The Two Most Desirable Features of a Platform as a Service

Big Data?

Multitenancy?

Uber DB scaling?

Mad Hadoopishness?

Faster app development?

Universal Social Connectivity?

Not so much.  Some platform or other claims all of those things, but the two most desirable features of a PaaS appear to be revenue generation and commodity pricing, not necessarily in that order.

Let me first say that I’ve come to view AppStores as PaaS offerings of a sort, and their ability to generate revenue for developers drives those developers into their arms.  This also applies to more traditional PaaS offerings such as Salesforce’s Force.com.  As nearly as I can tell talking to folks and scanning the blogosphere for activity, people write for Force.com either because they need to integrate with the Salesforce CRM app or because they want the revenue tailwind you can get via Force.com.

The commodity pricing piece applies to what many prefer to call IaaS, or Infrastructure as a Service, with  Amazon Web Services being the most widely used example so far.  Let’s go ahead and keep them in our PaaS list for this discussion and ignore the IaaS moniker.  If we start cutting out things like Amazon and Force.com for various reasons, there is so little left it’s hard to talk about it.  I would submit we may have divided up the market into too many A-A-S’s a little prematurely without waiting to see what would stick.

This is the gist of my problem, BTW.  There’s been plenty of time for PaaS to get big, but it is kind of lumbering along.  Yes, we get things like Heroku.  Doesn’t that qualify largely under the Commodity category though?  Force.com we’ve already talked about and Amazon too.  But in this Cloudy-Cloudy-*aaSy-*aaSy world, what else is flying high?  There’s room for a ton of things, but you have to solve the revenue and commodity checkboxes first.

Here is the problem for all you would-be PaaS vendors out there–it’s darned hard to get design wins if your platform involves heavy lock-in, heavy rewriting, too much cost, or isn’t otherwise a requirement for a Minimum Viable Product.   Yup, there’s that darned MVP concept rearing its ugly head again.  The trouble is, it’s no longer just something the Cool Kids bandy about while sipping lattes.  It’s become something of a requirement for survival and an article of How Things Are Done In The Valley.  You can’t get capital to fool around with fancy products any more, so you have to go MVP all the way because you’re likely starving on your own nickel until you do.  In addition to the VC’s, Agile thinking and a general suspicion of Premature Optimizaton have really made it hard to sell Feature Density.  The trouble with that list of things at the top is they’re either not that commonly needed, they involve dealing with scale you should be so lucky as to get to (and are therefore not MVP material), or they solve problems you’re convinced you can easily solve as you’re starting your journey (e.g. multitenant).  Yes, those problems are harder than you think, but it doesn’t matter.  They don’t look harder when you’re eyeing what it takes to get an MVP off the ground.

PaaS vendors, you have a couple of choices available to deal with this.  You can ignore it, argue that it’s early days yet and your time will come.  It’s pretty hard to dispute that because it is early days yet.  But don’t get too target fixated at such an early stage either lest some upstart take the early days away.  You can still be Zucked pretty darned easily precisely because it is early days.  Note: To be “Zucked” is to be treated to the same fait Facebook dished out to MySpace.  Call it Fast Follower on Steroids with a Heavy Case of Rabies.  It’s not a pleasant thing to happen to your life’s dream.

Okay, so what’s the alternative for would-be PaaS Masters of the Universe?

Hey, this is a good time for the Cloud.  You know that.  We hear less and less whining about security and all that.  Clever marketers are even now letting IT get just a little bit infected with “Private Clouds”, a potent Trojan Horse strategy to win over their hearts and minds.  Whatever it takes, resistance is futile.  Once their apps and data are on my servers it’s only a matter of reconfiguring the subnets and voila!  All your Apps are be in my Cloud!

Given that is the case, there may be some first mover, network effect, and momentum issues to think about.  In other words, stop being so darned pure to your vision and line up as many customers as you can as fast as you can.  That’s how we win in this part of the Bubble, um I mean Business, Cycle.

What the heck does that mean?

I’m glad you asked, but it should be obvious:  PaaS vendors need to embrace these two desirable features and nail them before worrying about much else.  There are two simple questions:

1.  Are you directly delivering revenue producing traffic to your customers by virtue of some aspect of your PaaS?

2.  Do you have an offering that lets people buy into some commodity-priced-let’s-get-started-without-boiling-the-ocean version of your PaaS?

If you do, Hallelujah Brothers and Sisters!  You have a shot at the promised land and you can now start looking at more potent differentiation rather than table stakes.  If you don’t, back up and let’s figure something out, because this PaaS stuff can turn into a Darwin Test if you’re not careful.

There is room for innovation on the commodity side, but it’s getting harder.  The days may be gone when you can deliver commodity infrastructure.  Storage and CPU like S3 and EC2, in other words.  If you aren’t already spun up and doing good things, you need to start skating where the puck is going to be.  I have offered up my PaaS-as-bite-sized-pieces strategy before (Sell the Condiments, not the Sandwiches).  Check it out.  Lots to commoditize there.

There is also room for tons of innovation on the “delivering revenue producing traffic” front.  We’ve seen it for mobile platforms, in fact, one could argue the appstores are the defining element there coupled with the relative desirability of the platforms to their users.  The participants seem to be pretty mercenary about those two related dimensions.  I am mystified about why Amazon, which ought to understand App Stores better than anyone, is not doing so great with their Android App Store and doesn’t appear to have one at all for Amazon Web Services.  The latter is inexcusable.  There’s got to be all sorts of opportunity to create an App Store there.

Salesforce keeps wanting to be a major PaaS vendor, but they somehow misunderstand the data they were among the first to collect.  Yes, they do have the revenue producing traffic piece nailed.  But, they seem to be very much in denial about whether that is the main reason people will use Force.com, and totally opposed to solving the commodity issue.  Every time I talk to an entrepreneur or investor that wonders whether they should use Force.com or one of its offshoots, I ask them to consider a simple thought experiment.  Look up Salesforce’s current cost of service as a percentage of revenue.  Take the cost they will be charged to use Force.comand divide by SFDC’s cost of service.  That number is what they must charge to have the same margins as Salesforce, and that assumes they don’t spend another dime on anything else to deliver their service.  Most of the time that makes for a short conversation.  Oh, I didn’t think about it like that.  There’s no way we can be competitive if we have to charge that much.  And so it goes with a lot of other PaaS offerings too, BTW.  Perhaps Heroku is their way of covering both bases and a sign that they do understand.

For other PaaS vendors, maybe there is a sliver of hope.  If you can change that cost of service to be cost of service plus some cost of marketing, because the PaaS will deliver revenue producing traffic, you can afford to pay more.  Heck, Steve Jobs gets 30% just for delivering the traffic and not helping you in much of any other way.

The revenue producing traffic is by far the hardest thing to do.  You can’t materialize it out of thin air.  You either already have a solid traffic stream you can repurpose (that’s what Salesforce did), or you may have to look at partnering opportunities.  For those that have a stream, now is your chance to enter the PaaS business in an interesting way.  Casting eyes around, Adobe is well positioned for this.  Get an AppStore together, Adobe, and link your dev tools and *aaS efforts to it.  There are bound to be others too.  Open Source vendors in the tools business, maybe you have this sort of opportunity as well.  IBM, Oracle, HP, and whomever else this is a huge opportunity for you.  Maybe Cisco too as I think about it.  Trouble is, your Big Sales Force may think it hampers them in some way.  Ignore their parochial interests and charge ahead.  This is a Silver Bullet for PaaS and Cloud ascendancy.

Give it some thought.  It’s high time for some break out PaaS action.

Remember HP’s New Wave? Here We Go Again!

Sam Diaz has gotten clarification on the future of Windows in the light of their Web OS announcements.  It should come as no surprise that Windows isn’t going anywhere, and certainly won’t be replaced by Web OS any time soon.  Instead, HP is saying:

HP will integrate the WebOS experience into Windows, but not through virtualization. He said: “…it will be a combination of taking the existing operating systems and bringing WebOS onto those platforms and making it universal across all of our footprint.”

Sounds great.  Been done before.  Remember HP’s New Wave?  It was a new object-oriented UI shell and mini-platform (we looked at possibly using it for our Windows apps at Borland but declined–not enough value add for the trouble) that HP launched way back in 1989.  They’ve been down this road before of trying to enhance Windows.

