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The Hitchhikers Guide to Cloud

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

I have just started using a service called Evernote to try and allow me to keep my notes and thoughts organized across Cloud and the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy all moments of inspiration, brainstorming and discussions with others whenever or wherever they occur. So far it looks to be a promising solution. Evernote is essentially providing me with cloud based storage with their particular access paradigm on top of it. They have clients for all manner of OS and device as well as a web client. I can access my Evernotes pervasively, wherever I am, and from whatever technology mechanism I have at hand. This is one of the promises of the cloud and they fulfill this promise.

This however, is not the ultimate promise of the cloud. Ultimately I would like to be able to access my Evernotes and any other data or data management/manipulation services from the cloud as a single federated source of information and information processors/transformers. Aside from the fact that there are no standard cloud information sharing protocols or data manipulation standards being used by all service providers, one of the key problems is the issue of federation and trust. We’ve got passport, openID, and other technologies for a federated identity management solution, but the adoption of these technologies seems to be absent in many of today’s cloud offerings. I use a few different cloud services now, and I have a different userid for all of them. Even if they provided a means for me to link their services with one another, I would still have to manage a different identity across services.

This same federated/aggregated service mashup challenge exists in the systems and server monitoring space. With services moving to the cloud, multiple datacenters and 3rd party IT interfaces, you need a management and monitoring tool that can manage these components locally, but still be able to aggregate them into a global view with the flexibility to mash them together into higher order views that take the local information and, through a little magic, allow you to create global knowledge.

For Example, in up.time we have had our local monitoring instance – or what we call and LDC instance - and our global console – or EMS - deployed in a large distributed enterprise to allow customers to extend basic monitoring from a local monitoring tool into an enterprise service delivery knowledge platform. This provides you with critical information on your infrastructure, as well as knowledge about how those services are delivered across your business, with the explicit understanding of the business impact of those services. When we have silos of valuable information, combining them together turns that information into actionable knowledge.

The cloud is allowing us to create highly accessible and pervasive silos of very valuable information. However, no matter how much information you have, it’s only valuable when we can convert that information into knowledge. The potential for the cloud as a future knowledge platform, with the appropriate federation between services and between users of those services, is a great opportunity enabled by technology of the 21st century. It has the potential to fundamentally change how we do things.

When speaking of knowledge, “Tacitness generally describes the extent to which knowledge is not codifiable (Galunic and Rodan, 1998). Tacit knowledge is personal, context specific, and therefore hard to formalize and communicate whereas explicit or codifable knowledge is transmittable in formal and systematic language (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Furthermore, intangibles like specific knowledge is expensive to transfer across because it cannot be easily aggregated meaningfully (Hayek, 1945).” – (Theory of the firm, Bach Seung, Bai – 2004)”

We are filling the cloud with an unimaginable amount of tacit knowledge about anything and everything imaginable at an astronomical rate. Combined with the AI technologies already available to mine, link and understand this data, we will be able to take these islands of knowledge from across the cloud and leverage it into a global knowledge platform with a tacit knowledge breadth that covers virtually everything. We will be able to access this ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy‘ from anywhere at any time, and it will always be up to date, with literally hundreds of millions of people updating this knowledge base in real time.

(I realize there are several major challenges to the earthly H2G2 related to the information processing, but look at where we are today already, and in a very short period of time, it’s not an ‘if’ but a ‘when’)

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, Cloud Monitoring, IT Systems Management, uptime
Posted in Cloud Virtualization, IT Management, Systems Management, Uncategorized, monitoring, uptime | No Comments »

The Cloud is truly “the human network”

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Remember the old tagline “the human network” from one of our favourite telecom providers? This is a great tagline, because it reminds us, that all of that telecom equipment that we put in place is ultimately used to facilitate communication and drive innovation between real people. That brings me nicely to the topic of today’s post – the cloud is actually the true “human network”.

Let’s ponder for a moment, that the cloud isn’t just changing the way we think about infrastructure, it’s changing the way we live. In essence, it’s cloud enabled applications that are making real what I think of as the “human network”.

If we look narrowly at social media networks and their exponential growth for just a moment, we can start to see what I mean. A simple cloud based application like Twitter has forever changed the way we interact, whether it be novel new ways for geeks (read anyone) to fundraise and promote social causes (HoHoTO.ca), whether it be the dissemination of real-time news, a way to flirt in real-time online, or to simply having a catalogue of our everyday thoughts – all of this brings our humanity to the surface through these connecting technologies.

