Cloud Front Office

Drinking My Own Champagne and Reading "Compute Cloud Abstraction APIs ... who needs 'em?"

Adrian Cole, who is Mr. Jclouds to me, has an interesting blog post on cloud API standards. Specifically, do we need them?

This is relevant to newScale as we already connect to a variety of provisioning systems and Run Book Automation tools. And clouds. Specifically, we use our RequestCenter product internally to provision and manage our growing Amazon Cloud offering.

We call this, drinking our own champagne! Other vendors call it "eating your own dog food;" I guess they know more about what they are selling.

All joking aside, we also have products for VmWware. This don't work on Amazon. I've been looking for a cloud provider to host them and so far have not had much luck. But once I do, I need to provide the same level of automation so we are planning on vCloud.

So it would make my life easier if we had a standard API to all these clouds.  Alas, we are not quite there, though for some limited functionality, there is some very encouraging progress. 

This is for a couple of very good and valid reasons.

First, the offerings are evolving at a very fast pace. There's a lot of great innovation. So any API that tries to abstract offerings is always going to be a behind going native. When Amazon added spot pricing, that is not a trivial API to implement. And as API developer, Amazon doesn't give you any notice. So Sunday your API is good, Monday is far behind. 

On the other hand,  from what I've seen, there's pretty much agreement on calls like "start instance," "stop instance" But not on "snapshot instance" because not all cloud providers offer snapshots (yet). I like Adrian's Turing Test:

1. Instance lifecycle. The lifecycle defines the basic commands to provision, start, stop, and terminate instances. The bare-bones of a compute service.
2. Shared images. While it is possible to bootstrap from plain OS images created by the cloud service provider, the ability to build your own customized image, and crucially to share it with others provides a social element that helps drive adoption of a cloud platform.
3. Instance metadata. This feature allows you to inject small amounts of user-specific metadata to each instance at boot time - e.g. secret keys, or custom boot parameters - which allows another level of customization. This feature works well in conjunction with shared images: the common non-user specific code is baked into the shared image, and the user-specific code is supplied at launch time as metadata.
4. Network controls. Cloud providers need to think about the network environment that the user's instances run in. Offering such services as DNS, firewalling, VPNs (and exposing it via an API) makes it easy for developers to get started quickly without having to build this infrastructure themselves.

Second, compute is but one element of cloud automation, as someone (Rightscale CTO?) writes on Jclouds.

The real benefit of standards would be around the semantics of resources like vlans, security groups, reassignable IP addresses, network attached block storage devices, etc. But vendors today barely support these and if they do they have quite different semantics from one another that reflect different underlying architectures and also use-cases.

Which is right. There's a lot more to providing cloud computing than just providing compute power.

Start instance is but one element of the API call we use at newScale. We also need to decide which offering (we use our service catalog), for which customer and where (we use our LifeCycle Center product for that and integrate that data from SF.com) and various other configurations questions like domain name, IP, security group, back up schedule, monitoring level, and of the most important one for us -- Length of subscription! 

As cloud matures and a set of services becomes baseline, I believe we'll see cloud API's increasingly able to describe enough major elements to be useful. But it can never be 100% -- vendors will differentiate (which is good for them) and innovate (which is good for us).

Now this API discussion does presume there's one way to do this. At newScale, we've worked out a different approach.

This approach, nicely benefits from standardization too, but does not require API standardization to support multiple clouds. I'll write about in my next blog.

Meanwhile, I've just received notice from Amazon EC2 that I've been upgraded to 100 instances in EU!  So more champagne drinking will happen today.

There Goes the Job of the DB Admin! Or Does it? Amazon Launches Database Cloud Service #cloudcomputing

I'm a big fan (and user) of cloud computing because of the potential efficiencies it brings to the enterprise IT operating model. So this announcement, via www.techcrunch.com, from Amazon is interesting.

Amazon has launched a hosted relational database service, Amazon RDS, as part of the suite of services available at AWS. The new service is a hosted MySQL database instance with the full capabilities and access rights as a normal self-hosted DB.

