Archivo de la categoría: Cloud computing

Azure, Cloud computing, Featured, Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure – It’s More Than Just Portability

When people discuss Microsoft Azure, they often think about portability to the cloud. One of the misnomers of the Azure cloud is that you’re just taking your on-prem virtual machines and moving them to the cloud when, in reality, Azure is much more than that. It is about VM portability, but it is also running different platforms in the cloud. It’s using instances which allows users to move, say, a web server to an instance in the Azure cloud so they don’t have to worry about the patching and management of that server from month to month. Instead, the user knows that it’s already taken care of for you. Other benefits include uptime SLAs and back up solutions.

Watch the video below with DJ Ferrara to learn more about the benefits Microsoft Azure has to offer.

 

Microsoft Azure – What are the benefits?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfsobUCjff0

What are your thoughts on Microsoft Azure? Has your organization utilized the platform? Any plans to use Azure in the future? Why or why not?

To hear more from DJ, watch his video blog discussing the pros and cons of different public cloud platforms and when it makes sense to use each. If you’d like to speak with DJ more about the Azure cloud, email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com.

 

Video with DJ Ferrara, Vice President & Enterprise Architect

Cloud computing, Featured, Virtualization

So You Want to be a Cloud Architect? Part I

Cloud ArchitectLately, I’ve been taking a look at the role of a cloud architect. What does that role look like? How does one acquire the necessary skills? Where do aspiring cloud architects turn for training? Is it possible to acquire the skills to be an effective cloud architect by taking a course or two? Rick Blaisdell wrote a great blog about a month ago called “Top Cloud Skills Employers are Looking For” that I would highly recommend reading.

Cloud Architect Training, Today

I recently wrote a blog about a Forbes article I read by Jason Bloomberg about the concept of cloudwashing. I think this idea applies very well to the cloud training offerings out there today. If you take a look, many of the cloud training courses that currently exist from established vendors are simply rebranded with “Cloud” as a highlight.

The Valuable Cloud Architect

The cloud architect should possess a healthy combination of the following skills:

  • Technical –especially virtualization with a splash of programming and automation
  • IT operations – in particular the concept of IT services and an IT services portfolio
  • Understanding of your business, its initiatives, its challenges, etc.

Technical Skills of the Cloud Architect

Technically speaking, cloud architects need to bring their past experience to bear, validated by the following certifications:

  • Current VCP
  • ITIL v3 Foundations
  • At least one vendor certification (e.g., AWS Certified Solution Architect)
  • Basic knowledge of programming and automation(2)

Technical competence is more of a pre-requisite for a cloud architect. It should be assumed that a cloud architect has some hands-on experience with these items. As they say, these technical skills are necessary but not sufficient for the complete cloud architect. Having acquired these certifications, an architect would probably be hip to the recent progression of IT that occurred since virtualization became mainstream. If you’ve read this far, you’d probably agree that virtualization alone does not mean cloud computing. However, many of the fundamental characteristics of cloud borrow from virtualization and are practical due to virtualization.

Other Core Skills of the Cloud Architect

Maybe the role of the cloud architect is less technical than we think. Business and market knowledge is absolutely critical for the cloud architect, for several reasons:

  1. Products, features, and prices are changing day to day in the market for cloud services – why is this happening and what will happen tomorrow?
  2. The traditional corporate IT market is, effectively, now a competitor in this market for IT services
  3. Using cloud concepts, new companies are being formed and are growing rapidly – some of these companies may challenge your own business – how can the cloud architect understand them and improve their company’s competitive advantage, recognize partnership opportunities, bring products to market more rapidly using cloud and other emerging technology?

 

The third point is a bit of a departure from what we’ve seen as a cloud architect. This says that a cloud architect should really be a specialist in business issues. More than that, we think that Corporate IT should look to transform to specialize in the business rather than specialize in providing IT services. IT departments should be an Innovation Center for the business. More on that in a future post.

