more updates before it's generally available later this year. Still, if you care about cloud computing, keeping up with Microsoft's cloud platform isn't a bad thing to do.

Azure Speaking Tour: US Dates

2009-09-13T19:20:00.000-07:00

I'm spending most of the next couple of months on a Microsoft-sponsored speaking tour focused on the Windows Azure platform. The US cities and dates are:

Boston: Sep. 18
Chicago: Sep. 21
Reston: Sep. 23
Dallas: Sep. 28
Mountain View: Oct. 29

Many of the events are invitation-only (and I don't control the invite list). Not all of them are, however, so if you're interested in Azure, I hope to see you there.

During the first few weeks of October, I'll be speaking in Europe, Japan, and India. I'll post the cities and dates for these as soon as they're all firm.

Is SOA Failing? A 2008 Interview

2009-08-14T12:18:00.000-07:00

I've avoided commenting much on the collapse of SOA. This is partly because I've been focused on other things, like cloud computing. It's also because I wanted to avoid colliding too much with the Oracle David Chappell, whose perspective on this issue has been somewhat different than mine. Plenty of people were out there making the points that I would have made, and so adding to the confusion didn't seem to have much value.

Still, I've just run across a video interview that I recorded quite a while ago (June 2008). It's a conversation with my friend Ted Neward, and it's largely about why SOA doesn't work in most organizations. It's more than a year old, but I'd say the same things today.

Somebody suggested to me that what "SOA" really stood for was "Suckered Once Again". This is a little harsh--there really is some value in these ideas. It's clear, though, that this value is nowhere near as large as we'd hoped.

New ITG Series Book: Understanding SCA

2009-07-20T13:41:00.000-07:00

One of the things I do is act as series editor for Addison-Wesley's Independent Technology Guides. The latest book in this series, Understanding SCA (Service Component Architecture), has just been published. Written by Jim Marino and Michael Rowley, it's like all the other books in the ITG series: an intro to an important new area.

We sometimes describe the series as containing the first book a developer should read and the only book that developer's manager needs to read. Toward this end, Understanding SCA provides a broad overview of the topic along with enough depth to give you a solid grasp of the basics.

I continue to believe that SCA gets less attention than it should (including from the vendors that claim to support it). Perhaps the publication of Jim and Mike's book will help change this. SCA is unquestionably an interesting technology.

Windows Azure and ISVs: A Guide for Decision Makers

2009-07-14T15:16:00.000-07:00

New platforms, including Windows Azure, are successful only if people write applications for them. This implies that one of the most important audiences for Windows Azure--maybe the most important--is independent software vendors (ISVs). Just as ISVs have adapted to new platforms in the past, they now need to decide how to adapt to cloud platforms like Windows Azure.

To help them sort through the options, I've written a Microsoft-sponsored paper (available here) that's aimed at ISV decision makers. My goal in the paper is to explain how and why ISVs might use a cloud platform like Windows Azure, as well to illuminate some of the challenges.

Using the cloud certainly isn't appropriate for every app and every ISV. Still, ignoring this new platform style strikes me as potentially suicidal. There's no way to avoid coming to grips with this emerging world.

Good Books

2009-07-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

In the last few months, I’ve run across lots of good technical books. Here are a few of my favorites:

- RESTful .NET, by Jon Flanders. Like most former SOAPafarians, I’ve come to be a big believer in the value of REST. SOAP still has value, but a RESTful approach is better in plenty of situations. Microsoft’s WCF added explicit REST support a while ago, and Jon’s book is the best introduction I’ve seen to building RESTful services in .NET. Full disclosure: I wrote the foreword to this book, and I was really happy to do it. Jon is just great at what he does.

- Programming Entity Framework, by Julia Lerman. Any technology that attempts to provide an object/relational mapping seems to attract controversy, and the ADO.NET Entity Framework is no exception. Whatever your view of the technology, though, you need to get this book if you care at all about the area. Julie provides a very coherent high-level description, along with as much detail (nearly 800 pages) as you’re ever likely to need.

- Microsoft.NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise, by Dino Esposito and Andrea Saltarello. Anybody who is or aspires to be a .NET architect should buy and read this book, right now. To my knowledge, there’s nothing else like it available, and it fills a gaping hole in the .NET world.

- 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, edited by Richard Monson-Haefel. I have an embarrassing fondness for books that are full of short, independent essays, especially when they’re on a topic I deeply care about. This book, written by dozens of different people, is a collection of maxims with supporting descriptions on the general theme of software architecture. Like me, you’ll probably disagree with many of them, but hey—that’s half the fun of reading a book like this.

The Microsoft Application Platform: A Perspective

2009-06-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

I spoke at a Microsoft conference in Holland last month, and a video of one of the talks I gave is now online. Its title is The Microsoft Application Platform: A Perspective, and it covers a potpourri of different things: the relationship between application platforms and business strategy, a simple model for thinking about application platforms today, a look at the on-premises and cloud platforms of various vendors using this model, and more.

Now that I think about it, a better title for this session might have been Things David Thinks are Interesting in the Application Platform World Today.

Perspectives on Application Lifecycle Management

2009-06-11T21:50:00.000-07:00

The first of the four short papers I wrote recently on ALM, What is Application Lifecycle Management?, was published a few weeks ago. The other three are also now available. They are:

Application Lifecycle Management and Business Strategy

Application Lifecycle Management as a Business Process

Tools for Team Development: Why Vendors are Finally Getting It Right

All four were sponsored by Microsoft, but they're not about Microsoft technologies. Instead, they're intended to help IT decision makers think about ALM in a broad sense.

IT innovation is fundamental to creating new value in the world, and ALM is fundamental to IT innovation. Understanding this topic and getting good at it ought to be on the top of every IT organization's agenda.

On Being Independent

2009-06-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

If you're interested in working as a technology consultant, either on your own or for a consulting firm, I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of Aaron Erickson's book The Nomadic Developer: Surviving and Thriving in the World of Technology Consulting. It's a first-rate description of the consulting world, looked at from many different angles. Anybody who's even considering this career path ought to buy this book.

The book's last chapter is a collection of short essays contributed by people who've made a career in consulting, including me. Addison-Wesley, the book's publisher, gave me permission to post my contribution. Called On Being Independent, it's available here.

An Update to Introducing the Azure Services Platform

2009-06-01T06:55:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has made some important updates to various parts of the Azure Services Platform. Accordingly, I've updated the overview white paper I wrote on Azure last fall. The new version is available here.

The biggest change is in SQL Data Services, which now will provide a standard relational datastore. This is really important, as the absence of relational storage was a gaping hole in the original announcement. It's great to see that Microsoft is fixing this.

An Update on Windows Azure

2009-05-19T15:49:00.001-07:00

I sat down with Bob Familiar from Microsoft last week in Los Angeles to talk about Windows Azure and cloud computing in general. Bob's a smart guy (and a fellow musician), and I really enjoyed the conversation. If you're interested, the video of our discussion is here.

The Workflow Way

2009-05-18T07:48:00.000-07:00

Windows Workflow Foundation (commonly called just WF) is a useful technology. It's not so simple to understand and use, however, and so it's not a widely used choice among enterprise Windows developers today. A primary goal of WF's next release is to change this, making the technology more approachable and more popular. For this to happen, people need to understand what WF really offers.

Toward this end, I've written a new introduction to WF. Called The Workflow Way: Understanding Windows Workflow Foundation, the paper's goal is to explain WF to mainstream Windows architects and developers in a straightforward way.

To me, everybody who builds software on Windows ought to understand the basics of WF--it's a fundamental part of the application platform. And while workflow isn't always the right approach, it's sometimes just what you need.

Categorizing Cloud Platforms: Beyond IaaS and PaaS

2009-04-21T10:50:00.001-07:00

The most common way to categorize cloud platforms today is to split them into two chunks: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). This dichotomy is simple, which is good, and it's useful in some situations.

