Joe's Thoughts on Software Architecture

I will be doing a cloud-computing webcast on November 25.  The abstract and registration link are below.

November 25, 2009, 11:00am – 12:30pm PST

Title: Cloud-computing architecture – designing multi-tenant applications on Windows Azure.

Speaker:  Joseph Hofstader

Abstract: Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in information technology today.  With all the confusion surrounding acronyms ending in ‘aas’ like Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) it can be intimidating for even seasoned IT professionals.  This presentation will briefly discuss the different types of cloud platforms and then address one of the key business scenarios for the cloud: Software as a Service.

Software as a Service is a business model for making applications available over the Internet.  One of the key tenets of SaaS is multi-tenancy, or software designed to be used by multiple parties.  Designing SaaS applications touches on many of the technologies that comprise the Azure platform: Processing, Storage, Workflow, Database and most importantly security.   This presentation will discuss how each of technologies can be utilized to define a flexible architecture for multi-tenant solutions.

Event ID:  1032432981

Link to Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032432981&Culture=en-US

I will be on the Cloud Providers panel at the Harvard Business School Cybersymposium on Saturday, November 21. 

This panel will explore the benefits and obstacles of cloud computing as seen through the eyes of cloud providers. While many companies extol the scalability that cloud solutions offer, they often express concerns regarding lock-in, loss of control of underlying infrastructure, security, service-level agreements, and regulatory compliance.

Ribbit, a subsidiary of British Telecom, has been working with Microsoft on a project called Ribbit for Silverlight (R4SL).  R4SL is a set of drag/drop Silverlight controls that make it easy for Designers/Developers to create communications enabled applications and web sites.  The controls are complete and the launch is approaching quickly!

Please join us in San Francisco November 5, 2009 for an invitation only deep dive into Ribbit’s open telephony APIs — and a Sneak Peek at the unreleased Ribbit for Silverlight Controls.
Ribbit is excited to formally launch our RESTful API, and we’re looking for early adopters like you! 
Learn how you can enrich your applications with communications capabilities — and take productivity to a whole new level. 
Join us for a day of innovation and learning and an evening of coding and cocktails.
Ribbit + REST = Open Programmable Communications
Rebuilding the Ribbit Platform on top of a RESTful framework allows developers to interact with Ribbit at the server level, enabling new forms of application-to-person and application-to-application services.  REST treats users, devices, calls, messages, and other elements as resources with which developers can easily interact — and exposes Ribbit’s core communications services in a platform-agnostic format using simple and secure HTTP calls. 
Space is limited, Register by Oct. 23 - latest! http://developer.ribbit.com/blog/spawn/

Agenda
8:00  –  9:00  Registration and continental breakfast
9:00 – 10:00  Ribbit Platform Overview — New Features, Platform Roadmap & Pricing
10:00 – 11:00  Integrating Ribbit into Any Application, Workflow, Site or Online Campaign
11:00 – 11:30  New APIs and application showcase
11:30 – 12:00  Platform opportunities
12:00  -   1:00  Lunch
1:00 - 2:45 Afternoon Breakout Sessions

• Flash
• Java
• .NET
• PHP

3:00 – 4:45  Afternoon Breakout Sessions

• Building Client-and Server-Side Apps
• JavaScript
• Silverlight
• REST

5:00 - 9:00  Hands-On Coding with Ribbit’s API/Programming Language Experts

• Coding for Flash, Silverlight
• Coding for Java, JS, PHP, REST, .NET

We look forward to seeing you there!
If you cannot attend in person, please join us via webcast. Register at:  http://developer.ribbit.com/blog/spawn-webcast/

Ribbit is an open, cloud-based platform for communications innovation. By exposing our carrier-grade SmartSwitch™ though popular programming APIs, Ribbit enables the development of next generation “voiceware” applications, such as our white-labeled Ribbit for Salesforce® and Ribbit Mobile™ consumer offering.

