The up.time IT Systems Management Blog

Archive for the ‘cloud’ Category

« Older Entries

The Cost of Cloud – Part 3: Testing in the Cloud

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

Cloud Capacity and Cloud TestinAs the conclusion to my 3 part Cost of Cloud Follow-up (click here to read part 1, click here for part 2), I wanted to focus on development and testing in the cloud and what questions you need to answer before beginning any tests.

 

Example #3 – Development and Testing in the Cloud: Although spinning up new test and development environments in the cloud improves agility, the essential questions to ask are:

 

  • Internal or Cloud: Is it more cost-effective to host the application or service internally or in the cloud? Can IT prove its decision?
  • Which Cloud is Best: Which cloud vendor should be chosen?
  • How Much will it Cost: How much will this service/workload cost month over month?
  • Failsafe Cloud Alerting and Reports: Additionally, the added problem of developers forgetting to de-commission cloud infrastructure and services drives major cost overruns. Proper notification of these ‘cloud zombies’ is essential to prevent large bills over time.  While services like Amazon’s AWS are an incredible boon to being able to create development and test environments in a few clicks, there are latent costs which aren’t always readily apparent – stopped instances still consume storage resources (and cost), snapshots linger even when volumes are deleted (and add more cost), just to name a few. IT needs better visibility.

As stated earlier (part 1), there are no tools that can help IT (or LOBs) model the cost of their cloud needs, predict their workload costs or notify when costs are escalating. However, there are tools coming in the future.

The most fundamental aspect of optimizing performance monitoring in the cloud is to understand the relationship between application/infrastructure performance and cost. Presently, the industry is just beginning to understand how to monitor the performance of applications in the cloud, yet it lacks a cloud costing dashboard necessary for IT managers to make smart budget related decisions. How can organizations understand the cost of cloud computing without a deeper level of visibility? It has become crucial for IT to tie cloud success to cost analysis, as well as overall system performance.

Conclusion: So to Cloud or Not to Cloud? How will you tie your cloud decisions to cost for justification to senior management? Or will you just deploy and cross your fingers?

Alex

————————————–

Quick update:

We have just launched uptimeCloud (beta) – the simple way to manage cost and capacity in the cloud. This new SaaS product will provide real-time, dynamic cloud cost monitoring, cloud cost forecasting, and cloud capacity management. for more, visit www.uptimecloud.com

 

—————————————

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in cloud, cloud cost, Cloud Cost Monitoring, cloud monitoring | 2 Comments »

The Cost of Cloud – Part 2: Applications in the Cloud

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

As part 2 of my Cost of Cloud Follow-up (click here to read part 1), I wanted to focus on applications in the cloud and what you need to see, report on and predict future cloud costs.

 

Example #2 – Applications in the Cloud:

  • See Cloud Cost: IT needs to see a clear monthly workload cost of their entire Amazon AWS deployment (by server, application or service) before they get the bill. For those companies that have deployed in AWS, the anxiousness and pain associated with the monthly AWS bill can be quite frustrating.
  • Predict Cloud Cost: Reports are needed that can estimate or predict the cost of running an application or service in AWS before it’s deployed. Predicting cloud cost based on individual workloads, applications or services is essential.
  • Identify Cloud Ready Applications: Reporting that can show which workloads are prime candidates for cloud deployment would be extremely helpful to IT departments wrestling with how to use cloud most effectively.

    If you have any questions about how you accomplish any of the above, let me know by posting a comment.

    Alex.

    ————————————–

    Quick update: We have just launched uptimeCloud (beta) – the simple way to manage cost and capacity in the cloud. This new SaaS product will provide real-time, dynamic cloud cost monitoring, cloud cost forecasting, and cloud capacity management. for more, visit www.uptimecloud.com

     

    —————————————

    Tags: , , , , , , ,
    Posted in cloud, cloud cost, Cloud Cost Monitoring, cloud monitoring | 1 Comment »

    The Cost of Cloud – Part 1: Cloud Cost Analysis

    Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

    Clost of Cloud, Cloud CostAs a follow-up to my cost of cloud computing post that had a large response, I decided to do a follow-up cloud cost analysis. This is part 1 of a 3 part series that will be posted over the next few weeks.