Still, I've become convinced that the IaaS/PaaS distinction is too limited; it hides more than it reveals. The reality is that the cloud platform world has become significantly more complex since the IaaS/PaaS split was created. We need something that does a better job of helping people decide which cloud platform is right for them.

A scenario-based approach can do this. By categorizing the kinds of applications we want to build on cloud platforms, then working out exactly what capabilities a cloud platform needs to support each of those application styles, we can better match our requirements with what the various platforms offer. The result isn't as simple as the IaaS/PaaS split, but at least in some cases, it's more useful.

I'm planning to write a paper on this sometime soon. In the meantime, here's the keynote presentation I gave at a conference in Silicon Valley last week. Along with a few other things, this talk illustrates the scenarios I currently find most representative, then shows how the leading cloud platforms match with what each of those scenarios requires.

My goal isn't to figure out which cloud platform is best--they all have pros and cons. Instead, the intent is to help people decide which platform makes the most sense for whatever they're trying to do.

The scenarios I've chosen certainly aren't exhaustive--this is a work in progress. As always, comments are very welcome.

What is Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)?

2009-04-11T14:59:00.000-07:00

I've written a group of short articles on application lifecycle management, all of which will be published over the next few weeks. They were sponsored by Microsoft, but they're not focused on Microsoft technology or products. Instead, my goal was to help people think about ALM in what I believe is a more useful way.

The first of these papers to appear is What is Application Lifecycle Management? Its main argument is that ALM is much more than just the traditional software development lifecycle. As usual, I think that understanding the big picture--having the right context for what you're doing--is essential.

SOAP vs. REST: Complements or Competitors?

2009-04-07T11:36:00.000-07:00

ESRI, a leading firm in geographic information systems (GIS) software, invited me to keynote their developer conference last month. I spoke about SOAP and REST, something that's relevant to most people building software today.

ESRI has posted a slightly edited video of the talk, along with a PDF of the slides. There's a bit of ESRI-specific content, but for the most part, the presentation is a general look at SOAP and REST.

The talk runs for more than an hour, so here's the punchline: Exposing services RESTfully is a better choice in a majority of situations, especially over the Internet. SOAP and the WS-* technologies still have some role, however, particularly inside enterprises.

Conference: Shaping the New Age of Application Development

2009-04-06T18:20:00.000-07:00

SDForum, a Silicon Valley non-profit focused on technology, is sponsoring a two-day conference on the future of application development. The event is in Santa Clara, California on April 17-18, and big chunks of the agenda are focused on cloud computing.

The first day's opening keynote is by Forrester's James Staten, one of the absolute best analysts in this area. I'm doing the keynote for the second day, talking about cloud platforms. If you have a couple of days to spare and you care about what's next in application development, I encourage you to take a look at this event.

Amazon Reserved Instances and Cloud Capacity Planning

2009-03-21T07:54:00.000-07:00

Amazon's announcement of discounted pricing for EC2 customers who make long-term commitments is welcome news. Cheaper is better.

One way to look at this change is to see it solely as a price reduction, something focused on addressing customer concerns. But adding reservations also addresses Amazon's own concerns.

Here's the issue: Customers want to see EC2 and similar public cloud platforms as an infinite pool of compute resources. Rather than building out your own data center to handle peak loads, you can instead count on your cloud provider always to have enough capacity. The providers themselves encourage this view, since it's one of their strongest economic arguments.

But can a cloud platform really provide infinite compute resources? Of course not. Relying on a cloud provider for peak computing resources doesn't make the capacity planning problem go away: It just moves it out of your data center and into the cloud. And the people who run cloud data centers now face this problem in a big way. As more firms depend on them, they need to predict more accurately what their aggregate demand will be.

With the original EC2 approach of VMs on demand, this is essentially impossible. While a cloud capacity planner might make some inferences based on previous demand, number of new customers, and other variables, accurately predicting the future is tough when anybody can request a bunch of new VMs with no warning.

Reservations make it easier. By knowing more up front about a customer's likely usage, cloud platform planners can make better decisions. Since having too much capacity hurts the cloud provider's profits, while not having enough capacity at times of heavy demand is really bad for business, knowledge about future usage has enormous value.

So yes, Amazon is lowering prices. At the same time, though, they're improving their own ability to make intelligent investments in their business.

As the innovator, Amazon is once again defining our expectations about what a public cloud platform is and how it should be priced. Because reservations are so valuable to the people who run a cloud platform, expect the idea to spread.

Introducing Windows Azure

2009-03-19T11:36:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's Azure Services Platform has various parts, but the one that's generated the most interest so far is Windows Azure. I've written an overview white paper on Windows Azure that's available here.

The paper overlaps some with my earlier paper on the entire Azure Services Platform. This one is focused entirely on Windows Azure, though, which lets me spend more time on things like the fabric. The paper also talks a bit about the recently announced changes to Windows Azure, such as support for unmanaged code. If you're interested in cloud platforms, you might find this overiew useful.

The Most Important Profession in the World

2009-03-14T21:15:00.000-07:00

The Wharton School of Business has created a list of the top 30 innovations in the last 30 years. The complete list is here, but here are the top ten:

Internet, broadband, WWW (browser and HTML)
PC/laptop computers
Mobile phones
E-mail
DNA testing and sequencing/Human genome mapping
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
Microprocessors
Fiber optics
Office software (spreadsheets, word processors)
Non-invasive laser/robotic surgery (laparoscopy)

Notice what they all have in common? Every single one is dependent on software. Some of them, like email, are purely software. Some, like microprocessors, exist solely to run software. And the rest, like mobile phones and MRI, rely heavily on software.

Going deeper into the list doesn't change this. Innovation number 11 is open source software, 14 is GPS systems, 21 is graphical user interfaces, and number 23 is RFIDs. Almost every one of the 30 innovations relies on code in some way.

For anybody who works in software, the takeaway should be clear: We work in the most important profession in the world.

Innovations are what underlie growth in productivity--the ability to do more with less--and productivity growth is what raises everyone's standard of living. Quality improves too, through better medical technology and more. In the most literal sense, the work we do is the most important factor in making the world a better place.

Ever feel like you're just writing another app, just doing technical marketing for another faceless corporation, or just supporting another piece of meaningless code? Don't. Our efforts have been a primary force in improving the world for the last several decades, and this isn't about to stop. All of us who are engaged in software are in fact doing the same thing: We're creating the foundation for a better world.

Cloud Platform Storage: Relational vs. Scale-Out

2009-02-27T23:33:00.000-08:00

All of today’s most visible cloud platforms provide a scalable storage mechanism. Google’s AppEngine has the Datastore, Amazon Web Services has SimpleDB, Microsoft’s Windows Azure has Tables, and Salesforce.com’s Force platform has an object store. All of them offer similar things: hierarchical rather than table-based storage, a straightforward schema-less approach, and a simple query language.

But why? Why don’t these platforms just provide ordinary relational storage? While their hierarchical approach has some strengths—it’s simple and flexible—it also has a host of weaknesses. Here are some of the big ones:

Because they don’t provide ordinary tables, these storage technologies are harder for developers to understand and use. It also requires work to move data between familiar on-premises relational databases and hierarchical cloud datastores. For example, achieving good performance probably means organizing your data hierarchy to optimize for your app’s most common queries, something that differs from the usual relational approach.
None of them support standard SQL. This adds to the unfamiliarity, and it also means that useful things like joins and aggregates aren’t generally available. And each platform has its own query language, making life more difficult for developers and increasing platform lock-in.
The lack of standard relational data means that existing tools for working with that data, such as reporting services, can’t easily be used.
Because there’s no schema, programs will contain more errors. Rather than relying on the database to catch attempts to, say, store a string in an integer field, you’ll have to find these yourself.

