Clear Channel integrates software development, ops

Enterprise applications built using Web services and other component-based architecture have many advantages, including interoperability, reusability and flexibility. But those advantages can become problematical for the operations department, which needs to monitor and track the software's performance.

In short: if all you have is piece parts, how do you know when the software is working? Or, more important, how can you tell if it's failed? That was the problem that Clear Channel's solution architect Curt Smith and enterprise architect John Szurek stared in the face.

Clear Channel is among the world's largest media companies, specializing in mobile and on-demand entertainment and information services for local communities. The company's businesses include radio (they own 8 percent of the radio stations in the U.S.) and billboards (more formally called outdoor displays).

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Enterprise applications built using Web services and other component-based architecture have many advantages, including interoperability, reusability and flexibility. But those advantages can become problematical for the operations department, which needs to monitor and track the software's performance.

In short: if all you have is piece parts, how do you know when the software is working? Or, more important, how can you tell if it's failed? That was the problem that Clear Channel's solution architect Curt Smith and enterprise architect John Szurek stared in the face.

Clear Channel is among the world's largest media companies, specializing in mobile and on-demand entertainment and information services for local communities. The company's businesses include radio (they own 8 percent of the radio stations in the U.S.) and billboards (more formally called outdoor displays).

On the IT side, Clear Channel has a primarily Web-based environment built on Microsoft platforms, with a lot of investment in Web services and cloud computing. "Almost everything we build-certainly our core business applications-are Web apps," explained Smith.

For the last few years, the company has been improving its user interfaces (UIs) to make their applications more common and unified. Concurrently, Smith and Szurek have been doing their best to make the delivery and management monitoring of those applications work more smoothly.

Part of creating a standardized UI is to treat the back-end systems as a commodity engine, Smith explained. Three years ago, they decided to adopt Web services, with the notion of a loosely-coupled world with a common interface. Great. The model works. But...

"From the beginning, some of us-Curt and I at the forefront-realized that there was trouble brewing in paradise," Szurek explained. "These SOAP-type systems that we hate so much turn out to be pretty nice after all. They define what the pieces are." While the business appreciates the agility of loosely-coupled architectures, and programmers were happy with it, said Szurek, "The monitoring people don't want that. The operations people don't want that. And with virtual machines in the data center... there could ultimately be chaos."

Chaos? Hey, isn't loosely-coupled software design supposed to make things simpler? For developers, sure. But for IT departments worried about monitoring a whole enterprise's collection of applications, the difficulty is understanding how it all interconnects and having visibility from one end of an application stream to the other.

You can see if an individual Web service is up or down, explained Smith, but what an operations department cares about is the uptime and performance of the system. If an application is no longer a monolithic construct, but composed of synthetic transactions, how do you define what the application is? Especially when the functionality is workflow-oriented, and thus may gate differently-that is change based on user behavior-depending on how the software is employed.