Author Archives: ssumbera

Software + Services: The convergence of SaaS, SOA and Web 2.0

my outlines of  Beat Swegler (Microsoft) presentation  “Software + Services: The convergence of SaaS, SOA and Web 2.0”,

 

 

Trends in IT

            SaaS – you have off premise software, you are outsourcing that

SOA – it is about service composition – you  assemble solution from different artifacts, how you build them, how you sell them

 

Web2.0 – multiple people able author and multiple to consume: internet applications that explicitly leverage network effects. Not necessary tight to Web Browsers but to applications

 

“Data is the next Intel Inside” – VE, Google Earth – every one can get images – the data what people put on top of the underlying data – this is the value.  It is not enough to think only about functionality.

“Software above the level of the single device”

 

 

Business Models:

Subscription/License based model: Models are based on the book “Place to Space” by Peter Weill

 

 

SaaS – is about service delivery

SOA – about service composition

Web 2.0 – economics + UX

 

all together S+S

 

 

S+S Lifecycle;

monetize (-license fees)->build (single tenant)->run -> consume (smart client)

 

Example : Outlook &Exchange

 

        Per user storage of data

        On/Offline capability

        Calendar/Folder

        Support different client types

 

 

Business Models

S+S Examples

S+S Platforms

 

 

Example: Eve Online

        leading Massive Multiplayer Online Game

        All users play in one single virtual world

        Graphics engine running on client

 

Monetize _>Build (highly scalable SQL server cluster) ->Consume (smart client leveraging GPU) ->Run

 

Command based –sending commands to objects in the game.(ships) to minimize network traffics

 

Photosynth – get value from data but also nice UX

 

        Cloud based service

        Consumed by rich application

 

HardRock sample (deepzoom technology) – memorabila.hardrock.com

British Library – five treasures

 

 

Platform for S+S:

 

1.     Live Service – targeting consumers, no IT involvements, Consumer oriented

2.     Online services – targeting businesses

 

Microsoft Service portfolio: (see above)

 

Oslo : will become our platform for building services that range from on premise to cloud space – you build stuff and later you decide how you gonna host the stuff. it is service delivery platform that come with some service creation aspects.

 

Exploring services:

Build Services:

1.     fundamental thing is scalability  – linear proportional between added resources and performance gained. I know how much performance I get if I get one box.

 

2.     Cost efficiency – because I can switch providers – competitors are on clouds as well

3.     Customizable – enterprise want to customize much more than SMB

4.     integration cap. – how do I integrate with my services

5.     Multi tenancy vs. Virtualization – do I want to create a fix instance for every tenant. or in a way that multiple tenants run in one instance.

 

ð more economical sense !

 

From Mega Hertz to Mega Watt – how many megawatts we use. ?

 

 

If you have well run data center – you are carbon neutral

Hosting choice

        On-premise

        Partner hosted

        Cloud based

 

Reducing carbon footprint:

        e.g. Quincy is carbon neutral

        consumer gets carbon unit credited

 

 

Consume – Criteria

SMB

            greatest potential for SaaS

        reduced IT management

        Relevance of the application – must for SMB

        Affordability

 

Enterprise

        reduce IT management

        Relevance of application

        Customizability and integration capabilities

        SLA

        TCO

 

 

Consumer Expectations:

Consumer:

        Free, ad funded or small fee

        can live with downtimes

SMB:

        affordable service delivery

Enterprise:

            – SLA with predictable maintenance . windows

 

 

 

SLA :

how can we become more reliable and HA than internet infrastructure.

 

        Internet availability challenges:

o    application avail vs. internet infras. avail

o   how to get more 9s than the electricity providers

        Requires an integrated and holistic operation-management story

 

 

 

Dealing with Service Outages:

        leverage cloud services as geo-backup

        duplicating cloud providers

 

 

Monetize

        license fee based model

        transaction fees (more in SaaS)

        Subscription fees

        Freemium (advertized sponsored)

 

Example : Amazon S3

S3 Simple Storage Service

        write, read, and delete objects (1 byte to 5 gigabytes each)

        objects are stored in buckets and retrieved via unique keys

        provided REST and SOAP based interfaces

o   Rest: (follows web pattern) Get, PUT ,Delete

o   SOAP (RPC way) : CreateBucket(),,,,

 

Amazon – enable scalability

 

The risk of cloud computing:

        problem with authentication overload and DoS  – 2 hours outage. (from 1 month it is within 10%)

 

Example BizTalk Services:

        Messaging

o    message routing and identif. in cloud

o   identity provides simple access control

 

        Identity

 

 

 

        Pub/Sub via URIs

        directional messaging via URIs

 

interesting for cloud interaction/integration services

 

Popfly (yahoo pipes?)  tool for mashing up:

what will happen if we have smooth transition between application -cloud

 

 

  

 

Closing :

        cloud based services will become more important

        some application are born to live in the cloud, others definitely not. – what drives you to put something in cloud – scale ? data ? you can gain ?

        future services platforms will provide a broad range of deployment choices. –

o   my dream would be: write application and define how you gonna host it (later in deployment decision)

 

Q&A:

        how you get the services into your operational and management story

        cloud services are for SMB most appropriate.

