David Chappell's Blog :: Opinari

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2010-04-29T11:29:00.001-07:00

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A Short Interview on Cloud Computing

2010-04-27T04:51:00.000-07:00

In Singapore earlier this month, I recorded a short interview with Zafar Anjum of MIS Asia. As has become typical for me lately, we talked mostly about cloud platforms. If you're interested, our discussion is available as a podcast here.

Platforms in the Cloud: Where Will Your Next Application Run?

2010-04-07T20:41:00.000-07:00

ESRI has posted the slides from the keynote I gave at their Developer Summit last month. The talk takes a big-picture view of cloud platforms today, providing a taxonomy for thinking about the leading offerings (both public and private). It ends with a look at what ESRI is doing in the cloud, but most of the talk isn't specific to the GIS world.

After resisting it for quite a while, I've given in to using the IaaS/PaaS categorization for public cloud platforms. I still think it's full of problems, but whether I like it or not, this way of talking about the space has become almost universal.

And I'm still not crazy about the term "private cloud". Technically, a private cloud is essentially IaaS in your data center, but the large scale and pay-as-you-go economics of public clouds aren't available in typical private clouds. This makes them different in fundamentally important ways. Still, it's clear that private clouds are what most people think of as the evolution of today's virtualized data centers, and the term is clearly here to stay.

As these slides suggest, we're seeing some convergence of what cloud platforms provide. This is a good thing--it's what happens as markets mature--but there's still a long way to go. As I'm so fond of saying, big platform shifts like this happen rarely; it's a great time to be alilve.

Presentation Integration and Blue Prism

2010-04-05T19:50:00.000-07:00

Remember screen scraping? It's grown up into something else entirely. That something else, now known as presentation integration, provides an alternative to the more common approach of business logic integration.

While there aren't many big vendors selling products that do presentation integration today, there are some smaller firms in this space. One of them, UK-based Blue Prism, hired me to write a white paper describing their technology and presentation integration in general. It's an effective approach in quite a few situations, and if you're interested, the paper is available here.

Azure Speaking Tour: Asia/New Zealand Dates

2010-03-25T17:45:00.000-07:00

My long-running Windows Azure speaking tour takes me back to Asia next month, then on to New Zealand. The cities and dates are:

Kuala Lumpor: April 12 (as part of the Visual Studio 2010 launch event)
Singapore: April 13
New Delhi: April 15
Manila: April 19
Auckland: April 22
Wellington: April 23

As always, feel free to stop by if you're in the area and interested in the topic.

Good Book: Development with the Force.com Platform

2010-03-11T11:10:00.000-08:00

Force.com is a truly interesting technology, and I've spoken with plenty of happy customers. Yet I've always been challenged by the way Salesforce.com talks about it. Even in what's supposed to be technical documentation, I feel like I'm being marketed to. This makes the technology harder to understand, and it also hurts their credibility.

Jason Ouellette's book Development with the Force.com Platform goes a long way toward fixing that problem. It's the first clear, complete, and trustworthy description I've seen of the Force platform. The writer does a first-rate job of explaining the technology, showing its strengths and (sometimes) weaknesses. Anybody who's interested in Force.com or cloud platforms in general should buy this book.

ESRI Developer Summit Keynote

2010-03-01T15:19:00.000-08:00

The people at ESRI have kindly invited me back to keynote their Developer Summit in Palm Springs later this month. I'll be talking about cloud platforms, describing and comparing some of the most visible examples, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft's Windows Azure platform, and Google AppEngine.

I also keynoted last year's event, and it was a great pleasure--it's a first-rate conference. If you work in the world of geographic information systems, this sure looks like the place to be for the last week of March.

Azure Speaking Tour: Australia Dates

2010-02-18T11:00:00.000-08:00

I'm still flying around talking about Windows Azure and platforms for cloud computing. My next stop is Australia:

Sydney: February 23
Melbourne: Feburary 24

If you're in the area and interested in the topic, feel free to stop by.

Providing Single Sign-On to Amazon EC2 Applications from an On-Premises Windows Domain

2010-01-11T16:28:00.000-08:00

Cloud platforms bring new challenges for handling identity. One important example of this is the need to give users in an on-premises Windows domain single sign-on to applications running in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). If we want to make cloud platforms a natural extension of our on-premises world--and we absolutely do--solving this problem is important.

Fortunately, there are a few different ways to do this. I've written a short white paper, jointly sponsored by Amazon and Microsoft, that gives an architectural overview of today's options. The paper won't walk you through the details of how to implement a solution, but it will give you a sense of what the options are.

Cloud platforms are quickly becoming part of our world. Anybody thinking about identity issues today who's not considering the cloud is missing something big.

Virtualization for Windows: An Update

2009-12-29T12:52:00.000-08:00

Even though the technology has been with us for some time, virtualization remains a big deal. And while hardware virtualization still gets most of the attention, other aspects also matter, including desktop virtualization and application virtualization.

I wrote an overview of Windows virtualization technology a couple of years ago. An updated version of the paper, once again sponsored by Microsoft, is now available here.

