How Nimble is your OSGi runtime?

Hands up all of you managing OSGi dependencies via an editable list of bundles. Easy isn't it! It just works right!?

Well actually - it 'just works' for a single application running in a small number of containers. From an enterprise perspective you are unintentionally contributing to an impending complexity meltdown; an explosion of dependency and configuration management issues. And if you are unfortunate enough to end up supporting your own composite creations, you may well end up envying the fate of Prometheus and rueing the day you learnt to code.

Possible harsh? But I'm not alone voicing this concern!

In his recent article "Reuse: Is the Dream Dead?", Kirk Knoernschild continues his efforts to educate the industry on the tensions between code 're-use' and 'simplicity of use'. Kirk argues that as you increase potential re-use via lightweight fine-grained components, the complexity of dependencies and necessary environmental configurations corresponding increase, so making these same components harder to use.

A simple concept, yet if unaddressed, an issue that will make your life as an enterprise developer increasing uncomfortable and help edge OSGi closer to that seemingly inevitable 'trough of disillusionment'.

Yet, from a development perspective the issue of dependency management is well understood.

Whilst initially found wanting, a number of projects now exist to address this; including the SIGIL eclipse plug-in which Paremus recently contributed to the Apache Felix project, (SIGIL leveraging Peter Krien's BND tool).

In contrast, the issue of dependency management in Production is less immediately obvious, its impact more profound and generally ignored.

* Will aspects of the runtime environment affect the runtime dependencies within the application?

* Will applications be isolated from each other, or might they run within the same JVM?

* How are the released artifacts subsequently managed in the production environment with respect to ongoing bundle dependency and version management?

Echoing Kirk's concerns, Robert Dunne started his presentation at OSGi DevCon Europe with the observation that; 'whilst modularity was good, its benefits are often undermined by dependency and configuration complexity'. The subject of Robert's presentation? The Paremus Nimble Resolver, which is our response to the concerns posed by Kirk.

Nimble is a high performance runtime dependency resolver. To deploy a composite application to a Nimble enabled runtime (i.e. the Paremus Service Fabric) one specifies:

* The root component of the artifact.

* And a set of associated policies and constraints.

Nimble then does the rest.

Presented with the 'root', Nimble dynamical constructs the target composite; ensuring that the structural dependencies are resolved in a manner consistent with both organizational policies and the runtime environment within which it finds itself.

Nimble's OSGi capabilities include:

* Fragment attachment policies.

* Optional import policies.

* Import version range narrowing.

* The ability to resolve dependencies on extender bundles (DS, 'classic' Spring, Spring DM, iPOJO).

With Nimble policies allowing:

* The configuration of selected extensions.

* Flexible constraint requirement -> capability matching.

* The ability to configure optional dependency resolution behaviors.

Not just OSGi, Nimble is a generic artifact resolver with a plug-able architecture. Any artifact type may be supported, with support currently available for:

* OSGi Bundles

* POJO's, 'classic' Spring & Spring DM

* WAR

* Configurations.

A Nimble enable runtime quite literally dynamically assembles all required runtime application and infrastructure service dependencies around the deployed business components! Specify a WAR artifact and Nimble will instantiate the appropriate Servlet engine dictated by runtime policy attached to the WAR; i.e. Tomcat or Jetty Sir? Specify a 'Configuration', and Nimble responds by installing the target of the configuration, and of-course its dependencies.

Nimble not only directly addresses Kirk's concerns, but goes on to radically transforms our understanding of the responsibilities and capabilities of next generation composite aware Service Platforms. But most importantly, Nimble was created to enable effect re-use whilst making life simpler for you and the organizations you work for.

Whilst recently writing up a white paper, I idly spent sometime looking through my usual archive - the Internet (anything to avoid writing). :-/

When did we (Paremus) first announce distributed OSGi again? Answer, not 2009 as one believe if you listened to all the IT vendor noise about RFC119 - but in December 16th 2005.

OK - we were a little early :)

This press release even had a quote from Jon Bostrom. Jon, six years early in 1998 actually visited Salomon Brothers UK to provide a Jini train course too, what turned out to be, a proto-Paremus team.

This morning I was alerted to a blog concerning Jini and OSGi which I dually half-read, then responded. Then realized that the blogger had actually reference a short 5 minute talk I gave at the Brussels JCM 10 Jini event September 2006. As the message from this presentation had been ignored by the community since that point - I has somewhat surprised / pleased to see it referenced.

