hybrid cloud
What to Look for in a Cloud Gateway
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BuzzPart 2 of a 2-Part Series
By Ellen Rubin
The last post explored why more and more enterprises and technology vendors are making the adoption of a cloud gateway a top priority. This post focuses on the capabilities that all stakeholders should look for.
So what exactly is a cloud gateway? A cloud gateway is technology that extends the enterprise data center or private cloud out to external clouds. It’s a core component of the hybrid model, and when it’s well-architected, it brings simplicity, flexibility, and control to cloud computing. By shielding users and IT departments from the complexity of cloud deployments, the gateway makes applications portable across different cloud architectures, platforms and even different hypervisors. It provides cloud users with easy access to the widest range of resources and services available, and gives technology vendors a platform for delivering high-value services to on-premise and cloud environments. It’s also a platform for innovation around new capabilities that now become available in the hybrid cloud model.
Here’s what a well-designed cloud gateway needs to do:
- Guarantee security: Data needs to be encrypted end to end, from inside the corporate firewall, across the Internet, and within the cloud infrastructure. Encryption keys need to be under enterprise control at all times, and off-limits to everyone else. The cloud becomes an integral part of the enterprise IT environment with data at rest and network communications protected from both the cloud provider and 3rd parties at all times.
- Extend enterprise networking: Every enterprise has a unique network infrastructure for connecting its servers and applications — things like addressing schemes, topology, identity and directory services, and network equipment (firewalls, routers, and switches). Cloud providers have completely different network architectures to support their multi-tenant operations. The gateway needs to enable enterprises to match their current network topologies when they are using the cloud, and have the ability to bridge specific network segments (or LANs) to the cloud in a simple and automated fashion – including both layer-2 (Ethernet) and layer-3 (Internet Protocol) connectivity.
- Deliver enterprise-class network appliances: As more and more network vendors introduce their own cloud versions, customers want to be able to leverage what they already have on-premise and use trusted vendor products for their cloud deployments. These enterprises have made significant investments in the management and operation of these appliances. A cloud gateway should enable the use of these trusted vendors across the various cloud offerings available to allow the enterprise to leverage policies, configurations, and expertise when extending into the cloud.
- Integrate with data center infrastructure: A gateway should be able to tie into existing virtualization infrastructure to allow users to seamlessly combine the cloud deployments with on-premise applications and infrastructure. The gateway should be able to interact with different virtualization technologies (VMware, Xen Server, Hyper-V, KVM) to give enterprises the broadest scope and flexibility in cloud deployments as they evolve their virtualization and cloud strategies.
- Provide seamless visibility and control: The gateway should allow users and administrators to monitor and manage applications running in a cloud as if they were running locally, using existing tools and polices in a single, integrated environment. Cloud resources should appear as part of the corporate infrastructure, with external pools of capacity appearing alongside internal ones.
- Protect roles and access: Dedicated individuals or teams are usually responsible for setting up enterprise networking, storage, virtual machines, applications, monitoring, etc. In the wild west of the cloud, with the paradigm shift towards self-service provisioning and management, these responsibilities fall on the end user — typically the developer or business user as they access cloud resources. These users are often unaware of corporate policies or configurations, and are unsure how to address these requirements. The cloud gateway should preserve the multi-role capabilities required for enterprise control, allowing rules to be created and enforced while letting users access cloud resources on demand.
- Span disparate cloud architectures: All the requirements mentioned above need to span multiple clouds, with their different APIs, hypervisors, storage architectures, etc. The gateway needs to give users access to the widest range of choices so they can take advantage of all the cloud has to offer. The gateway must be designed with a deep understanding of different cloud providers’ capabilities and differences, so it can deliver optimal services and the best price/performance to meet customers’ specific requirements.