    The ultimate goal of deploying application or dynamic infrastructure to the cloud is the truly agile and cost-competitive nature of running and managing applications and infrastructure. However, cost can increase exponentially without proper cloud monitoring and cloud cost modeling. It has become crucial for IT to tie cloud success to cost analysis, in addition to overall system performance. This article will provide some common pitfalls and pains around current gaps in cloud costing and deployment, as well as a key set of questions to help IT make smart cloud decisions.

    Up to now, the success of applications in cloud, virtual and physical environments have been viewed in only two dimensions – availability and performance. However, perhaps the most important dimension is cost, and it’s cost that will dramatically influence what, when and where IT organizations deploy to the cloud. Presently a major gap is in tooling, where no cloud monitoring tools can help IT and LOBs monitor their cloud costs, predict workload/application cost, notify when costs are escalating, as well as provide standard cloud performance and availability monitoring. However, we do see this tooling issue changing in the near future.

    To date, companies have been oblivious to the workload cost of an application running in the cloud, apart from unclear monthly billing. We are entering a new era where performance and availability will be baseline requirements, but workload cost efficiency will be the new key to success. This will be the age of ‘economic compute’ and will be defined by how and where companies can run workloads at the best cost (assuming performance and availability remain constant). It won’t matter if it’s internally run on physical or virtual servers, or in the cloud, as the economics will drive this decision. However, the lynch pin to this costing decision model is missing…

    To responsibly manage IT budgets, companies need visibility to the cost and performance data of workloads, applications and dynamic infrastructure services. However, the industry is missing a complete toolset or product suite that can help IT easily see and predict the cost of cloud deployment. Applications and services can be deployed on cloud infrastructure (assuming it returns acceptable performance and availability), but it’s essential for IT to have clear visibility to what the workloads will cost comparatively, across different cloud vendors or even the cost of an internally run workload. How can IT make a cost-conscious decision without the basic cost data of an application, workload or service? Quite simply, it can’t. This is part one of a three part series where the idea of the economic cloud comes into play:

    Example #1 – Dynamic Infrastructure Services:

    • Ensure IT Doesn’t Overpay: A company may have provisioned a $500 per month system, but if its CPU is only consumed 10 percent of the time, then one is largely over paying. Now scale that scenario out to a company that is running many services, applications and servers in the cloud.
    • Companies with Many Separate Cloud Accounts: For IT managers trying to understand the cumulative costs of many developers or departments (LOBs) with cloud accounts, it can be almost impossible, with no clear means of reconciling usage (until it’s too late).
    • Manage Cost Across Geographically Dynamic Workloads: For more advanced scenarios, there are now a number of services that allow the creation of cloud instances in specific geographic regions, which enables a new generation of smartphone or mobile applications to exist.  There are millions of smartphone users in the world in non-North American geographies, such as Latin America – imagine if you could dynamically and geographically provision cloud resources that are compute heavy, or can service the requests of these remote smartphone clients, in a cost effective manner.  This reduces bandwidth requirements, increases the response time and can be done on cheaper, temporarily available compute resources. This kind of dynamism is incredibly powerful, yet monitoring the changing costs and performance of these cloud resources is going to be a difficult problem to solve.

    Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more examples of where the economic cloud comes into play and please, let me know your feedback/questions by posting a comment.

    Until next week…

    Alex

    ——————–

    Quick update: We have just launched uptimeCloud (beta) – the simple way to manage cost and capacity in the cloud. This new SaaS product will provide real-time, dynamic cloud cost monitoring, cloud cost forecasting, and cloud capacity management. for more, visit www.uptimecloud.com

    Tags: , , , , , ,
    Posted in cloud, cloud cost, Cloud Cost Monitoring, cloud monitoring, Cloud Virtualization | 3 Comments »

    Amazon outage and greater awareness raising

    Thursday, April 28th, 2011

    Amazon was in the news this week, for all the wrong reasons — who wants to be associated with a massive outage and loss of customer data.  Having said this, the event has caused a great amount of hand-wringing and awareness raising around the limitation of cloud based services.  Let’s call it Amazon’s pets.com moment, the bubble of unlimited compute with perceived one hundred percent availability and storage reliability has been burst.  Yes, there will be a corresponding pull-back and introspection around deploying into the cloud, but this kind of cataclysmic event serves a great purpose – education.

