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Developers discuss ways to program in cloud environments


By Alex Handy
October 9, 2008 — 
Developers are starting to learn that clouds don’t always mean rain. But as Amazon, Google and eventually Microsoft work to build their stratospheric infrastructures, developers are still trying to figure out just what building applications for the cloud really entails. Are proprietary cloud APIs an anathema, or are they the quickest possible route to fast scalability?

David Intersimone, evangelist for CodeGear at Embarcadero Systems, said the current ecosystem of clouds is relatively tolerant of developer holy wars over protocols and transports. “The nice thing for developers is that you can pick protocols and you can pick transports. To me, it’s what that service provides. They’re making the architectural choices at Amazon, they’re making them at Microsoft, when they start opening up their clouds. From a developer standpoint, it’s right mouse click, get the interfaces and start using them. As long as you have rich support for different protocols and different transports, the tooling should be able to serve up the interfaces in the right way.”

Since a service such as Amazon’s makes architectural choices before development even begins, some of those decisions could tie your application to a specific cloud. That hasn’t stopped some users from building open-source alternatives and knockoffs. John Spurlock’s proof-of-concept baltic-avenue application, for example, brings Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) representational state transfer API into Google’s application engine, letting users mash up two competing cloud hosting services.

Rod Boothby, vice president of platform evangelism at cloud hosting company Joyent, said LinkedIn discovered a number of neat tricks to save itself time and money when building its Bumper Sticker Facebook application, which is hosted in a Joyent cloud. Along the way, the IT team working on the project discovered that a large amount of the hosting job could be offloaded to Facebook by pushing images into Facebook’s caching service. With a few simple tweaks to the code and the load balancers in front of its cloud, LinkedIn managed to push almost 80% of its hosting load to Facebook, saving bandwidth and money.

Developing for an internal cloud is an entirely different affair, said Intersimone. “I think the biggest opportunity is inside the firewall. [Corporate systems diagrams contain] thousands of systems, and [by] being able to put in infrastructure just as they’re putting in storage area networks, they’re going to put in clouds and let you have access to the functionality. Otherwise you have to say, ‘Oh, that’s an IBM mainframe; I have got to go talk to it.’ Besides, companies of any size are not going to put their storage out on Amazon.”

During a recent Amazon evangelical event, Jeff Barr, senior Web Services evangelist at Amazon, compared modern IT to the state of an electricity-dependent brewery at the turn of the last century. The brewer would need to generate its own electricity in the basement, requiring that a generator expert and machinist be kept on staff. Eventually, the proliferation of power grids eliminated that requirement. But until then, said Barr, “you needed all that low-level infrastructure to run your beer business. You had to spend a lot of that time to make sure you had a constant flow of electricity. The beer didn’t taste any different.”

Bernard Golden, CEO of Navica, said that many startups are already living in the cloud, but enterprises are still scanning the horizon. That said, there are three big questions any development team should ask before venturing into the white beyond.

“The fundamentals don’t change,” said Golden. “[The application is] still going to execute inside a machine. To me the architectural stuff you have to be aware of is: ‘What’s available [to me for] storage? What do I do to persist the data for the application?’

“The second cut is, ‘What else do I need this to communicate with? Do I need this to tie back to my own systems? Do I want to integrate it with something like my ID system?’ A third way you need to think about it is, ‘Am I going to design this to be a scalable?’ ”

Golden cited a case he’d heard about at a recent cloud conference in which a system in Amazon’s cloud went from two or three servers to more than 3,500 overnight. The cloud, he said, could handle such events; indeed, scalability is one of its biggest draws.

But achieving such scalability might require a bit more of the proprietary cloud infrastructure than most developers would prefer. Here it’s important to be aware of the difference between cloud computing and platforms-as-a-service, said Golden.

“I’m much more sanguine about the flexibility of [clouds] than many people are. Is there a lock-in with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud? If you build under the assumption that you’ll have Amazon S3 as your storage mechanism, yeah. If you’re smart about the way you design your systems and do good compartmentalization, if you put some kind of interface between your thing and the S3 calls, then you could swap out. The lock-in is more there in the so-called platform-as-a-service,” said Golden, referring to services such as those offered by Salesforce.com and LongJump.

Clouds are a young-company space right now, Golden said. The enterprise trial programs taking place are all asking tough questions about security, integrations and redundancy, and in some cases there still are no good answers. Until successful standards emerge, the world of the cloud will remain nebulous.

“Enterprises move very deliberately, and they’ll still be asking questions like, ‘Can we really count on this being here long term, like 20 years?’ Keep in mind, software lives forever,” said Golden.

“This is a land grab” comparable to what occurred in “the big rush to the Internet,” he said. “That’s when we got all these application servers. For a while, they were very proprietary. Then they ended up standardizing” around Java EE.

“I think there’s some of that going on in cloud right now,” Golden said. “In terms of applications, there are going to be these management frameworks, but in terms of a brand-new application architecture framework ... I would question how successful that’s going to be, because I think people have learned the lesson of buying into someone’s architecture.

“I still run into guys who say, ‘I need a ColdFusion developer.’ It’s a minuscule market, but if you’re locked into it...”


Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, Amazon, Google, Microsoft


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