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Moving to the Cloud: The Road Ahead
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BuzzOver the past few posts I covered a number of key points to consider as you plan to move to the cloud. These issues are based on our experiences with many public clouds, as well as what we have learned from working with enterprises adopting the cloud.
I hope it’s clear that today’s clouds are powerful resources that can be used to rapidly develop and deploy applications; they provide on-demand resources and true value. The challenges I outlined in configuration, storage, networking, and management really come into play when you try to integrate the power of the cloud with your existing infrastructure and processes. These challenges are centered on the fact that the cloud is separate from the data center – a problem that hits home when you want to utilize existing applications and rely on your existing services and infrastructure.
We believe that this hybrid model, where companies can use the cloud as a flexible extension of their data center, is central to the adoption of cloud computing, and efficiently addressing these problems is essential for cloud deployments to succeed. The technology we have been developing at CloudSwitch is designed to bring this vision to life. Software from CloudSwitch can now integrate your existing infrastructure with the power of the cloud while preserving your applications, tools and infrastructure investments.
As we look forward to the evolution of cloud computing, I expect the cloud will continue to play a larger, more significant role in enterprise IT. Cloud providers have shown they can rapidly iterate and improve their offerings in response to customer input and have been drawing from their experiences to develop new and powerful infrastructure and features. It has been exciting to be part of this evolution so far, and we’re looking forward to the continuing innovation and expansion of cloud computing.
To end this series, I’d like to leave you with the key principles that guide our technology and product development at CloudSwitch:
- Provide end-to-end security between data centers and clouds to protect all data and storage
- Enable existing multi-tier applications to move to the cloud without modification
- Integrate cloud deployments into the existing data center’s management tools and processes
- Eliminate cloud lock-in so you can move between clouds or back to the center as needed
With these principles in place, it becomes possible to resolve or eliminate most of the challenges I’ve outlined in this series, making cloud a much more secure and viable option for the enterprise.
Moving to the Cloud: Managing your Environment
This post is part of a series examining the issues involved when moving applications between internal data centers and public clouds.
One of the advantages of cloud computing is that someone else is managing the infrastructure – including the servers, network devices and storage systems, not to mention the data center power conditioning, cooling and fire suppression equipment. One of the costs of offloading this infrastructure is that the cloud becomes something different and separate from your data center. In most deployments today, the cloud is almost completely isolated from your data center, and this often requires changes in how you manage and interact with your applications.
So what does “management” mean in this context? I look at it in terms of provisioning resources and managing the infrastructure, operating systems and applications. Over the years a remarkable set of tools and processes has been developed to handle these tasks in the data center, and the challenge now is how you integrate all this investment with the new cloud deployments.
For provisioning, the cloud has a model similar to a data center virtualized environment, in that you can provision virtual resources from a pool of physical resources. However, the definition of these resources is dictated by the cloud provider, which means you have to adjust your processes to account for the capabilities and limitations imposed by the cloud, specifically CPU, memory and storage resources. To be successful in the cloud, you need to match the resources required for your application to the capabilities of the cloud (i.e., pick enough CPU/memory/etc. to meet your application’s requirements while balancing the costs of the cloud resources). If you already have a provisioning system, you need to expand and modify it to account for the cloud (e.g., add parameters to account for cloud capabilities, build connectors to the cloud API, tie into the cloud account mechanism, etc.). If you don’t have a system in place, you need to build a new process to access the cloud resources. The overriding issue for either approach is that there are no standards yet for cloud provisioning, so the work you do to tie into a cloud provider is not portable to another cloud. The promise of cloud products which offer multi-cloud capabilities is that they can connect you to different clouds using a common set of interfaces.
Managing your cloud infrastructure can be a lot of work. You need to integrate with an architecture defined by the cloud provider, using its specific primitives for working with cloud components. This requires tying into the cloud APIs for configuring IP addresses, subnets and firewalls, as well as data service functions for your storage. Because control of these functions is based on the cloud provider’s infrastructure and services, you also have to modify your internal processes and control systems to integrate with the cloud infrastructure management.