Virtualization is fundamental to how data centers--both on-premises and in the cloud--are structured today, and so it's also fundamental to modern computing. Everybody needs to know at least the basics.

Interviews from Berlin

2009-12-01T08:13:00.000-08:00

I spoke at TechEd Europe in Berlin last month, which was really a pleasure. While I was there, I sat down for two short interviews with Dutch IT students. Rather than asking me about technology, as people usually do, they wanted to talk mostly about the work I do: speaking and writing.

As a result, the interview isn't at all technical, but they certainly asked some original questions. I enjoyed the conversation, and if you're interested, the two segments are here and here.

An Interview on Cloud Platforms

2009-11-03T09:18:00.000-08:00

In London on my recent Azure speaking tour, I sat down with my friend David Gristwood from Microsoft for a conversation. We talked about a range of things, focusing mostly on what companies other than Microsoft offer in this space.

It's hard to compare cloud platforms. They're all different in significant ways, and they all focus on their own set of problems. Despite this, I tried in this interview to give short summaries of my perspective on some of today's most visible options, including Amazon Web Services, Google AppEngine, and Force.com. If this sounds interesting, you can watch the interview here.

The SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform

2009-10-27T18:52:00.000-07:00

The popularity of SharePoint continues to amaze me. It's a useful technology, so I'm not surprised that people like it. What I marvel at is how rapidly it's spread. Are there any Windows customers left who aren't using it in some way?

SharePoint is a platform for building applications as well as an application itself, but its platform aspect hasn't gotten as much attention. At least in part, this is because the SharePoint development environment hasn't been as easy for .NET developers to use as it might have been.

Yet a SharePoint app is fundamentally an ASP.NET app, so the two worlds have a good deal in common. With the 2010 release, Microsoft has put a significant amount of effort into making SharePoint a better development platform for creating what might otherwise be straight ASP.NET applications.

If you're interested in this area, I've written a Microsoft-sponsored white paper titled The SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform: An Introduction for ASP.NET Solution Architects. The paper's goal is to provide a big-picture view of SharePoint as a platform for creating applications. It's clear to me that with the advent of SharePoint 2010, a significant number of applications that might have been built using plain ASP.NET will instead be built on SharePoint. If you're interested in why, you might find the paper useful.

Azure Speaking Tour: Asia Dates

2009-10-01T04:23:00.000-07:00

It's taken a while to come together, but the Asian cities and dates for this tour are now firm. They are:

Tokyo: October 13-14
Singapore: October 19
Bangalore: October 21
Mumbai: October 23

I'm really looking forward to returning to all of these cities.

Azure Speaking Tour: Europe Dates

2009-09-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

Here are the European cities and dates for my fall Windows Azure speaking tour:

London: October 6
Munich: October 7
Paris: October 8

It's going to be a busy week.

Updating the Windows Azure Story

2009-09-14T17:43:00.000-07:00

If you're paying close attention, you already know this, but it's still worth pointing out that Microsoft has changed various aspects of what was called the Azure Services Platform. It's now known as the Windows Azure platform, and some pieces have been deleted, such as the Workflow part of .NET Services. For a current description, take a look at the updated version of my paper Introducing the Windows Azure Platform (formerly called Introducing the Azure Services Platform).

Is this the end of changes in this technology? Probably not--there may well be more updates before it's generally available later this year. Still, if you care about cloud computing, keeping up with Microsoft's cloud platform isn't a bad thing to do.

Azure Speaking Tour: US Dates

2009-09-13T19:20:00.000-07:00

I'm spending most of the next couple of months on a Microsoft-sponsored speaking tour focused on the Windows Azure platform. The US cities and dates are:

Boston: Sep. 18
Chicago: Sep. 21
Reston: Sep. 23
Dallas: Sep. 28
Mountain View: Oct. 29

Many of the events are invitation-only (and I don't control the invite list). Not all of them are, however, so if you're interested in Azure, I hope to see you there.

During the first few weeks of October, I'll be speaking in Europe, Japan, and India. I'll post the cities and dates for these as soon as they're all firm.

Is SOA Failing? A 2008 Interview

2009-08-14T12:18:00.000-07:00

I've avoided commenting much on the collapse of SOA. This is partly because I've been focused on other things, like cloud computing. It's also because I wanted to avoid colliding too much with the Oracle David Chappell, whose perspective on this issue has been somewhat different than mine. Plenty of people were out there making the points that I would have made, and so adding to the confusion didn't seem to have much value.

Still, I've just run across a video interview that I recorded quite a while ago (June 2008). It's a conversation with my friend Ted Neward, and it's largely about why SOA doesn't work in most organizations. It's more than a year old, but I'd say the same things today.

Somebody suggested to me that what "SOA" really stood for was "Suckered Once Again". This is a little harsh--there really is some value in these ideas. It's clear, though, that this value is nowhere near as large as we'd hoped.

