As I have written previously, convergence is a major theme in distributed computing. Darryl Taft (eWeek) recently wrote an article on the topic which was followed up by an article by Loraine Lawson (IT Business Edge). At Tech Ed, I did a quick video to talk about convergence and what it will mean for distributed computing and the role Modeling will play moving forward. Here’s a snip from my previous posting, if it’s interesting, check out the video.
Looking into the future, we see a perfect storm of productivity and application richness brewing. Specifically, SOA, SaaS, Application Virtualization and Modeling will collide and spark a wave of application creation that we haven’t seen since Al Gore invented the Internet. Let me paint you a picture - developers will compose business critical applications from services they didn’t author, run them in datacenters they don’t own, manage them at a policy level, and pay for them by the drink.
Drum roll please….for those of you are as interested in the advent of cloud services, this is big. Today, we released BizTalk Services “R12” Community Technology Preview (CTP). Just as a refresher: “BizTalk Services” is the code-name for an incubation for our SOA platform-in-the-cloud offering from Microsoft. BizTalk Services provides Messaging, Identity and Workflow (our latest addition) enabling developers to extend existing premises applications and build new composite applications. See my previous post for additional information.
While the BizTalk Services “R12” CTP includes a variety of updates, the piece that stand out is the release of the anticipated Workflow capabilities. The new cloud-based Workflow capabilities enable ‘service orchestration’ from the cloud. This functionality is based on the Windows Workflow Foundation (.NET Framework component) and can orchestrate services that connect to systems in your enterprise, or to systems running anywhere on the Internet via Web services messages. Using this service, you can define the interaction of any web-addressable services.
In addition to the Workflow functionality, the BizTalk Services Identity Service has been expanded and enhanced to enable more flexibility for scenarios demanded by our customers. R12 introduces a new approach for creating, viewing, and managing access control rules.
The new BizTalk Services “R12” CTP is online and available now for your use and the SDK is available at http://labs.biztalk.net. Whether or not you currently have an account, now’s the time to try it!
This week I returned to my home state of Texas to attend the Worldwide Partner Conference. Returning to my home state didn’t get me back to speaking in my southern-drawl, but it did get me speaking with partners about something we are both excited about. The news may not be as big as the state of Texas (but what is?); however, the BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0 is far from a Rhode Island sized announcement.
So what is it? The BizTalk Adapter Pack is a separate SKU from the rest of the BizTalk Server family of products. It continues to simplify the ways that customers and partners can connect to line-of-business systems (LOBs). Generally speaking, when developers want to build an application that draws information from an LOB, they use a message broker technology with an application adapter or they write directly to the LOB APIs. Neither is particularly productive especially in simple scenarios. The BizTalk Adapter pack changes this by giving developers simple technology to connect directly to the LOB system without using a heavy mid-tier server.
What’s new in V2? Specifically in the V2, we are delivering new adapters for the Oracle E-Business Suite and SQL Server. This builds on existing functionality from first version, which RTM’d a few months ago, and includes adapters for SAP R/3, Siebel and Oracle DBMS. A key value for partners is the WCF LOB Adapter SDK (available as a free download from MSDN) on which Microsoft has built the Adapter Pack. The SDK enables a platform that makes Adapter development much easier by providing support for key capabilities (like Metadata browse & search and connection pooling) out of the box.
Overall, the BizTalk Adapter Pack is another demonstration of Microsoft’s long term commitment to interoperability. Customers choose how they want to connect application platforms and people, and we provide them with the tools.
June has been an active month for the Business Process Alliance. In a recent post, I shared some thoughts on how several cutting edge technologies—SOA, modeling, SaaS and virtualization—are beginning to converge. Recent product announcements show that it’s already beginning to happen. That said, you’re probably asking, ‘why do I care again?’ The short answer… we’re watching business and IT slowly move toward the right levels of alignment for the last decade, and many have cited SOA & Business Process technologies as vehicles.