SUPERCOMM 2009 is at McCormick Place in Chicago From October 21 to October 23 2009.  I will be presenting at the Building Broadband Business pre-show summit on October 20.   The title of my presentation is Programmable Communications -- The Network as a Platform and focuses on the economics of opening up the telecommunications networks for application developers.  For anybody who follows this blog, you know that this topic is growing in importance as companies move headlong into this space.

Over the last couple of weeks both the mainstream media and  industry-specific publications are raising the awareness of Communications as a Service. 

Back in April I did a presentation at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Telecom2009 conference entitled Watch, Click, Connect, Buy: How to Create Instant Customer Connections.  In the presentation I made the case that providing click to call as part of a web advertisement (in the form of a video) can be used to increase sales through a web site.  Last week the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled “Three Best Ways to Convert Web Traffic Into Sales,” the top two included features provided by CaaS platforms: (1) Click to call; (2) Chat with a customer.

Next month I will be giving a presentation at SUPERCOMM on how carriers can build a next-generation business by using their network as a platform for application development.  Yesterday Xchange Magazine published an article entitled: “Palm Envy: Traditional Services Just Won’t Cut It” that describes how: “…carriers are emulating what’s happening with mobility and the third-party application store model by giving developers and Internet companies … access to open APIs for their networks.”  In May I co-authored an article published in Dr. Dobbs Journal entitled Communications as a Service  that discusses programmable voice platforms and presents some scenarios in which CaaS can be applied for application developers.  This article reinforces what Xchange mentions, that communications features present a great value for web-based applications.

This is an exciting time in this industry and there will certainly be more interesting news in the near future.

This interview from the Internet Telephony Conference has been posted on TMCnet CaaS community site.  In this interview with Charles Studt, VP of Product Management and Marketing from IntelePeer, and me we discuss SaaS/CaaS and Cloud Computing and the platform that IntelePeer is building using Windows Live Services. 

Here is the Link to the video: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmc/videos/default.aspx?vid=609

Travis Brown and Gary Sidhu from Qwest Communications and I have written a whitepaper on the benefits of using the Visual Studio DSL toolkit for a software system that activates IP VPNs for a telecommunications network service provider.  The whitepaper makes use of the TMForum's Shared Information and Data (SID) model and the DSL is based on the RFC2547bis standard. 

This paper is available at this link on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd320274.aspx

Last month I sat on a SaaS panel during the Internet Telephony conference in Los Angeles.  The panel began with opening statements from the speakers, and much to my surprise the first speaker went into a diatribe on the notion of SaaS as a concept and architecture, how SaaS had no meaning, and how anybody who tried to define what SaaS was was fighting a "religious war."  The speaker kept hammering the point that a business shouldn't care about how to deliver products and only care about the product to be delivered.  He seemed to be alluding to the the seminal "IT Doesn't Matter" article by Nicholas G. Carr - an article that I've lectured about at the University of Denver and find to be one of the most misunderstood publications (maybe people should read it twice).

In the weeks since, I have given some thought toward the speaker's comments - the speaker is certainly not alone in his beliefs.  There are different roles in most corporate environments that allow people to focus on specific aspects of delivering a product and everybody doesn't need to understand how a product will be implemented.  That being said, I'm becoming more alarmed at the number of people who are adopting this attitude as the web is becoming the public portal for many businesses, or in the case of many web 2.0 businesses the business itself.

In an article entitled "Why How Matters" in Tuesday's New York Times, Thomas Friedman talks about the financial crisis and how indifference toward how things work helped get us into this mess...he mentions an attitude pervasive within finance companies that "you'll be gone and I'll be gone before the bill comes due."  This hit home with me, since this is effectively the attitude that many have about information technology. 

That being said, without understanding how technology works people can't  assess the total cost of ownership for the lifetime of a software solution, leaving them at a huge financial disadvantage.  

