Cloud is something I'm excited about. I've been excited about the prospect of on-demand utility computing since way before I became Cloud Community Lead at Skills Matter (although it helped a lot when deciding to take the responsibility on!). However I caught myself yesterday wondering if I was just jumping on the same buzz words and phrases as everyone else. I'm not a 'bandwagon' kinda guy normally, so I'm always (over)-analysing what I'm working on to see if I'm falling into being a buzzword-bingo caller...
One evening later after doing a deep dive with Cloud Foundry and I'm feeling much more assured we're talking about a step forward. Cloud Foundry is essentially an non-intrusive Platform as a Service (think Google AppEngine, but applying the tech you're used to without having to jump through any intrusive constraints). Cloud Foundry is the cloud I wanted when I originally signed up to Amazon Web Services, and in a beautiful piece of work AWS is in fact the underlying infrastructure for all the Foundry-goodness.
If you're heading to the London Spring User Group tonight, you'll see the fruits of my labours on Cloud Foundry. It's a thing of beauty (the SpringSource service, not necessarily my demo application).
Speaking of buzz words though, I really love it when journos try and 'explain' simple concepts communicated at a trade show, and this article is a beaut. It's amazing how relatively simple messages presented by smart people can be confused the hell out of by educated people who want to give off the aura that they have the 'inside track on the hot future strategy'.
So I'll save you the bother of reading that article* (unless you've already jumped there) and provide a simple summary of what SpringSource's strategy might be now they're hooked up with VMware:
- Make developers lives simple, in the cloud this time. Done.
Yeah, I know that's simplistic, but that's something I learned during my time with S2, they really do 'get' how to make things simple, more than most in the enterprise space, and so I don't think there's anything more to get in a tizz over. Just take that simple message, look at offerings like Spring Integration, SpringSource Tool Suite, and especially Cloud Foundry and all will become clear...
Of course, that's just my opinion and the shrewd of you (most in fact) will notice that the London Spring User Group tonight was originally set for Mark Brewer, GM of Enterprise Delivery at SpringSource, to share some of this future strategy. But no, I haven't had a quiet chat with Mark (yet!), and in fact he's had to push back his talk to the SUG meeting in October so that's paused my questions for a bit longer. So if my own thoughts on the future of S2 are not enough, and they shouldn't be, then I heartily recommend you consider attending the October London SUG.
(Actually, as I write this I realised that the plans for the next few London Spring User Groups have been published; I'll cross post those here in just a bit)
That just leaves tonight's SUG, which has changed quite a bit but should still give a really compelling look into the future (and some fun demos to boot, you have my word on it!). The meal for tonight now is in three main bites:
(1) Embedded Tomcat: Recent developments within Apache Tomcat have included improvements to make Tomcat easier to embed in other applications. As a result, Grails now ships with Tomcat as the default embedded Servlet and JSP container. Mark Thomas, one of the leading contributors to Apache Tomcat, will demonstrate how to embed Tomcat in your application and explain how to use some of the new 'embed-ability' features.
(2) Cloud Foundry: This technology was recently and quietly acquired by SpringSource at the same time as VMWare announced the acquisition of SpringSource. Greg Southey of SpringSource will explain how this will become an important element in SpringSource’s ‘Cloud Strategy’ and Russ Miles of OpenCredo will demonstrate how he has been using the technology.
(3) Adrian Colyer: We have exclusive video interviews with Adrian who provided his personal views for our User Group. Hear Adrian’s views on Enterprise Java, Roo v Groovy, Aspect J’s future, dm Server 2 and Framework 3.
It should be a fun night! I hope you can make it and I looking forward to seeing you there!
/Russ
* I still enjoy the SDTimes on occasion, I just found myself smiling at the sheer amount of marketing speak in this particular article. It's probably just in the nature of the beast when it comes to trade shows, so my apologies to anyone at SDTimes that may take offence. I could have picked any number of other 'exposes' from this and other events, and yours was actually one of the better ones...