I have in the past stated that whole paradigm of the cloud is fraught with security issues because of the centralized nature of the data (I still believe this). However, if we examine the true potential of this new massive data set for the study of human interaction – we suddenly realize that we are at the cusp of a new era in understanding ourselves as social beings.

How else do you explain developments like graph node based databases engines like the one from Neo4j to help us find and articulate relationships between massive numbers of individuals? How about tools like Xobni , that link our every day communication by email to social networking (facebook,twitter,linkedin) and generate workplace analytics?

Wouldn’t it be cool to have the data to describe every friendship between every person on earth, how people do business and with whom, a giant database of what people are thinking about right now in real-time, who’s connected to who in the workplace, who’s who in the world of executive leadership? Wait a minute… we’re already there! [Facebook,Salesforce,Twitter,Linkedin, Hoovers]

Wouldn’t it be cool to have all this data all the time, converged to your mobile device? (we are almost there, the cloud is bringing it, why do you think I love Google Android?).

So if we were to say that there isn’t a lot of hype surrounding the cloud, I think we would be lying to ourselves. At the same time, we also need to recognize that the paradigm is real, and that it IS indeed a game changer, not just from a business perspective….. it’s actually about “the human network”.

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, the human network
Posted in Cloud Virtualization, cloud | No Comments »

2010 – The Year of Cloud Experimentation – Part 2 of 2

Monday, December 7th, 2009

This is Part 2 of The Year of Cloud Experimentation. Please click here to read Part 1.

How is the experimentation starting?

The first steps involve application inventorying and application topology. What business applications are in the inventory? What can be migrated? How are the applications interrelated and what is their topology?

The initial cloud evaluation is going to be similar to the P2V consolidation analyses that have been occurring over the past few years. An added dimension to the Cloud assessment, besides having to understand workload profiles, is identifying proximity of data to the compute aspects of the applications. Moving large amounts of data between a Cloud and a private network is not yet feasible.

An additional element to testing the Cloud, unlike in-house virtualization, is vendor risk assessment. If a vendor does indeed collapse, how quickly can workloads be migrated to a different vendor? Are there any technological ‘gotchas’ like unsupported platforms? This will be a very important hurdle for Cloud to overcome.

Furthermore, what types of Cloud services need to be evaluated? Cloud servers, Cloud storage, dedicated hosted platforms? Looking for a DR/HA environment to duplicate in-house infrastructure? Or perhaps looking to leverage fractional compute during peak application load times? How is network infrastructure integrated? Are VPN services available? How does storage fit into the deployment plans?

Ultimately, cost modeling will be needed to determine the true cost saving. A number of factors play into this equation: compute intensity and workload profile, network demand, storage throughput, and since services will now be remote, service latency plays a larger role in application delivery.

When evaluating how to deploy applications into the Cloud, there are a number of operations issues to consider. This includes packaging applications as images for quick deployment and scaling, as well as understanding the potential patch management needs. A considerable amount of experimentation with lifecycle management tooling will be required, especially if applications are multi-tiered or distributed. Experimentation with systems management tooling will be essential in order to monitor and manage physical, virtual, and Cloud (PVC) infrastructure from a single-pane-of-glass. Will tooling integrate with automation solutions to assist in dynamic allocation of resources, or possibly avoid incidents through proactive changes in infrastructure?

Evolution in automation will occur around “bundling” workflows. Currently, there are very few sophisticated automation workflows related to Cloud technologies. For example, imagine if VMware’s Orchestrator enabled Amazon EC2 or Rackspace drag-and-drop workflows around provisioning. If this were the case, dynamic changes in demand would be possible in just a few clicks.

An area of Cloud that we don’t see yet, but which will become more relevant as Cloud services mature, is the concept of cost brokering. Ultimately, since the workloads in a private environment are known, which Cloud vendors can be used most cost-effectively for fractional compute bursts? Quite conceivably, depending on location and time of day, rates will differ and you’ll be able to take advantage of the discounts and drive concrete cost-savings.

Internally developed applications won’t be the first applications in the Cloud environment. However, it is important to evaluate which application development platforms are available in the Cloud to be future-ready. This would include environments like Engine Yard, Azure, Google AppEngine, or SpringSource.

Here is a list of the first five things that an IT manager should consider when evaluating the Cloud:

Where on the IT Spectrum do we fit?
What business applications do we have? What are their topologies?
What is the profile of the application workloads (can we take advantage of fractional compute)?
Are the applications data or network heavy? Are they highly interdependent?
What systems management tooling passes the P-V-C (physical, virtual, and Cloud) test. Is all this infrastructure inside and outside our walls manageable through a single-pane-of-glass dashboard?

