Software application development
This blog is intended to provoke discussion and exchange between like minded software application developers, engineers, architects, project managers - and keen hobbyists too.
Tuesday 29 April 2008, 2:34 PM
Is extensibility giving you a headache?
Have you noticed how everything is scalable, extensible, modular, componentised and (yup, you guessed it) flexible these days? Not that it shouldn’t be of course, it’s just that it’s such a heavily emphasised facet of so much of the technology industry at the moment that you can’t stop yourself from wishing the vendors who talk about it would get over themselves sometimes.
We know that companies, industries, economies and even countries can experience exponential growth and that ‘provisioning for extensibility’ (I can’t believe I just said that) is important. So have arguments for computing efficiency such as virtualisation and cloud computing helped take the sting out this topic? Don’t get your hopes up – today we’re more modular than a bag of Lego bricks at a Tupperware convention (not sure if that analogy works?) if you get my drift.
I’m all for reusable code structures to speed up software development, but I question whether too much voice is given to application delivery devices (or controllers) that claim to be able to do the architect’s or administrator’s job for them.
A case in point is Zeus Technology, who says that its position in the industry is defined by the fact that its customers’ requirements for rapid and scalable delivery of applications have becoming increasingly more complex.
The company sells something it calls ZXTM (Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager) – essentially this thing is an extensible (there I go again) application delivery platform that manages traffic by inspecting, transforming and load-balancing requests across an application infrastructure. It is, we’re told, the “only” software application delivery controller available on the market.
My point is this – remember when storage was more of a big deal? Your hard disk got full, you played around with 3.5-inch floppies and you quickly used up your 32Meg USB stick when you first got it. These days we’re not so worried about extending our storage capacity for growing data needs. Will we see a time soon when we accept that application delivery demands can spiral upwards and know that we are equipped to deal with those eventualities? Or will we always need to essentially extensible and exponentially extendable?
PreviousComments on this post
Adrian, you've missed the point. We're no longer worried about extending storage capacity because storage is essentially dumb - it's not application aware; it's metal bits on a spinning platter, and the game is about fitting more bits on the platter.
The Application Delivery Controller market is about US $2 billion. I doubt Zeus would claim to be the only ADC given that 3 public companies are in the space - did you check your facts? (I did, I'm the VP Marketing for Zeus...glad to talk with you about this topic.)
The ADC space is evolving in 2 directions. The first is about fast, dumb hardware, similar to your storage analogy above. The name of that game is pushing more traffic through a box, and knowing there is a path if you need more than one box worth of capacity. This is a tough market. Zeus is in it because we have a better answer to the "more than one box worth of capacity" problem, and our well-architected software beats most hardware from a performance standpoint.
The second direction of evolution is with all about control and flexibility. Zeus has the most flexible layer 7 scripting language, and now we've added Java. "So what?" you might ask. The sad fact is that the aforementioned architects and administrators have created a mishmash of back-end web applications that use different formats and authentication schemes, and extensible, intelligent layer 7 scripting is the only way to tie all those systems together without re-writing each one.
I know some application architects who would relish the job security of being able to rewrite those web apps, guaranteeing years of work. The rest of us relish the idea that we won't have to, because extensible application delivery controllers save us the extra effort. ;)
Dave,
Thank you for your post - I appreciate the feedback. Let me first say that were these blogs simply verbatim reportage of the industry's news then they wouldn't be worth a cent - there has to be some level of informed opinion and added flavour to promote some extra readability.
So - on the use of the term "only" which you disputed, your company's official statement reads:
"ZXTM is an extensible Application Delivery platform that manages application traffic by inspecting, transforming and load-balancing requests across an application infrastructure. It is the only software application delivery controller available on the market and is flexible enough to meet the requirements of any organization’s deployment environment, whether dedicated appliances, standard servers, blades, or virtualized environments."
As to the general nature of the blog post - hopefully you'll also embrace the fact that the terms scalable, extensible, modular, componentised and flexible are becoming somewhat hackneyed as they repeatedly feature in so many of the press materials put out by vendors such as yourself.
We're merely trying to bring things down to earth here and take an external view of the industry. As you might say in marketing, "we're thinking outside the box." :-)
I don't dispute the value proposition you put forward for your technology and I'm personally very interested in what you do. Your reply brings clarity and insight over and above the info that you feature on your website and/or in your press materials.
Would that we had been given such content first time around.
But then, where would be the fun in that? This is what's so great about being able to discuss the technology in hand today and put it out to debate on forums such as ZDNet.co.uk
Once again, thanks for your post.
Adrian
