Management and PaaS

Many years ago I spent a few years working for HP as a Distinguished Engineer via their acquisition of Bluestone. Now I learnt a lot through that experience and one of those things was the importance of system management software such as OpenView. In truth I already knew, having done research with HP, IBM and others over the years prior to this; but spending quality time with the team was still informative and illuminating.

Managing middleware systems is a complex task, particularly if you want to do it efficiently and without adversely impacting the system that is being monitored/managed. (Almost like Schrodinger's Cat experiment!) But for large scale, dynamic systems such as those I mentioned previously, good monitoring and management is critical. This remains true if you remove the dynamic/autonomous aspects and assume that a human system administrator will be using the information provided.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. Even your favourite operating system has enjoyed monitoring and management capabilities of various quality over the decades. The good implementations tend to remain in the background doing their job and you don't even know they are there. And of course as soon as you add in the distributed factor, the need for good monitoring and management cannot be over stated.

But of course you can do without; it's just that you may then have to put up with sub-par performance or efficiency as you need to manually cope with failures, changes in network or machine characteristics, etc. Worse still, issues may go unnoticed until far too late, e.g., the lack of orphan detection can lead to multiple competing services corrupting data or conflicting with one another.

So why am I mentioning this? Is it because it's not obvious, or that I'm running out of interesting things to discuss? Not quite! It should be clear that management/monitoring software is important for middleware solutions (and others). Depending upon what you consider to be monitoring and management, it may be a core component of middleware, or a component in middleware (e.g., the previous example on orphan detection and elimination.) But if you're looking at a separate monitoring/management component or infrastructure, then you wouldn't consider that to be your development platform for arbitrary applications, right? You wouldn't, for instance, consider such a software system to be a replacement for your middleware platform, e.g., for CORBA or Java EE.

Over the years I've never heard anyone suggest such a thing, so this isn't something I've even considered people would think. However, recently this has come up in several conversations I've had. And yes, it's in the area of Cloud and specifically PaaS. The statements have been made that PaaS is the monitoring/management, or is all about the monitoring/management. Why would that be any more sensible a statement or position to take in the Cloud world if it wasn't sensible prior to Cloud? I really don't know. It doesn't make sense any more than ...

"Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests."

With PaaS we're talking about a Platform (the first letter in the acronym kind of gives it away). Now unless you're only developing applications, services or components for your favourite monitoring/management infrastructure, you'll probably consider your platform to be something else entirely, e.g., Java Enterprise Edition with all of its capabilities such as transactions, EJB3, POJOs, messaging, persistence etc. This (as an example) would be your definition of your platform. Very few people would consider OpenView (or whatever they're calling it these days) as their platform. So although something like OpenView, or even JON, are important to any platform, I certainly wouldn't consider them to be the platform.

Or maybe I'm missing something?!