Understanding the "as a Service" Revolution
I recently wrote a piece that was published on GigaOM that uses a bus (as in vehicle) analogy to try and establish a conceptual framework for the public vs. private cloud discussion. Check it out here!
read more
Before I get started, this post IS NOT a post about why multi-tenancy is a good thing, why it’s better than virtualization, or anything of that nature. I had to get that out before starting – there are plenty of posts that deal with this topic (one, two, three, etc.). Instead, I want to tackle a different issue: the issue of what multi-tenancy means in a variety of contexts as well as how its positioning by vendors is leading to mass confusion.
No particular event has motivated this post; instead, this post is the result of a number of conversations and miscommunications. A while back, I started noticing some disturbing trends in the market, and more specifically, in vendor pitches. Let me use a real world example of what I mean. Frequently, the sales team at Apprenda ends up in the following type of conversation at some point in our sales cycle (clearly, this is distilled for brevity):
Prospect: “I saw that SaaSGrid offers multi-tenancy.”
Apprenda: “That’s right; SaaSGrid gives your application access to various types of multi-tenancy using the same code base and application assets. It’s actually amazingly unique and takes significant effort out of your R&D.”
Prospect: “Yeah, but doesn’t <insert your favorite PaaS/IaaS here> offer multi-tenancy?” or “Well, the folks over at <insert your favorite PaaS/IaaS here> said they offer multi-tenancy too.”
Apprenda: “That’s different. Those technologies are themselves multi-tenant. SaaSGrid is a server technology that allows your single-tenant application to be multi-tenant at all application tiers without the huge effort typically associated with going multi-tenant.
Prospect: “Wait, but that’s exactly what I heard <insert your favorite PaaS/IaaS here> say. You’re saying that they don’t do the same thing as you.”
Apprenda: “Correct. Most, if not all, cloud platform vendors that refer to multi-tenancy are references to their own architectures, meaning they can efficiently pack their customers onto shared hardware/OS instances and offer you better service and a low price point. What you’re asking is how you can be multi-tenant and offer the same to your customers. Others in the cloud can’t help you with that.
Prospect: “OK, so using their service doesn’t make sense then?”
Apprenda: “That’s hard to answer, but it usually makes sense in conjunction with something like SaaSGrid. Clearly, being on something like EC2 (which is multi-tenant at the infrastructure tier) has advantages to you. Using SaaSGrid means you can really lower your internal cost of offering your service to your customers, and either put the savings to the bottom line or pass it along to your customers.”
Prospect: “What SaaSGrid does seems pretty magical now that I’ve cut through the marketing BS, how do you do it?”
Apprenda: “SaaSGrid is a runtime. When deployed to SaaSGrid, your application is transformed and new capabilities are instrumented into all tiers of your application. When running on SaaSGrid, these transformations and runtime instrumentations ‘inject’ SaaS architecture DNA into your non-SaaS web application.”
As you can see, this sort of conversation is a distraction. Whether it’s a conversation with an analyst, industry pundit, or potential customer, I’ve found that the most important thing to do upfront is to level-set on what both sides mean/understand when they say “multi-tenant.” Why so much confusion? I think it’s due to two factors:
On the marketing side, vendors do a good job of highlighting multi-tenancy. The problem is that the lack of context around the “feature” of multi-tenancy causes significant miscommunication. From a marketing perspective, vendors are sucked into the Green Crystals Marketing described by Bob Warfield a couple of years ago. Most cloud vendors are touting that they are multi-tenant; they want you to understand that they have a cost-effective and safe mechanism to isolate their customers from one another. To understand this better, I’ve taken the liberty to copy and paste (with references, of course) some content related to multi-tenancy from various cloud vendors:
The AppFabric Container provides base-level application infrastructure such as automatically ensuring scale out, availability, multi-tenancy and sandboxing of your application components. (Microsoft, Windows Azure)
Cloud-enabling infrastructure to allow secure multi-tenant deployments, including fully integrated management, monitoring, metering and billing infrastructure (CloudBees)
If you are running numerous applications/application instances, XAP’s fine-grained multi-tenancy allows you to share them across all available machines, instead of running only one instance per machine. This allows you to support more users on each machine. (GigaSpaces)
There a few others to use as examples, but this is fine for now. I’m not going to debate whether advertising that you are multi-tenant is an effective use of marketing real-estate. all of these snippets of text highlight multi-tenancy, but what is unclear is the context. For example, the first two indicate multi-tenancy at the platform tier; that is, multiple, unrelated code assets can share common OS instances. While this is powerful in its own right, it’s easy to understand how someone reading this text might walk away thinking “Excellent. Our requirements for our new SaaS project call for multi-tenancy. I can check that off our list.” The fact is, while ambiguous in terms of presentation, these technologies do not endow your application with multi-tenancy, they let you run in a multi-tenant environment. If you’re looking to build a multi-tenant app, you need to still architect multi-tenancy (‘architect’ is a verb according to the Oxford English Dictionary). In the gigaspaces case, although they refer to multi-tenancy in a way that lends itself to an “endowment” interpretation, it seems that they are focusing more on a grid approach of scaling the app to support more end users. While this is also valuable, it does not deal with segregation and isolation of logical groups of tenants (which is what multi-tenancy really is). At Apprenda, we even dealt with this definition in problem in our FAQ. This leads me to the next issue: term overloading.
