Every company is using Microsoft Office and especially Excel to do some sort of data analytics. However data volumes have grown exponentially and have outgrown Spreadsheets. You need experts in the business domain, in data analytics, in data migration/extraction/transformation/loading, in server management, etc. to get data analytics done on Big Data scale. This makes it expensive and only usable for the happy few.

Why? There must be easier ways to do it.

I think there are. For those unfamiliar with data analytics but eager to learn, you should take a look at a product called RapidMiner. It is close to amazing how a non-expert is able to use Neural Networks, Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines, Genetic Algorithms, etc. and get meaningful results in minutes. The amazing part is also that RapidMiner is open source hence for usage by 1 analyst it is free.

Rapid-i.com, the company behind RapidMiner, also offers server software to run data analytics remotely. It is here where big data opportunities meet easy data analytics. What if RapidMiner data analytics could be ran on hundreds of servers in parallel and you pay by usage just as you pay for any Cloud compute and storage instances?

RapidMiner as a Service

RapidMiner as a Service, RMaaS, would allow millions of business people to be able to analyse Big Data “without Big Investments”. This type of Data Analytics as a Service would provide any SME with the same data analytics tools as large corporations. Data could come from Amazon S3, Amazon’s DynamoDB, Hosted Hadoops, any webservices, any social network, etc.

Visual as a Service

RapidMiner as a Service is only one of the many domain specific tools that could be offered as a visual drag-and-drop Cloud service. VAS as a Service is another example in which complex telecom assets can be easily combined in a drag-and-drop manner. There are many more. These services will be the real revolution of Cloud Computing since they combine IaaS/PaaS/SaaS into a new generation of solutions that bring large savings for new users and potential large revenues for their providers…

When the first television shows were made they used one camera to record a theatre play. It was only after some time that the real potential of the television became clear.

Virtualization and IaaS is like a one-camera-theatre-play-broadcast

Yes it is great to be able to put software on virtual hardware and as such save some money in hardware costs. But it will not change anybody’s life because renting a virtual server full-time is more expensive than renting a physical hosting server. Companies that focus too much on virtualization and IaaS are not seeing the full potential of Cloud Computing.

Multi-tenancy – a game changer

Cloud Computing without mult-tenant solutions is like a race car without an engine. Making one solution that fits many and installing it once and managing it in one place is the real game changer.

How much time and money is lost in a per customer install? Ordering and installing hardware (4-6 weeks); paying for base software (OS, Cluster, Database, etc.); installing the total software stack; integration with back-up, fault management, single sign-on, performance management, third-party systems, etc.; upgrading and bug fixing; data migrations; etc.

All this can be drastically reduced if the software is installed once and designed for multiple companies and customers.

Best-In-Class Solutions

Best-In-Class solutions used to be those solutions with most features from market-leading companies like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc. However most of these solutions are unnecessarily complex. There is a simple rule to check if you will be overpaying for unnecessary features: Do my business users need training? The more, the worst.

Apple has demonstrated that simplicity and easy-of-use are real demand creators. The real revolution of Cloud Computing is starting now. The real revolution is that business users can ignore the legacy corporate IT systems and use alternative solutions to get things done faster and more efficiently. The Appstore concept of “There is an app for everything”, will now be translated into “There is a SaaS for everything”.

Project managers will stop asking the IT department to install a shared project management server to synchronize their MS-Projects. Instead they will simply use a SaaS solution for project management. The same will be happening for other disciplines.

IT departments can fight this trend, just like they can try to stop people from bringing smartphones and tablets to work. However smart IT departments see a clear opportunity.  Corporate systems are very expensive and often their implementation fails. This wastes a lot of time and money. By letting business users choose the SaaS solutions they want to use, IT departments will see the risk of project failures due to change management issues almost disappear. Using SaaS solutions however does not mean that IT departments are no longer necessary. Once users are over their honeymoon period they will want these SaaS solutions to use Single Sign-on and be integrated with corporate systems and other SaaS solutions.