My message at the time was simple and quite unpopular...

To survive and flourish Jini must embrace OSGi

The other thing that sprang to mind was Jim Waldo's presentation at the same conference. Unlike mine, this widely report with great enthusiasm; I really don't mind Jim:)

The interesting thing was - at least to my mind - one of Jim's most profound comments seemed to be missed by most.

Program v.s. Deploy - we'll put the management in later

This struck particular resonance with the Paremus engineering team - as our dynamic target state provisioning sub-system for Infiniflow had been released earlier that very year. This leveraging those very ideas!

Its now 2009 - we have the industry has defined the relevant required standards for distributed OSGi based frameworks. Now the industry is wondering how to develop, deploy and manage runtimes that consist of 1000's of dynamical deployed bundles running on a Cloud of Compute resource. No problem! Paremus have been doing that for half a decade ;)

Conclusions? Nothing profound. Perhaps the slow pace of the IT industry? But isn't the Internet a great communal memory!

Teleport or Telegraph?

If this blog entry were chiseled in stone, no currently existing technology would be capable of near instantaneous transportation of that stone. Perhaps quantum entanglement might one day provide the basis for Teleportation - yet much serious physics and engineering would be required to make this more than Science Fiction.

Yet the same information - in an binary format (Morse) - could have be transmitted across a continent at near the speed of light over a hundred years ago.

Both approaches achieve the same result - transmission of information.

Sometimes identifying the correct approach, the correct perspective, is far more important than the amount of engineering effort you throw at a problem.

Which brings me to the following article.

So VMware need 2,000 people to build a resource orchestration layer? Certainly, trying to manage a resource landscape so that it appears unchanging to a population of legacy applications is extremely difficult!

The alternative?

Take a different perspective.

Build dynamic / agile applications that adapt to the changing characteristics of their operational environments.

Global Financial Meltdown and Google Mail Service Outage

Whilst the current global economic meltdown and the recent Google e-mail service outage may seem entirely different types of event, there is some degree of commonality. Both represent catastrophic cascading failure within large complex distributed systems.

The analogy unfortunately finishes there. 

Google were up and running again in a couple of hours whilst the worlds economies may take a decade to recover. However the central theme -  how to avoid systemic catastrophic failure within complex systems - remains of deep concern to system architects and economists alike. 

Where does that leave "Cloud Computing". Quite simply don't believe the hype. Public Cloud infrastructures will continue to fail, hopefully infrequently, but almost certainly in a spectacular manner. The next generation for Public Cloud will need to be built upon a more modular resources landscape (swarms of geographically dispersed meshed data centre nodes) - with a suitably advanced distributed & partition-able Cloud Operating System. 

Unfortunately the same is true of the current generation of Grid Provisioning and Virtualization Management Software solutions increasingly used by large corporations. Use of this technology will end in tears for a number of large IT departments. To much visible complexity, too little automation. Like the economic meltdown, these solutions fail to account for outlier risks which cause systemic failure within complex systems.

The answer? Well its not a programming language (sorry Erlang!), nor a specific piece of middleware, nor specific replication technology, nor classic clustering.

To start the journey one must first realize that... 

Agility and Robustness are simply two faces of the same coin.

Forget Cloud - OSGi is the new Cool Thing!

Or so an Industry Analyst recently informed me. 

Yet the flurry of Twittering & Blogging concerning the distributed OSGi section of the new OSGi 4.2 specification is certainly interesting. Is OSGi approaching some sort of enterprise adoption tipping point? These along with other commercial indications imply this is likely.

This is good news. OSGi deserves to be wildly successful, OSGi is one of the key enablers for the next generation of enterprise. 

Yet a danger lurks in the shadows. 

The use of OSGi does not in itself guarantee any sort of coherent architecture, nor is capable of addressing the current complexity crisis with the enterprise. OSGi is simply a tool - and in the wrong hands OSGi runtime systems will seem orders of magnitude more complex than the systems they replaced.  Meanwhile, the distributed OSGi section of the 4.2 specification is simply an acknowledgment that "things" exist outside the local JVM - no more - no less. 

Distributed OSGi has little to say about how to address Deutsch's 8 Fallacies ( actually if you follow the link you'll notice that Wikipedia now have a 9th :)  ). How these distributed entities discover each other, interact with each other, and which protocols are used is left as an exercise to the software vendor. This is not a criticism of the standard - this is a good thing. OSGi doesn't constrain distributed architectures. 

