Is Vietnam Ready for SOA?

Least we push ourselves to the limits of marketing hype and business reality, there will be quite a few out there who really wonder how prudent, realistic is the push for SOA in the emerging markets, say for example East Asia, or ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). ASEAN is comprised of 10 member nations, specifically Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myannmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam. Many in the U.S. would scoff at the GNP of any one of these at the country level, but trust me, it is a misnomer to call some of these countries "emerging" markets. In many cases, for example in manufacturing, China is their only rival, with the U.S. losing out many years ago.

With the exception of Singapore, this region does have some challenges which earns it the "emerging" classifier, a book can be written about it, but primarily the key concerns from a social/economic perspective which can inhibit growth are the communication issues associated with the multitude of languages, population explosion, inadequate city infrastructure, and the horrendous pollution within the cities. Issues associated with non-transparent governments run a close second but can be managed. Like I said, another book.

So with these sort of issues, how can a country such as beautiful Vietnam, which is at the bottom of most lists which rate countries by education, poverty, disease, infrastructure, etc., how can it even think about solutions and technologies that are really geared towards societies which are far more mature in their ability to build IT infrastructure?

To that, during my 05-Dec-2007 trip to Hanoi, I was reading in the local Hanoi press how Vietnam was only now looking at agriculture solutions which employed mechanization. It is hard for the country to not leverage the agriculture industry's low cost labor as a means to drive most agriculture output. But the article correctly notes, the government and the citizens are better off achieving higher productivity via mechanization, with an added benefit of being able to redeploy freed up laborers into other sectors such as manufacturing.

So for Vietnam, business automation, for example through SOA, has the same parallel. A business model could use traditional means and deploy a plethora of cheap technical resources and build, build, build the rats nest of inflexible solutions, just like the U.S. did in the 60's through the 90's. Or, it can chose to use fewer technicians and leverage the newest of infrastructure technologies such as is offered by IBM, but along with the appropriate architectures, to arrive at business solutions which promise to make Vietnam immediately more competitive in IT areas which today bog down businesses and governments in all other countries. Ah, the wonderful opportunities which can begot with a green field space, if only the vision is there within Vietnamese IT and business leadership to capitalize.

My audience was not leadership however, as I was there to transfer knowledge to technicians on many different IBM SOA products and topics including architecture and modeling. So, in one week we reviewed the full life cycle SOA product line of WebSphere Modeler, Process Server (WPS), Registry and Repository (WSRR), and Monitor. To do this type of work without modeling is similar to putting up a building without a blueprint, so we inserted Rational Software Architect (RSA) as it is fully UML 2.0 compliant and it comes with a SOA for RUP Profile. SOA governance is facilitated with Tivoli for service management, and project life cycle management with the Rational products.

It was challenging, as most of my audience had NOT heard of EAI, RUP, UML, modeling in general, OMG, service management, project life cycle management, governance, work flow, long running transactions, asynchronous communication, etc. They HAVE heard of SOA, but today they do the classic things like write code, and persist data to databases. Web Services are akin to agriculture mechanization, we are so early in the game for Vietnam it can actually make front page news just discussing the subject. But far from implementing.

But now is the time for knowledge transfer, the trip was not wasted. I challenged my students, build for your country and government something which is long lasting, resilient, robust, something you will be proud of. Oh and of course, use IBM. All of this said, remember the aforementioned language issues for the region? Well, I speak English, they had limited skills with my native tongue, but they spoke perfect Vietnamese, and I none. So the region's communication issues left its mark again.

The Age of Appliances - DataPower "like" offerings

In one of the announcement's on the IBM Cognos proposed acquisition, there was a reference to SOABI (the merging of SOA and BI) as a possible implementation in a DataPower appliance

"There are potentially a number of interesting potential synergies from this deal, aside from the fact that it fills the BI hole in IBM's information management strategy. For instance, the Applix TM/1 technology itself could be spun along a parallel entry level path aimed at SMBs that could package this memory-resident, 64-bit, distributed OLAP analytics offering inside an IBM DataPower appliance."

Gary Smith at SOA Network Architect first noted this unique suggestion for an appliance product roadmap.

At IBM (caveatted with my blog's disclaimer footnote) I have the opportunity of working with DataPower. As an appliance, it processes XML (transformation, translation, routing) much faster than any software based engine, it has excellent security capabilities (including WS-Security) and is hardened so that it can reside safely in the DMZ. It is the best way I know of to secure your ESB on the edge.

