hybrid clouds
Hybrid Clouds: "Best of Both Worlds"
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BuzzBy Guest Author, Kamesh Pemmaraju
In a typical enterprise today, one finds a heterogeneous mix of modern platforms and legacy platforms of many vintages. With the emergence of a variety of cloud service models (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS) and an array of deployment models (private, public, and community), we will most likely see a heterogeneous mix of cloud environments in the enterprise of the future. Furthermore, cloud computing may be a great fit for some applications and workloads, but there will always be some data, processes, and applications that will remain on-premises for reasons of regulatory compliance, mission-critical or classified data, control, and cost.
While the trend toward cloud computing is inevitable, security, privacy, lock-in, and performance continue to be major obstacles for accelerated public cloud adoption. The lack of standards is another barrier as one CIO of a large insurance company said during our research:
"The big topic we are discussing is if we are not happy with the SLA of an existing vendor, how quickly can we re-outsource? Lock-in, interoperability and standards are big issues for us. I can’t move my workload easily between clusters due to incompatibilities between vendors and between virtual machines. We have to think about compatibility of compute, storage, and network virtual resources.”
– CIO, insurance company
Because there aren't established industry standards just yet in cloud computing, most enterprises remain wary about getting locked into a single vendor architecture and API. As adoption increases, however, open standards will naturally emerge. While premature standards can stifle market innovation, CIOs believe proprietary standards can be worse (and history has proved that the half-life of such standards tends to be very short).
The nature of the beast is such that customers need to consider using multiple cloud providers to meet their specific scalability, security, flexibility, and functionality needs. One Fortune 500 financial company CIO we interviewed as part of our "Leaders in the Cloud" research study said their company will move 20% of their application portfolio to specific clouds that meets the workload characteristics of their applications in the next 3-5 years. With a typical large enterprise application landscape of between 10,000 and 15,000 applications, that 20% translates to 2,000-3,000 applications! The numbers are staggering when you scale that out to the Global 2000 companies.
Our study surveyed more than 500 IT executives and indicated that the biggest growth will be in hybrid clouds (from 13 percent now to 43 percent in three years). These executives are looking for ways to seamlessly migrate/interoperate their data and applications (both legacy and new) between clouds and their datacenters based on their own business needs, risks, and architectural considerations.
We will see a number of use cases and variations of the hybrid approach. Enterprise customers will pick and choose applications and their IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS (*aaS) vendors based on their business needs thus creating a diverse and heterogeneous cloud environment. One healthcare company CIO emphasized that this is actually their preferred adoption model and explained the reason for it:
“Rather than stick to one [cloud] product that meets all of our needs, we have taken the approach of using multiple [cloud] vendors and solutions. Even though this may increase the integration complexity, we find that we get the most innovative solutions with the least amount of expenses and the fastest time.”
Examples of hybrid clouds include: bursting out from an internal to a public cloud when needs required more capacity; running logic and processing in the cloud and leaving the database in the data center; and performing highly parallelized database processing in the cloud combined with other logic processing in the data center and on. We will also see many storage-related use cases where companies and organizations of all sizes will augment their on-premise storage with cloud storage (potentially from various vendors) in a hybrid model deployment.
Some of the unique aspects of heterogeneous clouds working in concert with on-premise infrastructure include:
- Managing federated identity and security
- Migrating data, workloads, and applications
- Creating/buying and maintaining integration or "glue" applications to connect the clouds and to manage workflow and business processes
- Managing metering, billings, and relationships with multiple cloud vendors
Hybrid models can increase complexity due to interoperability issues and the need to deal with different tools, API's, and management frameworks. Customers would like to use their familiar existing technologies, tools, and user interfaces to handle hybrid cloud scenarios seamlessly and securely. The ideal scenario is when applications in the cloud look and behave exactly like their counterparts within the datacenter. This can be challenging if you are dealing with multiple cloud vendors and a variety of cloud architectures. In a recent interview, Ellen Rubin, VP of Products at CloudSwitch discussed how they are delivering technologies which will enable companies to use all of their existing infrastructure tools, networking architecture, security policies, active directories, firewalls, CDN systems, identity management systems, load balancers, and so on to interoperate seamlessly — and securely — with the applications in the cloud as if they are running locally.
Because of the existing heterogeneous infrastructure and the emergence of multiple clouds within and without large enterprises, cloud management technologies are becoming increasingly critical. A cloud management layer provides abstraction and governance capabilities and an adapter architecture enabling a "single pane of glass" for managing all the physical and cloud sub-environments.
Our survey data suggests that Small and Midsize Enterprises (SME) are adopting the hybrid and external cloud model much more quickly than others and are also the most likely to be the ones to use multiple cloud vendors in an integrated way. What I'm generally finding is that individual business units and departments in mid-tier and large enterprises are using a bottoms-up strategy and deploying cloud services in isolated pockets to solve specific and tactical problems. According to Ellen Rubin, CloudSwitch is seeing hybrid adoption taking place among the early adopter enterprises (F1000 and even F500) as the dominant model.
To learn more, join me at Cloudswitch's upcoming Webinar “Making Hybrid Clouds Work in the Real World” on Wednesday Oct, 13th, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm EDT. As a guest speaker, I will discuss our research findings on where cloud reality stands today versus all the hype, including which types of enterprises are adopting cloud and why (or why not). I will also provide an overview of the hybrid cloud architecture and explain why hybrid clouds are poised for the greatest growth. Watch the recording on demand.
