Cloud Service Brokers
Cloud Brokers Make the Cloud Fit for Enterprise Requirements
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BuzzBy Ellen Rubin
Sometimes it’s fun to look back at your predictions to remember what you were thinking at the time and see how accurate you turned out to be. Based on some recent conversations, I decided to revisit one of our early blog posts from 2009, where we were envisioning the direction this industry would take and the role our technology would play in it.
That post, Dynamic Cloud Fitting — the Future in Automated Cloud Management, described a world where workloads would move automatically to the right environment to meet a customer’s business and technical requirements. It also explored how an entity called a “cloud broker” (initially defined by Gartner in 2009) would provide the technology and expertise to achieve that goal.
Fast forward to 2011. The idea of workloads being redirecting on the fly across different clouds for real-time optimized cost/performance is still a vision for the distant future – both because the technology is not yet available and also because customers have shown little interest to date. However the main concept of a cloud broker “fitting” a workload to a cloud environment based on technical and business requirements turns out to be very important to customers, and is already possible today. By providing an intermediation layer spanning multiple clouds, cloud broker software from companies like CloudSwitch can provide a range of capabilities beyond the scope of an individual cloud provider or service.
In terms of cloud “fitting,” what customers want is the ability to set parameters on a number of dimensions in order to control usage and optimize workload performance. These parameters include (but are certainly not limited to):
- Which cloud services they want to make available (and for which users)
- Which geographic locations (regions, zones, data centers)
- Cost limitations – per hour, based on quotas, etc.
- Maximum latency that can be tolerated
- Virtual machine requirements for CPU, memory, etc.
- Maximum provisioning time that is acceptable
- Minimum SLA required for reasonable availability
What’s clear is that cloud broker software must incorporate an algorithmic approach to mapping the requirements of the enterprise, user groups, individual users, and specific workloads against the possible cloud services that have been enabled. This is a non-trivial process and is based on capturing and tracking a mix of inputs from administrators and users, as well as real-time data from the virtual machines, networks, and cloud providers. Think of this as being somewhat similar to recommendation engines on websites like kayak.com that help “fit” travelers’ requirements and preferences against available flights. Only in this case, the “flights” are instances that can be provided by one or more cloud provider or by internal virtualized resources.
Another important aspect for the cloud broker software is to implement the “fitting” algorithm in the context of a role-based access control (RBAC) system. Think of this in terms of layers of enterprise controls and permissions that guide users’ options for self-service access to cloud resources. For example, a global administrator may set up the initial constraints based on which cloud services are available for the entire enterprise, while a business unit administrator may have more narrow limits for her users based on quotas, geographic constraints for certain teams, etc. – and the final end-user just wants to get his work done quickly and cost-effectively without worrying about any of this.
One point we didn’t foresee in our original blog post on cloud fitting was how the cloud broker’s role would expand. In addition to on-boarding applications into the cloud, customers now look to cloud brokers to fill important gaps in areas that cloud providers either don’t want to deliver (such as multi-cloud capability) or that are hard to deliver because of architectural limitations.
Security is a good example of the latter, where the shared environment of the cloud makes it hard to give individual customers control over encryption and key management, something that enterprises frequently require to get CSO sign-off. Extension of network configurations into the cloud with full configurability is also challenging for most cloud providers, since their network architectures are by definition fairly “flattened” and limited in options like multiple sub-nets (unless the customer is willing to pay for a dedicated network setup). This is another area where cloud brokers can help bridge the gap between what enterprise users need and what multiple cloud providers can deliver.
So the role of a cloud broker turns out to be evolving and growing broader over time, and no doubt will continue to do so. There’s a broad consensus that the broker’s role is important — not just here at CloudSwitch, but also among industry analysts like Gartner, other technology vendors, and our enterprise customers. The key insight is that cloud brokers allow enterprises to extend their control over their applications and data into the cloud. This ability to put control in the hands of the customer is what matters the most.
Dynamic Cloud Fitting - The Future in Automated Cloud Management
The cloud computing landscape is evolving rapidly, with more and more players introducing cloud products and services of all kinds. Most recently we’ve seen the announcements by VMware partners including Terremark, BlueLock and others, as well as the introduction of Rackspace’s Cloud Servers. EMC is planning to offer a compute cloud in addition to its existing Atmos storage cloud. As the proliferation of offerings continues to accelerate, IT managers have questions about how to proceed: How can you evaluate the range of potential cloud offerings to find the right match? How do you route an application or workload to a target cloud and make sure that it works? How do you integrate it with other applications running back in the data center?
Cloud Brokers
As Gartner Group points out, getting the most out of the cloud will ultimately require the assistance of a knowledgeable and reliable expert: the cloud service broker. Cloud blogger John Willis feels strongly as well about the importance of this emerging category. Even within a single cloud, deploying an application requires learning the provider’s operating environment, management tools and business terms and conditions. Doing this for every cloud provider you may wish to utilize is likely to prove daunting and not cost-effective. In a cloud environment characterized by multiple providers, each with its own service terms, operating platforms, management systems, security levels and disaster recovery approaches, the specialized expertise and value-add of a cloud service broker will help IT managers find the right cloud offering, deploy their application in the cloud and manage it properly.
Effective cloud management will not only require technical expertise but also the business savvy and leverage necessary to negotiate the best deals and relationships between cloud consumers and cloud providers. This specialized knowledge, as well as access to the latest cloud management tools and services, will make the cloud broker a strategic partner for companies that want to use the cloud (broadly defined) to full advantage — especially as a wave of new cloud services come to market and the environment becomes still more heterogeneous.
Going Dynamic
Within the next few years, the cloud will become a much more dynamic environment, with the cloud broker playing a leading role. In the early adoption phase, enterprises will still want to “fit” their computing needs to a cloud manually. But over time, at least some cloud applications will be managed using an automated, rules-based approach, both for initial deployment and also for periodically reviewing performance and evaluating alternatives. For example, when the cost of running an application reaches a certain threshold, other cloud options will be evaluated automatically. If a more attractive offering meets established policies, the changeover can occur in real time.
The benefits of this dynamic cloud fitting will soon become apparent, whereby cloud service brokers use specialized tools to identify the most appropriate cloud resource, and then map the requirements of an enterprise application to it. Cloud service brokers will be able to automatically route data, applications and infrastructure needs based on key criteria such as price, location, latency needs, SLA level, supported operating systems, cloud scalability, backup/disaster recovery capabilities and regulatory requirements. IT managers will be able to run applications where they truly belong, while the broker takes care of the underlying details that make the cloud so compelling.
