vincent
11-14-2008 09:11 AM
An industry colleague mentioned to me over the Summer that they had attended a “Cloud Computing” talk where it was mentioned that cloud computing would overtake Complex Event Processing. I didn’t get a good response as to what “overtake” meant in this context - that all CEP will be done in cloud computing land? - that cloud computing will overtake CEP in the hype charts (assuming CEP is there anyway)? - that clouds of events will be processed near-source in-the-cloud is the inevitable future for event processing?

To some cynics, cloud computing will be seen purely as a means of delivering virtual server farms, primarily for SaaS (Software As A Service) vendors and their customers, who in turn for the most part are simply part of a renamed ASP (Application Service Provider) market. Amazon’s EC2 seems to be a pretty good example of cloud computing today, and it’s name (”Elastic Compute Cloud”) pretty much describes its function - the virtual mainframe resource for everyone else.

“Computing resources for data / event processing” are a somewhat orthogonal problem to the actual software algorithms used in CEP and event-based decisioning. There is surely no theoretical reason why you could not deploy a CEP application onto EC2 / into a cloud, although latency from event source to the cloud and back again could be an issue, as well as the need for reliable high performance shared data stores. On the latter point, I’m not sure how easy or performant TIBCO BusinessEvents‘ data grid would be on EC2, whose current uses seem almost entirely to be web-service and SOA-based. On the other hand, “the cloud” is possibly a good solution for global-scale event sources, for example as would be found in a large-scale distributed social networking CEP application.

So is there any connection between the terms “event-cloud processing”, as done by CEP, and “cloud computing”? Not particularly, as today the sources of events are not the “same cloud” as the cloud computing centres. On the other hand, I would not be at all surprised to find that the cloud computing architectures relied on event processing techniques to manage users, SLAs and pricing for their systems.

Index

Past alphabet soups have compared CEP to (2) BI, (3) BAM, (4) BPM, (5) BPEL, (6) SOA, (7) SQL, (8) MDM, (9) ETL. Future TLAs are TBA.



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