Sensible Cloud - Leaders in Cloud Computing

sense is a cloud application platform family to leverage SOA, JEE and cloud based services and computing resources, allowing business managers to define policies and priorities of how they wish to assign runtime computing resources to individual or pools of business applications based on their own business criteria.

sense operates with existing application platforms (JEE, Java, Web Services, SOA, ESB, etc) and extends them to cloud based computing platforms like Amazon EC2 and Virtualization solutions from vendors like Xen, VMware and Hewlett Packard.

Key capabilities and benefits of sense include:

• (XML) business defined policies indicate rules for resource assignment and priorities in the face of peak loads and unexpected performance degradation – sense guarantees your business SLAs
• Federated service publication with self-discovery within the sense domain – all sense nodes and services are aware of the state of the entire domain
• Almost unlimited scaling when business applications and services are extended to include cloud based resources like Amazon – use pay-as-you-go to bypass capital expenditure to get new operating platform up and running in hours
• Guaranteed reliability and performance policies are defined by business managers with sense automatically adjusting and aligning appropriate resources from the most ‘healthy’ servers available - your most valuable business applications get the best attention and resources
• Multiple platform execution and multi-protocol communication between nodes within (and potentially across) the sense domain(s) - eliminates single-point-of-failure, including sense itself
• Intelligent service routing to the most effective platform to execute the service – makes sure your most valuable services are directed to the best provider platform available to match the required SLA
• Services can be distributed across multiple platforms to support reliability and scalability with zero impact to the client business application(s) - guaranteed scalability and reliability from day one, with no capital outlay
• Runtime business SLA (service level agreements) implemented by business managers – transparent visibility and control by business of which applications receive what computing resources

sense is an innovative cloud based technology platform to allow businesses to impose and effect business goals on their key applications and services. This permits them to automatically ensure that higher value business services are dynamically provided higher levels of computing resources to handle peak or emergency workloads smoothly. sense sits within and along side existing and emerging application platforms and manages them, to route incoming work to the most appropriate and performant delivery platform or service, based on business rules and targets. sense transparently supports and bridges between J2EE, .Net, SOA and Cloud based application platforms.

Applications wanting to benefit from sense need not take into consideration any aspects of business targets or run-time governance to achieve those targets – sense does this automatically based on rules provided by business staff. This leaves architects and development staff to concentrate on designing and developing the highest quality functionality for business applications and services, and not on the technical complexities of how to achieve certain throughput on hardware infrastructures or how to handle peak loads or unplanned service outages.

Architects usually focus on functional requirements of the application, without thinking about the “business expectations” of the functional requirements. With sense an application architect can ask his business sponsor a more meaningful set of business related questions, such as:

• what are the business rules that address the value of this service, versus that other service?
• what do you want to happen if the service is hit by unexpected peak loads or the network goes down?
• how do you want to handle ‘gold’ member requests differently from ’silver’ and ‘bronze’ members?

sense offers service level agreements (SLA) defined over functional requirements, with automatic runtime enforcement.

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We have looked at the leading Virtualization server providers and extended the sense cloud application platform to two Virtualization technology providers.

Xen and VMWare are the leading Virtualization server providers today, and offer best in class performance for both servers and operating systems together with the highest degree of management functionality. So, while every modern operating system can be virtualized with industry-leading performance, they all suffer for being disconnected from a business approach to scaling.

The sense virtualization platform compliments existing Virtualization servers.  Built on sense the sense virtualization platform federates VMs to;

• extend VMs to both traditional JEE infrastructure and to cloud computing resources (like Amazon EC2 and others) – you can operate a virtual pool of resources across multiple platform types
• add critical business constraints on how the VMs are scaled to satisfy defined _business SLA_s – this lets you add business conditions for scaling VM resources to the technical criteria generally available from today’s _virtualization servers_

The role of Sensible Cloud’s innovative cloud application platform sense, is to match the business layers of an agreement (Business SLA) with the physical layer of a virtualized platform, by instantiating the right number and quality of VMs depending on defined business rules, and maintaining a consistent and real time catalogue of what “hardware” in the cloud is available to operate a new VM instance.

sense virtualization platform

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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.