These are significant limitations, and they raise a big question: Why would anybody use these things? Why don’t the cloud platform vendors just give us relational storage with SQL rather than these limited approaches?

The reason is that nobody seems to know how to make a relational DBMS scale to hold really massive amounts of data. You certainly can make a relational system handle more and more data by running it on ever-larger machines, but it’s much harder to do this by replicating relational data across multiple machines. In other words, traditional relational databases scale up, but they’re hard to scale out.

One way to scale out with a relational DBMS is to divide your data across multiple instances of the DBMS. Maybe all customers whose names start with “A” are in one instance, all whose names start with “B” are in the next instance, and so on. This approach, sometimes referred to as sharding, can work. But it’s hard to administer, and think about what it gives up: You lose the familiar all-in-one relational world, you can’t do SQL queries across different instances (which means you lose joins and aggregates), you can’t easily use reporting tools across different instances, and you no longer have an automatically maintained common schema across your entire database.

Does this list of problems sound familiar? It should, since it mirrors what you lose with the hierarchical storage mechanisms provided by cloud platforms. These hierarchical stores are all focused on providing massively scalable storage, which means scale-out storage. Just like sharded databases, they trade off functionality for scalability.

Perhaps we’ll one day see cloud platforms offer scale-out storage that provides everything we now get in traditional relational databases. At the moment, however, the state of the art in scale-out storage seems to require giving up much of what we’re used to with SQL and relational databases.

So when should you use a cloud platform’s scale-out storage? In some cases, such as Google AppEngine, there’s no choice: All persistent data is kept in the Datastore. But other platforms have options. Amazon Web Services, for instance, offers both SimpleDB for scale-out storage and the ability to run a standard relational DBMS such as Oracle or SQL Server in a virtual machine. This latter option won’t scale as well, but it does give you a full relational system.

I’d argue that scale-out storage is so limited that it should be used only when your app requires enormous scalability. Giving up the advantages of relational databases makes sense only when the trade-off between functionality and scalability is worth it. So far, my sense is that not many cloud apps require this—using SimpleDB appears to be much less popular than running a relational database in a VM, for example.

Relational storage is a wonderful thing. It won’t always solve your problem, and so embracing the limitations of scale-out storage is sometimes necessary. But unless your cloud app needs massive scale, the relational option still makes plenty of sense.

Why It's Hard for Enterprises to Save Money with Cloud Platforms

2009-01-22T20:09:00.000-08:00

There's a widespread belief that once a company moves its in-house applications onto a cloud platform, its costs will go down. Intuitively, the idea makes sense. After all, big cloud providers like Microsoft and Google should enjoy incredible economies of scale. (I don't care who you are--their data centers are bigger than your data centers.) And assuming these economies are reflected in their prices, running your apps in their cloud ought to be cheaper, right?

Well, sure--someday. If you look at what the most visible cloud providers offer today, however, this assumption turns out to be largely incorrect. The primary falsehood is the belief that an organization can move its on-premises applications to the cloud unchanged. While this isn't impossible--more on that in a minute--it can certainly be problematic.

Consider Google's AppEngine, for example. It supports only one kind of application: Python Web apps. How many existing enterprise apps fit this description? And even if you do have an on-premises Python app that you'd like to move to the cloud, AppEngine's datastore is a Google-proprietary hierarchical system--it's not a relational database with SQL. Moving an existing application to this world, however cheap it might be to run once it's there, isn't an option for most.

Microsoft's Windows Azure offers similar challenges (today, at least). While it does provide a reasonably standard .NET environment, it also offers only a proprietary hierarchical datastore--no relational tables and no SQL. Once again, moving existing apps to this world is more than a little challenging.

In fact, neither AppEngine nor Windows Azure today is intended to run existing on-premises apps unchanged. Instead, both focus on letting us build very scalable applications for the Web. This is certainly a worthy goal--it's exactly what you need for building some new software. But it's not much help to an organization that just wants to run its current apps more cheaply.

Of the most visible cloud platforms today, Amazon's EC2 is the only one that offers the ability to run on-premises applications in the cloud. With EC2, you really do have the potential to move your apps to Amazon's cloud unchanged. Even then, though, will you save money? It depends, as others have pointed out. And other complexities also emerge, such as the challenge of managing applications running on a cloud platform. Even with EC2, moving your current apps into the cloud isn't a no-brainer.

A related point: It's often claimed that cloud platforms can provide a cheap on-demand solution for handling extra computing load, much as electric utilities rely on gas generators to handle spikes in demand. But this is only possible if I can run the same app unchanged in the cloud and on-premises (or, I suppose, if I've got a version of the app and its data for each environment, which isn't a simple thing to create). Once again, I can do this with EC2 but not (today, at least) with AppEngine or Windows Azure.

The equation seems simple: Cloud platform economies of scale equal a cheaper way for me to run my current apps. Yet when you look at what's out there today from the big vendors, much of what's on offer just doesn't allow this. Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it so.

The Sixth Platform

2008-12-28T19:40:00.000-08:00

How many different hardware platform styles have we seen in the history of business computing? Let's count.

First were mainframes, appearing in the 1960s. Next were minicomputers, which got popular in the 1970s. Desktop computers were next, in the eighties, followed by servers based on similar technology. I'd also argue that mobile devices, especially phones, qualify as an important platform style.

Mainframes, minicomputers, desktops, servers, mobile phones: That's five platform styles in a little less than 50 years. New kinds of hardware platforms for business computing just don't appear very often.

Yet one is being born right now: The cloud is the sixth platform.

New platforms don't replace what came before--they add another option. Just as mainframes weren't wiped out by minicomputers, desktop machines, or anything else, so the cloud won't eliminate any of the earlier platform styles. It just provides another choice for us to use.

Given how rarely new platform styles appear, we're all lucky to be here when one is emerging. For anybody who cares about technology, it's a great time to be alive.

An Interview on Cloud Computing and Azure

2008-11-21T10:50:00.000-08:00

Last week in Barcelona, I sat down for a chat with Mark Dunn. We talked mostly about cloud computing and Windows Azure, but our conversation also wondered into a few other areas. Mark's an engaging interviewer--he was a founder of .NET Rocks--and if you're interested, the video is available here.

Upcoming Speaking Schedule

2008-11-06T21:35:00.001-08:00

I'm spending much of the next few weeks flying around Europe. If you're in any of these cities and the topic sounds interesting, feel free to stop by. They're all public presentations, and most of them are free:

November 10-14, Barcelona: Talks on the Azure Services Platform, Microsoft's Oslo and Geneva technologies, and other topics at TechEd EMEA
November 17, Lisbon: Presentation on cloud platforms and the Azure Services Platform
November 20, Geneva: Presentation on cloud platforms and the Azure Services Platform
November 21, Amsterdam: Presentation on cloud platforms and the Azure Services Platform
December 1, Brussels: Presentation on cloud platforms and the Azure Services Platform
December 2, Milan: Keynote at Microsoft TechDays
December 4-5, Moscow: Talks on the Azure Services Platform, Microsoft's Oslo and Geneva technologies, and other topics at Platforma conference
December 8, Dublin: Presentation on cloud platforms and the Azure Services Platform
December 9, Oslo: Presentation on cloud platforms and the Azure Services Platform
December 10, Stockholm: Presentation on cloud platforms and the Azure Services Platform
December 11, Helsinki: Presentation on cloud platforms and the Azure Services Platform
December 12, Vienna: Presentation on cloud platforms and the Azure Services Platform

Introducing Geneva

2008-11-05T16:53:00.000-08:00

The move to claims-based identity continues. Making this approach real requires infrastructure, however, which the vendors need to provide. Without it, a claims-based world won't materialize.

Microsoft's Geneva technology family provides one example of this infrastructure. First made public at last week's PDC, it has three parts:

The Geneva server, which is the next release of Active Directory Federation Services and more
CardSpace Geneva, the next release of Windows CardSpace
The Geneva framework, providing a foundation for developers to create claims-based applications and other identity-oriented software. (This technology was originally announced under the code name "Zermatt".)

