Cloud-based application styles are emerging: interactive systems

Cloud computing is changing the way we look at technology, and it's not just a flash in the pan. The user is using the cloud to store music. Start-ups are relying on the cloud to start and run away from the need for huge investments. Large enterprises and governments are relying on the cloud to make more data accessible. Cloud computing is changing the way businesses and societies operate, and opens up a wealth of innovative avenues. We're looking at how developers now combine the recording system with participatory systems, and we see a new cloud-based application style emerging. These applications are interactive systems.

For these applications to be sustainable, cloud computing needs to be built on open source and standard. The wide adoption of open source software and open standards should be the goal of everyone. It means that customers need not be afraid of vendor lock-in, and organizations can participate in growth markets that welcome cloud technology and service providers.

We learned from experience that open source and standards enable developers to share information faster, easier, and at lower cost. This brings more excellent innovation. We are at an inflection point. Our industry is focusing on important interoperability standards, and their Open-source reference implementations will:

Ensure end users have a strong say in building and adopting cloud computing models
Reduce barriers to cloud computing, such as developing skills and freedom of choice
Increase the long-term viability of today's cloud investments
Prevent unnecessary architectural complexity and fragmentation

IBM's Open Cloud architecture

On IBM Pulse in March 2013, IBM exposed its open cloud architecture and our plan to provide the foundation for all of our cloud products on OpenStack (starting with IBM Smart Cloud orchestrator). The announcement is a crystallization of a one-year investment in OpenStack products and a significant contribution to the OpenStack community, helping to improve OpenStack's ability to meet the needs of business and cloud service providers. By adopting the results, we see that our products and the entire active OpenStack community have been successful.

Today, with more than 189 organizations and more than 9,100 individuals involved, OpenStack is the world's largest active open source and cloud project community. This massive global collaboration between developers and cloud computing technicians is designed to create a ubiquitous infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Open-source cloud Platform for public and private Yunseng.

IBM prides itself on being a very active member of the OpenStack community and is proud of the many community achievements reflected in the latest version of Grizzly. OpenStack time-ready people bring massive portability and interoperability to IaaS applications.

Upgrade the product stack

But we don't just focus on OpenStack. Our Open cloud architecture extends all products from the product stack, from IaaS to PaaS and SaaS. In addition to all our work related to OpenStack, IBM is also working to explore the different technologies associated with our open cloud architecture, specifically extending to the PaaS and SaaS tiers, weaving participatory systems, recording systems, and IoT to achieve what we call interactive systems. We call these exploration tasks Project ET. I'll introduce Project ET in more detail later. But first, I want to share some insights about our open cloud architecture.

Today, business units are under great pressure to create new business values based on mobile, social, and large data and analytics capabilities. These new applications are driven by the emergence of new, highly iterative development models that use service synthesis, open architecture, open source components, and multi-language programming models to quickly implement the solution. Two additional trends are important drivers of this new style of application: DevOps and cloud-based PaaS offerings, such as Heroku, Cloud Foundry, and OpenShift. DEVOPS enables customers to achieve business results in an agile, iterative, and incremental manner: applications can be delivered in a matter of days or weeks, rather than typically months or years. Finally, in order to achieve this development efficiency, PaaS technology is developing, enabling developers to assemble a large number of middleware components hosted in the cloud at a very fast (seconds) pace.

Multi-tenant, flexible ("cloud native characteristics") software services are the driving force of this development style. We have seen the evolution and maturity of the API economy over the past 10 years, such as providing more than 10,000 services for cloud-based developers in sites such as Programmableweb. Given the depth and breadth of IBM's software-based services, especially in the areas of mobility, social networking, and analytics, we need to bring to the developer the implementation that clicks a button to access.

While there are certainly a number of proprietary products that are trying to embrace different aspects of this new development and operational style, we have observed that open products bring real value to customers and are more likely to be accepted by developers.

What do we mean by "open"?

So what do we mean by "openness"? Openness may have many implications.

One implication of "openness" is open source software (OSS), such as OpenStack, or one of many projects hosted by Linux, Apache, or Eclipse foundations or hosted on Github. Of course, not all OSS are created in the same way. It is important that OSS components have appropriate open licenses, such as Apache, Eclipse, or MIT, as well as an open governance model that welcomes harmless contributions from anyone, anywhere, and innovation. Furthermore, it means that OSS components can be easily scaled, easily used and integrated using relatively stable, mature and reliable APIs, or it provides a pluggable architecture that allows many different plug-ins or drivers.

Another implication of "openness" is the implementation of open interoperability standards, such as those from the International consortium, IETF, OASIS, or OMG. Another form of the standard, of course, is the fact that it is usually created by a market that accepts a particular solution, whether private or open. Ideally, to remain open, we should avoid proprietary fact standards that are controlled by a single entity that benefits a single entity.

A symbiotic relationship between open source and open standards is emerging. Proponents of emerging open standards, for example, often rely on open source to implement standards as a way of providing references and promoting tools. Another example is that communities that develop open source projects often record the APIs and/or protocols of their projects when they feel they are stable.

IBM's Open Cloud architecture

Now go back to IBM's Open cloud architecture. What does the wording mean? In general, it shows that our cloud architecture is unified based on a combination of open source components and, where possible, open standard formats, APIs, and protocols that can bring interoperability and value to customers at the same time. This open architecture has many benefits, both for IBM and for our customers. For IBM, we can enjoy unprecedented innovations found in open source communities such as OpenStack. In addition, we have an active ISV partner ecosystem developed from these open source and open standards programs. Our customers can leverage open source and open standard APIs and extend them-through third-party capabilities (leveraging our chosen active Open-source ecosystem) or through their own innovation and expansion.

By using the same open cloud architecture and technology across the cloud portfolio to implement private, public, and mixed cloud solutions, we can also achieve interoperability and portability in different products (not just workloads, but also features) that benefit our customers.

In fact, customers who choose cloud computing based on open standards can successfully take advantage of new opportunities. In particular, by leveraging high value business analysis across traditional and mobile devices, they are able to leverage interconnected data.

IBM's commitment to open cloud architecture

To help achieve this, IBM intends to apply its experience in supporting and validating open standards. IBM continues to work closely with the open source community, ranging from Linux, Eclipse and Apache to cloud computing. To make the open cloud architecture a reality, IBM is working to:

Set up a 400-person cloud Standard Client committee, which was first established with only 50 members
Advance related cloud standards, such as Open Service for lifecycle collaboration, linked Data in the consortium, and TOSCA in OASIS to enhance cloud application portability
Dedicated to more than 500 developers to participate in the Open Cloud project
Work closely with OpenStack Foundation and more than 9,100 members from 87 countries and 189 corporate sponsors