From the Enterprise perspective, now has never been a better time to invest in cloud services. Enterprises are broadly adopting all types of cloud services at multiple levels in the organization. Initial predictions were for the enterprise to favor private and community clouds over public services, but the hottest trends in Cloud adoption has been Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud-based business applications which are projected to grow from $13.4 billion in 2011 to $32.2 billion in 2016, a 19.1% five-year CAGR! The rapid adoption of SaaS applications of all flavors by the enterprise has been a surprise to many, but the vastly reduced costs due to the pay as you go pricing models, and high degree of service delivery flexibility has overcome any perceptions of needing to trade price for reduced feature sets. Unsurprisingly, the most often added cloud-based application services are Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM), with Web Conferencing, teaming platforms and social software suites nipping at their heels.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) continues to appeal to companies that want to replace in-house and traditional data center models for the cloud hardware abstraction approach. Gartner is predicting Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), cloud management & security devices, and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are growing from $7.6B in 2011 to $35.5B in 2016, a CAGR of 36%. A word of warning for companies that think just because the Amazon cloud is easy to use, it is easy to build and manage. Building a private cloud still requires a degree of expertise that few enterprises have in-house. In the next year or so expect more companies to see the value of using the services of cloud consultants to avoid painful and expensive mistakes when building private clouds; or alternatively using emerging enterprise focused public cloud services such as Bluelock or Terremark.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) which still does not quite know what it wants to be when it grows up, is lagging with only about $1B in revenue in 2012, but as the market matures, expect to see rapid uptake as companies recognize the value of standardized tools that can ease the pain of Cloud application deployments. Some of the newer PaaS tools like the ServiceMesh Agility Platform combine the features of a SDLC workflow engine, production support and orchestration across different cloud platforms.

New Cloud Technology Directions

Ultimately, innovation is the marriage of technology and organization change. The dilemma is how to pull innovation into IT core functionality without disrupting the flow of new ideas, when the modern enterprise understanding of IT is focused on operational excellence and cost control. The CIO should be leading the cultural change to the new flat organization by leveraging cloud and mobile application in new and interesting ways. The trick is to create tools for people to quickly test and validate their ideas so they can implement new ideas that work within the enterprise framework. Cloud tools can be used to deliver on that promise, but is the enterprise up to that challenge?

This is not the first time wrenching technology innovation has changed how companies do business, and it certainly will not be the last. Companies able to use disruptive technologies, such as cloud computing, effectively will leave companies who do not have that ability in the dust. By recognizing the seeds of change and embracing them, the smart company can leverage cloud services by using the efficiencies of pooled IT resources at the same time allowing greater flexibility to meet the challenges of the global economy. This combination of combining commodity utilities with innovation allows companies to compete effectively using the efficiency and flexibility strategies simultaneously.

Challenges, Always Challenges…

Consumers intuitively get cloud and have been more than willing to embrace it warts and all as it has matured. They are highly price sensitive and will easily sacrifice features in exchange for low cost. On the other side of the market spectrum, the more conservative enterprise market is still struggling with the basic model. Some companies worry that the emerging cloud companies are too small to do business with, while others are concerned with how to incorporate new technologies into existing technology portfolio investments. To address their concerns, at the same time as Cloud technology continues to mature and standards develop , innovation around service delivery and breakthroughs in storage technologies are making it ever more enterprise ready. The pace of cloud vendor consolidation has already picked up as the traditional enterprise vendors such as HP and IBM has rushed to add enterprise ready cloud services to their portfolios. This should alleviate the fears of even the most technology adverse companies.

A final word for any remaining cloud technology skeptics, as with any innovative force, the cloud is just a tool to drive change, not an embodiment of change itself. Enterprise cloud consulting leaders, have firsthand experience with how companies willing to ride the Cloud revolution will not only survive in today’s hyper-competitive world, but thrive. I cannot wait to see where the next wave takes us!

