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Posts Tagged ‘Private Cloud’

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 »

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 »

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.

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Posted in cloud, Cloud Virtualization, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

451 Group – Cloud Codex

Friday, November 20th, 2009

The 451 Group just recently posted their CloudScape summary, or Cloud Codex.  It can be obtained  from here (http://www.451group.com/cloudscape/cloudscape_report_detail.php?icid=869).  I consider this report to be a very thorough summary of the current Cloud landscape and the various issues that surround Cloud architectures and deployments.  I’d like to summarize a few salient points from the report:

The report defines various kinds of Cloud computing (closed private cloud, community private cloud, hosted private cloud, enterprise public cloud, and commodity public cloud) and then goes on to define the four pillars that support these clouds: management, automation, security, and storage.  These pillars then sit on top of the underlying hardware (network gear, x86 servers, mass storage, and virtualization software).

Of particular interest to us is the cloud management and automation, specifically: cloud monitoring, analytics; and provisioning, and orchestration.  Application performance in the cloud is going to become an issue and you’ll need management tooling that can quickly drill down into the application stack, virtualization layer, and physical infrastructure to identify performance issues.  Analytics then becomes important to understand correlations between cloud infrastructure (and possibly private infrastructure as well).

On the automation side, as applications become increasingly elastic, cloud management tooling is going to have to understand dynamic changes in infrastructure and be able to adjust the number of elements being monitored in real-time.  The tooling will also have to be able to trigger orchestration events in the cloud to react to certain kinds of load (or outage) scenarios.

As cloud evolves, so will we, these are exciting times.

Alex

P.S. Here’s my plug, of course, check out our cloud monitoring information. Lots more to come.

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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.

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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?

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Posted in agile, Cloud Virtualization, management, virtualization vmware | No 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.

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Posted in Cloud Virtualization, IT Management, security, Systems Management, Uncategorized | No Comments »