Yet this allows business as usual for the Software Vendors. And so we see the same old tired SOA rhetoric.

"ESB's & WS-*, would you like OSGi with that sir?"

But joking aside - the real danger is that OSGi's fate may become hopelessly entangled with the current disillusionment surrounding the web of vendor SOA Market-ectures. 

Paremus have always argued that OSGi deserves to be complemented by a network SOA framework that is as adaptable and dynamic as OSGi is locally within the JVM. A Self-Similar Architecture!

It was for this reason that Paremus fused OSGi (the new Cool technology) with Jini (was Jini ever Cool?) within the Newton project in 2006. A solution, in its commercial Infiniflow guise, which has been in customer production for over 2 years. 

As for Cloud Computing - that story has only just started ;-)

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats"

Howard Aiken 1900-1973

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

Arthur Schopenhauer

If only Newton were Apache....

Whilst I'm on a roll...

I continue to get asked by all sorts of parities, "Why is Newton using a GPL (actually AGPL) open source license? Why isn't it Apache?" Less frequently, the same question in another guise - "Why did Paremus set up codeCauldron rather than join Apache or Eclipse?"

This question usual emanates from one of three sources:

• Individual Developer: Usually very excited about Newton and its capabilities; typically a Samurai - (Paremus like Samurai!). The conversation goes - "If only Newton were Apache, I could deploy it in production without sign-off". The Samurai sees the value in the product, sees the vision - and believes (but cannot ensure) the organization will do the right thing; the right thing being to pay for support and consultancy services from the company that developed the product. Unfortunately I've seen exactly the opposite behavior from a number of Organisations! Many VC's believe without questioning - the diffusion model; i.e. "Give it away and the revenue will roll in" - yes, those very words have been used. My response - I continue to watch SpringSource and MuleSource with much interest! But I predict that the VC's in question are in for a shock!
  
• The Small SI: Usually want Newton capabilities upon which they can build business specific services - but do not want to pay for the privilege. Newton is unique in its capabilities at present - so either the SI must make their own derivative code GPL, or develop the equivalent of Newton capabilities themselves, or enter a commercial relationship with Paremus. If only Newton were Apache!
• Tier 1 Technology Vendors: Complain - "We (who shall remain nameless) cannot officially look at Newton code because it's GPL. Implication being: We are not interested in a commercial relationship with you, rather we want to see what you Paremus folks have, try and guess where you are going, and then do it ourselves. If only Newton were Apache!
  

So whilst capable of generating a large footprint, the Apache license model is, I believe, a significant barrier for small innovative companies wanting to build a financial successful business, as:

• Its easy to give something away. Trying to charge for usage a-priori - much more difficult! Again, I continue to watch SpringSource and MuleSource with much interest!
• The giants of the Software Industry, after the Linux/JBOSS experience have become quite effective at controlling open source communities, and neutralizing potential threats to the status quo; just my paranoid observations.

Perhaps Microsoft were correct all along?

That said, companies with closed source / proprietary software products seem to make the same mistake. The market is tough, developers opt for "free open source" solutions, our ROI isn't obvious? So give away the product based on some criteria - to customers with revenue below a certain level, or limited functionality / scale of the free product. Later - when the customer exceeds this boundary - we have them by the balls! (queue evil laugh). A viable long-term business strategy?

Again, I have my doubts.

Impaled on the Horns of an OPEX Dilemma

The finance industry are clearly having a tough time at present. As losses mount, CEO's & CIO's are increasingly scrutinizing the costs of doing business. One interesting metric, the cost of running a single production application; $1,000,000 per annum! Take the many thousands of applications typically used in a large finance house, and operational costs rapidly exceeds the billion dollar per annum mark.

Why is this?

Surely, over the last few years the Finance industry has increasingly driven down the price of enterprise software, to the point that an application server may now be charged at a few hundred dollars per node. Likewise, basic networking, server and storage are cheaper than at any time in the past.

The problem isn't the cost of the raw materials, rather the fact that these organizations have built increasingly complex environments which must be maintained by an army of IT staff.

I'm probably not far off the mark suggesting 80% of the annual cost for each application relates to support and development staff that are required to maintain and keep the application running.

And the choices available to the CxO?

