IBF Media has been running a series of events called Capital Connection 2010 which is focused on serving the needs of entrepreneurs looking to connect with participants in the venture capital eco-system, technology executives, and to get access to capital and resources to help build their growing enterprises.

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

The latest in the series was a panel discussion on ‘Cloud Platforms and Solutions: Business Models and Architectures for Value Creation in the Enterprise’. The emphasis was more on the value that Platform as a Service (PaaS) brings to an enterprise. The organizers managed to get the best PaaS providers in the business – Google, Microsoft and OrangeScape. While I represented Microsoft Corporation as the subject matter expert on Windows Azure, we had Rajdeep Dua from Google to provide the Google App Engine context. Suresh Sambandam, CEO of OrangeScape PaaS (which incidentally supports both GAE and Azure) was also one of the panelists. The session was moderated by Raghavan Subramanian from Infosys who did a great job of asking very relevant questions to the panel and driving a meaningful discussion.

The discussion was very lively and made it interesting and valuable for the attendees and panelists. I want to share the answers to the questions that were asked in the panel. This represents only the points that I shared and not the views of other panelists in the discussion.

Q) What does your company offer in terms of PaaS? What are the key differentiators?
A) Microsoft’s PaaS offering is called Windows Azure Platform.

There are three key services within this –

• Windows Azure – The Cloud OS from Microsoft
• SQL Azure – Relational Database for the Cloud
• Windows Azure AppFabric – Bridge between on-premise and Cloud Services

Key differentiators –

• Based on familiar .NET Platform
• Great integration with Visual Studio and 3rd party tools
• Reliable SLAs for the enterprise
• Integration with on-premise assets
• Choice of storage between relational (SQL Azure) and non-relational (Azure Storage)

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

Q) What is the threat faced from the layers above (SaaS) and below (IaaS) PaaS?
A) I believe the line drawn between IaaS and PaaS is blurring slowly. Windows Azure is clearly a meta-platform and customers can run Java, PHP, Perl along with .NET applications. Worker role and Native Execution mode enables to port legacy applications to Azure. Since Microsoft also plays in the SaaS layer through the Microsoft Online services, it is an opportunity for us rather than threat. We encourage ISVs to build SaaS offerings on Azure.

Q) Who is the target audience? Is it ISVs or enterprise?
A) Our target audience is the following –

• ISV – Offer SaaS based solutions of their existing or new applications
• Enterprise – Move seasonal and on-demand Line of Business (LoB) applications to Azure
• Start-up – Go live quickly by avoiding up-front investment in infrastructure
• System Integrators – Offer migration and integration of Cloud Services

Q) What is the role of standards for lowering the entry barrier?
A) Standards are applicable at multiple levels. Here are a few

• Security Standards – Azure is SAS70 complaint
• Industry Standards – Supporting industry specific standards like HIPAA
• Open Standards – Azure storage, compute and management APIs are based on open standards like HTTP, XML and REST.

Q) Are there Cloud friendly languages? Do programming languages need new constructs to target cloud capabilities like multi-tenancy?
A) Developers interact with the Cloud in one of the two ways –

• Consume APIs and interact with the Cloud through the management API
• Develop applications that get deployed on the Cloud platform

For consuming the APIs, any language with support for HTTP libraries will work. More than languages the frameworks like .NET and Java need to evolved to support Cloud. For example .NET developers are able to leverage the LINQ constructs to interact with the Cloud storage efficiently.

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

Q) How do you assure continuity of business? Are you a viable and reliable vendor for the enterprises to bet their business on your Cloud platform?
A) Microsoft has been in the data center business for 15 years. Hotmail was acquired in 1977, Outlook Web Access (OWA) was launched 11 years ago. Hosted Exchange processes more than 1 billion messages per month. More than 2000 institutions signed up for Live@Edu with millions of email accounts. Enterprise customers trust us as we have been a credible player for more than a decade. Windows Azure has the right level of SLAs defined which raises the confidence level of our customers.

Q) How about 3rd party components and licensing on the Cloud?
A) Most of the component vendors are aligning with the Cloud. Players like PayPal started to offer services for the SaaS developers by collaborating with PaaS providers. Companies like Twilio are bringing telephony to the Cloud. Most of the components will evolve to support the new paradigm.

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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• A Case for Private PaaS
• Cloud Computing – What’s in it for you?
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• Speaking at Capital Connection 2010

Yesterday, SalesForce.com and VMware jointly announced a new PaaS offering called VMforce. This is a huge announcement that has a very strong impact on the Cloud ecosystem. Let’s see what it means to us.

