random thoughts

ok so its been almost few weeks that I am involved with cloud computing domain or at least looking into Amazon as my first cloud infrastructure & I hate to see there are so many arguments about what cloud should or should not be. Instead I think if there is a collective focus as to how to make the new concept acceptable by end users would make the time spent worth it.
Also I have already integrated my product with GoGrid API & seems to be a useful features when it comes to managing multiple vendor cloud environments. So cheers for all who have been involved in cloud zone, lets make the best out of it. Will be releasing my product for beta phase soon at www.attribo.com hope it solves at least some issues when it comes to actually managing the day to day admin tasks.

automating the cloud management

ok its been 2 weeks I have been exhaustively looking into offering a business solution based off cloud solution providers, though most of the conversation about cloud have been in terms of good/bad kind of debate & after going through all frustrating threads I finally myself jumped into coding frenzy once again, for various reasons I choose to dig into Amazon API's & build a management application to manage Amazon, keep an eye for www.attribo.com which I will be releasing soon for public usage, my intention is to make Amazon easy to understand for any NON Administrator or a general audience because thats where the main user base exist.

Infrastructure as a Service

just few hours back I wrote this article & already we have a best usecase where in IaaS providers will gain , http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/30/congress.website/index.html
this is exactly the LIVE unpresedented, un anticipated user bombardment which could happen to any application available online/internet, I feel if they had a IaaS solution they would have easily scaled up instaed of taking the site down , so in this case both the parties are in loss i.e. the visitiors who should have been able to view the legislative document which they could not & the gov in itself was not able to server its own stakeholders (citizens) who have the rights towards the service offered.

Honestly even though I have mastered the programming side of the IT world I get sleepless when it comes to deployments & managing the applications designed, be it the 24x7 up time, faster response, or scalability issues it always feel being challenged by the unknowns of this ONLINE WORLD of inter connected applications. Good news though now that services like Hadoop, Amazon EC2, SQS, SimpleDB or evn FPS it has shifted the power back to the developers in terms of getting to design & deploy scalable & expandable infrastructure on demand which I feel will make my job much easier when it comes to deploy on EC2/S3 as a file system while run the applications as an AMI (amazon instance), essentially that is helping a common developer by abstracting the low/system level challenges into fragmented API's those are easily understandable & usable within shorter span of time & that too without having to be the master of all the low level transactions. even though amazon has been building these systems since last few years I think we are on verge of seeing an exponential growth for companies & end users (programmers) who can build & be successful with very high end solutions, & in case they even remotely FAIL (obviously for the solution use case they tackle) they can retry/realign their product without having any impact on the infrastructure investments (which are base don how much you use ) & is bare minimum even in terms of $100 & NOT Millions what we have seen getting evaporated because of above issues.

Only things that concerns me are that while accessing these on "demand business objects" off the cloud we end up paying PER FETCH that could mean that the objects are expensive till they are ALIVE, so I am giving it a try to understand how much of cost advantage it is to manage a BUSINESS OBJECT off & on cloud based platform. Though initial cost seems to be minuscule though over time the archived data would becomes more expensive (I guess) which could be a major issue for large enterprises who have to archive huge chunks of data for Sarbens Oxley or any other corporate obligations....

Cloud Computing

having seen the traditional software development efforts over the last 12+yrs & having seen the way we always have common development issues in terms of supporting the product on the server side & the object data store which is of utmost importance to scale the application & also offering the backend support for the business data that is being transacted day in & day out.This demands a greater team of resources who have expertise handling the server side & transaction level details(OS, Server Hardware, Databases, Front/GUI API etc).
Flash forward to 2008 & we are already seeing great support to Cloud or "Platform as a Service" models giving breather to groups of innovators who have been delaying the efforts due to failed teams or expensive resources, personally I have been involved with metadata based applications & support the cloud model by heart, have always tried to project that companies do not need a team of IT developers to design/develope/maintain day to day business applications, Amazon EC2/S3 & other upcoming data storage as well as PaaS Services will make it easy & cost effective for all to build/deploy/ & maintain applications in cloud with minimal IT resources/teams.
contact me on vshintre@definee.com if you are looking for a cloud/PaaS application developer

SalesForce Integration

Sharing few thoughts that crossed my mind while integrating SalesForce web services API, overall I loved the ease & clear documentations as to SFObjects & their detailed usecases, building SOAP binding API with java was quick with Axis wsdl2java, also saleforce developer account setup helped to test the api calls without impacting the live site, though only hitch was that for developer account only 2 accounts (whic is understandable) are allowed to be ACTIVE though the API allows CRUD on non ACTIVE SFObjects,
feel free to get in touch with me at vshintre@definee.com if you need a SalesForce Integration expert,

SaaS Integration

Lately have been agressively doing SaaS application integration for my client. Have come across vendors allowing integration using xml & various flavour of soap integration, best of the breeds so far I have seen is the Salesforce integration API, we were up & running with all integration business needs within days & not weeks, still for some reasons there are vendors who offer web services in a custom pattern like WebEx which more or less is a xml over http/https , no object binding adds an extra step to marshal/de-remarshal objects using either a custom or standard/open source xml data/document convertor like Apache xmlbeans which does a greater automation converting objects defined in xsd to java bean patterns making it a breez when it comes to parsing xml http request & response from xml server.....

contact me at vshintre@definee.com if you are looking for a webex integration expert.

Metadata based application design

Have been instrumental in designing & developing metadata based enterprise applications. Now that SaaS & PaaS services are being offered by major vendors we are moving away from traditional product development models.Given the cost advantage along with the application infrastructure maintenance benefits I feel cloud computing is here to stay, so enterprise on demand is a reality.From CRM, Email, to hosted data services like Amazon s3 building a product offering seems like a click away, which I think will boost greater innovation & bring more competitive vendors in the market giving cost advantage to clients. So 3 cheers to metadata & multi tenant platforms, I feel the multi tenant should extend to multi technology so that 1 is not bound by the platform limitations, though the integration seems open ended via web services & xml the end user should have a choice to deploy the app using PaaS while choosing the technology he wants. that way he has the option to keep his product development both in sync on & off PaaS/SaaS frameworks.
Contact me if you are looking for a Web Services & metadata expert on vshintre@definee.com

Integrate SaaS based applications

Integration has been an ever growing pain point for every enterprise , small -mid- large organizations have to innovate always in terms to keep their business agile & productive.With growing support & interest among organizations to use SaaS based applications for business usecases its also in turn becoming nearly insane for their IT teams to manage resources across these apps. This is where integration solution provider has the challenge to bring out a solution with focus for both to support the existing challenges for a management solution while extending the same to incorporate & manage SaaS based provisioning. Companies which has been seemlessely successfull in offering a solution keeping both the above pain points. So be it a Active directory to be synced with the Sales Force platform or be it a ADP HR/WebEx integration it takes days (not months) for any companies to get it deployed & gain the benefit of automating their integration on both with traditional data sources & SaaS ( cloud) based apps.

why SaaS matters...

With failed integration process over & over again enterprises are way too cautious when it comes to going through yet again an integration.Though things have changed & from a rigid, ad hoc based integration now we have a more flexible & cost effective integration solution using web services & SOAP.Along with companies turning to hosted on-demand applications for various reasons (cost effectiveness & no management overheads) & with a built in support for SOAP by SaaS providers has made it much more easier to integrate end to end with onsite/on premises applications. this has given way to solutions providers to incorporate various business models like SaaS(software as a service), PaaS(platform as a service) & now with cloud computing in picture its even a CaaS(computation as a service) option easily available. So i guess eventually all enterprises now can be virtually on line/on internet with minimal IT teams deployed in house.