• Use Cheaper Resource: Ship operations out to China, India or Mexico! While on-paper attractive as a quick fix; there is a catch. Wages tend to normalize as time progress, with the cost of initially cost effective workforces rising to the point that the Market will bear. Indeed - it has a name; "Free Market Dynamics". Hence within a reasonable timeframe (~5 yrs) - the cost advantage will evaporated; meanwhile the company is still left with a complex manually intensive operational environment. Traditional - third party outsourcing - of which there are several failed examples exist in the late 1999 / early 2000 period - fall into this category. This approach does nothing to address the the root cause of the spiraling operational costs – complexity! In short - a strategy guaranteed to fail in the medium / long term.
  
• Reduce the Number of Applications: If the cost relates to the number of applications - simply forcing down the number of applications in use will initially reduce OPEX costs. Whilst a reasonable strategy for some, the Financial Service industry is highly adaptive and constantly needing the evolve applications and services. Hence, a "no new" applications policy merely results in bolt-ons of additional functionality to existing systems - increasing complexity and associated costs of the remaining applications.
  
• Use Technology to Reduce headcount: The IT industry have collectively failed to provide real solutions to this! Despite a flood of Automated Run-Book, Monitoring, Configuration Management, Package / OS Deployment and Virtualization Management products, humans are still very much still "in-the-loop"; directly concerned with all aspects of every software service in the runtime environment. Environments are more complex than ever!
  

So what is stopping the IT industry developing the right products? Simply, industry continues to fail to realize that automation of the existing is not sufficient. A fundamental/radical change in perspective with respect to how distributed systems are built and maintained is needed to address the Complexity Crisis organizations now face. Funnily enough, this is what Infiniflow has been developed to address.

And the users of the technology?

• The fear of change!
  
• The linear relationship between status and managed headcount.
• And most importantly, a severe shortage of sufficiently talented engineers and architects that have the vision and determination to drive such changes through their organizations - (Paremus referring to these rather special individuals as Samurai).

So if you are a frustrated Samurai, contact us at Paremus, we can introduce you to many like minded individuals :)

Meanwhile, if you are a CEO / CIO with the desire to tackle the root causes of your organizations IT complexity - why not drop me an e-mail, and we'll explain how we might be able to help; specifically you may find the dramatic impact that Infiniflow has on operational cost of great interest.

Henry Ford and Software Assembly

Having used the Henry Ford analogy on numerous occasions; it was interesting to read a recent JDJ article by Eric Newcomer.

The Henry Ford analogy to software goes something like this (quoting Eric)...

"The application of the Ford analogy to software is that if you can standardize application programming APIs and communications protocols, you can meet requirements for application portability and interoperability. If all applications could work on any operating system, and easily share data with all other applications, IT costs (which are still mainly labor) would be significantly reduced and mass production achievable."

Eric suggests that despite the software industry having attempted the pursuit of software re-usability, these activities have failed. Whilst the Web Services initiative has, to some degree, increased interoperability, it has failed to deliver code re-use. Eric concludes that the whole analogy is wrong, and that rather than trying to achieve code re-use, the industry needs to focus of sophisticated tools to import code, check for conformance and ready it for deployment within the context of a particular production environment.

This article triggered a number of thoughts:

• Did the industry seriously expect WS-* to usher in a new era of code re-use? Surely Web Services are a way to achieve loose coupling between existing, and so by definition, stove-piped monolithic applications? I guess the answer here partly depends on the granularity of re-use intended?
  
• Perhaps JEE should have faired better? Generic or re-usable business logic that could be deployed to a general purpose application server seems like just the thing! However, expensive bloated JEE runtimes, and the associated complexity and restrictions, prompted the developer migration to Spring.

Do these experiences really point to a fundamental issue with the idea of code re-use, or are they an indication that the standards developed by the IT industry were simply not up to the job?

If the latter, then what is actually needed? Clearly:

• It must be significantly simpler for developers to re-use existing code relative to the effort required to cut new code for the task in hand -  thus implying:

1. The ability to rapidly search for existing components with the desired characteristics.
2. The ability to rapidly access and include the desired components into new composite applications.
3. Component dependency management must be robust and intuitive both during the development cycle and during the life-time of the application in production.

• The runtime environment must be sufficiently flexible and simple that it offers little or no resistance to developers and their use of composite applications.
• In addition to the runtime environment insulating applications from resource failure, and providing horizontal scale, the runtime must also track all components that are in use, and the context (the composite system) in which they are used.

