What does this have to do with the just concluded April 2013 OpenStack Summit? Everything! The Summit was a big turning point for the just under three year old Open Source Cloud Platform Project. Never before has the Summit felt more like a real business conference with a clear-eyed agenda to architect a stable and viable enterprise ready cloud platform, rather than just a bunch of wild developers on a mission to save the world. After several years of intense development and shakedown, OpenStack is finally more than ready to take on the unique challenges of enterprises that want to deploy private clouds.

There were plenty of great examples of respected organizations, public and private that have crossed the innovation chasm by deploying OpenStack clouds into their production environments. The keynote sessions all highlighted large enterprise case studies to emphasis the message that OpenStack is a strong and very viable option. Here are just a few to whet your appetite:

• • Bloomberg has deployed a large scale internal cloud, for a variety of applications including analytics and support of their backend systems.
• • BestBuy built an OpenStack cloud to support their extremely spiky holiday rush traffic. In just eight months, 25% of their systems ran on their new cloud in time for the 2012 Christmas buying season. They found the new platform, combined with a move to a PaaS push button development environment and a server side delivery architecture, allowed them to speed delivery of their catalog content pages down to under 2 seconds, while saving over $500K per platform upgrade. How is that for some serious discounting!
• • Comcast Cable and NBC/Universal built an OpenStack cloud to move content delivery out of proprietary limited function set-top boxes and into backend servers, giving them more flexibility and capabilities for the development of new interactive features such as live streaming and gaming.
• • The NSA, yes the spies in DC, are using OpenStack. Of course, what, how and why they are using it were not shared, but clearly they are not overly concerned with reports of security deficiencies.
• • Samsung is rolling out a production grade platform that will support millions of users across the globe. If the success of the new Android based smartphones and tablets are any indication, Apple should be looking over its shoulder very carefully.

In conclusion, if your company is contemplating a public or private cloud deployment, you should be putting OpenStack at the top of your shortlist. The rich ecosystem of big names, such as Dell, IBM, RedHat and Cisco is a clear signal that OpenStack has arrived!

About the Author
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.

After four extraordinary days of immersion into all things OpenStack at the just concluded OpenStack Summit in San Diego, I can heartily say without reservations that OpenStack is not only very real, it is truly a game changer for the IT industry.  With that being said, yes, there is certainly plenty of hype about this Open Source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering – one wag even quipped that OpenStack was at the peak of the Gardner hype cycle, so it must be real.  Here are just a few highlights for the terminally busy:

• The technology has come a long way since the project’s August 2010 inception.  With 13 major corporate foundation contributors, it seems like the only major technology companies not involved are Amazon and Apple.
• There was much discussion about the newly created OpenStack Foundation as an organization and its long-term viability.  However, compared to where the Apache Foundation was at the same time in its lifecycle, the OpenStack Foundation is far ahead of the curve.
• OpenStack is definitely gaining market traction.  There were plenty of academic, enterprise and service provider IT folks kicking the tires.  To encourage more market adoption, the website is featuring user stories.  A new one from WebEx was inspired by a visit to the Boston conference where the engineers saw the Mercardo Libra success story.
• While there was still a preponderance of developers in attendence (it was a design summit after all), there were more operations and business types than ever.  The vendor area was busier than ever.
• The biggest technical buzz was around Quantum and virtualized Software Defined Networking (SDN) — standing room only at the technical update and all the design sessions, but Cinder, and Keystone were not far behind in incorporating new features and functionality.
• Every time I turned around there seemed to be a new distribution available from both the usual suspects, such as Piston and Nebula, and the big players such as Cisco, SuSe and ???.  Niki Acosta’ Vapor Trail blog has a nice summary of the many vendor announcements.  More on the case of the proliferating distributions coming…
• And finally, the parties this time were for the most part more subdued.  HP’s soirée at the New Children’s Art Museum was cool, but the endless Techno Musak at all of them just gave me a pulsating (pun intended) headache.

As can be seen from this tiny sampling of the Summit activities, an enormous amount of energy and momentum has built up in just over two years.  For a project that will likely eventually be as important as Apache and Linux, every organization and person who has contributed to it should be justifiably proud of their accomplishments so far.

About the Author

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

The growing IT best practices consensus is that creating enterprise clouds are smart money for corporations.  Private cloud infrastructures empower user with self-service portals, stable application building platforms, and flexible service delivery models.  In addition, warming the hearts of corporate bean counters around the world, enterprise clouds can save significant amounts of money by maximizing utilization rates of expensive data center systems.  Cloud nirvana is achievable; there are plenty of successful case studies around proving the value.  However, for many senior IT executives just a review of the corporate IT portfolio is a daunting task, let alone systematically determining which applications should move to the cloud, then figuring out the best way to achieve that goal.

