Session title: Metering the Cloud, applying ABC from code profiling up to performance cost management of cloud computing
Speaker: William Louth, JINSPIRED

To quote Monty Python: And now for something complete different.

William correctly notes that ABC is an accepted accounting practice.

Novel: A movie excerpt (THX1138). In the portrayed world every activity has a budget. (The chase ends when the chaser’s budget runs out.) William claims that the cloud will operate in an analogous manner to this world. Business will demand a breakdown of the activities which result in a given total cost. They will do this so they can subsequently optimize their resource usage and reduce costs.

The speaker describes (and seemingly accepts) the assumption that the lower the cost, the higher the efficiency. For example, if I can identify that my persistence costs are high I may choose an alternative persistence provider.

Blogger thinks: What a horrible world this would be, where cost becomes the sole consideration at the expense of all other quality attributes. What about uptime, response time, throughput? But come to think of it: Isn’t this how companies have been thinking ever since the bubble burst!? For that matter maybe this is how businesses have been thinking since the invention of Taylorism.

Continues… billing will be required on various levels: Across groups and aggregated services.

The Jinspired product “Probes” enables the monitoring of high-level entities e.g. user, house, washing machine etc. as opposed to simply methods, which is what most probing software focusses on. AspectJ is used to inject probes into code.

The Probes API is attempting to become a JSR. It’s certainly an incredibly powerful idea. It permits metering at various levels, groups and aggregated entities.

Summary
This whole business of costing everything and billing accordingly will likely appeal to today’s business mindset.
However, I (and I’m not alone) view ABC as a disastrous approach to improving the efficiency of the organization. This is not just because quality comprises a multitude of attributes (cost being just one of them), but – more fundamentally – because it turns out that organizational efficiency (the cloud, which forms part of the organization) is not in fact maximized by maximizing the efficiency of each individual element involved.

Counter-intuitive though it is, the quality and quantity of what your organization produces (products, services) is actually determined by a handful of constraints (bottlenecks.) ABC does not only not recognize this fact, it guarantees that quality and quantity will be less than their potential for a given set of resources. For more information read this.

David Douglas, Senior VIP Cloud Computing and Developer platforms, kicked off CommunityOne with healthy enthusiasm this morning. The central message is that communities are absolutely necessary for future development – and not just software but humanity as a whole. Very profound!

Lew Tucker then joined Douglas on the stage to talk about Cloud Computing. Pay as you go is the idea… and presumably how Sun hopes to turn its financial fortunes around. He notes that cloud computing is more likely to succeed when budgets for proprietary data centres are being slashed.

Douglas (left) and Tucker (right) then talked about Sun’s Open Cloud Platform. Early access for this platform is expected in Summer 09. The goal: Make it possible for any developer to have his or her own virtual data centre in the cloud. Data centre of course provides complete monitoring and control. Sun Cloud also provides load testing, as well a choice of app servers e.g. Tomcat, Glassfish. More info at www.sun.com/cloud and at the “cloud zone” at Java One.