Overall, Cloud will change IT and business in a way similar to the Internet. Make no mistake, we are on the edge of a big and positive change. While there are many hurdles to overcome before the Cloud becomes a mainstream component of IT, these issues will be solved over the next few years.

Remember when the internet first started getting major traction? Were you one of the pioneers in your company that saw its potential? Don’t forget that one of the biggest software companies in the world missed the internet boat and fell behind in catching the ‘internet wave.’ Well, the horn has sounded. Cloud is the next big thing. What are you going to do with it?

Alex

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, Cloud Monitoring, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, vOrchestrator
Posted in Cloud Virtualization, IT Management, Systems Management, cloud | No Comments »

2010 – The Year of Cloud Experimentation – Part 1 of 2

Monday, November 30th, 2009

At uptime software, we’ve been quite bullish on Cloud’s potential but feel it still has some distance to cover before it lives up to the hype. In fact, I wrote a blog in January looking at a hypothetical company and the costs involved in moving an entire infrastructure into the Cloud (using Amazon EC2). The results were not impressive, Cloud computing was too expensive (in this example) to gain the critical mass it needs to catch on. It’s amazing how much had changed in the ten months since that blog, as we have learned more about how the Cloud can be best utilized. Recently, the media has driven the Cloud excitement and IT managers are now thinking about how the Cloud, in one form or another, can be used in their environments to drive performance and efficiencies.

The real question is this; in what capacity will organizations adopt Cloud over the next few years? With that in mind, we see the coming year as one of exploration and experimentation. The first step is for companies to quantify what Cloud means to their business. Is it as banal as remote storage used for DR purposes, or something as evolved as dynamic compute with secure private/public networking?

Let’s take a look at the “IT Spectrum,” which is loosely aligned with IT maturity and size of organization.

In this diagram, the left represents most small businesses who house their own servers and have a small number of IT staff. As the small business matures, they may evaluate SaaS-type applications (like Salesforce.com) or push some servers out to an MSP. Further maturing, or growing, businesses may have additional servers in remote hosted datacenters, like web servers or remote disaster recovery storage. At the right-most point in the spectrum, businesses/enterprises have opted to completely outsource their IT and minimize the number of IT staff employed by the business.

Understanding the spectrum’s components is important. They represent a “menu” of options that businesses can use to leverage virtualization and cloud technologies to reduce costs (either labor or infrastructure). This “menu” is most likely how IT managers will choose to evaluate the relevance of Cloud to cost savings and enhanced service delivery. For example, with VMware’s new VBlock offering and the ongoing relationship with Terremark, entire stacks of infrastructure can be pushed into off-premises locations and operated in a mission-critical environment. So, whether it’s just dipping a toe into the Cloud waters (like hosting a server in Amazon EC2 or the RackSpace Cloud to deliver a decoupled application) or leveraging the VBlock to move entire mission critical infrastructures, there are many options to consider. Keep in mind that issues such as backup management, lifecycle management, and systems management need to be addressed in all cases.

How is the experimentation starting?

[ more next week in Part 2 ]

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, Cloud Monitoring, EC2, IT Systems Management, Terremark, VBlock, VMware
Posted in Cloud Virtualization, cloud | 1 Comment »

Microsoft finally draws their line in the clouds

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

As many of you are likely aware, last week Ray Ozzie announced that Azure (Microsoft’s cloud service) would go into full production on January 1st, 2010. Azure is interesting because Microsoft wants to keep the paradigm of desktop OS’s as a key part of the architecture with “the cloud” as an adjunct in what they call the “three screens and a cloud” vision. This vision is important, because it makes the cloud real for consumers and makes it more understandable and accessible to the general populace. Project “Dallas” also re-affirms Microsoft’s commitment to cloud computing as a whole, Microsoft unveiled just enough details to make the project interesting – i.e. data-as-a-service.

For all the “evil empire” slag that Microsoft gets, people tend to forget, or ignore, what happens when Microsoft embraces a technology and tries to dominate that market – the technology just gets easier to adopt and becomes more real.

This is an important milestone in the development of the entire “cloud story”. Let’s be clear – Microsoft, due to their size and market position, does not have the need to innovate or invent new paradigms. All they have to do, and what they are good at, is step into nascent markets that are at the edge of becoming mature enough to explode. This is generally a moment of truth for any incumbents, as Microsoft can and does take advantage of their massive resources in an all out war for dominance. Once they ‘put their toes in the water’, they slowly wage a war of attrition on the incumbents, and buy all the best players and minds, until eventually their technology is pervasive. We have seen this strategy in effect to great success over the years. Remember the browser wars, Database (SQL?), ERP, CRM, Content Management (Sharepoint), Audio Devices (Zune), Console Gaming (XBox) and the list goes on.

