CloudNavigator

Most web service managers and architects I talk to describe their architecture as a "3-tier" model, meaning they have a web server tier, and appserver tier, and a database tier.  However most such architectures in fact turn out to be much more complicated with ESB components and other connectors, access control services, mulitple layers of data sources, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, audit servers, disaster recovery support and more.   Sure there are pieces which fall neatly into one of the classic three tiers.  However there are a lot of gray areas, side-bars, and odd pieces in the typical architecture as well.

Many popular web content management systems such as Django are particularily hard to fit in that model.

The traditional "Load Balancer" was a technology that mapped neatly into the spaces between the layers in the 3-tier model by providing horizontal scaling for at least the web layer and the appserver layer.   Nowadays, the technology has morphed what F5 calls Application Delivery infrastructure.  Intelligent adaptive traffic management which is almost a "tier" in and of itself.   In a lot of ways, deployment of F5 technology can render the webserver front-end to your application largely irrelevant (obsolete?).

Recently I came across Harbor which obliterates the traditional box based appserver layer by letting you write Java programs and then deploy the various classes to wherever in the cloud it makes sense to run them.  Cool technology!  The developer becomes abstracted from having to know where in the infrastructure they are running.  The application becomes highly flexible, adaptible, and hardware/platform independent.  Perfect for deployment in ambiguous Clouds.   Harbor seems cutting edge.  Clearly it will take some time for a paradigm shift such as what it represents to really catch on.

Throw in a neo4j data model (or two) - which I blogged about earlier and maybe it is time to finally break out of  the old 3-tier web architecture box and retire the concept….  

 

 

 

 

Here is a short posting titled "How Cloud Computing Hurts Venture Capitalism" which talks about the impact the new Cloud Infrastructure providers have on startup company strategies. 

Is the Relational Database Doomed?  is the title of a very interesting article exloring the pro’s and con’s of "key/value" databases, a common data structuring technique in Cloud Computing.  Clearly data management and modeling is evolving along with the technology we are using to store and access it

Due to the fluidic nature of the Cloud Computing architecture, your data could move around.  A system has to be devised that lets you keep track of where your data is, when you need it.  Traditional Vertical Scaling (building bigger and bigger boxes) has natural and obvious constraints.  It is not a model that lends itself well to cloud models.  The "key/value" data model described in the article is one technique for organizing certain kinds of data in a highly scalable array of inexpensive computing resources (a cloud).

In the comments to the article someone points out neo4j, an open source database technology which models data using Graph Theory techniques rather than as Tables.  As someone who really enjoyed graph theory in college, this data modelling approach really intriques me and will require much closer study as time permits.  (The graduate level Graph Theory course I took as an Undergraduate at U.Mass Lowell was one of the most challenging, mind expanding and interesting classes of my undergraduate and post-graduate education.)