Cloud Provisioning using SPML

SPML understood as Service Provider Markup Language is a Standard. It allows service requestors and service providers offering mainly ICT features to exchange provisiong request relevant information within a given framework.

If you’re not familar with the standard yet, just google for it and you will find information on the OASIS side including a well defined specifiction. This allows to implement a service provider or service requestor as it describes the request ans the response for defined capabilities and operations of both sides. Hence, you know what to send and how to react on request.

SPML does not define the services itself, but provides the carrier to transport the data for CRUD operations with.
This really make sense as this on the one hand side provides the frame, but also allows to flexible define the data structures fitting to the actual service requirements / offerings and the technological constraints.

One of the most important advantages of implementing SPML for cloud service provisioning is, that as a service provider you do not have to care who actually is requesting something from the cloud. The contract or as it is called Profile needs to be aligned once at the beginning. From that moment on the requestor can use one or many systems to send requests to the service provider.
The rest comes with the operation listsTargets, which provides in WSDL/XSD language all the capabilities and operartions offered by the service provider.

One of the rather pain points is, that a requestor won’t get notified on provisioned requests when the execution mode is asynchronous instead of synchronous.
The SPML Standard offers a statusRequest operation, which allows the requestor to get information on whether the request’s execution is still pending, successfully provisioned or aborted due to failure. The requestor needs to pull the information until the request has been provisioned successfully or has been aborted with failure.
This brings some senseless load on the provider’s system. It is recommended to spend a notification, i.e. The provider informs the requestor that the request has been executed.

There is more good things coming with SPML and implemented properly it can make service provider and service requestor lifes easier in the long run as reusability and standardization are not too far away from it.

Design work is required on targets, PsoID, PSOs and their attributes and the customer specifics, e.g. Two different passwords for one PSO intead of one which might lead to enhancements of the setPassword operation.

The last note on SPML for today – spend some more time on designing the inner stuff properly. Although it is a Standard some things need to be done and they need some time to be thought through end to end.

Music from the Cloud

Related to the previous post on Google’s Strategy it needs to be added that Apple and Amazon are on the same track offering music from the cloud very soon.
And even worse for Google it seems that Apple has some big labels signed already.

From an end user perspective one can only hope that this wont’t lead again to the rights and availability discussion.
Furthermore, the cloud itself is “international”, hence there should not be any difference between someone using the service from the US or France or Brazil.
–> that is going to be one of the tricky parts as history showed that there indeed were differences considered (e.g. Availability of YouTube videos due to legal constraints)

A Thought On Google’s Strategy

Recalling the hype around Google during it’s start up phase and later on the critics on their missing strategy how to compete against other start ups like facebook, twitter, etc. forced Google to again think carefully about their next step in order to remain a leader in their business.

Reading several comments and watching several pre-marketing videos of Google make me think that they’ve heavily understood the Cloud idea and will come up with new stuff very soon like the “cloud computer” or the “music beta” service.
Both services enable (even force) the user to just use the cloud for what it is for … Have your data and information you need just in there and use it from everywhere.

Although, the end user will have to understand the idea and more importantly accept the changing model of data and information storage, I am convinced that this will boost the cloud idea.

Many hurdles have to be taken still like data privacy or speed of internet connection before it also could be spread out to the business environment or entirely will be used for private purposes, but in the end there is too many advantages not stopping this evolution.

One way to organize Emails

15 words statement: Sort all emails into two categories and use desktop search. Do not forget backup.
———————————————————————————

It’s mainly two types of emails you have to deal with in your life:
1. Private emails
2. Business emails

For both kinds the number of emails is rather increasing and you should at least spend one singlenthought on how to deal with it.

This post focuses on the Business emails. However, this could be applied to private emails, as well.

Basically, it does not matter how many emails you get. It is the first step to decide whether you want to or need to save your emails for any situation coming after you sent or received an email.

In order to quickly find an email or an email thread I found the following very usefull:
1. Do not delete emails
2. Sort your emails by max. two criteria (e.g. Month & In/Outbox)
3. Have a desktop search for searching across the two sorting criteria
4. Backup your email folders and test restoring

I used to categorize my emails per topic or project or initiative or line function. This gave me a good chance of finding the email I looked for very quickly. However, that was true only for the starting phase as the number of folders increased and, hence, the time for searching across all folders as well.

As for private emails not sorting at all is an option I am checking out since some time.
Obviously, my account’s mailbox size is increasing a lot, which is btw. one of the constraints to be considered in a business environment where the size of mailbox stores is limited to some hundreds of megabyte.

Please, share you view on this matter. Would be great to find a better way of organizing emails.

Fun of the week

A man is smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke rings into the air. His girlfriend becomes irritated with the smoke and says, “Can’t you see the warning on the cigarette pack? Smoking is hazardous to your health!”

To which the man replies, “I am a programmer. We don’t worry about warnings; we only worry about errors.”

Comment on: Moving to Cloud to Gain Agility: 5 Lessons CIO.com

The article “Moving to Cloud to Gain Agility: 5 Lessons CIO.com” has been commented as follows:

Thanks for sharing.

1.
I’d appreciate an update on the implementation / transformation project for getting CloudSwitch in place and the lessons learned from it.

2.
Being involved in big enterprise provisioning projects some hurdles have to be taken and some prerequisites need to be fulfilled in order to get the desired target state. What is your view on this?

3.
Furthermore, I am very much interessted on the costs and how CloudSwitch is getting paid and what payment model is in place in general (Amazon / CloudSwitch).

4.
Last but not least, I am wondering whether any thoughts were spent on “vendor lock in” and how sustainability is ensured.

New Bus’ Notebook (Lenovo vs Sony)

“Either you love it or you don’t love it”.
This applies to many situations in our daily life. Here, this could be used for notebooks as well.
Either you love Lenovo notebooks or you don’t.

I do really like Lenovo notebooks, especially the X-Series. They perfectly fit into my usage behaviour.

But there is one thing that really makes me unhappy – The screen’s resolution.
Why is it only 1366 x 768 max on a 13,3 inch!?
Sony can make it FullHD on 13,3 inch and so should Lenovo.

This is probably the most discussed disadvantage of Lenovo notebooks.

Being in a project having more than 50 people working for it, the Sony Z Series is the far most represented model.
And yes, they are fantastic and really well stuffed with up to date parts.

Now, I am comparing Lenovo’s X-Series with Sony’s Z-Series.

Pure facts sheet comparison will make me buy a Sony instead of Lenovo.
My only hope is the announced X1 from Lenovo, which shall be released soon.
(as I could wait another month before buying)

So, this post is to support all the other threads on Lenovo’s bad screen resolution. It is not Sony marketing, although it could be.

iPhone App for taking pics

This pic was taken using an iPhone App:

How to reach aViewOnIt

Some changes where made to the blog in order to ease maintanence and accessibility.

Now, this blog can be reached either via
http://www.aViewOnIt.com or
http://aViewOnIt.wordpress.com

Comment of the Day

I like #Sony‘s sense of #responsibility regarding the hacker attack. Let’s see 4 how long they can keep it & how they’ll communicate.