I'd argue that, unlike previous IT attempts, current industry initiatives are clearly moving in the right direction:

• The OSGi service platform gives us a vendor neutral industry standard for fine-grained component deployment and life-cycle management. Several excellent OSGi open source projects are available; namely Knopflerfish , Apache Felix and Eclipse Equinox
• Service Component Architecture (SCA) provides a vendor neutral industry standard for service composition.
• Next generation runtime environments like Infiniflow (itself built from the ground up using OSGi and SCA) replace static stove-piped Grids, Application Servers and ESB's with cohesive, distributed, adaptive & dynamic runtime environments.

But are these trends sufficient to usher in the new era of code re-use?

Possibly - possibly not.

Rather than viewing code re-use simply in terms of "find - compose - deploy" activities, we perhaps need one more trigger; the development framework itself should implicitly support the concept of code re-use! This message was convincingly delivered by Rickard Oberg in his presentation concerning the qi4j project at this years JFokus conference.

But what would be the impact if these trends succeed? Will the majority organizations build their applications from a common set of tried and tested shrink wrapped components? To what extent will third party components be common across organizations, or in house developed components be common across systems within organizations?

The result will almost certainly be adaptive radiation; an explosion in re-usable software components from external software companies and internal development groups. As with any such population, a power-law can be expected in terms of use, and so re-use; a few components being used by the vast majority of systems, whilst many components occupying unique niches, perhaps adapted or built to address the specific needs within a single specialist application in a single organization.

Going back to the Henry Ford analogy, whilst standardization of car components enabled the move to mass production, this was not, at least ultimately at the expense of diversity. Indeed, the process of component standardization, whilst initially concerned with the production of Ford Model Ts (black only) resulted in cars available for every lifestyle, for every budget and in any colour!

LiquidFusion - Any Takers?

Just after I found out about the Sun's purchase of MySQL, the news about Oracle's acquisition of BEA filtered through.

Can this be anything other than consolidation within an aging market sector. An indication that the "one size fits all" monolithic messaging middleware /  application server era is in its twilight years?

Perhaps OSGi and SCA will, in due course, be seen as key technology enablers allowing the shift away from costly monolith middleware?

Sun no Longer Afraid?

I've just been contacted by an old friend asking for my thoughts w.r.t Sun's MySQL announcement. Certainly news to me! Yet, a quick check of Sun's front page and Jonathan's blog, just to be sure, confirms the story.

So initial response was surprise. Sun had previously purchased an excellent database technology and then proceeded to silently kill it by burying it behind medico middleware. Anyone remember Clustra? True Clustra was a new market entrant whereas MySQL has massive market adoption. 

My interpretation was always that Sun were to concerned about the Oracle relationship - and specifically the Oracle on Sparc business line - to risk having any in-house product that remotely looked like a relational database. 

If true - that would imply the  revenue stream is no longer as important as it use to be? 

Whatever, it seems to me like a bold and interesting move. Far more so than the StorageTek acquisition (still don't understand that one). This also follows on from Lustre; to my mind an interesting technology motivated acquisition.

 

 

Complexity - Part II: It all depends on the Question you ask!

I previously argued that the apparent complexity of a system varies dramatically with respect to the type of question you ask. The answer to one question may make a given system seem inordinately complex, yet ask another similar question, from a slightly different perspective, and the same system appears very simple.

Hence, it is the question that dictates where the line is drawn separating hidden and exposed system complexity.

Assume I want to deploy a set of services to an Enterprise. These services have specific runtime requirements and interdependencies. The usual question asked is...

• "What compute resources do I have, what are their individual configurations and capabilities?"
  

The response to which, an extensive list of resources and associated configurations/capabilities are presented, that now need analyzing. Like the positions of nodes in a lattice, the initial question, and subsequent answer, expose too much unnecessary information!

In contrast, if I ask,

• "Out of the cloud of potential resource which may or may not exist, what sub-set resources currently satisfies the following conditions?"
  

The response requires no further thought. Whilst I may never know the configuration of everything, I'll always know whether there are resources capable of servicing my stated requirements. As the response to the question is simple, and requires no effort on my part, I have no issue in re-asking the question as may times as required; this is essential, as the one thing I do know is that the environment WILL change!!

Re-visiting the lattice analogy.

Because it is simple to measure emergent macroscopic properties such a pressure, temperature and volume, it is easy to re-measure these and so deduce the relationship between them over time - e.g. Boyles Law. This would have been a significant challenge if the microscopic quantities of position, mass and velocity for each particle had been used instead!

Abstraction versus Virtualization?