It’ll be interesting to see whether it works any better this time around.  Personally, I’m betting against.  The little things it adds that have been demoed so far are all obvious things Microsoft should be building into Windows and in fact will have to build if they want to make their Nokia partnership perform as it should.

This is more or less what happened to New Wave.  It introduced some cool stuff that Redmond promptly scooped up and marginalized through various releases of their own.  It’s good news for Microsoft though.  Their engine is not particularly innovative, but if someone else can show them what to do that’s in a format not too far removed from what they’re familiar with they will grind that stuff out like nobody else.  They’ve needed some of that help, though frankly it has been out there lately and Microsoft hasn’t bitten (Xobni, anyone?). 

Perhaps this will get their attention.

Scoble Discovers Developers are Schizo About New Platforms

I just listened to Scoble’s bar interview of @longview (Nick Long) and @renatto (Paul Robinett), two Dreamworks developers who are building a mobile app of their own.  They’re talking about the Mobile World, and there are some great sound bites coming from the interview.  BTW, the Cinchcast tool he used to do the interview was pretty cool.

These developers conclude Nokia-Apple are “screwed”, Android is the cutting edge, yada, yada.

Some key passages and ideas I’ve paraphrased: 

-  The constant refrain: “No one is developing apps for X”.

-  It’s costly to learn a new platform.  Android has Java.  If you know Java and have to learn Objective-C that’s hard and vice versa.  You have to hire a new programmer.

-  It’ll be hard for developers to straddle 2 platforms and 3 is impossible.  How can there ever be a #3 of any consequence?

-  You have to pay us up front enough so it wouldn’t matter if anyone bought the platform.  Because they can’t guarantee the distribution.

 - Cool is about openness, not about closed.  The big momentum is with Open on Android. 

-  The Cool Kids want to be on the cutting edge, but that’s slowing down a little bit for Apple.

-  When somebody builds the uber cool app on Android first, that shift away from Apple will be here.

-  Scoble’s advice to Microsoft, get rid of Windows and go XBox.  They may have been too long in the bar at this point!

-  What if the Apple store is full of hundreds of thousands of apps, and you’re lost in that sea of apps.  How about a marketing decision to launch on Google first so you stand out?

Takeaways for Once and Future Platform Kings

I am a developer and have worked with developers for my entire career in a variety of different markets.  I’ve also spent a lot of time doing the “impedance match” between marketing/sales and developers, and formulating winning product strategies in new markets.  Let me tell you it is an interesting challenge to juggle all of those balls just because of how the various players think and are motivated.  It’s worth getting behind the sound bites of this interview and understanding the developer, marketer, and strategic implications for companies who want to be Platform Kings.

Let’s start with the marketing / strategic perspective for the mobile world.  It’s all about the apps you have on phones, and Scoble gets this in a prior blog post very eloquently:

Nothing matters in this world more than apps. Write that on your forehead. Write that on the mirror on your bathroom wall. Write that on your car windshield. Whatever it will take so you remember it.

HP execs know this. Google’s execs know this. Everyone in Silicon Valley knows this.

Apps are the ONLY thing that matters now.

Why? Because when a customer, whether in Cape Town or San Francisco or Tel Aviv walks into a store to buy a smartphone they will NOT want to feel stupid.

What makes you feel stupid when buying a Smartphone? Buying one that doesn’t have the apps your friends are taunting you with.

Apps need a platform, so if you’re going anywhere in these markets, you’d better have one that will attract the right apps.  Unfortunately, it’s getting late to try to establish a new platform.  Why?  Because the developers are in control of whether or not apps will appear on your platform, and you will have a hard time attracting them.  Many companies are woefully unprepared for the idea that if they’re in the platform business, they actually have two sets of customers.  First are the people that buy the phones.  Those are the obvious customers, the ones marketers at companies like Nokia have built their entire professional careers learning how to deal with.  Second are the developers that bring the apps.  These are the customers many of these companies have no earthly idea how to deal with, yet they are the gate keepers for the apps.

So how do we think about developers as customers and how do we get them to adopt our platforms?

There are a very limited number of opportunities to attract developers because they are so schizoid about new platforms.  On the one hand, developers really hate having their expert status reset to beginner while they learn a new platform.  They may protest that its cool, they’re always learning new things, they love to learn, yada, yada, but they really hate the nuts and bolts of the learning.  This is a corollary of what happens when you give a developer somebody else’s code to maintain.  The code may have come from their most revered uber geek hero, but if they don’t know that’s the source, their first words on briefly looking over the code will be, “This code is shit–we have to rewrite it.”  Welcome to the real source of NIH.

So what will get a developer to voluntarily surrender his Uber Geek status for the time it takes to learn a new platform? 

There really are only two things.  Either that platform is so hot and sexy they will lose their Uber Geek status anyway if they don’t learn it, or the platform is so successful that profit motive dictates it must be supported.  Are you beginning to see the problem with introducing a new platform?  It hasn’t been around long enough for profit motive to kick in, so you have to make sure it isn’t just a little bit cool, it has to be ultimately way-over-the-top-super-duper-no-kidding-insanely-friggin-UBER COOL. 

This has been Steve Jobs genius.  He has managed to create such platforms multiple times in his career.  That’s no small accomplishment, and I don’t know whether we’ll ever see it again in our lifetimes from someone else.  The Apple II.  The Macintosh.  The iPod.  The iPhone. The iPad.  Dang Steve, that’s gettin’ jiggy with it.

When the corpocracy wants to roll out a new platform, that’s what they’re faced with.  There are a limited number of things the Corpocracy (my term for that faceless Big Business  thing the lady in the Apple 1984 commercial threw her hammer at) can do about this.  The best one is to make their platform absolutely compatible with some other platform so that developers don’t have a long learning curve.  We’ve seen a lot of those kinds of things going on in the industry.  It’s one reason why some things just won’t die.  Sometimes it works to give away the platform, and make it open.  It’s helpful if in the process you can make it as compatible as possible with something developers know.  Enter Android with a lot of Java inside.

That’s about it.  If you can’t make your platform fit those molds, you’re probably not going to be a Platform King.  Not enough developers will learn your stuff no matter how great it is because it was either not sexy enough or didn’t already have a big enough installed base.  The latter, BTW, is why Gordon Moore says it is better to go from app to platform than vice versa.  At least you’ll have the installed base and ecosystem of the app users to drag developers onto the platform.  They come to make the app users happy if there is enough motivation in that.  But this does not necessarily a huge platform success make.  This is the problem Salesforce struggles with in Force.com. 

Getting back to the Scoble interview, are these developers right, is Nokia screwed?  And whither the other mobile platforms?

Because developers have this big speed bump in their willingness to learn new platforms, they will tend to create sub-cultures that don’t communicate very much.  Right now we have a huge division between the Unix + Open Source world and the Windows + .NET world, for example.  Only a very small number of developers can claim to be Uber in both camps.  The vast majority know very little about the camp they are not Uber in, and often hold it in extreme disdain as a result.  But that does not mean they’re right.  It only means you have to understand where those boundaries are and what they mean to the success or failure of your product strategy. 

Translation:  don’t ask a set of developers about whether a platform they will have to learn will succeed unless all you care about is whether they perceive it as cool.  They don’t know much else.  It’s all religion to them.  Despite the fact they are engineers, very few will look at this sort of thing objectively.

In fact, Microsoft may have the only viable alternative platform opportunity that will work for mobile after Apple and Android.  Why?

Because there is a large community of developers who don’t have to relearn their tools.  To the extent the phone platform can minimize relearning and appeal to that group, they’re in.  It would be ideal if Microsoft can also create the commercial reality of a big enough market.  In fact, that will be a requirement in the long run.  But in the short run, Microsoft needs to stimulate some innovative hit apps on the platform that show life and prime the pump.  Steve Ballmer, if you’re listening, that’s the most valuable thing the billions you spend on R&D could purchase.  Bring 3 to 6 hip, really cool, must have apps to your platform so your customers don’t have to feel stupid (ala Scoble and mobile phone apps) and you have a chance.  While you’re waiting for that lightning to strike, at least make sure you have apps that give great experiences for all the key hip web properties out there, such as Facebook and Twitter.  And with whatever cash you have left, make sure your phone platform is minimizing the speed bump for .NET, Windows, and XBox developers to put apps on your phones.

