Google ADAS: Shuffling toward Multi-Tenancy
July 30, 2008
I have been puzzled by Google’s interest in cloud computing and seemingly sluggish response to growing market demand. Amazon, for instance, has rolled out a mini-fleet of Web services. Despite some hiccups, Amazon has landed some major accounts, and it has insinuated itself into a number of promising start ups. The “deals” are not disclosed, but outfits like Powerset (recently purchased by Microsoft) were using some of Amazon’s cloud services to deliver the Wikipedia demo if my sources are correct.
Salesforce.com is another baffler. Google demonstrates obvious affection for Salesforce.com. There are “hooks” from Salesforce.com into Google. Google dons its short skirts and picks up its pom poms when asked about the promise of Salesforce.com. Google is a really attractive cheerleader, despite the horn rimmed glasses with tape on the nose piece.
Now HP, Intel, and Yahoo (my goodness) have teamed to form a quasi-academic cloud computing service. The new Three Musketeers’ plans look a bit like the Google-IBM parallel processing education initiative. This initiative also drags along some cloud computing functionality, but its focus is aimed at training programmers and getting the US computer science programs to shift back into high gear. Why go to MIT or Stanford when Moscow State University, the University of Waterloo, and various institutions in China, France, and Germany, are cranking out folks with sharper and deeper technical skills?
On July 29, 2008, the struggling and often confused USPTO published a patent assigned to Google wonderfully titled “Method and System for Assured Denotation of Application Semantics”. The inventor is Google Ulfar Erlingsson (yep, Icelandic), who is not a household name even among the in crowd in Mountain View, California. Google likes to keep certain wizards deep in the digital wonderland. The best security is the cloak of anonymity Google provides for some of its 19,000 geniuses.
Mr. Erlingsson’s invention appears as US7406542. The patent was filed in March 2003. The date is important because it provides a peg on which to hang Google’s initial interest in the ADAS “sharing” technology. Google, based on my research, requires any where from six months to 18 months to build up the research momentum to draft a patent document. Doing some crude calendar flipping, Google engineers were poking into ADAS as early as 2002, maybe earlier. The point is that unlike the Guha five patent documents in February 2007, the ADAS invention has been in the Google lab quite a bit longer than the programmable search engine invention was.
What’s ADAS do?
Well, ADAS–based on the reading of this addled goose–appears to address one tiny slice of the multi-tenant tar ball. Multi-tenant is a fancy term that means one application can be used by many different clients at one time. Now, what’s tricky is that each client can have many different users. Implicit in multi-tenant operations, then, is keeping:
- Users seeing and interacting with what each is supposed to see and interact with
- Preventing the application from tripping over itself as many different clients’ users bang on the application
- Managing the complicated system in an efficient way because traditional messaging and management tools can be too verbose and inefficient.
Will Google use this technology? Is Google now using a chunk of this invention in another system; for example, the “ig” or individualized Google service? I will keep looking for information to put this interesting invention into a more solid context.
If you have ideas or insights about ADAS, please, use the comments section of this Web log to share them.
Stephen Arnold, July 30, 2008
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