About the Author
Beth Cohen, Beth Cohen is a senior cloud architect for Cloud Technology Partners, Inc., focused on delivering solutions to help enterprises leverage the efficiencies of cloud architectures and technologies. Previously, Ms. Cohen was the director of engineering IT for BBN Corporation, where she was involved with the initial development of the Internet, working on some of the hottest networking and web technology protocols in their infancy.

As I mentioned my previous post on the recently concluded OpenStack Summit held in San Diego October 2012, OpenStack needs to be taken seriously by anyone who is interested in building a public or private cloud.  For the more technically inclined the latest Folsom release has several new modules and features of interest to the enterprise and cloud service provider alike:

Quantum – Software Defined Networking (SDN), the latest darling of the cloud world is moving forward quickly with some really valuable features including L2 to L3 tunneling and a network API.  Expect to see lots of new development here.  On a side note, there was a great panel on the future of SDN moderated by Ken Pepple from Cloud Technology Partners, with people from Midokura, Big Switch and HP Cloud Services talking about their vision of the future for SDN.

Cinder – Now that Cinder has been spun out as its own named project, new features include intelligent location of Virtual Machine image storage, real snapshots, live migration, and more capability for large scale simultaneous VM initiations.

Keystone – New features includes support for role-based identify management (RBAC), PKI functionality, tools to add integration capability with enterprise grade account management systems such as Active Directory and other LDAP based systems.  Rumors of Kerberos support coming were floating around.

Documentation and security are both finally being taken seriously, with a half day documentation track on Monday morning and a full day of security related sessions on Thursday.  There was recognition among the lead techs that the developers who are creating OpenStack are not the users.  This resulted in much discussion regarding new features to make it easier to do deployments, upgrades (finally!) and manage it by operations folks.  There even was some discussion of IaaS/PaaS integration and how the VM’s work with the platform, a long overdue recognition that the IaaS and PaaS layers of the cloud stack are intimately related.

On the subject of operations, the tools to manage OpenStack are still weak, but they are no longer non-existent.  Ceilometer and heat among others look promising, but the better operations management tools are still mostly part of separate distributions such as Cloudscaling, Nebula, StackOps and others rather than being part of the product core.  While I do see the reasoning behind this thinking, at the very least we really need to have some standardized installation tools.  There is little benefit for every instance and distribution to reinvent the wheel.

One final note, one thing that was quite noticeable was that the Grizzly design sessions had a very different vibe from previous summits.  While some were packed with lots of discussions about new features, more often the Technical Project Lead and a few others ran the show with little input from the other participants in the room.  As the number contributors grow, the community is going to need to work hard to avoid having the immediacy of the Summit be diluted.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of meat already, but as can be seen by this tiny sampling of the current hot projects, there is still much work to be done.  The good news is the OpenStack community is ready willing and capable of delivering the goods in the coming months and years.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions

From CTP’s perspective, since the majority of our customers are the big enterprise, we need to evaluate IaaS providers against a very different set of criteria. The enterprise is going to be more cautious – partially because they need to be and partially because they can afford to be — about putting anything beyond dev/test in these types of public IaaS services.  Gartner only touched on the IaaS requirements that are really important to the enterprise, regulatory compliance, true high availability SLA’s, support for large scale global deployments and a cost structure that isn’t essentially linear.  From that perspective, the Magic Quadrant would look very different: CSC, IBM, HP, Savvis and Terremark would all be top tier players, with Rackspace and Amazon in the niche quadrant.

On a side note, it is quite noticeable just how many of the providers on the list have at least some OpenStack built into their infrastructure.  HP Cloud Services is 100% based on OpenStack, while RackSpace is migrating from their legacy infrastructure as fast as they can convert their customers.  Internap, AT&T and others have either already stood up OpenStack services or have announced that they are in the works.  Definitely validates the OpenStack approach.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions

The wonderful thing about cloud architectures is that they are designed to be cost effective at massive scales.  The major cloud providers are profitable not only because they can aggregate customers and use the available equipment more efficiently, but they can leverage their considerable market muscle to purchase truckloads of components at steep discounts.  As Google discovered and published in Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population , the brand and cost of a hard drive had little to do with its reliability.  Another paper delivered at the same 2007 Usenix Conference, Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You?, came to similar conclusions.  The key to building reliability in the cloud is not quality components; it is building a hardware architecture that assumes that the components will fail and plan for that failure.  Since the individual components are essentially interchangeable, it stands to reason that a good cloud architecture should be completely hardware agnostic.