So what’s the moral of the story? When Microsoft wades into the game, it’s a very strong sign that it’s time to get with the program and adopt this emerging pardigm.

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, Cloud Monitoring, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, virtualization
Posted in Cloud Virtualization, Uncategorized, cloud | 2 Comments »

The Cloud goes beyond Virtualization

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

There is a article over at The Cloud Option discussing how virtualization is not Cloud. It is summed up very well in this statement:

“Cloud/IaaS goes beyond virtualization by providing extra services for dynamically allocating infrastructure resources to match the peaks and valleys of application demand.”

I think that when people discuss the public/private cloud, this is an often understated point. Simply virtualizing your existing infrastructure with your favourite hypervisor does not mean you have implemented a private cloud within your datacenter. Cloud is about enablement, not virtualization. As ‘The Cloud Option’ says, virtualization is a valuable first step, but it is not Cloud.

From my perspective, Cloud is all about the ability to deploy and manage business services without the involvement of an infrastructure team. If you develop application X for the Cloud, given the right permissions, you should be able to provision the application into production without ever involving someone from the IT department responsible for providing the Cloud resource.

Once provisioned, you should be able to manage, maintain and scale application X without ever involving IT. Virtualization alone is never going to give you this. Cloud is about tools, and given the infrastructure requirements to deliver todays applications and services, it’s about about simple tools performing complex tasks behind the scenes. I go back to the article at ‘Cloud Option’ and, as they suggest, at a minimum the Cloud provider (internal or external) must bring: Self Service, Resource Metring & Accountability, Image Management and Network Policy Enforcement.

up.time provides great visibility into your physical and virtual assets that are a part of your Cloud strategy, by provinding deep Cloud monitoring and Cloud management, as well as traditionally deployed applications. In conjunction with our vOrchestrator integration, up.time can also provide resource automation for the scaling and provisioning of applications into the Cloud.

I think Terremark is heading down the right path with their Cloud offering, providing a complete solution to their customers with self management from the application to the virtual network and its security features. I also think that as enterprises look to push their applications and data onto the Cloud, network capabilities are going to become the real differentiator between Cloud offerings. We are at the point where virtualization at the server level is a known and pretty comodditized good. However, at the network layer there are all kinds of opportunities to provide value as part of the overall Cloud offering. From basic firewalling and load balancing to application aware layer 7 switching and deep packet manipulation, these are all capabilities that will allow Cloud providers like Terremark to differentiate themselves from one another.

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, Cloud Monitoring, Private Cloud, Terremark
Posted in Cloud Virtualization, IT Management, uptime | No Comments »

Just how disruptive is Cloud technology?

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Let’s understand for a moment just how disruptive Cloud and virtualization technologies are to OTHER technologies. Ignore for a moment, all the changes required to business processes, maintenance processes, infrastructure deployment models and all the other stuff people have been beating to death over the past 2 months.

Just how pervasive and challenging is Cloud technology to entrenched technology? Well for one, people are redesigning and re-thinking how we use TCP/IP in order to enable and Long Distance VMotion. That’s right, in order to be able to forklift virtual instances and massive data over the internet, companies like netex have figured out how to make the old building block of the interwebs TCP/IP even better – dubbing their new UDP over IP translation technology “HyperIP”. HyperIP optimizes TCP/IP so that you can move a full vmware instance over the wire up to 10X faster than usual. (Let’s not even talk about how people will monitor this new disruptive technology, but you can bet it’s the agile players who are even aware of the new challenges in this space).

The potential for this technology is 100% clear, and probably is somewhere in a lab being coveted by the people at VMWare as “my precious” – especially in the context of their desire to get remote DRS as a solidified feature in the VSPHERE platform. If VMware manages to get this integrated as part of remote DRS and they start forklifting instances to/from and across the Savvis and Terremark clouds this will be a giant leap towards making unified compute and private/public clouds – “as real as it gets”. This doesn’t even take into account the latest ‘turnkey’ private cloud solutions unveiled by VMWare known as VBlocks.

The clouds just zapped TCP/IP, what’s next?

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, HyperIP, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Terremark, virtualization, VMware
Posted in Cloud Virtualization, agile, management, virtualization vmware | No Comments »

Cloud Computing -The Clouds Are Brewing, Are You Ready for the Storm?

