WSO2Con 2013 is here!

After months of planning, WSO2Con 2013 is starting today in London. We already ran the tutorials in Sri Lanka last week - today (Tuesday 12th) is tutorials in UK and then the main conference is Wednesday 13th and Thursday 14th.

Yes this is a globally distributed conference! We have nearly 500 registrants (which is at least 50% more than we expected) in the two locations and they are connected via 4 high quality video streams so we have 2-way video interaction. The amount of technical details underneath is incredible - we will blog about that later. We even have one speaker doing his presentation from New York as he was unable to travel .. if everything goes off without a hitch that'll be a technological marvel :-).

We have 4 fantastic external keynote speakers:

Eben Upton, Founder & Trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation talking about the hottest little computer in the world. Oh and BTW, if you haven't heard yet, we've been putting together around 40 node R-Pi cluster and that system will be live running WSO2 middleware powering the WSO2Con app. Azeez has been blogging about it.

Brian Behlendorf, Founder of Apache, CollabNet and a long time god of open source (and my friend and also WSO2 Advisor) and currently Senior Advisor for Science and Technology at the World Economic Forum talking about how open source can still save the world.

Pankaj Srivastava, Vice President of the Cisco Industry Solutions Group talking about how they are building next generation cloud and embedded business systems. Guess what stuff they use :-).

 Yefim Natis, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner talking about their view of Platform as a Service. Yefim leads Gartner's analysis on PaaS and has a super clear view of the future.



In addition, Paul and I will be doing keynote talks as well - I will be talking a bit about WSO2, our vision and most importantly how we see the future of enterprise computing. Paul will be talking about how to achieve that vision incrementally via a pragmatic milestone plan.

In addition we have nearly 20 external speakers (selected from over 50 submissions which we got in response to our open call for papers) and another 20 WSO2 speakers covering all aspects of our product platform.

We also have some super cool sponsors for the first time this time. Thank you to our Gold Sponsors Suse and Yenlo and our Silver Sponsors Grid Solut, Wipro and Redpill-Linpro.

The App

Oh yes the conference app .. we have a conference app that lets you do a bunch of stuff including rating talks and chatting to others. This too of course was written our stuff (and PhoneGap) and the back end will run on the Raspberry Pi cluster. Crazy? Yes. But super fun and majorly cool :-). Search for WSO2Con in the Google Play Store or you can use it with a browser here: https://wso2con.com/m/.  You need to have a WSO2 user account to log in - get one at https://wso2.org/user/register. Unfortunately the wonderful people in the Apple App Store haven't yet approved the updated version :-( .. we're keeping our fingers crossed it will happen today at least.

Putting it together

This event, like every previous WSO2Con event and all WSO2 events, is being organized by our internal marketing team. Hasmin (Director of Communications) is the general chair and she lives in Saskatoon, Canada and most of the rest of the team are in Sri Lanka! Harindu is out event God and he doesn't seem to lose hair yet. The "advance team" (of Harindu and Tasha) moved to London about 3 weeks ago and have been operating out of our Portsmouth office putting the final touches together. The rest of the marketing folks operating the UK event started arrived a week ago. There's another team managing the event in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lanka event is at a rather odd time since it starts at 2:00pm and runs until 10:30pm! We were very keen to have a live, bi-directional telecast in Sri Lanka as that's where we are based and that's where we have our team and a large community of supporters, users, and customers.

Coming back to London, overall we have nearly 50 WSO2 folks flying in from all over the world to London! I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the infinite amount of work done by Maryam and our outsourced travel team lead by Zakir .. its not easy to manage all of this while still running the daily operations of the company.

Thank you to all the wonderful team at WSO2 for putting this together! And thank you to everyone participating (whether in London, Colombo or just watching over the Internet) ... we're doing this for you.

I look forward to a fun week :-).

API Management: The missing link for SOA success

Nearly 2 years ago I tweeted:



Well, unfortunately, I had it a bit wrong.