The next steps in the Cloud Revolution

The next step in the Cloud revolution will be solutions that make easy integration between on-site systems and between different SaaS solutions possible. Project managers will love to manage projects via a best-in-class project management SaaS. However they will still need to get time reporting info, travel expenses, resource allocation, etc. The reality will be that some of these systems can be offered via other SaaS solutions and some will be local. All of them will need to be integrated if the enterprise wants to get real benefits. History has a tendency to repeat itself. Middleware  and EAIs are not death because of the Cloud. They just will become EAIaaS.

The other Cloud revolution is likely to give business users tools to create their own applications in the Cloud. This does not mean programming tools but instead drag-and-drop wizards and dynamic data storage solutions. There are millions of business critical applications stored in Excel and Access files. It is time that business users get the proper Cloud tools to convert these into social corporate solutions. Google Apps and Force.com are ahead of the rest but they are far from being the winner yet. The war has just started…

In previous articles I wrote about automating cloud operations as a key to successfully and quickly launching new services.

You can use Chef or Puppet to automate the deployment of servers. However neither solves some of the other problems with cloud operations: autoscaling and disaster recovery.

Scalr is relatively new and still a bit rough around the edges. However it has great promises to simplify deployment, automate scaling and quickly recover from server outage. Scalr uses the out-of-the-box functionality from Amazon to quickly bootstrap an environment via AMIs. Afterwards it implements an alternative autoscaling that does not rely on Amazon’s. Disaster recovery depends on the type of server but it can automatically recover from master database failure and other elements in a typical scalable web architecture.

Work on extending Scalr towards other providers like Eucalyptus and Rackspace seem to be work in progress.

Scalr is  not only a good sample of the 80-20 rule in which they focus on the most common scenarios. However via a plugin mechanism it is very easy to extend. I expect other public cloud providers to contribute plugins in the near future.

At the moment Scalr is still rough around the edges but definitely with the right push of some startups and public cloud providers it should quickly mature. With some custom plugins a telecom operator that is thinking about IaaS and private clouds should definitely look at it and inspire themselves…

If you are trying to find out what the right hypervisor is for your private cloud or IaaS then you might be asking the wrong question…

Do most applications really need an OS and hypervisor is a better question?

One company of the companies that is exploring this area is Joyent. Thier SmartOS is like the mix between a virtual machine and a combined OS + hypervisor. Instead of installing a hypervisor, on top an operating system, on top an application server or database, the Joyent team thought it would be more efficient to try to remove as many layers as possible between the application/data and the hardware.

According to publicly available videos and material, their SmartOS is based on a telecom technology for high-scalable low-latency application operations. Unfortunately Google does not seem to be able to answer which telecom technology it is. So if you know the answer, please leave a comment.

The idea of running applications as close to the hardware as possible and being able to scale an application over multiple servers is the ultimate goal of many cloud architects. Joyent claims that their SmartOS runs directly on the hardware. On top of SmartOS you are able to install virtualization but ideally you run applications and data stores directly.

The next step would be to combine the operating system with the  virtual machine/application server or database server into one.  Removing more layers will greatly improve performance as can be seen by Joyent’s performance tests.

So the real question is: do we need so many extra layers?

A distributed storage system, a virtualized webserver, a virtualized app server, a distributed SQL-accessble database or NoSQL solution that would run straight on hardware with a minimal extension to distribute load over multiple machines would be the ideal IaaS/PaaS architecture. It would give customers what they really need: performance, scalability, low-latency, etc. Why add a large set of OS and hypervisor functions that at the end are not strictly necessary?

In previous posts I already expressed my doubt about telecom operators getting any real benefits from offering virtual servers and other IaaS aspects to their customers. It looks like “a 2000 déjà vu” in which operators started to offer hosted email after Yahoo and other showed them the way…

So if you don’t want to be a bad clone of Amazon AWS what can you do?

Alternative 1: The Mobile IaaS

Operators are all about mobile communication. However creating mobile applications is hard. Testing them is even harder. Let alone testing them on different hand-sets in a continuous automated testing approach.