• A majority of the costs associated with  a software system occur after the initial release, yet most business people focus only on the cost of the initial deployment as opposed to caring about the support/maintenance and extendibility of the solution.  It is analogous to only considering a honeymoon without thinking about the marriage - let's face it there are people who you may want to vacation with in Hawaii with but not want to spend the rest of your life with.  Technical decisions must be made with an understanding that you may own the product for longer than you anticipated.
• All products are not created equal and some have additional features and capabilities that may make the product more useful beyond it's initial intent.  An example is business intelligence built into database systems - this can help business forecasting and improve productivity - this is only a concern once the system goes live.  This can be overlooked by people who don't understand the details of modern database technologies.
• Business leaders must also understand the number of successful deployments of a given technology and the number of developers with experience on that technology.  These can also add HUGE costs to the development and maintenance of the solution.

That being said, you may be wondering how I reacted to the other speaker.  I just gave my presentation and basically ignored the comments.  The audience had expectations of the content that was to be presented and even if I was boring them to death about something that (according to the other speaker) they shouldn't care about I committed to give a talk on SaaS architecture and that is what they got.  I wouldn't argue with a nihilist about the meaning of life and didn't argue with someone who vehemently questions the need for technical understanding about software architecture.

There was an interesting article on CNET News on September 12, 2008 describing a forum on cloud computing hosted by Google.  The article provides a series of quotes from members of the panel.

Notable comments from Mike Nelson, a visiting professor at Georgetown University's Center for Communication, Culture, and Technology and a former tech policy adviser under the Clinton administration:

• "Most users understand enough" to feel comfortable with cloud computing, Nelson said, "but they don't understand what can happen to that information. There's a definite need for education in that area."
• politicians needed to learn more about the implications of cloud computing as well
• "The government has an almost unlimited capacity to screw up things," Nelson said. "We've got some huge challenges ahead of us."

Notable comments from Ari Schwartz, vice president and chief operating officer for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said

• there should be enough protections and privacy options for consumers online that "we should get to a point where it doesn't make a difference" how much users understand about the privacy risks of cloud computing
• "Consumers expect their information (on the cloud) to be treated as if it were stored on a home computer," Schwartz said
• once a user moves his data online, he loses the Constitutional rights he would have had over the data on a home computer

I firmly agree in this assessment: consumers and policy makers both need to understand the implications of privacy in the world of cloud computing.  Privacy is a very important matter when it comes to cloud computing, especially in terms of data.  In the course I taught this Spring, I was SHOCKED at how naive the students were about privacy on the Internet and spent a class teaching them about how they lose all privacy once they're on line.

I also think that during this time that the cloud is becoming a dominant computing platform it is extremely important that consumers are aware of the privacy policies of the providers of their cloud services.  Ultimately it is the consumer who needs to understand where their data lives and the implications of that data falling into the wrong hands.  I firmly believe that the companies that implement policies that respect the privacy of their customers will win the largest amount of market share in this emerging platform.

Here is the link to the full article:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10040709-38.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

SOA Telecom Architect, an on-line publication focused on service oriented telecommunications software, published this press release on the panel that I will be part of discussing SaaS (and CaaS).  Also participating in this panel are representatives from Jamcracker and IntelePeer. 

For those less familiar with IntelePeer, this week they released their AppworX platform, which is an open CaaS platform that seamlessly delivers enhanced voice and multimedia features from within any Web or IP-based application to any phone or network-connected device.  This platform is accessible through REST based APIs that allow easy integration into software systems and business processes.

Here is the link to the SaaS overview press release: http://soatelecomarchitect.com/2008/09/09/jamcracker-to-present-saas-overview-at-2008-internet-telephony-conference.aspx

I will be on a SaaS panel at the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo in Los Angeles on 9/17/2008 (details below).  If you're attending the conference and interested in chatting about SaaS/CaaS/S+S/Design Patterns/.NET/Baseball/Bicycling/Jazz/or the upcoming ski season send me an e-mail and we can set a time to get together.

