The interactive cloud
How many times have you been called in the middle of the night by your operation guys telling you that your application throws some odd red alerts? How many times did you found out that when those issues happens you don't have enough information to analyze this incident? have you tried to increase the log level just to find out that your problem became even worse - now your application throws tons of information in a continues basis most of which is complete garbage...
The current separation between the way we implement our application and the way we manage it leads to many of this ridicules situations. Cloud makes those things even worse.
In this post i suggest an alternative approach. Why don't we run our application the way we run our business? I refer to this approach as the "interactive cloud" where our application behaves just like our project team and the operations just like our managers. As with our business our application would need to take more responsibility to the way it runs and take corrective actions such as balancing it own resources, re-assign tasks to the available resources in case of failure etc. It will need to involve its manager only when it runs out of resource. It will need to provide reports in a way that makes sense to our managers.
In the first part of this post describes the general concept behind this model and the second part provides technical background which include code snippet based on our experience in GigaSpaces.