It is interesting that this appliance is a software offering specifically under the WebSphere brand. There is reason for this as DataPower straddles the network infrastructure and application infrastructure reference architecture, and it is the application space where the DataPower appliance augments the application integration layer, for which WebSphere has the bulk of IBM's offerings.

The market can still get confused with where the boundaries of software augmentation ends and where the hardware/firmware framework dictates the scope of what the appliance is designed for. The DataPower appliance shines with a well thought out design, but what makes it really competitive is what it's firmware is dedicated to (XML and security). The Blue colored XI50 is augmented with WebSphere MQ, Tivoli, and TIBCO clients, but for the reason of helping the device slot in more seamlessly into an ESB infrastructure. It is not a product roadmap which leads to more and more application layers added on in order to create yet another hardware/application "thing" which is taken out of it's crate and does something after plugging it in. The DataPower appliance was built from the ground up to solve very specific problems, and to burden it with bloating functionality which provides a declining scale of incremental functionality with each new layer, would not be a good thing.

That said, there IS something to having an out of the box appliance which is architected, designed, and built from the ground up with modularized off the shelf hardware and software components, and finished off with specialized firmware implementations and other niceties like hardening, which makes it a first class appliance which bolts into an existing infrastructure. Something which could, for example, dedicate itself to specialized functions such as SOABI. This concept extends the SOA software framework where adaptability, flexibility, and time to market are paramount. Dropping in significant functionality without extensive configuration, integration effort, deployment effort, is a nice addition to anyone's future SOA infrastructure.

Oh, and to put a ribbon and bow on such future appliances, how about building them to BladeCenter specs, and slotting them into Blue Cloud for On Demand computing. Interested players in this concept, please Digg here!!

IBM Blue Cloud Announcement

On the news of IBM's Blue Cloud, would like to mention Dana Gardner's thorough diatribe on the announcement. Let's highlight her summation on IBM providing an infrastructure (BladeCenter, Linux, cloud software), which would be a shared/dedicated services based SOLUTION, provisioned by Tivoli products. A services solution vs. just selling IT inventory assets.

"And so large enterprises will need not just make decisions about technology platform, supplier, and computing models. They will need to make bigger decisions based on broad partnerships that produce services ecologies in niches and industries. For an enterprise to adopt a Blue Cloud approach is not just to pick a vendor -- they are picking much more. The businesses and services and hosting all become mingled. It becomes more about revenue sharing than just a supplier contract."

This is beyond the scope of the announcement, but why not provision strategic solutions, and the adjoining back office, just as one would for an externally managed web site. This is quite the play on the old outsourcing model.

A relevant business case for Blue Cloud would require massive data/processing services to drive future mashup type social solutions requiring huge parallel processing on the back-end with matching data streams. These requirements will most likely call for a greenfield infrastructure. The Blue Cloud is comprised of very unique application services which initially does NOT seem to map to back-office requirements. But if scenarios do start to arise from such a marriage, why not run an entire enterprise on a services based platform which possesses such huge processing and data handling capabilities?

Though not as sexy, but possibly improving an initial ROI by leveraging underutilized hardware, is the fact that IBM has more than one platform option for this scenario. Tivoli can readily provision SUSE Linux on the IBM hardware platforms for which SUSE is certified: BladeCenter & xSeries (natively), and zSeries, iSeries, pSeries (virtually).

Deeper into the Woods
Part of the Cloud offering is Hadoop, an open-source parallel workload-scheduling software originally developed by Yahoo. With it's own distributed file system (HDFS), it leverages the MapReduce file distribution programming model from Google. Yahoo is currently using Hadoop to process 10,000 research jobs a week, on ~10,000 servers with largest cluster at 1,600 nodes, managing 1 petabyte of user data. It might be that Ubuntu is the GNU/Linux distro but this is not verified. Read Tim O'Reily on the subject.

An interesting point about the Google programming model, it relaxes a few POSIX requirements to enable streaming access to distributed file system data by splitting files on arbitrary byte boundaries. But more importantly, it represents Google's recent advances in abstraction allowing them to express simple computation but still hide the messy details of parallelization, fault-tolerance, data distribution and load balancing required in such a library.

So in a quasi-joint offering, Google, Yahoo, open source, and IBM, are now indirectly combining their technologies to provide to the world a services based solution via the cloud which can handle extremely large processing requirements and be provisioned without the corporate and academic worlds having to build out their own infrastructure. HP, Sun, Oracle, Amazon, et al., are heading in the same direction, so the race is on.