A Platform for Innovation
Beyond meeting the needs of customers and vendors today, the gateway is a platform for innovation that opens the door to a new generation of capabilities. The cloud gateway sits at the nexus of new technologies – it ties into the virtualization infrastructure within the data center, tightly integrates into the network infrastructure, and connects with multiple external clouds. The ability to interact with all these key components enables new services and solutions. Here are a few examples:
- Cloud brokerage: Workloads can be moved to the right environment based on business and technical requirements. Users can examine a menu of available clouds and choose the ones that provide the best combination of pricing, QoS, provider flexibility, or other criteria.
- Geographically distributed applications: The cloud provides the freedom to place workloads around the world. The gateway allows simplified network management, multi-cloud support (the ability to choose clouds nearest your consumers), and central control for resource management.
- Data management: The gateway is in a key position for managing data and workload distribution. With ties into both the data center and target clouds, the gateway can facilitate data movement, replication, remote access, and security of data.
- Enhanced security: With access to enterprise resources as well as control of distributed networking and compute resources, the gateway is an ideal place for delivering new security models – including remote access, distributed policies, and advanced virus protection.
The concept of a cloud gateway is capturing mindshare across the cloud industry –from enterprise customers to technology vendors and service providers. It’s a key enabler for their cloud strategies, and they’re eagerly looking for ways to take advantage of it, to meet current requirements and introduce some new paradigms in enterprise computing.
Hybrid Gets Real: Blending Private and Public Clouds
By the CloudSwitch Team
Over the past year we've had the pleasure of working with Terremark as a partner, as we jointly engage with enterprise customers who want to leverage hybrid clouds. For these customers and prospects, hybrid means the flexibility to combine their traditional data centers, new private clouds and managed service/colo environments with public clouds such as Terremark's Enterprise Cloud. Please join us tomorrow, March 3rd from 1:00-2:00pm EST to learn about hybrid clouds based on our hands-on experiences with enterprise customers who are using Terremark for a full range of cloud services.
F500 Corporate IT, Cloud Innovators?
By Ellen Rubin
The way you know you’re in the midst of a technology shift and market disruption is when organizations don’t behave the way you expect them to based on past track records. Cloud computing has been filled with surprises and unexpected behavior from the get-go. First, Amazon, a retailer, turns out to be a technology powerhouse in disguise and changes the rules of IT infrastructure. Then, “real” technology leaders like IBM, Dell, EMC, HP and others make lots of announcements about cloud but essentially do little and re-brand existing offerings as “cloud-enabled.” Next, Verizon, the phone company, buys Terremark in a bid to become a global cloud leader. And of course, there’s always the fact that the federal government has embraced cloud widely and is spending large amounts of money to build private clouds and leverage public ones.
So, in a world that sometimes seems upside-down, how surprising is it really that the F500, and in particular, the corporate IT groups within these huge organizations, have often turned out to be the early adopters and drivers of cloud in all flavors – private, public and hybrid? When we started CloudSwitch, our hypothesis (based on all sorts of track records and past behaviors) was that within the enterprise market, mid-tier companies (defined loosely as several hundred million to a few billion dollars in revenues) would try cloud first. This was because we were betting that these organizations had enough pain from internal data center management (cost, over-provisioning, not their core business, lack of responsiveness to business users, etc.) that cloud computing’s benefits would overcome their initial concerns. And in fact, this is true of many mid-tier enterprises, who have indeed taken the leap into cloud over the past couple of years, along with the developer and start-up communities.
But the companies who seem to be driving enterprise adoption of cloud and defining many of the requirements for vendors in our experience are at the multi-billion-dollar revenue mark, and often within the F500. Our initial hypothesis here was that these companies would be too large and resistant to change to be early adopters, unlike the smaller, more nimble mid-tier players. But it turns out that these companies have such enormous capital expenditures in data centers and infrastructure investments that they’re determined to adopt cloud to move them to a lower cost curve (“get off the data center treadmill”) and help them break through the internal limitations on self-service provisioning and scaling that have frustrated their business users for years.
