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Posts Tagged ‘cloud computing’

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

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

Cloud Capacity and Cloud Testin As 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

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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

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Tags: cloud computing, cloud cost, cloud cost monitoring, Cloud Monitoring, cloud testing, cost of cloud
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.

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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

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Tags: cloud, cloud computing, cloud cost, cloud cost monitoring, Cloud Monitoring, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, uptime cloud
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 Cost As 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

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Tags: application monitor, Application Monitoring, cloud, cloud computing, cloud cost, cloud cost monitoring, virtualization
Posted in cloud, cloud cost, Cloud Cost Monitoring, cloud monitoring, Cloud Virtualization | 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: cloud computing, Cloud Monitoring, virtualization
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

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Tags: cloud computing, cloud computing podcast, Cloud Monitoring, Systems Management, up.time, uptime, uptime software
Posted in cloud, IT operations | 1 Comment »

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 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, monitoring, Systems Management, Uncategorized, 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, Cloud Virtualization | 2 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, Cloud Virtualization, IT Management, Systems Management | 2 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, Cloud Virtualization | 3 Comments »

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