APIs and service do have a very direct and 1-1 relationship: an API is the interface of a service. However, what is different is that one's about the implementation and is focused on the provider, and the other is about using the functionality and is focused on the consumer. The service of course is what matters to the provider and API is what matters to the consumer.

So its clearly more than just a new name.

Services: If you build it will they come?

One of the most common anti-patterns of SOA is the one service - one client pattern. That's when the developer who wrote the service also wrote its only client. In that case there's no sharing, no common data, no common authentication and no reuse of any kind. The number one reason for SOA (improving productivity by reusing functionality as services) is gone. Its simply client-server at the cost of having to use interoperable formats like XML, JSON, XML Schema, WSDL and SOAP. 

There are two primary reasons for this pattern being so prevalent: first is due to a management failure whereby everyone is required to create services for whatever they do because that's the new "blessed way". There's no architectural vision driving proper factoring. Instead its each person or at least each team for themselves. The resulting services are only really usable for that one scenario - so no wonder no one else uses them!

Writing services that can service many users requires careful design and thinking and willingness to invest in the common good. That's against human intuition and something that will happen only if its properly guided and incentivized. The cost of writing common services must be paid by someone and will not happen by itself.

That's in effect the second reason why this anti-pattern exists: the infrastructure in place for SOA does not support or encourage reuse. Even if you had a service that is reusable how do you find out how well it works? How do you know how many people are using it? Do you know what time of day they use it most? Do you know which operations of your service get hit the hardest? Next, how do others even find out you wrote a service and it may do what they need? 

SOA Governance (for which WSO2 has an excellent product: WSO2 Governance Registry) is not focused on encouraging service reuse but rather on governing the creation and management of services. The SOA world has lacked a solution for making it easy to help people discover available services and to manage and monitor their consumption. 

API Management

What's an API? Its the interface to a service. Simple. In other words, if you don't have any services, you have no APIs to expose and manage.

API Management is about managing the entire lifecycle of APIs. This involves someone who publishes the interface of a service into a store of some kind. Next it involves developers who browse the store to find APIs they care about and get access to them (typically by acquiring an access token of some sort) and then the developers using those keys to program accesses to the service via its interface.

Why is this important? In my opinion, API Management is to SOA what Amazon EC2 is to Virtualization. Of course virtualization has been around for a long time, but EC2 changed the game by making it trivially simple for someone to get a VM. It brought self service, serendipitous consumption, and elasticity to virtualization. Similarly, API Management brings self service & serendipitous consumption by allowing developers to discover, try and use services without requiring any type of "management approval". It allows consumers to not have to worry about scaling - they just indicate the desired SLA (typically in the form of a subscription plan) and its up to the provider to make it work right. 

API Management & SOA are married at the hip

If you have an SOA strategy in your organization but don't have an API Management plan then you are doomed to failure. Notice that I didn't even talk about externally exposing APIs- even internal service consumption should be managed through an API Management system so that everyone has clear visibility into who's using what service and how much is used when. Its patently obvious why external exposition of services requires API Management.

Chris Haddad, WSO2's VP of Technology Evangelism, recently wrote a superb whitepaper that discusses and explain the connection between SOA and API Management. Check out Promoting service reuse within your enterprise and maximizing SOA success and I can guarantee you will leave enlightened.

In May this year, a blog on highscalability.com talked about how "Startups Are Creating A New System Of The World For IT". In that the author talked about open source as the foundation of this new system and SOA as the load bearing walls of the new IT landscape. I will take it to the next level and say that API Management is the roof of the new IT house.

WSO2 API Manager

We recently introduced an API Management product: WSO2 API Manager. This product comes with an application for API Providers to create and manage APIs, a store application for API Developers to discover and consume APIs and a gateway to route API traffic through. Of course all parts of the product can be scaled horizontally to deal with massive loads. The WSO2 API Manager can be deployed either for internal consumption, external consumption or both. As with any other WSO2 product, this too is 100% open source. After you read Chris' whitepaper download this product and sit it next to your SOA infrastructure (whether its from us or not) and see what happens!