The market for cloud computing is changing every day. Established providers like Amazon Web Services introduce new features and products while also dropping prices. Established companies like Microsoft up their game quickly. New companies form to carve out a niche or challenge an established provider. Barriers to entry are low. Economists call this an active competitive marketplace. What does this mean for consumers? Consumers enjoy significant downward pressure on prices for cloud services (especially for commodity IaaS). This also means many new products from which to choose. For this reason, we think the modern cloud architect also needs to have some knowledge of the following:

  • Consulting Experience (particularly, how to assess an organization)
  • Relationships Between the Customer and Provider(1)
  • Essentials of Behavior in a Competitive Market(1) – specialization, substitutes, complements, network effects

I’ve seen a few posts lately suggesting that individuals in corporate IT need to retool. Here is one of those posts. I definitely agree with the author that IT administrators need to shift focus to services rather than servers. What this post leaves out is a recommendation of which new skills are needed. Which skills or certifications should an IT administrator or architect acquire? How do they get them? Later in this series, I’ll propose a training path for the new role of Cloud Architect, why certain skills are important, and how to acquire them.

For Part II, I’ll propose three different types of cloud architect, outline the responsibilities that individuals in this role might have, and describe a path to obtain the skills needed to deliver in this new role. Leave a comment below with your thoughts & stay tuned for part II.

 

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

Photo credit = http://www.patheos.com/blogs/deaconsbench/2011/10/what-they-didnt-ask/

Cloud computing, cloudwashing, Featured

Forbes Cloudwashing Article: A Few Key Points

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

 

I came across an article from a couple of months ago by Jason Bloomberg in Forbes entitled, “Why Implement Cloud When Cloudwashing Will Suffice?” The article briefly describes adoption of cloud computing and the term “cloudwashing” – what vendors and customers are tending to do in order to get started with cloud computing. The article makes a lot of good points. Below, I highlighted a few of the points that stood out the most to me and added in some of my own thoughts.

“Cloudwashing typically refers to vendors’ and service providers’ exaggerated marketing, where they label a product as “Cloud” even when such designation is either completely false or at best, jumping the gun on a future capability … But it’s not just vendors and service providers who Cloudwash – executives often exaggerate the truth as well … some CIOs are only too happy to put OpenStack or CloudFoundry on their Cloud roadmaps, secure in the knowledge that they will now be able to present themselves as forward-looking and Cloud savvy…”

I’ve seen this firsthand in various conversations. And I don’t think it’s malicious or wrong – I think it represents a limited understanding of cloud computing. I like to point back to recent history and the days of datacenter consolidation. The whole thing was pretty straightforward…we installed some software on servers (vSphere, Hyper-V, or similar) and went to work virtualizing servers. From that, I derived benefits that were easy to understand – fewer servers to administer, less power consumed, vastly improved time to provision new servers, etc. We didn’t have to do much measurement of those things either. Who needs measurement when you consolidate, say, at least ten servers onto one. The whole thing was very comfortable. I think “cloudwashing” is a good term, and it feels like an attempt to replay datacenter consolidation in terms of cloud computing. And…It’ll be BETTER! After all, it is cloud, so the benefits must be greater!

Not so fast though. Mr. Bloomberg makes a key point later in the article, and I agree 100%.

“The underlying story [of cloud computing] is one of business transformation. Cloud Computing does not simply represent new ways of procuring IT assets or software. It represents new ways of doing business. Cloud, along with other Digital Transformation trends in IT including the rise of mobile technologies, the Internet of Things, and the Agile Architecture that facilitates the entire mess, are in the process of revolutionizing how businesses – and people – leverage technology. And as with any revolution, the change is both difficult to implement and impossible to understand while it’s happening.”

I think the author is absolutely correct here. Cloud Computing is a new capability for the business. One of the most exciting prospects of the whole cloud computing scene is this: it allows a business to take on more risk, fail fast, learn, and begin again. Call that the Deming Cycle or P-D-C-A, or whatever you like. Cloud computing has made real the fantastic growth of companies like Uber (valuation greater than Hertz and Avis combined) and Airbnb (in 2014, estimated to book more “hotel stays” than Hilton). Two crazy ideas that were no doubt implemented in “the cloud.”

Cloud is difficult to implement – if you think of it like any other technology project. Where do you start? How do you know when you’re done? Maybe it is not an implementation project at all.

