Virtualization
Opscamp Austin: IT Ops and the Cloud
Digg
Reddit
Delicious
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedInGoing to a conference focused on IT on a Saturday sounds like a really geeky way to spend a weekend, but thanks to an “alternative” venue, the “un conference” format, and a group of really good people, it was a great day. I just got back from Opscamp Austin, a meeting of IT professionals, system administrators, tools vendors, cloud providers, and people who spend their time building and keeping the computing infrastructure of business running. Many thanks to those who built this un-conference especially John Willis, Mark Hinkle, Damon Edwards, and all of the sponsors and presenters – you pulled together a great event.
Opscamp was created to allow an “open exchange of ideas around next generation technologies and strategies for IT Operations.” The big topics at this meeting (as measured by both passion and interest) were Monitoring, Configuration Management, and DevOps. I was particularly interested in these topics because we added the phrase “in cloudy environments” to the sessions.
I came away from this conference with a few conclusions:
1. IT operations is currently messy, and “cloud computing” is exposing some of the problems. One problem is that when the cloud delivers on the notion of allocating resources in minutes, the pressure switches from raw provisioning to the speed of configuration; with the timescale compressed from days to minutes, there is nowhere to hide. The other big issue is the dynamic nature of cloud computing – with servers, networks, and storage showing up and disappearing from your environment, it becomes difficult to model and manage. The manual or loosely connected processes that worked because there was time while you waited for hardware to arrive no longer work in a highly dynamic environment.
2. There are very different views about what monitoring in the cloud should be – deep and consistent with current processes, or “just hide the messy parts,” to quote Amazon. Some wanted the cloud providers to give them deep access to the “normal” monitoring data – think cpu temperatures. Others think that the value in the cloud is getting rid of the support and detailed attention to the infrastructure, so who cares about that data, it is for the infrastructure provider to manage. The issue is that the current cloud offerings are quite opaque about what is happening in the infrastructure.
After talking with Bret Piatt from Rackspace it seems that the problem is not collecting the data (they have to do it anyway), but storing it, processing it, and doling it out to the customers. There is real expense here, and for those customers who don’t want it, they would have to carry the burden of the extra cost in a market that is sensitive to price. The fundamental choice here is whether we are going to carry the current detailed monitoring practices into the cloud, or give up on the low level monitoring of the remote resources. In order to carry forward the current models, the cloud providers will have to provide API’s to get at the internal data. In order to change the model, developers and tool providers will have to increase the capabilities of the applications around fault tolerance and providing useful monitoring data that can be measured from the application level.
3. We are still in the early days of cloud computing. This should not be a surprise to anyone, but since at CloudSwitch, we’ve been so fully integrated with the cloud since the beginning – with everything from our build servers, bug database, large number of QA servers, code repository and web site –it’s easy to think that everyone is already comfortable using the cloud. What became clear in the discussions is that many of the organizations are still working though server virtualization and how to take advantage of the advanced features enabled by that technology.
What was really exciting for me was to see the people who actually have to make IT work thinking through what is needed to build a dynamic data center and integrate with cloud computing. With these guys on the case, I know that cloud computing is taking real steps forward.
Why Cloud is at the Top of the CIO's Priorities
In the most difficult economic climate in decades, CIOs are reevaluating their strategies and looking for new ways to reduce data center costs and overhead while improving responsiveness to business requirements. Cloud computing has emerged as a much more agile and efficient approach than what companies have done in the past: adding more compute, storage and networking capacity or trying to get more out of what they already own.
Cloud computing did not emerge from a vacuum, but has its origins in three technology "megatrends" that most CIOs are already familiar with. These developments were all born out of the same need -- to drive down costs, simplify data center operations and allow IT to be as agile as possible. As these megatrends have become pervasive, they've helped put the cloud in the CIO's strike zone:
The drive to consolidate: Consolidating sprawling data centers has become a top IT priority as companies struggle with out-of-control costs for hardware, power, administration and service. Many companies have seen their data centers grow beyond anything they ever anticipated, with the result that in many cases they're not only running out of space, they're increasingly running out of power and cooling as well. In response, they look for innovative ways to reduce their data center footprints - to move out anything that adds cost and complexity, and takes up extra real estate.
