We are now mostly familiar with what the concept of a service is in terms of computing software.  Software services have and continue to have an enormous impact on modern software architecture and development methods.  But what of other aspects of computing technology? are they excluded from being considered and subsequently managed and interacted with as services.  

A key underlying concept of sense is to define and interact with internal and external computing units as services.  That means that within sense we have a small set of tried and tested architectural approaches that can be applied to many other aspects of computing technology.   To start with, all internal components and modules of sense itself expose themselves as sense services - meaning we can apply the same SLA driven benefits to sense’s internal components as to user business services. But what about interactions with external services, resources or appliances?

sense considers all interactions with computer based assets and resources as a series of services!  This means whether you are dealing with a Java program, a web service, a human task, a piece of hardware, a VM, a router, or even sense itself, sense will view and manage the interaction with the asset as a service. This permits sense, to use a tested and consistent set of development and management principles to build, manage and operate any cloud based solution where sense is involved.  This consistency provides for reduced development time, managed end-to-end operations, and guaranteed SLA achievement across your entire applications and infrastructure portfolio.  This is independent of whether you choose to operate your own private cloud on any mix of existing infrastructure, involve internal or external Virtualization solutions or decide to move operation into an internet based cloud.  You get the same capabilities and SLA driven benefits whatever you choose to mange with sense.

In technical terms, services deployed to sense adhere to an interface and packaging metaphor to which we add runtime SLA driven behaviors.  For external services; services not deployed into sense itself such as your existing web services or EJBs, or for external computing resources like a VM, or a router, or a cloud server, sense allows the implementation of a feeling to act as the intermediator to the external asset. So to sense a service deployed internally or a feeling to an external resource have the same management and SLA driven behaviors. It is this approach that offers gives us the general “something as a service” tag and allows sense to add business driven SLA behaviors to many more types of computing asset and resource than other cloud based architectures.

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The Cloud computing  market space has got very noisy very quickly, with dozens of new, old and recast cloud solutions being proposed every month.  What differentiates Sensible Cloud’s sense cloud application platform?

• sense was born from the practical experience of dozens of complex enterprise level distributed application projects using JEE, SOA and agile development techniques.  It comes from tried and tested development projects – not a marketing booklet.
• sense was designer and written from the start for cloud based operations – it carries no legacy implementations.
• sense offers the key principles of cloud computing across all major types of computing platform.  Whether you use it on of JEE, .Net, Virtualization, SaaS or cloud solutions, or most likely some combination of these, sense offers the same benefits within each platform silo and across the boundaries between them. You are not locked into just one type of technology platform to satisfy your business computing needs – you can extend from where you are today and still maintain, or even improve, the control, service levels and reliability you provide.
• sense uses business rules, defined by business staff as the evaluation criteria for what constitutes a high value service.  These business criteria and service level agreements (SLAs) guide the actions of sense to match the best resources available at the time, to the incoming business requests.  While technical criteria, such as latency, CPU utilization, etc. are important, perhaps profit, revenue or penalty driven contracts are more valuable to the business success.
• Sensible Cloud offers different business models to match your own, not require you to adopt ours.  If pay-as-you-go is your preferred model, then with minimal setup you can begin to accrue the benefits of cloud computing from day 1, and only pay for what you actually use.  If you require complete control, we can also offer more traditional subscription and software licensing models for your onsite operations.  In all cases you will be able to determine your initial and ongoing cost outlay for the use of sense.
• sense operates on a principle of “everything as a service”.  Rather than point at one class of computing resource and turn that into a cloud, sense looks at all computing assets as a service. This lets you use the same cloud based principles if you are working with Java programs, SOA web Services, PHP web development, SaaS applications, computer hardware or virtualized resources (like Xen or Vmware). In effect all these, and even sense itself, are viewed as SLA managed services.  In this way sense provides and end-to-end cloud view of your business applications and you can choose how much you move into the cloud and still interact consistently with your existing infrastructure and applications.

What is the typical result of running out of computing horsepower?

• Business applications and services slow down, perhaps to the point of non-usability, failure or even system crash.
• Huge amounts of operations time and effort is used in tuning, tweaking and moving resources around.
• IT operations make requests for large amounts of additional capital to purchase new servers or networks.
• Lost time and revenue in getting new products or services into the market.

