Last week was pretty busy. I went to a Lucent-Alcatel sponsored Clouderati party. Hung out with Reuven Cohen, George Reese, James Urquhart, Sinclair Schuller, Klint Finley, Alex Williams, Chris Gaun, Aneel Dash, Deborah Salons.

Also attended Forecast 2012, DeployCon, and Cloud Expo sessions. Mobile is place to be for app development. At DeployCon the best prezos were from Mike Hoskins CTO of Pervasive Software - at least his vision of a Cloud of single function web services and applications composed of such services as the new paradigm for composing (as opposed to writing applications) echoes what I believe are of the fundamentals of object oriented programming:  composition over inheritance and interfaces aka APIs as opposed to inheritance. These two capabilities, while possible in C++ became clearer as Java strips away much of the noise of C++ and itself supplies a large library of useable objects with which to begin to build. Does anybody studying C++ and writing a String class? In Java 5 many of the original classes and containers were rewritten or reimplemented, yet beginning with a JDK immediately changed a Java programmers focus from writing basic objects to building applications from objects in the JDK.



At DeployCon Mike Hoskins presented a vision of PaaS that aligns with what I think will happen and how I think Cloud will disrupt the present day approach to application development and developers themselves. It goes well beyond the late to the game binary opposition I find in the discourse of DevOps / NoOps discourse. I wont do it justice here but after he stopped talking about his rough flight, Mike Hoskins articulated a vision of a service catalog of web services from which developers will compose applications. In the enterprise the term service catalog still means a catalog of stuff IT can do, like provision and configure an email account, reset a password, deliver a desktop, onboard a new employee and on the whole such service cstalogs remain firmly footed in the present IT world that thinks in terms of fiefdoms, stacks, and ine off builds of vms, app servers, web servers, identity service--but I digress.

In the world of real service catalogs and web services as specified and implied in SOA Architecture,  just as all bugs become shallow when viewed by many eyes, I believe that a Cloud application architecture will shift the focus and level of abstraction at which developers and architects work from objects to the web services.
In this way portability and APIs become the bonding point of these new organic building blocks and an entire ecosystem will emerge.

James Urquhart was fascinating in his role of MC at DeployCon through his commentary or lack of commentary following each presentation. After Mike's presentation words uttered by James several times included the phrase "Cambrian explosion" of innovation and I think this is exactly right. What James did not say was that due to Data Gravity the ecosystems will be specific to a Cloud. It's pretty clear which Cloud this will be. And in this context I consider the presentation that followed. The Chief Scientist of Time Warner presented his strategy for PaaS without once naming a vendor, yet warning the many suppliers in the audience that if what they offered didn't "plug-in" to the framework he was building, that they would not be viable suppliers in his world. What he articulated in his presentation was essentially his revelation that presently his firm spends 70% of budget on maintenance and that very little of IT spend buys innovation but rather supports the many layers of technology and application platforms the brief period of the last twenty years has left in the datacenter and the many people, processes, and surgical extractions and workarounds that form the technology and business and social superstructure that has grown around those artifacts. My question is whether in IT there can be a bloodless revolution and still achieve results that will place an enterprise at the top of the food chain.