Software, Interrupted

There aren't yet many practical demonstrations of how you actually use cloud services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. To put my money where my mouth is, I coerced Kevin, my IT guy, into setting up and deploying one of our products on Amazon EC2.

Disclosure: Lest you think I am trying to shill, we obviously used our own software for this proof of concept. Mule Galaxy is a service-oriented architecture governance platform with built-in registry and repository. It's written in Java and is GPLv2 licensed.

We are using the EC2 instance of Galaxy for customer demo purposes and to prove out the cloud as a deployment option. Odds are most enterprises won't put their SOA governance in the cloud, though there is a strong likelihood that you will have assets that cross your corporate firewall.

The cloud is becoming a more and more realistic deployment option making software consumable in new and interesting ways.

Just how complicated is this cloud thing?

The Amazon toolset has come a long way since the beta launched. In fact, it took us less than an hour to provision a lightweight instance of Fedora 6, install a few missing utilities, set a couple of environment variables, and launch Galaxy.

Here are the basic steps, followed by the nitty-gritty details for each section:

I just wrote a piece about how we use Amazon S3 to manage the downloads of Mule Enterprise. Putting a mule on a cloud: one man's battle with Amazon S3 is now up on El Reg.

We had been managing and maintaining multiple archives on multiple servers. After a while, a server crash, a disk blowout, lack of memory or some other fiasco kept reminding us why we hate computers.

This brings us to reason one for liking S3: you can stop buying and maintaining tons of machines - at least for file serving over the internet.

As we Twitt-iots sit around bemoaning the fact that we can't send each other useless junk on a flaky service, I thought I would take this chance to address the notion that this message-scaling problem is new.

It's not. It's very common, and it can be solved.

Scaling a messaging platform is why IBM sells a boatload of MQ series, why the AMQP protocol was developed, and why JMS is nearly ubiquitous. Pretty much every large enterprise has similar scale issues related to messaging, especially in financial services. But they don't have downtime, and if they did as frequently as Twitter, the people behind them would all get fired.

This is a topic I actually know something about. (Disclosure: my company develops an open-source enterprise service bus, or ESB, called Mule.) All of our use cases involve some kind of complicated messaging architecture, whether it be Web-service based, publish and subscribe, one to many, direct connection, etc. And most deal with data transformations and a vast array of protocols.

In my view, what Twitter needs is to adopt a bus-type of architecture that separates the transport from the application and uses a middleman to process the transactions. This is a very common enterprise scenario that needs to be applied. This is what an ESB does.

One example in the Web 2.0 world is OpSource, which is delivering billions of transactions a day as an SaaS provider using the ESB at the crux of the transactions. This is much larger than Twitter and has actual revenue impact. Maybe OpSource can host Twitter?

CohesiveFT is one of the more interesting vendors that you probably haven't heard much about yet. Their "Elastic Servers" are custom application stacks as virtual images.

Basically, they have created a "software chassis" for VM images to rolled on-demand. The company maintains libraries of components and customers may add their own proprietary components to the library (for their use only) and construct the image of a virtual application stack. The resulting images are built, encapsulated, given a unique identity and injected with management and integration services.

For example you can quickly create a VM image of Mule with a variety of accessories and run it locally or on EC2.

Now that they have been named one of InfoWorld's top 10 tech startups, I suspect you'll start seeing more of CFT.

I think it's a great thing to see the big analyst firms recognize open source products and companies as key players in today's software world. The fact that Gartner has named MuleSource as a "Cool Vendor in SOA Governance" obviously speaks to the quality of the software, but also to the fact that the analysts who have typically been less open source focused (versus say, Red Monk) are realizing the massive impact that we are having on the market.

According to Gartner, "The cost, complexity and potential vendor lock-in of closed-source technology from infrastructure platform vendors have pushed the desire for open-source technologies past operating systems, application servers and enterprise service buses."

If you read into the Gartner quote, they are now also setting themselves up to be able to talk about open source applications and other infrastructure components. The times sure are changing.