At the Process World event in Berlin, IDS Scheer announced the release of ARIS for BizTalk, which generates BizTalk applications from process models. They will release a second product in the near future which allows data from BizTalk to be exposed in their process monitoring software. In other words, you can now model a process in ARIS SOA Architect, take the process represented in either BPEL or BPMN code from the SOA Architect product and convert it directly into a BizTalk application using ARIS for Microsoft BizTalk. This is a great demonstration of design and runtime technologies working together thru standards. The second, as yet to be named product also announced at Process World will enable a full cycle process modeling and execution experience by extracting data from the BizTalk BAM database and presenting it in the ARIS PPM dashboard.
The combination of these two products will allow users to model a process, generate an executable application, run the application and monitor the resulting application performance so that adjustments can be made to the model with the intent of optimizing performance. This release is the result of over a year of work by a joint MS and IDS Scheer team to realize the goal of end-to-end support of process model execution. We think this represents a huge step forward for developers, and look forward to continuing work with the BPA on Oslo—this is just the beginning!
A couple other key announcements: on the 3rd of June, K2 announced their new BlackPoint product, a derivative of BlackPearl. Aimed at providing a low cost way of building workflow applications in MOSS with an Office-style designer, the innovations in BlackPearl make it friendly to non-technical users. Later on June 10th, SOA Software announced that they had certified their SOA governance solution to work with WCF allowing .Net applications to act as fully governed peer in heterogeneous SOA environments the might include other vendor’s products.
The BPA members just continue to create exciting new products and making it easier to build great SOA & BPM solutions with Microsoft technology!
For those that missed it and those hungry to see it again - check out this video from TechEd IT Pro last week in Orlando. Greg Leake demo’d his .NET StockTrader 2.0 during Bob Muglia’s keynote with industry partner, WS02, highlighting our commitment to interoperability.
.NET StockTrader 2.0 demo at TechEd IT Pro 2008
What a week! TechEd is always one of my favorite shows. Not just for learning, but also for the connection to developers- the heart that keeps the blood pumping. Just wanted to do a quick post to wrap up the show this week and a brief glance toward this week’s activities.
For me, one of the most exciting things this week was providing additional insight into Oslo. In Gates’ Tuesday keynote he highlighted (excerpt here) our investments in a new modeling platform, which will help take model-driven programming mainstream. He talked about a world in which models describe bits and pieces of the application design to a world where models are connected across the end to end lifecycle and where they are the application. You heard Bill correctly- we will deliver a CTP of Oslo technologies at PDC this year, as mentioned at the SOA & BP conference last year. Stay tuned for the PDC!
I’m particularly passionate about this subject, so let me take a minute and dive into this a bit deeper. Over the last several years, the world has become increasingly model-driven. As referenced in the press release, Oslo delivers core technologies and tools to help manage the model-driven world. This platform will help further inspire collaboration between all the necessary roles of the application lifecycle, as well as enable applications to be more easily managed, deployed, and evolved. Oslo will add new advancements within the areas of visual modeling and composition tools, a foundational repository for managing application metadata, and a new, declarative modeling language to enable interoperability of models between tools and domain specific modeling notations.
Separate, but related to Oslo… I have really been thinking about the convergence of model-driven programming with other important trends including Saas, SOA and ‘cloud’ virtualization. See my post from yesterday for additional context. There will be a video on the topic published later this week.
This week at TechEd IT Pro, Greg Leake will be doing a demo of his .NET StockTrader 2.0 sample application (see my earlier post) during Bob Muglia’s keynote. Greg will be showcasing the interoperable capabilities of Windows Communication Foundation and will also be joined with partner, WS02, on stage who also worked with Greg on making the app interoperable on the Apache platform. OH by the way….did I mention the .NET StockTrader 2.0 and Configuration Services 2.0 download is now available? Congrats Greg- really impressive work. Also, there be an Interop panel next Tuesday, June 10 at 2-3 pm ET with WS02, Sun and TIBCO to discuss how interoperability is important today and the role it plays for customers in the future.
Last year at TechEd we talked about deploying technologies in a blended way – both on premises and in the cloud. We also talked about a framework for thinking about which applications might benefit the most from the blended world. Specifically, applications can be grouped in two buckets – core and commodity. Core – things that make your business really unique. Commodity – things that are important, but not secret sauce – think Expense Reporting. Those who started the journey a year ago are starting to see real benefits.