Congratulations Dr. Ajith Ranabahu!

It gives me great pleasure to post belated congratulations to Dr. Ajith Ranbahu on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Ajith's Ph.D. topic was Abstraction Driven Application and Data Portability in Cloud Computing and his advisor was Prof. Amith Sheth. You can watch his Ph.D. defense on YouTube ... a sign of the times!

Ajith is of course one of the 6 founding members of the Apache Axis2 team and the 5th to finish his Ph.D.! Now only Deepal (at Georgia Tech) is left to finish and it'll be an amazing record when he completes too :-). Ajith also worked inWSO2 for an year before leaving for grad school where he continued to work on Axis2 and WSO2 Tungsten (now WSO2 App Server) and where he was championing building developer tools (which I used to dismiss ;-)). He initially went to University of Georgia but moved to Dayton when Amith moved to Dayton. Ajith plans to stay on at Dayton for a while and is looking towards a research career.

Congratulations Dr. Nabeel Mohamed!

It gives me great pleasure to post belated congratulations to Dr. Nabeel Mohamed on completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University.

Nabeel was an employee in WSO2 for a short time before he left to pursue Ph.D. work and is the first of many who have worked in WSO2 and gone onto doing Ph.Ds to complete the degree. Nabeel's Ph.D. thesis topic was "Privacy Preserving Access Control for Third-Party Data Management Systems" and his advisor was Prof. Elisa Bertino. The topic is of immense applicability for cloud data protection. Nabeel is staying on in Purdue as a Post-Doctoral Researcher right now.

Congratulations Dr. Chathura Herath!

It gives me great pleasure to congratulations Chathura Herath on completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University on the topic Programming Abstraction for Resource Aware Stream Processing in Scientific Workflows. Chathura is a student of Prof. Beth Plale.

Chathura was also one of the original members of the Apache Axis2 crew and is now the 4th of the original group of 6 to finish their Ph.D. degrees. He joins Srinath (in WSO2), Jaliya (in Microsoft Research), Eran (heading to Wall Street) to finish off leaving just Ajith (in Wright State) and Deepal (in Georgia Tech) in the pipeline. Chathura is heading towards an academic career. 

Are you attending WSO2Con 2011?

WSO2Con 2011 is happening in Sri Lanka at the awesome Waters Edge Conference Center (just outside the capital Colombo) from Monday, September 12th to Friday, September 16th. Have you signed up yet? If not here are a bunch of reasons to do it NOW!

The Program

The overal agenda is a combination of superb keynotes, talks by users about various solutions / case studies, talks by WSO2 folks about various new and up and coming cool things, couple of superb panels and of course some pre- and post-conference tutorials to help get an overview first and then an indepth understanding of various topics. Here's a circular view of the week:



This year we ran an open call for papers and selected nearly 20 external speakers to present their stories from amongst a large number of submissions. The speakers are coming from more than 10 countries (14 if I remember right) from North America, South America, Europe, Asia (including Sri Lanka, of course) and Australia/NZ. With attendees coming from various other countries too this is a truly global event with one hell of a program.



I would be doing a great dis-service if I didn't highlight our keynote speakers. We have 4 outside keynotes from IBM, eBay, Google and Cognizant. Paul and I are doing keynotes too. These folks who are coming in to give the keynotes are highly accomplished individuals who will undoubtedly have superb stuff to say .. listening to them itself will justify the trip!

The Place



Sri Lanka is one of the hottest tourist destinations in the world today. In one small accessible package, Sri Lanka offers everything from awesome beaches to great surf to archeology to history to mountains to hang gliding to hot air ballooning to just plain going native. After having ended a 30-year horrendous war more than 2 years ago, we're now one of the safest places in the world! Interestingly, while most places in the world are increasing their security levels Sri Lanka is massively opening up.