"Geneva" is also a code name, and all of these technologies are still in their initial betas. Still, to help people understand what they're all about, I've written a Microsoft-sponsored Geneva white paper, available here.

I believe that claims-based identity is a terrific idea--it can make life so much simpler both for developers and for the people who use the apps they create. I look forward to a world where this approach is the norm.

A First Look at WF 4.0, Dublin, and Oslo

2008-11-01T10:33:00.000-07:00

Lots of interesting new technology is on the horizon from Microsoft. Among it is a set of interlated things from the company's Connected Systems Division. This group includes:

WF 4.0, which is the next release of Windows Workflow Foundation
Dublin, a new server for WF applications and others
Oslo, a modeling platform that can be applied in lots of different ways.

I've written a Microsoft-sponsored white paper introducing these three, attempting (as usual) to paint the big picture. If this picture sounds interesting to you, the paper is available here.

Introducing the Azure Services Platform

2008-10-31T08:27:00.001-07:00

Big news this week: Microsoft at last announced its broad cloud platform. I've written a Microsoft-sponsored white paper that provides an overview of this new technology, available here.

All three of the obvious cloud platform providers--Amazon, Google, and Microsoft--now offer something that lets customers run their apps in the cloud. All three are different, however, and they differ in interesting ways. As always in a new technology area, nobody really knows what the best approach will be, and so a hundred schools of thought are blooming.

It's a great time in our industry: A new kind of platform is coming into being.

What is Oslo?

2008-09-22T15:30:00.001-07:00

If you've been following Microsoft's announcements about its forthcoming Oslo technology, you might be a little confused--the story has been somewhat fluid. As I understand it, here's where things stand.

Some Oslo details first went public in June of this year at TechEd. As described then, the code name "Oslo" applied to three things: a new version of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), a server for running WF applications and others, and a set of modeling technologies, including a repository and visual editor. All of these technologies can be used together, so putting then under an umbrella code name made some sense.

Yet the technologies can also be used independently. Reflecting this, Microsoft decided to change what "Oslo" referred to. The new version of WF is part of the .NET Framework version 4.0, and so it's now commonly known as WF 4.0. The server has been given its own code name--"Dublin"--and the "Oslo" name now refers solely to the modeling technologies.

Just as software goes through a beta stage, so does the way that software is named. We'll eventually see more naming changes here, as code names like "Oslo" and "Dublin" are replaced with final names. Still, lumping everything under "Oslo" was confusing, and so to me, this more focused naming is a good thing.

Architect Connections Conference

2008-09-22T15:11:00.000-07:00

I'm keynoting the IASA Connections & Architect Connections conference in San Francisco early next month. Despite its long name, I expect the event to be an interesting couple of days for enterprise and application architects. If you're interested in attending, go here.

Responses to A Short Introduction to Cloud Platforms

2008-08-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

It’s been interesting to see the initial responses to my paper on cloud platforms, and I’m glad that people seem to find it useful. I have been a bit surprised, however, that some readers are viewing it as news about Microsoft’s direction in this area. Mary Jo Foley, for example, whose blog I read religiously, appeared to view the paper as offering insight into Microsoft’s plans for cloud computing platforms.

Sorry, but that was a non-goal. Instead, the paper presents my personal perspective, putting forth what I believe is a useful model for thinking about application platforms—on-premises and in the cloud—then illustrating that model with technologies from various vendors.

The paper was sponsored by Microsoft, so I suppose I was naïve not to think that people would read more into it. Yet the truth is that the Microsoft people who sponsored the work disagreed with me on more than one issue.

Still, the paper might stimulate discussion about the area, perhaps boosting people’s interest in advance of Microsoft’s cloud platform unveiling at the PDC later this year. In any case, I encourage you not to assume that the view I present in the paper is Microsoft’s—it’s not.

A Short Introduction to Cloud Platforms

2008-08-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

Cloud platforms are an important topic. It’s a messy area, though, with lots of diverse services offered in various ways by several different vendors. To perhaps create a bit more clarity, I’ve written a short introduction to cloud platforms that tries to provide a general framework for thinking about the area.

The paper was sponsored by Microsoft, but it’s not Microsoft-specific. Instead, my goal is to look at the topic in a broad way, positioning offerings from Microsoft and other providers of cloud platform technologies in a non-partisan way. As always, comments are welcome.

An Interview on Microsoft's Oslo

2008-07-29T18:32:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Ron Jacobs about Microsoft's forthcoming Oslo technologies. The video of our conversation has been posted here. Microsoft tells us that we'll hear more about Oslo at the PDC this fall, but if you're interested in what's currently public, you might find this useful.

What is Software + Services?

2008-06-29T21:57:00.000-07:00

Exactly what Microsoft means by the term Software + Services (S+S) can be hard to puzzle out. For a good example of the confusion this can cause, see Phil Wainewright's post earlier this year about Microsoft's S+S mantra, then read the response from Gianpaolo Carraro at Microsoft and Phil's rejoinder to that. While the exchange is interesting, I'd argue that their underlying premise is inaccurate--S+S doesn't mean what Phil thinks it means.

It's easy to assume, as Phil seems to, that S+S refers only to scenarios combining both on-premises software and cloud services. Yet when Microsoft hired me to write a (now slightly dated) paper on S+S, I learned that this isn't accurate. As part of that project, I talked with lots of people in Redmond who were working in this area. Like Phil, I began with the assumption that S+S meant using both together, something that's not all that common today (although it certainly happens, as with iTunes). The truth is that Microsoft really means something broader than this.

S+S is in fact a label for the world we live in today, where individuals and businesses use both on-premises software and cloud services. Sometimes we do use the two together, but more often we use one or the other on its own. Zealots believe that pretty much everything will migrate into the cloud, while Luddites argue that almost nothing will. Neither group is right--the future actually lies somewhere between these two extremes--and so both are important.

So if S+S is actually just a term for today's broad world, why does Microsoft promote this label so strongly? The answer is simple: It plays to the company's strengths. Every vendor wants to shape this discussion (and thus our perceptions) in ways that benefit it. Salesforce.com, for example, uses its No Software slogan to tilt our thinking toward services, while vendors without a strong cloud services focus, such as IBM, continue to emphasize their on-premises offerings.

S+S is an attractive label for Microsoft because they're strong in both areas. With Windows and .NET, they provide one of the dominant on-premises platforms. At the same time, their massive collection of cloud data centers gives them services scale on par with Google, Amazon, and Yahoo.

It's certainly true that Microsoft's revenues are tilted much more toward the on-premises world, and as Phil points out, it's a safe bet that they'll work hard to maintain their position here. As the attempted Yahoo acquisition shows, they're also trying to get bigger on the services front, a business in which they're not even close to dominant.

Still, expect the company to keep promoting its strengths in both areas. As the seismic shift to services continues, every vendor will position itself in the most flattering way it can find. S+S is Microsoft's expression of how it sees itself in a world where both on-premises software and cloud services are important.

The State of SCA: An Update

2008-05-09T13:21:00.000-07:00

I moderated a panel on Service Component Architecture (SCA) at JavaOne last week. I was also the moderator for last year’s SCA panel, and several of the same people were on the panel with me this time. While the things we talked about were broadly similar, two things stand out about what's changed in a year.

The first is that SCA is real, or at least part of it is. One of the things the SCA specs define is an XML-based language called the Service Component Definition Language (SCDL). SCDL is meant to provide a vendor-neutral way to describe how components created in various technologies, such as Java, BPEL, and Spring, are configured and wired together to create applications. Vendors were showing SCDL in real products on the JavaOne floor—Oracle had an especially nice demo—and so it's clear that this part of SCA is seeing some success.