As a hosted solution, instances are easily created and available almost immediately. Pricing stars at $0.11c per hour for the smallest scale specification, and is available now on the AWS site.

So my question is: does the adoption of this cloud service remove the need for a database administrator? Because if it does,

it's a radical change to the IT operating model. If it doesn't, then it's more complicated to find value because I still need to have a DB admin.

What do you think?

Paul Maritz, VMware CEO - General Session Keynote Mentions Service Catalog

Paul Maritz presented their view of the Front Office of IT, that includes Service Catalog, Self-service, charge back and service profiles.  This is all about Offer a Cloud.

In other words, they have adopted newScale's Front Office vision; which is great.

However, based on the Lifecycle Manager lab that I attended last night, their 'catalog' is still very much focused on the back-end mechanics. It's a good step but has a few years to mature.

So overall, I'm very pleased by this development. It validates what I've been writing for a while. IT needs to be able to make offers to manage demand. Cloud is all about standard offerings.

Server virtualization – what could possibly go wrong? Answer: VM Sprawl

Server virtualization – what could possibly go wrong? • The Register.

..server virtualization has a lot going for it. The challenge does not lie in its faults, given that no technology is perfect. Rather, when we researched this topic we found that the level of competence and/or experience around virtualization is not particularly high.

So what could go wrong? Top of the list - given the gung-ho way that some organisations are rolling out server virtualization - is the potential for proliferation of virtual machines, and subsequent virtual server sprawl.

As one Reg reader has pointed out: “Virtualization does save a kicking from the Finance Director.” But we have also been told how the cost savings may well be storing up manageability issues down the line.

2 In 3 IT Managers Have Cloud Funding -- Cloud Computing -- InformationWeek

Interesting quote in Information Week's 2 In 3 IT Managers Have Cloud Funding

As IT managers adopt cloud computing, they are looking to fill in the missing pieces behind the simplified services now available. Among other things, 90% said they want control over who can access their cloud resources. "Who has access? How is it controlled? Who can self-provision a server," said MacVittie.

Wow. It's what newScale does!  Send them my way.

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Kicking up the racket on "Rackspace Launches Cloud Tools"

James Water has an interesting take on the Rackspace announcement.  My comments follow:

My Take: Its early enough to grow their own ecosystem, but it will require sincere focus and value-ad to justify the differentiation

Rackspace’s API is different for a reason. There are certain features (like static/unique IPs) they wanted to support that EC2 did not.

All the same that puts the onus on them to continue to create value ad differentiation for their cloud until there are numerous ISV’s building natively on the Rackcloud instead of porting over to it—that is until they have a unique market footprint, and their own cluster of long tail users who prefer their cloud for those architectural features. This is a partial departure from their service and quality branding—its compute quality and feature centric.

I agree with James in that is too early to declare winners and losers.  But I'd say that the window is closing very fast. You got VMware, Amazon, Microsoft in the leading spots for 1-2-3. The fight now is to be #4 or to unseat one of the incumbents.

The issue of compatibility vs innovation is one of the real difficult ones any platform provider faces.  What I see is this: why not just embrace the EC2 API's?  Launch a server is launch a server.  You can always extend to support differentiated value.  This would get you a whole bunch of ISV's for free, then let the customer drive extensions by beating up the ISV's.

Embrace and extend.  That's a strategy you don't see working often. Oh wait.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Analyze: Gartner Consulting is in the Cloud Collision #FailBucket

Silicon angle wrote an interesting observation (rant?): Gartner Consulting is in the Cloud Collision #FailBucket

 Is there a bigger intellectual #FAIL in current technology analysis than Gartner consulting? Watch them closely, because in my opinion they are the definition of dissonance

My take:

The cloud represents the consumerization of IT infrastructure services and a new delivery model for IT services. Thus it represents both a threat to parts of the IT, while representing an opportunity to IT and the business overall. 
Gartner magic quadrants are traditionally not used for consumer stuff, but rather for enterprise buying decisions. The cloud today, and particularly Amazon, represent freedom from IT operations for many organizations, as I've written before in 16 Digits to Freedom.