Even more unexpectedly, many of the people who are leading the way within these companies are managers and architects within the corporate IT group. It’s interesting to note that in previous technology shifts – SaaS and virtualization come to mind – the revolution was staged from within business units or at the developer level, and corporate IT came on board once these technologies were de facto standards. It’s possible that with these experiences in mind, corporate IT (and the CIO in particular) has decided to take the lead this time around, and not wait to find out what’s been going on without enterprise security, control or standards.
Last year, corporate IT was struggling to absorb the avalanche of information about cloud and to separate the hype from meaningful architectures and use cases. With some encouragement from the large technology vendors, corporate IT shops retreated into private clouds as the safe way to go. This year, with hybrid clouds all the rage, it feels like enterprises and IT managers are coming into their own. They’ve been speaking with more confidence based on their pilots and initial deployments, and have come to see cloud as something that can be shaped and driven by real enterprise requirements – not just a new set of processes/resources that need to be run as a separate and un-integrated silo.
In this hybrid model, F500 enterprises are working with vendor partners to build private clouds, and identify application categories that can run completely in public clouds, and those that need to span internal and external environments. They’re asking for management, orchestration and federation technologies that let them be vendor-agnostic and “position independent” (so apps can run in a given environment at a particular point in time, regardless of underlying infrastructures). This process is clearly a multi-year learning experience with the usual fits-and-starts as companies bump into the inevitable limitations of new technology and meet resistance from internal stakeholders. But the trend is clear. And although relatively few of these large enterprises are willing to go on record yet with their case studies, we can see first-hand the in-roads cloud is making among some of the largest pharmas, banks and manufacturing companies in the world, and it’s exciting to be part of the paradigm shift.
Why Public Clouds Are Looking Hot (Again)
By Ellen Rubin
Seems like it was only yesterday when industry pundits were backing away from public clouds in favor of the safer, more big-vendor-compliant “private clouds.” After Amazon shook things up with its new paradigm for computing and storage clouds in 2007, and started to gain traction (along with Rackspace and other cloud providers) in 2008 and 2009 – 2010 so far has been in many ways a retreat from the forces of innovation and the emergence of much fear, uncertainty and doubt about the perils of the public cloud. But lately, I’m seeing the pendulum start to swing back in favor of public clouds, albeit with a twist.
Not surprisingly, private clouds look more familiar and comfortable to IT managers, big vendors and consulting/SI/service providers. They involve purchases of hardware, software and services through traditional enterprise procurement processes. They allow resources to stay behind the firewall under enterprise control. They fall within the existing legal, compliance and audit structures. With the addition of many flavors of “cloud in a box” offerings, they start to address the main issues that drove developers to the public clouds to begin with: self-service, provisioning on demand and the ability to get access to more scalable resources without requiring large upfront cap ex.
Public clouds have all the benefits that have been written about extensively (horizontal scaling, true on-demand capabilities, pure op ex, etc.). But for much of this year, the debate in the industry has been all about how worried everyone is about using public clouds (security, control, etc. etc.), and how uncertain they are about whether IaaS will really take off.
But there are some recent indications that the public cloud is hot again. A great study by Appirio speaks to growing industry comfort with public clouds and the likelihood that these will have a dominant place in IT infrastructure. At the Up2010 cloud event this week in San Francisco, Doug Hauger, GM of Microsoft’s Azure cloud, referred to this study extensively to make the point that public clouds are gaining credibility. James Staten of Forrester recently blogged about his predictions for 2011, including: “You will build a private cloud and it will fail.” His point is not to discredit private clouds as an approach but to remind companies beginning this process how incredibly hard it is to build a large, scalable, on-demand, multi-tenant cloud – even just for internal users.
Staten’s predictions make the case for how the cloud market has evolved in 2010, as enterprises planned their cloud strategies, implemented their pilots and defined their cloud architectures. Rather than seeing public clouds as “the other alternative” to private ones, enterprises and vendors have begun to view these as compatible strategies in a more sophisticated hybrid cloud model.
