IT's just life!!

When we were young :

• Waterfall really meant a scenic location with "the water falling down" now its a software development model.



• Java actualy meant coffee now its a programming language.



• Bean was something to eat , now its a data holder.




• Crawling was supposed to be done by babies , now its done by search engines.









Browsing was meant to be a type of predation, now its done sitting on chair infront of computer






Surfing was an act of riding down a breaking wave, now its an act of getting back ache and RSI.






Mail was supposed to be handwritten piece of paper , now its handtypped piece of zeros and ones Greeting card never expired after 30 days !






Bug was something to kill, now its something to "resolve".





"Windows" were transparent openings in a wall for wind and light





"DOORS" were used to screen areas of a building for aesthetic purposes





ANTs were meant to be social hardworking insects





SPRING had nothing to do with computers, it really meant a SEASON

I wonder how many words IT industry is going to adapt and change their meaning forever.

Extreme Programming

Dilbert has some classic scenarios showing what happens when people like Pointy Haired Boss get interested in XP . Please visit this page to see those cartoon strips.

OK, so lot of people talk about extereme programming but I am not sure how many people really "know" exterme programming. Here is what happens when one of your "Managers" get involved in too much of XP.

Location: A Multinational Company, Meeting Room

Action : Code Review Meeting

Actors : Developers, Senior Developers, Architects etc

We all were in between code review when suddenly our manager decided to do some "Drive-by-Management". This is where things went wrong. Let me tell you what happened.

Manager : Whats going on guys ?

Me : Code Review.

Manager : Sounds great !! Which module.

Me : Cache Redesign

Manager: Ohh , why code review for Bill Print and Barcodes is not yet done ?

Me: Because its not yet developed !!

Manager : Why dont you start code review parallerly ?

Me: It cant be done , since the code is not ready.

Manager: But I thought we were following XP ??

Me: Lost for words !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

These kind of Managers are actually known as Damagers in our circle. Common guys , XP is not a solution for everything. Atleast not for ignorance.

IMHO XP is a wonderfull methodology which when understood and followed correctly can make our lives less painfull.

Cloud Computing or Glorified Outsourcing

If you are into IT field you might have probably heard this term "cloud computing" several times by now. Its an interesting format and there are lots of definitions and information already available on net on Cloud Computing. The most common ( agreed upon) layers of Cloud Computing are.

SaaS ( Software as a Service )
PaaS ( Platform as a Service )
IaaS ( Infrastructure as a Service )

In my opinion its really "Separation Of Concerns" we are talking about here but at an organizational level. Let me give you an example , if you want to use a particular software for a limited period of time you send a request to people managing the "SaaS" cloud layer of your organization. Licensing issues , installation issues are NOT YOUR CONCERN.You are only concerned with "using" it. Cloud Computing allows companies to outsource their entire IT infrastructure

What do we achieve by this ?
Centralization and Separation of Concern

what really is the benefit here ?
Cost

Now , as soon as We talk about cost we are talking about crossing the geopolitical boundaries. Will it make sense to have your data centers or SaaS support staff in a place where costs are high ?
According to this article "SaaS is predominantly a Business Process Outsourcing trend, Cloud Computing is predominantly an IT operation outsourcing trend. "

As always ,these are just my thoughts and you are free to differ.

Microsoft Yahoo and Google

As everyone will be aware by now that Microsoft and Yahoo have struck a deal to jointly work towards bringing down the popularity of Google search engine. Here is what Neil MacDonald, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Group has to say
"I credit Bing for being what tipped the deal finally over the edge," he said. "Microsoft has shown they can actually do something that has a chance of reversing the slide of both Yahoo and Microsoft against Google."

As of now Microsoft and Yahoo are waiting for goverment's approval to go ahead. Assuming that they get the approval , which they will, sooner or later what do you think would be the consequences ? will they really bring down the popularity of Google ? I really dont think so , the reason for this are :

1) It is marriage of convnience
2) Its not towards growth of an organization but towards downfall of other.
3) To bring down Google they need a paradigm shift in organizational attitude.
4) The deal is not for benefit of consumer/share holder but defeat of a common enemy.
5) They are some how the "UnUsual Partners"

PS: Its just my opinion you are free to disagree with me.

BTW its hillarious when some one claims that BING helped them struck a deal.

Business Oppurtunity

Today I got a phone call from one of my old friends whom I used to work with sometime back. It was a surprise to get his call since we were not in touch since long time. "A freind in need is freind indeed" is so true and beautifull as long as the "need in question" is yours and not other way round. Let me tell me you what our conversation was like.
As I dont want to reveal the real name of my friend I shall call him MULEMA


Me : Hello!
Mulema : Hey, This is me . Mulema !!! I used to work with you 10 years back.