“The choices facing today’s executives are far more complex than is it Cloud or isn’t it, or should we do Cloud or not. Instead, the question is how to keep your eye on your business goals as technology change transforms the entire business landscape.”

I couldn’t agree more with this. I think that IT organizations should specialize in its company’s core business, rather than administering systems that do not provide competitive advantages. At GreenPages, we’re currently bringing to market a set of Professional and Cloud services that will help organizations take advantage of cloud computing that I’m pretty excited about. To learn more about the evolution of the corporate IT department and what it means for IT decision makers, check out my ebook.

What do you think of Jason’s take on cloudwashing?

 

 

Azure, Cloud computing, Featured, vCloud Air

Comparing Cloud Platforms: When it Makes Sense to Use Each

Video with DJ Ferrara, Vice President & Enterprise Architect

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn9-VJ92yxc

 

In this video, DJ discusses the pros and cons different cloud providers have to offer. When does it make sense to use vCloud Air (note: this was filmed right before VMware announced name change from vCHS)? What about Azure? How about Amazon?

If you’re interested in learning more, read this ebook about the evolution of the corporate IT department.

 

 

 

 

 

Cloud computing, Featured, XaaS

X as a Service (XaaS): What the Future of Cloud Computing Will Bring

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

 

Last week, Chris Ward and I hosted a breakout session at Cloudscape 2014, GreenPages’ annual customer Summit. We spoke about cloud service models today (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), as well as tomorrow’s models — loosely defined as XaaS, or Anything-as-a-Service. In this post, I’ll discuss XaaS: what it is and why you might want to consider using it.

First, what is XaaS? Is this just more marketing fluff? Why do we need to define yet another model to fully describe cloud services? I contest that XaaS is a legitimate term, and that it is useful to describe a new type of cloud services — those that make use of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS all neatly delivered in one package. Such packages are intended to fully displace the delivery of a commodity IT service. My favorite example of XaaS is desktop as a service, or DaaS. In a DaaS product, a service provider might assemble it with the following:

  • Servers to run Virtual Desktop Infrastructure from a provider such as Terremark (IaaS)
  • An office suite such as Microsoft Office365 (SaaS)
  • Patching and maintenance services
  • A physical endpoint such as a Chromebook or thin client device

The organization providing DaaS would design, assemble, and manage the product out of best-of-breed offerings in this case. The customer would pay one fee for the use of the product and have the all-important “one throat to choke” for the delivery of the product. At GreenPages, we see the emergence of XaaS (such as DaaS) as a natural evolution of the market for cloud services. This sort of market behavior is nothing new for other industries in a competitive market. Take a look at the auto industry (another one of my favorite examples). When you purchase a car, you are buying a single product from one manufacturer. That product is assembled from pieces provided by many other companies — from the paint, to the brake system, to the interior, to the tires, to the navigation system, to name a few. GM or Ford, for example, doesn’t manufacture any of those items themselves (they did in days past). They source those parts to specialist providers. The brakes come from Brembo. The interior is provided by Lear Corp. The Tires are from Goodyear. The navigation system is produced by Harman. The auto manufacturer specializes in the design, marketing, assembly, and maintenance of the end product, just as a service provider does in the case of XaaS. When you buy an XaaS product from a provider, you are purchasing a single product, with guaranteed performance, and one price. You have one bill to pay. And you often purchase XaaS on a subscription basis, sometimes with $0 of capital investment.

You can download John’s “The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department” eBook here

So, secondly, why would you want to use XaaS? Let’s go back to our DaaS example. At GreenPages, we think of XaaS as one of those products that can completely displace a commodity service that is delivered by corporate IT today. What are commodity services? I like to think of them as the set of services that every IT department delivers to its internal customers. In my mind, commodity IT services deliver little or no value to the top line (revenue) or bottom line (profit) of the business. Desktops and email are my favorite commodity services. Increased investment in email or the desktop environment does not translate into increases in top-line revenue or bottom-line profit for the business. Consider that investment includes financial and time investments. So, why have an employee spend time maintaining an email system if it doesn’t provide any value to the business? Two key questions:

  1. Does investment in the service return measurable value to the business?
  2. In the market for cloud services, can your IT department compete with a specialist in delivering the service?