We’re huge fans of the hybrid model at CloudSwitch, and it’s great to see customers embracing public clouds as extensions of their private ones (as well as of their traditional virtualized data centers). The critical point about public clouds is that they allow testing, innovation and quick success or failure to happen in a low-cost way. This learning is imperative for the hybrid model, and public clouds are here now, today, working well and allowing enterprises to gain experience and log cloud mileage as they build out the rest of their cloud infrastructures. With CloudSwitch, these companies are now able to view the public cloud as a safe and seamless extension of their internal environment, in effect turning the public cloud into a “private” cloud as well.
Hybrid Clouds: Private vs. Public, Revisited
By Ellen Rubin
We’ve written extensively about the benefits of hybrid clouds, since it’s a core part of our founding vision at CloudSwitch. For most of this past year, the cloud market has been focused on defining the differences between public and private clouds and weighing the costs and benefits. Slowly the conversation has shifted to what we believe is the central axiom of cloud: it’s not all or nothing on-premise or in an external cloud; it’s the ability to federate across multiple pools of resources, matching application workloads to their most appropriate infrastructure environments.
To reiterate some key thoughts we’ve written about in the past, the idea of hybrid clouds encompasses several use cases:
- Using multiple clouds for different applications to match business needs. For example, Amazon or Rackspace could be used for applications that need large horizontal scale, and Savvis, Terremark or BlueLock for applications that need stronger SLAs and higher security. An internal cloud is another federation option for applications that need to live behind the corporate firewall.
- Allocating different elements of an application to different environments, whether internal or external. For example, the compute tiers of an application could run in a cloud while accessing data stored internally as a security precaution (“application stretching”).
- Moving an application to meet requirements at different stages in its lifecycle, whether between public clouds or back to the data center. For example, Amazon or Terremark's vCloud Express could be used for development, and when the application is ready for production it could move to Terremark's Enterprise Cloud or similar clouds. This is also important as applications move towards the end of their lifecycle, where they can be moved to lower-cost cloud infrastructure as their importance and duty-cycle patterns diminish.
CloudSwitch customers and prospects are clear that hybrid clouds are the way to go. Here are some examples of recent conversations:
“It’s going to take our internal IT group more than 18 months to build a private cloud; in the meantime we can use the public clouds now for on-demand capacity and scalability.” – VP of Business IT group at a large Wall Street firm
“We’re highly virtualized and we see external clouds as pools of virtualized resources that are available as extensions of our internal infrastructure.” – IT Director at a large healthcare company
“We have compliance data that will never leave our firewall but we like the idea of scaling out the computing resources in the cloud for peak periods.” – VP of Informatics at a large pharma
We’ve also been tracking some validation from more official sources on the growth of public clouds and the hybrid model. For example, a recent study by SandHill Group surveyed more than 500 IT executives and indicated that the biggest growth in cloud computing will be in hybrid clouds (from 13% now to 43% in three years). Another survey by Evans Data finds an even higher adoption rate among IT developers, suggesting that the hybrid cloud model is set to dominate the coming IT landscape.
It’s also interesting to see the importance of the hybrid model taking hold among industry insiders with many different perspectives. We saw this at VMworld 2010, where there was tremendous interest in hybrid clouds, from Paul Maritz’s keynote predicting a hybrid cloud future through many sessions and product announcements. Veteran cloud watcher James Urquhart points out that the hybrid approach lets you hedge your bets in cloud computing, using technology that allows you to decouple the application from the underlying infrastructure and move it to the right environment so you don’t get locked in. And even private cloud advocates acknowledge that hybrid has an essential role, where public cloud platforms serve as extensions of private cloud deployments.
It’s gratifying to see the CloudSwitch founding vision gain broad industry acceptance, with the hybrid model as key enabler for cloud computing. It’s even more satisfying to seeing the vision coming to life as more and more customers leverage our technology to run their applications effortlessly in the right environment, whether an internal data center, private cloud, or public cloud. Enterprise users and their companies are the real winners.