The enterprise application development platform is dominated by two obvious platforms – .NET and Java. I qualified my statement with the ‘enterprise’ keyword because other platforms like LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Python are great for consumer web apps and they are not the first choice for building the Line of Business (LoB) applications. So, when the enterprise wants to seriously look at the Cloud, they want a platform exposing either .NET or Java as a service. The application platform on the Cloud is technically called as the Platform as a Service (PaaS). Till date, PaaS is typically associated with Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform, Google App Engine and Force.com. Windows Azure is the preferred platform for all the .NET developers. In the last one year, Microsoft’s continuous investments in Azure made it comprehensive and mature for the businesses to go live on the Cloud. Java developers had to settle for the limited capabilities offered by Google App Engine. Right from the day of announcement of Java runtime on App Engine, Google did very little to entice the Java community. Moving an enterprise Java app to GAE is not really straight forward. GAE doesn’t support all the capabilities of Java EE. Even for the web applications, there are quite a few constraints that force the developers to re-factor the application to run on GAE. Moving an app back and forth from the local datacenter and GAE is not easy. So, there has been no comparable PaaS offering to Azure for Java developers. In one of my articles, I covered how Sun lost the opportunity of delivering the Java PaaS to the community. This gap is now being filled by VMforce. They want to make VMforce the defacto Cloud platform for Java developers. VMforce for Java developers would be what Azure is for .NET developers.

VMforce PaaS Offering

But why did VMware join hands with SalesForce.com? VMware has a proven stack for the Cloud in the form of vSphere and vCloud. They never wanted to compete directly with the IaaS providers like AWS or GoGrid. Instead, VMware wants to capture the Private Cloud market by aggressively competing with Microsoft and others. On the other hand, SalesForce.com has been in Cloud services business for a while and has become synonymous with SaaS. They also started to expose the middle tier that powers their CRM through the force.com PaaS offering. SalesForce.com has the right level of infrastructure that is ready to scale. But just virtualization combined with the right infrastructure doesn’t offer an exciting platform for the developers. VMware made two strategic investments last year. They acquired a Java framework and tools company called SpringSource and a Message-Oriented-Middleware (MOM) company called RabbitMQ. This investment made VMware ready for a complete platform offering. Just like VMware brings an abstraction layer between the real hardware and the OS, SpringSource adds a layer between Java runtime and enterprise applications. Java developers targeting SpringSource can easily move apps across multiple environments. Message Queuing is very important for enterprise application scalability. The combo of SpringSource and RabbitMQ offer a powerful and scalable enterprise Java environment. Now, when we look at the equation, it becomes pretty interesting. VMware offering the SpringSource framework for the on-premise servers and the Private Cloud that can be further extended to the Public Cloud hosted on SalesForce.com. Add the LoB components, the multi-tenant capability, enterprise database and the UI widgets that are already a part of force.com, they have a pretty solid PaaS in the making.

Deployment Scenarios

Who should be worried about this announcement? It is Google! They have a serious contender in VMforce. As a developer, I prefer setting up SpringSource environment on my local machine and use Eclipse to seamlessly deploy across my local server, Private Cloud or on the VMforce Public Cloud. I need not heavily re-factor my applications for the Cloud anymore. Relying on a proven Java framework like Spring gives the developers the confidence to standardize their apps across multiple deployment environments. But, should Microsoft be worried about this announcement? Yes. But not as much as Google! Microsoft did the right thing by bringing .NET to the Cloud early and helping the developers make a smooth transition. For any Microsoft shop, the first choice is Azure and Microsoft will continue to lead in that space.

Do you think VMforce will deliver on its promise? Let me know your thoughts!

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

Related Posts

• A Case for Private PaaS
• IBF Media’s PaaS Panel Discussion
• Is it Azure vs. Rest of the World on the Cloud?
• Cloud Computing – What’s in it for you?
• Who Will Win The Cloud Computing Battle in India?

It’s been just over a week since Microsoft has started to offer the commercial subscription of Windows Azure. As a Cloud enthusiast, I quickly signed up for the Introductory Special subscription and downloaded the required tools to deploy my first app to the Cloud. I had access to Windows Azure since PDC08 and I deployed quite a few apps to test the functionality and features of the platform. As an independent Cloud Computing Strategist, I also explore Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine. Having worked on a few mature Cloud Computing platforms and tools, I had certain expectations from Windows Azure particularly after it has gone past the beta phase. Honestly, there is no significant difference (except the pricing part) that I could notice in the development and deployment experience on Windows Azure.

Here is a list of top 5 things that I feel Microsoft should fix immediately.

5) Metering and Billing Model – Microsoft would start charging the moment you deploy your app even if it is not running and not consuming any resources. Refer to the FAQ on pricing for more details. I personally find this as a huge entry barrier. Ideally, I wouldn’t want to get charged when my app is in ‘Suspended’ mode and not in ‘Run’ mode. Technically speaking, what resources would my app consume when it is not running? It would only be a few megabytes of storage to keep the package and the configuration files. Amazon doesn’t charge me VM hours for inactive AMIs. They only charge me for the nominal storage cost of storing the AMI on S3. Charging VM hours for an idle application is just not convincing enough. I find it to be counterproductive and a barrier for developers to embrace this platform.

