The Cure for the Common Cloud

Apr 20, 2011 by

Let’s face it.  There’s a lot of hype around “the cloud.” Lots of promises, lots of claims, lots of vendors, and lots of lackluster results.  All the while, software engineers and architects are getting sick of it.

If you’re a software engineer or architect, what does the cloud do for you? It’s elastic and infinitely scalable, so you just put your app up there and everything magically works, right? The cloud solves all of your scalability challenges, all of your app delivery challenges, and it just plain works, right?

Wrong. You’re the one responsible for building the software that the cloud exists to host and deliver, and you know full well that there’s a lot more to it than that.

What about onboarding new customers or business units to your app?  The individual end-users – how do they get access, and to what are they entitled?  What about charging for different features, or different transactions?  What about managing the application lifecycle, and rolling out updates?  What about the underlying architecture to make use of the cloud in an intelligent way?  To actually take advantage of the raw compute power at your disposal, and not just use the cloud like it’s the late 90′s again and people are throwing their apps online like it’s going out of style.

These are the types of things that software engineers and architects are thinking about.

Haven’t we been through this before?


There are many significant engineering challenges associated with building and delivering applications today.  This is very similar to when we first started developing applications for the desktop PC.  Back then, everyone wrote code to manage memory, to interface with specific hardware, etc.  Then the desktop OS came along, and made all of that complex and time consuming (but CRITICAL) work a thing of the past.

While the challenges themselves were different, they were still challenges that were specific to the delivery method, rather than challenges associated with building the actual software functionality.  Those challenges will always be there, because the passion to innovate and develop applications that help facilitate better business performance, and meet the needs of end users is what drives great engineers/organizations.  HOWEVER, the challenges associated with the delivery method/paradigm go away in time, as layers of abstraction come about to solve those problems for us.

The “Cure for the Common Cloud” is Here


Now let’s get back to today.  Shouldn’t we expect that all of these challenges associated with building and delivering next generation software applications in this new cloud era will become a thing of the past?  Won’t we be able to focus on building great software again, and not worry about all of the complexities of the delivery method?  Someday?  Maybe?

Yes.  We can today!

A large and increasing number of organizations and developers have discovered the “Cure for the Common Cloud“.  They’ve found the abstraction layer that handles all of the complex engineering challenges associated with building and delivery applications today, and truly leveraging private or public cloud infrastructure in an intelligent way.  They’ve found the one technology that decouples apps from infrastructure, developers from IT/Operations, and business execution from IT implementation.

The Cure for the Common Cloud is here.  Do you have it?


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Transparency In The Cloud, Part I: The End-User Transformation

Apr 6, 2011 by

In case you didn’t know, the days of business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service are upon us.  If you’re a software developer and you haven’t begun planning a SaaS offering, stop reading this article right now, go gather your team and get started.  Seriously, you’re already late.

Ok, now that they’re gone, this article is for the rest of us: the B2B software end-users.

I have it on good authority, that in the next couple of years most of us are going to throw away our piles of compact discs and DVDs and replace them with bandwidth.  We’re going to say goodbye to license fees and free-up some square footage by dismantling our servers.  We’re then going to embrace the technologies that give us access to always-on, internet-based services which we will access from our new server-rooms-turned-corner-offices.  The benefits are manifold:  accessing software typically costs less than owning it, online services are accessible from any location and on a plethora of devices, and we don’t have to worry about things like hard drive failures when our documents aren’t actually stored on our hard drives.

The unfortunate side-effect of our herd-like flocking to internet-based services is that, by forfeiting our ownership of the servers and software that fuel our businesses, we put our destinies in the hands of software companies that, put simply, are software companies.  They’ve spent many years honing algorithms and interfaces that made us want their software in the first place but unfortunately, those years were not spent learning how to offer that software, as a service.  After all, we bought the servers, we provided the power, often times we even installed the software ourselves. Believe it or not, sometimes we’re better at running software than the vendors who sold it to us.

Fortunately, some software companies are comprised of incredibly smart people who do amazing and innovative things. They also have amazing tools available to them to supplement what they lack in experience. I have every bit of faith (*cough* SaaSGrid) that with some hard work (*sniffle* SaaSGrid), and a bit of help (*yelling* SaaSGrid), our trusted software vendors will seamlessly make the transition from shrink-wrappers to world-class service providers, without us noticing as much as a blip on our B2B, software-consuming, radars.

As end-users, we have an obligation to ensure this whole thing goes smoothly. We need to hold our service providers accountable.  One way to do that is by relentlessly asking questions. Interestingly, no one is more qualified than us to ask the appropriate questions, because we’re the ones who’ve been running software on-premises for 20-years. We know the scenarios and situations to avoid, and most of these scenarios translate into very good questions that each and every service provider should be able to answer in a way that not only gives you the warm and fuzzies but also makes technical sense.  Remember, we’re banking our businesses on these companies’ ability to learn how to provide software-as-a-service. I’d at least like to know that they have a plan.