Whether SCDL will in fact provide much cross-vendor portability remains to be seen. As usual, this depends on how many proprietary extensions vendors add. Still, a standard language for describing the components and assembly of an application is a useful idea, and the signs so far are promising.

The second thing that stands out after a year is less promising: It’s the confusion around how to write SCA components. Along with SCDL, the SCA specs define how to create components using several different technologies. Yet the various SCA vendors and open source projects can’t agree on which of these to implement. SCA support for Spring components, for example, is hit or miss: some SCA offerings support it, some don’t. BPEL is much the same—Oracle is a big fan, while the open source Fabric3 currently has no BPEL support.

And just as it was a year ago, support for SCA’s new programming model for creating Java components is uneven. As I've written before, I believe that this aspect of the spec is really important--it unifies the diverse approaches of Java EE much as Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) unified the diverse programming models in the original .NET Framework. Yet this part of the SCA standard has always been contentious. At last year's SCA panel, for example, the SAP rep asked the audience who wants to see a new programming model for Java components and (unsurprisingly) got no hands raised. Accordingly, SAP has been a leader in defining an alternative way to create Java SCA components as EJB 3.0 session beans. This alternative is a superset of SCA's original component model, so it's not a wholly new thing. Still, the challenge for developers and decision makers is to choose among these various options, and so creating more of them is problematic.

Some existing SCA offerings, such as Fabric3, implement the original Java programming model for SCA components and apparently have no intention of supporting the EJB-based approach. SAP, by contrast, explicitly told me that they have no plans to support the original Java programming model; they're going with the EJB-based approach. IBM, ever the big tent, is supporting both.

The stated goal of SCA is to provide application portability. Widespread support for SCDL is an essential part of this, but so is agreeing on how to create SCA components. For SCA to really improve portability, the vendors and open source projects that support it need to agree on how their customers should create components. If they don’t, SCA risks becoming yet another standard that doesn’t provide much benefit to the people who use it.

Understanding Windows CardSpace

2008-04-29T20:13:00.000-07:00

Do you think digital identity is important? If not, I respectfully suggest that you're wrong. Messy, yes, and in some ways hard to understand--it's a broad topic with lots of diverse aspects--but it's unquestionably important.

I believe that one of the most significant events of the last few years in identity is the advent of information card technologies. Spearheaded by Microsoft's Kim Cameron, this idea is embodied most visibly in Windows CardSpace (although there are other important implementations too, such as Higgins). If you're looking for a short introduction to CardSpace, you might read the overview paper I wrote a couple of years ago.

Even better, get a copy of Understanding Windows CardSpace: An Introduction to the Concepts and Challenges of Digital Identities. This terrific book by Vittorio Bertocci, Garrett Serak, and Caleb Baker is far and away the best introduction I've seen to CardSpace and to much of digital identity in general. The book has been out for a few months now, and while it's gotten great reviews, I don't think it's getting the attention it deserves (because nothing about identity gets the attention it deserves).

Full disclosure: The book is part of Addison-Wesley's Independent Technology Guides series, for which I am series editor. This means that I played a small (really small) part in making this book happen. I'm a huge fan of the technology, however, and of this book. You really ought to read it.

Cloud Platform Services: A Simple Taxonomy

2008-03-31T10:22:00.001-07:00

If the next great application platform battle is for dominance in the cloud—and it is—it’s worth trying to categorize the services those platforms will provide. We’re all familiar with platforms for on-premises applications, which commonly have three fundamental parts:

Computing Services, providing a way to run logic. These services might be quite basic, such as those provided directly by an operating system such as Windows or Linux. Computing services can also offer more, such as the higher-level services provided by a Java EE server or the .NET Framework.

Data Services, allowing applications to store and work with data. Once again, these can be simple, such as an ordinary file system, or more complex, such as the services provided by SQL Server, Oracle, and other relational databases.

Integration Services, making it easier to connect applications and data. These might include communication services, the ability to run workflows that control the integration, and others. Plenty of on-premises products offer these today, including WebSphere Process Server, BizTalk Server, and many others.

Cloud platforms are beginning to address all three of these areas. Here are some examples in each one:

Computing Services: The most visible example of raw operating system services today is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). By hosting Linux virtual machines, EC2 lets organizations run pretty much any Linux software they’d like in the cloud. For higher-level services, one good example is Saleforce.com’s Force.com. Intended to support a specific kind of business application, Force.com has attracted a significant number of ISVs. Microsoft provides something similar with its CRM Live offering, also targeting a specific kind of business application rather than the more general support offered by the .NET Framework or a Java EE server.

Data Services: For basic data access, Amazon is once again the most visible: Its Simple Storage Service (S3) works much like a file system in the cloud. Amazon also offers structured data access with SimpleDB, as does Microsoft with its recently announced SQL Server Data Services. It’s worth noting that these two offerings both work with hierarchical rather than relational data, each providing its own (non-SQL) query language.

Integration Services: Amazon's Simple Queue Service (SQS) provides a simple offering for cloud-based integration. Microsoft takes a somewhat different approach with BizTalk Services, providing connectivity and identity services today with support for cloud-based workflow promised soon.

There are connections between these categories in cloud platforms too, much like the connections in on-premises platforms; Amazon's EC2 relies on S3 for storage, for instance. We're also seeing hints of other kinds of services that a cloud platform will need. BizTalk Services includes an identity service, for example, something that's logically distinct from integration but is nonetheless required to provide cloud-based integration.

It’s early days for cloud platforms, and so nothing out there currently provides anything like the completeness, maturity, or unity of today’s on-premises platforms. All the vendors mentioned above (and others) are racing toward this goal, however, so don’t expect today’s fragmented world to last. Cloud platforms will one day provide the same kind of solid environment for creating hosted applications that on-premises platforms offer today. Anybody who cares about enterprise software should keep a sharp eye on this space.

Platforms for SaaS Applications: Which Approach Will Win?

2008-02-26T13:22:00.000-08:00

The next great application platform battle is taking shape. As more and more applications are created that provide software as a service (SaaS), it makes sense to provide a common platform on which to build these applications. Just as traditional on-premises applications depend on the platforms provided by Windows, Linux, and other operating systems, developers of hosted SaaS applications should also be able to build on a common foundation.

It's way too early to know who's going to win this battle. Most likely, there will be a handful of dominant SaaS platforms a few years from now, just as there are a handful of dominant operating systems today for building on-premises applications. But it's not too soon to think about what kind of platform is likely to win.

Two approaches to SaaS platforms are appearing. One style, SaaS-only platforms, focuses solely on supporting applications that run in the cloud. The marquee example of this is Salesforce.com's Force.com, which has attracted a significant number of application developers. The second approach aims at providing a common platform for both SaaS applications and on-premises applications. Microsoft has announced plans to do this, and other vendors are also moving in this direction.

Of these two approaches, the second--a common platform for SaaS and on-premises applications--is likely to win. Here's why:

Extending existing on-premises technologies to a SaaS platform means that developers don't have to learn entirely new skills and new development tools. Instead, there's a ready-made population of people who already know the basics of how to use the SaaS platform. The creator of a SaaS-only platform, by contrast, faces the challenge of teaching developers how to use whatever new tools and technologies it provides. Force.com, for example, has its own programming language, called Apex, that developers need to learn. While Apex isn't especially complicated, using it is certainly more work than writing in languages that developers already know such as Java or C#.

Using the same basic technologies for both a SaaS platform and an on-premises platform lets ISVs and end users more easily move their applications from one environment to the other. While the two worlds might not be exactly the same, they ought to be similar enough that SaaS applications can be brought in house without too much pain and vice-versa. Providing this flexibility is likely to be attractive to many potential users of a SaaS platform. Contrast that with a SaaS-only platform, which supports solely applications that run in the cloud. If moving an application in-house makes sense for any reason, the only real choice is to rewrite it.