It’s not too late, but it is far from early.

Related Articles

This community of developers who know Microsoft platforms is one of the under-served markets I alluded to in my article saying that Nokia-Microsoft are filling the last of the 3 winning market strategies.

Forget SaaS vs On-Prem, Here are 8 Application Styles to Consider

The EI discussion about Microsoft’s poor handling of Silverlight brought out the different viewpoints swinging. The “RIA was never a good idea” camp was in full force as was the “this confirms everything about HTML5″ and the “Flash is on the same train as Silverlight” camps.

I don’t see these developments nor the evolution of Flash and its strategy as a confirmation that RIA is a bad idea at all, that Flash, at least is going away, or that HTML5 is the answer to all the world’s problems. Whether your RIA consists of Flash widgets embedded in HTML (my favorite RIA strategy for web apps) or AJAX HTML, RIA’s are essential for many kinds of app and HTML5 is years from being a first class choice for that work. There has been too much tendency to conflate every conceivable nuanced app type as one single web app that is best served by one single technology. That way lies crappy UX, high dev costs, and longer lead times to market.

There are new categories of application coming along all the time, and the vast majority haven’t really stopped to think about the evolution of application types and their ecosystems. Let’s forget the ongoing dogfight about Clouds, elasticity, SaaS, and Multitenant for a minute, and have a look at factoring software along some other dimensions.

I see 8 different application design centers, and you choice of which design center to use and which tools and platforms to go with it can matter quite a lot.

#1 Plain Old Desktop (POD) Apps

 

I always loved the term “POTS” = Plain Old Telephone Service, so I’ll borrow the idea for PODs, which are “plain old desktop” apps. This is still a huge business including MS Office and much of what Adobe sells by way of content creation tools. It’s also huge for complex games, though the platform is sufficiently separate we will want a separate category for console games which I won’t get into here.

Typical platforms include the desktop OS–Windows or Mac, and the traditional developer languages such as C# and Java. To deal with the pains of PODs, your app needs to be something that requires too much horsepower for the other architectures as well as a rich User Experience (UX).

#2 Server Software

A command line is a UX, and for some purposes, its even a good UX, so we will count this as an “app” category. It’s like the PODS except there are more languages and OS’s to consider. On the OS side we have Unix in commanding lead (in all of its many flavors) with Windows distantly to the rear. From the langauge side, the world has probably spent more time and effort building an explosion of different evolutionary language branches here than anywhere else. I can’t even begin to list them all, but suffice it to say that when in doubt, you could do a lot worse than to bet on it being a language for server side development. Certainly we can count on Java, C#, and Ruby on Rails as all being in this category.

Some languages are a little bit muddled as to whether they’re server or client languages. PHP is a little of both that mostly errs towards client in my book, but you wouldn’t think of it for server-less apps (if no client is a headless app, are those tail-less apps?). For this app category, we have no UX but a command line, so I’m not sure we’d pick PHP. Put it in the category of helping out Plain old web apps and RIA’s.

#3 Client Server

 

The Client Server model is tried and true and still a huge business, especially for business software. I don’t know how much genuinely new Client Server software is being built anymore. The Cloud and SaaS are a much better model for most applications. Think of Client Server as the somewhat unwieldy combination of a POD and Server Software. Most of what I’ve said for those other styles carries to this one when combined appropriately.

The combination of Desktop, Server, and Client Server are the oldest app styles that are still vigorous today. We’ll call mainframe software a flavor of Server or Client Server. All three are under siege or revolution. Desktop and Client Server are clearly under siege as various web technologies via to take their place. Server is under the dual revolutions of Cloud and Multitenant SaaS. There have been many minor infrastructure revolutions as well as the world transitions from SOAP to REST or decides POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects) make more sense than deep J2EE architectures (let alone CORBA style, Service Bus, and all the rest of that melee).

#4 Plain Old Web (POW) Apps

 

No fancy RIA tech, AJAX or otherwise. This is the modern equivalent of the half duplex 3270 green screen. But, it is lowest common denominator friendly. That means everyone can access it, but the experience may not be great. Save it for times when coverage is more important than satisfaction. Simple UI you just have to get through once in a blue moon is perfect.

The platforms? Who cares. POW apps should use such vanilla HTML they never notice. Tools and languages? Vanilla HTML and whatever your favorite dev tools are for that.

If we add POW apps to the other 3, you really do have the majority of revenue and installed base at present. What follows are newer models that are catching on to a greater or lesser degree. I should add that I see POW as stable and non-controversial, Server as growing but full of revolution, and the other two (Desktop and Client Server) as in decline to greater or lesser degrees.

#5 Rich Internet Apps

RIA’s are web apps that live in the browser but provide a nicer UX than a POW can offer. AJAX, Flash, or Silverlight have to be there for it to count. HTML5 supports this poorly at present, but everyone knows it wants to go here over time.

The “Rich” part of a RIA can boil down to lots of things, so let’s call some out so they don’t go unnoticed. Yes, we will started with Rich User Experience. But what does that mean?

Well, instead of posting a form, you have enough expressiveness that you can actually create new kinds of widgets and respond to user inputs with much more fluidity. We also have rich media, including sound and video to play with, as well as sophisticated ways of manipulating bitmaps to produce animations and art.

However, depending on the RIA platform, you may also experience other “riches.” Flash player delivers a very high performance virtual machine. It isn’t Java-class, but it is darned good. Recently, browser makers have decided performance matters for HTML as well, but it isn’t clear they’re keeping up with Flash. If your RIA has to do some kind of crunching, Flash may help it along. It isn’t just about the high performance VM, there is also the support for more elaborate data structures, which are also helpful where more horsepower is needed.

I have been fascinated by an idea I came up with called “Fat SaaS”.  We live in the multicore era where computers no longer get faster in raw terms, they just get more cores.  At the same time, it is very hard to write software that takes advantage of all those cores.  On the server side, the world has been evolving towards dealing with the issues need to scale large problems onto grids of commodity PC’s as a way to deal with the realities and economics of the multicore era.  On the client side, it seems that machines accrue more and more unused capacity without delivering good reasons for customers to upgrade as often as they used to.

Fat SaaS is an architecture that pushes as much down onto the client as possible and leaves the server farm largely for data storage.  In an extreme Fat SaaS case one could imagine that the clients become the business logic processing grid.  The goal is to tap into the computing resources that lie fallow there, and there are a lot of them.  Most organizations will have more client cores than server cores.

But we digress…

The last bit of “riches” I want to touch on is device independence.  We largely got there for server software, and write once run anywhere is a beautiful thing.  Other than Flash, we are nowhere in sight of it for the client.  This is a sad and embarrassing tale for our industry, and one that developers too often try to power their way through by just writing more code.  Browser incompatibilities are insidious.  As I write this article in WordPress, I’m trying to use their rich text editor.  It runs with varying degrees of success and a little differently on each browser.  Lately, it mostly fails on IE, meaning the UX has not been kept up to snuff.  If they would simply invoke Flash to do one single thing, manage the text editing, they could deliver an identical experience on every browser, not to mention many mobile devices too, though on Apple’s devices they would need an app to do that.

This browser dependence is absolutely the bane of HTML based RIA’s, and I can see no reason why the problems won’t continue with HTML5.  As vendors race to see who can deliver better HTML5 support sooner, keep eyes peeled for the incompatibilities to start.  If they do, that’s a sign that the HTML5 dream is not all its cracked up to be, even in the fullness of time.  It will take some new generation and a bunch of restarted browser implementations to get there.  Meanwhile, Flash will have gained another 5 to 10 years lease on life, despite detractors.

#6 Rich Internet Desktop Apps

RIDs!  A RID is a really cool thing.  It is the web era approach to building desktop apps–we build them with web technology.  Amazingly, nobody seems to have noticed that if you need to run disconnected, or if you want to build an app with web technology that does meaningful things on the desktop, Adobe is the last man standing.

Google killed Gears and Silverlight looks more and more deprecated by the day.  HTML5 is still struggling to get to the minimum RIA bar and will be for years.  What’s a poor RID developer to do, but focus on Flash?