Multi-tenancy is valid in 3 common computing contexts:
Clearly, multi-tenancy means different things in all of these scenarios. There is nothing wrong with overloading, but it certainly doesn’t help the already high levels of confusion that exist around the word. If you’re an app developer in the Cloud looking to see what tech can help you, having a sense of clarity is most useful. Make sure you ask simple questions like:
If you get answers of “I don’t know” or “No”, then clearly, you’re on your own if you want to build a multi-tenant SaaS app from the ground up.
Do you feel multi-tenancy is thrown around too often by the wrong parties? Is multi-tenancy confusing to you?
I recently spoke with Phil Wainewright of ZDNet and had a great conversation regarding private cloud/private SaaS. The focus of the conversation was to help Phil understand some work we’ve been doing at Apprenda with enterprise IT . For anyone that doesn’t know Apprenda and our platform SaaSGrid, I co-founded the company with the intent of solving a major market problem: create a server technology to help independent software vendors (ISVs) build amazing multi-tenant, fully web scalable and commercializable SaaS offerings. Basically, SaaSGrid is a layer that sits underneath an application as an “operating system” middleware that provides a modern distributed runtime solving all major SaaS architecture and operating requirements.
As Apprenda evolved, we started realizing that ISVs weren’t the only entities trying to deliver their software to thousands (or even millions) of customers via a services model instead of a shipped bits model. We found that huge numbers of home built enterprise IT apps were essentially being written as SaaS offerings because of the simplified delivery and consumption model.Enterprise IT could write an application, deploy it as a their own “private” SaaS offerings, and have internal end users, partners, vendors, and even external customers, use those applications. For example, imagine a custom supply chain management application used by the employees of a large, global logistics company, or an HR app deployed to multiple lines of business within the enterprise. We also found that a cloud application architecture is not something that solves problems unique to ISVs, but that we could give the same or more value to enterprise IT. Furthermore, we started noticing that enterprises are building private clouds, essentially IaaS offerings within the enterprise, allowing for flexible access to massive pools of resources. This solves a number of IT problems, but now developers are aching for access to higher order value: essentially, a platform like SaaSGrid that could be deployed ontop of that IaaS to rapidly build complex cloud architectures and deploy those architectures to their private clouds. My conversation with Wainewright really honed in on understanding how and why enterprise architects are adopting cloud architectures for internally built custom applications.
Wainewright wrote up a great post entitled “The OEMing of SaaS: build or buy?” that describes private SaaS in good detail. At the end of his post, he posits that “…the case [is] against ‘private’ SaaS and in favor of having the provider run the platform” I don’t think this is necessarily a good position, at least in terms of a coherent taxonomy. First, we need to make sure we don’t confound Cloud topic areas. Where an application lives and it’s “visibility” are two different things. A Cloud application has a few attributes associated with it:
Being ‘against’ private SaaS, at least by how we define it (where again, ‘private’ is a visibility construct that helps determine who is allowed to consume the app) has nothing to do with where it runs (the provider running the platform). For example, if an enterprise chooses to use a Cloud platform like SaaSGrid, they are choosing to use it because it solves some very tricky architecture and operations problems. Morgan Stanley, for example, might choose to build a multi-tenant app for it’s thousands of retail banking branches on something like SaaSGrid to solve distribution, scale, provisioning, and entitlements problems through multi-tenancy and infrastructure abstraction, but still run it on something like EC2. Running the app on EC2 doesn’t make the application ‘public’; it’s still only privately accessible but running on a ‘public’ cloud. That said, there is also nothing wrong with someone like Morgan Stanley deploying a their private SaaS app on their own infrastructure, or with building a private Cloud stack with something like SaaSGrid running atop their internal IaaS offering. There are huge advantages to this as well.