Software-As-A-Service: The Basics
(SAAS-01)

Wednesday - 09/17/08,  9:00-9:45am

You may remember the term “Application Service Provider” or “ASP.” You may frequently hear the terms “hosted” or “on-demand” thrown around. You may be dizzy with confusion as to what all these terms mean, how they are similar and how they are different. You’ve heard SaaS can save you money, but how? Is your organization suited for software-as-a-service delivery? If it can save you money, where, exactly, do those savings occur? Where does the return on investment lie? Did you know that SaaS solutions can be accounted for in a completely different way (as an operating expense rather than a capital expenditure)? What are the implications for your business? What are the benefits? Where do the pitfalls lie? After this session, you’ll be a pro at sorting out all the terms for this model of business, and you’ll know if and how it’s right for your company.       

My colleague Michael Scherotter, a User Experience aficionado, will be conducting a Silverlight and WPF workshop in NYC on 9/3/2008.  Foe more details on this workshop, please go to Michael's blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/synergist/archive/2008/08/27/silverlight-and-wpf-workshop-in-nyc-9-3-2008.aspx

I will be at NXTComm next week talking about Services Syndication for Communications as a Service (CaaS) solutions.  Services Syndication allows for the aggregation of CaaS services into a cohesive product offering and addresses many of the management aspects of a CaaS environment like provisioning and billing.  Please stop by the Microsoft booth to learn about this topic and discuss it with me.

My colleague Michael Scherotter and I had a couple of conversations about CaaS on Michael's Communicating show on MSDN's Channel 9.

The first show contains an overview of CaaS.  This show talks about: the evolution in telecommunications equipment from monolithic hardware and software solutions to applications implementing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) on commodity hardware; trends in networking that support CaaS; and the other tenets of CaaS, like multi-tenant software.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Communicating/Communications-as-a-Service-CaaS/

The second show covers the conceptual architecture of CaaS - which is a layered architecture that create a strict separation of concerns between parts of the solution.  This seperation of concerns supports a flexible architecture that is essential to the successful deployment of a CaaS application. 

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Communicating/CaaS-Conceptual-Architecture/

I plan on increasing my writing and creating videos on CaaS.  Future topics will include: CaaS and Services Syndication; the infrastructure required to deliver CaaS applications; lessons learned from a CaaS project; and Managing a CaaS environment.

It's been over a week since The Architecture Journal published it's latest issue and my article "We Don't Need No Architects."  The intent of this article was to present some of the common perceptions of architects in the IT community and look at the skills possessed by effective architects.

As could be assumed in any article about architects in IT, the feedback on this article has conjured up some raw emotions - which is honestly appreciate.  I enjoy candid feedback and appreciate the respectful, and sometimes humorous opinions.

The first blog written on the article, even before I knew the journal was posted, was We Don't Need No Architects--Really!.  This rebuttal to my article helps illustrate the raw emotions conjured up by the title architect.  The blog expressed disappointed my article didn't renounce the entire profession of architecture in IT and felt that the skill set that I presented was more applicable to developers.  The blog concludes with an explanation on how the title architect should be eliminated from IT in order to remove the confusion caused by the title.

Other feedback I have received :

The article you wrote on the Architect Journal was very helpful and made me feel proud about my job.  An Architect is assumed to be a a) Another name for sr. developer b) Technical guru who is supposed to know everything c) Or does nothing other than throw in Jargons.  You article threw light into it. Thanks!.

and

We fully agree with your definition of the architect where we came to as well with exception of the patterns part (we do apply this, but it is so obvious one tends to forget to put this in the job description). - I responded to this reader saying that his organization is fortunate to have so many resources versed in patterns.

Finally, my favorite feedback was from a blog that simply describes architects as "over forty and over confident."

Thanks for the feedback!  Select this Link to join a discussion on the role of an archtiect.