    Cloud is convenient, cloud is dynamic, cloud is cool; but the romance is over, and now it’s time to figure out how can you effectively use it knowing the risks.  In the mid-enterprise market, private datacenters are not going away any time soon and the current Amazon outage indicates that not all data is best housed in the cloud.  How are you going to decide what goes where, and just as importantly, how are you going to monitor your physical, virtual, and cloud assets?

    Alex

    Posted in cloud | 2 Comments »

    Notes from VMworld: Future is Cloudy

    Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

    First week of September, at VMworld, I was able to hang out with 17,000 of my closest VMware colleagues and get the lowdown on the vision of where VMware is going. uptime software also hosted a customer event at the Press Club, just next to the Moscone Centre, and it was a nice chance to meet a great group of up.time users in an informal group.

    In a nutshell, VMware identified three tiers of technology that they are going to address with a portfolio of products: mobile, application platform, and infrastructure. By spanning these three tiers, VMware intends to be able to deliver applications to end-users with a few clicks – and these applications would be dynamically deployed, secured, managed, and accessible to a user on any kind of device. Obviously, there are a lot of moving parts to delivering this, and not all are in place yet, but the vision is compelling.

    VMware also announced the acquisition of Integrien, a small predictive analytics company, and they will be used for automatically identifying problem VM guests in a vSphere infrastructure. Integrien doesn’t actually do any performance data collection and relies on other tools to do the collection. This acquisition obviously puts a bit of chill in the VMware partner ecosystem, as VMware is building up its systems management portfolio and components of it will compete with partner offerings. We at uptime are excited as our broad heterogenous monitoring capabilities can feed into Integrien and help administrators diagnose multi-platform problems quickly. It’s also important to point out that up.time does high-level application performance and SLA reporting and this is not an area addressed by Integrien.

    While wandering the Solutions floor, there were many familiar faces, and it was great to check out the latest offerings. One thing became very apparent though, and that is there weren’t many heterogeneous systems management tools – yes, it was a VMware show – but for the next foreseeable number of years, people will not be deploying a pure VMware solution, and will need to monitor all of their infrastructure. As applications start to spread from physical systems, become virtualized, and then start moving into the cloud (be it private or hosted), a coherent single-pane-of-glass view is still necessary, especially since applications will be fragmented. Monitoring applications with multiple tools is going to be problematic and will pose problems for manager of managers tools if people want a consolidated view of application performance and availability.

    All-in-all I feel that up.time is well positioned to span all the VMware stacks and offers the higher level SLA and Application monitoring/reporting capabilities that people need as they explore private cloud.

    Alex

    Posted in cloud, virtualization vmware | 3 Comments »

    Living in the Clouds, The Myth, The Reality

    Monday, July 12th, 2010

    So the question of the day –  is “the cloud” as an infrastructure alternative becoming more of a reality, or still just a Myth?

    A Quick Status Check:

    • We are seeing vendors continue to consolidate their efforts to standardize cloud service offerings and provide new “cloud computing frameworks”. (Terremark, Savvis, Liquid Computing, VMforce  to name a very small handful)
    • We are seeing a cloud services and consultancy eco-system cropping up. (Ala ServiceMesh and Symplified to solve cloud identity management problems, CloudSwitch to solve cloud migrations and vendor management to name a tiny sampling)
    • It’s becoming clearer and clearer that virtualization is a major building block for “cloudifying” our operations, it’s just really not clear what level of virtualization we should be able to achieve in the data center. Nor is it clear how we should deal with all the processes required to reach these seemingly universally desired higher levels of virtualization to facilitate data with “private clouds”. (See Andi Mann’s interesting article on ‘VM Stall’)

    So back to the original question – Myth or Reality?

    My thought is – still a bit of both.

    The idea that you ‘should’ achieve 80%-90% virtualization in the private data center, or that you can deliver anything close to 100% of your IT operations using cloud based services alone continues to be more of a myth than a reality.