RIDs are fascinating apps, and I would argue your nuts to build any new PODs or Client Server when this model would work. In the area of games, there are amazing developments in 3D coming for Flash Player that will also play to this architecture. Lastly, Ialready mentioned “Fat SaaS”, a model which is ideally suited to RIDs.  The RID just gives the Fat SaaS access to local disk and more of the machine’s facilities.  Fat SaaS work can go on whether the client is connected or not, and a connection can wait until the client needs to connect, which reduces the demand on the Cloud Server Farm still further.

#7 Mobile Apps

MAs are closely related to RID’s, and certainly much better known. The non-HTML RIA platforms are excellent for this purpose, and it is no accident MSFT sees this as Silverlight’s future.  HTML5 doesn’t do enough and it will be years before it does to have real apps stand alone with it. iPhone’s default toolset is basically foisting desktop technology on you to build these apps, and I’m skeptical this is as productive, but the stakes are high enough people deal with it.

#8 Mobile Internet Apps

MIAs:  when you want to live in a browser on a mobile device.  Plenty of data suggests that for apps that are not heavily used, users prefer to consume via browser.  This shouldn’t be controversial as it simply makes sense.  The browser makes it much easier to dip in and out of a lot of apps that you probably never use enough to learn really deeply.  MIAs are a different category than RIAs because like the RIA, there are considerations beyond one-size-fits-all HTML.  However, a MIA could be a RIA MIA (LOL) or a simple HTML MIA.  I won’t bother breaking those two out as new app types–we already have 8 and that’s enough.  The reality is the MIA is a placeholder reminder that you have to do something to make your app palatable on a mobile device lest you have a below par UX.

Conclusion

Have you thought about when to use each of these design centers, what the optimal tool sets are for each, and especially how to weave an all-platform strategy with as little work as possible?

Most haven’t.  I see low expertise in out in the world as much of this is new and very few organizations have so much breadth of experience.  Most of the time organizations start with one design center and move chaotically on to others as targets of opportunity present themselves.

We increasingly live in a world where being on one or a few platforms will not be good enough, and we won’t be able to build for all with organically grown “luck” strategies.  Maybe this is a good time to start thinking through these issues in a systematic way for your organization and its products?

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Recursivity and RWWeb talking about Fat SaaS.

Dell Buys Boomi: Right Inline With My Cloud Strategy

Just read that Dell is buying Cloud data integration company Boomi.  That’s right in line with the focus on data strategy I’ve recommended for Cloud vendors.  I’m not sure how many more companies in this space are available to be picked up.  IBM picked up Cast Iron Systems, which was another great catch.

Just a refresher on why these companies are so pivotal, because it amounts to two key observations:

First, Clouds have latency, which creates a network effect.  It’s easier for apps in the same Cloud to talk to each other than it is to go across Clouds.  Hence Clouds are going to accrete applications based on which ones need to talk to each other.

Second, in the SaaS world, integration is a tremendous competitive and transaction friction issue.  No Enterprise application is an island, they all need to talk to some other application.  If that integration has to be done without the leveraging benefits of a supporting technology, if it has to be done strictly as a service, that adds a lot of friction to the transaction.  That friction can slow down sales momentum.  In addition, from a competitive standpoint, SaaS apps are often bought by the Business with the idea that they will cause minimal support overhead for IT.  Whether IT buys into that or not, the availability of suitable integration technology is going to determine how happy everyone is.  If IT has to constantly dive in and bandaid the integration, nobody is happy.  If IT can get comfortable at the outset that the integration solution will be high quality, everyone will be a lot happier.

These data integration acquisitions are very strategic to the Cloud space.  Good on Dell for going after Boomi.

What is the Sound of One Cloud Thunderclapping?

I just finished reading Randy Bias’s piece, “Elasticity is NOT #Cloud Computing … Just Ask Google“, and I must admit, it takes me back to all sorts of questions of a vaguely unsettling nature that have been bubbling below the surface of my cloudy thinking for some time.

If Elasticity is NOT Cloud Computing, and I profoundly disagree with that statement, then what the heck is Cloud Computing?  I admit to already having been pretty skeptical about whether Private Clouds are really Cloud Computing, but I got over that from an understanding of elasticity and private clouds.  However, if we take away Elasticity, and make whatever is left Private, I’m not sure we have anything profound whatsoever.  How does it differ from an outsourced data center, for example?

Randy seems to have come to his position about elasticity by looking at the large web operators like Amazon, Google and Salesforce who offer Cloud platforms of one kind or another (IaaS, PaaS, and the rest of the alphabet soup).  He’s interested in their history, why they built the kind of infrastructure they did, and why that turned out to be an ideal platform from which to offer Cloud Computing offerings.  My problem is that the mere fact that Amazon did not get the Elasticity benefit from its Cloud that AWS customers can does not in any way diminish the revolution that is the Cloud and that comes with Elasticity.  Without customers, these fancy Amazon and Google data centers are literally the sound of One Cloud Thunderclapping (because Clouds don’t just clap in the sense of the old Zen saying).  I don’t see how you can regard those data centers as “Cloud” at all.  A term more like “commodity computing” data center, perhaps with some form of “virtual” thrown in makes more sense.  Interestingly, it is the addition of the customers to their data centers that exposed Amazon and Google to a little elasticity.  Why?  Because now they have customers to help pay for excess computing capacity and hence elasticity.   What a beautiful thing, and another strong argument for why elasticity changes everything. 

The term “Cloud”, in any sense I’ve ever heard it used, is a service of some kind provided by one organization and shared (this sharing is critical) by many other independent customer organizations.  Thinking back on the idea that Amazon’s data center wasn’t cloud until they flipped the switch and started sharing it with customers (that’s the point where they got elasticity too), you can see that the ideas of “sharing” and “independepent customers” are critical.  Without both, there is no way to pay for the excess capacity that is elasticity, or at the very least, if the sharing is the sort pushed by companies like VMWare to up server utilization, it isn’t quite the same as having real net positive dollars coming in from paying customers, versus simple cost savings.

This is where I get into trouble with the Private Cloud concept.  Yeah sure, people are interested in building data centers that use technology similar to what the “Cloud” vendor’s data centers use.  Yeah sure, there is some benefit to that.  Those technologies were developed by organizations that needed to commoditize their data center services into as cheap an offering as possible.  But to call that Cloud Computing sure seems like gratuitous marketing to me.  If nothing else, it radically understates the challenge those organizations faced.  A little bit of storage virtualization, a healthy dose of VMWare-style machine virtualization, and do you really have the full benefits of Cloud Computing?  Not in my book.  You just have a modern data center. 

There are steps beyond that to take advantage of.  And the advantages are enough of a quantum leap that it isn’t fair to award the accolade “Cloud” for anything less.  If you do, you’re just engaging in gratuitous marketing, trying to draft somebody else’s hype and momentum.  I am already on record as arguing for the definition of Cloud being two things: 

-  It is Software as a Service.  I sometimes refer to this as “Ops as an API”, meaning rather than crawling around cages and machine racks, you perform ops by making API calls on your Cloud infrastructure.

-  It is Elastic.  Yep, I refuse to separate Elasticity from the Cloud, though Randy’s piece wants to leave it more in the camp of simply “Data Center as a Service”.

So then what really is a Private Cloud, and can we still call it a Cloud?  If you include the Software as a Service Piece, and the Elasticity, I would say “yes”.  The difference between a Public and Private Cloud is simply that in the Private case, the Customer paid the service provider to decouple their Private Cloud from the rest of the Public Cloud so no network traffic can get into the Private Cloud without its full knowledge and consent.  This is no biggie–it’s a subnet with the additional proviso that we don’t run anyone else’s Cloud Software but the one owner of the Private Cloud insider that subnet.  This is actually a pretty good deal for all concerned.  The Private Cloud user still gets nearly all the benefits of the Public Cloud user.  They do not get quite a good a price as they must monopolize the hardware to a greater extent than their Public brethren, but it is still a great deal.  Elasticity is still available to them, as is “Ops as an API”.  If your Private Cloud lacks either one of those characteristics, you have a modern data center, but it isn’t Cloud, despite what your vendor’s marketing people want to tell you.