When looking at a particular service, if you answer is “No” to both questions, then you are likely dealing with a commodity service. Email and desktops are two of my favorite examples. Coming back to the original question… you may want to source commodity services to specialist providers in order to increase investment (time and money) on services that do return value to the business.

We’ll expand this discussion into the role of corporate IT in a future post. For now though, what do you think of XaaS? Would you use it to replace one of your commodity services? Maybe you already do. I’m interested to hear from you about which services you have chosen to source to specialist providers.

cloud brokerage, Cloud computing, Featured, hybrid cloud, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Shadow IT

Managing Resources in the Cloud: How to Control Shadow IT & Enable Business Agility

 

In this video, GreenPages CTO Chris Ward discusses the importance of gaining visibility into Shadow IT and how IT Departments need to offer the same agility to its users that public cloud offerings like Amazon can provide.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AELrS51sYFY

 

 

If you would like to hear more from Chris, download his on-demand webinar, “What’s Missing in Today’s Hybrid Cloud Management – Leveraging Cloud Brokerage”

You can also download this ebook to learn more about the evolution of the corporate IT department & changes you need to make to avoid being left behind.

 

 

 

App Dev, Big Data, Cloud computing, Featured, PaaS, SDN, Storage

Top 25 Findings from Giagom’s 4th Annual “Future of Cloud Computing” Survey

By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud

 

Giagom Research and North Bridge Partners recently released their 4th annual “Future of Cloud Computing” study. There was some great data gathered from the 1,358 respondents surveyed. In case you don’t have time to click through the entire 124 slideshare deck, I’ve pulled out what I think are the 25 most interesting statistics from the study. Here’s the complete deck if you would like to review in more detail.

 

  • 49% using the cloud for revenue generating or product development activities (Slide 9)
  • 80% of IT budget is used to maintain current systems (Slide 20) <–> GreenPages actually held a webinar recently explaining how organizations can avoid spending the majority of their IT budgets on “keeping the lights on“
  • For IT across all functions tested in the survey, 60-85% of respondents will move some or significant processing to the cloud in the next 12-24 months (Slide 21)
  • Shifting CapEx to OpEx is more important for companies with over 5,000 employees (Slide 27)
  • For respondents moving workloads to the cloud today, 27% said they are motivated to do so because they believe using a cloud platform service will help them lower their capital expenditures (Slide 28)
  • Top Inhibitor: Security, remains the biggest concern, despite declining slightly last year, it rose again as an issue in 2014 and was cited by 49% of respondents (Slide 55)
  • Privacy is of growing importance. As an inhibitor, Privacy grew from 25% in 2011 to 31% (Slide 57)
  • Over 1/3 see regulatory/compliance as an inhibitor to moving to the cloud (Slide 60)
  • Interoperability concerns dropped by 45%, relatively, over the past two years…but 29% are still concerned about lock in (Slide 62)
  • Nearly ¼ people still think network bandwidth is an inhibitor (Slide 64)
  • Reliability concerns dropped by half since 2011 (Slide 66)
  • Amazon S3 holds trillions of objects and regularly peaks at 1.5 million requests per second (Slide 71)
  • 90% of world’s data was created in past two years…80% of it is unstructured (Slide 73) <–> Here’s a video blog where Journey to the Cloud blogger Randy Weis talks about big data in more detail
  • Approximately 66% of data is in the cloud today (Slide 74)
  • The number above is expected to grow 73% in two years (Slide 75)
  • 50% of enterprise customers will purchase as much storage in 2014 as they have accumulated in their ENTIRE history (slide 77)
  • IaaS use has jumped from 11% in 2011 to 56% in 2014 & SaaS has increased from 13% in 2011 to 72% in 2014 (Slide 81)
  • Applications Development growing 50% (Slide 84) <–> with the growth of app dev, we’re also seeing the growth of shadow IT. Check out this on-demand webinar “The Rise of Unauthorized AWS Use. How to Address Risks Created by Shadow IT.”
  • PaaS approaching the tipping point! PaaS has increased from 7% in 20111 to 41% in 2014. (Slide 85) <–> See what one of our bloggers, John Dixon, predicted in regards to the rise of PaaS at the beginning of the year.
  • Database as a Service expected to nearly double, from 23% to 44% among users (Slide 86)
  • By 2017, nearly 2/3rds of all workloads will be processed in cloud data centers. Growth of workloads in cloud data centers is expected to be five times the growth in traditional workloads between 2012 and 2017. (Slide 87)
  • SDN usage will grow among business users almost threefold…from 11% to 30%  (Slide 89) <–> Check out this video blog where Nick Phelps talks about the business drivers behind SDN.
  • 42% use hybrid cloud now (Slide 93)
  • That 42% will grow to 55% in 2 years (Slide 94) <–> This whitepaper gives a nice breakdown of the future of hybrid cloud management.
  • “This second cloud front will be an order of magnitude bigger than the first cloud front.” (Slide 117). <–> hmmm, where have I heard this one before? Oh, that’s right, GreenPages’ CEO Ron Dupler has been saying it for about two years now.

