Rumblings in the Cloud

March 08, 2010 Digital Experience, Data & AI


Cloud computing... it's on everyone's mind these days. Personally I think it's a term that has attained such aggrandized acclaim that vendors, analysts, bloggers and anyone with marketing muscle has pulled and stretched its definition to such and extent that it could mean just about anything hosted. Cloud Computing Journal polled twenty-one experts to define Cloud Computing.  Just the fact they had to ask the question of twenty-one experts is rather telling in itself.  Well I read what the experts had to say.

So armed with my newly minted (yet fully stretched, but not of my own making) Cloud definition I happened upon this commentary about CEP in the Cloud or the lack thereof.  There's a great quote in the article: "I don’t care where a message is coming from and I don’t care where it’s going”. Correctly indicated, this in a sense defines a key aspect of CEP. Event-based applications should be transparent to messages (or events to which messages transform) origin and destination (sans a logical or virtual name).  However, unlike the author Colin Clark, I do believe the current crop of vendor products, most notably Progress Apama maintain this separation of the physical from the virtual.

The rationale behind the lack of CEP-based applications in the Cloud (ok, there's that word again) are found in other factors. To explain my reasoning I'll start by dividing CEP-based applications into two categories. Of course there are many ways to categorize CEP-based applications, but for the sake of this discussion, I'll use these two:

CEP-based Application Categories

  1. Those that do things
  2. Those that observe other applications doing things

Not sure I could make a simpler layman-like description, but needless to say it warrants further explanation (or definition in sticking with our theme)

CEP-based applications that do things

This category is best explained by example. Typical of event processing applications that do things are those in Capital Markets like algorithmic trading, pricing and market making. These applications perform some business function, often critical in nature in their own right. Save connectivity to data sources and destinations, they are the key ingredient or the only ingredient to a business process. In the algo world CEP systems tap into the firehose of data, and the data rates in these markets (Equities, Futures & Options, etc.) is increasing at a dizzying pace. CEP-based trading systems are focused on achieving the lowest latency possible. Investment banks, hedge funds, and others in the arms race demand the very best in hardware and software platforms to shave microseconds off each trade. Anything that gets in the (latency) way is quickly shed.

In other verticals, an up and coming usage of CEP is location-based services. This is one that leveraging smart mobile devices (i.e "don't care where the message is going") to provide promotions and offers.  

    • Algo Trading, Pricing, Market Aggregation
    • Location Based Services (providing promotional offers and alerts)

CEP-based applications that observe other applications doing things

Conversely, event-based applications that observe other applications doing things are classified as providing visibility or greater insight into some existing business function. These event-based applications overlay business processes to take measures to improve their effectiveness. As is often the case critical business applications provide little visibility or the information is silo’ed. There is a need to provide a broader operational semantic across a heterogeneous mix of business applications and processes.  Here are a few typical examples of event-based visibility applications observing other business systems.

    • Telco Revenue Assurance
    • Click Stream Analysis
    • Fraud Detection
    • Surveillance

Of  course the demarcation line between these two classifications is not clear cut. Providing greater visibility is just a starting point, monitoring for opportunities to take action is just as important such as kicking-off a fraud watch if a suspected wash-trade occurred  (so in a sense they are doing things).

Where for art thou oh CEP
When considering the Cloud, an important point to consider is dependency. Specifically, there is a dependency that the underlying applications and business processes exist in the Cloud for (observing) CEP to overlay them.  I would offer that Enterprise business has not yet migrated their key business processes to the Cloud on a widespread scale just yet. Why not? What are the barriers? Security, regulatory compliance, DR, investment costs, limited skill sets are just a few of the challenges mentioned in this ITProPortal article.  I suspect these barriers are far reaching, keeping the pace of Cloud deployment in check to the point where it's not as yet strategic to many.
 
One of key things that makes the Cloud a reality is virtualization, it has clearly revolutionized PaaS as the Cloud. Virtualization does come at a cost, there is a latency penalty for the convenience, no matter how small for some use-cases that cost is too great.

Make no mistake, I am certain the Cloud with all it's twenty-one definitions is the future of computing. It's an imperative that will knock down the barriers and change the face of the Enterprise and when it reaches critical mass CEP will be there.

Once again thanks for reading, you can follow me at twitter, here.
Louie

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The Progress Team