Why do a Private Cloud? 

Largely to reduce perceived risks.  The risks boil down to security and performance.  The Private Cloud is presumably more secure, and its performance is more predictable because no unknown Public Cloud tenants can get into the Private Cloud and do unknown things.

There is one more advantage I will mention for the Cloud, which very much does include Elasticity, versus the Modern Data Center, which uses some Cloud technology, but has no Elasticity and is not a Cloud:

You Cloud Vendor may have more buying power than you, more technology they have amortized over more customers, and hence a lower cost to deliver the service than even relatively large corporate data centers can attain.  Hey, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it, instead of just everyone claiming to do it.

PaaS Strategy: Sell the Condiments, Not the Sandwiches

This is part two of a two-part series I’ve wanted to do about strategy for PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) vendors.  The overall theme is that Platforms as a Service require too much commitment from customers.  They are Boil the Ocean answers to every problem under the sun.  That’s great, but it requires tremendous trust and commitment for customers to accept such solutions.  I want to explore alternate paths that have lower friction of adoption and still leave the door open in the long run for the full solution.  PaaS vendors need to offer a little dating before insisting on marriage and community property. 

In Part one of this PaaS Strategy series, I covered the idea of focusing on getting the customer’s data over before trying to get too much code.  We talked about Analytics, Integration with other Apps, Aggregation, and similar services as being valuable PaaS offerings that wouldn’t require the customer to rewrite their software from the ground up to start getting value from your PaaS.  Now I want to talk about the idea of starting to get some code to come over to the PaaS without having to have all of it.  My fundamental premise is to create a series of packages that can be adopted into the architecture of a product without forcing the product to be wholesale re-architected.  I use the term “packages” very deliberately.

Consider Ruby on Rails Gems as a typical packaging system.  A gem can be anything from a full blown RoR application to a library intended to be used as part of an application.  We’re more focused on the latter.  The SaaS/PaaS world has a pretty good handle on packaging applications in the form of App Stores, but it needs to take the next step.  A proper PaaS Store (we’re gonna need a better name!) would include not only apps built on the platform, but libraries usable by other apps and data too.  Harkening back to my part one article, data is valuable and the PaaS vendor should make it possible to share and monetize the data.  Companies like Hoovers and LinkedIn make it very clear that there is data that is valuable and would add value if you could link your data to that data.

What are other packages that a PaaS PackageStore might offer?

I am fond of saying that when you set out to write a piece of software, 70% of the code written adds no differentiated business advantage for your effort at all.  It’s just stuff you have to get done.  Stuff like your login and authentication subsystem.  You’re not really going to try to build a better login and authentication system, are you?  You just want it to work and follow the industry best practices.  A Login system is a pretty good example of a useful PaaS package for a variety of reasons:

-  It doesn’t have a lot of UI, and what UI it does have is pretty generic.  Packages with a lot of UI are problematic because they require a lot of customization to make them compatible with your product’s look and feel.  That’s not to say it can’t be done, just that it’s a nuisance.

-  It adds a lot of value and it has to be done right.  As a budding young company, I’d pay some vendor who can point to much larger companies who use their login package.  It would make my customers feel better to know this critical component was done well.

-  It involves a fair amount of work to get one done.  There is a fair amount of code and it has to be tested very carefully.

-  I can’t really add unique value with it, it just has to work, and everyone expects it to work the same way.

-  It is a divisible subsystem with a well-defined API and a pretty solid “bulkhead” interface.  What goes on the other side of the bulkhead is something my architecture can largely ignore.  It doesn’t have to spread its tendrils too far and wide through my system in order to add value.  Therefore, it doesn’t perturb my architecture, and if I had to, I could replace it pretty easily.

These are all great qualities for such a package.  What are some others?  Think about the Open Source libaries you’ve used for software in the past, because all of that is legitimate territory:

- Search:  Full text search as delivered by packages like Lucene is a valuable adjunct.

- Messaging:  Adobe and Amazon both have messaging services available.

- Mobile:  A variety of services could be envisioned for mobile ranging from making it easy to deal with voice delivered to and from telephones to SMS messages to full blown platforms that facilitate delivering transparent access to your SaaS app on a smartphone.

-  Billing:  There are companies like Zuora out there focused on exactly this area.  Billing and payment processing comes in all shapes and sizes, and many businesses need access to it.  You needn’t have full-blown Zuora to add value.

-  Attachments:  Many apps like to have a rich set of attachments.  There’s a whole series of problems that have to be solved to make that happen, and most of it adds no value at all to your solution.  Doing a great job of storing, searching, viewing, and editing attachments would be an ideal PaaS package.  There are loads of interesting special cases too.  Photos and Videos, for example.

I want to touch on an interesting point of competitive differentiation and selling.  Let’s pick one of these that has a lot of potential for richness like Photos.  Photos are a world unto themselves as you start adding facilities like resizing, cropping, and other image processing chores, not to mention face recognition.  There’s tons of functionality there that the average startup might never get to, but that their users might think was pretty neat.  After a while, the PaaS can set the bar for what’s expected when an app deals with photos.  They do this when their Photos package is plush enough and adopted widely enough, that people come to expect it’s features.  When it reaches the point where the features are expected, but a startup can’t begin to write them from scratch, the PaaS vendor wins big.  The PaaS customers can win big too, because in the early days, before that plushness becomes the norm, a good set of packages can really add depth to the application being built.

PaaS vendors that want to take advantage of this for their own marketing should focus on packages that deliver sizzle.  I can imagine a PaaS package vendor that totally focuses on sizzle.  They’ve got photos, video, maps, charts (bar charts to Gantt charts), calendars, Social Media integrations, mobile, messaging, all the stuff that when it appears in the demo, delivers tons of sizzle and conveys a slick User Experience. 

Before moving on, I want to briefly consider the opposite end of the spectrum from sizzle.  There’s a lot of really boring stuff that has to get done in an application too.  We’ve touched on login/authentication.  SaaS Operations is another area that I predict a PaaS could penetrate with good success.  Ops covers a whole lot of territory and the ops needs of SaaS can be quite a bit different than the ops needs of typical on-prem software.  For one thing, it needs to scale cheaply.  You can’t throw bodies at it.  For another, you have to diagnose and manage problems remotely.  One of the most common complaints at SaaS companies I’ve worked with is the customer saying performance is terrible.  Is it a problem with the servers?  Is it a problem in the Internet between your servers and the customer?  Is it a problem inside their firewall?  Or is it a problem on their particular machine?  Having a PaaS subsystem that instrumented every leg of the journey, and made it easy to diagnose and report all that would be another valuable, though not particularly sexy offering.

I hope I have shown that there is a lot of evolution left for the PaaS world.  It started out with boil the ocean solutions that demand an application be completely rewritten before it can gain advantage from the platform.  I believe the future is in what I’ll call “Incremental PaaS”.  This is PaaS that adds value without the rewrite.  It’s still a service, and you don’t have to touch code beyond the API’s to access the packages, but it adds value and simplifies the process of creating new Cloud Applications of all kinds.

Android is so Open, it got Flash Back on the iPhone

How ironic.  On the same day that MG Seigler was penning one of his characteristically snarky posts (snark is one of the ways Techcrunch pursues its Follower Economy) about how Android isn’t really open, Apple announces the return of Flash to the iWorld.

Adobe’s stock price is cooking this morning as a result (I wonder if 10% of Adobe’s revenue is even traceable to Mobile Flash? Maybe), and I have to admit, being the Adobe Flex fanboy that I am, I’m chortling over my morning cafe mocha too!

A couple of things to talk about on this news.

First, why do I award credit for this to Android?  Peeps, come on–Steve Jobs didn’t just wake up from his hissy fit about Flash (thanks for that link, Larry!) and decide, “Oh darn, I was wrong.”  No, no, no, not happening.  Something grabbed Steve Jobs by the throat and shook him right out of his reality distortion field.  That something was competition.  Not only has Android been selling extremely well, but the Bastiches have even been using Apple’s, “Hey, we’re not the Man, we’re Cool“, marketing tactics.  Dude, what’s next, Android thinking differently (I can’t see Google having the populist moxie to get that grammar wrong the way Apple did, all those PhD nerds just couldn’t handle it).

