A New IT World

It’s official – we can now announce the new writing gig I’ve been hinting at.

From the start of September Mary Branscombe and I will be looking after the Server and Networking sections of IT Pro. Not only that, we’ll also be running a joint blog on the IT Pro site.

On a more formal note, we’ll be doing several news stories a week, and a similar number of features a month – so we’ll be looking for plenty of press releases and people to talk to.

Any PRs with relevant clients, please, get in touch – we’re starting to work on September right now!

We’re not dropping any of our other regular writing. We’ll just be busier…

tags: it+pro, writing, servers, networks

I wrote up my thoughts on Amazon’s EC2 for IT Pro.

Amazon has now added a new layer to its utility computing platform with the Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2. S3 redefined the pricing model for utility storage, and EC2 looks set to do the same for utility and grid compute resources.

You should all give Mary the credit for the pun in the strap…

It also looks as though we’ll have some very interesting writing news to announce next week. Stay tuned to this channel!

Amazon is launching a new service – the Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2 to its friends).

Like S3, its storage service, EC2 is a “cloud” service, treating compute resources as a commodity that can be charged for as a utility. Machine images are used to handle applications – with templates available to ease configuration. Amazon is currently supporting Fedora Core 3 and 4 Linux OSes with a 2.6 kernel, though it says any 2.6 kernel–based distribution should work. Each image is the equivalent of:

a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.

S3 will be used for storage. Pricing is good, too, especially when compared to Sun’s $1/CPU/Hour:

• Pay only for what you use.
• $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
• $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

Worth looking at as a prototyping facility, or as a source of quick compute power when required.

It’s only limited beta to start with, though. So don’t start piling on to it yet!

There’s a FAQ here.

Crossposted to Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff.

Mary and I will be in and around San Francisco, San Jose, Silicon Valley and the Bay Area at the beginning of October.

If you’re a PR or a company representative, get in touch, as we’re looking for technology companies to visit whilst we’re there.

We’re interested in everything from enterprise architecture to desktop applications, with a particular interest in mobile and social technologies, as well as tools for managing service oriented architectures.

Want to give a US client exposure in the UK? Drop us a line!

[This is something in the way of an experiment to see if I can use this blog as a tool for handling pitches and RFIs.]

I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with Simon Phipps, Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer. You can read some of it here at IT Pro .

Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps has announced the next stage of the open sourcing of Java in London this week, adding Java ME to the road map. Open source versions of both Java ME and Java SE should be available by the end of the year.

While there were no actual dates confirmed, Phipps went into more detail on the open source roadmap for Sun’s various software platforms. Describing it as a gradual process, he detailed Sun’s commitment to providing an open source software stack, from OS to Java, and in the future, its middleware.

We also talked about the missing element in many Open Source projects: governance.

While one of the keys to Open Source is the license, another is just how the project is run. And Simon sees one big problem facing many open source projects.

It’s all very well being open source, but with only one person with commit rights (the ability to make changes to the code) to the code base, if the project becomes successful, they’re going to become overwhelmed very quickly. Things get worse when commit rights are concentrated in a single project. A project run that like that (and there are many many of them, including some very high profile ones indeed) is more like Microsoft’s shared source programme than anything else. There have even been cases when experts on a piece of code have left the company that sponsors the project, and have immediately lost any rights to working with the codebase…

The really successful projects, like Linux and Apache, have distributed commit rights, and a range of people from many different organisations adding code. That’s what Phipps wants to do with Sun’s open source projects. Open Solaris is certainly successful, and has spawned several different distributions (including one that mixes Debian with a Solaris kernel), and he hopes to the same with Java.

Cross Posted to Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

tags: sun, simon+phipps, it+pro, open+source, java

Unfolding Origami: The UMPC at IDF

Originally uploaded by sbisson.

A series of photographs of UMPC prototypes and concept devices, taken at Intel’s IDF Spring event in San Francisco.

