On premise vs off premise , cloud and hybrid mobile Integration scenarios using Worklight and IIB V9.

Part 1 : Architects 10,000 feet view.

 DISCLAIMER : "The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."

 

In my line of work, I do come across IBM Integration Bus (the ESB formerly known as WebSphere Message Broker) at customer sites quite often and I cannot help but think  "REST JSON and Worklight", Granted this is not the typical ESQL, MQ cluster and MQSI command line thoughts usually evoked by WMB .. err. I mean IIB,but bear with me.

A quick glance at figure 1 below and you can see that IBM ESB's (IIB, WMB and the former WESB) are sitting on a treasure trove of enterprise information, that  is already used to build Internal applications slicing and dicing data and functionality from multiple resources.

To me this is the perfect entry point for Worklight as a mobile solution into an enterprise that may not think of going mobile now or thinking it would be too difficult and costly.

Figure 1

 All we need is to use the already existing flows we have, tweak them a bit if needed, make sure they are exposed as web services (or RESTful if you are really cool like that !) provide enough security by fronting them with DataPower (a very common scenario already) and we are off to the races. 

The one curious thing to the left of the chart is the what I called "Mobile App Data".

Database as a Service (DBaaS) 

In February of 2014 IBM acquired Cloudant, a CouchDB branch that is cloud hosted (Unless you have been sleeping under the proverbial SQL rock you should know CouchDB is a nosql document based database that uses JSON as a primary way to deliver data ), conventional thinking architects and designers (myself included) went in a loop trying to figure out what was that all about?!. 

Two weeks later while on vacation, reading a book on Big Data the issue of "wasted" data was discussed, that is data that has never been collected before, like user clicks, application navigation history, etc. and suddenly it all made sense, I had to take back some of the things I mumbled about IBM acquisition folks. 

Big Data comes from many sources, one of those sources is what we may call ‘metadata’ (Insert NSA and Edward Snowden jokes at well), Data like 

• How many times users click certain buttons, tabs, fields.
• How many times users zoom in and out in different pages .
• Typical User Navigation flow and time spent on each task.
• Number of times user type vs. copy and paste data in fields. 
• Etc. 

Figure 2

Classic web applications did not typically collect this type of data, it was too cumbersome to collect , expensive to hold and there were no use case scenarios for them.

Now with DBaaS IBM has a strong cloud DB offering that is suitable for the new mobile needs.

In the new scenario each phone, mobile device or ‘thing’ on the internet can collect its own statistics (acting as a (level 1) Map processor in a MapReduce prototype), deliver them at certain intervals into this database that lies outside the corporate and is provided as a services freeing the enterprise from the associated work that comes with creating a new database.

" Whether This Data could be delivered directly to the cloud database from the mobile device or through Worklight is technical detail worth another future blog entry". 

Gone are the days when I used a combination of HTTP server log output and unix file processing to conclude the number of open HTTP sessions at any given time, and plot that daily for a client.

With modern analytics techniques, Enterprises can actually draw charts of how many users used each page at what time of the day during which season. Development can get feedback to make certain page fonts larger or smaller based pinch zooms stats, make certain fields easier to type data in based on copy/paste numbers, etc.

Imagine the fact that we can do this without burdening the Company IT folks with any requests, no new Servers, no new databases, no administrators forms, no security fire walls, but for a monthly fee that makes both accounting and IT departments happy.  This is where the mix of data and cloud becomes really appealing and you see how easy it is to suggest such a combination like the one in figure 3 to future customers. And the great value it does add to IBM mobile offering. 

Figure 3

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

 This great appeal of cloud based solutions can also be extended  to include Worklight itself in the cloud offering which frees the customer completely from the infrastructure setup burdens of the full mobile solution

• New Administration skill training.
• Hiring decisions.
• Hardware decisions.
• Infrastructure design decisions.
• Workload management ,Capacity planning.
• Security design decisions.
• Fail-over and Disaster Recovery (DR).

The customer team can focus on the development of the mobile piece of the application, providing the 'cool' factor in the functionality and let IBM and/or other PaaS providers worry about the rest.

Figure 4 Worklight Mobile solution as a Service

While this latest scenario is not currently supported (April 2014) with out of the box solutions but a little effort with Environments like the Emerging BlueMix, or Even IBM's new push toward OpenStack, Running Worklight on top of Liberty profile in a private or off premise cloud could be achieved.

Enterprise infrastructure folks who are well versed in MQ clustering and Channel security , Broker execution groups and their setup can breathe a collective sigh of relief as they will be spared the exposure to Java2EE, Liberty profile or something as heinous as JavaScript, the previous scenario has very little impact on their current operations (taking into consideration that while the job may not change, the data throughput of the system may explode exponentially which is another challenge all together).

Conclusion 

The future line separating what is going to be hosted On-Premise and Off-Premise is going to be very dynamic and probably elastic in nature, allowing the enterprise to fulfil their application needs with minimum intrusion to existing infrastructure and operations. IBM Cloud and mobile  offerings  provide a practical entry point to the world of mobile solutions and analytics for organizations that are reluctant to do so, this approach can then be applied retroactively into existing enterprise applications.