This leads me to a brief discussion of the evolution of Cloud in the context of enterprise IT (and maybe even the broader market in general). First, I think we’ll always have two distinct stack layers: IaaS and PaaS. The state of PaaS as a Cloud layer is important to understand. To date, most PaaS offerings have not focused on the changed software consumption paradigm where thousands or millions of people plan on consuming a centralized service. That’s still an architecture that most developers have to deal with.
Offerings like Heroku, which was referenced by Wainewright, abstract away the infrastructure and provide a package, deploy and run model for arbitrary applications. These platforms do little to nothing for the applications’ fundamental architecture qualities and runtime behavior, and merely simply part of the build, configuration and release process, and remove the need to deal with IT staff. In this case, forklifting an application off of a PaaS to another PaaS, or even to IaaS, is easy and requires no code changes. Unfortunately, these types of PaaS offerings are uninteresting from an advanced application architecture and engineering point of view (don’t misinterpret this as uninteresting in general. I find PaaS offerings to be amazingly valuable, just not in terms of solving challenging architecture and engineering problems like multi-tenancy, which are still dealt with “by hand”) If someone chooses a platform (PaaS or cloud-focused architecture platform) that provides a modern, advanced Cloud architecture out of the box and that provides your application with significant runtime value, you won’t think about forklifting the same codebase from the platform to something like IaaS or some deploy-focused PaaS offering because you will lose all the architectural value you were after in the first place. This means that the Cloud runtime, to prevent operational lock-in, must be decoupled from the provider. If it is not, you are in grave danger of being operationally beholden to the provider for fundamental architecture needs. This is extremely risky.
Enterprise IT faces extremely complex engineering challenges; they don’t build “websites”, they build sophisticated web applications that need to deal with challenging problems. The Cloud will evolve to acknowledge Cloud architectures as a topic separate from Cloud “hosting”, and that the two layers should be decoupled as a rationale step to ensuring freedom and openness. What I expect to see is that enterprise will adopt Cloud runtimes to solve their engineering challenges, and whether an app built on that runtime is deployed in their private cloud or in the public cloud will be dictated by an entirely different set of parameters. Any external providers that think they can have people write code that will run in their Cloud and only their Cloud will not succeed in the long run.
Have you worked on private SaaS projects built by your enterprise IT organization? Do you think the Cloud will evolve into a runtime and hosting tier, or will you be forced to choose a runtime that is locked in to a single provider? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Jeff Kaplan posted an article on Internet Evolution this morning entitled “Bridging the Great Divide in Cloud Computing“. It’s a nice little piece that focuses on a burning problem: the Cloud has been very infrastructure focused, to the point that if you attend industry events you’ll find that, as Kaplan identified, “Those events that promise the latest information and insight about the nuts and bolts of the leading IaaS offerings will likely be overrun by network engineers or storage and security specialists. ”
My experiences have been the same: for the most part, cloud has provided tremendous value in creating a highly flexible datacenter abstraction, democratizing access to high end infrastructure offerings, and trivializing a number of deployment and management issues (think PaaS). Most of this is something that network engineers love (I don’t believe it’s a pari passu displacement of IT staff – Cloud has created a set of more interesting, higher value challenges that modern IT operators need to tackle) Additionally, the Cloud has provide some basic value to software engineers through some highly available and scalable nuts and bolts services (like blob storage solutions, etc.), but the problem domain of building Cloud/SaaS offerings has not been directly addressed by most Cloud providers since the focus has been entrenched at this network and virtualization tier. Cloud at the infrastructure tier is absolutely necessary, but the development community needs more Cloud value that solves modern software architecture problems. The Cloud, with its vast elasticity and democratization of software access to end users, has created challenging software delivery problems like cost efficiency delivery, scalability, and the need for codification of critical operating workflows. These are things that Cloud tech to date has predominantly shied away from.
Historically, middleware/infrastructure software has provided a common layer that acts as a single point of interest shared by IT network level operators and software developers. Think IIS, WebSphere, database servers, etc. These infrastructure software products typically provide a wealth of tooling to network folks in support of applications written by developers that use the pattern and practice productization value captured by these “application servers” to ease use case specific software engineering burdens. When the developers finish building something, the network ops teams can communicate in a familiar way with the same product, but through a different lens.