In part two of the Transparency In The Cloud series, we’ll start a list of questions that you should ask each and every SaaS vendor you approach.  The questions are designed to help us guide the B2B SaaS transformation by making us all knowledgeable and empowered SaaS end-users.

Stay tuned!

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Webinar: Accelerating The Road To SaaS

Mar 22, 2011 by

Webinar announcement: Accelerating The Road To SaaS – 5 Ways To Get To Market Before Your Competitors

For SaaSBlogs readers who are interested, we are holding a joint webinar tomorrow (Wednesday 3/23 at 11:00 EDT) that will cover 5 key lessons critical to the speed of transitioning to a SaaS delivery model.  The webinar is co-hosted by our partner Tenzing, a leading IaaS provider for ISVs.

If you are interested, you can register here:  https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/897150934

Event Details:
Date: Wednesday 3/23
Time: 11:00 EDT
Location: online
Registration: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/89715093

Overview:
Whether your company is a SaaS start up or employs a more traditional on-premise software model, you need to find ways to accelerate and streamline your SaaS application development. The fact is software as a service is exploding; IDC estimating that by 2014, 85 percent of new software companies will be offering their product through a SaaS delivery mechanism.

This webinar explores how Apprenda’s SaaSGrid Application Delivery Fabric combined with Tenzing’s Cloud infrastructure delivers a true end-to-end SaaS delivery platform to enable ISVs to bring their SaaS offerings to market faster with the lowest ongoing cost of service delivery. Why reinvent the wheel when making the move to SaaS? If you are to survive and thrive you need to leverage best of breed technology that will get you into market faster and with the right capabilities to unlock the efficiencies of scale needed for long term success.

Join Will Childs, SaaS Practice Director at Tenzing, and Devon Watson, Director of Business Development at Apprenda, as they discuss their partnership and resulting platform that enables software vendors to dramatically accelerate SaaS delivery while reducing development cost and complexity.

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Throwing Around the Term “Multi-tenancy” Isn’t Helpful: Advice to App Developers in the Cloud

Mar 14, 2011 by

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:

  1. The marketing pitch offered up by vendors and how those marketing sound-bites are contexualized
  2. The general overloading of the term “multi-tenant”

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:

  1. Infrastructure: This is multi-tenancy the way someone like Amazon might refer to multi-tenancy on EC2. In the IaaS context, multi-tenancy means that multiple OS instances can run on the same physical hardware through hypervisor technology.
  2. Platform: PaaS multi-tenancy means that, like a Heroku or a CloudBees, the platform can isolate code from different apps/vendors on the same OS instance (usually by commingling processes and databases on OS instances). This removes the need to allocate a whole VM per application stack component, improving efficiency.
  3. Application: SaaS multi-tenancy, at least at the highest level of isolation, means that single runtime stack component instances are shared across multiple customers. For example, a single database might commingle data rows for thousands of customers while preserving isolation and performance.

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:

  1. When you say ‘multi-tenant’, what do you mean?
  2. If multi-tenancy is a feature of your IaaS/PaaS, does that mean my app automatically becomes multi-tenant and I get to reap efficiencies from it?
  3. If I want my app to be multi-tenant on your IaaS/PaaS, will I have to still architect the app to be multi-tenant?

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?

Before co-founding Apprenda, Sinclair held positions at Morgan Stanley, Eden Communications, and the State University of New York (SUNY). Sinclair holds a dual Bachelor of Science in Computer Science & Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude. Sinclair excels in understanding the economics of SaaS platforms and ecosystems, and is a frequent speaker and panelist at industry events

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2011 Predictions for Cloud, SaaS, Multi-Tenancy and More!

Jan 10, 2011 by

OK, it’s already 2011 and I’m a bit late on providing some predictions for 2011 – but now is better than never! I sat down and thought about events in 2010 and whether those events have created a meaningful disruption with near term potential to affect 2011 outcomes, and this is what I came up with. Some of it is based on intuition, some on knowledge, and some experiences I’ve had at Apprenda in working with customers, prospects, and others in the industry. This is more of a mental exercise in subjective extrapolation rather than “prediction”, so don’t hold me to these;-)

1)Adoption of SaaS by ISVs will pick up more steam in 2011

a.Overall, an overwhelming majority of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) deliver their software via the on-premises “packaged software” model. Consumption of software as a service (SaaS) offerings continues to grow at an amazing pace, but most of the demand has been satisfied by a couple of hundred companies that have surfaced in the past 10 years as wild success stories, such as Salesforce.com. As a result, I expect that on-premises player will continue to take notice and make the switch.