    Most clients I work with continue to  juggle their needs with respect to computing demand, data security, regulatory requirements and continuous systems manageability. All of this is being weighed across a diverse stack of private, MSP, and cloud service offerings.

    Clients express the observation that every vendor is coming out of “the woodwork” to magically solve all of their “cloud” computing problems,  and they realize like you that they need to figure out how to combine several technologies and platforms together to create something unified that’s as unique as their business and technology needs are. Typically this leads to a giant systems management architecture diagram, that looks more like a patchwork quilt of disparate tools, than anything that is remotely manageable or sane. This is typically when I get involved to help our clients  start rationalizing their tool set with our product capabilities – either by  leveraging product capabilities to aggregate data from disparate data sources or to enable the complete removal of tools from their stack to simplify the overall architecture.

    From this we quickly see the reality come into focus – there continues to be a need  a systems management tooling that encompasses your needs for presentation, correlation, consolidation, and detection across all physical, virtual and cloud based infrastructure. And we need this to be easy to license, deploy, manage and use.

    If you are interested in seeing how you might potentially create this reality for yourself, feel free to join me on my next webinar that covers some of these topics “Simplifying Virtual, Physical and Cloud Monitoring”.


    Tags: , ,
    Posted in cloud, IT Management | 2 Comments »

    Interview with Randy Bias, CEO of cloudscaling

    Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

    A few weeks ago I was able to catch up with Randy Bias, CEO of cloudscaling, in Seoul, Korea where he is currently camped out for a large engagement his firm is working on.  It was really early our time, and really late his time, but Randy was a good sport and gave a wonderful interview.  I even had most of it recorded until the last two seconds when my Audio Hijack Pro crashed and zeroed out the audio file.  Good thing the recording wasn’t running after that, otherwise I would have had to excise lots of expletives. There’s a lesson to be learned in there somewhere.  Anyway, being a great individual, Randy participated in the interview again and it’s attached to this blog posting.

    One of the first things discussed was “what is cloud?” and Randy described it simply as “self service IT delivered through automation.”  So what does this mean?  Ultimately, there are three different layers to the cloud stack: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).  So, when you consume any of these, whether it’s an application, a platform somewhere to load your code and go, or whether it’s infrastructure to get servers or storage on demand — it’s really the whole experience of being able to get what you want, when you want it, and on your own terms.

    In the rest of the podcast, Randy talks about a number of other great topics such as:

    • what kinds of businesses are using cloud
    • how you should go about evaluating it
    • how to avoid being outsourced as an IT department
    • what are the barriers to adoption; monitoring in the cloud (near and dear to our hearts)
    • designing applications for failure awareness
    • where he thinks the cloud is going

    It goes without saying that Randy is extremely experienced and I learned a lot from this podcast.  You can get more information about Randy here at cloudscaling.

    Alex

    Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

     

    Tags: , , , , , ,
    Posted in cloud, IT operations | 1 Comment »

    Continuing to Innovate – New up.time Release

    Monday, May 17th, 2010

    It’s been a busy day for us at uptime software today, as our new release of up.time hit the marketplace this morning. We’ve had fantastic feedback from both analysts and media alike, especially surrounding our ability to address the needs to Mid-Enterprise IT departments.

    We are finding that Mid-Enterprises are facing a very complex IT environment that includes applications and infrastructure spanning virtual, physical and cloud platforms. While there are expensive solutions available to large enterprises, there is little on the market for these mid-sized enterprises, which face the very same challenges. The key, we have found, is that they need:

    • Deep Monitoring: Providing metrics at the service, application and systems resource levels
    • Simple Management: Virtual, physical, and cloud environments with a single tool
    • Ensured Service Levels: Proactive issue avoidance and automated healing
    • Affordability and Ease-of-use: Most importantly, they need to do this with a tool that is quick to deploy, easy to use, and affordable based on their budgets.

    I thought I would share a couple of the articles that have already been published on up.time today:

    Information Week: uptime software Refreshes Monitoring Tool for Mid-Market

    CTO Edge: uptime software Makes IT Simpler

    What makes this exciting is the perfect fit that mid-enterprise companies have found when using up.time. In fact, more than 90 percent of our new customers in 2009 were mid-enterprise. So, we know first hand what these companies need to be successful. They need a powerful systems management solution that is truly low maintenance, able to deploy quickly and affordable at a mid-enterprise price. up.time is the perfect fit for mid-size companies that want deep monitoring of virtual and physical environments with a single tool but have constrained IT staff and budgets.