Even managing your operating systems as part of a cloud deployment presents challenges. Many cloud services provide “base servers” or templates that contain a simple distribution or OS, which are then used to build up your specific server/OS/application. This approach works well when the provider has the exact base server you want to start from, and you have a process in place to build from a running server. The challenge is that when you build up a server based on a gold image, it may: a) not match the base cloud OS version, b) be built from a non-running or base OS versus a fully-running OS (as required by most clouds), and c) use internal resources (boot servers, internal repositories, etc.) that are not available in the cloud. From a maintenance perspective, many organizations use central controls for updates (like WSUS for windows), and these services depend on access to data center networks and services. Since public clouds are running external to your data center, these services either won’t work, or need to be altered to run the hybrid environment.
Finally, the cloud creates additional complexity for managing applications. You almost always need to modify applications to accommodate cloud differences (virtual environment, networks and storage), which means that the applications in the cloud diverge from the “original” or base applications in your data center. You may also use third-party tools to help with integration into the cloud (such as VPN software, integration scripts, encryption software, etc.), which then need to be maintained. Each of these software elements has it its own lifecycle and update management, most of which apply to every image deployed into the cloud.
The management problems introduced by including the cloud in your infrastructure all have their source in the same issue – the cloud is something separate and different from your data center. This separation becomes clear when you consider the integration and management issues that span everything from provisioning to reengineering your applications to changes in lifecycle management. At CloudSwitch we’re streamlining and automating cloud management to eliminate most of these issues, and bridge the separation between the cloud and your data center.
Next: Moving to the Cloud: Series Wrap-Up
Reality Check at the Cloud Expo
The talk at the Cloud Computing Expo this week in Santa Clara was all about enterprise cloud adoption. Is it real? Is it already happening? If so, who’s doing it, which applications are they running and which clouds are being tested?
To a large extent, cloud computing is a victim of its own somewhat out-of-control hype cycle. Since so much has been written and discussed about the cloud in 2009, there is now a growing impatience for actual results. The fact that 2000 people showed up at the Cloud Expo in Santa Clara this week (double the number from last year’s show) suggests that at the very least, interest in enterprise cloud computing remains very real, and the need for practical solutions and use cases is growing more urgent.
There was a growing concensus about a number of issues:
1. The hybrid model of on-prem data centers combined with the use of public clouds and cloud offerings from managed service providers is emerging as the new model for enterprise computing. Enterprise users would like to keep some applications behind the firewall (within an internal cloud or more traditional environment) and put others in the right cloud environment outside the data center.
2. The first applications to move to the cloud are development and test environments, business continuity solutions (“poor man’s DR,” not full active-active scenarios) and web applications. These are more easily separable from other applications and infrastructure within the data center, and tend to be lower risk for moving off-prem.
3. Major hurdles for enterprise cloud adoption remain the same as last year: security, loss of control, lack of integration with the enterprise data center and fear of cloud lock-in. The lock-in concerns have become more pointed as new cloud offerings come into the market beyond Amazon. (As an aside, Rackspace had a strong presence at the show, but surprisingly, Amazon, Terremark, Savvis, Microsoft and other providers were noticeably absent. Many Asian companies appear to be gearing up for new cloud offerings in 2010.)
Beyond these broad areas of agreement, the sessions at the show revealed very little new information about enterprise success stories. In some ways, it was surprising that there wasn’t more visible progress across the industry this year. However, what we’ve learned from our own enterprise experiences is that in 2009, a lot of groundwork is being laid by both cloud providers as well as enterprise IT to prepare for cloud deployments in 2010.
As we’ve geared up for our private beta (started this week and running through the end of the year), we’ve learned from CIOs and heads of IT that they first want to do some “cloud exploration” to validate the experience for admins and users in terms of ROI, functionality and performance. They start by putting a small number of servers into the cloud to see what works and what breaks. They need buy-in from security and risk management to start putting applications and data outside the firewall. They are building TCO and ROI cases to review with legal and finance as they get cloud budgets approved for 2010. For their part, the cloud providers are deeply engaged with POCs and test environments for enterprise users, and are learning what’s missing from their offerings. It seems clear that by the next Cloud Computing Expo in April, we’ll be seeing the results of all this work in some strong case studies by enterprise adopters.