Resource abstraction is different from resource virtualization. Whilst the latter attempts to represent a physical resource with a “virtual” equivalent, this equivalent emulating the attributes as the underlying entity, resource abstraction masks the complexity of the entity (physical or virtual), representing this resource via a simplified description. Resource abstraction and resource virtualization are orthogonal / complementary and interdependent.

To Conclude

• As systems become increasingly distributed and composed of an ever increasing number of moving parts - we need to step back from attempting a microscope description of the environment, and rather describe it in terms of its emergent macroscopic characteristics.
• We need to intelligently define the boundaries - the point at which microscopic behavior gives way to a more appropriate macroscopic view. Also don't be surprised if several boundaries exist.
  
• Dynamic service discovery / dynamic service provisioning / re-provisioning are fundamental - they are MUST HAVE core behaviors.
  
• So avoid all architectures and solutions that assume a static world, comprising of fixed immutable resources at known addresses; NB including wiring systems together via static immutable middleware services! Unfortunately the vast percentage of current software solutions, and the mindsets of the engineers that built them.
  

Build dynamic systems, manage them with respect to their macroscopic properties and the management / complexity issue vanishes. Conversely, if runtime complexity is a serious issue - it's about time you redesign / rebuilt your systems as no amount of traditional management software will save you.

Paremus colleagues continuing to flag articles to me, and partially restored vigor (New Year and all that) - have conspired to overcome my Q4-07 Blogger's Block.

I'll start by briefly para-phrasing the recent crop of virualization articles.

Virtualization is great because...

• You can increase data centre resource utilization.
• You can simply restart a service on a new physically platform, should the current physical platform fail.

However there may be some dark clouds on the horizon because...

• Resource / Dependency Management and Security are problematic
  
• Operational Risk may adversely affected
  

Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs!

Isn't it obvious that, "visible" runtime complexity is increased by current forms of virtualization. Given this, it is surely no surprise that virtualization can negatively impact manageability, OPEX and, ironically, service availability?

Increasing server utilization at the expense of increased runtime complexity seems like a poor trade; especially if you remember that complexity is proportional to the number of skilled personnel required - and so OPEX. From a recent survey by Sun Microsystems ( Sun Survey ) it would appear that many CIO's would agree.

Meanwhile, we're told that:

"the IT industry will develop a new generation of management tools to address manageability and security issues created by virtualization. A great opportunity for start-ups and large IT companies alike".

Doubt this? Then check the current datacentre virtualization hype, and the number of VC funded companies in this market sector. Clearly the adage - "Identify the Pain - and sell them the Aspirin" is still in vogue with our VC friends. Unfortunately such strategies are at best simplistic; at worse, they demonstrate both the level of stupidity only achievable via a fully qualified MBA, and also the lemming behavior of the IT industry.

This time, the patient (Enterprise IT), really does need more than yet another, in a long sequence, of expensive Aspirins.

But perhaps the established IT vendors will address the problem?

Let's see. How many established vendors after 15 years of client server computing have enterprise management frameworks that are:

• Simple to Use
  
• Cost Effective
• Simple to deploy
• Address simple requirements like configuration management for software, server, storage and networks.

Its been a while since I've been involved in this area (i.e. HP Openview, Tivoli and the like), but I suspect the answer is still the same.

So what real hope is there for extending such solutions to address the new complications posed by the service virtualization?

I'll let the reader come to their own conclusions.

Complexity - Part I: What would IT Marketing do without it?

For all its press coverage, little effort has been made in defining "Complexity" in a manner that is relevant to the modern enterprise.

So here goes...

We'll start by imagining two abstract distributed "systems"; each system an infinite 3 dimensional lattice, each in a 3 dimensional space -- we'll avoid distractions caused by none-euclidean geometry :).

However, whereas the first lattice comprises of regularly spaced identical nodes, the second lattice has randomly spaced identical nodes.

Here is the crunch.

Whereas the first regular lattices may be simply, and completely, described in-terms of,

* A description of a node
* A description of the offset of a selected node from your chosen co-ordinate system, and
* The 3 parameters that describe the spacing between the nodes.

In contrast, the second random lattice needs an infinite number of spacing parameters to describe the system to the same level of accuracy.

By choosing to model each system in this manner, the first system is seen as trivial, whereas the second is infinitely complex!

Now, let us assume that relative node position is not important, and that instead we use an emergent property; in this case the density ( the number of nodes within a given volume of space).

Now the amount of information required to describe each system, is identical, and reduces to

* Composition of a node
* Density of nodes in a given volume of space.

