CloudWave is now in its second project year and whilst the technical team have been busy developing the prototypes, the business consultants have been working in parallel to assess and assist the eventual uptake of them. Here are some highlights emerging from that work.
CloudWave is positioned at the nexus of two powerful trends in the IT industry – Cloud Computing and DevOps. Cloud scarcely requires an introduction and has shown consistent growth and evolution. The benefits and pain points of cloud are stable, with reliability consistently among the highest perceived risks or drawbacks. Cloud and DevOps have been described as a “match made in heaven” as the agility afforded by cloud chimes with the agility afforded by DevOps and because in the cloud model the complexity of the ‘Ops’ is hidden to such an extent that the developer can manage it without difficulty. DevOps itself can be seen as an evolution of the Agile movement. Whilst Agile has come through the hype cycle and is now on what Gartner calls the “slope of enlightenment”, DevOps is at the “peak of inflated expectations”. Both have successfully crossed the “chasm” of the innovation uptake cycle. This positioning is positive for CloudWave in terms of being able to create impact in its constituent stakeholders.
CloudWave is based on three pillars: Execution Analytics, Coordinated Adaption, and Feedback Driven Development. In CloudWave we are integrating analytics from the application and infrastructure domains, both multibillion, mature markets with many Open Source offerings where CloudWave’s Execution Analytics innovations can potentially be adopted. Coordinated Adaption and Feedback driven development are largely undefined markets. In the second year the business consultants will analyse the market actors in these emerging fields on a feature by feature basis, to assess exactly where to position the project.
Based on currently identified exploitable items, the value propositions for the project have been identified. Five overall value propositions have been identified from the project (without excluding value propositions that can arise from the piecemeal exploitation of components). These relate to the demonstration of the proof of concept or under lab conditions of: superior analytics; the combination of application and infrastructure monitoring; the concept of coordinated adaption in cloud applications; the CloudWave approach to coordinated adaption; and the FDD paradigm. The associated Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) are 3 and 4, meaning that the expected uptake is in the form of a follow-on pre-market development phase.
At this point in CloudWave each participant has identified the top key concrete business opportunities for their organisation, without limiting further opportunities. These cover a broad range of options. These include exploitation of specific components, of use cases, consultancy, extension of existing tools and research and academic exploitation.
Of particular relevance to the wider community is the release of CloudWave contributions to the OpenStack community, which is channelled through partner Intel, gold sponsor of OpenStack, and supported by IBM (platinum sponsor) and Atos (sponsor through subsidiary Bull). OpenStack is the dominant open source cloud stack at present, by an overwhelming majority. We will report on the progress of getting these components formally accepted through this blog. Watch this space!