Cloud microservices make their play

SOA is Dead; Long Live Services

By G C Network | January 7, 2009

Blogger: Anne Thomas ManesObituary: SOA“SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its…

2009 – The Year of Cloud Computing!

By G C Network | January 6, 2009

Yes, everyone is making this bold statement. In his article, David Fredh laid out the reasons quite well: The technological hype has started already but the commercial breakthrough will come…

Salesforce.com and Google expand their alliance

By G C Network | January 5, 2009

In a Jan. 3rd announcement, Salesforce.com announced an expansion of its global strategic alliance with Google. In announcing the availability of Force.com for Google App Engine™, the team has connected…

December NCOIC Plenary Presentations

By G C Network | December 31, 2008

Presentations from the NCOIC Cloud Computing sessions held earlier this month have been posted on-line in the Federal Cloud Computing wiki. The event featured speakers from IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, HP,…

Booz|Allen|Hamilton Launches “Government Cloud Computing Community”

By G C Network | December 30, 2008

As a follow-up to a Washington, DC Executive Summit event, BoozAllenHamilton recently launched an on-line government cloud computing collaboration environment. In an effort to expand the current dialog around government…

Is Google Losing Document?

By G C Network | December 29, 2008

John Dvorak posted this question on his blog Saturday and as of Sunday evening had 52 responses! This is not a good thing for building confidence in cloud computing. Or…

Cryptographic Data Splitting? What’s that?

By G C Network | December 26, 2008

Cryptographic data splitting is a new approach to securing information. This process encrypts data and then uses random or deterministic distribution to multiple shares. this distribution can also include fault…

Now really. Should the Obama administration use cloud computing?

By G C Network | December 23, 2008

It’s amazing what a little radio time will do! Since Sunday’s broadcast, I’ve been asked numerous times about my real answer to the question “Will ‘Cloud Computing’ Work In White…

NPR “All Things Considered” considers Government Cloud Computing

By G C Network | December 21, 2008

My personal thanks to Andrea Seabrook, Petra Mayer and National Public Radio for their report “Will ‘Cloud Computing’ Work In White House?” on today’s “All Things Considered”. When I started this blog…

HP Brings EDS Division into it’s cloud plans

By G C Network | December 18, 2008

The Street reported earlier this week that Hewlett Packard’s EDS division has won a $111 million contract with the Department of Defense (DoD) that could eventually support the U.S. military’s…

 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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