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Netflix to Open Source Army of Cloud Monkeys | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

April 16, 2012 By brenda michelson

Via the open source monkeys, cloud developers everywhere will have an opportunity to learn how Netflix manages a spike laden business on Amazon’s cloud. In addition to the open source news, the article provides a nice overview of the business problem Netflix is solving, why they went cloud, how open source helps with recruiting talent, and profiles one of their big talents, Adrian Cockcroft.

An excerpt:

“Netflix is getting ready to unleash its Simian Army.

The online movie rental company uses a troupe of cloud software — it calls the programs “monkeys” — that poke and prod its online applications and keep the website and its services humming along.

There’s a Chaos Monkey, a program that randomly kills virtual machines to make sure that small outages will not disrupt the overall system. They’ve got Security Monkey — it looks for configuration and security flaws — and Janitor Monkey, too: It looks for system resources that aren’t being used and shuts them down.

Over the next few months Netflix will release the source code for these programs and more, giving cloud developers a look at how it runs its services on Amazon’s cloud. The plan is “to release pretty much all of our platform, including the Monkey infrastructure, over the rest of this year,” says Adrian Cockcroft, the Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix. “We will be doing bits and pieces of it through the summer and into the fall.””

via Netflix to Open Source Army of Cloud Monkeys | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

Filed Under: cloud computing, open source

Cloud Watch now underway… Lawyers, Data and Money

November 13, 2009 By brenda michelson

This week, I’ve started up the Cloud Watch section of Elemental Cloud Computing.  Cloud Watch items are snippets from cloud computing industry news, business and technical publications, and thought leaders.  These snippets may be as short as a 140-character tweet, or as long as a few paragraphs.  Cloud Watch items will be posted throughout the course of the day, and may be expanded as more voices and sources cover a hot topic.  Cloud Watch items may include a short Elemental Cloud Computing perspective.

The opening cloud watch items are a mix of business and economics, and data, contracts and legal issues:

  • Bessemer’s 8th of Cloud Computing and SaaS: Leverage and monetize the data asset
  • Workload Metrics: Business Transactions per Kilowatt?
  • Microsoft Exec: Customers Embracing "Cloud Computing" <– But whose?
  • GigaOm: 10 Open Source Resources for Cloud Computing
  • Lawyers, Clouds and Warrants
  • McKinsey to CIOs in ‘New Normal’: Rethink Procurement…
  • Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Cloud Computing is Relevant for (mostly) everyone
  • Joyent is First in China: Launches Commercial Cloud Computing Platform

From Elemental Cloud Computing, there several ways to follow the cloud watch.  The Current Cloud Watch section on the homepage, the Cloud Watch tab of the Recent Posts navigation element in the sidebar, the Cloud Watch tab of the site navigation, via the Cloud Watch or Full Site feeds and email, and on Twitter. 

Filed Under: business, cloud computing, economy, open source, sustainability

Announcing the SOA Consortium | CIO magazine Case Study Contest Winners

September 16, 2009 By brenda michelson

[update on September 18, 2009 for my disclosures]

This morning, at the inaugural SOA | BPM Symposium in San Antonio Texas, we (the SOA Consortium) announced the winners of the 2009 SOA Consortium | CIO magazine case study contest.  As we’ve shared previously, the purpose of the contest was to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing SOA adoption.

To qualify, organizations must have solutions in production based on a SOA approach, which have demonstrated business results. We judged the submissions on business problem solved, value achieved, business and IT collaboration, usage of SOA technology and lessons learned.

And now, the winners…

We are pleased to announce that Cisco Systems’ IT Organization is the overall winner of the 2009 contest.  Cisco successfully applied a SOA approach to their Commerce Transformation Initiative:

Cisco Systems, Inc. designs, manufactures and sells hardware, software and services to create Internet and networked based solutions. Cisco wanted to create a consistent, unified ordering experience for users of its online commerce applications. The “Commerce Transformation” initiative is based on SOA principles that have allowed Cisco IT to create a solid architectural and technology foundation for both existing and future application development. One of the first projects developed within the Commerce Transformation initiative was the Partner Deal Registration (PDR) application, since most of Cisco’s revenues come through partner channels. Among the many benefits of this application, deal cycle time has been reduced by 50 percent. The Commerce Transformation initiative is already delivering scalable solutions, enhancing customers’ experiences, and providing the partner ecosystem with secure access to business services like pricing, promotions and configuration tools. It also allows Cisco to more easily and cost-effectively support new business models and enter new markets.

In addition to the overall winner, we have three special recognition winners representing Energy/Utility, Regulatory, and Government sectors.