New ITG Series Book: Understanding SCA

2009-07-20T13:41:00.000-07:00

One of the things I do is act as series editor for Addison-Wesley's Independent Technology Guides. The latest book in this series, Understanding SCA (Service Component Architecture), has just been published. Written by Jim Marino and Michael Rowley, it's like all the other books in the ITG series: an intro to an important new area.

We sometimes describe the series as containing the first book a developer should read and the only book that developer's manager needs to read. Toward this end, Understanding SCA provides a broad overview of the topic along with enough depth to give you a solid grasp of the basics.

I continue to believe that SCA gets less attention than it should (including from the vendors that claim to support it). Perhaps the publication of Jim and Mike's book will help change this. SCA is unquestionably an interesting technology.

Windows Azure and ISVs: A Guide for Decision Makers

2009-07-14T15:16:00.000-07:00

New platforms, including Windows Azure, are successful only if people write applications for them. This implies that one of the most important audiences for Windows Azure--maybe the most important--is independent software vendors (ISVs). Just as ISVs have adapted to new platforms in the past, they now need to decide how to adapt to cloud platforms like Windows Azure.

To help them sort through the options, I've written a Microsoft-sponsored paper (available here) that's aimed at ISV decision makers. My goal in the paper is to explain how and why ISVs might use a cloud platform like Windows Azure, as well to illuminate some of the challenges.

Using the cloud certainly isn't appropriate for every app and every ISV. Still, ignoring this new platform style strikes me as potentially suicidal. There's no way to avoid coming to grips with this emerging world.

Good Books

2009-07-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

In the last few months, I’ve run across lots of good technical books. Here are a few of my favorites:

- RESTful .NET, by Jon Flanders. Like most former SOAPafarians, I’ve come to be a big believer in the value of REST. SOAP still has value, but a RESTful approach is better in plenty of situations. Microsoft’s WCF added explicit REST support a while ago, and Jon’s book is the best introduction I’ve seen to building RESTful services in .NET. Full disclosure: I wrote the foreword to this book, and I was really happy to do it. Jon is just great at what he does.

- Programming Entity Framework, by Julia Lerman. Any technology that attempts to provide an object/relational mapping seems to attract controversy, and the ADO.NET Entity Framework is no exception. Whatever your view of the technology, though, you need to get this book if you care at all about the area. Julie provides a very coherent high-level description, along with as much detail (nearly 800 pages) as you’re ever likely to need.

- Microsoft.NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise, by Dino Esposito and Andrea Saltarello. Anybody who is or aspires to be a .NET architect should buy and read this book, right now. To my knowledge, there’s nothing else like it available, and it fills a gaping hole in the .NET world.

- 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, edited by Richard Monson-Haefel. I have an embarrassing fondness for books that are full of short, independent essays, especially when they’re on a topic I deeply care about. This book, written by dozens of different people, is a collection of maxims with supporting descriptions on the general theme of software architecture. Like me, you’ll probably disagree with many of them, but hey—that’s half the fun of reading a book like this.

The Microsoft Application Platform: A Perspective

2009-06-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

I spoke at a Microsoft conference in Holland last month, and a video of one of the talks I gave is now online. Its title is The Microsoft Application Platform: A Perspective, and it covers a potpourri of different things: the relationship between application platforms and business strategy, a simple model for thinking about application platforms today, a look at the on-premises and cloud platforms of various vendors using this model, and more.

Now that I think about it, a better title for this session might have been Things David Thinks are Interesting in the Application Platform World Today.

Perspectives on Application Lifecycle Management

2009-06-11T21:50:00.000-07:00

The first of the four short papers I wrote recently on ALM, What is Application Lifecycle Management?, was published a few weeks ago. The other three are also now available. They are:

Application Lifecycle Management and Business Strategy

Application Lifecycle Management as a Business Process

Tools for Team Development: Why Vendors are Finally Getting It Right

All four were sponsored by Microsoft, but they're not about Microsoft technologies. Instead, they're intended to help IT decision makers think about ALM in a broad sense.

IT innovation is fundamental to creating new value in the world, and ALM is fundamental to IT innovation. Understanding this topic and getting good at it ought to be on the top of every IT organization's agenda.

On Being Independent

2009-06-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

If you're interested in working as a technology consultant, either on your own or for a consulting firm, I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of Aaron Erickson's book The Nomadic Developer: Surviving and Thriving in the World of Technology Consulting. It's a first-rate description of the consulting world, looked at from many different angles. Anybody who's even considering this career path ought to buy this book.

The book's last chapter is a collection of short essays contributed by people who've made a career in consulting, including me. Addison-Wesley, the book's publisher, gave me permission to post my contribution. Called On Being Independent, it's available here.

An Update to Introducing the Azure Services Platform

2009-06-01T06:55:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has made some important updates to various parts of the Azure Services Platform. Accordingly, I've updated the overview white paper I wrote on Azure last fall. The new version is available here.

The biggest change is in SQL Data Services, which now will provide a standard relational datastore. This is really important, as the absence of relational storage was a gaping hole in the original announcement. It's great to see that Microsoft is fixing this.