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IT is getting Cloudy

After visiting PDC 2009 I posted a short blog entry on the upcoming changes to the computing world as a result of cloud adaptation. As I am trying to understand the impact of these changes to software architecture, new patterns have started to emerge. There are four concerns that are repeated in a series of discussions; architecting for cost, integration, security, and  data storage.

Architecting for Cost

Having access to thousands of computers in the cloud to run your application is the most cost efficient way of serving your application to your clients, right? Think again. This enormous elasticity comes at a price. Prior to the cloud architects were not extremely cautious about the intranet bandwidth consumed by the system architecture as long as the systems performed. In terms of communication costs the only real variable cost has always been the public traffic bandwidth in communicating with your application’s end users.

With the introduction of cloud, now your application incurs usage charges as soon as it tries to contact one of your N-tiers in your system. Result? As an architect you really need to make sure that you are designing systems that transfer just the minimum required information to complete the task.

What about hardware? It is relatively simple to scale your application in the cloud, just spin up another instance of a virtual machine and all of a sudden the system capacity doubles. Well, not really. If the systems are not designed properly, spinning up another server can significantly increase the internal communication traffic and result in a tremendous spike in your monthly costs. Again, without the proper supporting structure, not well thought architectures will not be compensated for by computing elasticity. In contrast, a carefully designed system will be able to almost double its capacity within a matter of minutes without breaking the bank.

All this can be summed up as: Up in the clouds, bad software architecture will still work and scale at a very high cost to your company’s bottom line.

Integration

If you designed any software systems in the past 30 years or so, most likely you are aware of the never ending integration challenges (there are even entire master’s degrees dedicated to this field). How does this change in the cloud? Firstly, the standards and protocols are converging into just a handful. There are some true and tested patterns. One thing however that stands out is the SLA of your application when you rely on a handful of other services running in the cloud. You need very powerful monitoring/instrumentation solutions such that you can proactively take measures to gracefully degrade your application by turning off features, throttling the requests or creating entirely asynchronous business workflows that can dissipate the load to 3rd parties over time. This is easier than it sounds, it might force a lot of businesses to re-think their process flows.

Security/Privacy

Your data usually travels with your application. Most cloud platforms also provide services to host the data in structured or unstructured way in the cloud. For obvious reasons you should definitely leverage the DB features that your platform of choice offers. However, depending on the vertical you are in there are some real obstacles to moving your application to the cloud. PCI, HIPAA and other regulatory certifications are not yet available for cloud platforms. If you do not plan ahead, you might be forced into using a temporary workaround solution that ships off parts of your sensitive data to specific traditional data centers owned by ISPs that are certified. This negatively impacts your solution from a performance point of view and adds to the overall complexity of the solution. If you are dealing with financial or health data, check before you design your cloud solution.

Data Storage

The cloud offers great facilities for computing but the data side of it has been lagging behind. The most prominent solution is to resort to a key-value-pair like database that scales and replicates across many machines. The new SQL Azure platform tries to re-use the existing SQL Server knowledge of people and offer the same experience in the cloud. Although it is promising it comes with some constraints. So as an architect, you must think very carefully about the implications of migrating your application data to the cloud and how it would change your architecture. One interesting example is how do you ensure atomicity and isolation across many nodes without having the RDBMS facilities that come out of the box today?

If you can answer all these questions prior to your move to the cloud, you are 80% there :)

Why Telemedicine might be the answer?

Advancements in technology change everything. What about our health care system? This paper explores the concept of tele-medicine and how the changing factors in this decade affect the adoption and usage patterns of tele-medicine around the world.

Below is an excerpt from the paper.

“Health care is one of the determining factors when categorizing different countries on development scale. Based on availability of health professionals, education system, infrastructure capabilities and finally available government funding, the quality and reach of health care varies greatly from one country to the next. Today, depending on one’s location and socio-economic status, the amount and quality of health care available ranges from non-existent to intensive and close monitored…”

You can download the paper in  PDF or Word.

ITARC 2009 Presentation

I recently gave a talk on Re-thinking Software Architecture for Mobile platforms and it was very well received. What’s interesting is that most architects today keep ignoring the mobile space and think of it just as a new, shiny UI for the existing applications.

Unfortunately, however existing systems that were architected for web applications does not scale well to serve the requirements of multiple mobile clients.