This is exactly the type of services that a mobile operator can offer:

1. Mobile hardware virtualization – instead of virtualizing an x86, why not virtualize the phone hardware, e.g. Nvidia Tigra2. A mobile operating system (MOS) developer could choose which hardware to virtualize: the amount of ram, which sensors, which CPU, which graphics card, etc. Afterwards different flavors of operating systems can be ran on this hardware: iOS, Android, Blackberry OS, Symbian, Windows Phone 7, etc.
2. Mobile operating system virtualization – For less experienced developers they can already pick a pre-configured phone, e.g. iPhone 4. Afterwards a developer can launch applications on the phone.
3. Automated mobile phone testing – After installing the application on the phone or using the build in browser to access a remote application, a developer should be able to run automated tests. This would allow for a continuous testing approach whereby a new version of a mobile app or an HTML5 application can be automatically tested by a whole set of mobile devices.

The business model would be the same as virtual servers: you pay by the hour.

Alternative 2: Telecom Infrastructure as a Service

Why not offer telecom infrastructure as a service instead of pure virtual servers? Admitted, the boundry between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS might be thin but ideas can be the following:

• Billing as a Service: this can go from offering a complete billing system as a service to MVNOs or other industries that need real-time billing capabilities. To the other extreme whereby you would only offer APIs for partners and developers to charge.
• Numbering Plan as a Service: more then just offering DIDs, you should be able to create services and associate them to a number formed by shortcode+mobile phone+app id => 12367012345601 => calling this number would forward the call to the application 01 belonging to the mobile subscriber 670123456 and 123 means the owner pays the call. 234 could mean caller pays. 345 could mean caller pays premium call and gives revenue share to owner. This could allow every subscriber to have multiple applications without having to pay €1-€5 for a virtual phone number.

Alternative 3: Mobile Development IaaS

Different from the mobile IaaS in the sense that we focus on facilitating the development and hosting of applications for mobiles. Developers would find tools to develop mobile application interfaces very easily. You write it once and run it on a large set of different mobile devices. Services like mobile push notification, device detection, charging, etc. should also be available. Also the hosting is optimized for mobile applications in which you have very strict low-latency and unreliable connectivity requirements.

Alternative 4: Beat Amazon AWS at Bootstrapping, Configuration Management, and other cloud operation automatization

If you are going to offer virtual servers, focus enormously on the bootstrapping and configuration management. Amazon and others have virtual images that allow a quick deployment of an existing configuration. However that is good if your application is stable and your software stack needs few modifications. Real-life applications and business solutions need a lot more flexibility. Setting up a database cluster, a webserver/proxy/memcache farm, a high-availability loadbalancer, an application server cluster, etc. are very manual tasks on most public clouds. True you can get an image with an apache, tomcat and mysql pre-configured, but you do not get a multi-node cluster image. To solve this you could use software like Chef or Puppet for provisioning and ControlTier or Capistrano for command & control. See my other blog post…

Alternative 5: Be the Salesforce for Telecom & Mobile Applications

This is more PaaS then SaaS but being a Telco PaaS in which in a Salesforce.com style you can use Web 2.0 and drag-and-drop to create mobile and telecom applications. Instead of having to code, people can create application via visual designers.

Alternative 6: No.de/Heroku/etc. alternative for quick web & mobile front-ends combined with custom protocols and on-site systems

No.de is PaaS for applications written in Node.js a javascript language that allows for massively scalable applications to be quickly developed.

Heroku is a PaaS for Ruby applications.

These are language specific PaaS that are similar to Google App Engine (GAE).  Where GAE allows Java and Python, No.de has Javascript and Heroku has Ruby. Developers can very easily create applications. However GAE falls short writing front-end applications: Web GUI/Mobile HTML5 quickly. Also integration with non-HTTP protocols is not offered. Although the Internet lets you believe HTTP and FTP are the only protocols out there, there are literally thousands of binary, alternative standards and proprietary systems that large enterprises can not do without. Examples in the telecom industry are RTSP, SS7, etc.  If you can combine the speed of developing modern front-end together with the integration with legacy systems, binary protocols, on-site systems, etc. then you can have a large advantage when corporations want to move their back-office to the cloud.