Here we are at TechEd a year later with some new trends on the horizon – this time, it’s the convergence of technologies that has us really excited. There are four distinct major technology trends which are beginning to converge. Looking into the future, we see a perfect storm of productivity and application richness brewing. Specifically, SOA, SaaS, Application Virtualization and Modeling will collide and spark a wave of application creation that we haven’t seen since Al Gore invented the Internet. Let me paint you a picture - developers will compose business critical applications from services they didn’t author, run them in datacenters they don’t own, manage them at a policy level, and pay for them by the drink.
Let’s take a look at these four trends. Today, developers build services and expose them across the firewall, which looks a lot like SaaS. Modeling technologies are being used to aggregate services into composite apps. Cloud based, Application virtualization will allow developers to think about their infrastructure in logical terms rather than physical – imagine datacenter as you go. No more worrying about building something and having too much or too little. You eliminate the Three Bears problem, not too hot, not too cold – but just right.
Microsoft architecting for convergence. When it comes to building apps that will live in the cloud, we know developers will want to harness their existing skills, leverage their existing apps and connect to existing third party apps. Today we have sevarla active incubations running – BizTalk Services, SSDS and Live Mesh to name a few. We’ll say a lot more about our plans for the cloud at the PDC in October.
I have two things to be excited about today. First, we’ve finally had some sunny spring days in Seattle (which means I had plenty of dry time outside this week). Second, there’s more great news about our B2B technology. Today, we’re announcing another important update for our customers—we’ve come to an agreement with our partner Covast to acquire advanced B2B capabilities. This will be availableas part of the Software Assurance benefits. Timing has not yet been finalized, but customers who purchase BizTalk Server 2006 R3 with SA will have access to this new B2B capability (for context on BizTalk Server 2006 R3, see my previous post).
Why is this important? It builds on the most recent B2B improvements in BizTalk Server. Some highlights include:
· New standards for specific retail segments such as warehousing, grocery, energy, automotive and air freight
· B2B metadata management for EDI ‘super’ interchanges, deeper integration with SQL Server repository/Visual Studio (EDI Explorer) and new reporting capabilities
· Advanced B2B transports include new file adapters and transports and VAN connectivity
· B2B operations monitor that enables role-based viewing, end-to-end tracking/tracing and automatic archiving
For our ISV partners, this increases the breath of B2B solutions that partners can build on top of BizTalk Server. They can now take advantage of both industry-specific protocols in their own vertical solutions as well as advanced B2B scenarios for their customers. Over the past year, this has been a specific customer request and adds the growing set of capabilities BizTalk Server brings to businesses. This will make it easier to address the individual needs of a broad set of customers. As an example, auto component makers need info about parts, sales, customers, employees and branch offices to store, track and use to execute transactions. Meanwhile the grocery store down the street needs unique templates, workflows, rules, etc that save development time and work automatically. These new capabilities will help both of them.
We have had a lot of great news about the BizTalk family recently (BizTalk RFID Mobile, BizTalk Server 2006 R3, etc.). I can’t promise that we will have big updates like this on a weekly basis but it gives you a sense for the investments we are making to continue to improve technologies on which customers heavily rely.
For those that have managed to avoid the pitfall of SOA for SOA’s sake, composite applications are one of the biggest driving forces behind deployments. The reason for service enablement in the first place is so that you can compose them into new applications more easily and richly. As a byproduct, you tend to get more abstraction, and therefore control, over the application logic. Yet, there are some dirty-little secrets about composite apps – compared with your old-fashioned “monolithic app” they introduce some new challenges:
1. Composite apps are more complex for IT to deploy, manage and evolve. The fact that pieces of the composite app may be distributed across servers, platforms and possibly organizational boundaries creates a need for more sophisticated management solutions than exist today.
2. Composite apps present new challenges around scalability, performance and reliability. With classic monolith apps there are tried-and-true strategies for optimizing apps to scale in demanding environments. But how can you predict the way that a composite app will perform, when the underlying services may have been built for much different levels of scale? How can you make a composite app resilient to failure, so that if one service stops working it doesn’t bring the whole app down?
