Jason Bloomberg

Your data center, sometime in the mid 1990s: the server you ordered finally arrives. Could be Windows, Linux, some flavor of Unix, doesn’t matter. You unpack it. Boot it up. Patch the OS. Configure the OS. Install software off of CDs. Patch the software. Configure the software. Move data to the box. Test. Tweak. Test again. Finally, the box goes live. Cut to 2012. You’re working in the Cloud now. You provision a virtual machine (VM) instance in the Cloud. Or three. Or maybe a few dozen. Only you’re not just provisioning VMs. You also provision some dynamic storage. Maybe some Cloud-based queues. You also want some SaaS-based services. And your software release cycles? Weekly. No, daily. How about hourly? Now what? Clearly, it’s impractical to set up your Cloud instances manually, the way we used to set up servers in the good old days. So you go through the process o... (more)

Garbage in the Cloud

On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. —Charles Babbage, 1864 The long-standing computer science principle of “garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO) is so fundamental to IT that it predates digital computing by almost a century. And yet here we are in the twenty-first century, moving to the Cloud, and Babbage’s exasperated response is no truer or more on point. For not only is the Cloud ... (more)

2011 Retrospective and Predictions for 2012

The presents are unwrapped, family has headed home, and the leftovers are almost gone. Once again, it’s time for ZapThink’s annual retrospective and predictions for the coming year. While it’s true that many pundits and prognosticators churn out their guesses for the year to come around this time, ZapThink takes the practice one step further: we actually review the previous year’s predictions and score ourselves on how well we did. Here then are our results from last year and our predictions for the year to come. 2011 Predictions: 2 ½ out of 3 I’m proudest of how well we did on ou... (more)

The Right End of REST

One of our Licensed ZapThink Architects, Michael Poulin, struggled with our recent ZapFlash, Where is the SOA in REST-Based SOA? In a forum post, Poulin asked: If we have a UI that works with the middle- and back-end resources, do we care if … REST or Web Services are used behind the UI? If [the] UI all of a sudden becomes the orchestrator on its own (which contradicts the essence of Service with interfaces where one of [them is the] UI), how [may the] UI journey/workflow … be attributed to the communication channels - REST calls - running behind it? What constitute[s] “A REST a... (more)

The Secret to a RESTful Cloud

If you’ve been following ZapThink for the last few years, you know we’re talking less about SOA and more about REST and Cloud. Not that there’s anything wrong with SOA — we’re simply focusing on the current challenges organizations face when building agile architectures. So, it should come as no surprise that we finally write a ZapFlash on RESTful Clouds. You might think the story we have to tell about RESTful Clouds has to do with RESTful APIs to the Cloud. Sure, we want to be able to access Cloud resources as well as Cloud management capabilities via RESTful interfaces. Makes so... (more)