Archivo de la categoría: Cloud computing

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, Cloud computing, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, OpenStack, Research

Cloud Computing Entering Hypergrowth Phase

abril 24, 2014 Richard

Cloud services and cloud platforms are now an undeniable part of the IT landscape. Forrester research indicates the shift has begun from exploration of cloud as a potential option, to rationalization of cloud services within the overall IT portfolio.

Cloud platforms, most notably Amazon Web Services, were only collectively $4.7 billion last year but are maturing quickly thanks to stronger recent solutions from traditional IT partners IBM, HP and Microsoft. The growth in use, maturity, and financial viability of public cloud platforms are proving their longstanding value as legitimate deployment options for enterprise applications. While not a one-for-one replacement for on-premise, hosting, or colocation, cloud platforms fit well as ideal deployment options for elastic and transient workloads built in modern application architectures.

For applications and services built in an agile mode with modern architectures, discrete cloud services, such as database, storage, integration and other standalone cloud middleware components, will empower developers by freeing them from the management and maintenance of these components and reduce overall deployment footprint and cost. They are also managed and enhanced by vendors as often as daily delivering new capabilities that can help a company maintain pace with the changing desires of an empowered customer base

As the largest clouds continue to invest in efficiencies that can only be achieved at their massive scales, the gulf between the cost efficiencies that can be had from the cloud and what is possible on-premise or through other outsourcing and hosting options will widen dramatically.

How Forrester came to these conclusions.

Aereo, Cloud computing, DropBox, Electronic Frontier Foundation, File Sharing, Internet television, Legal, Supreme Court, Video

Aereo Decision: the Cloud at a Crossroad?

abril 21, 2014 Richard

Broadcasters’ latest legal target is 2-year-old upstart Aereo—which retransmits over-the-air broadcast television using dime-sized antennas to paying consumers, who can watch TV online or record it for later viewing. The case, before the Supreme Court, may have impact on cloud computing generally, not just on Aereo’s business. A federal appeals court said that Aereo’s service is akin to a consumer putting a broadcast antenna atop their dwelling. Aereo, the appeals court ruled, “provides the functionality of three devices: a standard TV antenna, a DVR, and a Slingbox”

Companies like Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Yahoo, and others are worried that a victory for the broadcasters could upend the cloud. The companies, in trade association briefs, told the justices in a recent filing that the “dramatic expansion of the cloud computing sector, bringing with it real benefits previously only imagined in science fiction, depends upon an interpretation of the Copyright Act that allows adequate breathing room for transmissions of content.”

Consider any file-hosting service that allows people to store their own material, such as Dropbox. What if it can be shown they are storing copyrighted work. Do they need a license?

Mitch Stoltz, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney, said in a telephone interview that, “If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the broadcasters, their opinion might create liability for various types of cloud computing, especially cloud storage.”

But, in urging the high court to kill Aereo, the broadcasters said that “The disruption threatened by Aereo will produce changes that will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.”

More detail and analysis.

Amazon, Amazon AWS, Cloud computing, Data center, Google

Amazon, Google: a Battle to Dominate the Cloud

abril 16, 2014 Richard

The cloud is just a vast mass of computers connected to the internet, on which people or companies can rent processing power or data storage as they need it.

All the warehouses of servers that run the whole of the internet, all the software used by companies the world over, and all the other IT services companies hire others to provide, or which they provide internally, will be worth some $1.4 trillion in 2014, according to Gartner Research—some six times Google and Amazon’s combined annual revenue last year.

When that time comes, all the world’s business IT needs will be delivered as a service, like electricity; you won’t much care where it was generated, as long as the supply is reliable.

Way back in 2006, Amazon had the foresight to start renting out portions of its own, already substantial cloud—the data centers on which it was running Amazon.com—to startups that wanted to pay for servers by the hour, instead of renting them individually, as was typical at the time. Because Amazon was so early, and so aggressive—it has lowered prices for its cloud services 42 times since first unveiling them, according to the company—it first defined and then swallowed whole the market for cloud computing and storage.

Even though Amazon’s external cloud business is much bigger than Google’s, Google still has the biggest total cloud infrastructure—the most servers and data centers. Tests of Amazon’s and Google’s clouds show that by one measure at least—how fast data is transferred from one virtual computer to another inside the cloud—Google’s cloud is seven to nine times faster than Amazon’s.

The question is, is Amazon’s lead insurmountable?

Amazon, cloud brokerage, Cloud computing, Featured, Public Cloud

Google & Amazon Cut Prices & Microsoft is Next. Why Not Take Advantage of Them All?

marzo 28, 2014 Journey to the Cloud

By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud

There’s been a lot of talk this week about price cuts coming from cloud providers. First Google announced several price reductions for most of its cloud services. In response, Amazon announced a round of price cuts as well. This marked the 42^nd time AWS has reduced prices since 2006. This means that Microsoft Azure will most likely get in on the action as well. Last April, Microsoft pledged that it would match any price drops from AWS. In early 2014, Microsoft did just that when it lowered prices to match a reduction made by Amazon. TechCrunch has nice write-ups on the specifics of the Google & Amazon price reductions.

Obviously price cuts are beneficial to organizations using these platforms, but wouldn’t it make sense to take advantage of price cuts from multiple providers at the same time to maximize cost savings and performance? What if you moved different applications to different clouds – or even different parts of an application to different clouds?

Let’s say you have some applications for your database that require high-end performance, and you’re willing to pay more for performance. But if you use a more expensive provider exclusively, you may be overspending in other areas that do not require as high performance. So, instead of running all your apps on the same provider, you could move some, say, commodity web-based applications that don’t require as much performance to the cheapest provider. You also have to keep in mind that the best option could be to keep the application on premise. This is only one example. John Dixon wrote a great ebook about the evolution of the corporate IT department and gives a more in depth look at the “which app, which cloud” philosophy that I highly recommend downloading.