3. Composite apps often require much greater cross-vendor interoperability. The benefits of reusing services for new apps can’t be limited to services you’ve created on a single vendor platform, since most enterprises live in a fundamentally heterogeneous world. Therefore composite apps need to be able to easily interop across.NET, Java and legacy mainframe environments.
Despite what some vendors might tell you (which tend to be driven by their monetization goals), solutions to the above problems are challenging. Customers often avoid these issues with initial SOA deployments, but as they start to pursue enterprise-wide initiatives and develop numerous new composite apps these challenges become more apparent.
However, there are existing architectural patterns for addressing these concerns. Think about how the world’s largest distributed, service-oriented application - the Internet - addresses the above challenges. Every second of the day the Internet gains more scale and power as new nodes are added to the fabric of the internet. All nodes on the Internet are virtualized – I don’t need to know machine addresses, or know how many boxes any website is running on. You can dynamically add new computing resources without having to take down the Internet, and if any failure occurs the Internet is resilient enough to route traffic around individual points of failure. The Internet is also fundamentally interoperable – you can add computing nodes of any vendor platform as long as you adhere to standards-based protocols.
I’ll apply these characteristics of the Internet to the world of SOA, and describe something that I’ll call a distributed “Service Network”. The Service Network should be able to automatically detect when you’ve added new computing nodes to the network and take advantage of scaling out with greater power (without requiring complex setup or configuration – it should auto-detect that more resources are available for use). A Service Network should allow you to add new services without having to worry about physically deploying bits on servers or taking down machines – it should dynamically be “virtualized” against the underlying physical resources. The Service Network should also let you mix/match services across vendors, as long as you stick to open standards. And most importantly, the Service Network should keep the composite application from knowing about failure of hardware, automatically redirecting access to new services somewhere on the network without the app ever skipping a beat.
Last week I wrote about how Greg Leake was going on tour to talk about his latest work on both StockTrader and the new Configuration Service. Greg’s configuration service is one of the first examples of a general purpose Service Network built using .NET managed code. These code libraries can be leveraged as part of your SOA projects to develop new composite application that mix/match services across both .NET and Java. And you can take advantage of the Config Service with your existing services and apps, requiring only 20 lines of code to reap all of the advantages of the Service Network concept.
For more on this, check out a recent article by Redmond Magazine that describes how Greg’s efforts are helping shape the future of SOA and composite applications. We’ll be using the feedback we get from this initial work to drive requirements and patterns into our on-going product development efforts.
And remember, if a vendor tells you that you have to open a PO to “do SOA” and the money isn’t for training, start asking hard questions.
Over the past few months we’ve seen an incredible wave of new platform products and technologies including Windows Server 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. You may remember that in the past BizTalk Server has updated features to support the most recent platform releases. With BizTalk Server 2006 once the RTM versions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 were released, we did final testing and sent a new version of BizTalk Server out the door.
Based on feedback from customers and partners, we are planning to do the same thing this time around to follow closely on the heels of this latest platform wave. Once SQL Server 2008 (the final of the three to be released) becomes generally available, we will follow with an updated version of BizTalk Server designed for the latest versions of Windows Server, the .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and SQL Server. This will mean that BizTalk Server customers will continue to take full advantage of the platform’s latest improvements including: scalability for mission-critical workloads, improved support for next-generation web and service oriented applications, improved virtualization support and better business insight through Office.
We are also taking the opportunity as part of this BizTalk Server release to deliver additional customer-requested capabilities for our core SOA infrastructure. We will give more updates on specific features in the coming months, but at a high level we are planning some new investments in the release that includes:
- New web service registry capabilities with support for UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) version 3.0
- Enhanced service enablement of applications (through new and enhanced adapters for LOB applications, databases, and legacy/host systems)
- Enhanced service enablement of “edge” devices through BizTalk RFID Mobile
- Enhanced interoperability and connectivity support for B2B protocols (like SWIFT, EDI, etc)
- SOA patterns and best practices guidance to assist our customer’s implementations
To ensure existing BTS applications continue to run without changes, we are taking an incremental approach and limiting the changes to the items listed above. Because this release build on existing bits, the name of this release will be BizTalk Server 2006 R3. Refreshing the bits (instead of applying a large Service Pack) provides for the best update experience. You should expect to see a CTP of BizTalk Server 2006 R3 later this year (with an RTM planned in H1 CY09).
