Legacy Apps
What IT Managers Should Learn from Public Clouds
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BuzzBy 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.
Legacy Apps Make the Case for the Cloud
By John Considine
We often talk about CloudSwitch moving legacy applications to the cloud in a simple and secure way; this raises the question of what exactly we mean by “legacy.” To be more specific, we mean a broad range of apps—including third-party, custom and customized off-the-shelf applications—basically any application that has been developed in your current environment without specific design for a cloud.
It turns out that these existing applications are very important in cloud computing. When we started building CloudSwitch, we were focused on the hybrid cloud computing model; that is, some components must stay in the data center and other applications and functions can move to the cloud. However, it became apparent that “stretching” applications between the data center and cloud only works for certain types of deployments due to the added latency between the data center and the cloud. For this reason, we recommend moving as much of a multi-tier application to the cloud as you can. This allows the application to continue to run with low latencies between the different components. Sounds obvious, but this is where a whole new set of problems arise, and it’s what causes people to start talking about the challenges of moving legacy applications to the cloud.
In order to operate a multi-tier application in the cloud, you need to be able to control the application(s), infrastructure, and operating system, including things like a database tier, middleware, and custom applications. This also means that you have to “cloudify” each of these components. Suddenly you are looking at a lot of work, and potentially facing failure because some of those tiers can’t be modified to run in the cloud.
We saw a great example of this when Microsoft’s Azure service first launched. The initial release of Azure allowed application developers to build .NET applications and run them seamlessly on their local machines or in the Azure cloud. However, people trying to use this cloud usually had other applications/databases/etc. that were part of their solution, and there was no way to run these in Azure. This meant that there were a lot of things that could not be moved to Azure since “stretching” the application caused unacceptable latency and there was no way to connect the Azure deployment to the data center-side applications. Microsoft has since expanded the capabilities of Azure, but there are still many types of applications and services that cannot run in their environment.
Given all the challenges, why is it worth bothering to move legacy applications to the cloud? For most enterprises (as opposed to new ventures and SMBs), legacy apps by definition occupy the majority of the existing IT footprint, far more than newer applications, let alone those designed specifically to run in a cloud. In many of the companies we’ve worked with, legacy apps are well over 75% of the data center footprint, and they’re constantly expanding and creating needs for more capacity. Legacy apps tie up internal processing and storage resources, sometimes continually, sometimes in a “spiky” way to meet occasional massive needs. Their demand for computing power is usually growing (or skyrocketing), and contending with other applications. The enterprise then has to make tough choices about whether to buy more equipment or put up with degraded performance.
By providing access to virtually unlimited resources on demand, the cloud can bring a new level of elasticity and efficiency to a company’s IT environment. Legacy apps are often the best candidates for moving to the cloud, especially in cases where they’re infrequently used, or only need to scale for new releases or for seasonal/marketing-driven events. One of the best use cases for the cloud so far is the ability to offload this type of resource-consuming set of apps to a lower-cost cloud infrastructure, freeing IT to focus limited internal resources where they’re needed most.
Legacy Apps: The Next Frontier in the Cloud
Although cloud computing momentum continues to build and scarcely a day goes by without a new cloud announcement or study, there’s been little real enterprise adoption and almost no meaningful case studies. In part, that’s because early cloud providers and vendors were focused on developers and technology start-ups when they designed their offerings, and larger, more established organizations were rarely on their radar screen. While start-ups can easily embrace new technologies and architectures, enterprises have far more constraints and have been largely limited to “tire kicking” the cloud with small applications that aren’t particularly meaningful for the business.
Cloud computing is now entering a new stage as CIOs and IT managers recognize that cloud computing is going to become an integral part of the enterprise computing environment. For it to be strategic as opposed to experimental, they need to know that the cloud can integrate with their existing data center infrastructure and incorporate the legacy applications that reside there. That’s where the major pain points, complexity, and costs have always been, and where the cloud can potentially offer its greatest returns. In our discussions with CIOs, we hear this theme over and over.
Legacy apps cover the entire installed base of applications running on a company’s internal infrastructure. They include everything from highly-used apps that are optimized for particular hardware to older versions of apps that must be maintained for specific customers as well as test and development environments, and apps used for internal purposes such as training. The true enterprise payoff for cloud computing will come from the ability to offload a wide range of legacy apps that don’t need to run in the data center to a cloud environment where they can be managed more cost-effectively. Not all legacy apps will make sense to move to the cloud initially (or perhaps ever), so the trick will be to select the right ones.
As Bernard Golden points out, the conundrum is that while putting legacy apps into the cloud can provide huge value for the enterprise, it’s also where the biggest hurdles lie. While a new application designed specifically for a cloud can usually be rolled out fairly easily, legacy apps come with a whole new set of challenges. Many of today’s cloud offerings were built for serving up web apps and Amazon-type storefronts, and have attributes that were not originally designed with the enterprise in mind (non-standard storage, isolated networking, and multi-tenancy are some examples). The result is lots of manual re-configuring, complex engineering, and trial and error before the enterprise application is able to run in the cloud. And once the app is in the cloud, it’s completely separate from the existing management tools and policies, and potentially locked-in to the cloud for which it has been re-architected. This lack of fast, incredibly simple ways to migrate legacy apps to the cloud and back without modification is one of the major factors holding back enterprise cloud adoption today.
CloudSwitch is focused on eliminating the barriers to moving legacy apps to the cloud. We believe applications should be able to run in the cloud “as is”, without worrying about the technical hurdles that today makes cloud deployments complex, time-consuming and expensive. We’re excited to be part of the “next frontier” in cloud adoption, working closely with enterprise customers and cloud providers.
