1Volume 1, 2010: Issue 5

Cloud

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eems like every great battle has a good guy, a bad guy, and perhaps an even uglier monster of a thing to contend with. If you’ve ever opened a new server box, and hours later found yourself at wits’ end searching through manuals trying to figure

out why the heck the thing won’t boot properly, you’ve faced ugly head-on.

APPLICATION PLATFORMS: THE NEXT CLOUD BATTLEGROUND?

A LOOK AT THE FORCES BEHIND THE UNLEASHING OF MORE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT AND DEPLOYMENT

By Vince Vasquez

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There’s also an interesting situation that one might put into the bad category. Volumes of unstructured data are metaphorically rusting in places like behind enterprise firewalls, not being used to their full poten-tial. In fact, some estimates put it at 80 - 85% of all potentially usable business information originates in

unstructured form.1 And whether this data represents patient health-care records, vital customer interac-tions, potentially fraudulent insurance claims, or comments regarding your company circling around social networks, all forms of businesses and consum-ers might benefit greatly from the development of new applications that unlock this data’s full poten-tial.

Unfortunately, in the past, the development of such really good applications had lots of bad and ugly obstacles that limited their development and de-ployment. For instance, there was the challenge of assembling a team of seasoned programmers who had the technical expertise to write sophisticated apps. There were the high capital costs of acquiring compute and storage infrastructure and, of course, the enormous complexity of assembling and man-aging the entire deployed stack so users had a great experience. And if the technical challenges weren’t tough enough, there were also thorny business issues to contend with like building a sales channel, pric-ing, and the high cost of network bandwidth to get the data to and from the app and end customer.

These days, however, there are many forces well at work conquering many of these challenges. The cost of network bandwidth is in a steady decline. App stores have created a level of business abstraction that provides developers a packaged go-to-mar-ket plan option. Modern programming languages greatly reduce the technical expertise and time re-quired to write compelling apps, increasing the pool of potential developers. Infrastructure-as-a-Service

(IaaS) Cloud providers have abstracted infrastruc-ture complexity away so developers, among other things, no longer need to find screwdrivers and stick-its every time they need to rack a new server and label the maze of connecting cables.

That said, the next force in play is platform abstrac-tion. Here, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers further abstract away complexity such as resource configuration and operating system management. Finally, developers can simply run their code and not worry about the underlying supporting stack of hard-ware, software and network.

And who will win in drawing developers to its PaaS offering? The winners of this next cloud battleground could very well be the ones who win the hearts and minds of developers by providing the highest level of agility and productivity.

DECREASING COST OF NETWORK BANDWIDTHIndeed, a number of forces at work are fundamen-tally changing the landscape for application devel-opment and deployment.

Let’s start with the cost of network bandwidth. Al-though pricing can vary greatly by provider, back in 2005 the median GigE IP Transit prices in New York and London ranged from $28 to $30 per Mbps per month.2 Now, prices can be found around $4/Mbps per month, and could very well maintain the price decline as Moore’s law continues to apply itself in the IP transit and IP transport spaces.3

So as network cost barriers continue to fall, the cost to transmit data to and from applications and end users will continue to drop as well.

UNSTRUCTURED DATAClearly, “unstructured data” is a vague term, often used to describe anything not stored in a database. Typical forms of unstructured data include email, blogs, and web pages. In addition, as relationship databases grow, developers are moving to unstruc-tured key/value pairs to better scale.

Regardless though of where this data is stored, there’s a wealth of information contained in it. For instance, how cool would it be to easily and quickly search buckets of unformatted corporate data us-ing an iPhone or iPad app to assist in the decision-making process?

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BUSINESS ABSTRACTIONIn the old days, as software companies were shrink wrapping their products, they were also worrying about fundamental business issues such as develop-ing a sales channel.

Now with App stores from companies like Apple, much of that goes away. If a developer wants to take advantage of an App store’s existing pool of potential buyers, the business terms are already set. In the case of Apple, it’s 30% to Apple, 70% to the developer. Simple. And if you don’t like it, you can go somewhere else.

In addition, App stores have emerged as part of the IaaS and PaaS provider’s offerings, creating entire Cloud service eco-systems. For instance, if a devel-oper on Heroku needs more functionality to go along with his application, he can check out the “Add-On” catalog and he’s one click away from deploying an additional service. Again, all the business terms are already set so no need for haggling.