Stay tuned for an update in the coming weeks! See you @ TechEd.
This is a question I find myself asking my colleagues often. And they typically reply with something like, “Who's Greg?” or "Greg in accounting??". Not quite what I was getting at…
Greg Leake is a guy who works for me in the Connected Systems Division. He spends most of his time in a self-created, self-run .Net Framework testing lab; and by most of this time, I literally mean most of the hours that he is not sleeping, and some of those too. During the hours of 9am to 2 am, you can typically find him working away in his lab. Greg’s very passionate about helping developers, and he’s had significant successes with his projects--Interesting enough that I recently looked into his bloodshot, over caffeinated eyes and told him to pack up his servers and hit the road to tell more people.
This week and next, Greg will be presenting the .NET StockTrader 2.0, including a new Configuration Service, to .NET community user groups in San Francisco, Boston and NYC—check here for more info. We’re also posting the updates online for everyone to play with and give feedback on—we hope that you’ll write to Greg on his blog or in the forum about what’s working and what isn’t.
So check out Greg’s blog for good stories from the tour, updates to the code and more. Oh, and if you’re interested in how many cups of coffee Greg drinks in a day…the Twitter section is especially interesting.
Today at the RFID Journal Live conference in Las Vegas, we announced Microsoft BizTalk RFID Mobile -a light weight application that works on mobile RFID devices, and will enable delivery of relevant information from these devices to central business process systems. We'll deliver this to our customers at the end of the calendar year, 2008. We have a private beta running today.
When we look at the RFID market, it's truly an example of a technology that's ‘come of age'. Just a couple years back, RFID tags and mobile readers were too expensive to purchase and implement, making reasonable ROI out of reach for most customers. Today, tags cost just pennies, and mobile readers work well with central business process management systems, empowering people to make on-the-spot business decisions that can truly impact the bottom line. At the same time, this important information gets communicated back to the guys in the office to monitor trends and make adjustments-it's the type of capability most businesspeople have dreamed of-until now.
And none of this would have been possible without the ecosystem-partners across the industry have worked together to come up with standards, and to integrate mobile hardware with central infrastructure, tags and software alike. We're seeing results from this effort, and Microsoft is particularly happy to be working with several of our hardware partners on BizTalk RFID Mobile integration. Here's what a few of them had to say:
"BizTalk RFID Mobile represents an exciting opportunity for Motorola to build on our track record of delivering innovative products to meet customer needs," said Joe White, vp RFID business development, Motorola Enterprise Mobility. "Motorola is actively partnering with Microsoft so that our customers will be able to reliably and seamlessly run applications on BizTalk RFID Mobile."
"As a committed leader in the application of mobile RFID, we believe that Microsoft's BizTalk RFID Mobile will help accelerate the adoption of RFID by easing integration," said Intermec Director of RFID Business Strategy, Chris Kelley. "With the release of the Microsoft BizTalk RFID Mobile, Microsoft partners will have a unified interface to all Intermec mobile and fixed readers, as well as our RFID-enabled printers."
"We're committed to working with Microsoft towards the integration of our rugged mobile computing devices with Microsoft's innovative BizTalk RFID Mobile platform. Compatibility with Microsoft's BizTalk RFID platform will offer our customers an unprecedented ability to leverage RFID applications throughout their enterprise" said Aneline Ghita, RFID Project Manager, Global Solutions Group, Psion Teklogix.
"Samsung is excited to support BizTalk RFID Mobile and see this innovative product drive a evolution in the RFID market," said Chungkoo Yoon, Vice President Samsung.
"Visibility of edge process is critical business decision, we are glad to announce that unitech readers now support BizTalk Mobile. Microsoft is once again making it simple and easy to create solutions to empower the mobile worker to act on real world visibility. Together with Microsoft BizTalk & Unitech, the industry now has a best-of-breed platform to build and deploy these real time solutions. And as a core partner of Microsoft BizTalk RFID, we are implementing Microsoft BizTalk RFID and Unitech RFID readers for Unitech RFID Reader Inventory & Shipping System." said Judy Huang, Global RFID Director of Unitech.
