TIBCO Silver v. Amazon EC2: First Impressions
Just coming off a ten day vacation, I was planning to write a few posts on a few “pure” scientific topics like string theory, complexity, and emergence. However, a few folks contacted me and asked me my opinion on TIBCO Silver; so, I thought I would at least blog on my first impressions.
TIBCO’s marketing team has been discussing TIBCO Silver as a “silver lining” in the multiverse of cloud computing. As a part of this marketing campaign, TIBCO has been comparing Silver to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and in particular Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). This post is my initial impressions after reading what is publicly available on TIBCO Silver and also watching the TIBCO YouTube channel on the same topic.
First of all, my initial impression of Silver is that it is not a true cloud computing platform, it is more of an advanced integration platform. To me, Silver looks like an evolution of TIBCO’s excellent BusinessWork’s integration platform, which was evolving to a more generic component integration platform called TIBCO ActiveMatrix. In fact, BusinessWorks was rebranded, TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks.
What TIBCO has done, or at least how it appears to me, is that TIBCO has added some rule-based provisioning and scheduling to their core product suite(s) and called it “cloud computing”. However, as mentioned I don’t get the impression that Silver is a true cloud computing platform, it is more of an advanced integration platform.
The reason for my initial opinion is that TIBCO Silver is designed to build component-based applications on top of TIBCO software. This is good, and most people know I am a huge fan of TIBCO. However, most people also know that I am also someone who “tells it as it is.” Let me explain.
A cloud computing platform, like Amazon’s EC2, is designed to be used without the requirement to purchase or provision hardware and software. When an organization uses EC2, it simply provisions what is required and “the cloud” does the rest. The “cloud” is this big massive “server farm” (centralized or distributed) and the user does not have to provision any hardware at all.
This is not true with TIBCO Silver, unless you are running TIBCO Silver as an instance in a cloud like EC2 (or your own private cloud computing infrastructure). For example, if a major firm on Wall Street wants to build a “Silver Cloud” as their application integration platform, they will need to provision hardware and software. Provisioning is not necessary a “good thing” or a “bad thing” but it is a fact that unless you run Silver in a cloud, you don’t really have cloud computing. Organizations will have to pay for the servers and the software licenses to run Silver, because Silver is not a cloud computing infrastructure.
Another important distinction is that TIBCO Silver considers software components like Java or .Net code to be the core component objects that are provisioned and integrated. Amazon’s EC2 core components are operating system instances. Hence, we have very different object models. TIBCO Silver’s object model is based on application code. Amazon EC2’s object model is based on operating system instances. This is another reason that I consider TIBCO Silver to be more like an advanced software integration platform and less of a cloud computing infrastructure. Conversely, Amazon EC2 is a true cloud computing multiverse and not really designed to be an application integration platform.
I was a bit amused to watch the YouTube videos on Silver and to hear good folks comparing Silver to EC2 — apples and oranges. On the other hand, I was encouraged to read that TIBCO is going to make Silver available as an AMI (hopefully more than one AMI, as I like Ubuntu and you might like Debian or RedHat or AIX or Solaris).
I do think it would be very cool to have a heterogeneous component-based system integration platform (e.g. TIBCO Silver) running on a cloud computing multiverse (Amazon EC2). Users should keep in mind that all the challenges of creating a “personal AMI” from the “TIBCO AMI” will be necessary to save configuration changes. More on this later after I have had a chance to do some prototyping with the TIBCO Silver design-time desktop client and the corresponding run-time Silver AMIs running in EC2.
If anyone has the name of TIBCO Silver AMI, please post or email. I have not had a chance to login to AWS and search for the Silver AMI. Hopefully, it runs on Ubuntu Linux.
As an editorial note, I do have one other small issue with Silver (or more precisely software marketing). I don’t consider a rules-engine at the core of an application integration platform that functions as a scheduling, provisioning and goverance component to be a “complex event processing” application. For that (well known) reason, I also tend to disagree with marketing departments in their use of the term “CEP” for scheduling, orchestration, provisioning and goverance. CEP is, by definition, a detection-oriented technology. (Just to set the record straight!)
Filed under: Cloud Computing, Complex Event Processing, Development and Evaluation, Distributed Object Caching, EAI ESB & SOA, Event Processing, Message-Oriented Middleware, Scheduling, Systems Engineering, TIBCO
Hi Tim:
Hope your vacation was a good one. Just saw your blog and wanted to comment on your first impressions of Silver.
First, it is not fair to compare TIBCO Silver and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
What AWS offers is the virtual machine (bare bones hardware with an OS installation). – typically called IaaS (infrastructure as a service)
What TIBCO Silver offers is an application delivery platform that helps developers build applications quickly – typically called PaaS (platform as a service)
As a developer you can go off and build applications directly on top of the barebones Virtual machine but then you will have to also build the underlying infrastructure (like messaging, integration, composition etc) – this will take a lot of work and time.
- You can’t really compare TIBCO Silver to Amazon EC2. EC2 is complementary to Silver and in fact, Silver needs a public cloud infrastructure (like EC2) to run applications
– there is no hardware to procure or provision as well as no software to install or configure. TIBCO Silver provides a browser tool – that allows users to configure their environment for testing or deploying the created composite application. Users can configure and get their environment ready - Silver takes care of provisioning these virtual machines, getting them networked, fault-tolerant, highly available and ready for deployment of the composite applications. It’s additional functionality which you do not get from just bare bones infrastructure.