… inevitably more effort and money is spent, while service and income are reduced to the business consumers.

sense can help get over this hurdle while at the same time providing the same, or better, level of reliability and scalability for your internally managed computing resources.  Whether you choose additional resources from a virtualization provider of cloud operator, sense can extend and buffer your applications and services across the boundary from your own infrastructure to the cloud based resources.  All the while providing additional benefits like:

• Using business criteria to align additional resources to the most valuable applications.
• Introducing a pay-as-you-go model for the use of the additional resources used.
• Reducing the time and effort to configure additional resources down to a few minutes – and have them activated and released automatically only as needed by the business.

A key differentiator of sense in the cloud market is the ability to bridge across the most common computing platforms to provide all the benefits of cloud computing while continuing to offer all the control required by enterprise level business operations.  This means you can start where you are today and with the minimal cost, effort and risk, begin to provide additional computing capacity to your existing server pools by buffering extra capacity in a sense managed cloud.  

For example:

* You operate a JBoss server cluster to provide 24×7 web access to services for some of your business partners around the world.  Sales & marketing want to expand into the fastest growing markets in the far east.  They advise that you’ll need to cater for an additional 75% load and to extend guaranteed operations around the clock ….. Oh and this has to start at the end of next week.  With traditional methods of capacity planning, procurement, and then the effort to install, integrate, and bring online the new hardware, you’re looking at two to three months minimum.  What if you could go online to setup an arrangement to deploy your existing software infrastructure to additional servers that look just like yours, and to do all this with no capital outlay, minimal setup effort, guaranteed performance and scalability, and only pay for what you use (even on a credit card) ……..  and still apply all the control and policies you need.

sense can provide all you need to build and operate your own cloud based services, applications and resources using your existing computing infrastructure.  You can operate cloud based applications running on your JEE (JBoss, BEA) application servers or operating across your virtualization resources (XEN, VMWare), or some combination of the two.  This provides you with all the benefits of cloud based computing while retaining complete control of resources and governance policies.

Your cloud based operations are not bound by one set of computing platforms or by physical location or ownership, so you can choose the most efficient and cost effective solution to fit your needs, and to change this as time progresses.  With this approach, even the most secure and controlled environment can begin to accrue the benefits of cloud operations without relinquishing any control from the data centre.

By operating with the core principle of ‘everything as a service’, sense provides a clean and efficient abstraction layer to allow you to deploy applications based on cloud principles without the need for you to change the way you build your JEE, .Net and SOA applications.  Whether you want to deploy your web services, or EJBs, or even your hardware resources, sense can provide the cloud application platform to let you deliver the results to users and other applications as if they were running in the cloud – in fact, users and applications are not aware of any difference, except improved quality of service as sense matches the best available resources to satisfy the Business SLA requirements of the incoming requests. This will allow IT operations to more closely align with business demands of your internal, and external, customers while achieving better utilization of the infrastructure investment you have already made.

Of course, should you wish to compliment your own resources with additional virtual or cloud based resources from external providers, with sense you are already 80% there, and you will be able to maintain your Business SLAs and control across the different computing platforms.

Cloud computing has emerged as a key element of evolving computing infrastructures, but many enterprises are wary of letting control of such fundamental computing resources go off site. sense can  bring the true benefits of cloud computing to your own existing in-house infrastructure – servers, network, middleware, and still give you the control you need.

• Guarantee Business SLA performance for your applications and services – provide more resource to your most valuable business applications
• Dynamically allocate additional computing resources based on business priorities as needed – better utilize what you already have
• Abstraction of applications and services from the complexity of physical HW and network operations – build the cloud on JEE or your Virtual Machines
• Scale computing resources as required – allocate resource only as needed by the business
• Increase computer resource utilization – builds on the technically driven virtualization solutions
• Increase service reliability and quality by introducing self-healing for you critical business applications – business applications and service become more resilient to performance and network problems
• Offer bill-as-you-use measurements to business users – easy to apply pay-as-you-go charge back practices to the business

Cloud computing should not be thought of as simply internet based technologies and services. The true value of Cloud computing is in the abstraction and transparency of resolving business computing needs without the need to setup, configure and manage large physical installations of hardware and networks. If you could manage the use of your existing computing resources to dynamically match the business requirements of users in real time, this would be a very large benefit of cloud computing to your organization.

sense has been designed from practical experience to deliver true Cloud computing across different computing platforms. Whether you choose to implement a cloud on your own JEE servers, or select a Virtualization software, or indeed do go out to the internet cloud, sense can bring reliability and scalability to meet the SLA requirements of your business applications while offering you the full set of Cloud computing benefits.

Listed below, or here, are a number of use cases for sense to bring Cloud computing onto your own infrastructure and under your direct control, in effect, to build your own private cloud

…. of course there is nothing to stop you also extending this to additional cloud resources and services offsite as well.