Providing a common platform for SaaS and on-premises applications is harder than creating a purely SaaS platform (or a purely on-premises platform, for that matter). After all, a platform built solely for SaaS applications can focus entirely on the problems those applications face. Targeting both worlds requires addressing the requirements of each while still providing more or less the same programming environment.

Still, the advantages of offering a common technology foundation for both platform styles are clear. Five years from now, I'm betting that the dominant SaaS platforms will largely provide the same programming environment as their on-premises cousins.

Software + Services in the Microsoft World

2008-01-22T14:52:00.000-08:00

Using both on-premises software running inside an organization and services provided by externally hosted software makes a lot of sense. Some things, it seems, need to run on-premises. An awful lot of stuff, though--probably more than you think--can make sense as a hosted service. And a few things work best as a combination of the two.

Microsoft has chosen to refer to this set of ideas as software plus services (S+S). I've written a white paper that gives a broad introduction to the topic. While the paper was sponsored by Microsoft, don't think that it describes the One True Perspective on S+S within Microsoft--I wouldn't make that claim. (In fact, I'm not sure there is one true perspective, as the company seems to use the term in diverse ways.) Instead, the paper's goal is to help people think about this emerging area, organizing the main ideas into a coherent whole.

The paper's subtitle is "A Technology Overview for IT Decision Makers", and the core audience is IT managers. Still, I hope it's useful for anybody who's interested in the area. If that includes you, the paper is available here.

Understanding WCF Communication Options in the .NET Framework 3.5

2007-12-26T15:15:00.000-08:00

WCF is an impressive technology. It's not the simplest thing in the world--does anybody really feel at home configuring WCF security today?--but it certainly is simpler than the broad set of things it supplants.

One way to appreciate the value of WCF is to take a look at the range of communication styles it supports, especially in the .NET Framework 3.5. I've written a white paper that's meant to help with this. Called Dealing with Diversity: Understanding WCF Communication Options in the .NET Framework 3.5, the paper walks through the variety of approaches that are now supported. Along with the traditional things, like Web services and queued messaging, this latest WCF release adds support for RESTful communication, RSS/ATOM, and an interesting option called the WCF Line-of-Business Adapter SDK. The paper also takes a look at how WCF is used with BizTalk Services.

If you're an expert in WCF, you probably won't get a whole lot out of this paper. If you're wondering why this technology is important, though, or how one approach can be used for many different kinds of communication, you might find it worthwhile.

Introducing the .NET Framework 3.5

2007-12-26T14:55:00.000-08:00

When the .NET Framework 3.0 was released, I wrote a series of whitepapers describing the new technologies it contained: WCF, WF, WPF, and Windows CardSpace. I also wrote an overview paper that gave a high-level view of this new version.

With the release of the .NET Framework 3.5, I've updated most of the those papers. (The exception is the paper on Windows CardSpace--that technology hasn't changed.) The updated papers are:

The 3.5 release doesn't contain as many changes as did the move from .NET 2.0 to .NET 3.0. Still, there's lots of interesting new stuff, with plenty of useful additions.

Introducing System Center Operations Manager 2007

2007-11-11T05:11:00.000-08:00

Monitoring and managing hardware and software are fundamental to keeping an organization running. In the Windows world, the dominant tool for doing this today is Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005. MOM now has a successor: System Center Operations Manager 2007. As part of the series I'm writing on System Center, I've produced a Microsoft-sponsored introduction to this new management technology. Everybody who works in IT should have a basic grasp of how operations management works, and the goal of this paper is to help people acquire that understanding. It's available here.

Advancing Application Platforms: The Twilight of Vendor Consortia

2007-11-04T06:13:00.000-08:00

After graduate school, I worked for a while as a Unix developer, then spent several years in the networking standards world. I was a true believer in the value of these standards, and I remain one today. Without real standards, interoperability isn't possible.

Yet in the mid-nineties, I consciously changed my focus to the Microsoft world. I didn't make this switch because I thought Microsoft technologies were inherently better--they weren't, especially then. Nor did I stop believing in the value of standards for interoperability--they're essential. Instead, my attention had moved to application platforms, where standardization efforts emphasize portability rather than interoperability.

Portability is a more forgiving goal than interoperability. With networking standards, both sides must follow the exact same rules, or communication isn’t possible. Standards for portability allow lots more wiggle room, and so vendor and personality politics can more easily trump both customer requirements and good technology. It didn't take me long to decide that this was no way to run an industry. Providing portability across application platforms from different vendors while still making technological progress looked hopeless.

The big Unix vendors promptly proved me wrong. By rallying together around J2EE in the late 1990s, they were able to create a more or less common platform that provided first-class support for that era's enterprise applications. All of them were afraid of Microsoft, and they were able to work together quite well for several years.

This unity is now breaking down. It's not entirely clear why this breakdown is happening today, but one possibility is that the enterprise Java vendors have forgotten who their real competitor is. Spending time in the enterprise Java world often leaves me with the sense that these vendors focus more on competing with one another than on making common cause against their shared enemy in Redmond. Whatever the reason, the personal and political agreements that kept the enterprise Java world together are fraying.

Just as important, the kinds of innovation needed today often require a more unified approach. Think about Microsoft's Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), for example. LINQ requires changes to programming languages, development tools, and the application platform. Microsoft owns all three--C#/VB, Visual Studio, and the .NET Framework—and so it can make these unified changes. Trying to provide a similar technology for Java would be more complex: Sun owns the Java language, Eclipse is open source software, and each vendor has its own platform. Accomplishing this kind of multi-factor innovation in such a divided world is no easy thing.

Microsoft's recent Oslo announcement provides another example. The goal of Oslo is to create a broad set of innovations touching many aspects of the application lifecycle, including languages, development tools, integration, application management, and more. It's too soon to know which parts of this very ambitious project will succeed. Still, it's hard to believe that these broad changes across many connected technologies could be done by standards committees. Too many groups are involved with too many competing vendors.

If even some parts of Oslo are successful, enterprise Java vendors will need a new approach to creating its competitor. Especially when change must happen in a unified way across many technologies, standards committees don't work. Even groups less formal than standards organizations, such as the Open SOA group that produced Service Component Architecture (SCA), have a hard time creating effective standards for application platforms. While the vendors behind SCA were able to agree on a set of standards, for example, they can’t seem to agree on which of those standards to implement.

It looks like the years of J2EE unity were the high water mark of vendor agreement. I wouldn't be surprised if five years from now the dominant vendor platforms are provided by Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle. The last two will both use the Java programming language, but they’ll vary widely in other ways.

We're headed for a world where the big vendors are forced to strike out on their own. It’s had a good run, but the era of vendor consortia for application platforms appears to be drawing to a close.

Digital Identity for .NET Applications: A Technology Overview

2007-10-30T06:12:00.000-07:00

Identity is an inescapable aspect of distributed applications. The .NET world provides several technologies that developers can use in this area, but figuring out what each one does and how they fit together can be challenging. I've written a Microsoft-sponsored white paper to help people find their way through this thicket of options. Available here, the technologies it describes include ADFS, Windows Cardspace, and several more.

Handling identity well should be a fundamental competence for anybody who creates .NET applications. The goal of this paper is to help people get started on the path to acquiring this competence.

Why Microsoft Should Not Support SCA

2007-09-29T14:57:00.000-07:00

Will Microsoft support Service Component Architecture (SCA)? It seems unlikely. After all, this new technology is controlled entirely by Microsoft's competitors. Still, even if Microsoft did decide to implement SCA, customers would see almost no benefit. Here's why.

First, it's important to understand that SCA is purely about portability--it has nothing to do with interoperability. To connect applications across vendor boundaries, SCA relies on standard Web services, adding nothing extra. This is an important point, but it's often lost (or misunderstood) in SCA discussions. Because some of SCA's supporters describe it as a standard for SOA, people assume it somehow enhances interoperability between products from different vendors. This just isn't true, and so Microsoft not supporting SCA will in no way affect anyone's ability to connect applications running on different vendor platforms.