Mule Galaxy is available for download and is licensed under the GPL v2.

Disclosure: I work for MuleSource.

John M. Willis has put together a matrix of the major players in the cloud right now including some of the companies that enable and others that are just offerings.

It's an interesting exercise to figure out how all these parts fit together and considering that the SaaS providers don't have a reason to disclose what's going on behind the scenes I bet there is a ton of other software that is not represented here.

Just knowing what I know about Mule's adoption in SaaS companies I can tell you that we are enabling several businesses already. It would also be interesting to know how many of these cloud companies are using open source--especially MySQL and Spring as part of their environments

Disclosure: I work for MuleSource, an open source software vendor.

When Gartner analyst Robert Desisto wrote this week on the idea that SaaS companies are going to adopt tons of open source I was thrilled. And yet some of the blogosphere seemed to think that meant they wouldn't pay for support and services offered by open source vendors.

Nine out of ten software-as-a-service providers will rely on open source software by 2010 to save money, but the cost savings likely won't be passed onto customers, Gartner says in a new research note.

From an open source vendor perspective, I can tell you that the interest we are seeing from SaaS companies is tremendous. In my case Mule offers the integration/abstraction layer for SaaS to bridge internal applications and data structures (and really if a SaaS architecture is not service-oriented the vendors are going to have serious problems) and Galaxy provides the governance and lifecycle to manage the services. (Disclosure: I am CEO of MuleSource)

But that's just one example--If you consider that Adobe is using Alfresco as part of its online PDF product or that MySQL powers a great many SaaS applications and that both of these companies make money as open source providers I think it shows there is a great opportunity.

Good news for those who love Atom and AtomPub as Google announced that they are removing any patent implications to help further adoption.

We've always encouraged other developers to adopt Atom, the Atom Publishing Protocol, and the extensions that Google has created on top of those standards, but we realized the issue of patents may have held back some adopters. Well, those concerns end today as we are giving a no-charge, royalty-free license to any patents we have that you would need to implement Atom, AtomPub, or any of those extensions.

I'm a fan of the AtomPub API and we (MuleSource) use it for Mule Galaxy. I had been a bit concerned about how Google would treat companies that were using it in products but this certainly alleviates any anxiety.

Microsoft should take a lesson from Google (as is often the case) and not just show the APIs but actually allow developers to use them without risk.

I had planned to interview Cote this afternoon after he moderated a few panels at MuleCon but somehow he got lost in the crowd. So, I've decided to make it all up and entertain myself.

Q: Being that you do most of you work in the Bay Area, why do you live in Austin?
A: I had flown blimps for a number of years and I was based down in Sunnyvale at Moffett Field. I had been training for the next manned shuttle launch to the moon but then Iceland pulled the funding that they had allotted to the program. (Note: while not a native Icelander, Cote spent his early years on a fishing boat in the Atlantic.)

After the moon trip got cancelled I got a gig flying the blimp for the University of Texas football team and ended up in Austin. As all of our RedMonk work is virtual and collaborative and I fly a blimp I can get anywhere slowly but efficiently.

Q: Do you own any teeth that are not your own?
A: I own one of Ben Franklin's molars that I took as payment for a blimp flight from Dallas to Orlando. The client was a crazed oil-baron who looked like the Texan on the Simpsons. His grandfather won the tooth in a bet and passed it on from father to son to grandson. I wear it around my neck at all times in order to keep the peace between the Tories and Whigs.

Q: What's with the beard?
A: A vast majority of great men have always rocked beards. It's a sign of virility and dynamism. If you are on the town you'll always see the bearded guys with the lovely ladies. For that matter, bearded ladies always have the hunky guys.

Q: If you had to choose a favorite pastry, what would it be?
A: First, let me state that its hard to beat a muffin-top. However, my weapon of choice would be a fresh-baked croissant with butter and jam. Excessive? Maybe, but we RedMonk guys live life on the edge.