Sensible Cloud - Leaders in Cloud Computing

Generations of hardware and software acquisitions have been made using traditional capital or expense cost models that require your organization to pay large amounts of up-front fees for the use of long-term assets.  In the large majority of cases the return on any investment has never been proven to be positive, and yet still we buy these critical business resources on “trust” and belief that we will garner value and benefit from them.

Software as a Service (SaaS) threatened to reduce a lot of the risk and headache as we moved to a simpler subscription model for “renting” software and application licenses.  This still requires paying a regular fee for the right to use software or services that may not be fully utilized over the contracted period – e.g. a per user model charges whether the user is actively using the software or is on holiday or asleep. It is a step in the right direction, but not far enough.

One of the key business benefits to customers, and key disruptors to hardware and software selling machines is cloud computing’s base in the pay-as-you-go model, i.e. you only pay for what you use at the time you use it. Imagine being able to provide a brand new high powered server farm for the introduction of a new web based service to your market with zero capital outlay, only minutes of  configuration, and per use business terms that charge you for what you consume and can be setup online in a few minutes.

Cloud computing, whether you are acquiring extended hardware resources,  whole application platforms or component business services allows you to only pay for resources you use. This approach is revolutionizing the way organizations buy and measure their success from IT related purchases, impacting the vacuous and aggressive over selling techniques of traditional IT vendors and giving the market a much more transparent way to manage and monitor the commercial relationships created.  The consumer is put back in charge of the value chain and decides how and where to drive in a transparent assessment of the use and value against the costs incurred.

By offering sense as a pay-as-you-go license and providing business criteria for how IT resources are allocated to high value business application in real time, sense provides the maximum business control of how IT operations dollars are used. Operating across your existing JEE servers, virtualization solutions and cloud operations transparently, sense can bring the enterprise guarantees, policies, and SLAs that you demand to your cloud based soluitons (whether private opr public).

Like its ancestors; “what is client/server?” and “what is SOA?”, questions like “what is cloud computing?” are already attracting numerous marketing based answers, discussions and blogs.  Here we’ll try to put a clear and simple label on cloud computing.  Feel free to help us adjust this with your comments.

Cloud computing is the evolution and convergence of a number of fast maturing market threads; virtualization, utility computing and software as a service (SaaS).  While cloud computing already extends beyond the sum of these three, they represent the core of what is fast becoming the most disruptive computing model of the 2000′s.

• Virtualization – abstracts away from the underlying hardware technology and provides a complete software interface to interact and manage all aspects of physical hardware representation.
• Utility computing – provide access to computing resource on a pay-as-you-go model without the need to invest in the capital to build your own computing infrastructure (not unlike utility companies that produce, distribute and sell electricity).
• SaaS – deliver business application functionally over the web at a subscription rate without the need to buy or install software licenses

These concepts combine in cloud computing to provide transparent access to required computing software and hardware services on a pay-as-you-go model.  While there are numerous technical and commercial twists in the different cloud offerings on the market the following principles should be common to cloud based solutions:

• No requirement to operate or even understand in detail the underlying hardware technology or core software operating platform - you are abstracted away from the technical complexity of servers, routers, switches, etc.
• You access the cloud service only when you need it and are only charged for your use - pay-as-you-go model
• You access cloud services that represent some unit of business input or value to you – underlying transactions, protocols and messaging are hidden in the cloud
• You do not require proprietary software or protocols to use cloud services integrated into your existing business applications domain – everything should be transparently available to existing development methods and practices (JEE, Web 2.0, SOA, etc.)
• You can choose to run cloud computing on your own site and infrastructure, on external hosted resources or on some combination of the two – mix and match onsite versus remote cloud operations

As you explore the benefits of cloud computing to your organization these simple principles will help you test your requirements against the declared offerings of your selected vendors (including Sensible Cloud).  You should thoroughly test the cloud offering against many or all of them.

Another definition of Cloud Computing

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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.

go to faq

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.

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