But what about portability? Just as the various Java EE specs have allowed some portability of code and developer skills, SCA promises the same thing. Wouldn't Microsoft supporting SCA help here? The answer is yes, but only a little. To explain why, it's useful to look separately at the two main things SCA defines: programming models for creating components in various languages and an XML-based language for defining composites from groups of these components.

The current SCA specs define component programming models for Java, BPEL, C++, C, and COBOL. The only one of these languages that Microsoft fully supports is C++, a reality that significantly limits the value of SCA in the .NET world. Even if Microsoft chose to support the C++ SCA component model, not many people are likely to use it; C# and Visual Basic are far more popular choices for creating .NET applications. And while Microsoft could choose to define SCA programming models for C# and Visual Basic, what value would this bring? There'd be no portability outside the .NET world, since that's the only place these languages are really used. Besides, Microsoft already provides an analogous programming model for C#, VB, C++, and other languages in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Adding another one might well confuse its customers rather than make their lives better.

But what about implementing SCA's assembly model? Many SCA supporters argue that this is the most important aspect of the technology, so wouldn't Microsoft's endorsement benefit customers by allowing more cross-vendor portability? Once again, the answer is yes, but not much. The concrete expression of SCA's assembly model is the Service Component Definition Language (SCDL). SCDL provides a way to describe what components comprise a particular composite, specify bindings for those components, and more. Yet even in its full form, SCDL is a relatively simple language. Within a single vendor's SCA domain, much of SCDL can be optimized away, making it simpler still. (See my paper Introducing SCA for examples of this.) Vendors are also free to add their own extensions to SCDL, which they do. Even if Microsoft provided an assembly model, which they currently don't, using SCDL to describe it would offer at best minimal portability. The language just doesn't define much. And since all of the components in a single SCDL-defined composite must run on the same vendor's infrastructure, Microsoft's lack of support doesn't affect anyone's ability to define SCA composites that include both, say, Java and .NET components. This wouldn't be possible even if Microsoft did support SCDL.

There's a corollary here that's probably obvious by now. The big reason that Microsoft's support for SCA wouldn't much improve the portability of code is that SCA doesn't define much that truly allows that portability. (This is especially true for SCDL and the assembly model.) In fact, it's reasonable to wonder how much code portability will be possible across different vendor implementations of SCA. While some SCA skills portability will occur--at least everybody will be describing components and composites using the same terms--I'm doubtful that SCA will do much to help move applications from one vendor's SCA product to another. Put another way, don't look to SCA to play a big role in reducing vendor lock-in.

Given the competitive realities, Microsoft supporting SCA today is about as likely as an embrace of EJB would have been a decade ago. Yet even if the company wanted to, there's not much there for Microsoft to embrace. Given SCA's complete focus on portability rather than interoperability, the set of programming languages it supports, and the minimalist nature of SCDL, Microsoft's support of this emerging technology would provide almost no benefit to customers.

Virtualization for Windows: A Technology Overview

2007-08-15T15:12:00.000-07:00

Virtualization is a big deal. Hardware virtualization, which is what most of us think of first, is having the biggest impact so far (as the recent VMware IPO makes clear). Yet there are also other important aspects of this idea. Presentation virtualization is widely used today, for example, while application virtualization may well become the default for distributing applications on Windows.

I've written an overview of Windows virtualization technology, available here, that provides a broad introduction to the entire area. Sponsored by Microsoft, the paper looks at technologies for hardware virtualization, presentation virtualization, and application virtualization. Especially when looked at from all three perspectives, it's clear that virtualization will have a huge impact on our world. Whatever your role, it's in your interest to understand what it's all about.

Responses to REST vs. WS-*: War is Over (If You Want It)

2007-07-23T21:21:00.000-07:00

Well, maybe the war’s not completely over. Judging from the responses to my recent entry, a few people are still girded for battle. Some examples:

- I said “A RESTful approach is a natural for data-oriented applications that focus on create/read/update/delete scenarios”. Some took this as an assertion that REST was only useful in these scenarios. I didn’t mean this. Still, believing that a RESTful approach is right for everything seems too strong. As Microsoft’s Steve Maine pointed out, the fact that I can do anything with the universal interface of a Turing machine doesn’t mean that I want to write all of my apps that way.

- Comments like this: “What is this amazing security mechanism that WS-* has that cannot be applied to REST?” are easy to answer, but comments like this: “[N]obody uses SOAP. Everyone has had the ability to choose it for years, and nobody does” are more puzzling. SOAP and WS-* are used in many, many enterprise applications today, and they’ll be in a bunch more by this time tomorrow. Transferring money between accounts at my bank depends on SOAP, for example, as do many other commercial functions that we all rely on. For clients interacting with Internet applications, a RESTful approach is often—usually, even—the right choice. For creating typical enterprise apps inside the firewall, SOAP and WS-* are commonly better, and lots of people use them.

- A few people commented on the number of specs in the WS-* canon. The relevant number, however, is how many of those specs a developer must understand to write an application using SOAP and WS-*. Assuming a decent framework, such as Microsoft’s WCF or the Java world's SCA, that number might well be zero. Just as the creator of a sockets app needn’t read the specs for TCP and IP, the creator of a SOAP/WS-* app can remain largely ignorant of how these technologies provide their services.

- And to be clear, I wasn’t making any kind of analogy between WS-*/REST and Korea/World War II. My only goal was to provide an example of a truce rather than an overwhelming victory. Ted Neward’s erudite response to this brief mention was nothing short of awe-inspiring, however.

Nobody feels strongly about whether the sun will come up tomorrow—people are only passionate when something is in doubt. Now that the value of REST is as certain as tomorrow’s sunrise, perhaps we can all lighten up a little. Readers seemed to focus on the first part of the John Lennon quote in the entry’s title rather than the equally important second half: The WS-*/REST war is over only if we want it to be. And we certainly should—it’s a waste of our energy.

Introducing SCA

2007-07-16T13:57:00.001-07:00

Service Component Architecture (SCA) isn't an especially simple technology. It's also hard to figure out just by reading the specs. To help make clear what SCA is, I've written a white paper that introduces the topic, available here.

My original goal for this paper was to create a straight tutorial that all of SCA's creators would agree was accurate. This turned out to be impossible. Different vendors have different perspectives on how SCA should be presented and even on which parts of the technology are important. Accordingly, while I've done my best to be accurate and objective, I'm certain that there will be some disagreement with how I've described or positioned a few things. Still, my hope is that there's value in an overview of the topic from somebody with no particular vendor ax to grind.

And one more thing: Although everything I produce reflects my take on a topic, I get paid for most of the papers I write. That's not the case here. I've been interested in SCA since it first went public in late 2005, yet I don't think this technology has gotten the attention it deserves. Maybe providing a place for people to start understanding it can help change that.

REST vs. WS-*: War is Over (If You Want It)

2007-06-27T22:48:00.000-07:00

To anybody who's paying attention and who's not a hopeless partisan, the war between REST and WS-* is over. The war ended in a truce rather than crushing victory for one side--it's Korea, not World War II. The now-obvious truth is that both technologies have value, and both will be used going forward.

If you doubt this, take a look at Microsoft's forthcoming support for creating RESTful applications in the next release of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). The official Java world is also on board, with the impending creation of JAX-RS. Since both worlds also have good support for the WS-* approach, developers will be able to choose the approach that's best for a particular application.

Two big questions remain. The first is, What exactly is REST? By far the best and clearest definition I've seen is provided by RESTful Web Services, a wonderful book by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. If everybody can buy into the measures of RESTfulness this book provides, we can all avoid lots of future arguments. (As a side benefit, it will let most of us get by without reading Roy Fielding's PhD thesis, the canonical text on REST.)