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

I recently watched some “unknown guy,” you know that “unknown techie” person Larry Ellison, rant about the cloud for at least 5 minutes. I found it interesting for a couple reasons:

1) He isn’t wrong that the cloud, in essence, is based on traditional hardware infrastructure placed essentially into the net, and that a lot of people are abusing the terminology for commercial means.

2) He has a huge interest in Netsuite, which is a SAAS based cloud CRM provider, and Oracle. Both organizations are doing a lot in the background around Cloud. Don’t believe me? Visit the Netsuite website or “http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/cloud/index.htm“.

Companies and luminaries in leadership positions will always say one thing in particular during periods of challenging competition or changing market landscapes. When you dig a bit deeper, these companies usually try to deny the newcomers as long as they can while hedging their bets in the background to protect their leadership position against the ever dangerous “game changer”. This gives them time to position themselves as a prime player when the time comes.

Cloud computing is coming hard and fast. It’s a game changer.

Although the underlying technology components are the same, the ability to connect them over a public carrier network has increased its potential effect exponentially. The obvious truth is that the current catalyst for Cloud and the resurgence of centralized compute from a technology perspective, is the decrease in cost for network bandwidth. I recently downloaded an 8 Gigabyte file in less than an hour over a home-based broadband connection (21MBPS) . This is unbelievable when put in the context of connectivity not that long ago (ok, maybe I’m old) – remember 28.8K Baud modems?

It’s no wonder that Cloud based services, like Microsoft Live Mesh, Sugar Synch, and Salesforce CRM, are able to provide ever richer and broader services “over the wire”.

Edge bandwidth to wireless devices right now is reaching upwards of 5 to 8 mbps in 3G HDSPA areas, making the new generation of netbooks, smartphones, and hybrid smartphone/notebook technologies, prime candidates to join the Cloud computingand social networking phenomenon. If Larry is ranting now, wait ’till billions of smartphones join the Cloud. I call dibs on the term “SWARM COMPUTING” for the surge of all these consumer grade devices to the Cloud. So, when Larry Ellison wants to rant about it, he can call my mobile.

In other words, the clouds are brewing, make sure you grab an umbrella, there’s going to be a storm.

P.S. – If you haven’t seen Larry’s tirade against “The Cloud” click here and enjoy the fireworks.

Tags: Application Monitoring, cloud, cloud computing
Posted in Cloud Virtualization | 2 Comments »

Large Scale Cloud Computing Adoption

Monday, October 19th, 2009

There is a very well written article over at ulitzer.com regarding the US Federal Governments IT spend plan for FY11 and their investigation into leveraging cloud computing as a cost cuttimg measure for federal IT spend. It breaks the analysis down into 3 options: Public, Hybrid and Private cloud. In their analysis, the public cloud comes out at a BCR of 15.4 (Benefit/Cost Ratio) with the hybrid and private cloud coming out at 6.8 and 5.7 respectively. I found these results rather surprising considering the scope of what their analysis entails.

We aren’t talking about migrating a few workloads to the cloud, but thousands and thousands of servers worth of federal workloads. When defining the public cloud versus hybrid/private solution and the assumptions, they state for the public cloud it is a migration of ‘low-sensitivity’ data onto existing public clouds. Based on the ever increasing compliance requirements and demand for data privacy and integrity, I would think that the low-sensitivity workloads would not comprise the lions share of the workloads being examined, thereby leaning the tables to the hybrid and/or private cloud offering.

When migrating to the cloud, todays organizations have many terabytes or petabytes (in the case of the US Federal Government, for thousands of workloads) of data that has to be migrated onto the cloud in order to move the complete workload to the cloud. Moving and synchronizing petabytes of storage while maintaining service continuity through the migration is a non-trivial task.

While the analysis within the article is sound, I think that there are significant hurdles still in place from a large scale public cloud adoption standpoint that are not taken into consideration to the extent that they deserve. Everyone wants the public cloud computing model to be successful, after all the benefits stand to be great. I think that in the public cloud, from a security and connectivity standpoint, is not quite there yet for large scale initiatives. I think that the real successes will come from the creation and adoption of private clouds, with the slow learned migration of workloads to the public cloud as we iron out all of the security, networking and compliance requirements.

Maybe it would make sense to have the public cloud providers offer their own hybrid approach where you deploy your own private cloud and they manage it for you. You get to leverage the benefits of their processes and technologies developed for managing the public cloud, with the benefits that come with a private cloud.

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, Government IT, Private Cloud, Public Cloud
Posted in Cloud Virtualization, IT Management, Systems Management, Uncategorized, security | No Comments »

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