cloud servers
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.
Holiday Presents from the Cloud
As the year winds down, there are a few things I have come to expect: holiday parties, snow, and new features from cloud providers. This year exceeded all of my expectations, starting with a note in early December from our friends at Terremark letting us know that they have fixed their Windows pricing for cloud servers. Until this upgrade, if you started a Windows server in their cloud, you had to pay for a whole month of Windows licensing ($30-$100 depending on the version) no matter how much you used the server. This was rather un-cloudlike, where we want to only pay for what we use. With this new feature, running Windows in Terremark’s cloud only costs a few cents per hour (Linux cost + 20%).
Then came the snow—I live in New Hampshire, and on December 9th we received a foot of new snow to really get the season going. The very next day, Amazon made a big flurry of announcements—support for Windows 2008, the ability to boot from EBS, and the new US region US-West1.
Each of these features means big things for Amazon and for cloud users. First, support for Windows 2008 is a longstanding request from Amazon users. I think that Amazon was held back from supporting W2K8 because of the design of their boot volumes, which needed to be copied out of S3 into the local storage instance in order to boot the operating system. As the boot volume grows, the amount of resources consumed and the boot time of the servers grows significantly, withW2K8 requiring more than 10GB by default. In order to support W2K8, Amazon required another technology advance to make it possible—booting from EBS snapshots.
Perhaps the biggest problem enterprise users had with Amazon was the lack of persistent storage for boot volumes. Amazon has now created a way for users to build persistent boot volumes, coming up to parity with competitors on this feature. Sure, it’s a little different from how enterprises normally think about storage and configure boot volumes, but the ability to use EBS volumes for booting eliminates the window for data loss that most users had to contend with in the original boot methods. (This feature is not huge for CloudSwitch customers because we have always supported booting from EBS as part of our products; however, we can take advantage of this feature to improve boot times for servers in Amazon.)
Another major Amazon announcement is the new west coast region. Many of CloudSwitch’s early customers (not to mention our own development activities) are based on the east coast, so EC2’s primary location has been a good fit for us. Things only improved with the introduction of the Europe region since we have seen a lot of interest for European resources for both locality and compliance reasons. However, for west coast customers, having to hop across the whole country to access your cloud resources was less than ideal. Now these companies have local resources to target, but more important, this ongoing expansion shows that the public cloud is doing well. The addition of US-WEST1 and the soon-to-open Asia region reflect just how quickly the public cloud is growing and how hard Amazon is driving it.
The news from Amazon comes on top of what was already an outstanding year for cloud computing with major announcements from many key players, including: IBM software running in the cloud, new VMware-based public clouds, reduced pricing for servers and storage in the cloud, and Microsoft’s Azure gaining momentum. Each of the cloud providers is growing and maturing its cloud offerings, and we are reaching a tipping point where there are multiple clouds with sufficient features to support enterprise workloads. Get ready for 2010—it’s going to be an exciting year as large-scale enterprise cloud computing takes off.