Whilst "density" is only an abstract concept, it never the less captures important characteristics of each system with minimal information, so hiding in the case of the random lattice an infinite amount of structural complexity.

I'll now define System Complexity as, a measure of the amount of information required to describe a System; but crucially, with respect to the System Properties that are of interest to us. Furthermore, by defining/modeling a system w.r.t relevant Emergent properties, we can dramatically reduce the amount of information required to usefully describe the system. The model, representing the System and it's emergent properties, isolates us from potentially vast amounts of internal structure / complexity.

Also, for a given System, the abstraction / model that optimally describes the relevant emergent properties, with the least information; provides the least complex representation of that system.


Back to IT

Whilst IT provisionals are no longer required to understand:
* The arrangement of silicon atoms required to produce semi-conductors
* The detailed architecture of the processor or memory chip in use
* The firmware used
* The specific considerations in an OS kernel design

The resultant distributed systems are still "complex"; complicated by the fact that they consist of many inter-dependent components and services, each of which must continue to function within a volatile runtime environment.

The response to this "complexity" can be seen in every FT/Fortune 1000 company.

* Attempts are made to lock down the runtime infrastructure, to completely describe it, and prevent changes to it. More recently, attempts are made to virtualize / abstract to runtime infrastructure in a manner that presents an unchanging persona to the static business systems.
* Meanwhile, software middleware is treated as strategic investment - with physical silos of grid computing, ESB's and data caching introduced into these environments, the mandated then made that these infrastructure services must be used.

What is wrong with this consensus approach? Quite simply, as with the random lattice example, organizations are viewing their systems and so associated system complexity in the wrong frame of reference! And then attempt to address perceived complexity issues with a series of measures that actual drive up operational costs whilst impacting service agility and availability.

Enough for today - next blogging session I'll provide, what I believe to be, the answer ;)

The Death of Middleware??


Recent attempts - no I'm not saying who :) - to justify centralized approaches to enterprise middleware, in the light of current application modularization trends, triggered a fond memory of driving from San Francisco to Palo Alto, probably sometime 2004.

In between the usual process of struggling with US road signs, the in-car navigation system, and for us Brits, being on the wrong side of the road, I noticed two advertisements. The first, "Middleware Everywhere" was courtesy of IBM, this seemingly in response to a billboard a mile or so further down the road (or visa versa) "The End of Middleware" courtesy of Sun Microsystems.

Ironically, counter to what tradition middleware companies may have you believe, both marketing messages may now be rapidly realized by application modularization, fueled by OSGi and dynamic composition, exemplified by SCA.

Whilst SCA allows Service bindings to be defined at application composition time, OSGi allows these bindings to be dynamically loaded and used by dynamically assembled runtime applications. In principle, the relevant infrastructure messaging / caching components may also be dynamically deployed alongside business logic; see the Newton open source project, and its commercial big brother - Infiniflow - for examples of this approach to dynamic "Business System" assembly.

So - no longer strategic, high cost, high risk, monolithic frameworks that constrain application agility and scalability - "middleware" will simply be the ensemble, or aggregate, of all applications bindings and associated infrastructure components - in use - at each point in time!

The impact on the industry should be significant. Enterprise Service Buses, Space Based Architectures, Message Centric, direct synchronous / asynchronous communication, Web Services?? Ultimately why should we care? Rather than purchasing that strategic "all-purpose" Hammer, and treating all Enterprise inter-service interaction as Nails, lets start using the right tool for the right job; dynamically deploy the appropriate infrastructure service alongside the applications they serve!! And whilst we're at it, lets do this in a manner that increases overall resilience and rips OPEX costs out of the operational environment.

So perhaps IBM's "Middleware is Everywhere" was nearer the mark - that said perhaps Sun's response should now be "Yes But - Enterprise Middleware is rapidly becoming Irrelevant".

We live in exciting times!

Java EE 6 is announced. The Interface21 folks think its finally "right", and the daggers are drawn as the old JBoss boys feel the need to defend their position as popular open source JEE appserver vendor (see theserverside).

Extensibility and Profiling are a couple of key features in Java EE 6.

Mmmm. So I can take my very bloated Java EE infrastructure and reduce it to merely bloated.

I'm almost sold on the idea ;-)

But hang on? What about OSGi and SCA. Can I not already dynamically build very sophisticated distributed composite applications that adapt and evolve to their resource landscapes? Such distributed application services only running loading and running what is required at each specific point in time. These solutions self-managing, self-configuring and self healing?