Gartner is probably right about the leadership quadrant from an enterprise point of view. A CIO might be curious about Amazon, but will call those their traditional suppliers in Gartner's magic quadrant when it comes time to explain cloud computing and how to use it.

The question is whether the cloud is out of the barn already, and no vendor can stop -- only hope to ride it.

View Yonder says: Free the Gladiators! (Through Process, Of All Things)

I'm quite enjoying the View Yonder blog. The Gladiators to be freed in this case, are your top people.

Virtualization is a technology that greatly helps in the road to an IT organization that is service oriented, but as the case is made, it's not enough. There's also a process and culture transformation.

The challenge in rolling out virtualization is that you can’t do it in isolation: all of these SME roles are impacted in some way, either in the justification, design, implementation or operational phases.

At a minimum, the processes they use will be changed, and that spells trouble. Rarely in my five years at VMware did I find a cohesive system of processes that I could tweak because they were all at VMM level 5.

Instead, I continuously found subject matter experts hoarding the knowledge in their brains, acting on “experience” (read: gut feel), and not having the time to document/improve processes. Often the biggest barrier to a virtualization project was the VMware Fanboy, because that individual was awesome at what they did and didn’t see why anyone else (like Operations, or Security) needed to know about virtualization… that was Somebody Else’s Problem. Sigh.

[Editor's note: to be fair to VM admins, every other silo does the same thing. This is why a service catalog with its underlying processes is soooo crucial.

Remember, virtualization is technology, cloud computing an operational model.  The rest is here.
View Yonder » Free the Gladiators!.

Private Clouds: IT Operations Finally Meet Moore’s Law

Private Clouds: IT Operations Finally Meet Moore’s Law.

Dramatically reducing the cost of IT operations will require unprecedented levels of standardization, specialization and automation across these traditional administrative silos.

 And finally, the transparency created by more visible service level agreements and charge-backs enables benchmarking internal IT against large and well-run external service providers. New organizations and processes will come from external pressure. Because IT operations can be metered and billed back to each application owner, IT itself will have to compete for resources with external cloud service providers.

IT to Business: Squeeze Blood from Turnip? Business to IT: We Are Desperate, Get Used to It

The blog entry below ask" Not blood from a turnip, but water from a cloud?  Or as one of my favorite bands of all time, X used to sing: "We are desperate, get used to it."

What Business Wants from IT: Squeeze Blood from Turnip?

Frankly, I'm wondering if it boils down to advising CIOs to squeeze blood from a turnip.

There are a couple of reasons why the report has me scratching my head, but primarily it comes down to this: It strikes me as a list of wants with no clear indication of how companies hope to achieve them. For instance, the report found - not surprisingly - that companies want to reduce IT costs. This seems to me the most clear finding from the report, with 81 percent of businesses saying they want to reduce IT costs. But, a close second demand was better integration between applications, at 77 percent. Likewise, the top initiative for 2009 was updating key legacy systems.

Of course, both would probably save companies money in the long run, so in a way it makes sense. It's the short-term compatibility I question. If your goal this year is to reduce IT costs, then is this really the time to update legacy systems and undertake better application integration? Or could it be that companies expect IT to accomplish these massive tasks without added spending?

Perhaps the answer lies in the press release's quote from Jean Pierre Garbani, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester:

“The costs of operating monolithic legacy applications makes them unsustainable, and these survey results show that firms are seeking efficient ways to modernize. Companies are willing to adapt their business processes to cheaper packaged software solutions rather than wait for custom applications. Automation is the key to IT’s future.”

Certainly that was another finding in the report – companies prefer packaged solutions to tailored solutions or hosted or SaaS solutions. I was a bit surprised that SaaS came in last, considering the potential for cost savings and the report's finding about reducing IT costs. But apparently security concerns worry enterprises, and SMBs fret about the total ownership costs with SaaS.

If you are curious, this is X and we better get used to it.