View from the Edge

Learn the ABC’s on BTM with Progress® OpenEdge® in the Cloud on September 15th.

Gary Clink is an experienced OpenEdge Consultant and pre-sales Engineer working for Progress Software from their UK office. Gary joined Progress in 1999 having previously worked for a Direct End-User (DEU) in the Petrochemicals industry and also for an OpenEdge Application Partner (AP) working in the Transportation, Whisky (yes Whisky), and Personnel/Payroll industries.

Gary, having learned OpenEdge as part of his university degree, some 16 years ago, has always been interested in the rapid creation of business transaction processing applications. Gary has had a particular flair for development frameworks (having work with such frameworks as OpenStart, PS:eScript, Progress Dynamics, SmartObjects, and a number of others). Software Configuration Management has also played a key focus in Gary's career – having successfully deployed dozens of Roundtable TSMS implementations to address such things as version control, build management, deployment management, and legislative compliancy such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

Gary is currently focused as a Pre-Sales Engineer on helping large direct enterprise companies and government in the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia to expand their current Progress estate and to open up new technical and commercial possibilities using the complimentary products from Progress's extensive portfolio.

In Gary's session, Know your ABC's: Business Transaction Management with Progress OpenEdge in the Cloud, Gary will demonstrate how some of the complimentary Progress' products enhance the OpenEdge experience for business Transaction Management. Business Transaction Management (BTM) is a critical component in the new IT/Business relationship. Progress Actional, Progress's first class BTM product, translates data relating to an underlying IT estate into information that is relevant to various business stakeholders including Operations Staff, Application Development, quality Assurance, and Security & compliance personnel. With this knowledge the various stakeholders can make informed decisions, often proactively, to ensure the success of every critical Business Transactions necessary for the day-to-day running of a business. Progress Actional also offers the capabilities of automating operational Service Leven Agreements (SLA) against this estate, thus preventing issues or alerting appropriate staff to problems before they have even happened.

Based on the centuries old Hippocratic oath of "first do no harm!", all of this is achieved by using Progress Actional's patented technology; which combines centralized management with distributed policy evaluation, ensures no server bottlenecks and therefore no degradation in an applications performance. Actional has been performing this function for several years for technologies such as Java, .NET, Corba, Middleware, Enterprise Service Busses, WebService, MainFrame Integration, etc. Now, starting with OpenEdge 10.2B, support for the OpenEdge platform is also included for key components such as WebSpeed Transaction Server, WebService Adaptors, Sonic Adaptors, AppServers, AppServer Internet Adaptors, and OpenEdge batch clients. What's really exciting is that all of this is achieved without having to modify your existing application, changed your application's behavior or write a single line of new ABL code. In addition to examining OpenEdge's support for Actional, during this session we'll also see how Progress Actional can be used alongside the Amazon Web Service (AWS) platform for application monitoring and Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management on the Cloud.

Come and join Gary in his session "Know Your ABC's: Business Transaction Management with Progress OpenEdge in the Cloud" on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at 9:45 a.m. EDT. To register for Progress Exchange Online 2010, go to www.progress.com/exchange2010

 

Where Are The Cloud Standards?

The short answer

It's still too early and there aren't any. People are starting to work on them though.

The long answer

Well defined and well accepted standards could make it possible to have things like interoperability and reliability and tell you what you can expect for functionality. They can also (in theory, anyway) help prevent vendor "lock-in". But they can also make life worse. Consider the myriad WS-* standards which are extremely complicated, suffer from feature creep, are hard to implement in products, and products are often hard to use. Many of the WS-* standards were defined by vendors without much input from the people who were expected to use them.

Are Amazon's API's the Answer?

Several vendors (Eucalyptus, cloud.com, Nimbula, and RackSpace to name a few), have implemented the same API's that are used in Amazon's EC2 and S3 for their own cloud computing environments. Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus, says "the Amazon Web Service API's are a candidate for a standard much like the PC standard of the 80's"

You can read about Amazon's APIs here. 

Amazon is certainly the dominant vendor but the API is specific to Amazon's architecture and feature set. It is probably not complete enough to build into an industry standard.

Do Cloud Users Care About Standards?

Some do. Vivek Kundra, Federal Chief Information Officer of the United States, says standards are needed before the cloud can take hold in government. The federal government must develop standards so agencies don't duplicate inefficiencies in data centers.

Who Is Working On Cloud Standards?

A large group of companies has banded together here  to establish "a core set of principles to ensure that organizations will have freedom of choice, flexibility, and openness as they take advantage of cloud computing. While cloud computing has the potential to have a positive impact on organizations, there is also potential for lock-in and lost flexibility if appropriate open standards are not identified and adopted."

