InfoQ: Presentation: Operational Manageability lessons learned from eBay

InfoQ: Presentation: Operational Manageability lessons learned from eBay

Design for operation. That is something that today's corporate IT should embed in their minds.

In past 10 years, the so-called application servers are supposed to provide transparent technologies to software programmers so that programmers don't have to worry about availability and scalability issues. Indeed, in small to medium scalability scenarios, Java EE Application Server like BEA WebLogic has achieved certain success. As clustering demand get larger and more complex, however, features offered by today's application servers are not enough anymore. Like any asset, IT assets today are facing the challenge of fluidity. Computing power should be provided when needed and just as much as needed.

Cloud computing offerings provided by Google and Amazon are indeed quite appealing, but corporate mindset is not likely to concede ownership of core business systems to another entity. Outsourcing is one thing; to convince corporate that EC2 or Google App Engine can be a solid substitute for outsourcing is another.

Therefore, I see several technology/business opportunities:

1. Partnership between IBM/Accenture/Tata etc. and Google/Amazon
• This is most likely to happen within near future. An endorsement from IT shop like Accenture would ease corporate mind and fear.
2. IT Consulting practices focused on helping build in-house cloud computing architecture
• Certain entrepreneurs departing Google or Amazon could definitely make some buck by sharing their in-house experience.
3. Advancement of Virtualization software packages to close the gap between Cloud-computing and Virtualization
• I have seen real demo of VMWare ESX Server. It is a very interesting and promising technology. Endorsement of key outsourcing services providers is key to their success though.
  
4. Cloud-enabling application platforms.
• From a Java programmer perspective, I do hope to see a "cloud-enabling" JavaEE application server. But that is near impossible to happen. Java EE is designed with old-style scalability and availability in mind; its current focus is still to achieve easier development and deployment (which makes sense). I hope that current remaining JavaEE players can allocate some effort in cloud-computing.