OK, cool, you’re a developer with a wickedly great app idea, and the business abstraction has simpli-fied your business plan. Now you only need to de-velop that new app and get it into a few App Stores pronto.

PROGRAMMING ABSTRACTIONFor starters, application development has also be-come a lot easier. Again, in the old days, you had to worry about such relics as punch cards, and chasing memory-eating runaway pointers. In those days, you had to have a large team of fairly serious computer science educated geek-noids to build a truly com-mercial application.

Now with modern and mainstream programming languages such as Ruby, Python and Java, more of the programming complexity has been abstracted away, leaving developers to focus more on the ap-plication logic. In simplified terms, one result is that a lower level of technical expertise is now required to write applications. This is a good thing as growth for software engineers is expected to continue. For example, in the U.S. software, engineer jobs are fore-casted to grow at 32% between 2008 - 2018, much faster than the average for other occupations.4

INFRASTRUCTURE ABSTRACTIONAs anyone reading this article no doubt knows, one of the things an IaaS provider offers is a level of ab-straction over the compute, storage and network.

In the old days, you had to buy, rack and stack the hardware, load the operating system, apply patch-es, etc., before you could even get “hello world” staring at you from your monitor. Now, in about the time it takes to order a latte, you can have a virtual core and 1+ GB of memory up and running. This, of course, means huge cost and time savings for the developer as the IaaS providers abstract away much of the complexity of getting infrastructure running.

Then there’s competition in the IaaS landscape to discuss. At Cloudbook.net, we track more than 50 IaaS providers, but there are no doubt many more on the horizon. For instance, any and all Telcos and co-location providers are prime candidates to put up their own run-on-my-Cloud shingles.

What this means is that competition will continue to drive prices for infrastructure downward, as spinning up instances will look more and more like commod-ity offerings.

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PLATFORM ABSTRACTIONAlthough IaaS offerings abstract away a lot of the infrastructure work, the developer still has to have some level of operational expertise. For instance, developers have to de-cide how many instances of what type to spin up, and when, so spikes in traffic don’t run their ap-plications into ugly halts. In addition, they have to manage the deployed operating systems and middleware stacks. This means that a sys admin type of function is still re-quired to run on a typical IaaS offering.

This is where the Platform Abstraction comes in. PaaS providers go the next step by abstracting away such things as the virtual services, operat-ing systems and middleware stack. This enables de-velopers to focus on high-level management of the application akin to controlling a car’s steering wheel and gas pedal.

Meanwhile, the Platform provider’s secret sauce worries about managing the underlying stack and virtualized resources, ef-fectively controlling the engine underneath. In other words, with PaaS, developers no longer need to have opera-tions know-how, which is a great feature as the pool of less technical developers expands.

In addition, the compe-tition in the PaaS space is definitely heating up. In terms of market cap, these players come in all shapes and sizes. There are the big guys like Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure. Public Software-as-a-Service companies are moving down stack such as Salesforce.com partner-ing with VMWare to create VMForce and Netsuite with SuiteCloud. There are also upstarts innovating in PaaS include Heroku and Joyent with their own platform offerings.

AND THE WINNER IS?So who will win the Cloud Platform wars? As we said earlier, the keys will be agility and productivity: agil-ity to respond quickly to changes in application

real-time demand, and productivity to build the next apps quickly and efficiently.

After all, with these levels of abstraction, today’s developer has the good fortune of focusing on creating and running his code. And as access to more and more unstruc-tured data is released from behind firewalls, the developers with the high-est level of agility and productivity will probably be first to market with the next killer apps.

Meanwhile, the bad and ugly parts of application deployment are handled by others with high levels of specialization expertise.

Of course, what today’s developer loses are such things as late-night de-tective-style datacenter cage crawling, solving yet another monster of an infrastructure bug, and the enjoyment of patch management.

Perhaps like being the owner of a modern car, it might be best to leave the maintenance of bad to ugly operations prob-lems to specialized me-chanics; today’s devel-oper might have far more interesting good to great places to go.

1. Seth Grimes “Unstructured Data and the 80 Percent Rule” Date Unknown, http://bit.ly/9b1EBW (accessed June 25, 2010)2. IP Transit Pricing Report, Telegraphy Research, 2008, http://bit.ly/bNHNMv3. Ilissa Miller, Telecom News Now, February 8, 2010 http://bit.ly/9H8MSv (accessed June 25, 2010)4. Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010-11 Edition, U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics http://bit.ly/cxpn7k