    More to come…

    Alex

    P.S. and next blog, I’ll take my marketing hat off…

    Tags: , , , , , , ,
    Posted in cloud, IT operations, sla, uptime | No Comments »

    Notes from #CloudCamp #Toronto

    Thursday, April 8th, 2010

    A few nights ago, I was at CloudCamp here in Toronto and it was my first experience with an un-conference and an un-panel.  The un-conference vibe meant there wasn’t an agenda, but a loose structure that involved flash/quick presentations from the sponsors, an un-panel, and then breakout sessions.

    The sponsor five-minute talks were interesting in that none of them were customer story oriented, all were vendor me-me-me presentations.  The IBM one was squint inducing and the quick summary page had twenty different URL links on it for quick reference!  I did enjoy the OpsCode presentation as John Willis was pretty enthusiastic, might be worth a visit to an OpsCamp soon.

    The un-panel aspect was engaging in that the facilitator asked the crowd who thought they were cloud experts and then got them to sit on the stage as the panelists.  A list of questions was then generated by the crowd and the panelists got to choose a question and had one minute to answer it.  My question of “how do you monitor your applications in the cloud” went un-answered, which irked me, but based on the other questions asked and discussed – most people just aren’t very far along the cloud deployment route.  People are still trying to understand things like security, lifecycle management, ROI, types of cloud, vendor lock-in, future of cloud, etc.

    On the whole, worth the visit, and I’m sure as the crowds get bigger, the conversations will evolve and mature.

    Alex

    Posted in cloud | No Comments »

    Green IT, Green Peace Strikes out at the Clouds

    Monday, April 5th, 2010

    Green Peace is no stranger to controversy, and in this case their recently published study on Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change has certainly caused a lot of discussion on the inter webs.

    The documents thesis is that we are building huge numbers of data centers and that we need to consider the impact of them, and also that we need to ensure we use renewable energy to power cloud based infrastructure.

    Again, as usual with Green Peace, in general it’s hard to disagree with the overall argument that the planet is important, it’s the way they choose to deliver their messages, and the way they target them that I find issue with.

    The document wants to attack the corporate “boogey man out to kill mother nature”, which is embodied by this quote: “But decisions about how the cloud will be built out are being made by business leaders primarily concerned with quarterly profit statements and earnings for shareholders.”

    The first point I’d like to make is, data centers and computing resources are cost centers from a business perspective, the more efficiently and the less resources we can use to deliver IT, the better the profit statements and earnings for shareholders will be. So to say that business and being green are mutually exclusive would be naive and as usual irks me.

    Secondly, Green Peace is totally missing the boat on what Cloud is. Cloud infrastructure would be the equivalent of public transit for the IT world. The fact that the stack can be scaled dynamically up and down and that many organizations/deptartments/stakeholders can share the same common infrastructure means far less wasteage in the form of dedicated hardware stacks for app silos that sit idle.

    Thirdly, the world of IT has driven up productivity, increased the worldwide standard of living, enabled Green Peace and many other organizations to disseminate their message without using paper products, and due to supply chain enhancement has increased the efficiency of delivering goods on demand to consumers (thus reducing waste).

    The paper totally misses the most important point, which is the fact that the number one waster of energy in IT is overcapacity or sprawl. Regardless of whether we use renewable sources or not to power our data centers, the fact of the matter is that IT is nessecary for the progress of society, what is un-necessary and needless is the provisioning of unneeded hardware or sprawl in improperly sized environments.

    Luckily there are monitoring solutions out there that can help with this key challenge. Whatever hardware/virtual/cloud, software or device stack you are using, make sure your monitoring platform allows you to determine whether you have too many “heaters in the data center”, “whether you can save on space”, “save on cooling” and all those other things Green Peace should love you for.

    P.S: If you are interested in Green Peace’s original study, click here.

    Tags: , ,
    Posted in cloud | 5 Comments »

    « Older Entries