Me: Hey Mulema , How are you ?
Mulema: Listen! I have a great business oppurtunity for you.



Me: ok ? what business is that ? what do you do ?
Mulema : Its franchise business , I cannot tell you on phone , Can you meet me ?



Me : Sure , but what is the name of business ? what is the product ?
Mulema: well, Its a distribution business , can you meet me ?



Me: But I need to know what do you sell , what exactly do you distribute ?
Mulema: well, can you attend a conference ? can you meet me?


Me: Well, but what is the product ? what is sales turnover ?
Mulema: its a 90/10 business , you can earn more than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates

Me: Ok!! Is it MLM ?
Mulema: Hmm !! Bye!
BANG!!!! Disconnected













MULEMA = Multi Level Marketer!!!

Bollywood and Twitter

We saw our greatest superstar AB on Bigadda.com and Amir Khans own blog (website).

Now the latest to join twitter bandwagon are actors and actresses from bollywood. I read in news that priyanka chopra and Gul Panag are into twitter big time and have more than 10 thousand followers. HT had a news article claiming that priyanka chopra has more followers than Mallika Sherawat and other actresses.

Thanks a lot twitter , now we will know when these actors got up , when they went to bathroom and what they ate for breakfast.

Keep it up guys !!!

ePoliticians of India

Some time back I was surprised to read in news that our own politicians of India were becoming more tech savy and using internet and various technologies for benefit of nation and to run for elections. Well its nice to know that they are thinking about the urban population now and beleiving that "even educated people vote".

I am not sure if this news is good or bad , but its definely a welcome change.

Cloud Camp Unconference Toronto 22 July 2009

We entered Mariott Hotel at around 5.10 , Just in time before the registrations , As expected Nitin dint forget to bring the registration printout and handed it over to the gentelman collecting them. Umasankar just joined us to try his luck and he was lucky enough to get a seat for the unconference.
On a side note I was pleasently surprised when the registration executive recognized my last name (Mysore) as name of a province in India.

We entered the unconference hall to find out it had not yet started. So we just got ourlseleves cup of coffee ( free if you are interested to know). There were some cakes and chocolate pasteries too.

At around 6.00PM the unconference started!!!

Our host for the evening was Dr Scott Radeztsky, He is an interesting speaker and indeed a subject matter expert. For those who don’t know him : Dr. Scott Radeztsky is the Chief Technologist for Sun's Systems Engineering organization in North and South America. He is one of Sun's 6 Principal Engineers, the author of the Sun Blueprint Book "N1 Grid: Preparing, Architecting and Implementing Service-centric Data Centers", and the Sun representative on the Open Group Board.



We all were asked to comeup with few interesting topics about cloud computing which would be discussed among ourselves in a sepearte room. Each room was going to have atleast one subject matter expert who would be steering the whole discussion (unconference). Well, I must say this was my first unconference and I was pretty much impressed with the whole unconference concept.

Nitin, Umasankar and I decided to attend the first session which was “what is cloud computing”. As stated by Scott on twitter he “enjoyed the first-timers in the "what is cloud computing" session...fundamentally questioning the "fundamentals”.
Yes , that’s what we all did , we questioned the fundamentals. Some of the questions were.

1) what is cloud computing ?
2) How different is it from distributed computing ?
3) Who are all the players in this field ?
4) What are the security and privacy issues in CC ?
5) Does it give unfair advantages to certain big players ?
6) How will it handle the “conflic of interest” if two major players monoplise different layers of cloud computing ?
7) What are the different grey ares between layers ?
8) How can we achieve Operating systems Virtualization or Hypervisor ?
Etc etc.

There were total of 8 sessions to know more about them please visit cloud camp wiki.

It was an excellent session according to all of us.

Next we attended Business Scenario Workshop by , this gave us a lot of practical knowledge about cloud computing and current pain points in IT industry.

Please read the blog by Sandy Kemsley to know more about this workshop.

Current Trends on Cloud

This is one in the series of blogs I have written about Cloud computing , ( my new found interest ). As I wrote in my previous blog I got intreseted in cloud computing after attending the unconference in Toronto Mariott on 22 Of July.

We attended few sessions but were not able to attend the session on current API's because of time clash. Since then I have been trying to follow up and collect as much as information about current trends or current API's in Cloud Computing.

If you wish to browse through current standards in cloud computing you can click here.

As mentioned in my previous blog cloud computing is a concept which many organizations have been following as a form of their best practices. This term might have been formalized a given the name of cloud computing much later. As I read on the WIKI
"
The first academic use of this term appears to be by Prof. Ramnath K. Chellappa (currently at Goizueta Business School, Emory University) who originally defined it as a computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits.
"

Well, coming back to current trends , two of the most interesting APIS I found were

1) Mapreduce By Google/Apache ,
2) Hadoop By Apache

I am still in process of reading and understanding them. Since there is more than enough information on internet about them already I dont think its good idea to cut and paste the same information.