How to run in parallel executable graphicaly intensive applications on Win32

code

Example of settings for 10 concurrent processes runing in batch mode:

1. Graphical Application could take cca 250 KB per instance from desktop heap, that is 2.5 MB for 10 running executables. Thus desktop heap for non interactive services should be set to 3072 KB if you want to run 10 Applications. You set it in registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\
\SubSystems\Windows%SystemRoot%\system32\csrss.exe
ObjectDirectory=\Windows SharedSection=1024,3072,3072 …

2. Total desktop heap per session is controlled by SessionViewSize. The size depends on total number of services you run. For instance running 10 services as domain user in session0 + default desktop + logon would give the minimum size around 30MB, set it to 42 MB ( decimal value !)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
DWORD key SessionViewSize = 42

3. GDIs most likely use area of paged pool for the session, so set parameter SessionPagedSize to 128 MB.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
DWORD key SessionPoolSize = 128

4. SessionPagedSize + SessionViewsSize should not exceed 450MB, however downside is decreasing other memory areas used by the system in it’s 2GB space (like system cache )

5.you should not boot the system with /3GB option *because system space has only 1 GB space, you can not influence SessionSpace size and it is fixed to 20 MB – that imply that you can not run many Applicationse on such system, may be more after turning some services off. Moreover GDI also uses SessionViewSpace and the limit 20 MB is insufficient even for one process running. Check that in c:\boot.ini that there is nothing like /3G

Image Processing lectures

In year 2006 I have made series of presentations of thema image processing on Mendel University in Czech Language, You may find ppt slides useful here (although in Czech Language, there are lot of nice pictures collected from Web) : http://mapserver.mendelu.cz/sites/default/files/data/skripta/dpz/DIP1_7.rar

  • DIP1 – úvod, lidské vnímání obrazu
  • DIP2 – základní pojmy, digitalizace, modely
  • DIP3 – rektifikace obrazu
  • DIP4 – úprava obrazu
  • DIP5 – Prostorové zvýraznění
  • DIP6 – Spektrální zvýraznění
  • DIP7 – Segmentace, klasifikace
  • DIP 1 – 7 – Přednášky 1 – 7 power point
  • Freedom from OS lock-in

    quoting from http://blogs.vmware.com/console/2006/11/changing_role_o.html
    “Once you have a pervasive virtualization layer that focuses exclusively on managing all the underlying hardware and can run any OS, developers will finally be able to adapt and integrate the operating system as a part of their application, ship both of those together as a virtual machine and be confident it can run in any environment.”

    Caching WMS requests

    Recently I was interested in caching WMS requests on MapSnack, that would allow off-line usage of WMS sources. Unfortunately there is no functional WMS discovery or search engine. Google is very weak in this area and even inurl: doesn’t bring too many results. There is one paper I found on this topics called “OpenGIS WMS-based prototype system of Spatial Information Search Engine” but to access this paper you nee to login to IEEE. pages. So how to help google to index WMS layers and pictures it produce ? one of the thoughts I have is to create simple set of pages on which each request for certain layer for certain zoom level and in particular tile would be referenced. Tiling is important as “sampling frequency” for the WMS cache. Actually last year I was working on prototype which enabled me to save for offline use WMS tiled layers (refer to http://www.sumbera.com/news/mapajax/mapajax.htm) what was missing was an automatic crawler on the area and layers – the saving was done only by manual navigation in the area. Last note : I expect the shift of the google search engine towards this freely available geospatail content (…. just right after I will start to generate my index pages 😉

    MapSnack pilot run

    MapSnack runs.
    thanks to Jachym Cepicky and Peter Balogh we have now 2 pilot runs of MapSnack

    1st: http://mapserver-slp.mendelu.cz – serving school forest enterprise maps SLP Krtiny
    2nd : http://mapsnack.mendelu.cz – serving maps of southmoravia area

    all 2 virtual geospatial appliances runs on server MapBistro with VMware Server installed on Debian

    The only thing which is missing there is a button for downloading MapSnack.
    So kind of Web WYSIWYG :))

    Reading MapSnack virtual disks directly from DVD

    Today I’ve tried to access virtual disks from DVD to run MapSnack. Interestingly enough it runs, the trick is to make snapshot which can be read-only and remain on DVD – so you don’t need to copy all Gigabytes to your hardrive. Instead you copy on your HD just few MB of ‘delta’ virtual disks which need to be writable. Of course it is slower to read from DVD but for saving a disk space that make sense. So let’s consider following modes of running MapSnack: 1. virtualized and runing from harddrive (current release) 2. virtualized but mostly run directly from DVD (this) 3. native run from DVD as LiveDVD (see previous post) 4. hybrid run – native: small booting iso image which mounts virtual disks virtual: see point 2. Number 4 is target which brings great flexibility.