Re: [soa-rm] ESBs and cloud services

I can answer your first question only. I asked it to myself when I worked for a couple of clients who wanted to move to Cloud. After reviewing my article "A Checklist for Contracting Cloud Business" [http://www.clingstone.co.uk/a-checklist-for-contracting-cloud-business/] and performing related checks, the apetise for Cloud wend down significantly. So, before discusstion inside-ESB vs. Cloud-ESB, it is usually useful to find:

1) whether those who promote Cloud-ESB really understand the risks and disadvantage of Cloud in general (or this is just another "cool" thing and asking about 'cons" of it is mauvais ton)?

2) has anybody really validated Cloud-solution from the corporate business (not IT) perspectives?

As I recall, A. Einsein said: "a symptom of insenity is trying to do efficiently what shold not be done at all'. Ken, if my arguments still don't convince you, I can recommend you to agree with Cloud-ESB on the condition that those who promote it should be kept responsible for this for a few next years.

- Michael

Sent: Friday, April 24, 2015 at 8:19 PM
From: "Ken Laskey" <klaskey@mitre.org>
To: "Mike Poulin" <mpoulin@usa.com>
Cc: "Martin Smith" <bfc.mclean@gmail.com>, "soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org" <soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: Re: [soa-rm] ESBs and cloud services

Agree from a control standpoint, although I’m not sure where the internal configuration is more an illusion of control than the real thing. A very competent external configuration may give you better results.

My main musings are whether expending resources for an internal ESB and for a cloud solution is double spending or are there situations where there is added value. What does it mean to have one group putting in an ESB and another group concurrently talking to moving everything to the cloud? There are tradeoffs to be made, but in which situations does having concurrent, interacting ESB and cloud solutions make sense? Has anyone asked this question before? Who would we ask it to and get an unbiased (at least minimally biased) answer?

Ken

On Apr 24, 2015, at 4:52 AM, Mike Poulin <mpoulin@usa.com> wrote:

There are many cases like this. Nevertheless, an ESB in the company is by definition your property under the full control of yours. The same ESB in the cloud is on the foreign territory and in spite of contracts you have to deal with it as with an external company: if your contract is smart and you have an on-demand control over the ESB, in a case of any problems you have to deal with an extra node in the command chain, which can screw you totally. For example, when an internal ESB support person is going for vacations, you define the deputy (temporary replacement); when this case takes place in the external company, you never can be sure that your Cloud ESB is under proper support at any moment. As a small help here, you can require the DR of your Cloud provider would fully cover your DR requirements.

- Michael

Sent: Friday, April 24, 2015 at 1:22 AM
From: "Ken Laskey" <klaskey@mitre.org>
To: "Mike Poulin" <mpoulin@usa.com>
Cc: "Martin Smith" <bfc.mclean@gmail.com>, "soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org" <soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: Re: [soa-rm] ESBs and cloud services

How about if the ESB vendor also becomes a cloud provider and has its ESB services running in the cloud?

Anything else come to mind?

Ken

On Apr 23, 2015, at 1:19 PM, Mike Poulin <mpoulin@usa.com> wrote:

How much logical synergy between doing your work in/by your company (via ESB) and by cooperation of external (not-controlled) Cloud-provider companies?

- Michael

Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 at 9:41 PM
From: "Ken Laskey" <klaskey@mitre.org>
To: "Martin Smith" <bfc.mclean@gmail.com>
Cc: "Mike Poulin" <mpoulin@usa.com>, "soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org" <soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: Re: [soa-rm] ESBs and cloud services

My question isn’t whether you should to do things in-house or out-source. There is (and I expect always will be) plenty to debate.

What I really had in mind is that cloud services seem a replacement for an ESB. Now I could have an ESB in-house for things I do not want (trust?) to put in a cloud, but that is just splitting the problem and adding the complication of making the ESB and cloud pieces work together (unless we can make the two pieces nearly independent of each other).

Is there any logical synergy in ESB and cloud use?

Ken

On Apr 22, 2015, at 4:29 PM, Martin Smith <bfc.mclean@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't think that the ESB is mission-critical to a company any more than any other "commodity" IT service component that does not constitute the core and proprietary business knowledge, expertise and data of the company.

Sure, an external (or internal) ESB total failure can take down the business for a while. So can a wide electrical or Internet outage, flood, fire, etc. Companies cannot and do not totally insulate themselves from all external dependencies. Moreover, unless you are responsible for managing a disaster (FEMA) the losses the business faces from widespread outages are mitigated in part by the fact that partners and customers are also likely affected and therefore even if your company is up and running, there's not a lot of business to be done. (My big takeaway from Y2K.)

As for the fact that AWS and other Cloud providers have outages: sure, but the relevant standard is not perfection but performance relative to alternatives. My impression is that Cloud providers, at least the leading ones, measure up well by that standard.

Martin

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 3:42 PM, Mike Poulin <mpoulin@usa.com> wrote:

I have had a few conversation on this topic. A potentially conceptual conflict might be in that ESB is used to be considered as an internal integration mechanism, i.e. all operations and usage was/is controlled by the corporate policies. When we talk about Cloud, we MUST understand that we plan to deal with another business, which is totaly out of our control and which would preserve its own interestest above ours in all situations ( which is normal for any independent business). This leads to a few questions:

1) do we want to take a risk of giving our integration "heart" into someone's hands?

2) what we would do if communication channel with the Cloud gets down (several cases of Amazone and others going down for a while are known already)?

3) what we want from the Cloud - to place our ESB over there or to utilise "Cloud Integrator/ESB"? Or we want to integrate several Cloud providers and think about hiring a Clouf Integrator provider? [Based on previous publications of Jason Bloomberg and my BLOG, I can say that if a company delegates integration between Cloud Providers to another Cloud provider, the company looks for troubles due to minimal visibility and control over sensitive to stability integration solution. INstead, a compny has to become a "Cloud Broker" and bridge between different Cloud providers. Remember Cloud providers are services - they have individual contracts with the client and do not care about each other.]

I can continue if needed.

- Michael

Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 at 6:16 PM
From: "Ken Laskey" <klaskey@mitre.org>
To: soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [soa-rm] ESBs and cloud services

Recently, I’ve done work where part of an organization was implementing an ESB and part was looking at the potential for cloud. Has anyone considered or seen other discussions of how ESBs and cloud are opposite paths or how they might work together?

Ken

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Dr. Kenneth Laskey
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