b.Competitive pressures within major verticals are becoming more and more real due to successful SaaS entrants, which will drive adoption of SaaS delivery as a market response. Existing software ISVs will start respond by moving part of their product lines to SaaS, or by choosing to offer down-market offerings as an initial experiment.

c.Counter to the perspective of many experts, packaged software ISVs will find strategies that work in their transition to SaaS. Transitional “poster-children” of each vertical will give confidence to other ISVs in the market that the transition can be made successfully.

d.Continued adoption of new technologies such as platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud application servers will bridge technical gaps that will ease the overall transition burden, fueling adoption of SaaS by more and more ISVs. I do not think SaaS is the nail in the coffin for existing ISVs, particularly with technologies like SaaSGrid in the mix which flatten the technical curve for both new application development as well as migrations.

e.Continued explosion of mobile usage creates further pressure (and significant opportunity) for companies to move to a SaaS delivery model. Most business applications that have a mobile angle typically need back-end systems to reconcile the data into primary applications, and SaaS is the only architecture that makes this feasible at scale across many customers.

2) The Upstack Scramble Intensifies

a.Big players continue to make big moves to seize the opportunity to control the new software battle ground in the cloud. Traditional platform vendors will realize that the application development and architecture tiers are huge opportunities, and that infrastructure virtualization and infrastructure tier technologies are not the competitive landscape of the future. Deals like the Heroku and Makara acquisitions make a lot of sense for players like Salesforce.com and Red Hat, respectively.

b.2011 and 2012 will be a make or break years for these big players, and the moves they make over the next 12 to 24 months will ultimately determine the next decade of control and leadership.

c.Commodity players, or players that have become commodity, seek to buy value up-stack through acquisitions.

3) Real Traction with Private Cloud/Internal Utility Computing and SaaS delivery

a.Mistakes and failures experienced in 2010 will be the lessons learned to drive the real solutions and seed private cloud and private PaaS adoption over the next 12 – 36 months.

b.Organizations want a unified and scalable platform for software delivery, and the vision of private cloud will begin to include technologies that sit above the virtual tier to give significant architecture and services value to internal development assets. A paradigm shift in how software developed internally for business units will kick off.

b. Enterprise projects will continue to explore leveraging Cloud architectures such as multi-tenancy for internal use. The cost savings and agility potential presents enormous savings profiles that push their way into enterprise development shops.

4) Cloud Washing Reaches Critical Mass and Collapses by EOY 2011

a.After attempting to cloud wash offerings, a number of small and mid-market ISVs will close shop due to competitive pressures and no real tactical response. This will help identify cloud washing as a poor strategy and that only real, measurable attempts to convert a SaaS model will lead to success.

b.Forces vendors to articulate how their strategies and solutions that is unique and truly “cloud.” Continued success of pure-cloud/SaaS plays will evidence that cloud washing adds no value.

5) Force.com Starts to Realize Momentum Potential

a.Force.com/Apex’s stuttered start begins to gain true rhythm now that Salesforce.com has diversified its cloud to be competitive outside of its proprietary track, particularly in Ruby and Java arenas due to Heroku and VMForce.

b.Force.com will continue to show strong among those extending Salesforce.com’s CRM functionality and potentially within the enterprise where it can be used to displace situational “spreadsheet” applications.

6) Cloud Middleware Provides Democratized Access to Complex Software Architectures

a.General development/programming skills declining, coupled with a continued increase in architecture complexity creates a gapping void that new middleware needs to fill

b.Just like the years when desktop OS’ spurred innovation by enabling companies to focus on their software and not the underlying complexities associated with its delivery – new solutions will fill the gap and catalyze a similar era of innovation once again.

c.Middleware solutions like SaaSGrid will drive multi-tenancy as a defacto standard since the primary concern of difficulty and cost to implement is trivialized.

7) QE[pick your number] won’t be a panacea for the economy – but SaaS and Cloud will help

a.Economic factors will continue to put pressure on operating budgets. Companies will be looking to do more with less; that is, they’ll want to boost efficiency while slashing budgets in order to survive in the modern economic climate. Due to size, IT budgets will be scrutinized and IT managers will be challenged to come up with solutions.

b.SaaS will be seen as a means of democratized access to solutions that drastically improve efficiencies while driving down the cost of IT. Infrastructure as a service will be leveraged to reduce the operating burden associated with in-house infrastructure.

c.Doing more with less, optimizing business performance – SaaS based B2B solutions will grow significantly in 2011 as a result.

I’d love to get everyone’s thoughts. Agree/disagree? Why? Did I miss something or does this seem to cover the right surface area?

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!

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