Lori MacVittie’s posterous

My brother sent over a question to Don and I on a coding problem he's having. Yes, most of my family members are geeks, thank you. You can probably blame that on my COBOL-coding mother.

In any case, his signature always contains this lovely quote from Brian Kernighan:

That got me thinking about network topology and configuration and application delivery. Yes, most things get me thinking about that, thank you. You can probably blame ... well, no one. That's just the way I am.

But this tongue-in-cheek humor from Kernighan is just as applicable to network and application delivery architecture. If he were a network architect he'd probably use "troubleshooting" instead of "debugging" and "configuring" instead of "writing the code", but the core of the concept would remain the same: something is wrong and we have to find out what it is and it's really, really hard. I'm pretty sure this is where the idea of outsmarting yourself came from.

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The cloud computing craze is leading to some interesting new terms. Cloudware and cloudbursting are two terms I particularly like for their ability to describe specific computing models based on cloud computing. Today we're going to look at cloudbursting, which is basically a new twist on an old concept.

Cloudbursting can also be used to shoulder the burden of some of an application's processing. For example, basic application functionality could be provided from within the cloud while more critical (e.g. revenue-generating) applications continue to be served from within the controlled enterprise data center. This assumes that only a portion of consumers will actually be interacting with the data-driven side of a web site (customer management, process visibility, etc...) while the greater portion will simply be browsing around on the non-interactive, as it were, side of the site.

Bursting has traditionally been applied to resource allocation and automated provisioning/de-provisioning of resources, historically focused on bandwidth. Today, in the cloud, it is being applied to resources such as servers, application servers, application delivery systems, and other infrastructure required to provide on-demand computing environments that expand and contract as necessary, without manual intervention.

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In general, we talk a lot about the benefits of SOA in terms of agility, aligning IT with the business, and risk mitigation. Then we talk about WOA (web oriented architecture) separately from SOA (service oriented architecture) but go on to discuss how the two architectures can be blended to create a giant application architecture milkshake that not only tastes good, but looks good.

It's seen as a tool; a means to an end, rather than as an enabling facet of either architectural model. It's seen as a mechanism for building interactive and more responsive user interfaces, as a cool tool to implement interesting tricks in the browser, and as yet another cross-browser incompatible scripting technology that makes developer's lives miserable.

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You walked past me again today without stopping. I remember when you used to stop and admire my glowing red ball every day. But that was back when I was brand new and you thought I was the center of your data center.

I heard you talking to some friends about looking for a web acceleration solution yesterday. You were going to a meeting about it later that afternoon and you were so excited it was almost like old times, until you pointed me out on the way by and said, "Oh yeah, there's our load balancer."

I can accelerate web applications like nobody's business, if you just give me the chance. Remember? I have a modular core that can add functionality like web application acceleration, advanced client authentication, IPv6, and layer 7 rate shaping with software modules. I have extra cycles, I can do it, but you wouldn't know that because you haven't touched my GUI in months.

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Elasticity (adj) the ability of a cloud computing environment to expand or contract automatically on-demand according to real-time computing needs

Surprisingly, some of the providers being grouped under the "cloud computing provider" moniker do not offer the ability to burst resources. Seriously. I was reading through "Who provides what in the cloud" over at InfoWorld and came across this description of a cloud computing provider:

That sounds more like managed hosted services than cloud computing. There's no indication whether you can "burst" resources if you consume all the dedicated resources you have purchased, but the requirement to "buy a dedicated resource pool" pretty much seems to say that you can burst within your resource pool, but you can't burst beyond that limit.

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As I was reading the Internet this morning I happened across an article with "Tips for Optimizing Your WAN (Wide Area Network)" and I thought, "Huh. That's pretty ... generic."  

While the article uses SAP applications as an example, it speaks in terms of generalities. Selective ACKs, quality of service, data reduction techniques, and HTTP compression.

That's when I said, "Whoop de doo."

Really, these techniques have nothing to do with SAP and applications and everything to do with packets. Every WAN and acceleration solution can do this stuff. I'm not really picking on the author of this article, per se. It's a common practice to "name drop" applications when you're describing WAN optimization and acceleration because, well, it exists to deliver applications. Without applications, a WAN is about as useful as HD cable service without a television. So why do we talk so much about packets and bandwidth instead of the important stuff, the applications?

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Don and I were discussing security as a service and, as usual, he spouted off some wisdom in the form of an analogy that was too good to not to share.

When you're walking down the street with your entourage and an angry, I mean really angry, man steps out in front of you with a lead pipe where should your bodyguard be?

Basically, if I get hit by that lead pipe or I expend effort avoiding being hit or even momentarily look like something out of an Edvard Munch painting, my bodyguard is fired because he wasn't doing his job. He's doing it wrong.

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No, it's not this one. It's not even mine. It's this one on High Scalability written by Todd Hoff. Not only does he explain latency and its sources, but its costs. Then he goes on to offer a plethora of ways to reduce latency.

A couple of suggestions he offers are:

Make TCP Faster. FastTCP, for example, tweaks TCP to provide smoother and faster data delivery.

I'd also suggest combining his suggestions of load-balancing and caching with TCP optimizations and connection management optimization by deploying an application delivery controller instead of a legacy load-balancer.

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David Bressler of Progress Software, who acquired SOA vendor Actional in January 2006 wrote a very thought provoking post on marketing that really ended up being a post about SOA and where Progress fits into the "SOA continuum". He raises some questions, and problems, with SOA and product categories that ties in nicely with an excellent blog post on the subject Todd Biske wrote a while back containing some concepts that he presented at Burton's Catalyst 2006.

One of the confusing things about any market is the wide variety of names used to describe the products and solutions that fit into the wider technology landscape. There are a distinct set of SOA product categories, or SOA What as David calls them. The problem is that there is a lot of overlap in responsibilities between those categories. For example, SOA gateways and SOA management both provide a similar set of proxy-focused capabilities: content based routing, transformation, even service-enablement, but SOA gateways rarely include the robust monitoring and alerting side of management, choosing instead to integrate with existing network management systems (NMS) like HP OpenView or IBM's Tivoli instead.

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