1. UMPC at work, 2. UMPC at rest, 3. Concept UMPC, 4. Concept UMPC, 5. Concept UMPC, 6. The Real UMPC, 7. The Real UMPC

A fascinating device – qand one that will make an excellent mobile client for service architectures.

It’s a truism of the service world that open APIs mean more developers working with your public services.

Google is a good example of this, and it’s doing it again by opening up its talk service with an interesting set of functions as described on TechCrunch .

Libjingle looks very interesting (and probably something for me to think about with my Server Management messaging editor hat on). Quickly looking at Google’s announcement we see a collection of tools that could make it a lot easier to build collaboration applications:

We are releasing this source code as part of our ongoing commitment to promoting consumer choice and interoperability in Internet-based real-time-communications. The Google source code is made available under a Berkeley-style license, which means you are free to incorporate it into commercial and non-commercial software and distribute it.

In addition to enabling interoperability with Google Talk, there are several general purpose components in the library such as the P2P stack which can be used to build a variety of communication and collaboration applications. We are eager to see the many innovative applications the community will build with this technology.

Below is a summary of the individual components of the library. You can use any or all of these components.

• base – low-level portable utility functions.
• p2p – The p2p stack, including base p2p functionality and client hooks into XMPP.
• session – Phone call signaling.
• third_party – Non-Google components required for some functionality.
• xmllite – XML parser.
• xmpp – XMPP engine.

Looks interesting.

The related Google Talkabout blog has just gone on to my blogroll…

I’ve written a bit on the idea of stacks as a key component of next generation computing environments, but they’re only part of the story. Once you’ve implemented a stack, and are using it to deliver services, you need to group the services together, and add a management layer to show usage and predict future operational needs. The resulting architecture can best be described as a platform – as it’s the foundation for a range of SOA processes.

Amazon has been slowly turning itself into a platform, and they’ve just turned their search engine into a public managed platform. Alexa‘s been around a long while, but it’s turning itself into a set of services – managed (and priced) using a utility computing model.

An interesting move, from an SOA pioneer.

While I noodle away at my thoughts on licensing for the next generation of IT systems, Sun is being suprisingly innovative. Not only are they moving their software sales model to support services, but they’re also using the same model to get developers onto their hardware.

In the US you can get a shiny new 64-bit Opteron powered Sun Ultra 20 Workstation for only $30 a month (payable a year in advance). Sign up for 3 years support for Sun’s OS and dev tools, and the hardware comes free.

An interesting approach It’ll also be interesting to see how the rest of the Java tools world responds. Will BEA start giving away its tools, to drive people to the AquaLogic and WebLogic platforms?

Time will tell.

Richard Veryard has some interesting things to say about reuse in the SOA world.

It’s a problem I’ve been thinking about, too – but from a very different direction.

Reuse isn’t just about using the same piece of code again and again across your business’ many applications. It’s also about ripping and replacing code without affecting all the applications that use it. In the past reuse has been avoided as this element of the philosophy could have undue effects on key business operations…

SOA changes the status quo.

The key seems to be that effective SOA demands what I think of as “interface first” design. Often thought of as “design by contract”, this approach fixes the properties, methods and events offered by a service. What it doesn’t do is define the code that delivers the service elements. If an application only needs to be aware of a service’s interfaces, then an application instance can be switch from using service V1.0 to V1.1 without affecting operation, as long as V1.1 offers the same service interfaces as V1.0.

A major change, V 2.0 could still offer V 1.0 interfaces at the old service URI, with new functions at an alternative service URI.

Rip and replace without affecting consuming applications. A definite benefit of the SOA world.

It appears from this blog entry that Microsoft are starting using their Avalanche P2P distribution network in anger…

With the shift to two year release cycles for stack components, and monthly CTPs, I suspect it won’t be long before this becomes common practice for all betas and for MSDN.

It appears from this blog entry that Microsoft are starting using their Avalanche P2P distribution network in anger…

With the shift to two year release cycles for stack components, and monthly CTPs, I suspect it won’t be long before this becomes common practice for all betas and for MSDN.

