VMWare's acquisition of SpringSource this week is a significant development in the history of the Java development platform.
I have been working closely with VMWare for some time now, and I know a little bit about how the company sees its role in the cloud. The acquisition of the commercial open-source middleware/framework company makes perfect sense to me.
SpringSource gives VMWare a development "platform," of sorts, to deliver in VMWare-based cloud services and a unique declarative environment in which to define both application construction and deployment architectures. The vision painted by SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson speaks to an environment in which developers can declare not only how objects should connect with one another, but how they should be packaged into virtual machines and deployed into the virtualized infrastructure:
Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds. A solution that exploits knowledge of the application structure, and collaboration with middleware and management components, to ensure optimal efficiency and resiliency of the supporting virtual environment at deployment time and during runtime. A solution that will deliver a Platform as a Service (Paas) built around technologies that you already know, which can slash cost and complexity. A solution built around open, portable middleware technologies that can run on traditional Java EE application servers in a conventional data center and on Amazon EC2 and other elastic compute environments as well as on the VMware platform.
Much of the early analysis of this acquisition has focused on how it plays as a counter to Microsoft Azure, which--when combined with the Hyper-V virtualization platform--threatens VMWare's dominance in the enterprise. Forrester Research's James Staten thinks it's much more than that, however:
VMware has a bigger agenda SpringSource helps to fulfill making vCloud bigger than simply an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) alternative and keeping Microsoft at bay. Enterprises are already demanding that cloud environments and internal cloud solutions support their hypervisor standard VMware. So it wasn't going to be a stretch to get vCloud adopted, assuming it delivered as promised. But the battle isn't IaaS, it's becoming the equivalent of the operating system for the next generation data center and you can't achieve that aim without applications; and you can't become application-relevant without being relevant to developers.
Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady thinks it's not just about the development and integration, but also about tooling:
When (colleague Michael) Cote and I met with SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson at OSCON a few weeks ago, one of the primary topics of discussion was the development experience. This could wind up one of the unheralded benefits of the acquisition: Rod gets the tooling story. He understands that Microsoft, again, is setting the bar for the development experience by allowing its developers to localize the cloud environment via Visual Studio. With VMware's virtualization capabilities, the tooling story for SpringSource could get very interesting vis a vis cloud development and deployment.
This goes to the vision that has me most excited about the future of cloud computing right now. I think that there are technologies evolving for both public and private clouds that actually give developers and solutions architects just as much control over every element of how their applications are built, deployed, and operated as they have had in the past.
These technologies are a combination of declarative descriptive configuration policies and automated software and systems that can interpret those policies and respond as required. Contrary to Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain's well-read New York Times OpEd piece, developers would keep control over their application environments.
SaaS offerings could allow for customization at levels of granularity unthinkable before Spring demonstrated dynamic instantiation. Custom applications deployed to IaaS offerings could declare that they require a isolated networks for backplane communication, connectivity to two different storage systems by name (perhaps even one in the cloud and one through FCoE), or provide monitoring through specific protocols.
By the way, I don't think VMWare is the only company that can achieve this vision. As noted in the earlier quotes, Microsoft is in a great position to allow a similar story for its developers, assuming it partners with the right systems companies to push dynamic configuration beyond Hyper-V into the physical infrastructure layers. .Net and the Microsoft tool set are already quite capable of delivering significant coordination between application development and deployment. Citrix and Red Hat, by contrast, do not yet seem to have such a sophisticated vision.
Oh, and VMWare got cloud monitoring powerhouse Hyperic in the deal as well. More on that in a later post.
I'd love to hear your opinion of the VMWare's acquisition of SpringSource. Is it as important as the cloud pundits and I say it is, or is there little excitement to be found here?
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Last week's announcement of enhancements to Citrix Cloud Center (C3) at Citrix Synergy 2009 was one that made me sit up and take notice. Awhile ago, I proclaimed that the era of the "cloud OS" had begun, and I called out VMware vCloud, Citrix, C3 and 3TERA AppLogic as examples of what would eventually become cloud operating systems.
Strangely, however, Citrix (and the former XenSource team) has been strangely silent since that post. Yeah, there have been one or two "announcements" that basically positioned existing Citrix technologies as being cloud infrastructure, but all in all both VMware and 3TERA greatly outstripped Citrix in the marketing department.
At Synergy last week, Citrix announced several product enhancements to C3 that help solidify its position as a true cloud infrastructure. It listed these in its press release:
Product Enhancements
The updates to the Citrix C3 product family enable service providers to create secure, highly performing, multi-tenant cloud infrastructure environments in a cost effective manner. New capabilities include:
Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop - The incorporation of these two products into Citrix C3 enable service providers to take their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings to a new level. With Citrix C3, service providers can now effectively deliver any Microsoft Windows applications in the Software as a Service (SaaS) model and even deliver Windows Desktops as a Service (DaaS).