Other groups include the Cloud Security Alliance, Distributed Management Task force (DMTF), Europea Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Open Grid Forum (OGF), Object Management Group (OMG), Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), and others. You can read about the various standardization efforts currently under way here.

Dissenting Opinions

Not everyone agrees that we need cloud computing standards. At a panel discussion entitled "Where Standards Are Going" at the Cloud Connect conference in March 2010, one member of the audience opined "Standards bodies are a solution in search of problem...the people on standards bodies are in danger of speaking in an echo chamber. After a while, all they can hear is themselves."

What do You think?

I leave you with a quote from Ron Knode, Director of Global Security Solutions for CSC:

    "We will accept no cloud standard before its time.”

Meet the Multi-tenant Database Guru at Progress Exchange Online on September 15th

Rich Banville is a Progress® OpenEdge® Fellow at Progress Software. He joined Progress in 1993 with a background in operating system test and development. While working on OpenEdge products, Rich has focused primarily on the database storage manager and the SQL query processor. His areas of interest include performance, concurrent programming, and multi-tenancy. He is also one of the few engineers at Progress who still programs in assembler when the need arises. Rich likes nothing more than discussing potential new features for the database with others. If you've used any new feature of the OpenEdge database in the past 15 years, you can bet that Rich had a hand in its conception, architecture, or development.

Rich's current focus has been on providing multi-tenancy capabilities within OpenEdge. A "shared tenancy" application deployment model was the chosen direction where one copy of the application is shared amongst all tenants who maintain their data in the same database using the same infrastructure. Keeping with the ease of use and adoption philosophy, the goal was to allow existing applications to take advantage of this new direction in application deployment without requiring additional code changes. Through much brainstorming with his colleagues, "multi-tenant tables" within the OpenEdge database was conceived.

Multi-tenant tables in OpenEdge 11.0 provide data access based on tenant identity. While all tenants share the same schema definition within the database for a multi-tenant table, the data associated with each tenant identity is logically and physically separated from each other within the database. The tenant's of the database are shielded from the fact that they are operating in a purely shared vs. isolated tenancy model. Thus different tenants running the exact same query on a multi-tenant table will only retrieve data associated with their asserted tenant identity.

Implementing shared tenancy without multi-tenant tables is significantly more complex. Without multi-tenant tables a tenant identity column must be added to each table which is to be shared across tenants within the application. Implementing shared tenancy in that way increases maintenance costs due to the need for specialized code performing complex queries, careful data insertion, and tenant specific updates. Additionally, it's error prone, open to security violations and performs poorly.

Multi-tenant tables in OpenEdge circumvent all that. The implementation of multi-tenant tables within OpenEdge from the application provider's perspective greatly reduces development, deployment, and maintenance costs when delivering a multi-tenant application. There is one database, one schema definition and one application instance that are shared by all tenants.

One copy of the database yields better utilization of system resources and reduced operational maintenance costs. One schema definition provides a consistent table layout amongst all tenants allowing future table definition changes to be made once and immediately experienced by all tenants. One copy of the application means that development, maintenance, and deployment versioning is simplified.

Although there is one copy of the application, tenant based customizations within the application can easily be implemented based on the tenant identity asserted at runtime. In addition to the application deployment, security and performance benefits of multi-tenant tables, the database operational maintenance and analysis activities can efficiently be performed on a per tenant basis as well database wide.

While multi-tenant tables are vital for SaaS type deployments, they are also very useful for anyone building and deploying applications in a multi-organization environment. A tenant is after all just a grouping of users with separate data access requirements.

Join Rich in his session "Meet the Multi-tenant Database" on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at 9:00 a.m. EDT to learn everything there is to know about this fascinating new OpenEdge feature. To register for Progress Exchange Online 2010, go to www.progress.com/exchange2010.

Exchange Online 2010

Progress Exchange Online Conference is coming to a computer near you, September 14 – 16, 2010. This free virtual forum is the place for sharing ideas, tips, and best practices on how to benefit fully from Progress OpenEdge in the cloud. You'll be joined by OpenEdge users from around the world to explore hot topics like:

• Modernizing OpenEdge applications using GUI for .Net
• Combining Microsoft Silverlight and Progress OpenEdge
• Leveraging the latest and greatest of OpenEdge Architect
• Previewing OpenEdge 11 and the NEW multi-tenant database
• Enhancing OpenEdge performance
• Deploying OpenEdge in the Cloud
• Understanding how Savvion (BPM) and OpenEdge can work together

Register now and get ready to choose from over 36 interactive sessions in 6 tracks, including:

• Integration and Process Management
• Best Practices and Application Modernization
• Developer Tools & Productivity
• Operational Efficiency
• Software as a Service/Cloud Computing
• UI Flexibility

If you register before August 30th, you'll be entered to win an Apple iPad. For more information and to register, please visit www.progress.com/exchange2010.

Ken