Recent Posts
World Cup and the Cloud: The Case for Monitoring
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BuzzBy John McEleney
The World Cup is the world’s largest sporting event and this year’s extravaganza from South Africa has been exciting, but not without controversy. Any sports fan watching the recent match between England and Germany had to be frustrated to see English midfielder Frank Lampard’s goal clearly crossing the goal line, but without the referee awarding the goal. Where was the videotape? A simple review of a videotape could have prevented this miscall.
Fortunately the IT world has subscribed to the old adage, “you can’t fix what you can’t see.” For this reason, we have a plethora of tools and processes to help monitor networks, operating systems, applications, etc. These tools and processes are essential for IT operations teams to determine what’s wrong and pre-empt an even larger problem. In the IT world, it’s impossible to imagine how you would be able to run your operations without this monitoring capability.
Today the cloud is separate and distinct from your enterprise data center, but as the cloud becomes an integral part of the IT strategy, the big question is: how will people monitor their networks? Application performance? Operating systems? Undoubtedly, the existing monitoring players will try to “cloudify” their offerings – but will these really work? Are they extensible to the cloud?
At CloudSwitch, we are extending the enterprise data center to the cloud, so in effect the cloud is simply part of your infrastructure. The implications are profound:
- Your existing virtualized applications will work with no modifications
- Your connection to the cloud is encrypted and secure
- Your existing monitoring tools and processes will continue to work
While we can’t claim that we will be able to help FIFA resolve future World Cup disputes, we can help you monitor and examine your applications and networks in the cloud!
CloudSwitch Enterprise - Ready for Business
By the CloudSwitch Team
Today we launched the commercial version of our CloudSwitch Enterprise software at Structure 2010 in San Francisco. We’re ready for business and making our innovative software generally available. It’s an exciting moment for us, but it also reflects the evolution of the cloud industry.
Two years ago when we were just designing and envisioning our products, we realized that enterprises would want to use the cloud – it seemed inevitable to us that the cloud would dramatically change the way companies build and scale their applications. However, many early discussions tended to go as follows: “Are you thinking of using cloud computing?” “Um, what’s cloud computing?”
What a difference two years make. Not only do we not need to explain what cloud computing is anymore, but we’ve found that most of the companies who participated in our beta program were already planning, thinking, testing and evaluating their cloud strategies and architectures. As seen at the Structure show, an ecosystem of cloud providers has emerged, with offerings for public and private clouds, as well as a growing list of consulting and services firms to support cloud initiatives – and of course, a large and vibrant set of cloud management/enablement providers, including CloudSwitch.
In the past several months, we’ve tested our software with some of the leading enterprises at the forefront of the cloud world – brand-name companies as well as mid-tier organizations, all with exciting use cases that have taught us a great deal about customer requirements. Working with these innovators and seeing our software deployed and working at these customer sites has been a thrill, and we truly appreciate all the input and support. We’ve learned that customers want the agility and cost-effectiveness of the cloud, but need the critical CloudSwitch capabilities of full security and seamless portability between the data center and the cloud – across hypervisors and multiple cloud offerings.
So today we’re proud to announce that v1.0 of CloudSwitch Enterprise is ready for download. Try our 15-day free trial now and start running your applications in the cloud environment that’s right for you. Use your existing management tools and data center policies. CloudSwitch makes it easy with our enterprise-class features:
- Support for Amazon EC2 and Terremark’s VMware-based clouds (enabled through the vCloud API)
- Full encryption of data and communications through AES-256
- Role-based access controls for setting user/group permissions and controls
- Support for Windows and Linux-based applications
- Industry-first CloudFit™ for best fit of virtual instances into cloud resources
- Layer-2 bridge between data center and cloud environments
- API for programmatic control and integration into virtualized environments
To learn more about CloudSwitch Enterprise, please visit our updated product information. And if you’re still thinking about your cloud strategy, get started by downloading our always-free Explorer software for 1 user and up to 5 servers running in the Amazon EC2 cloud. Make the cloud part of your IT infrastructure today and see how simple and secure the cloud can be with CloudSwitch.
What IT Managers Should Learn from Public Clouds
By Ellen Rubin
Corporate computing is going through a fundamental shift — moving to a world that’s largely cloud-based, self-service, and highly virtual with shared resources. Rather than go through their IT departments like they have for decades, users will simply specify how many cloud servers they need and for how long, and provision their own resources with a few mouse clicks. I recently read an interesting post by Rodrigo Flores, observing that the growing acceptance of public clouds is also changing the role of corporate IT departments, and they’ll have to either adapt or die. I’d like to make a few suggestions about how they can adapt.
First of all, they need to face reality. IT is driven by the need for agility, elasticity and cost-efficiency, and that can be provided most effectively in the public cloud. A year or two ago, most pundits were saying that large-scale adoption was inevitable — now the transition is well underway. Individual users and departments are already making inroads into the cloud to take advantage of agility not available internally. In many cases they’re not waiting for permission or help from corporate IT— they’re moving ahead on their own.
The growing emergence of public clouds creates an alternative to the traditional data center, while lowering the costs of infrastructure services. As cloud computing takes hold, the impact can prove unsettling for corporate IT departments that find themselves increasingly evaluated against the fast service and flexibility provided by public clouds. How will corporate IT departments fit in? How can they maintain their relevance when users can simply go to the cloud and get the servers they need immediately, often with better service than is available internally?
Rather than viewing public clouds as a competitive threat, corporate IT should embrace cloud computing and recognize their new role — serving as a trusted broker for the resources that users need, whether in a public cloud or internally depending on where the application belongs. Corporate IT becomes a much more agile organization, leveraging public clouds and internal clouds within an integrated framework, and IT professionals providing the front-facing infrastructure and support services that make it work.