This week is an exciting one for Microsoft, particularly those of us who work on the Server & Tools Business—today we’re launching new versions of three cornerstone technologies—Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. The theme is “Heroes Happen Here”—meant to recognize the valiant efforts of our IT Pros and Developers every day. These are the individuals who help make real, meaningful connections between IT and the business.
One of folks on my team who is making heroes happen is Greg Leake, who is a technical marketing director. In his own words, Greg’s purpose is to “improve the lives of developers.” To do this, he has created a lab, and spends time on interoperability testing for Web Services as well as performance testing. No matter the time of day or night, it’s likely that you will find Greg in his lab, which means he probably also holds the record for most cups of coffee in one day.
Once again Greg jumped in the ring to find out just how far we could push the perf boundaries for Windows Server and .NET against other publicly available apps like IBM’s J2EE StockTrader perf application.
My favorite findings:
· Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with .NET Framework 3.5 delivers 117% better throughput than IBM WebSphere 6.1 on Red Hat Linux for the Web Application Server test using the IBM-designed Trade 6.1 benchmark as well as delivers 93% better throughput for the remote services test.
· On the Sun Microsystems’ WSTest Web Services benchmark, .NET StockTrader demonstrates 94% better throughput on Windows Server on processing Web Service requests and 86% better throughput performance for the EchoStruct operation.
The paper on MSDN presents the benchmark results of two key application server workloads:
1. Trade 6.1 Application Server Benchmark created by IBM – This benchmark serves as IBM’s primary capacity planning tool for WebSphere, and as their primary performance sample application for Java Enterprise applications. The benchmarks detail throughput results for the IBM implementation vs. the functionally equivalent of the .NET Framework 3.5 implementation.
2. WSTest Web Services 1.5 Benchmark, created by Sun Microsystems – This benchmark tests an application server’s performance as a Web Service Host, measuring the platforms ability to process Web Service operations involving HTTP/SOAP requests, isolating the networking stack, Web server integration, and XML serialization engines within the application server.
For more information and complete results, check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/stocktrader! You can also download the application with the benchmark tests and try it yourself! Also, look out for the upcoming .NET StockTrader 2.0 in the next few weeks!
With Day 3 behind us, and the fifth annual SOA & Business Process Conference coming to a close, we can officially declare the last week a success! It was great to see lots of familiar faces over the last several days, and to have a chance to reflect on how much progress the industry has made toward achieving ROI with real-world SOA in a short timeframe. We're looking forward to continuing these conversations with our customers and partners over the course of the next year.
We shifted gears a bit on Day 3, and started talking more about the 'consume' phase of SOA--specifically how customers will capture and view their business critical information through front end technologies such as Microsoft Dynamics, SharePoint and Visio. It's also important to remember that this all plugs into a larger shift the industry is seeing right now to software plus services, and a bigger focus on "cloud" computing. It's a blended world out there! For more, check out the day 3 recap video: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=353080
Hope to see you all at next year's event. Details coming soon!
We’re officially through day 2 of the SOA & Business Process Conference! For me it was great to hear all the hallway conversations between attendees doing real-world SOA today, and sharing tips for success. In fact, Day 2 was all about the ecosystem, and we had some key announcements from partners including:
JNBridge: Announced their JMS Adapters for the .NET Framework and the JNBridge Adapter for BizTalk Server. The new adapters provide a streamlined and automated method to connect JMS (Java Messaging Service) capabilities to Microsoft .NET Framework applications and BizTalk Server.
IDS Scheer: Announced the 2008 availability of its integration of the ARIS Platform with Microsoft BizTalk Server. As a preferred BPM modeling and monitoring partner for Microsoft’s Business Process Alliance, IDS Scheer is previewing the integration at the conference this week.
SOA Software: One of our key partners for SOA governance, did a session detailing the topic and helping customer use their .NET assets to deliver a first class governance experience.
We also talked about the availability of the Managed Services Engine, available today on CodePlex. Time to go Trick Or Treating! But first, and check out the Video recap of the conference today: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=352776