We still of course have ways to go to build up many key infrastructure aspects in the country. In a way the whole country is under construction right now .. but not in the way that you wouldn't have the best time of your life here! Coming now will save you a lot of bucks too .. tourism in Sri Lanka WILL get much more expensive in the next 5 years!

Certainly don't just take my word for it. Instead, how about:

• New York Times says Sri Lanka is the #1 travel destination in the world (2010)
• National Georgraphic says Sri Lanka is the 2nd best island in the world (2010) [they're wrong of course and we're number 1 ;-) .. but I do admit Galapagos is incredibly cool]

Who am I to argue with places like New York Times and National Geographic telling you to come to Sri Lanka!

The conference hotel we've chosen is Cinnamon Lakeside in Colombo. This is one of the best (5-star, of course) hotels in Colombo and sits next to the Beira Lake in Colombo. In addition to being a great hotel smack in the middle of Colombo, it also houses several superb restaurants. Do not miss Royal Thai.

The conference itself is being held at the very very cool Waters Edge Conference Center, about 10km (6 miles) out of Colombo. Its a very large facility and is in fact part of a golf course and is home to all the high-end events in Colombo. We will have buses organized to shuttle you to/from the hotel to the conference location.

The People

One of the best things about going to a conference is of course the opportunity to hang out with like minded people .. some of who will end up becoming your buddies for the rest of your life. At WSO2Con 2011 you will have the opportunity to interact with people from 20 countries, people who are total geeks, people who are world famous and of course the people from WSO2 who create and develop the products you love.

In order to make sure you get maximum time to interact and engage with each other we are also organizing several evening events. Don't plan to leave as the sessions finish!

The Deal

We want you to come from wherever you are in the world. At the same time, we realize its not easy to get travel approval these days with an unknown budget to travel to an exotic destination ("you want to go to a conference where?").

So, in order to make that process easier we're offering a complete, soup-to-nuts package that covers everything:

• round-trip (economy class) airfare
• up to 6 nites hotel accommodation at the conference hotel
• all ground transportation in Sri Lanka
• all meals within those 6 nights
• (oh yeah) a full conference pass including both tutorial days

How much? They are priced based on where you're coming from:

• Anywhere from South Asia: $1,900
• Anywhere from Europe, Australia or New Zealand: $2,400
• Anywhere else in the world (America, Africa, rest of Asia, Arctic region, Antarctica etc.): $2,900

If you've ever paid and attended a 5-day event anywhere in the US you know that you easily spend more than $2,900 for that week all told. This is an incredible value .. even your manager will grok it :). AND you get to spend a week in Sri Lanka as a bonus!

We OF COURSE are hoping lots and lots of folks from Sri Lanka will attend! We don't have airfare included rates for that :) .. you just have to register at the regular rates (and we give a special discount to most LK organizations - government, SLASSCOM members, AMCHAM members, IESL members, etc. etc.).

What are you waiting for? REGISTER NOW and reserve your spot :-).

10 years since returning to Sri Lanka

Today marks the 10 year anniversary of our returning home to Sri Lanka.

I went to the US in 1985 where I lived for a total of nearly 16 years .. first arriving on August 18, 1985 to go to Kent State University for undergraduate studies. I lived in Kent, Ohio for 4 years, finishing both a BS and an MS, and then moved to West Lafayette, Indiana for 8 years where I was a PhD student at Purdue for 5 years and then visiting faculty for 3 more. Then I joined IBM Research in August 1997 (starting August 4th) and moved to Yorktown Heights, New York and finally left the US on August 4th 2001 and arrived back home on August 6th, 2001. That's 10 years ago today :-).

Wow, 10 years .. time flies when you are having fun!

I remember that there were pieces of airplanes on the ground at the Colombo Airport when we landed - the dreaded LTTE had brazenly attacked the airport just 10 days before that destroying 3 Sri Lankan Airlines planes and damaging 3 more as well as damaging or destroying 26 Airforce aircraft and killing a bunch of people.

