Cloud microservices make their play

Vivek Kundra to Speak at NRO Showcase

By G C Network | June 8, 2009

On the 17 & 18 June, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) will present the premiere Innovative Solutions Showcase. Titled “Unleashing the Crowd in the Cloud: Igniting the Innovation Insurgency“, this event…

Secure Cloud Computing on Federal News Radio

By G C Network | June 1, 2009

Last week the Trezza Media Group, Flyzik Group and Federal News Radio combined to produce an outstanding Federal Executive Forum on Secure Cloud Computing. Moderated by Jim Flyzik, panelist included:…

My Meeting with Mr. Vivek Kundra

By G C Network | May 29, 2009

Earlier this week I had the distinct pleasure and opportunity to have a private meeting with Mr. Vivek Kundra. Although my time with him and Mr. Gary Washington (OMB/Egov &IT Internal…

Comments for Mr. Kundra (Thank you for the input!)

By G C Network | May 25, 2009

A little over a week ago I put out a request to my readers to help me with my meeting with Vivek Kundra.  The response has been awesome!! thank you…

Congratulations to Roger Baker !!

By G C Network | May 23, 2009

My congratulations goes out to Roger Baker !  I first met Roger a little over a year ago when he interviewed me for my present job at Dataline. At that…

NDU (IRM) and DoD CIO (NII) Co-Hosting Cloud Computing and Cyber Security Symposia

By G C Network | May 20, 2009

I’m proud to announce two important coming events. The Information Resources Management (IRM) College and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Networks and Information Integration)/DOD CIO are co-hosting…

Please Help Me Plan My Meeting With Mr. Vivek Kundra !!

By G C Network | May 18, 2009

A couple of weeks ago, I was offered a chance to meet Mr. Vivek Kundra at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in downtown Washington, DC. Needless to say, I was…

President Obama’s 2010 Budget Highlights Cloud Computing

By G C Network | May 12, 2009

President Obama’s 2010 Budget (pp. 157-158) has highlighted cloud computing as a key tool for improving innovation, efficiency and effectiveness in Federal IT. ” Cloud-computing is a convenient, on-demand model…

Federal Cloud Computing Heating Up !

By G C Network | May 7, 2009

As fellow blogger Reuven Cohen mentions in his post, Federal cloud computing is indeed heating up: Vivek Kundra held a US Federal Government Cloud Computing Summit yesterday The Federal CIO…

USA.gov “Flips the switch” to Cloud Computing

By G C Network | May 4, 2009

Last weekend, USA.gov shifted to a cloud computing platform. This move is expected to reduce infrastructure expenses by 90% and drastically improve flexibility. “‘We are flipping the switch tomorrow to…

 by Kevin L. Jackson

Cloud computing seems destined to be the way enterprises will use information technology. The drastic cost reductions and impressive operational improvements make the transition an unstoppable trend. The “What is cloud computing?” question now, however, seems to be morphing into “Where is cloud computing going?”

While software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers see their market rocketing upward as the easiest and quickest path for cloud adoption, infrastructure-as-a-service providers are suffering as their high-capital-cost commodity business transitions to a profit margin race to the bottom. This unsettling paradox, driven by increased competition between major infrastructure players, portends a near-term shakeout as smaller players either fail, exit or get gobbled up.

Cloud services brokerage, still struggling to be even recognized as a real market, is being seriously threatened by open-source approaches from giants like Booz Allen Hamilton’s Jellyfish and the European Commission-funded CompatibleOne open-source broker. So what about platform-as-a-service? Seen by some as the most profitable segment, this also seems to be where most of the confusion resides. Unfortunately PaaS is still struggling to deliver on the promise of universal software interoperability. So what’s next? With all due deference to Mr. McGuire in “The Graduate,” two words: microservice architecture.

Microservice architecture, or simply microservices, is a new software development method that is, for many developers, rapidly becoming a preferred way of creating enterprise applications. Because of its scalability, this architectural method is considered ideal when there is a need to enable support for a range of platforms and devices — spanning web, mobile, the “Internet-of-Things,” and wearables.

Although no standard, formal definition of microservices exists, it is generally characterized as a method of developing software applications that uses a suite of independently deployable, small, modular services in which each service runs a unique process and communicates through a well-defined, lightweight mechanism. How the services communicate with each other depends on your application’s requirements, but many use HTTP/REST with JSON or Protobuf.
Microservices architecture contrasts with the traditional monolithic development styles in that the latter approach is always built as a single, autonomous unit. In a client-server model, the server-side application is a monolith that handles the HTTP requests, executes logic, and retrieves/updates the data in the underlying database. The challenge with this approach is that all change cycles usually end up being tied to one another. Microservices are also better aligned with more modern agile software development approaches.

Dell, traditionally an infrastructure company, is even noticing the importance of this trend. On this, the observation of James Thomason, CTO of Dell Cloud Marketplace, is of note:

Already, Docker (and others) are working on various new forms of service discovery, in order to solve the infrastructure dependency injection problem, and consequently the “awareness” of dependencies between application components on different servers and infrastructure.

The recent love affair with infrastructure containers like Docker and VMware’s surprising investment in Linux containers through the release of Photon has now opened the door for a rapid adoption of microservices and the isolation of containers to one process or service.

This containerization of single services or processes makes it very simple to manage and update these services. Therefore, it’s not surprising that the emergence of frameworks for managing more complex scenarios will be next. Open-source projects like Kubernetes, Maestro-ng and Mesos are now springing up to answer this need. Stay tuned.

(This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. For more on these topics, visit Dell’s thought leadership site PowerMore. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies.)

Cloud Musings

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