Silver also embeds the BusinessEvents (CEP) engine to accomplish non-traditional CEP functionality. I think it’s important to be able to have a correlation engine and intelligence functionality in the cloud environment, and I think that users will appreciate the added functionality, but you are right when you say CEP is traditionally known and defined as a detection-oriented technology.
[...] from all directions. The latest appears to be Silver. Tim over at Cyberstrategics has compared Silver to EC2. However I suspect a better comparison is Silver vs Azure – especially as TIBCO Silver is [...]
Hi Alan,
Great to hear from you!
If you recall from my blog post, I said “I was a bit amused to watch the YouTube videos on Silver and to hear good folks comparing Silver to EC2 — apples and oranges.” (Apples and oranges is my editorial comment, BTW.)
My post was in response to statements I have read and heard (by TIBCO and the trade press) that said (either directly or indirectly, sorry I don’t recall off-hand), that TIBCO Silver was somehow a “better, easier to use, yadda, yadda, yadda” mousetrap than Amazon EC2. This marketing (by TIBCO I assume) had been picked up in the trade press, because I read similar statements when I “did the Google” on TIBCO Silver.
I agree with you completely that Silver is complementary to EC2 and hope to see a series of TIBCO Silver AMIs on various platforms to tinker with. PS: I signed up to be a BETA tester, so please do not forget to approve me
Regarding BE and Silver, I think an embedded rules-engine for governance, provisioning and scheduling is quite different than BE for more advanced complex event detection / correlation “CEP style” so it would be great to see a set of TIBCO BE AMIs in EC2. as well.
In my opinion, it is important for TIBCO to bring the richness and diversity of their excellent design-time / run-time models to EC2 so designers and developers can use their desktop to design applications and deploy to running instances of TIBCO’s run-time engines “in the clouds” (public and private clouds).
Thanks again for visiting and keep up the good work in Palo Alto. (Hope all is well with the family).
Yours faithfully, Tim
Hi Tim
I think you missed some key parts of what is Tibco Silver. and you know what me too. I was at the paris first official presentation of Tibco Silver and even then I had issue understanding what it is …
So to sum-up:
- tibco Silver is a PAAS, it is a platform offering all services around SCA components execution in the cloud. So you can not deploy your java or C++ code directly. they need to be wrapped in SCA …
- Tibco reuse all Tibco AMX service to provide you a full platform (governance, security, etc.).
- Tibco Silver is enabling you to create environment ready to deploy SCA components, not just CPU and OS.
So this is for me the first attempt to propose an SCA (some will say more generally) an SOA execution platform in the cloud.
Hi Kaim,
No, I understand perfectly well what TIBCO Silver is.
If you actually read my post and the comments, which it seems like you did not, you will know I my post is a direct response to TIBCO’s marketing.
It was TIBCO who has been implying, in certain channels, that they have something “better than EC2″ and that “cloud are so difficult without Silver”, etc. Or “The Silver Lining of Clouds”, etc. This is not my positioning. Read my post before commenting, thanks!
I have already stated that comparing a application integration platform to a cloud computing infrastucture is like comparing apples and bananas.
Now, of course, I hope that TIBCO will be more clear in their positioning.
Yours, Tim
My name is El Kaim, not Kaim, so it seems that you did not read my post also carefully
Since I’m French and try to understand another language I may miss some subtle ideas.
Anyway, I do agree with you concerning the marketing part. The presentations made during the paris show where done by marketing people. Even their web site is desperately technically empty.
But you know why? It seems that apart from some informed bloggers, most IT manager are not aware of what is cloud computing and PAAS in particular. During the meeting, the speaker made a poll and from all participants (around 60) only three were knowing and understanding the concepts. Everybody was happy at the end of the meeting except may be 3 people, not a lot.
For me, what people need to understand is that this platform is still in beta, the pricing model is still not defined and the tool will work only if you adopt an SCA based approach.
But, thinking long term, it could be a very interesting SCA execution platform in the cloud. May be the first real proposal from a vendor for an SOA platform in the cloud.
PS: They claimed that Tibco Business Events and CEP approach where used inside the silver platform, but I was not able to know more on its usage. marketing again?
Hello El Kaim,
Sorry to get your name wrong. It does not sound at all French to me, sorry.
Well, if you read my post carefully
, my comments were not based on the “Paris show,” it specifically says my comments were based on what was in the press (press releases) and the YouTube videos.
I am not sure what your point is, posting here? You are advocating an SCA platform? Great. However, that is not the purpose of my post.
My post was a response to marketing and trade press comparisons of TIBCO Silver and Amazon EC2. I called them apples and oranges.
In other words, you are posting here, in complete agreement with me, but acting as if you disagree. I find it a bit funny, to be candid.
This blog post is not about the merits of an SCA platform. It is a reply to the comparisions in the trade press and marketing videos of Silver to EC2.
When you reply, please try to stay on topic, thanks. Let’s don’t discuss the merits of SCA or SOA in this thread, that is a different topics altogether.
Cheers.
Yours, Tim