Definitely some pretty interesting takeaways from this study. What are your thoughts? Did certain findings surprise you?

 

 

 

Cloud & IT Management, Cloud computing, Free, Google, Google App Engine, Kubernetes, LXC, Open Source, Tools

Google Adds Docker Image Support to App Engine, Announces Kubernetes Container Manager

Google continues to up the cloud ante by adding a set of extensions that allow Google App Engine developers to build and deploy Docker images in Managed VMs. Developers can use these extensions to easily access the large and growing library of Docker images, and the Docker community can easily deploy containers into a completely managed environment with access to services such as Cloud Datastore.

From the Google Cloud Platform Blog:

“Based on our experience running Linux containers within Google, we know how important it is to be able to efficiently schedule containers at Internet scale. To that end, we’re announcing Kubernetes, a lean yet powerful open-source container manager that deploys containers into a fleet of machines, provides health management and replication capabilities, and makes it easy for containers to connect to one another and the outside world. We’ll continue to build out the feature set, while collaborating with the Docker community to incorporate the best ideas from Kubernetes into Docker.”

 

Full details here.

Cloud & IT Management, Cloud computing, Docker, Free, Google, Google App Engine, Kubernetes, LXC, Open Source, Tools

Google Adds Docker Image Support to App Engine, Announces Kubernetes Container Manager

Google continues to up the cloud ante by adding a set of extensions that allow Google App Engine developers to build and deploy Docker images in Managed VMs. Developers can use these extensions to easily access the large and growing library of Docker images, and the Docker community can easily deploy containers into a completely managed environment with access to services such as Cloud Datastore.

From the Google Cloud Platform Blog:

“Based on our experience running Linux containers within Google, we know how important it is to be able to efficiently schedule containers at Internet scale. To that end, we’re announcing Kubernetes, a lean yet powerful open-source container manager that deploys containers into a fleet of machines, provides health management and replication capabilities, and makes it easy for containers to connect to one another and the outside world. We’ll continue to build out the feature set, while collaborating with the Docker community to incorporate the best ideas from Kubernetes into Docker.”

 

Full details here.

Cloud computing, Featured, hybrid cloud, Public Cloud, Shadow IT

Have You Met My Friend, Cloud Sprawl?

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

 

With the acceptance of cloud computing gaining steam, more specific issues related to adoption are emerging. Beyond the big-show topics of self-service, security, and automation, cloud sprawl is one of the specific problems that organizations face when implementing cloud computing. In this post, I’ll take a deep dive into this topic, what it means, how it’s caused, and some options for dealing with it now and in the future.

Cloud Sprawl and VM Sprawl

First, what is cloud sprawl? Simply put, cloud sprawl is the proliferation of IT resources – that provide little or no value – in the cloud. For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll consider cloud to be IaaS, and the resources to be individual server VMs. VM sprawl is a similar concept that happens when a virtual environment goes unchecked. In that case, it was common for an administrator, or someone with access to vCenter, to spin up a VM for testing, perform some test or development activity, and then forget about it. The VM stayed running, consuming resources, until someone or something identified it, determined that it was no longer being used, and shut it down. It was a good thing that most midsize organizations limited vCenter or console access to perhaps 10 individuals.  So, we solved VM sprawl by limiting access to vCenter, and by maybe installing some tools to identify little-used VMs.