Looking at the state of the Cloud, it seems pretty obvious to me that we are at an inflection point. The “great divide in cloud computing” is something that can, should, and will be filled by modern middleware purpose-built for the Cloud. This middleware is what can act as the intermediary between the new architecture pressures that software developers must face and the Cloud management requirements of the IT staff. Without middleware handling this, we fundamentally have a better way to host software, which is hardly a catalyst for continued innovation.
If you’d like to mingle with others in the SaaS space, the SaaSBlogs group on LinkedIn now has 3600+ members and is growing every day; make sure you’ re not missing out and join today!
read more
Yesterday, an article by Brendan Read over at TMCnet really caught my attention because it captured the spirit of what I think about every single day. The article announces the introduction of an IT service management SaaS offering by FrontRange Solutions, a relatively well known mid-market applications company with 2007 revenues at $135 million (as per their company Wikipedia entry) and apps like HEAT and GoldMine in its application portfolio. Brendan Read starts off by accurately stating that “…successfully hosting…complex applications such as IT support tools is much more than installing software onto a server and connecting it to a network that is linked to clients and their users. It requires carefully architecting the solutions for the hosted environment.” Read’s introduction set the stage for how FrontRange did SaaS the right way.
Read hit the nail on the head. Throwing an app onto some servers, whether on-premises or in the Cloud on something like Amazon’s EC2, is not SaaS. I’ve written many times about what it means to truly offer a business offering in the Cloud, but this article captures a real world example of the effort required to move to SaaS.
Read goes on to highlight data volunteered by Michael McCloskey, FrontRange’s CEO that provides an interesting data point: FrontRange “…spent two years re-architecting from scratch a new platform for the SaaS environment” Two years! (Notice the emphasis – I clearly care about this number) I don’t know the hard dollar investments made by FrontRange, but one must imagine that their SaaS platform project had a good number of developers working on it, and that the investment was, with a high probability, in the seven figure category (probably a few developers and architects, as these projects go, with a fully loaded average cost of somewhere in the $90K to $150K range per year working for two years). So a proper product to SaaS transition is a combination of 24 months of SaaS specific effort, seven figures in hard dollar costs (probably), resulting opportunity costs, and ongoing R&D maintenance costs (someone needs to fix the SaaS specific bugs and evolve the platform) – Holy smokes!
I seem surprised, but I’m really not. I’ve been in the thick of this very scenario, and responded by channeling all my effort into Apprenda. Apprenda was built on the premise that a high end SaaS architecture and operating tool-set could be productized into an application server. We built SaaSGrid to do just that – productize a world class SaaS platform so that applications running on it could inherit and give a company a sustainable short and long term solution with tremendous ROI. SaaSGrid was kicked-off as a product knowing full well the costs of a real SaaS architecture with things like multi-tenancy, provisioning, billing etc.
The scenario highlighted in this FrontRange scenario is in fact very much like the ROI analysis we go through with prospects and customers. Someone like McCloskey, faced with a SaaS decision (regardless of whether its a new application or a migration) needs to compare those build figures to investing in technology that they can buy that solves these problems out of the box. Fundamentally, you start to ask yourself:
If you add up the hard dollar costs of the above questions, you start to realize that millions of dollars are required, and the soft dollar costs add many more millions. SaaS is a strategic advantage, but the cost of that advantage is whats in question. Clearly, I do not think that building is a sustainable or strategic overall approach – it’s expensive and distracting. Thats not to say a company can’t be successful (just ask Salesforce.com), but the probability of success goes down while risk goes up when you build. We’ve seen this before – most companies don’t go out and build relational database servers because its not their core competency. Instead they download or license an RDBMS. A SaaS stack is of the same complexity level and same level of orthogonality, so why build? Our goal with SaaSGrid was to let people focus all of their energy on their offering – the stuff that your customers care about – and not on SaaS. My bet is that Cloud build vs buy cases like this will one day define a Harvard Business Review case study or two;-)
How do you feel about this - does building make sense, or is the ROI not there? Do circumstances exist where building is warranted, and if so, what are they? What other costs can you think of that should be factored in the SaaS platform build vs. buy?
If you’d like to mingle with others in the SaaS space, the SaaSBlogs group on LinkedIn now has 3600+ members and is growing every day; make sure you’ re not missing out and join today!
read more