Kamesh Pemmaraju is the Director of cloud research at the Sand Hill Group. He consults with companies—enterprises and technology vendors—to help accelerate their transition to the cloud. He is the co-author of the critically acclaimed "Leaders in the Cloud" research study that is a result of 70+ hours of one-on-one interviews with CIO’s and IT executives from 30 companies. His blog has been recognized in the top 50 bloggers on cloud computing and in CloudTP's best cloud computing blogs list. He welcomes your comments, opinions, and questions. For information on developments, customers, vendors, people, solutions, trends, news, opinions, interviews, webcasts, events, and blog posts on cloud computing, follow Kamesh on twitter @kpemmaraju and his LinkedIn Profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/kpemmaraju.
2010 is the Year of the Federated Cloud
In this first post of 2010, I’d like to look at one of the most important cloud issues that enterprises want to tackle: federation in the cloud — across clouds and between the cloud and the data center. Also known as hybrid clouds, the notion of federation has been around since cloud computing began, but as a long-term vision rather than a working solution. This year that gap is going to close.
What Is Cloud Federation?
Federation brings together different cloud flavors and internal resources so companies can select a computing environment on demand that makes sense for a particular workload. It opens the door to a range of useful scenarios that take advantage of cloud capabilities:
- Using multiple clouds for different applications to match business needs. For example, Amazon AWS or Rackspace could be used for applications that need large horizontal scale, and Savvis or Terremark 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, an application could run in a cloud while accessing data stored internally as a security precaution. (We call this concept “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.
Enterprise users don’t typically talk about federation per se; they speak in terms of application-specific and general business requirements. While some applications will always belong in their data center, they may have others (possibly hundreds) that could run more cost-effectively in the right cloud. Our customers and prospects tell us that they would love to take advantage of different clouds to get the computing performance they need, along with the desired service levels, scalability, security and price points. And since they aren’t that clear yet on their cloud requirements, and cloud services are in early stages and will continue to evolve, they want the ability to pick up their applications if necessary and move them to other clouds or back to the data center with minimal effort.
The problem is that the cloud is not a homogenous entity, but covers a broad landscape of computing environments, with no consistency between any of them or with the enterprise data center. Federation is the missing link, providing a structure that bridges these disparate environments so enterprise cloud computing can become as seamless and straightforward as it needs to be. Let’s examine some of the key issues and see what CloudSwitch is doing to make federation work.
Bridging the Differences
An application should to be able to run “as is” in any cloud with the resources to support it. But each cloud has its own server platforms, operating system versions, APIs, network settings, storage options—a whole landscape of varied characteristics. Without federation, each cloud deployment becomes a custom “one-off” exercise to meet the requirements of a particular cloud environment. That’s not acceptable internally, and companies are now demanding the ability to leverage different clouds without the underlying engineering efforts required to make it happen.
A unique capability of CloudSwitch is the ability to integrate at an infrastructure level between the data center and different clouds. We sit in the middle of all of these resources and automatically bridge the differences, regardless of variations in virtualization platforms, operating systems, APIs, storage infrastructures or other characteristics of the different clouds. Both internal and cloud resources appear as if they’re running locally, using a common interface spanning multiple clouds and the local environment.
Setting Consistent Rules
Rules and permissions about what employees can do in the cloud must be consistent with those in the data center. Role-based controls are required, for example, to enable a particular individual or group to create servers but not to delete or modify them. However, in these early days of cloud computing, the standard procedure is to allow cloud users access to the cloud credentials; essentially every user has full control and access to the cloud resources. This not only causes control issues but makes auditing and problem resolution difficult since it is unclear who is responsible for any particular action.
CloudSwitch solves this problem by holding the credentials for external clouds and serving as the gateway to cloud accounts. Rather than users accessing their accounts directly, they interact with the cloud through the gateway, which consolidates permissions for all users and multiple clouds for management by an administrator. The approach provides consistent policies governing user and management roles, whether internal or external.
Streamlining Cloud Management
Federation also means that administrators should be able to manage applications running in one or more clouds as if they were running locally, using their familiar tools and processes for application lifecycle management, monitoring, compliance management, etc. But cloud computing involves a wide assortment of isolated environments to keep track of and manage. Adding to the complexity, cloud providers often have their own management tools that users or administrators need to learn, all different from each other and from what enterprises have internally.
CloudSwitch keeps things simple for the enterprise by replicating the existing IT infrastructure and mapping it to the target cloud. The approach allows current management tools to work seamlessly in the cloud, just as if an application were running locally. Using consistent tools and policies, applications and resources can be managed with the same flexibility, security and control regardless of their location.
Bringing the Vision to Life
Federation is required for cloud computing to be successful, particularly as computing needs continue to expand. Enterprise users want to take advantage of all the capabilities available in the cloud, but without the complexity or risk. The ability to federate this heterogeneous ecosystem—to create a uniform environment spanning external and internal clouds—is going to allow IT organizations to meet user and corporate needs with an agility and economy not previously possible. CloudSwitch is part of an emerging ecosystem that’s making federated cloud a reality.
