Sensible Cloud - Leaders in Cloud Computing

sense is a cloud application platform family to leverage SOA, JEE and cloud based services and computing resources, allowing business managers to define policies and priorities of how they wish to assign runtime computing resources to individual or pools of business applications based on their own business criteria.

sense operates with existing application platforms (JEE, Java, Web Services, SOA, ESB, etc) and extends them to cloud based computing platforms like Amazon EC2 and Virtualization solutions from vendors like Xen, VMware and Hewlett Packard.

Key capabilities and benefits of sense include:

• (XML) business defined policies indicate rules for resource assignment and priorities in the face of peak loads and unexpected performance degradation – sense guarantees your business SLAs
• Federated service publication with self-discovery within the sense domain – all sense nodes and services are aware of the state of the entire domain
• Almost unlimited scaling when business applications and services are extended to include cloud based resources like Amazon – use pay-as-you-go to bypass capital expenditure to get new operating platform up and running in hours
• Guaranteed reliability and performance policies are defined by business managers with sense automatically adjusting and aligning appropriate resources from the most ‘healthy’ servers available - your most valuable business applications get the best attention and resources
• Multiple platform execution and multi-protocol communication between nodes within (and potentially across) the sense domain(s) - eliminates single-point-of-failure, including sense itself
• Intelligent service routing to the most effective platform to execute the service – makes sure your most valuable services are directed to the best provider platform available to match the required SLA
• Services can be distributed across multiple platforms to support reliability and scalability with zero impact to the client business application(s) - guaranteed scalability and reliability from day one, with no capital outlay
• Runtime business SLA (service level agreements) implemented by business managers – transparent visibility and control by business of which applications receive what computing resources

We have looked at the leading Virtualization server providers and extended the sense cloud application platform to two Virtualization technology providers.

Xen and VMWare are the leading Virtualization server providers today, and offer best in class performance for both servers and operating systems together with the highest degree of management functionality. So, while every modern operating system can be virtualized with industry-leading performance, they all suffer for being disconnected from a business approach to scaling.

The sense virtualization platform compliments existing Virtualization servers.  Built on sense the sense virtualization platform federates VMs to;

• extend VMs to both traditional JEE infrastructure and to cloud computing resources (like Amazon EC2 and others) – you can operate a virtual pool of resources across multiple platform types
• add critical business constraints on how the VMs are scaled to satisfy defined _business SLA_s – this lets you add business conditions for scaling VM resources to the technical criteria generally available from today’s _virtualization servers_

The role of Sensible Cloud’s innovative cloud application platform sense, is to match the business layers of an agreement (Business SLA) with the physical layer of a virtualized platform, by instantiating the right number and quality of VMs depending on defined business rules, and maintaining a consistent and real time catalogue of what “hardware” in the cloud is available to operate a new VM instance.

sense virtualization platform

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We are now mostly familiar with what the concept of a service is in terms of computing software.  Software services have and continue to have an enormous impact on modern software architecture and development methods.  But what of other aspects of computing technology? are they excluded from being considered and subsequently managed and interacted with as services.  

A key underlying concept of sense is to define and interact with internal and external computing units as services.  That means that within sense we have a small set of tried and tested architectural approaches that can be applied to many other aspects of computing technology.   To start with, all internal components and modules of sense itself expose themselves as sense services - meaning we can apply the same SLA driven benefits to sense‘s internal components as to user business services. But what about interactions with external services, resources or appliances?

sense considers all interactions with computer based assets and resources as a series of services!  This means whether you are dealing with a Java program, a web service, a human task, a piece of hardware, a VM, a router, or even sense itself, sense will view and manage the interaction with the asset as a service. This permits sense, to use a tested and consistent set of development and management principles to build, manage and operate any cloud based solution where sense is involved.  This consistency provides for reduced development time, managed end-to-end operations, and guaranteed SLA achievement across your entire applications and infrastructure portfolio.  This is independent of whether you choose to operate your own private cloud on any mix of existing infrastructure, involve internal or external Virtualization solutions or decide to move operation into an internet based cloud.  You get the same capabilities and SLA driven benefits whatever you choose to mange with sense.

In technical terms, services deployed to sense adhere to an interface and packaging metaphor to which we add runtime SLA driven behaviors.  For external services; services not deployed into sense itself such as your existing web services or EJBs, or for external computing resources like a VM, or a router, or a cloud server, sense allows the implementation of a feeling to act as the intermediator to the external asset. So to sense a service deployed internally or a feeling to an external resource have the same management and SLA driven behaviors. It is this approach that offers gives us the general “something as a service” tag and allows sense to add business driven SLA behaviors to many more types of computing asset and resource than other cloud based architectures.

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The Cloud computing  market space has got very noisy very quickly, with dozens of new, old and recast cloud solutions being proposed every month.  What differentiates Sensible Cloud’s sense cloud application platform?

• sense was born from the practical experience of dozens of complex enterprise level distributed application projects using JEE, SOA and agile development techniques.  It comes from tried and tested development projects – not a marketing booklet.
• sense was designer and written from the start for cloud based operations – it carries no legacy implementations.
• sense offers the key principles of cloud computing across all major types of computing platform.  Whether you use it on of JEE, .Net, Virtualization, SaaS or cloud solutions, or most likely some combination of these, sense offers the same benefits within each platform silo and across the boundaries between them. You are not locked into just one type of technology platform to satisfy your business computing needs – you can extend from where you are today and still maintain, or even improve, the control, service levels and reliability you provide.
• sense uses business rules, defined by business staff as the evaluation criteria for what constitutes a high value service.  These business criteria and service level agreements (SLAs) guide the actions of sense to match the best resources available at the time, to the incoming business requests.  While technical criteria, such as latency, CPU utilization, etc. are important, perhaps profit, revenue or penalty driven contracts are more valuable to the business success.
• Sensible Cloud offers different business models to match your own, not require you to adopt ours.  If pay-as-you-go is your preferred model, then with minimal setup you can begin to accrue the benefits of cloud computing from day 1, and only pay for what you actually use.  If you require complete control, we can also offer more traditional subscription and software licensing models for your onsite operations.  In all cases you will be able to determine your initial and ongoing cost outlay for the use of sense.
• sense operates on a principle of “everything as a service”.  Rather than point at one class of computing resource and turn that into a cloud, sense looks at all computing assets as a service. This lets you use the same cloud based principles if you are working with Java programs, SOA web Services, PHP web development, SaaS applications, computer hardware or virtualized resources (like Xen or Vmware). In effect all these, and even sense itself, are viewed as SLA managed services.  In this way sense provides and end-to-end cloud view of your business applications and you can choose how much you move into the cloud and still interact consistently with your existing infrastructure and applications.