The BTSummit held at Bangalore on November 03 and 04, 2009 provided greater insight into latest trends in Cloud computing, SOA and BI. It is indeed a good effort from BTS event executives to bring industry leaders and practitioners under single roop.
Day-1, 3rd Nov 2009
The keynote/focused session was delivered by Mr.Howard Charney CISCO, in his inspirational speech, he highlightedthe IT visionary by developing smart IT services for better future for all of us.
After that, Mr.Ravikumar delivered speach on Cloud Computing, he explained different cloud computing environments andrelated models to chose and apply. In his views, "Cloud Computing is an application and infrastructure over Internet". There are three aspects of cloud computing:
1) The availability of infinite computing on demand
2) The elimination of up front community
3) The ability to pay on usage basis
Also cloud infrastructure shall be categorized into less constrained models to highly constrained models. The offering from Amazon, MS or Google falls either of these categories.Also he shared and urged the audience to have a look at white paper called "Above the cloud a Berkeley view of Cloud Computing".
Mr.Robert S, from think88, shared his views on SOA, Composite and Cloud Computing. The SOA key concepts covered are scope of vision,scope of deployment, decision making, speed to deployment, technical skills required, market penetration, speed to ROI, eventual total ROI, expected longevity of solutions, available standards and maturity of the vision. I personally felt, these concepts are very vital in overall SOA/EA initiative.He also emphasized on some characteristics of cloud computing such as s/w assets hosted offsite, browser is the primary UI, if there is no UI, then s/w assets are being accessed through REST services. Many of us did not know the true meaning composite apps, so from the speech it was evident that, "from the prospective of the user, it appears that, the primary functionality is 'extended' from multiple disparate apps". Also he envised that composite apps and mashups might converge in near future, may be 3 to 5 years. The composite apps are business oriented where in mashups are consumer oriented.
According to Mr.Robert, following factors might favor cloud computing:-
a)Limited internal apps
b)Limited IT assets-
c)Non-sensitive data
d)Not willing to buy IT assets
For SOA, the limited IT resources, software reuse and hosted web services might influence strategic decisions.
Mr.Eben Hewitt, took us a brief case study on SOA. According Hewitt, "Business Driven" means business users/Top executives knows SOA/or any other EA initiatives. Also he shared his views on establishing CoE. Also according to him, SOAP vs REST is outdated topic, and organizations are moved beyond that. Also Eben delivered speech on designing the RESTful web services and related architecture. He emphasized REST is an a architectural style with some of characteristics/concepts such as stateless, separation of concerns, cacheable, uniform interface, info hiding etc. In REST architecture, GET is for read, POST is for create/update and PUT is for update/create.
Mr.Som Sarma from 3i Infotech, delivered very inspirational and typical business executive style of speech on innovation. He highlighted how innovations are changing the business dynamics and how products like iPhone are becoming part of enterprise IT.
Dr.Robert Marcus, Sr.IT professional delivered speech on Cloud computing use cases. He categorized the clouds as end user to cloud (public cloud), enterprise to cloud (outsourced services), enterprise to cloud to end user (enhanced services) and private cloud (intra services). Following are standard requirements mapped to use cases under cloud computing environment: - Cloud Management- Security- Identity- Open Client- Federated Identity- Location awareness
Also Mr.Robert Marcus, explained cloud categorization such as IaaS, PasS, SaaS.
Mr.Jinesh Varia from Amazon delivered one of the best speech (in my view) on cloud computing; specifically on cloud migration strategies. He highlighted the phased approach to address the existing apps migration to cloud env. According to speaker, following are few phase-wise steps one shall consider for migration planning.
a) Cloud Assement Phase - In this phase, care should be taken for cost benefit analysis, app/infra dependencies, technical assessments etc.
b) POC Phase - In this phase, reference architecture shall be built by having management buy-in for this new initiative. So POCs must include some critical factors such as technology validations, testing of legacy apps, orgn feasibility etc. Also reference architecture must be developed with the help of learning AWS, small apps and small datasets. It is to just check the water before going big-bang approach.
c) DB Migration Phase - One should take care by leveraging different storage options, different db options, expert opinions from db architects etc.
d) App Migration Phase - He advised two strategies called "forklift" and "hybrid" migration strategy
e) Leverage the cloud Phase - He highlighted the cloud capability such as auto-scaling, automation and elasticity.
f) Optimization Phase - Mr.Jinesh, explained importance of having optimization phase by considering some of the factors such as utilization, performance (post migration) and efficiency. Also give a brief explanation on Amazon's capability for different elasticity styles such as proactive cycle scale, proactive event based and auto-scaling on demand basis.