Competition is what forced this change, MG Seigler.  Android’s “We’re more open than open can be” pitch was working.  In fact, this Apple announcement sweeps away most of what one would’ve argued were barriers to openness.  It isn’t just Flash that benefits.  Besides which, a heck of a lot of people love their iDevices (3 out of 4 of our whole family have iPhones and we share an iPad) but want Flash access.  Forget movies, they can change.  I can’t even see the stock graphs on Yahoo because they’re Flash.

Gordon Gecko was wrong when he said, “Greed is good.”  It pains me as a person often described as being slightly to the right of Attila the Hun to reach that realization.  What Gordon should have said was this:

Competition, for lack of a better word, is good. Competition is right, Competition works. Competition clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Competition, in all of its forms; Competition for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.

And here, it has let Flash back into the iWorld.  Good job, Android!

Second, I want to take a few lines to talk about why I think Flash is so important.  Much has been made of how the LAMP stack has transformed web development.  Companies can now create products without requiring millions of dollars in R&D expense.  But the LAMP stack primarily benefit the back-end, in other words the server-side.  What about the client?  What is the equivalent of a LAMP stack for client development?  Unless you’re a tremendous fan of 3270 green screen UI, and I know some are even in this day and age, you need the equivalent of the LAMP stack to efficiently product great clients.  Here is the secret:  Flash is the LAMP stack of UI development!  Yes, there are some Flash wannabes out there, specifically Silverlight.  So what?  Microsoft would love for .NET to be the LAMP alternative too.  Flash is it for these simple reasons:

-  It is ubiquitious.  Aside from the iWorld, and that changes today, the vast majority of the world has already installed Flash and it runs in their browsers.  That’s 99.3% penetration in mature markets.  Essentially, everyone has it.

-  It is a write once run anywhere tool that really works.  You write your Flash code and all 99.3% of users can run it without you needing to give it another thought. 

-  AJAX and Javascript, the alternative, is riddled with browser dependencies.  Any dev team that has tried to get even simple rich UI like a Wiki-style rich text editor to work understands this.  It’s a huge overhead to keep up with all of these browser dependencies, and a constantly moving target.  With Flash, Adobe does that work for you so you can get on with building your app.

-  Flash has amazing graphical power and Job’s protestations to the contrary is actually quite fast.  People are writing 3D games in it, for example.

-  Flash can transcend the browser to create apps via AIR, and as we’ve discovered in the mobile world, apps are where it’s at.  Google used to offer Gears for this purpose, but pulled the plug on it.  Silverlight?  Hey, competition is good, bring it.  But they aren’t really there yet.

This all adds up to something that’s very important to the ongoing evolution of User Experience across all devices.  Simply put, Flash deserves to keep going and to be available on all those devices.  Thank you, Steve Jobs, for relenting, even if it took a gun to your head.  Adobe: now is not the time to rest on your Laurels.  There are some issues here and there in the House of Flash that you still need to attend to.

Single Tenant, Multitenant, Private and Public Clouds: Oh My!

My head is starting to hurt with all the back and forth among my Enterprise Irregulars buddies about the relationships between the complex concepts of Multitenancy, Private, and Public Clouds.  A set of disjoint conversations and posts came together like the whirlpool in the bottom of a tub when it drains.  I was busy with other things and didn’t get a chance to really respond until I was well and truly sucked into the vortex.  Apologies for the long post, but so many wonderful cans of worms finally got opened that I just have to try to deal with a few of them.  That’s why I love these Irregulars!

To start, let me rehash some of the many memes that had me preparing to respond:

-  Josh Greenbaum’s assertion that Multitenancy is a Vendor, not a Customer Issue.  This post includes some choice observations like:

While the benefits that multi-tenancy can provide are manifold for the vendor, these rationales don’t hold water on the user side.

That is not to say that customers can’t benefit from multi-tenancy. They can, but the effects of multi-tenancy for users are side-benefits, subordinate to the vendors’ benefits. This means, IMO, that a customer that looks at multi-tenancy as a key criteria for acquiring a new piece of functionality is basing their decision on factors that are not directly relevant to their TCO, all other factors being equal.

and:

Multi-tenancy promises to age gracelessly as this market matures.

Not to mention:

Most of the main benefits of multi-tenancy – every customer is on the same version and is updated simultaneously, in particular – are vendor benefits that don’t intrinsically benefit customers directly.

The implication being that someone somewhere will provide an alternate technology very soon that works just as good or better than multitenancy.  Wow.  Lots to disagree with there.  My ears are still ringing from the sound of the steel gauntlet that was thrown down.

-  Phil Wainewright took a little of the edge of my ire with his response post to Josh, “Single Tenancy, the DEC Rainbow of SaaS.”  Basically, Phil says that any would-be SaaS vendor trying to create an offering without multitenancy is doomed as the DEC Rainbow was.  They have some that sort of walks and quacks like a SaaS offering but that can’t really deliver the goods.

-  Well of course Josh had to respond with a post that ends with:

I think the pricing and services pressure of the multi-tenant vendors will force single-tenant vendors to make their offerings as compatible as possible. But as long as they are compatible with the promises of multi-tenancy, they don’t need to actually be multi-tenant to compete in the market.

That’s kind of like saying, “I’m right so long as nothing happens to make me wrong.”  Where are the facts that show this counter case is anything beyond imagination?  Who has built a SaaS application that does not include multitenancy but that delivers all the benefits?

Meanwhile back at the ranch (we EI’s need a colorful name for our private community where the feathers really start to fly as we chew the bones of some good debates), still more fascinating points and counterpoints were being made as the topic of public vs private clouds came up (paraphrasing):

-  Is there any value in private clouds?

-  Do public clouds result in less lock-in than private clouds?

-  Are private clouds and single tenant (sic) SaaS apps just Old School vendors attempts to hang on while the New Era dawns?  Attempts that will ultimately prove terribly flawed?

-  Can the economics of private clouds ever compete with public?

-  BTW, eBay now uses Amazon for “burst” loads and purchases servers for a few hours at a time on their peak periods.  Cool!

-  Companies like Eucalyptus and Nimbula are trying to make Private Clouds that are completely fungible with Public Clouds.  If you  in private cloud frameworks like these means you have
to believe companies are going to be running / owning their own servers for a long time to come even if the public cloud guys take over a number of compute workloads.  The Nimbula guys built EC2 and they’re no dummies, so if they believe in this, there must be something to it.

-  There are two kinds of clouds – real and virtual.  Real clouds are multi-tenant. Virtual clouds are not. Virtualization is an amazing technology but it can’t compete with bottoms up multi-tenant platforms and apps.

Stop!  Let me off this merry go-round and let’s talk.

What It Is and Why Multitenancy Matters

Sorry Josh, but Multitenancy isn’t marketing like Intel Inside (BTW, do you notice Intel wound up everywhere anyway?  That wasn’t marketing either), and it matters to more than just vendors.  Why?

Push aside all of the partisan definitions of multitenancy (all your customers go in the same table or not).   Let’s look at the fundamental difference between virtualization and multitenancy, since these two seem to be fighting it out.

Virtualization takes multiple copies of your entire software stack and lets them coexist on the same machine.  Whereas before you had one OS, one DB, and one copy of your app, now you may have 10 of each.  Each of the 10 may be a different version entirely.  Each may be a different customer entirely, as they share a machine.  For each of them, life is just like they had their own dedicated server.  Cool.  No wonder VMWare is so successful.  That’s a handy thing to do.

Multitenancy is a little different.  Instead of 10 copies of the OS, 10 copies of the DB, and 10 copies of the app, it has 1 OS, 1 DB, and 1 app on the server.  But, through judicious modifications to the app, it allows those 10 customers to all peacefully coexist within the app just as though they had it entirely to themselves.

Can you see the pros and cons of each?  Let’s start with cost.  Every SaaS vendor that has multitenancy crows about this, because its true.  Don’t believe me?  Plug in your VM software, go install Oracle 10 times across 10 different virtual machines.  Now add up how much disk space that uses, how much RAM it uses when all 10 are running, and so on.  This is before you’ve put a single byte of information into Oracle or even started up an app.  Compare that to having installed 1 copy of Oracle on a machine, but not putting any data into it.  Dang!  That VM has used up a heck of a lot of resources before I even get started!