So, what are the top causes of cloud sprawl? In IT operations terms, we have the following:

  • Self-service is a central advantage of cloud computing, and essentially cloud means opening up a request system to many users
  • Traditional IT service management (a.k.a. ITIL) is somewhat limited in dealing with cloud, specifically configuration management and change management processes
  • There remains limited visibility into the costs of IT resources, though cloud improves this since resource consumption ends up as a dollar amount on a bill…somewhere

How is Cloud Sprawl Different?

One of the main ideas behind cloud computing – and a differentiator between plain old virtualization and centralization – is the notion of self-service. In the language of VMware, self-service IaaS might be interpreted as handing out vCenter admin access to everyone in the company. Well, in a sense, cloud computing is kind of like that – anyone who wants to provision IaaS can go out to AWS and do just that. What’s more? They can request all sorts of things, aside from individual VMs. Entire platform stacks can be provisioned with a few clicks of the mouse. In short, users can provision a lot more resources, spend a lot more money, and cause a lot of problems in the cloud.

We have seen one of our clients estimate their cloud usage at a certain amount, only to discover that actual usage was over 10 times their original estimate!

In addition, cloud sprawl can go in different directions than plain old VM sprawl. Since there are different cloud providers out there, the proliferation of processes and automation becomes something to watch out for. A process to deal with your internal private cloud may need to be tweaked to deal with AWS. And it may need to be tweaked again to deal with another cloud provider. In the end, you may end up with a different process to deal with each provider (including your own datacenter). That means more processes to audit and bring under compliance. The same goes for tools – tools that were good for your internal private cloud may be completely worthless for AWS. I’ve already seen some of my clients filling their toolboxes with point solutions that are specific to one cloud provider. So, bottom line is that cloud sprawl has the potential to drag on resources in the following ways:

  1. Orphaned VMs – a lot like traditional VM sprawl, resulting in increased spend that is completely avoidable
  2. Proliferation of processes – increased overhead for IT operations to stay compliant with various regulations
  3. Proliferation of tools – financial and maintenance overhead for IT operations

 

Download John’s ebook “The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department” to learn more

 

How Can You Deal with Cloud Sprawl?

One way to deal with cloud sprawl is to apply the same treatment that worked for VM sprawl: limit access to the console, and install some tools to identify little-used VMs. At GreenPages, we don’t think that’s a very realistic option in this day and age. So, we’ve conceptualized two new approaches:

  1. Adopt request management and funnel all IaaS requests through a central portalThis means using the accepted request-approve-fulfill paradigm that is a familiar concept from IT service management.
  2. Sync and discoverGive users the freedom to obtain resources from the supplier of their choosing, whenever and wherever they want. IT operations then discovers what has been done, and runs their usual governance processes (e.g., chargeback, showback) on the transactions.

Both options have been built in to our Cloud Management and a Service (CMaaS) platform. I see the options less as an “either/or” decision, and more of a progression of maturity within an organization. Begin with Option 2 – Sync and Discover, and move toward Option 1 – Request Management.

As I’ve written before, and I’ll highlight here again, IT service management practices become even more important in cloud. Defining services, using proper configuration management, change management, and financial management is crucial to operating cloud computing in a modern IT environment. The important thing to do now is to automate configuration and change management to prevent impeding the speed and agility that comes with cloud computing. Just how do you automate configuration and change management? I’ll explore that in an upcoming post.

See both options in action in our upcoming webinar on cloud brokerage and governance. Our CTO Chris Ward will cover:

  • Govern cloud without locking it down: see how AWS transactions can be automatically discovered by IT operations
  • Influence user behavior: see how showback reports can influence user behavior and conserve resources, regardless of cloud provider
  • Gain visibility into costs: see how IaaS costs can be estimated before provisioning an entire bill of materials

 

Register for our upcoming webinar being held on May 22nd @ 11:00 am EST. “The Rise of Unauthorized AWS Use. How to Address Risks Created by Shadow IT.