sense is an innovative cloud based technology platform to allow businesses to impose and effect business goals on their key applications and services. This permits them to automatically ensure that higher value business services are dynamically provided higher levels of computing resources to handle peak or emergency workloads smoothly. sense sits within and along side existing and emerging application platforms and manages them, to route incoming work to the most appropriate and performant delivery platform or service, based on business rules and targets. sense transparently supports and bridges between J2EE, .Net, SOA and Cloud based application platforms.

Applications wanting to benefit from sense need not take into consideration any aspects of business targets or run-time governance to achieve those targets – sense does this automatically based on rules provided by business staff. This leaves architects and development staff to concentrate on designing and developing the highest quality functionality for business applications and services, and not on the technical complexities of how to achieve certain throughput on hardware infrastructures or how to handle peak loads or unplanned service outages.

Architects usually focus on functional requirements of the application, without thinking about the “business expectations” of the functional requirements. With sense an application architect can ask his business sponsor a more meaningful set of business related questions, such as:

• what are the business rules that address the value of this service, versus that other service?
• what do you want to happen if the service is hit by unexpected peak loads or the network goes down?
• how do you want to handle ‘gold’ member requests differently from ‘silver’ and ‘bronze’ members?

sense offers service level agreements (SLA) defined over functional requirements, with automatic runtime enforcement.

How sense bridges the cloud

sense bridges the cloud by extending the concept of services to SLA based services that can scale across the network and can intelligently route incoming calls to precise computing locations in the cloud with the most performant operations.

Every service in sense establishes itself in the self-discoverable distributed federation and indicates its own state of health.  This state of health, called an emotion, allows sense to evaluate in runtime the most performant service delivery platform for any given service request, and to intelligently route incoming calls to the most performant provider, thus achieving continuous maximum performance. It doesn’t matter if the service is a native sense service (deployed directly into sense) or if the service is perceived by sense as a feeling – such as an external web service or an appliance (hardware, etc.); sense applies the same SLA management to all service types (including sense‘s own internal services).

A group of services can be handled, in the real paradigm of Software as a Service (SaaS), as a single service that realizes an explicit business function, in sense called an experience. An experience lets you configure a set of sense objects, assembling and packaging them and associating a Business SLA policy to create the new service. An experience can be composed of:

• native sense services – services deployed directly into sense.
• feelings – interactions with external services, resources, and environments.
• emotions – service health indicators and influencers
• and bizflows – logically sequenced set of activities treated as a single service outcome

The new service level agreement is expressed as a Business SLA and informs sense that the system should evaluate and select the most performant experience within the cloud that satisfies the same  business behavior. This could be multiple internal services and applications or even external resources from an appliance or third party service provider – the resolution of the request is driven by business drivers set by the business stakeholders. This lets the business have more input on how critical and valuable business services are carried out without needing to enter the complexity of computer platform performance and reliability operations.

sense‘s internal load balancer redirects incoming requests to a limited number of available service providers and assigns a category of services that can respond to a particular business request. This is achieved using the concept of flock computing or flocking, where resources and services are tagged as flock horizons, and incoming calls are treated as a storm to be directed to appropriate provider platforms. This enables sense to route calls within the cloud using the criteria of the most appropriate and performant service provider.

The cloud is a complex computing environment where services reside in a highly distributed fashion and their data and information are propagated to and from the cloud as needed. Business requirement can dictate that services in the cloud should change their behavior and work in a different way under certain conditions – high load, unreliable network, high cost resources, high value clients, etc. sense lets the cloud perceive these changes as emotions and alters the system behavior in a automatic, secure and predictable way. By defining an emotion on the cloud sense manages the services that are required to change their runtime business behavior to suit changing demands without needing to change the services theselves.

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