In short here are some key points from the presentation:

  1. Cloud computing is the key enabler of scaling architectures for new mobile solutions
  2. User Experience is key when designing a mobile solution
  3. Analyze your users, not all of them are on the same platform. Create different applications for different users instead of creating a monolithic applications with menus and options
  4. Touch UI is a minimum requirement today
  5. Responsiveness of the touch interface determines the usability of the application
  6. Responsiveness on the client is achieved by introducing asynchronous client development
  7. People who use your mobile solution will have short attention spans, break-down your workflows into smaller activities that can be completed within a couple of minutes
  8. Limit the text input to a minimum, use selection based data entry as much as possible
  9. Platform choice is key but some of the determining factors are: Internal/External Deployment, current skills of development team, market share of the platform, form factor and screen resolution of the target platform

Above points mostly talk about the client aspect of mobile development. The server aspects were covered in great detail during the presentation.

Why I love Netflix?

I have been a very happy Netflix customer for years now. It’s nice to see a company innovate and adopt all the new technologies like streaming to the XBox360, provide a Silverlight based video player etc. However, sometimes things go wrong. Last night I had some problems watching an episode of Coupling on my Xbox 360. Nothing that a good reboot couldn’t fix. I had almost forgotten about the incidence when I received the following email:

Netflix apology

Netflix apology

Not that 3% really matters on a $10/month account but this shows what customer satisfaction means to Netflix. Once again cementing my loyalty to their service, good job Netflix!

CCD and HealthVault

A new paper written by on the topic of integrating legacy health care systems to CCD compliant me has been published on Netsoft’s web site.. Here’s an excerpt from the paper

In recent years, health care providers, insurance companies
and health applications have all been collecting mountains
of health-related data in various electronic formats. The
ability to search and analyze this data in context is required in
order to prove it worthy of the effort of collecting it in the first
place. One big challenge that stands in the way of ubiquitous
health information is the data format disparity between different
systems. It is not uncommon today to see legacy applications that
are using older standards such as flat text files, HL7, CCR …

You can read the white paper on Netsoft USA’s web site by clicking here.

Moved To WordPress

After getting frustrated with keeping up with WordPress upgrades using my older hosing service, I decided to move to WordPress.com to host this blog. I have to say that the entire process took about 10 minutes including:

  1. Creating a new account on WordPress
  2. Exporting existing posts from my Hosted WordPress installation to an XML file
  3. Importing the XML file into WordPress.com account
  4. Updating burag.com DNS settings to point to WordPress name servers
  5. Paying $10 for yearly hosting on WordPress using PayPal
  6. Pointing the domain to wordpress (Through DashBoard)
  7. Selecting a new theme

So, if any of you out there is using a hosted solution for just blogging. Switch over today, save yourself some time, money and headache.

Electronic Health Records

Here is a paper that I wrote a couple of months ago on EHRs and the state we are in currently. With the recent news in the media about EHRs, I think most of the issues are even more relevant today. Below is the first paragraph:

The United States population is one of the largest in the world with 300 million people and increasing at rate of 1%.1 A growing population of this size, however, also comes with its set of problems. One of the problems, maybe the most important, is health care and how it is provided and consumed in such a large country. One particular aspect of health care that makes it a special topic is its universality. No matter how healthy or sick, every single person in the population is part of this system either by receiving or providing health care, although the frequency and the amount of care will vary among different demographic groups. Unfortunately the cost of health care has been increasing over years and health cost per capita in the U.S. is highest in the world4. A direct result of high cost of health care is reflected in the decreased number of people getting the necessary medical treatment. According to a National Institute of Health (NIH) study, almost 8% of people who are in need of medical help cannot get it due to economic hardship.

You can read the rest of the article in PDF or Word format.

iParted

There goes the Mac Mini. After tinkering with the Mac Mini for about 2-3 months it turned out to be a less than ideal development platform. Although this little experience has totally changed my view on  Mac software and hardware. I would recommend an Apple macbook/pro to any regular computer users who use web based applications for most of the daily tasks. I think the premium paid on the hardware is justified. In terms of 3rd party software available on the platform however, I have mixed feelings. Yes most of them look great, very visually appealing effects etc but it is damn hard to find applications that offer the same functionality on the windows platform.

Software does exist, it’s just that you have to pay for every single little thing that you are used to getting for free in the windows/linux worlds.