What a difference 10 years makes; guns have been silent and peace reigns loudly in Sri Lanka for more than 2 years now. Whether you like the current leadership team in the country or not, we all owe them an incredible debt of gratitude for putting everything aside and destroying the LTTE menace and creating a stable nation so we have (another) chance at becoming what Sri Lanka is capable of becoming.

I was of course still working for IBM Research when I came back .. working remotely from Sri Lanka. I finally quit on April 15, 2005 and started WSO2 a few months later. I started encouraging Sri Lankan developers to contribute to open source projects in fall 2002 and ended up starting the Lanka Software Foundation in early 2003 (along with friend, colleague and mentor Jivaka Weeratunge). LSF was of course instrumental in many projects that ended up in Apache and for Sahana, the tsunami-inspired disaster management system we created. (BTW IBM recently highlighted Sahana in their 100 year celebrations .. very cool!) I also started teaching as a volunteer visiting lecturer at the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University of Moratuwa from around 2002, where many of the brilliant brains that contributed to LSF's projects, and later WSO2, came from. (We of course get brilliant people from many sources now .. but MRT still dominates!)

One of the things I'm really proud of is that so many people have benefitted from the work done in LSF to help get them into grad school for further studies. Counting WSO2 too, there are now more than 25 people in various places doing PhD's in Computer Science. Three have finished so far.

--

Many people have asked me at various times: "Have you ever regretted coming back home?". I can honestly say: NOT EVEN ONCE!

Don't get me wrong- the US was a great country to live in and I will never forget the superb education nor the wonderful experiences and friends I made in my 16 years there. However, this is home and there's nothing like home (for me). I love the fact that I can have some small impact on young people who can help Sri Lanka get ahead in its journey. I love the fact that I am not second class in any way in my home country. I love the fact that my kids are growing up here with roots in their home country - where they end up as adults is their decision, not mine. But at least they have a firm footing here as their home.

Moving back to Sri Lanka is not without its challenges. Many things that are easy in the US are not so easy here. At the same time, many things that are hard in the US are quite easy here. So its always a mixed bag .. what matters is your mindset about the journey: if you are committed to moving back then you can come back. If you are half-hearted and look for problems instead of challenges then you will run back to wherever you attempted to move back from.

I am writing this because I am very very keen to attract Sri Lankans living in other countries to come back home. We need our educated, experienced, connected, knowledgable Lankans to come back home and help us rebuild after the 30 year nightmare that ended 2 years ago. The opportunities here are absolutely amazing and this is the start of a boom period .. now is as good as ever to come back home.

OF COURSE Sri Lanka is not a perfect place. Neither is the US (can you say "debt ceiling"?) nor any other place. The advantage Sri Lanka offers to Sri Lankans is that this is our home. Whatever hard work you do will have tremendous impact. Sri Lanka is a small country .. that means the impact of your work is much more direct and immediate too. Every problem is an opportunity if you take up the challenge!

I, along with Dulith Herath, Founder and CEO of Kapruka.com, along with SL2College (another non-profit project I'm involved in - founded by Nayana Samaranayake) are launching a "come back to Sri Lanka" effort soon. The idea is to help dispel many myths (that traffic is a nighmare, that everything is corrupt, that nothing is easy etc. etc.), get info about jobs and other opportunities, provide accurate and direct information and eventually help people who want to come back make the move and settle down (including things like kids school etc.).

BTW if you're a hardcore passionate techie wanting to come back then I know at least one great place to work ;-).

The last 10 years have been amazingly fantastic for me. The last 6 years have been most special because I have helped create a company that now employees more than 125 people here (and soon more here as well as in the US, UK and some in Europe). Thank you Paul for much of that!

The move was made easier by many many people who helped get settled in, helped get connected to various places and helped in various other ways. You are too numerous to list (and I know I will screw up by missing some key people) but please know that I know you played a crucial role in how well the last 10 years have gone. From the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU.