• “Own the Base and Rent the Spike”
• “Cloudbursting”
• “Application migration”
• “Application Portability”
• “Avoid Lock-in’

Pick your favorite slogan, they were all there. Throw in the ability to dynamically migrate workloads between physical locations and there was a frenzy of excitement over the possibilities of a Hybrid environment.

And then reality set in and people began to realize that the limitations far outweighed the possibilities. Limited Bandwidth. Security Concerns. Ownership Issues. Consistency of Operations. Early offerings such as Amazon AWS could provide a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), but it had limitations (or “wish-lists“). CloudSwitch did some cool things (since acquired by Verizon/Terremark), but it was cloaked in a security story and hence didn’t get as much visibility as it could have from “Cloud Architects” at the time.

It also led to an explosion of definitions of Hybrid Cloud, mostly to match the needs of a vendor selling their HW/SW, or an Enterprise Architect trying to justify their design to their CIO. Either way, it’s evolved to where Hybrid Cloud can mean any mix of offerings or architectures where the resources and applications are both on-premise and off-premise. And if I squint my eyes just right, my borrowed concept of “Cloud Concierge” might even fit one of these definitions.

Fast forward to 2013 and we’re beginning to see a new set of Hybrid Cloud offerings emerge that are backed by both evolving technology and vendors large and small. They tend to fall into these categories:

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) – This is the category of solutions that involve a Public Cloud vendor (eg. Amazon AWS) offering a VPN or Gateway offering at the edge of the Enterprise. The edge offering might be from them, it might involve API-level integration (eg. Eucalyptus) or a 3rd-party gateway product (eg. TwinStrata, StorSimple, Riverbed Whitewater, NetApp).

Federated Clouds – This category of solutions are enabled by placing consistent Cloud Management Platform software on both a Public Cloud and Private Cloud, and leveraging the federation capabilities between the two (or multiple) locations. These include VMware vCloud, Apache CloudStack, and Virtustream xStream. Over time I would expect OpenStack to add federation capabilities, as multi-cloud interop is one of the core tenants of that project.

Workload Migration – These solutions are focused on ways to take existing applications (virtualized or on bare metal) and either seamlessly migrate them to a Public Cloud, or create synchronization between a Private Cloud and Public Cloud on a per-application basis. These include AWS’s VM Import, CloudVelocity (podcast) and Ravello Systems (podcast). Layer on top of this the emergence of new Public/Private PaaS platforms (Apprenda, CloudFoundry, etc.) and we’re also beginning to see portability higher up the stack.

Multi-Cloud Managers – In the past the definition of Hybrid centered around Public + Private. But as more Public options have evolved to fill niches, offer differentiated pricing or performance, or geographic presence, a new class of Hybrid has evolved – the multi-Public hybrid. Companies like Enstratius (Dell), Rightscale and AppOps have emerged to providing leading technology in navigating management and governance between clouds, Public or Private.

Over the past 4-5 years, the definition of Hybrid Cloud took many forms and meant many things to different people. The good news is we appear to be coming out of the hype cycle and are beginning to have wider choices of hybrid solutions to address multiple use-case and workload requirements. And as even more of these evolve to being software-centric deployment models, I expect that we’ll see the acceleration of hybrid architectures expand quite rapidly. And over time, we’ll begin to see more of the elements that are considered “tools” or smaller functionality get integrated into larger cloud offerings (eg. AWS Cloud Gateway, OpsWorks and CloudWatch).

What are your plans for Hybrid Cloud in the near-term and long-term? What critical elements do you still see missing in the market place today?

btw – if you’d like a view of Hybrid Cloud as only my wonder British colleagues can describe it, check out this beauty from Stevie Chambers (@stevie_chambers, CTO at Canopy Cloud)

1. Audience - Who is the target audience of the survey? Are they IT professionals that currently work in IT operations, IT architecture or application developers? It’s especially important to understand if they come from IT, or they come from the groups trying to move around IT.
2. Area of Focus - Do the survey results come from people focused on existing IT systems or future-looking systems (eg. Mobile, Big Data, SDN, Automation, Open-Source, etc.). IT silos can create unique viewpoints about what problems exist and how they can be solved.
3. Decision-Making / Budget-Owner – Which group(s) within the organization have responsibility for IT budget? Which groups are able to obtain funding for IT services outside the existing IT organization?
4. Length and Scope of Projects – Is the research focused on length or scope of projects? Long-term projects have a completely different framework (planning, strategic-alignment, project management, budgeting, etc.) that short-term projects, which are primarily driven by immediate needs.
5. ROI of Projects – Is the research focused on ROI of projects, or just attempting to determine costs comparisons. Does the ROI measurement align to traditional IT expectations about depreciation cycles (eg. 3-5yrs on hardware) or does it incorporate short-term project expectations?
6. Cloud Definitions – How are terms like “Hybrid Cloud”, “Virtual Private Cloud” or “Platform as a Service” defined within the research? Does it align with industry standard definitions or something else?
7. Overlapping Concepts - Often times, research permits answers such as “all of the above” or “both”. Respondents tend to click those answers more often. Make sure the results that are based on “overlap” actually make sense, especially if more details are not provided via the research.
8. Market Segmentation - Too often, Cloud projections attempt to make broad statements about the entire marketplace. But different market segments, whether by size or vertical or IT skill set can have very different characteristics. Be sure the research aligns to the segment that’s relevant to your needs.
9. Geographic Segmentation – Just like market segmentation, there are significant geographic differences in the marketplace today. Some geographies are much farther ahead of others in terms of adoption. Results based on US or Asia respondents will be much different than EMEA or South America.
10. Funding for the Research – Unfortunately, for many technology companies, Cloud Computing is defined as “whatever makes them money”, whether it aligns to NIST standards or not. So it’s critical to research who paid for the forecasts and then compare the results to the agenda that company is trying to push into the market. Independently funded research can provide much different results than directly or indirectly funded research.

Cloud Computing is a rapidly changing market, with many many participants that all have a financial incentive to shift thinking in there direction. As a consumer of Cloud Computing services, it’s always important to understand what’s behind the forecasts and research prior to allowing it to influence your strategy or decisions.

Too often we hear technology vendors say that if all IT organizations would just operate like Google or Facebook or Twitter, then IT costs would be reduced and business productivity increased. Except this leaves many companies saying that they don’t have a “deliver digitals ads” problem, so how does that approach make sense for them?

Two years ago, I was introduced to Christian Reilly (@reillyusa), who is part of the IT organization at construction leader Bechtel. Bechtel had been looking at how to solve some massive business challenges (global workforce, complex projects, internal and external employees, etc.) by better leveraging their technology investment. It required them to transform how they thought about technology, as well as implementing a new set of technologies to enable new applications. As I quickly learned from Reilly, this set of changes wasn’t something they could buy shrink-wrapped in a box, but rather it was a multi-year transformation that involved people, process and technology changes.

It had been a while since I last caught up with Reilly, but this past week I saw a very interesting video that Bechtel jointly created with Apple about their iPad rollout. While the video is produced in typical high-production-value Apple manner, under the covers it highlights the implementation of tons of very interesting technology. Their solution is not being used to serve ads or update their social network, but instead is focused on things that aren’t sexy but are critical for Bechtel to solve their business challenges and bring value to their customers. Let take a look at some of the things behind the scenes.

• A highly virtualized server and application environment, which allows Bechtel to not only be efficient at running the applications, but be agile in capacity management when large projects spin-up or spin-down.
• A hybrid cloud environment that leverages a mix of Private Cloud and Public Cloud resources.
• A data access architecture, enabled via APIs (or MIM – Mobile Information Management) to enable a data marketplace ,that allos them to keep the data secure and centralized, but accessible via legacy devices or new devices like iPad apps. Not only does this help if a device is lost/stolen/damaged, but also keeps information centralized when audits or compliance reviews are required.
• A user-authentication framework that allows Bechtel to control who has access to certain information, based on project and company (Bechtel employees vs. contractor partners).
• Leveraging sensors to capture real-time information about the quality of project infrastructure (cement quality) and presenting this to users on the iPad or back in the central offices. Over time this information can be correlated across projects, contractors or suppliers to improve quality or predict project outcomes.
• A file-sharing and collaboration environment that allows them to handle everything from the mundane (check-box paperwork) to critical project plans.

While the video only highlights a few productivity applications, the power of the technology behind the scenes shows how impactful the right technology can be to business. It puts the technology in the context of the business activity.

For those of us that live in the technology industry, we often get overly religious about Technology X vs Technology Y. Sometimes its good to step back and see how the combination of many technologies can be brought together to solve business problems, both large and small.

1. Who are the major OpenStack customers?

While each OpenStack summit highlights a new set of users or use-cases, the majority of them are either small-scale or only using a limited number of OpenStack services. This would align to the modular nature of the projects, and to some extent their competitive goal vs. AWS, but it doesn’t align to a complete “stack” solution. When is it realistic to see Enterprise customers that were previously VMware-centric move to a complete OpenStack environment?

2. Are there already too many distributions? Should they be considered competitive, similar to Linux distributions in 1990-2000s?

For a project that is three years old, what is a reasonable number of distributions to have appeared on the market? How are customers supposed to be able to keep track of all the variations? Does the OpenStack community expect this number to grow (limited / significant) before it begins to pare down?

• Rackspace (2 versions – Private, Public)
• HP Cloud (public cloud)
• Piston Cloud
• Nebula (shipping details TBD)
• Cloudscaling
• Cisco
• Dell
• Red Hat
• IBM (shipping details TBD)
• Various Linux distributions

3. What is the “Open” goal for OpenStack these days? (open-source, multi-cloud)

One of the main goals of OpenStack is to allow open, interoperability between clouds to (potentially) facilitate open movement for applications or data. We’re already seeing the early Service Providers (Rackspace, HP Cloud) having incompatible versions. Is open cloud still a goal, or have market priorities made that almost impossible?

4. How to get it installed?

The best OpenStack developers have collected at a small number of companies (Piston Cloud, Nebula (NASA/Anso Labs), Rackspace, Mirantis, MorphLabs) and OpenStack is still considered to be fairly complicated to install and operate. What resources do customers have to get an OpenStack environment running? How many SIs and VARs are starting up OpenStack practices (eg. Colin McNamara (@colinmcnamara) at Nexus IS has created an OpenStack practice).

5. Where is the next major architecture re-write?

Several of the projects have gone through major re-writes or re-architectures (Compute, Block Storage, Networking). What other areas are expected to go through significant re-architecture in the next 6-12 months?

What new projects are expected to start in the next 6-12 months?

6. When do operational-tools get integrated (or appear)?

When can the market expect to see OpenStack projects begin to move some of their focus to operations-centric capabilities? When is it expected that we’ll begin to see 3rd-party tools begin to become integrated into OpenStack (Backup, Monitoring, etc.). Is this expected from existing vendors, or primarily only via other open-source projects?

7. Where are the scaling guidelines?

Is there a group within the OpenStack foundation that has the charter of creating best-practices or reference architectures, or is this expected to come from individual companies (eg. Cloudscaling, Rackspace, etc.).

Are any 3rd-party labs/groups beginning to test various project implementations from vendors to determine scaling or performance characteristics?

8. The target: AWS or VMware?

While some of this will be determined by the market and the individuals involved with OpenStack, there have been mixed messages from the leadership (eg. Boris Renski @ Mirantis, Chris Kemp @ Nebula, Rackspace leadership) about the type of system that OpenStack is attempting to compete with. Are the projects more focused on AWS type services (web-scale applications), or VMware type environments (Enterprise applications), or has OpenStack gotten broad enough to try and service both types of environments?

9. What is the VMware role in OpenStack?

At this week’s Partner Exchange, I didn’t hear OpenStack mentioned one time. I asked a few of their engineers, specifically in the vCloud group, and either got a “I don’t have any details” or a “We never see that in the marketplace” answer. We know that the Nicira team is heavily involved in OpenStack Quantum, but it’s still very unclear what other involvement VMware will have with OpenStack. It’s starting to appear that their parent company, EMC, is moving faster than VMware.

As for #10, I’ll leave that to the readers to pose to the community in the comments section…

When it comes to IT organizations, we haven’t been nearly as flexible. While SaaS adoption has grown for many non-differentiated services, the adoption of Cloud Computing is often considered the 3^rd-option after internal data-center resources or outsourcing contracts. But this way of thinking is beginning to change. We’re starting to see large organizations become frustrated with their outsourcing contracts (here, here). We’re quickly seeing a significant change in the companies identified as leaders and visionaries (2010, 2011, 2012) in the cloud service provider market, especially towards those that offer differentiated services. Throw in the emergence of several viable PaaS platforms (Heroku, CloudFoundry, Apprenda, etc.) and we’re on the cusp of the 3rd option, variations of Hybrid Cloud, becoming more and more mainstream for IT organizations.

So when is the right time to consider either migrating existing applications, or beginning a journey with new application models? Here are some triggers to consider:

• The end of existing outsourcing contracts that haven’t kept up with technology trends, especially those longer than 3yrs.
• Uncertainty over the longevity of existing/legacy hardware platforms, such Itanium or RISC-based servers.
• Uncertainty about the longevity of existing/legacy hardware providers, such as Dell or HP.
• The opportunity to truly change the economics of business-critical applications by moving to both a virtualized environment and OPEX-based cloud deployment model.
• Shifting business environments, driven by mergers, globalization, or evolving industry regulation (HIPPA, FedRAMP, PCI-DSS, etc.).

The evolution of “Hybrid Cloud” as a concept has a somewhat convoluted history. It began as the grey area between “Public Cloud” services and IT organizations virtualizing their data centers and terming it “Private Cloud”. A promise of the best-of-both-worlds that was difficult to achieve.

Now just as we’ve seen mobile computing emerge as a disjointed but powerful addition to Enterprise computing, we’re beginning to see the evolution of Hybrid Cloud thinking. Companies grasp that the best-of-both-worlds middle ground delivers better cost models (consumption-based OPEX vs. CAPEX) or application-awareness (SLAs, High-Performance) or industry-specific compliance. It augments existing IT organization skills where needed, or simplifies setup and consumption for demand-starved business units. In other words, the Hybrid Cloud of the next couple years isn’t necessary a magical bridge, but a simplified way to give IT organizations confidence that business productivity and demand can be satisfied outside of internal data centers or outsourcing. Hybrid Cloud unlocks the third option, as well as unlocking a set of creative thinking about how to best leverage the new consumption models.

I expect that we’ll see many IT organizations prioritize their evaluation of Hybrid Cloud options, in many cases prioritized above Private Cloud, which is still struggling to find wide-spread success beyond data center virtualization. The economics of Hybrid Cloud’s operational flexibility will outweigh the cost savings that no longer exist once the low-hanging applications have been consolidated and virtualized.

What is somewhat surprising is that IT organizations have not followed a strategy that has been proven over many years and against various ROI calculations. The practice of “tiering” their applications. In the past this meant applying various levels of resources (typically faster CPUs, more RAM, faster network, various levels of redundancy, etc.) to different classes of applications. While some will say that dragging along any legacy concepts into the new cloud world is a disaster waiting to happen, the reality is that most Enterprises have a huge variety of application needs and application types. Expecting them all to run in a similar manner, with similar SLAs or costs is not realistic. It would be like saying that everyone can wear a suit and tie to the office, so they should all be paid executive compensation. 

Some of this already happens today, as Enterprises look to SaaS application providers to help them with applications like CRM, Payroll, Conferencing, File-Sharing or a variety of other business services. In most of those cases, the business leaders has decided that those applications don’t provide a competitive advantage or are too costly to maintain in-house, so they have mored them to a “SaaS-Tier”. In addition, we’ve seen the evolution of the “ShadowIT-Tier”, which is essentially made up of workloads that exceeded the existing capacity of Enterprise IT organizations. Developers have decided that the cost of waiting for IT to manage this requirement exceeds the cost of them going outside for resources. Both of these non-IT groups have inherently grasped the concept of “tiered applications”.

So where is the opportunity for IT to leverage this model in the new cloud world? The answer lies in having consistency between your Private Cloud and Public Cloud environments. Consistency in management; consistency in measuring workload resources; consistency in allocating workload resources. With this environment established, IT organizations can look at Private vs. Public Cloud as just a set of tiers, deciding where to place a certain application based on cost, skill-set, geography, or time-to-market. Sometime this is called a “hybrid cloud”, but too often hybrid definitions only focus on the movement of workloads between locations, or consistency of equipment stacks in multiple locations. It requires much more to truly deliver a functional hybrid environment. Here are a few qualifying questions to ask your cloud management provider or Cloud SP:

• Can you give me a single metric to understand how much my applications will cost (in terms of $$ and resources), regardless of where they run?
• Can you give me a consistent management viewpoint into how my applications are running, regardless of where they run?
• Can you give me the ability to securely move a workload from one location to another, and ensure that it’s integrity has not been compromised?
• Can you provide me with a framework to migrate workloads between tiers, including the ability to reclaim some of those ShadowIT-tier’d applications that might now need to be managed by the IT organization?
• Can you provide me a way to integrate services such as Backup/Recovery and DR, such that I have flexibility of where the workload runs and where the recovery services reside?

In the Cloud Computing lexicon, “hybrid cloud” is a fairly new term. But in reality, if done properly, it’s just a new way of thinking about Application Tiering. A concept has been proven over many years and against various ROI calculations.

But over the past few weeks, I’ve come across a few “SDN Use-Cases” that are pretty straight forward, so I thought I’d write about them. Now keep in mind, this won’t be your typical blog about SDN, because I promise to break all these guidelines:

• Discuss why SDN means the death of Cisco &/or Juniper
• Discuss why SDN will immediately build networks using commodity x86 boxes, because they have fast chips (btw: listen to Packet Pushers #88 if you want good insight into why x86 servers don’t work exactly like switches/routers)
• Discuss how SDN is only applicable to “web-scale” networks and “web 2.0 scale-out, share-nothing” applications
• Mention “OpenFlow” (in a good way or bad way)
• Make a list of which SDN start-ups will get acquired in 2013

Backstory: Due to economic uncertainty, new regulations, and maturity of the Cloud SP markets, 2013 and 2014 are expected to see a significant rise in the number of applications, both existing and new, that are run in SP Cloud environments.

These businesses are going to be looking for flexibility in how they onboard applications, how applications are protected, and how they an add, remove or change the environments.

So if you’re one of these viable Cloud SPs, you’re going to have a couple use-cases that need fairly immediate attention.

Use-Case #1: ”Isolation & Segmentation” – Until you can truly prove to companies that you can isolate their critical data in your multi-tenant Cloud, it’s very likely that you’ll use VLANs for a number of application use-cases. Dev/Test workloads. QA workloads. Production workload. Backup environments. DR environments. The number of VLANs can add up very, very quickly, and the 4096 limit runs out even faster. So you’ll be looking for a way to scale out those segments. Now this isn’t “web-scale scale-out”, this is grow the network in a fast, flexible way so you can continue to add new services that are demand from Enterprise customers. “Dropbox File-Sharing for the Enterprise”. “Real-time Collaboration via the Cloud”. “Onboarding and Staging for new acquisitions”. The list goes on and on. VXLAN seems to be the early leader in vendor adoption for “Overlay Networks” that are virtualization-aware. This may be a good fit, but it still feels like there is more innovation needed, since VXLAN essentially remove any physical-network visibility for the operations teams.

Use-Case #2: ”Gumby Networking” – Yep, we all remember that lovable, flexible, malleable green creature from the 1980s. We need his characteristics back in networking. With new companies bringing applications to Cloud SPs at a variable pace, the ability to fit them into existing or new resource is key. But how, when and where? We all know that no two IT organizations are the same, so the ability to Gumby-fy the underlying network and resources will be critical for Cloud SPs to be able to meet SLA, Security and capacity-planning needs. But this isn’t an “overlay” problem that VXLAN can easily solve. It’s much more of a flexible, programmable topology challenge. If you drop a controller-based solution in to handle this challenge, it had better be able to integrate tightly with your Cloud provisioning platform for VMs, Apps, Security and Storage.

Both of these use-cases are real challenges for Cloud SPs in 2013 and 2014, but they will also be realities for Large Enterprises that deal with a reasonable amount of change (re-orgs, M&A, regulatory changes, etc.).

The networking companies offering SDN solutions to these basic use-cases will be well on their way to capturing early market-share in this growing market. Tie both of them together and offer API hooks to the leading cloud platforms and you’ll have a winner on your hands.

As always, I’m curious from my readers about the viable SDN use-cases you’re seeing in your IT environments or in the marketplace. btw – saying you have a WAN the size of Google probably doesn’t count (unless you work at Google)

The next item I noticed was the announcement of the OpenStack Summit 2013 (Spring), being held in Portland. OpenStack is the collection of open source cloud computing projects with the goal of creating an open alternative to existing cloud computing environments. It promises to allow customers to be able avoid lock-in and support multi-cloud environments. So coincidently, the dream of the open multi-cloud is going to be alive in Portland. Tattoos and Clowning is optional.

Or is it?

I was somewhat surprised to see that Dell claims OpenStack is being “dramatically forked”, causing them to delay their public cloud offering until late 2013 or 2014. This came only a few weeks after they announced support for OpenStack for their Private Cloud offering.  While this is only one data point, it also appears to be confirmed by Dell’s OpenStack lead Rob Hershfeld. These comments don’t imply any significant problems with OpenStack, but it does bring up the question about how various companies will balance the tradeoffs of open projects and quarterly revenue demands. Innovation vs. Operations vs. Implementation. How much of the multi-cloud interoperability burden will be placed on customers, and how easily will it be for them to know where multi-cloud is possible? And does any vendor or Cloud Provider really have any incentive to help customers move their application workloads from one cloud to another?

The last item I saw was a knowledgable SysAdmin questioning if OpenStack actually prevents lock-in. He reinforced my prior statement that “open” doesn’t always make things less expensive or less complicated. Whether it’s IT Operations or Developers, almost any decision made about technology comes with some level of cost (people, hardware, software, licenses, integration), so “lock-in” is nothing more than the level of risk of making a decision plus on-going costs plus the cost of future changes.

How important is multi-cloud interoperability to your future IT plans?

How confident are you that multi-cloud technology will be available to your business when the time comes for those capabilities?