The second question is, When should each approach be used? Whatever partisans may claim, neither technology is right for every situation. While hammering out a true understanding of this will likely take some time, the basic outlines are clear. A RESTful approach is a natural for data-oriented applications that focus on create/read/update/delete scenarios. Lots and lots of apps fit this model, especially on the public Internet. A solution based on WS-* makes more sense for service/method-oriented applications, especially those that need more advanced behaviors such as transactions and more-than-basic security. (Doubt this last point? Look up "Security" in the index of the Richardson/Ruby book: Exactly one page number is listed.)

Maybe the problem was always really just naming. Applying the term "Web services" to SOAP/WS-* applications doesn't make much sense. The SOAP/WS-* stack is actually the culmination of a twenty-year vendor battle over distributed computing protocols, the end of a line that included OSF DCE, CORBA, DCOM, Java RMI, and .NET Remoting. By finally agreeing on this standard set of technologies, the vendors have put an end to their long struggle. Yet other than the fact that SOAP is commonly sent over HTTP to get through firewalls, these technologies have nothing to do with the Web. REST, on the other hand, is deeply Web-based--it's just a way to create distributed applications using standard Web technologies. Given this, REST is far more deserving of the "Web services" moniker than is the SOAP/WS-* approach.

I've always thought REST was interesting, starting with the first piece I wrote on it almost five years ago. I've also been a fan of SOAP and WS-*, partly because I've spent a large part of my career on that vendor battlefield. It's a real pleasure to see fanaticism recede and reason win the day. The war really is over.

SCA vs. SOA?

2007-05-22T07:35:00.000-07:00

Service Component Architecture (SCA) is commonly described as being a technology for SOA. The group that created it christened themselves the Open SOA Collaboration, a name that clearly indicates their stance. In fact, the first sentence of this group’s SCA web page says that it describes “a model for building applications and systems using a Service-Oriented Architecture”.

I understand the need to link new technologies to SOA today—it’s a great way to get attention. The problem is that talking about SCA and SOA in the same breath is at best confusing. At worst, it’s downright misleading.

To see why, understand that SCA defines an abstract component model, then specifies how those components can be assembled into larger groups called composites. The components that make up a single composite might all run in the same process, they might be spread across different processes on the same machine, or they might run on different machines. In all of these cases, SCA’s assembly model defines how components in a composite relate to one another, specifying things like how those components should be wired together. In effect, it allows treating a group of possibly distributed components as a single unified application.

The applicability to SOA is obvious, isn’t it? As the notion of “application” increasingly refers to a group of services provided by software on various machines, having some way to define the relationships among this software is appealing. And because an SCA composite also defines a deployment unit, it can help make managing this new kind of application easier.

But there’s one problem: While the SCA specs don’t strictly mandate this, in practice all of the components in a composite must run within a single vendor’s SCA environment. This limitation isn’t obvious from reading the specs, so just to make sure, I asked this question of the participants on the SCA panel I moderated at this year’s JavaOne conference. All of them publicly agreed. While things could change in the future, at least for now, an SCA composite is a single-vendor construct.

A primary reason for this is that the SCA 1.0 specs focus on portability, not interoperability, and so they don’t fully define the interactions between components necessary to create composites that cross vendor boundaries. This means that I’m free to create a distributed application that’s wrapped into an SCA composite, and even to allow the services that application provides to be accessed from other vendor platforms, as long as all of its components run on a single vendor’s SCA container.

What does this have to do with SOA? The answer is simple: not much. Multi-vendor services are the sine qua non of SOA . If an SCA composite can't be assembled from them, it’s not an SOA technology.

So does SCA improve the SOA picture in any way? I think the answer is yes, for a couple of reasons. First, even though its internals remain a vendor-specific black box, how a composite interacts with the outside world can be specified in a service-oriented way. And along with its assembly model, SCA also defines a new programming model for creating Java components. This component model allows building business logic in a modern, service-oriented style, similar to Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Just as WCF makes it easier to create service-oriented applications on the .NET Framework, SCA’s Java component model can make it easier to create service-oriented applications in the Java world. Although it might not be fully supported by all of SCA’s creators, this approach nonetheless counts as a step forward.

SCA has the potential to be an important technology. By defining a modern, explicitly service-oriented approach to creating business logic, its Java component model can help Java developers build better applications for an SOA world. But as long as composites can contain only components running in a single-vendor environment, SCA’s value as a technology for SOA is limited.

Supporting SCA’s Java Component Model: Which Vendors Will Do It?

2007-05-11T11:04:00.000-07:00

This year's JavaOne conference included a panel on Service Component Architecture (SCA), for which I was the moderator. Representatives from BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Sun, and Tibco spent an hour answering questions posed by the audience and me. It quickly became apparent that even though all of these vendors supported SCA, they had quite different ideas about what this meant.

To understand the main division, recall that SCA 1.0 defines two main things: a new programming model for creating service-oriented components in Java (and C++), and a way to describe how components are assembled into groups called composites. Composites can contain components built using SCA’s new programming models, but they can also contain components built using other technologies, such as Spring and BPEL. SCA doesn’t define a new programming model for these other technologies, however; it just describes how components built using them can be made part of a composite.

I’ve argued before that the new programming model for creating Java components is a fundamentally important part of SCA. Because it provides a simpler and more service-oriented approach to building business logic, developers can use it instead of EJB, JAX-WS, and perhaps other parts of Java EE 5. As the JavaOne panel discussion made clear, not everyone agrees.

While IBM and BEA strongly support the new SCA Java component model, Oracle, Sun, and SAP appear to have a different perspective. All were big fans of SCA’s assembly aspects, but none of these vendors seemed happy about the prospect of another component model competing for the hearts and minds of Java developers. SAP's panelist asked the audience for a show of hands: Who wants to see a new programming model for Java components? In a crowd of several hundred people, not one hand went up.

Yet asking this question of a .NET developer audience before the announcement of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) , the .NET analog to the SCA Java component model, would have elicited the same response. Most developers want to get their jobs done, not devote scarce working hours to learning yet another way to do them. Nevertheless, it’s incumbent upon platform vendors to improve the technologies those developers use. Moving from COBOL and CICS to the Java platform annoyed a lot of people, as did Microsoft’s move to the .NET Framework. But in both cases, the resulting boost in productivity and functionality made the pain worth the effort.

Although it’s nowhere near as big a change as these earlier shifts, SCA’s Java component model has the potential to offer another boost. Yet judging from the vendor responses on this JavaOne panel, there’s no guarantee that this will happen. Strong support by BEA and IBM improves the odds of success, since these two vendors dominate the market for commercial Java platforms. Still, if their competitors fail to support this new approach, SCA could miss a chance to modernize and simplify the Java environment.

One more point to take away from this is that when a vendor says they support SCA, you can’t know what they mean until you ask them. When Oracle says it, they seem to mean the technology’s assembly aspects. When BEA says it, they seem to mean the assembly aspects and the Java component model, but not necessarily the C++ component model. When IBM says it, they seem to mean pretty much everything in the current 1.0 specs. When Sun says it--well, I’m afraid I can’t tell what they really mean.

The unity that let J2EE compete so successfully against Microsoft is breaking down, and the result isn’t pretty. If the vendors in this camp can’t agree that supporting SCA’s Java component model is worth doing, I can’t help worrying about the future of the Java platform

Microsoft and BPM: A Technology Overview

2007-04-02T17:09:00.000-07:00

I've argued previously that, despite the perspective of some analyst firms, it makes sense to view Microsoft as a BPM vendor. I've now written a paper that provides an introduction to Microsoft's BPM technology. Available here, it describes what Microsoft offers in various categories, along with some partner products that complement what Microsoft sells. The goal is to provide a straightforward overview of the Microsoft technologies that fall under the BPM umbrella.