The CSP program - The newest Citrix channel partner offering, the CSP program is designed specifically for service providers who provide hosted software services to end-user customers. The CSP program addresses the service provider market for offsite and multi-tenant hosting, where the end-user customer is not the licensee. The CSP program extends to service providers the "right to use" Citrix products as the underpinning of their delivery infrastructure and gives them the flexibility of a monthly "active subscriber" pricing and licensing model. Service providers always have access to the most current versions of Citrix products available in the program and only pay for actual end-user usage recorded during the previous calendar month.
Citrix NetScaler VPX - A virtual appliance version of Citrix NetScaler (see today's separate announcement), the new Citrix NetScaler VPX will be added to Citrix C3, enabling service providers to run multiple NetScaler instances simultaneously and provide true, cost-effective multi-tenancy web application delivery. In addition, service providers will be able to ensure the best application performance and most reliable service delivery by "cloud balancing," which allows load balancing across multiple cloud infrastructures.
Citrix XenServer - One of the key components of Citrix C3, XenServer will soon be enhanced with a new distributed virtual switch add-on to enable secure, multi-tenant, highly scalable public clouds. The switch will partition network traffic on a per-application basis, with resource and security guarantees, and offer full visibility into and control over inter-VM traffic both within a server and virtual network overlay.
Furthermore, Citrix has taken to the clouds themselves via its C3 Labs offering, a suite of cloud tools now available on Amazon EC2 to support development and test lab applications. According to Citrix, C3 Labs provides standard Amazon AMIs for a variety of the C3 product line:
The Citrix C3 Lab is designed to provide an inexpensive, preconfigured environment for IT professionals to prototype solutions using their existing applications and includes technical components required to create a robust application delivery center in the cloud. Initially, lab users will have access to Citrix XenApp alongside key Citrix C3 technologies such as Citrix Access Gateway and Citrix Repeater in the AWS cloud environment, allowing them to securely test application compatibility, application staging and gain overall experience in the AWS cloud environment. Additional Citrix C3 products and scenarios will be added over time. To enable customers and partners to fully take advantage of the Citrix C3 Lab, Citrix is also providing Citrix C3 Lab Blueprints...
I like the fact that Citrix's significant abstraction portfolio has made its way to its cloud platform, and that it's attacked significant problems like networking, load balancing application delivery across cloud infrastructures, and added application streaming to the cloud. I also like that it has made it easy for others to play. I can't wait to see what services appear based on these technologies.
Ah, but there's the rub. James Staten, a Forrester analyst and a man who knows his clouds, notes that with all of the fanfare and partner focus of the announcements, there are no known ISP partners for C3:
(T)he announcement left me a little concerned when it wasn't coupled with a list of brand name ISPs who have signed on to deliver this service to enterprise customers. Anyone out there? Perusal of Citrix' C3 web site and Citrix Service Provider partner pages offer no insights either (Ingram Micro? Softcat? ExpressData? Not exactly ISPs). The technology without the partners looks a little incomplete. Citrix has started a timeclock on the credibility of this effort that it will need to fulfill soon.
The lack of ISPs will be a significant problem, as VMware's vCloud and 3TERA's AppLogic platforms increase their own presence in that market. ISPs will be a critical piece of both public and private cloud strategies, and Citrix will be fighting with the others to be the leading "platform" for workload portability (and eventually mobility).
Yes, Xen is used in all kinds of cloud implementations (including 3TERAs), but not in a form that benefits Citrix.
I join Staten in watching intently for the progress that Citrix makes on the partner front in the coming months--or, perhaps as an interesting alternative, any indication that C3 Labs gains Citrix cloud OS market share. One way or another, Citrix has to prove to people that C3 is a competitive--and desirable--choice for their cloud-computing infrastructures.
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From Jason Boche's blog:
Today at the Minneapolis VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting, VMware employees disclosed to a group of 150+ attendees the new name for the next generation of Virtual Infrastructure many have been referring to as VI4 or VI.next. The new name is VMware vSphere. I value and respect the various relationships I have with VMware and thus before posting this news, I checked with authoritative sources inside VMware. VMware Marketing has endorsed the release of this information to the public. VMware also released a few new configuration maximum details on vSphere but for now I am keeping that information to myself. Other audience members in attendance may decide to break this news.
Why does this matter to cloud computing fans, you ask?
VMWare's vCloud vision depends greatly on the upcoming features that expand the scale in which VMWare's core products can operate; expanding beyond the server to the data center as a whole and beyond. Rumors of features such as over-WAN migration of virtual machines in VI4 are key to the vision of federated VMWare-based clouds becoming a reality. So, create a Google Alert for vSphere, sit back and watch the show.
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