The fallacy of that kind of thinking is that failure rates are the only criteria for choosing a given component.  As you know hardware is a moving target, new and better hardware is always coming around the next corner.  Any good storage engineer knows that enterprise customers do not pay the EMC or NetApp premium just because they feel more comfortable buying from a known brand.  They are typically paying for the better tools, faster performance or bigger capacity that they need for their high performance applications.

It turns out that this applies to cloud hardware architectures as well.  Hardware does in fact matter if a cloud is going to run at peak efficiency.  Which hardware components are chosen can make a significant difference under stress conditions.  When the objective is to optimize the environment, the ideal cloud environment should be running at close to peak capacity – essentially under some stress — most to the time.  For example, in a storage array, the two constraints are always going to be system network bandwidth and disk I/O, i.e. how fast the disks can push the data around.  By specifying a faster disk controller and tweaking the configuration to boost the throughput by eliminating disk write caching for example, the entire system will run that much more efficiently.  Yes, in this case you will be reducing disk reliability, but since you already have a mechanism that provides disk failure resiliency in other ways, that risk can be tolerated in exchange for the faster throughput.

In conclusion, at the proof of concept and small system level, cloud hardware agnosticism works just fine, but for massive cloud installations that want to run at peak efficiency, paying attention to specifying the right hardware components to eliminate the throughput bottlenecks, has the potential to boost overall performance significantly.  The trick is determining if the hardware cost differential is worth the increased performance.  Of course at truly Amazonian scales, that cost differential essentially disappears.  However at more modest enterprise scales, in my opinion, in most cases the TCO business case for the better hardware will prevail.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!

In our work, clients often ask for a cloud reference architecture.  They see it as a holy grail that will provide clear vision and help define their cloud strategies.  In response to a recent client inquiry about a cloud hardware reference architecture that could be used to define a joint venture with another company, I realized that defining a cloud reference architecture as the same hardware platforms was the wrong way to look at the question.  While I do agree a reference architecture is certainly a good starting point, it not something I would build an entire corporate cloud strategy around.

Reference architectures are supposed to be by their nature somewhat theoretical.  Like the OSI model and the cloud stack model, they are artificial constructs or frameworks that can be used to create real systems.  By themselves they tend to be so generic and broad that building an enterprise cloud based on a reference architecture without considerable work defining business objectives and system requirements would only be an exercise in frustration.  For example, an enterprise cloud designed to be used for internal use as a more flexible development platform is a far different animal than an enterprise cloud planned to be used to support massively scalable customer facing applications.

After looking at a few available cloud reference models, a reference architecture means very different things depending on the agenda of the creator.  A useful way to compare the perspectives of the various cloud reference architectures is to map them to the older and simpler Cloud Service Stack Model: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.  For example: both the NIST and its closely related IBM architecture are relatively generic and high level, but they both have an operational focus which closely matches the IaaS layer.  The recently published RackSpace Private Cloud Reference Architecture while specific to OpenStack, also primarily has an operational/IaaS bias.  Microsoft has defined the cloud not surprisingly more from a development platform/PaaS view, but it also has an IaaS flavored version based on Hyper-V.  The HP and VMWare versions are more appropriate for companies building end to end applications, SaaS or otherwise.

In the end, a good cloud reference architecture should be robust enough to allow it to be used from a variety of different perspectives: business, operations, development and consumer.  However, any company that is foolish enough to try to use a cloud reference architecture to create its strategy without the application of a rigorous amount of common sense and basic good business practices, is likely to be disappointed with the results.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!