Alternative 7: The Zoho/37 Signals for Telecom Applications

Zoho and 37 Signals are companies specialized in creating one-purpose mini applications for small and medium enterprises. Instead of a Siebel, Zoho will give you a basic CRM that works out of the box and has virtually no learning curve.

Zoho allows others to build applications on their infrastructure as well and resell them.

The same concept could be applied to telecom. Mini telecom applications like a PBX in the Cloud, SMS marketing, etc. are build on a common infrastructure. Externals can extend the application portfolio and resell them.

Alternative 8: Hosted PaaS

Instead of offering PaaS you offer a hosted PaaS infrastructure for enterprises. Each enterprise gets their own PaaS. Companies like Longjump and WSO2 are in this market. Be sure to add in some telecom assets…

Any operator that has not started a project on Cloud Computing is late. The typical data center at an operator is filled with servers that are under utilized e.g. application servers and database servers are running at 30% of memory, disk and CPU. Just by doing step one of getting to Cloud Computing: virtualization, operators are able to save substantially in the cost of hardware, electricity, maintenance, etc. Virtualization means decoupling software from hardware. This allows to run multiple operating systems on one server.

However this would only be focusing on the tip of the iceberg. Cloud Computing is so much more…

Private Clouds

Automatic Scaling

Let´s first focus on the internal systems of an operator. After solutions have been virtualized, then you are able to scale them to more or less servers. The first step is to automate this process. If you have an application server cluster, do you need 8 nodes all the time? You probably only need them the week before Christmas or during some other peak period. So the ideal is to be able to measure the load and to automate the deployment of more or less cluster nodes based on load. The same can be done with the database. During the night you have 2 nodes. In the morning 3. During the day 4. During peak moments 8. In the evening 3 again. You could save massive amounts of money if application servers and databases can be scaled in this way. You ideally also are able to pay licenses based on what you really use and not on your maximum number of nodes during a yearly peak.

Redesigning Applications and Data

Both Amazon and Google found out that if they redesign their applications then they can get even more gains than pure virtualization. Amazon´s S3 service is a clear example. However internally they started with services like Dynamo on which S3 is build. The first step is to build general data stores. Multiple applications should be using a common data store instead of needing a separate database cluster each.

Unlike popular believe in the IT world, the dotcoms are not filling their data centers with Oracle RAC clusters. The dotcoms are designing special purpose data stores. The data volumes any market-leading dotcom has to deal with are so massive that a SQL database can not keep up. SQL databases are very good at running efficient queries on structural data or making sure transactions are consistent. However they fail when data is unstructured, write operations are massive or data volumes grow with terabytes every data.

Relational Data

So for all low-volume applications that need transactional data and read more than they write, you could still use a unified Oracle RAC cluster to serve multiple applications. An alternative approach are the data stores that have been build by Amazon (Relational Database Service or SimpleDB) or Google´s App Engine (Datastore with JDO).

What other alternatives are there?

Read Mostly Data

Data that needs to be read a lot and is not updated frequently can get an enormous performance and scalability boost by using an in-memory data store. The dotcom standard is memcached. Facebook (800 servers and 28TB) and Twitter are addicted to memcached.

Documents, Images & Videos

Binary and media files are best stored outside of a database. In small numbers they are often stored on a file system. However they occupy a lot of disk as well as network bandwidth when moved around. The ideal is a document store with a content-delivery network or CDN as a front-end. Amazon´s S3 and CloudFront are examples. Storing them in a compressed format, e.g. LZO can save valuable space. Also transcoding into different formats, e.g. thumbnails or preview can help save network bandwidth.

Unstructed Realtime Data

Data that is unstructured and needs to be stored and accessed in real-time in high volumes are best stored in special purpose data stores. You can write a book about the latest NoSQL solutions. Write an email to maarten at telruptive dot com if you are interested.

