Oracle Lowers Expectations

I was floored when Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun after Sun's deal with IBM fell apart. I never saw Oracle buying Sun in a million years – too much reliance on hardware revenue. Then, Oracle announced this week that they intend to purchase Virtual Iron Software. It seems that Oracle is serious about lowering their influence in the software technology ecosystem. They are going after the lower layers of the infrastructure, and they are putting their money where their mouth is in order to put some real assets into the battle for the next generation, virtualized datacenter.

Sun provides some terrific infrastructure assets in the form of the Solaris operating system, the ZFS file system, the Java programming language, and several other lesser known projects that are nonetheless useful technology in assembling a world class datacenter infrastructure. I actually believe that Solaris is not so relevant as an operating system (too difficult to do the driver work for all the variations in X86 hardware) as it will be relevant as a collection of useful system software and engineering expertise for delivering innovation and support. If you have not seen Sun's investment in this area, do some research on the Image Packaging System. It is Sun's implementation of the rPath approach for tailoring the operating system to the needs of an application (JeOS) and providing robust lifecycle management – they even wrote it in python, not java, to make it easier to mimic rPath's features.

Virtualization is going to change the notion of the operating system, and Solaris will get torn apart into a series of useful components and support libraries that will be attached as JeOS to various applications that will run on a cloud of virtualized infrastructure (witness Amazon EC2). The lines between Linux, Solaris, and other open system components will blur. This outcome is a good one for Oracle because it is very disruptive to the existing providers of one size fits all, general purpose operating systems. Especially if Oracle follows through on their commitment to virtualization as evidenced by their acquisition of Virtual Iron.

Virtual Iron was an early entrant into the hypervisor space – behind VMware but ahead of XenSource. They never really got out of the gate from a marketing perspective, but they always had some useful technology for managing virtual infrastructure. If Oracle makes a strong commitment to Xen as well as the management interface for controlling virtual infrastructure, they could definitely emerge as the strong contender to take on VMware in this market. I do not believe Citrix has a strong commitment to the datacenter infrastructure market (they prefer the desktop with a strong Microsoft alliance), Red Hat is far behind in market adoption with their late commitment to KVM in lieu of Xen, and Microsoft has so much anxiety over Google that worrying about VMware is likely lower on the list of priorities.

The race to the bottom of the software stack just became more interesting yet again. With Oracle continuing to raise the bar with lower expectations, it will be fun to watch the feeding frenzy for the assets that will win the hearts and minds of those datacenter customers that are certain to embrace virtualization and cloud as the new architecture for scalable, elastic computing.

Cloud Application Management - Agile, Lean, Lightweight

The acquisition of Hyperic by SpringSource got me thinking about the next generation of application delivery and management for cloud applications. At first, I was cynical about this combination – two small companies with common investors combining resources to soldier on in a tough capital environment. While this cynical thinking probably has a kernel of truth to it, the more I thought about the combination the more I thought that it makes sense beyond the balance sheet implications. Indeed, I believe the future of application delivery and management will combine agile development with lean resource allocation and lightweight management. This new approach to application delivery and management is one that complements the emerging cloud architecture for infrastructure.

Agile development, with its focus on rapid releases of new application functionality, requires a programming approach that is not overly burdened with the structure of J2EE and EJB. Spring, Rails, Grails, Groovy, Python all represent the new approach – placing a premium on quick delivery of new application functionality. Application functionality takes center stage, displacing the IT infrastructure dominance of the legacy application server oriented approach. Developers will use what works to deliver the application functionality instead of using what works for the IT organization's management framework. The new approach does have implications for scalability, but we will get to that issue in a moment.

Lean is one of the newer terms emerging to describe the future of application delivery. I first referenced lean as an IT concept by relating it to the lean approach for manufacturing operations in a blog post about a year ago. With lean application delivery, applications scale horizontally to consume the infrastructure resources that they require based upon the actual demand that they are experiencing. The corollary is that they also contract to release resources to other applications as demand subsides. This “lean” approach to resource allocation with dynamic scaling and de-scaling is what a cloud architecture is all about – elasticity. Rather than optimizing the code to “scale up” on an ever bigger host, the code remains un-optimized but simple – scaling out with cheap, variable cost compute cycles when the peaks in demand require more capacity. Giving back the capacity when the peaks subside.

With the lean approach for resource allocation, a lightweight management approach that measures only a few things replaces the old frameworks that attempt to measure and optimize every layer in an ever more complex infrastructure stack. If the service is under stress due to demand, add more instances until the stress level subsides. If the service is under extremely light load, eliminate resources until a more economical balance is struck between supply and demand. If an instance of a service disappears, start a new one. In most cases, you don't even bother figuring out what went wrong. It costs too much to know everything. This lightweight approach for management makes sense when you have architected your applications and data to be loosely coupled to the physical infrastructure. Managing application availability is dramatically simplified. Managing the physical hosts becomes a separate matter, unrelated to the applications, and is handled by the emerging datacenter OS as described by VMware or the cloud provider in the case of services like those provided by Amazon AWS.

Take a look at the rPath video on this topic. I think it reinforces the logic behind the SpringSource and Hyperic combination. It rings true regarding the new approach that will be taken for rapid application delivery and management in a cloud infrastructure environment. Applications and data will be loosely coupled to the underlying infrastructure, and agile development, lean resource allocation, and lightweight management will emerge as the preferred approach for application delivery and management.