The growth of virtualization: Many organizations now operate in virtualized environments, where applications can be quickly deployed to available resources, rather than assigning them to a specific physical machine. Not only does this optimize utilization of equipment, it allows IT to become much more responsive to the needs of the business.
Emergence of SaaS: The Software as a Service (SaaS) model has become widely accepted, in which applications are hosted by outside service providers that can apply specialized expertise, the right hardware and economies of scale. The idea of running certain apps outside the walls of the organization is recognized as not only acceptable but often preferable, where an external provider delivers the service just as well (if not better) than companies trying to do it themselves.
Cloud computing builds on these megatrends, and goes several steps further, providing new capabilities for enterprise computing:
- Not just consolidating the data center, but creating the optimum environment both within the DC and in the external cloud, to match changing demands for computing resources
- Not just virtualizing applications across internal systems, but across whatever environment is most appropriate and cost effective
- Not just software as a service, but enterprise applications running in the cloud on the cloud provider's infrastructure
The ability to run applications in the cloud promises to radically alter the balance sheet by which IT projects are judged, where initial capital expense and ongoing operating costs are factored against value delivered and how quickly resources become available. CIOs now have the opportunity to do something much more significant than make small incremental improvements -- particularly as new cloud deployment and management tools come to market. That's why more and more IT executives are making cloud computing a top priority as they plan their strategies for 2010 and beyond.
Has Virtualization Solved the Data Center Crisis?
Over the past several years, many IT departments have committed to virtualization as an antidote to the spiraling costs and inflexibility plaguing corporate data centers everywhere. By running applications on virtual servers and consolidating underutilized hardware, data centers can get maximum value from their equipment. Virtualization also makes IT more responsive to the needs of the business: rather than spending weeks or months to provision a physical server, a virtual server can be launched in minutes.
Virtualization was meant to be the solution to today's data center woes - but is it? While it brings much-needed flexibility and efficiency to an environment where these qualities were sorely lacking, virtualization alone doesn't cure the underlying problem and in some ways adds to it. Companies still have large data center infrastructure footprints to maintain, plus virtualization licenses, plus management issues introduced by virtualization - ironically adding cost as they try to reduce cost. Many IT managers report that the technical and management challenges associated with virtualization are hindering them from realizing its full cost benefits. They're still paying huge energy bills (those consolidated servers are working much harder than previously). They're still running out of capacity and need to keep buying more servers and storage. And over half of them are still building new data centers at enormous cost.
We're Not Done Yet
But virtualization is one step toward a larger goal, not the end of the journey. IT is in the middle of a fundamental transition from the rigid, siloed world of traditional data centers toward a more elastic, responsive model where needs are met far faster and more efficiently. And we're not done yet. While virtualization helps companies reduce cost and improve agility, the full promise of the new model plays out with the addition of cloud computing, delivering infrastructure on demand as an easily-accessible, cost-effective service.
Rather than perpetuating a bloated data center, the new model will allow companies to get out of the computing infrastructure business where appropriate, retaining only the portion that is essential to the enterprise. As the cloud environment becomes increasingly agile and secure, provisioning decisions will be framed by asking: Should we be really be doing this ourselves, or can someone else do it better and at lower cost? The majority of companies surveyed that are either using or actively planning to run at least some apps in the public cloud have started asking themselves the same question.
Some companies - particularly larger enterprises with the skills and scale to do it effectively -- are building on their virtualized environments to create private, or internal, clouds that deliver several of the benefits of cloud computing within the enterprise. Private clouds provide users with an elastic computing resource on demand and help make better, more efficient use of existing capacity. But IT departments still face many of the same fundamental challenges - they still need to buy, manage and grow the data center infrastructure on which the private cloud depends. As Gartner Group's Tom Bittman points out, for most enterprises, the private cloud is not the ultimate goal, it's another stepping stone to services available in the public cloud as they become available.
It's All About the Application
The real issue is determining where each application truly belongs. Some apps are simply not suitable for any cloud, while others, at least for the foreseeable future, belong in the private cloud. Some applications are candidates for the public cloud, but the appropriate services aren't ready yet. And some data center applications could be moved to a public cloud now or in the very near future.
While virtualization is a key step toward moving beyond the rigid data center, cloud computing takes you all the way there - which is why it's getting so much attention. With new technology from CloudSwitch under development, it may work for your enterprise faster than you think. Stay tuned.
RSS Feed