Analytics Data

Twitter has described most extensively how they use all the unstructured data they get from their logs and other sources. They use technology from Facebook to stream it into a high-available file-system from Yahoo. There they run massive parallel map-reduce operations to get to know a lot more about what users are doing and who is influencing who, etc.

Social Graph

The social graph is about who knows who and what kind of relationship you have. This data is best stored in graph data stores.

Collective Intelligence

Again a chapter by itself but dotcoms are also heavy users of collective intelligence which often means dedicate systems.

Accessing Data

Instead of stove pipes with data, the dotcoms are making data accessible to all their applications. Either via search interfaces, web technology to access data (e.g. REST and JSON) or efficient binary interfaces (Thrift and Protocol Buffers).

Messaging and Notification

Amazon is having a simple queue service and a simple notification service to make sure applications communicate in a uniform matter.

Applications

If applications have access to all the above services then the architecture of an application is simplified enormously. Most of the famous dotcoms don´t use middleware. They prefer the SOA principle. However unlike the IT SOA solutions, a dotcom would take an application and make it into a chain of reusable services. Let´s take an IVR application as an example. There would be a service to do voice recognition. Another one for voice transcription. Another one for text-to-speech. A transcoding service to transcode between different media formats (e.g. high-quality voice and low-phone-quality voice). And so on. Each service has independent load-balancing and can be scaled separately. Services can be re-used between applications. An application is very short because it just need to define which services need to work together and how.

Application Deployment

The dotcoms deploy new features on a daily and even hourly basis. This means that all application deployment is fully automated. When a new feature is deployed it does not necessarily overwrite an existing feature. It is possible that a new functionality has been solved in 5 different approaches. Dotcoms would split the total user base and let small parts of users try out the different approaches. Depending on the user´s feedback they would take the preferred approach and slowly scale up from 1% to 100%. If they detect that the feature has a performance problem or a bug then they would be able to roll-back or decrease the load, fix it and deploy gradually again.

The Network, OSS and BSS

There is a substantial effort needed to redesign a network to be cloud-aware. Some components need latencies lower than 10 milli-seconds (e.g. antennas), hence most of this logic will have to be processed locally. However all systems that can live with 100 milli-seconds latencies benefit from a cloud make-over.

Especially in the area of OSS and BSS there is room for optimizing applications and making them cloud-aware. Global services like a network inventory service, a user profile service, a device profile service, etc. would mean simpler applications and less data duplication.

Opening the Cloud

So the network and IT infrastructure is being redesigned to allow for faster innovation and lower costs. However Cloud Computing can also be used to increment revenues.

Being a Cloud Infrastructure Provider

Many IT consultancies and software/hardware vendors will tell an operator that they could be a Cloud infrastructure provider. On slides this really looks nice. However unless an operator is not using the cloud computing principles for their own systems as described in the first part, they are lacking substantial knowledge about how to manage such an infrastructure. Without this knowledge it would be hard to have a very optimized solution and as such be price competitive with the existing players.

Being a Cloud Platform Provider

Although closer to the operator´s core competencies, being a cloud platform provider would still be for those operators that are Cloud experts. A Cloud platform provider would allow others to use the infrastructure services to create applications on top. The complexity lies in the fact that malicious users try to break the platform which could have a very negative effect on the infrastructure if not handled correctly.

Being a Cloud Service Provider

This is the default option most operators should explore first before moving into the other areas. Being a service provider also has a roadmap:

Reselling SaaS

The easiest step is to be the storefront and to resell IT applications from others, e.g. cloud backup storage, security solutions, etc.

Offering Telco SaaS

The next step would be to offer specific telecom applications. Applications that are build for the operator or even better applications that can be build by others based on the operator´s assets. An example would be a PBX in the Cloud.

Open Market for SaaS

Building all telecom applications yourself is hard. Attracting others to do it for you is easier. However just putting a “Net App Store” and an SDK on the web will not get you to dominate the market. Only an open market with a large eco-system of companies and developers can generate large quantities of “Net Apps”. If you are thinking about building an open market, why don´t we talk first. Send an email to maarten at telruptive dot com.