The sorry reality is that no matter how well disciplined a company is about its IT governance, the average enterprise has 20 plus years of legacy applications in its portfolio that it needs to manage.  Over time, even the best run company will acquire what one of my co-workers affectionately refers to as, glops and legacy linguini.  We all know the recipe; start with a couple of semi-successful enterprise application implementations (the kind where the company is using both the old and the new systems and cannot shut down either), throw in a few mergers and acquisitions (include a handful of management regime changes and reorganizations just to spice things up a bit), then stir in thousands of undocumented patches, temporary fixes that turn permanent and shadow IT applications.  Bake until solidified into an impenetrable morass of siloed functions and tangled application inter-dependencies.

Fortunately, there are some emerging tools, methodologies and best practices that can cut through layers of ossified applications, and offer real actionable guidance on the right approach to moving an enterprise application portfolio to the cloud.  If you are seriously considering adding a private cloud to your IT portfolio, here are just a few questions to ask about your portfolio to get started:

• How ready are the applications for migration to the cloud? – There are tools available that can drill down within each application to determine the exact amount of effort it will take to make it cloud ready.
• Would moving the applications be operationally disruptive? – Again, an organizational cloud readiness skills assessment provides guidance to how the IT organization needs to change to meet the different requirements of managing an enterprise cloud.
• Are they built on x86 based Windows or Linux platforms or are they Solaris, HP-UX or some other more exotic platform? — Only a few years ago I ran into an ERP system that was still running on a Data General platform. A rewrite of the application was a foregone conclusion in that case.
• How much of the existing portfolio is already virtualized? – Virtualization is not cloud (a common mistake), but being virtualized makes moving to the cloud that much easier. The average enterprise is typically only 30% virtualized.
• Can the application be replaced by existing SaaS applications that offer similar functionality at a fraction of the cost? — Cloud email, document management and supply chain applications for all except the most unique circumstances are far superior to the legacy systems they are replacing.

From the inside undertaking an enterprise cloud project might seem hopeless, but these types of situations are where bringing in outside experts with real expertise in cloud infrastructures and application transformations can really pay off.  I can tell you from hard earned personal experience, we have seen it before and whatever mess your portfolio is in, others were far worse and they successfully moved their portfolios to the cloud.

About the Author

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

Andy Oram’s recent article on Open Source software and cloud architectures, Reaching the pinnacle: truly open web services and clouds, sparked my thinking on how the enterprise view of cloud architectures might be somewhat different.  While much of the public cloud infrastructure is built using Open Source platforms, recent trends show enterprises are embracing a private cloud model built on proprietary systems, such as VMWare, Azure and IBM Cloud.  Certainly the private cloud vendors are encouraging this trend, but is this a temporary aberration on the road to cloud Nirvana or a different animal entirely?

Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift that has been going on for a few years.  IT systems are no longer represent a competitive advantage for a company — that is something to be horded, treasured and developed – but are seen more like something that resembles a toaster, or a better analogy, a phone system.  It is expected it to work flawlessly for a reasonable cost, and everybody needs to have it to function as a business.  At the consumer end — which is where cloud computing started, see my previous blog post, Looking for Business Innovation in all the Right Places, for a better perspective on my thoughts, people don’t care how it works, they want it to be cheap and always available. If you look at Cloud Computing from that perspective, using Open Source has a clear advantage over a proprietary system.

Gmail and Facebook, as Andy notes, are perfect examples of this phenomenon.  These systems are built on Open Source, not because it is better, but because it is cheaper.  One thing that people often overlook, is that Open Source is not free, far from it, just cheaper if you can live with its idiosyncrasies and lack of a company to blame if something goes wrong.  Clearly larger companies with the technical resources can use that to their advantage to build software on the cloud more cheaply.  I would argue that unlike the expected effect of democratizing software availability, Open Source actual has the opposite effect.  Amazon and Google and other large Cloud vendors can take advantage of the Open Source community and resources, while smaller companies are stuck with using more expensive and less flexible commercial products, or they are purchasing downstream services from Amazon and Google.  To drive home my point, ask yourself, who is supporting the Open Source projects and how are they actually getting paid for?

Where does that leave Open Source?  To my mind, it is an enabling technology, pure and simple.  It serves the cloud providers purposes.  If it were cheaper and more useful to build something proprietary they would do it in a minute.  In fact, Google Chrome and the iPhone OS is the latest in the long history of proprietary software that gets turned into de facto standards over time.  As a business strategy it carries higher risk, but far greater payoff.  That is why both Apple and Microsoft have stuck with their proprietary software strategy for so long.  The cloud providers are using Open Source simply because it is not what keeps potential competitors out of the business.  The high cost of building and maintaining data centers is their real strategic advantage.  Why do you think IBM, HP and other old-line high end service providers are jumping on the private cloud bandwagon?  They already have the infrastructure in place, so they are able to take advantage of their relations with the large corporations to build private clouds for their customers.

About the Author

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