Special Recognition in Energy Utility: BlueStar Energy

BlueStar Energy is an independent retail electric supplier, certified to sell electricity in Illinois, Maryland and the District of Columbia. In addition, BlueStar provides green power and energy efficiency solutions to home and business customers. BlueStar sponsored an enterprise-wide SOA initiative to unite business and technology. BlueStar adopted a mature enterprise architecture (EA) called NextStar™ with the goal of streamlining and automating core business processes. The NexStar project has helped BlueStar grow 12,197% over five years and has contributed to $24 million in estimated savings over five years.

Special Recognition in Regulatory: Financial Industry Regulatory Agency (FINRA)

FINRA is the largest independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the United States. FINRA’s SOA project consolidated the New York Stock Exchange Member Regulation systems with the NASD Member Regulation systems. The size and complexity of the project, which involved combining large application portfolios and legacy business processes, required multiple teams in different locations working effectively in parallel to meet the aggressive schedule. Using an SOA approach enabled FINRA to deliver the project faster and reduced the risks inherent to large development teams. The business-centric service design and modularity of the SOA approach provides flexible deployment to support current business processes and to rapidly adapt to support future business process.

Special Recognition in Government: New York State Department of Taxation and Finance

The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance is responsible for the administration of the state’s tax laws, including the administration of related local taxes, and the management of the State Treasury. The goal of the e-MPIRE project was to establish a 21st century government system and toolset. The planned business value of e-MPIRE was to eliminate the risks of having the core departmental systems on unsupported platforms, give the user a single interface into all systems and build agility to adapt to changing legislative and business requirements. The e-MPIRE project gave the department the ability to process high volumes of income tax returns and deliver refunds to taxpayers at a dramatically improved rate, with a near real time evaluation for fraud, up from 24 hours with the old system.

To learn more about the contest winners, please visit the contest center on the SOA Consortium website.  As well, keep an eye here for deeper excerpts and opportunities to meet the winners.

[Disclosures: The SOA Consortium is a client of my firm, Elemental Links. I was a contest judge.]

Filed Under: bpm, enterprise architecture, open source, services architecture, soa

Iona acquires LogicBlaze (and the team behind Apache ServiceMix and ActiveMQ)

April 10, 2007 By brenda michelson

This morning, Iona announced its acquisition of LogicBlaze, and most importantly, that the core team behind Apache ServiceMix and ActiveMQ are transitioning to Iona. This combination makes a lot of sense to me. Iona and LogicBlaze are both proponents of open source, pragmatic about SOA, early adopters of Java Business Integration, and ‘cooperative competitors’ — Iona’s Celtix incorporates both ActiveMQ and ServiceMix (which I think is more recent, but could be mistaken).

Last fall/winter, I did work some with LogicBlaze, and this excerpt from the press release definitely reflects points (see my emphasis) I heard firsthand from LogicBlaze customers and ServiceMix adopters:

"The ability to deliver enterprise-level support to companies deploying Open Source technologies is critical as an increasing number of global 2000 customers incorporate Open Source into their performance-demanding, distributed SOA environments. The acquisition of LogicBlaze is based upon of IONA’s vision that successful SOA deployments will involve the use of multiple technologies, including many from the Open Source community. IONA is committed to supporting its customers’ desire to incorporate these technologies in their SOA environment.

"As a greater number of large IT organizations embrace the use of Open Source technology to support their mission-critical applications, they want to know that the innovation of Open Source is paired with world-class service and support from the development stage through deployment," said James Strachan. "This is a philosophy shared by IONA and LogicBlaze.""

I think this is good news for Iona, LogicBlaze, and most importantly, the enterprise.

[Disclosure: LogicBlaze is a (not so past) client of Elemental Links.]

Filed Under: open source, services architecture, soa

Java Open Source: The Questions of “How” and “When” are Answered.

November 13, 2006 By brenda michelson

In May, during the JavaOne keynote, Sun’s Rich Green stated “it isn’t a question of whether, but a question of how” in respect to the open sourcing of Java. Well, today there’s an answer. From Tim Bray’s ongoing:

"Today’s story is simple: Unmodified GPL2 for our SE, ME, and EE code. GPL2 + Classpath exception for the SE libraries. Javac and HotSpot and JavaHelp code drops today. The libraries to follow, with pain expected fighting through the encumbrances. Governance TBD, but external committers are a design goal. No short-term changes in the TCK or JCP. There are a ton of presentations and an (excellent) FAQ and so on, all to show up at sun.com/opensource/java sometime in the next few hours."

Clicking on the sun.com/opensource/java link this morning, there’s an announcement of an announcement webcast, starting today at 9:30 PST. I hope my schedule works out so I can listen in live. I imagine this news will dominate the technology conversation today, traditional tech press, blogs, business press, and, of course, enterprise hallways.

Are practitioners thinking this is a good thing? Or do you fear a fork?

Filed Under: open source

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Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

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