If you don’t think that the overhead of 10 copies of the stack has an impact on TCO, you either have in mind a very interesting application + customer combination (some do exist, and I have written about them), or you just don’t understand.  10x the hardware to handle the “before you put in data” requirements are not cheap.  Whatever overhead is involved in making that more cumbersome to automate is not cheap.  Heck, 10x more Oracle licenses is very not cheap.  I know SaaS companies who complain their single biggest ops cost is their Oracle licenses. 

However, if all works well, that’s a fixed cost to have all those copies, and you can start adding data by customers to each virtual Oracle, and things will be okay from that point on.  But, take my word for it, there is no free lunch.  The VM world will be slower and less nimble to share resources between the different Virtual Machines than a Multitenant App can be.  The reason is that by the time it knows it even needs to share, it is too late.  Shifting things around to take resource from one VM and give it to another takes time.  By contrast, the Multitenant App knows what is going on inside the App because it is the App.  It can even anticipate needs (e.g. that customer is in UK and they’re going to wake up x hours before my customers in the US, so I will put them on the same machine because they mostly use the machine at different times).

So, no, there is not some magic technology that will make multitenant obsolete.  There may be some new marketing label on some technology that makes multitenancy automatic and implicit, but if it does what I describe, it is multitenant.  It will age gracefully for a long time to come despite the indignities that petty competition and marketing labels will bring to bear on it.

What’s the Relationship of Clouds and Multitenancy?

Must Real Clouds be Multitenant?

Sorry, but Real Clouds are not Multitenant because they’re based on Virtualization not Multitenancy in any sense such as I just defined.  In fact, EC2 doesn’t share a core with multiple virtual machines because it can’t.  If one of the VM’s started sucking up all the cycles, the other would suffer terrible performance and the hypervisors don’t really have a way to deal with that.  Imagine having to shut down one of the virtual machines and move it onto other hardware to load balance.  That’s not a simple or fast operation.  Multi-tasking operating systems expect a context switch to be as fast as possible, and that’s what we’re talking about.  That’s part of what I mean by the VM solution being less nimble.  So instead, cores get allocated to a particular VM.  That doesn’t mean a server can’t have multiple tenants, just that at the granularity of a core, things have to be kept clean and not dynamically moved around. 

Note to rocket scientists and entrepreneurs out there–if you could create a new hardware architecture that was really fast at the Virtual Machine load balancing, you would have a winner.  So far, there is no good hardware architecture to facilitate a tenant swap inside a core at a seamless enough granularity to allow the sharing.  In the Multicore Era, this would be the Killer Architecture for Cloud Computing.  If you get all the right patents, you’ll be rich and Intel will be sad.  OTOH, if Intel and VMWare got their heads together and figured it out, it would be like ole Jack Burton said, “You can go off and rule the universe from beyond the grave.”

But, it isn’t quite so black and white.  While EC2 is not multitenant at the core level, it sort of is at the server level as we discussed.  And, services like S3 are multitenant through and through.  Should we cut them some slack?  In a word, “No.”  Even though an awful lot of the overall stack cost (network, cpu, and storage) is pretty well multitenant, I still wind up installing those 10 copies of Oracle and I still have the same economic disadvantage as the VM scenario.  Multitenancy is an Application characteristic, or at the very least, a deep platform characteristic.  If I build my app on Force.com, it is automatically multitenant.  If I build it on Amazon Web Services, it is not automatic.

But isn’t there Any Multitenant-like Advantage to the Cloud?  And how do Public and Private Compare?

Yes, there are tons of benefits to the Cloud, and through an understanding and definition of them, we will tease out the relationship of Public and Private Clouds.  Let me explain…

There are two primary advantages to the Cloud:  it is a Software Service and it is Elastic.  If you don’t have those advantages, you don’t have a Cloud.  Let’s drill down.

The Cloud is a Software Service, first and foremost.  I can spin up and control a server entirely through a set of API’s.  I never have to go into a Data Center cage.  I never have to ask someone at the Data Center to go into the Cage (though that would be a Service, just not a Software Service, an important distinction).  This is powerful for basically the same reasons that SaaS is powerful versus doing it yourself with On-prem software.  Think Cloud = SaaS and Data Center = On Prem and extrapolate and you’ll have it. 

Since Cloud is a standardized service, we expect all the same benefits as SaaS:

- They know their service better than I do since it is their whole business.  So I should expect they will run it better and more efficiently.

- Upgrades to that service are transparent and painless (try that on your own data center, buddy!).

- When one customer has a problem, the Service knows and often fixes it before the others even know it exists.  Yes Josh, there is value in SaaS running everyone on the same release.  I surveyed Tech Support managers one time and asked them one simple question:  How many open problems in your trouble ticketing system are fixed in the current release?  The answers were astounding–40 to 80%.  Imagine a world where your customers see 40 to 80% fewer problems.  It’s a good thing!

- That service has economic buying power that you don’t have because it is aggregated across many customers.  They can get better deals on their hardware and order so much of it that the world will build it precisely to their specs.  They can get stuff you can’t, and they can invest in R&D you can’t.  Again, because it is aggregated across many customers.  A Startup running in the Amazon Cloud can have multipe redundant data centers on multiple continents.  Most SaaS companies don’t get to building multiple data centers until they are way past having gone public. 

-  Because it is a Software Service, you can invest your Ops time in automation, rather than in crawling around Data Center cages.  You don’t need to hire anyone who knows how to hot swap a disk or take a backup.  You need peeps who know how to write automation scripts.  Those scripts are a leveragable asset that will permanently lower your costs in a dramatic way.  You have reallocated your costs from basic Data Center grubbing around (where does this patch cable go, Bruce?), an expense, to actually building an asset.

The list goes on.

The second benefit is Elasticity.  It’s another form of aggregation benefit.  They have spare capacity because everyone doesn’t use all the hardware all the time.  Whatever % isn’t utilized, it is a large amount of hardware, because it is aggregated.  It’s more than you can afford to have sitting around idle in your own data center.  Because of that, they don’t have to sell it to you in perpetuity.  You can rent it as you need it, just like eBay does for bursting.  There are tons of new operational strategies that are suddenly available to you by taking advantage of Elasticity.

Let me give you just one.  For SaaS companies, it is really easy to do Beta Tests.  You don’t have to buy 2x the hardware in perpetuity.  You just need to rent it for the duration of the Beta Test and every single customer can access their instance with their data to their heart’s content.  Trust me, they will like that.

What about Public Versus Private Clouds?

Hang on, we’re almost there, and it seems like it has been a worthwhile journey.

Start with, “What’s a Private Cloud?”  Let’s take all the technology of a Public Cloud (heck, the Nimbulla guys built EC2, so they know how to do this), and create a Private Cloud.  The Private Cloud is one restricted to a single customer.  It’d be kind of like taking a copy of Salesforce.com’s software, and installing it at Citibank for their private use.  Multitenant with only one tenant.  Do you hear the sound of one hand clapping yet?  Yep, it hurts my head too, just thinking about it.  But we must.

Pawing through the various advantages we’ve discussed for the Cloud, there are still some that accrue to a Cloud of One Customer:

-  It is still a Software Service that we can control via API’s, so we can invest in Ops Automation.  In a sense, you can spin up a new Virtual Data Center (I like that word better than Private Cloud, because it’s closer to the truth) on 10 minutes notice.  No waiting for servers to be shipped.  No uncrating and testing.  No shoving into racks and connecting cables.  Push a button, get a Data Center.

-  You get the buying power advantages of the Cloud Vendor if they supply your Private Cloud, though not if you buy software and build  your Private Cloud.  Hmmm, wonder what terminology is needed to make that distinction?  Forrester says it’s either a Private Cloud (company owns their own Cloud) or a Hosted Virtual Private Cloud.  Cumbersome.

But, and this is a huge one, the granularity is huge, and there is way less Elasticity.  Sure, you can spin up a Data Center, but depending on its size, it’s a much bigger on/off switch.  You likely will have to commit to buy more capacity for a longer time at a bigger price in order for the Cloud Provider to recoup giving you so much more control.  They have to clear other customers away from a larger security zone before you can occupy it, instead of letting your VM’s commingle with other VM’s on the same box.  You may lose the more multitenant-like advantages of the storage cluster and the network infrastructure (remember, only EC2 was stuck being pure virtual). 