Azure Pricing

4) Simpler Pricing and Subscription Plans – Microsoft is at it again! After confusing the consumers with half-a-dozen flavors of Windows Vista and recently with Windows 7, they are doing it to their Online Services subscribers. There are at least 4 types of subscription to choose from – Introductory Special, Development Accelerator Core, Development Accelerator Extended and ‘Pay As You Go’ Consumption. This bouquet of subscription offers is confusing and not a straightforward model. This reflects the classic Microsoft way of packaging and licensing products in the form of Express, Standard, Professional and Enterprise. This doesn’t gel with the online services model. I personally prefer the Amazon way of pricing and the sign up process. Simple and straightforward!

3) Agile Deployment and Faster Change Management – On the commercial version of Windows Azure, it takes more than 7 minutes for the application to be available and accessible. And, I am not talking of an Azure application built to assist NASA launch the Mars Rover. This is a plain and simple Hello World ASP.NET app that doesn’t even have a single line of server side code. Add a Worker Role, few lines of dynamic code and storage access code, it will take a good 10 minutes for your application to take off. Again, comparing this with Google App Engine and Amazon EC2, they are almost instant. Each Linux EC2 AMI takes about 2 min. to boot and I am at the root prompt in no time. Windows Azure is a PaaS offering and I cannot afford to wait for few minutes every time I make a trivial change to my HTML file. I can understand if Amazon forces me to go through this as I may have to bundle the AMI with every change that I make. With EBS now supporting booting AMIs, I need not even worry about bundling the AMI. Windows Azure might also be doing the job of spinning the new VMs for every change that I make to the app or the configuration. But I don’t care and cannot wait for 10 minutes for the simple changes to reflect. This needs to be fixed!

2) Configuration Editor – After you deploy the Cloud application, you may need to change the configuration settings. This includes changing the no. of instances of Web Role / Worker Role or changing a custom configuration setting. Having a plain vanilla textbox to change the sensitive configuration setting is just not acceptable! Microsoft has every reason to put up a better frontend to manage the configuration settings that can be potentially built using Silverlight. At least that will drive more downloads of Silverlight plugin. One look at the Configuration settings textbox makes me feel that I am working on an early CTP release. I consider the EC2 Console from Amazon (and a bunch of 3rd party tools like ElasticFox) and ElasticHosts’ configuration editor to be much better. Though Microsoft may want to encourage partners like RightScale to eventually build such tools, as a paid subscriber I deserve a better tool here!

Azure Configuration Interface

AWS Console

ElasticHosts Configuration

1) Windows Azure Integration with Visual Studio – This certainly deserves to be the numero uno. The biggest USP of Microsoft is its integrated platform and tools approach. Whether it is core .NET Development, Microsoft Office Development, BizTalk Adapter Development or SharePoint Development, it has always been the ‘Better Together’ story for the developers by putting Visual Studio in the center. When it comes to Azure, I had a lot of expectations from Microsoft on the Visual Studio integration. The reason for that is Azure is logically an extended development platform on the Cloud and the developers should be able to seamlessly deploy their new breed of applications. To my surprise, Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2008 1.1 has little to no integration with the real Azure platform. When I right click on the Cloud Service project and select Publish, I expected Visual Studio to prompt me for my Windows Live ID to enumerate the Hosted Service project to seamlessly deploy the app onto Azure and then take me to the Development Portal to let me decide between staging and production. The approach of opening an Explorer window with the folder containing the .cspkg and .cscfg files and launching the browser with the Azure development portal appears to be so broken! Compare this with the Eclipse and the Google plugin integration. Two independent entities coming from different companies offer a better experience to the developers than Azure Tools for VS. When I click on the GAE button on Eclipse toolbar, it just does the deployment after prompting me for the Google ID and the Application ID. I am not sure if this would get fixed in Visual Studio 2010. But as of now, on the currently available Visual Studio 2008 SP1, it is not in place. I want Visual Studio to fully support me end to end during my Cloud application design, development, testing and deployment. I also expect an integrated Azure Storage tool within Visual Studio. I should be able to browse and manipulate the Tables, Blob metadata and the Queues. Today I have to rely on 3rd party tools for this which doesn’t make the developer productive. Overall, Visual Studio and Azure integration has a long way to go!

Google App Engine Deployment

Google App Engine Deployment

Visual Studio Publish

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

Related Posts

• IBF Media’s PaaS Panel Discussion
• Cloud Computing – What’s in it for you?
• VMforce – What’s in it for us?
• My Interview on Cloud at IndicThreads.com
• Who Will Win The Cloud Computing Battle in India?

I am presenting at Eclipse India Summit on two topics.

1. Google AppEngine for Java Developers
2. Silverlight for Java Developers

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

Related Posts

• Eclipse India Summit 2009 – Trip Report
• IBF Media’s PaaS Panel Discussion
• VMforce – What’s in it for us?
• Top 5 Things Microsoft Should Fix in Azure
• A Case for Private PaaS