04 Nov 09 - 2nd Day
Mr.Nils Puhlmann from Cloud Security Alliance delivered thought provoking speech on new challenges of security under modern enterprise environment.The speaker highlighted some key drivers and associatedchallenges/threats to protect business from security vulnerabilities. Following are few drivers:
1) Younger generation is growing up with consumer technologies
2) IT becoming a tool to enhance peoples creativity
3) Consumer products like iPhone are now part of enterprise environment; including but not limited to emails, calendar, contacts, SMS etc...Also he shared interesting fact about iPhone taking every user browsing activities as screen shot in the background.
Mr.Srinvivas V from Vigyanlabs, shared his thoughts on virtual enterprise and key facts like how business can leverage on latest technological trends to truly become virtual enterprise?, the typical spread of modern enterprise comprising customers, employees, partners/suppliers, enterprise assets, services, products spread across multiple IT products and services.
Mr.Robert S from think88, shared his views on applying governance technologies for effective SOA governance. Following are top 10 strategies:
1) Include governance technologies as part of SOA governance
2) Make sure your governance platform is agnostic about service development platforms
3) Make sure that governance platform is able to support all service deployment technologies
4) Importance of SOA testing
5) Collect governance metrics and review periodically
6) Track activity through multiple IT resource layers (e.g., db, middle ware, object, app server)7) Breakdown the barriers between repositories and registries
8) When selecting governance technology product, write a formal RFP (interesting strategy, this leads proper homework)
9) Avoid tools that would require code modifications
10) Make sure that, the selected governance tool fits into existing IT governance landscape
According Robert S, following are three major SOA life cycle events- Design time (meta data mgmt, service discovery, service composition/modeling, orgn policy)- Testing and QA (Service unit validation, policy adoption, compliance, performance and prediction)- Runtime (SLA, Version control, error reporting & mgmt, performance monitoring)
Mr.Eben Hewitt delivered speech on "10 things software architect must know", these are shared views from different architects/developers worldwide and it is available on the net under the title called "97 things s/w architect should know". He highlighted the Gartners architecture definition covering concepts like abstraction, constraints, translation, properties/principles and enabling evolution. One of the thing (in list of 10) that particularly took audience attention was moving the problems on course of enabling evolutions.
Mr.Janakiraman delivered inspirational speech on open source based cloud computing. According to speaker, there are four key tenets:
1) Elasticity
2) Pay by use
3) Self service
4) Programmability (muliti machine apps).
Cloud shall be classified as IaaS - Renting machine in simple terms, PaaS - O.S specific, being offered by google, MS and SaaS - Google apps. Also cloud could implemented as private, public, hybrid and community clouds.
Under the anatomy of cloud, "hypervisors" are plays a key role. These are heart and soul of the cloud computing technology. Over the hypervisors, platform, infrastructure and applications shall be placed and managed. There are couple of open source hypervisors; KUM from linux ubuntu and Xen from EC2 Amazon; the Citrix is the commercial form. The cloud open source tools stack includes LAMP (linuxm apache, mysql and php), ubuntu enterprise cloud, apache Hadoop etc.
Mr.Vivek Khurana from SoundSource, shared his dashboard design and development experience under the topic called "Building Enterprise Dashboards". According to speaker;
1) Dashboards should act as immediate decision making aid
2) While designing dashboard; one should keep different stakeholder's interest in mind
3) UI controls should be selected judiciously
4) Focus should be on data, try to remove unusable data
5) Don't put too much data; because of screen size
6) Don't listen to business users on solutions part
7) Dashboard data should be current
8) Notify user on dashboard events/data changes
9) Learn from new sites like CNN, BBC, nyt for about placing and arranging important/key data
10) Important dashboard data which do matter to the business should be placed under mobile - best way is to arrange with text based SMSs
On the trends, speaker identified following few such as animated charts, streaming dashboards, collaborative visualization and expressions. For animated charts, speaker requested audience to visit Hans Roslings TED talks/gapminder.org
Mr.Udayan Banerjee, shared NIIT's experience in developing collaborative website for internal employees using enterprise 2.0 tools. The speaker advised that "collaboration and interaction can not be forced rather it has to emerge and technology is an enabler". Following are web2.0 technology stacks; wiki, blogs, IM, mashups, RSS, social networking sites etc.