But corporate IT still has much to learn about how to design and support this new environment, with virtualization being only the first step. To gain this expertise, they need to look to the public cloud — Amazon, Terremark, Savvis, Rackspace, Microsoft, etc. The infrastructure and processes that cloud providers have created at tremendous effort and cost can provide a guide for how corporate IT departments are going to operate in the very near future. It’s an idea that hasn’t yet received much attention from industry observers, but we’ve been hearing it a lot lately from our customers, particularly those thinking strategically about the cloud.
Thus, corporate IT has another incentive (in case they needed one) to take the lead in moving their companies to public clouds. As they plan their own agile environments for internal users, public clouds are where they’ll learn the best practices needed to make it work:
- Building the self-service portal: Corporate IT will need to make self-service for computing resources as simple and robust as it is in the public clouds.
- Managing a multi-tenant environment: Cloud providers deliver rapid provisioning at low cost by supporting large numbers of users on a shared infrastructure. Corporate IT will need to replicate this environment, while providing mechanisms that allow applications to be moved out to a public cloud or back again.
- Scaling efficiently: Cloud providers use several different scaling techniques and policies to keep up with growing demands, and corporate IT can learn a great deal from them about how to make trade-offs and automate wherever possible.
To sum up, corporate IT should look to public clouds as their most valuable resource — often far more agile, elastic, and cost-effective than internal resources. They’re where many enterprise applications (perhaps the majority) will soon run. In addition to their inherent advantages, public clouds also have much to teach. The lessons will come in handy as IT departments discover their new strategic role as champions of a more agile corporate computing environment. CloudSwitch technology makes that new world much easier to build and manage, so corporate IT can drive innovation without losing the security and control they need.
It Takes Bench Strength to Win
By John McEleney
Last night the Celtics beat the LA Lakers in a tremendously hard fought, exciting basketball game. Both teams played well and in the end, the Celtics won. They won because in the fourth quarter their bench strength (the depth of their talent roster) demonstrated why they would be part of the starting five of any other NBA team. To win in sports and in business you need excellence and you need depth.
At CloudSwitch we have some incredibly talented technical talent that working on the frontier of Cloud technology. This talent is not limited to the “starting five” - we have the technical depth throughout the entire team. My experience in leading teams over the past two decades is that serious technical talent wants to work with the best people. They want to be challenged and they want to challenge others. It is this passion and desire that will drive us to deliver products that will help enterprises realize the benefits of cloud computing.
In the fourth quarter in last night’s game, Kevin Garnett, Rajon Rando and Paul Pierce were on the bench rooting for their team. In a sport that typically glorifies the individual star, they demonstrated their selfless support. They knew that the Celtics were fielding a world class team and they were getting the needed rest to close out the game. This confidence in their teammates and their desire to win is what makes them truly a world class team. World class teams deliver world class results, in the cloud as well as on the court.
Three Ways to Do Web Apps in the Cloud
By Ellen Rubin
Web apps were born to run in the cloud. With endless flexibility, on-demand scaling and great pricing, the cloud meets the business and technical needs of many enterprises’ web-based applications for e-commerce, collaboration, marketing, CRM and dozens of other functions. With their ‘spikey’ needs for compute resources around peak periods, web apps are often corporate data center hogs and/or hosted at colos and MSPs at high cost.
As we work with many enterprise customers, we consistently hear the desire to host web apps in the cloud to reduce data center costs, footprints and headaches. There seem to be three major use cases emerging in the cloud market, reflecting the ways in which specific web apps are architected, and the comfort levels of the customer in exposing some or all of their app stacks outside the corporate firewall:
- Build the entire web application to run in the cloud. Launch some raw servers in the cloud and create your application using simple templates so that all tiers (user-facing, business logic, and database) run in the cloud. If you are putting up a new public web site, this is a great way to get into the cloud, and is particularly useful if you do not need to access data or systems that already exist within your data center. Many new companies and start-ups already also use this approach since they don’t have any legacy infrastructure to integrate with!
- Move parts of the application to the cloud. Keep some of the app components internal and move others to the cloud. For example, put the user-facing portion of the application stack in the cloud for scaling and access by large numbers of users, and let it reach back to the data center to access your business logic and/or database tiers. Some of our customers put the user-facing and business logic in the cloud and reach back for the main database, while others put just the public access portions into the cloud. The key considerations are what kind of data the application needs to access, how much data is required, and the application’s sensitivity to latency between the tiers. If data is very sensitive, the pull is to keep it in the data center, but if the application is susceptible to database latency, the desire is to move data to the cloud to be near the computation servers. Even when all tiers are moved to the cloud, there is often a need to access data center resources (for management, user validation, or ancillary data).
- Use the cloud for peak-period scaling. This approach involves scaling portions of the web application into the cloud during peak periods, such as for a Mother’s Day sale or when the tax filing deadline approaches. Based on a peak-workload trigger, move base images of the app into the cloud and let them scale away. Add the new cloud resources to your load balancers to keep response times low during peak usage. When you need occasional access to massive compute resources, the cloud provides a great alternative to buying and maintaining expensive equipment. The cloud essentially becomes an extension of your data center for on-demand scenarios.
Which of these approaches will work best for you? Many enterprises are testing more than one approach with different web applications as they define their cloud strategies. CloudSwitch technology lets you get started now with no risk, moving applications (or selected portions) to the right cloud, and keeping cloud resources in seamless integration with your data center. Put your web apps where they belong and free yourself from endless infrastructure heavy-lifting.