Windows Live is to Windows as Xbox Live is to Xbox.

You can’t have Windows Live without Windows – but you can have Windows without Windows Live.

This is Microsoft showing that it has a presence on all the layers of the next generation computing stack. It’s a logical move – and nothing to do with Microsoft’s rivalry with Google. The MSN brand needs reworking – and bringing elements of it closer to the Windows platform makes a lot of sense, especially with the Vista wave of tools pushing Microsoft’s XAML-powered Smart Client vision.

I wonder how much the live.com domain cost the folk at Redmond?

Windows Live is to Windows as Xbox Live is to Xbox.

You can’t have Windows Live without Windows – but you can have Windows without Windows Live.

This is Microsoft showing that it has a presence on all the layers of the next generation computing stack. It’s a logical move – and nothing to do with Microsoft’s rivalry with Google. The MSN brand needs reworking – and bringing elements of it closer to the Windows platform makes a lot of sense, especially with the Vista wave of tools pushing Microsoft’s XAML-powered Smart Client vision.

I wonder how much the live.com domain cost the folk at Redmond?

Preferahbly as many as you can. Then you’ve got a really useful service that people can build into their applications.

Here’s one to look forward to: The BBC’s programme catalogue.

It turns out there’s a huge database that’s been carefully tended by a gang of crack BBC librarians for decades. Nearly a million programmes are catalogued, with descriptions, contributor details and annotations drawn from a wonderfully detailed controlled vocabulary.

7 million rows of data going back to the 1930s. Wow.

Preferahbly as many as you can. Then you’ve got a really useful service that people can build into their applications.

Here’s one to look forward to: The BBC’s programme catalogue.

It turns out there’s a huge database that’s been carefully tended by a gang of crack BBC librarians for decades. Nearly a million programmes are catalogued, with descriptions, contributor details and annotations drawn from a wonderfully detailed controlled vocabulary.

7 million rows of data going back to the 1930s. Wow.

Here’s a fascinating document from Microsoft Research detailing work on Singularity. It’s an OS designed to support languages like Java and C# – so has been designed to support partitioned memory spaces, and to handle dependable code.

SIPs are the OS processes on Singularity. All code outside the kernel executes in a SIP. SIPs differ from conventional operating system processes in a number of ways:

• SIPs are closed object spaces, not address spaces. Two Singularity processes cannot simultaneously access an object. Communications between processes transfers exclusive ownership of data.
• SIPs are closed code spaces. A process cannot dynamically load or generate code.
• SIPs do not rely on memory management hardware for isolation. Multiple SIPs can reside in a physical or virtual address space.
• Communications between SIPs is through bidirectional, strongly typed, higher-order channels. A channel specifies its communications protocol as well as the values transferred, and both aspects are verified.
• SIPs are inexpensive to create and communication between SIPs incurs low overhead. Low cost makes it practical to use SIPs as a fine-grain isolation and extension mechanism.
• SIPs are created and terminated by the operating system, so that on termination, a SIP’s resources can be efficiently reclaimed.
• SIPs executed independently, even to the extent of having different data layouts, run-time systems, and garbage collectors.

SIPs are not just used to encapsulate application extensions. Singularity uses a single mechanism for both protection and extensibility, instead of the conventional dual mechanisms of processes and dynamic code loading. As a consequence, Singularity needs only one error recovery model, one communication mechanism, one security policy, and one programming model, rather than the layers of partially redundant mechanisms and policies in current systems. A key experiment in Singularity is to construct an entire operating system using SIPs and demonstrate that the resulting system is more dependable than a conventional system.

Something to keep an eye on – this could be the type of approach needed to deliver modular OSes that run on hypervisors.

Newsnight will be featuring a segment on the Web 2.0 movement and Flock in particular.

While I’m a definite Web 2.0 sceptic, I think Flock is an interesting example of a next generation client application, providing a single (relatively) consistent user interface to a number of different applications that expose functionality via web services and other open APIs such as ATOM.