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Posts Tagged ‘Cloud Monitoring’

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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

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

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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Posted in cloud, cloud cost, Cloud Cost Monitoring, cloud monitoring | No 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”.


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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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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…

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Posted in cloud, IT operations, sla, uptime | 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.

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2009: A Year in Review; and looking forward to 2010

Monday, January 11th, 2010

I thought I’d take a little time to review this past year, which has been a crazy year, and then briefly comment on the upcoming year.

In light of one of the most depressing economic years in a good long while, we’ve fared very well, acquiring several hundred new customers this year and retaining and growing our existing account base.  We have a fantastic customer renewal rate, and can you believe that 87% of up.time customers buy more within a year!  We launched a great new release of up.time (5.2) this past summer which has capabilities to help automate virtualized environments to minimize or eliminate incidents (or reduce MTTR), can scale to over 15,000 systems deployed globally, and is more tightly integrated with virtualization technologies to help oversee systems in the physical, virtual, and now ‘cloud’ based worlds.  Our VMware appliance (listed on the VAM) has seen its download rate skyrocket the past few months and is almost becoming our primary evaluation platform by prospects.

We’ve also been covered extensively by the industry press and analysts, and for good measure I’ve included a brief list below.  One exciting award includes winning (again) the TechWorld 2009 Product of the Year Award. See more of our awards and reviews here.

In keeping at the forefront of social media, we’re on Twitter as @uptimesoftware, so you can follow us for updates and successes.  There are also a number of staff Twittering about a variety of diverse topics, so @uptimesoftware to ask who they are to follow them.

We have some exciting new releases of the software coming out this year, all furthering our virtualization and virtual server monitoring, as well as cloud capabilities, more as we get closer to release times.

Staying strong, loving it, looking forward to 2010.  Cloud will definitely be first and foremost on people’s mind, but we’ll still be doing what we do best, and that is help you monitor, measure, and manage your systems.

Thanks from everybody on the uptime team.

Alex

o CIO Magazine: How Mt. Sinai’s IT Team Made Virtualization Easier – Kevin Fogarty, CIO Magazine, June 2009.

o Network World: Better Efficiency in VMware Environments – June, 2009

o InformationWeek: up.time Monitors VMWare Physical, Virtual Assets – Charles Babcock, InformationWeek, July2009.

o eWeek: up.time offers Deep VMware Monitoring and Management – July, 2009

o Virtual Strategy Magazine Podcast – June, 2009

o Award: TechWorld Product of the Year – November 2009

o Award: Braham Software 300 – March 2009

o Award: Software 500 – September 2009

o March 2009 – 451 Group Insight Report (No downtime for uptime as it retools its software for virtual, distributed IT)

o June 2009 – 451 Group Insight Report (uptime Software gets deeper into VMware with latest release)

o June 2009 – The Virtualization Practice (uptime software Delivers Next-Generation VMware Monitoring and Reporting)

o July 2009 – Gartner ECA Magic Quadrant

o August 2009 -  451 Group Focus Report (uptime as target for EMC)

o August 2009 – IDC Worldwide Performance and Availability Software Vendor Report (included as a ‘Vendor to Watch’)

o September 2009 – Forrester Webinar with JP Garbani (Doing More with Less: Today’s Success Essentials for Better IT Systems Management

o September 2009 – Forrester Webinar with Galen Schrek (“Virtual Dexterity:” The Keys to Successfully Leveraging Virtual Environments)


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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 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’)

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Posted in Cloud Virtualization, IT Management, monitoring, Systems Management, Uncategorized, uptime | 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:

  1. Where on the IT Spectrum do we fit?
  2. What business applications do we have?  What are their topologies?
  3. What is the profile of the application workloads (can we take advantage of fractional compute)?
  4. Are the applications data or network heavy? Are they highly interdependent?
  5. 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

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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 ]

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