What Does it All Mean, and What Should My Company Do?

Did you see Forrester’s conclusion that most companies are not yet ready to embrace the Cloud and won’t be for a long time?

I love the way Big Organizations think about things (not!).  Since their goal is preservation of wealth and status, it’s all about risk mitigation whether that is risk to the org or to the individual career.  A common strategy is to take some revolutionary thing (like SaaS, Multitenancy, or the Cloud), and break it down into costs and benefits.  Further, there needs to be a phased modular approach that over time, captures all the benefits with as little cost as possible.  And each phase has to have a defined completion so we can stop, evaluate whether we succeeded, celebrate the success, punish those who didn’t play the politics well enough, check in with stakeholders, and sing that Big Company Round of Kumbaya.  Yay!

In this case, we have a 5 year plan for CIO’s.  Do you remember anything else, maybe from the Cold War, that used to work on 5 year plans?  Never mind.

It asserts that before you are ready for the Cloud, you have to cross some of those modular hurdles:

A company will need a standardized operating procedure, fully-automated deployment and management (to avoid human error) and self-service access for developers. It will also need each of its business divisions – finance, HR, engineering, etc – to be sharing the same infrastructure.  In fact, there are four evolutionary stages that it takes to get there, starting with an acclimation stage where users are getting used to and comfortable with online apps, working to convince leaders of the various business divisions to be guinea pigs. Beyond that, there’s the rollout itself and then the optimization to fine-tune it.

Holy CYA, Batman!  Do you think eBay spent 5 years figuring out whether it could benefit from bursting to the Cloud before it just did it?

There’s a part of me that says if your IT org is so behind the times it needs 5 years just to understand it all, then you should quit doing anything on-premise and get it all into the hands of SaaS vendors.  They’re already so far beyond you that they must have a huge advantage.  There is a another part that says, “Gee guys, you don’t have to be able to build an automobile factory as good as Toyota to be able to drive a car.”

But then sanity and Political Correctness prevail, I come back down to Earth, and I realize we are ready to summarize.  There are 4 levels of Cloud Maturity (Hey, I know the Big Co IT Guys are feeling more comfortable already, they can deal with a Capability and Maturity Model, right?):

Level 1:  Dabbling.  You are using some Virtualization or Cloud technology a little bit at your org in order to learn.  You now know what a Machine Image is, and you have at least seen a server that can run them and swapped a few in and out so that you experience the pleasures of doing amazing things without crawling around the Data Center Cage.

Level 2:  Private Cloud.  You were impressed enough by Level 1 that you want the benefits of Cloud Technology for as much of your operation as you can as fast as you can get it.  But, you are not yet ready to relinquish much of any control.  For Early Level 2, you may very well insist on a Private Cloud you own entirely.  Later stage Level 2 and you will seek a Hosted Virtual Private Cloud.

Level 3:  Public Cloud.  This has been cool, but you are ready to embrace Elasticity.  You tripped into it with a little bit of Bursting like eBay, but you are gradually realizing that the latency between your Data Center and the Cloud is really painful.  To fix that, you went to a Hosted Virtual Private Cloud.  Now that your data is in that Cloud and Bursting works well, you are realizing that the data is already stepping outside your Private Cloud pretty often anyway.  And you’ve had to come to terms with it.  So why not go the rest of the way and pick up some Elasticity?

Level 4:  SaaS Multitenant.  Eventually, you conclude that you’re still micromanaging your software too much and it isn’t adding any value unique to your organization.  Plus, most of the software you can buy and run in your Public Cloud world is pretty darned antiquated anyway.  It hasn’t been rearchitected since the late 80′s and early 90′s.  Not really.  What would an app look like if it was built from the ground up to live in the Cloud, to connect Customers the way the Internet has been going, to be Social, to do all the rest?  Welcome to SaaS Multitenant.  Now you can finally get completely out of Software Operations and start delivering value.

BTW, you don’t have to take the levels one at a time.  It will cost you a lot more and be a lot more painful if you do.  That’s my problem with the Forrester analysis.  Pick the level that is as far along as you can possibly stomach, add one to that, and go.  Ironically, not only is it cheaper to go directly to the end game, but each level is cheaper for you on a wide scale usage basis all by itself.  In other words, it’s cheaper for you to do Public Cloud than Private Cloud.  And it’s WAY cheaper to go Public Cloud than to try Private Cloud for a time and then go Public Cloud.  Switching to a SaaS Multitenant app is cheaper still.

Welcome to crazy world of learning how to work and play well together when efficiently sharing your computing resources with friends and strangers!

Amazon Web Services: The De Facto Cloud API?

Read a couple of posts last week that coalesced some thoughts I’d been having into this one.  First was the fascinating rumor about a Google EC2 clone.  Hat tip to High Scalability Blog for putting me on to this one.  The second was James Urquhart’s musings about the desirability of the Amazon API’s as a standard.

James and most of his commenters are worried that we might standardize on something that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles.  Guess what guys, standards NEVER have all the bells and whistles.  By the time people get done arguing about them and they get enough momentum and use to be more than just standards in name, the world has moved on.  So what?  If we waited for standards to be perfect, we’d would have none.  The point of the standards is that they’re good enough to help reduce friction in areas where innovation at every turn is no longer desirable.

Are we there yet with the Cloud?

I think so.  I’m not saying there is no innovation left to do–there is tons of it coming, and it’ll all be good.  But, there is value at this stage in having a standard too.  There has been a lot of success demonstrated with the Amazon Cloud from companies large and small.  I would be curious to hear whether Amazon thinks their API should be a standard (and whether they’re prepared to give up some control in exchange), or whether they think it still has too much growing up to do. 

I look at it like this:

First, the wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.  Just because we annoint Amazon as one such standard does not mean there can never be others that are completely different.  It does not mean the standard can never have a superset or optional features to cover many of the cases Urquhart raises.  And remember, there is still that period of making it into a standard during which it can be molded a bit before it settles in.

Second, speaking of supersets, I think it is important to think about Cloud Standards as a layered model.  I would definitely not put all of Amazon’s offerings into the standing.  Perhaps just EC2, EBS, and S3.  Note that S3 is spreading even more rapidly than EC2 as a de facto standard.  These three seem pretty benign, reasonably abstract (meaning they don’t expose too much ugly detail about what goes on underneath), and reasonably proven.

So what do we get for it?

If the standard works and matters, we get a lot more vendors supporting the standard.  That’s a good thing, and something I have to believe every Amazon Web Services client would very much like to see happen.  The second thing we get is that some, but not all, of the innovators will quit trying to reinvent the wheel that is the Amazon layer (IaaS if you must use an ‘aaS name for it) and they will move on to other layers.  Depending on how much more innovation you think that layer needs, this is a good thing.  For those that think it is a bad thing, there is still time for someone with a better mousetrap to put it out there and show us.  But what if making it a standard causes a ton of innovation around how to solve some of the problems like I/O bandwidth behind the scenes without affecting the API?  Wouldn’t that be an excellent thing?  Heck, I’d love to be able to add an “11″ to the AWS I/O speed control, who wouldn’t?

But time is a wasting.  For whatever reasons, it seems like the other players are very late to the party relative to Amazon.  If they wait too long, Amazon gets a de facto standard before the market has much leverage to pry loose some control.  This is arguably what happened around the IBM PC, DOS, and Windows.  BTW, you read that like its a bad thing, but it wasn’t.  We accomplished a heck of a lot by not having to continue innovating over the bus, the BIOS, and so on.  It just could’ve been a lot better if there hadn’t been so much control vested in Microsoft and IBM.  As I write this, I wonder a little bit if players like Google really aren’t taking too long.  Maybe AppEngine is the exact image of what they think the Cloud should look like, and the problem is the world just didn’t bite the way they have with AWS.  Google could be saying, “Okay, we hear you, so we’ll do it your way now.”  There has to be some reason they’d endorse S3 and potentially EC2. 

If Google’s ready to go there, why not the rest of us?