Well actually, yes I can - and Java EE - in any form - doesn't figure!

On a finishing note - a nice article (concerning Web Services) whose underlying message is, I'd suggest, as equally applicable to the monolith Java EE v.s. composite OSGi / SCA debate.

Venture Capitalists embrace Command Economy in preference to Free Market!

A recent article Interesting Times for Distributed DataCentres by Paul Strong (Ebay - Distinguished Research Scientist ) makes a number of interesting points:

• For Web2.0 Services to scale, you MUST back-end these onto massively horizontally scaled processing environments.
• Most Enterprise datacentre environments are moving towards, or could be considered as, priomordial Grid type architectures.
• What is really missing is the Data Centre MetaOperating System - to provide the resource scheduling and management functions required.
  

Whilst these arguments are correct, and highlight a real need, Industry & VC response seems entirely inappropriate.

Whilst VC and major Systems Vendors are happly throwing money into expounding the virtues of loosely coupled business models enabled by Web2.0 and all things WS-SOA; somewhat perplexingly, they also continue to invest in managment / virtualization / infrastructure solutions which drive tight couplings through the infrastructure stack. Examples include data centre "virtualization" or, as per my previous blog entry on the Complexity Crisis, configuration / deployment management tools.

Hence, industry investment seems to continue to favor the technology equivalent of the "command economy" in which the next generation of distributed Grid data centre is really just one more iteration on today's; central IT organisation control/manage and allocate IT resource in a rigid hierarchical/control command structure. The whole environment is viewed as rigid system which one centrally controls at each layer of the ISO stack; approaches that continue the futile attempt to make distributed environments behave like MainFrames!

What is actually needed is a good dose of Free Market Economics!

• Business Services dynamically compete for available resources at each point in time,
  
• Resources may come and go - as they feel fit!
• Infrastructure and Systems look after their own interests, and optimise their behaviors to ensure overall efficency within the Business Ecosystem.
  

Successful next generation MetaOperating Systems, will heavily leverage such principles at the core of their architectures!

You simply cannot beat an efficient Market!

A new survey posted on GRID today highlights the Risks associated with Infrastructure Complexity. Interesting highlights include:

• Each hour of downtime costs Fortune 1000 companies in excess of $300,000 according to 1/3 of the survey responses.

Of course, dependent on the specific Industry, these figures could be so much larger! Everyone tends to focus on availability/scaling issues for the new Internet based companies (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay). However, if you want to see real risk - consider the impact on some of the core systems that support global Banking / Financial systems.

• Trouble shooting the problem can take more than a day. According to 1/3 of survey responses.

So if these are the same guys that have the $300,000 an hour loss - the figures are starting to mount up.

• Change Management for Fortune/FT 1000 companies occupies 11 full time people!

• Installation and configuration of core applications is a major resource sink; taking 4 days to configure a complete application infrastructure stack.

The report then goes on to justify change management / configuration management products. The implication being that to address the complexity issues, these Fortune/FT 1000 companies need to purchase and configure yet more enterprise software?

So Layering Complexity upon Complexity!!

I wonder, just what is the Production impact, if after all this automation, you loose the systems that are doing the automation and configuration?? I suspect recovery would be significantly longer than 1 working day!

The truth of the matter is that Enterprise Systems including those based upon the latest ESB, Grid, WS-SOA Marketectures are the root cause of the explosive increase in Complexity.

Each of these approaches implicitly assume that:

• The compute resource landscape is static,
• Software functionality is static
• Provisioning is thought of as a one time event, and
• Failure is treated as an exception.

Whereas in reality:

• Compute resource landscape is dynamic
• Software functionality needs to evolve and adapt
• Provisioning is an on-going process - caused by
• Continual - re-optimisation against the shfting compute landscape and recovery from failure.
  

So how do these Fortune/FT 1000 companies dig themselves out of their current Complexity Crisis?

By building the correct IT foundations for their businesses! Fortune 1000 companies need to implement Enterprise wide solutions where configuration, adaption and recovery are core design features. Systems configure, deploy and maintain themselves, as part of what they do (by way of an example - see Infiniflow)! Such solutions will also heavily leverage industry trends towards modularization via OSGi & SCA.

Whether you are the CIO of a Global Bank, a Gaming Company or a Telcoms company, once the correct technology foundations have been put in place - no easy task - significant OPEX savings WILL follow. However, take the easy route - fail with the foundations, avoid necessary change - and no amount of management, configuration or deployment software bandaid will save you!