In this unconference I learned following things

1) Some of the early players of CC were Craigslist, facebook , flicr etc
2) There were/are Google groups such as "Cloud computing use cases" which has lot of information about CC
3) Discussions about having private island on a public cloud ?
4) Discussions on convergance of private and public clouds ?
5) What do we get ? Cost ? Time ? IT resource optimization ?
6) What are the Issues solved by cloud computing?
Flexible Network
Incremental Cost

7) What are different Ownership issues or License management issues arising due to CC ?

I still have some questions unanswered they are

1) Do we assume infinte access to internet crossing the geopolitical boundaries ?

2) Financial institutions might be bit sensitive to the fact that there data is somewhere else physically what is the solution in this scenario ?

My thoughts on Cloud

A big thanks to The Open Group for taking so much interest in Cloud Computing and arranging all those (un)conferences and seminars. As mentioned in my previous blog I attended an unconference in Toronto on July 22and left wondering how much can we achieve/unachieve using Cloud computing concept.

As with all other Jargons and Buzzwords people realize only later that they have been doing this for years before it was formalized and a Buzzword was created. Believe me We all have been cloud computing for years without even knowing about it.

I used to work for an organization where we had a software installation and license client kit on each and every workstation. This client kit was controlled from a central location. Any new software required by any employee had to be done through this kit. This I believe in a classic example of Software as A Service layer of Cloud Computing.

Now coming back to Unconference: I unlearned that there are basically 4 Types of cloud

1) Public
2) Private
3) Community
4) Hybrid

More information about these clouds can be found here. These clouds can provide services independently or can converge to provide a more meaning full and custom service.

Although the cloud computing concept can be used in many different aspects but its most commonly used in consolidation of data centers or networks. According to Google
"
As computation continues to move into the cloud, the computing platform of interest no longer resembles a pizza box or a refrigerator, but a warehouse full of computers.
"
Google has just released a white paper on Warehouse scale Computing which is pretty interesting and a must read.

This unconference was really informative and provided more insight on this relatively new topic which ironically we have been doing years ( Just kidding). However I still have a question which remains unanswered till now.
Can the holistic view of Cloud Computing be of a pyramid structure rather than plain horizontal layer ?












What I mean by this is , when we talk about scalability one layer has to be "theoretically" more scalable then the layer above it. Please let me know your thoughts on this.

Cloud Computing : CloudCamp Unconference

Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam that’s what came to my mind when I first read about Cloud Computing which is often described as the “the ultimate form of globalization”. Although, claiming it to the ultimate form might appear to be an over statement but it actually makes sense when you dig down deep into it.

I attended a CloudCamp (un)conference by Open Group yesterday at Marriott yesterday and was able to clear some of my misconceptions about cloud computing. There were experts on cloud computing from different walks of life (industry). For starters ,


CloudCamp is an unconference where early adapters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions.


That takes me to the frequently asked question “What the Heck is Cloud Computing ?” . Well, there is lot of information on the sweet old internet about it and I wont do a COPY-PASTE of same information here.

In a nulshell Cloud computing can be defined as “centralizing your IT resources into layers to achieve maximum utilization.” You can basically combine following IT resources to give you a holistic view.

Please wait for second part of this blog to know more about UNdiscussions which took place in this cloud computing camp.

Enterprise Service Bus Or Enterprise Message Broker

Using EMB of ESB is not a project level decision but an enterprise level decision. The factors which influence this decision are not only technological but also business and political. This blog is not an argument favoring one over other but just additional information which could help you in making your decision from a technical point of view.

My friend Nitin Shekhar has already written a nice article explaning the core concept and difference between the two you can read it here (
http://nitinshekhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/enterprise-service-bus-vs-message.html
)

I would like to add some more information through this blog.

EMB ( Message Broker )

It is a physical component that handles the communication between applications. Instead of communicating with each other, applications communicate only with the message broker. An application sends a message to the message broker, providing the logical name of the receivers. The message broker looks up applications registered under the logical name and then passes the message to them.

Reponsibilities

• Receive message
• Determine the message recipients and perform the routing
• Handle any interface-level differences ( mapping etc ) mostly one to one.
• Dipatch the message to the recipients


ESB ( Service Bus)

Used to Connect all applications through a logical component. It specializes in transporting messages between applications. Key elements of ESB are:
• A set of agreed-upon message schemas
• A set of common command messages
• A shared infrastructure for sending bus messages to recipients

Responsiblities

• Provides a common set of message formats to the participating applications.
• Transports messages from the sender to the other applications that are connected to the bus.
• Senders tag outgoing messages and pass them to the bus.
• Receivers inspect the incoming messages and discard the messages that are not needed.