So why don’t more companies split applications across multiple cloud providers? It’s simple; it’s complex and painful to manage. Furthermore, price cuts can happen at the spur of the moment so you need to be able to take advantage in real time to maximize savings.

This is where you need a management platform like GreenPages’ Cloud Management as a Service (CMaaS) Brokerage and Governance offering. CMaaS gives you the ability to match the right applications to the right cloud providers and compare the true cost of running your resources at a CSP before even placing an order. The platform eliminates cloud sourcing complexity with a central portal where business and IT users can quickly and easily aggregate, procure, and pay for cloud solutions. It answers the “which app, which cloud?” question across both internal private and public cloud environments.

Has your organization looked into spreading different applications across different clouds? What are your thoughts?

Download whitepaper: Cloud Management, Now

Cloud computing, cloud service broker, Featured, IaaS, IT Management

Are We All Cloud Service Brokers Now? Part II

marzo 6, 2014 John Dixon

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

In my last post, I discussed Cloud Service Brokers and some of their benefits after reading a couple of articles from Robin Meehan (Article 1 here and Article 2 here). In this post, I will break down some of Robin’s points and explain why I agree or disagree with each.

At the end of last post, I was breaking down cloud arbitrage into three areas (run-time, deployment-time, plan-time). Credit to Robin for run-time and deployment-time arbitrage. I really like those terms, and I think it illuminates the conversation. So, run-time cloud arbitrage is really science fiction right now – this is where the CSB moves running workloads around on the fly to find the best benefit for the customer. I haven’t seen any technology (yet) that does this. However, VMware does deployment-time and run-time arbitrage with VMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduling – albeit, in a single virtual datacenter, with individual VMs, and with a single policy objective to balance a cluster’s load across vSphere nodes. See Duncan Epping’s excellent write up on DRS here. Even 10 years ago, this was not possible. 15 years ago, this was certainly science fiction. Now, it’s pretty common to have DRS enabled for all of your vSphere clusters.

A few of Robin’s points…

Point 1:
“The ability to migrate IT workloads dynamically (i.e. at run-time, not at deployment time) is something I sometimes see as a capability under the ‘cloud broker’ banner, but in my view it really just doesn’t make sense – at least not at the moment.”

I agree. Run-time cloud arbitrage and workload migration ala vMotion is not possible today in cloud. Will it be possible within the next few years? Absolutely. I think it will first manifest itself in a VMware High Availability-like scenario. Again, see Duncan Epping’s fantastic deep-dive into HA. If cloud provider X drops off of the internet suddenly, then restart the resources and application at cloud provider Y (where cloud provider Y might even be your own datacenter). This is sometimes known as DR as a service, or DRaaS. And even now, there are some DRaaS solutions that are coming onto the market.

Point 2:
“The rate of innovation in the IaaS/PaaS/DaaS market is such that most of the other vendors are playing catch-up with AWS, as AWS continue to differentiate themselves from the following pack. This shows no sign of slowing down over the next couple of years – so the only way a migrated workload is going to work across multiple cloud vendors is if it only relies on the lowest common denominator functionality across the vendors, which is typically basic storage, virtualised compute and connectivity.”

Also agree, the rate of innovation in the market for cloud computing is rapid as specialization sets in at an industrial level. This also means that downward price pressures are enormous for vendors in the cloud space, even today as vendors vie for market share. As switching costs decrease (e.g., portability of applications increases), prices for IaaS will decrease even more. Now, wouldn’t you, as a customer, like to take advantage of this market behavior? Take in to consideration that CSBs aggregate providers but they also aggregate customer demand. If you believe this interpretation of the market for IaaS, then you’ll want to position yourself to take advantage of it by planning portability for your applications. A CSB can help you do this.

Point 3:
“The bottom line is that if you are going to architect your applications so they can run on any cloud service provider, then you can’t easily use any of the good bits and hence your value in migrating to a cloud solution is diminished. Not ruined, just reduced.”

Disagree. To take advantage of market behavior, customers should look to avoid using proprietary features of IaaS platforms because they compromise portability. Like we noted earlier, increased portability of applications means more flexibility to take advantage of market behavior that leads to decreasing prices.

This is where perspective on cloud becomes really important. For example, GreenPages has a customer with a great use case for commodity IaaS. They may deploy ~800 machines in a cluster at AWS for only a matter of hours to run a simulation or solve a problem. After the result is read, these machines are completely destroyed—even the data. So, it makes no difference to this customer where they do this work. AWS happens to be the convenient choice right now. Next quarter, it may be Azure, who knows? I’m absolutely certain that this customer sees more benefit in avoiding the use of propriety features (a.k.a., the “good bits” of cloud) in a cloud provider rather than using them.

What is your perspective on cloud?
• A means to improve time to market and agility
• A way to transform capex into opex
• Simply a management paradigm – you can have cloud anywhere, even internally as long as you have self-service and infinite resources
• An enabler for a new methodology like DevOps
• Simply a destination for applications

I think that a good perspective may include all of these things. Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Interested in learning more? Download this free whitepaper ‘Cloud Management, Now!’

Cloud computing, cloud service broker, Featured, Public Cloud

Are We All Cloud Service Brokers Now?

marzo 4, 2014 John Dixon

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

Robin Meehan of Smart421 recently wrote a couple of great posts on cloud service brokers (CSBs) and the role that they play for consumers of cloud services. (http://smart421.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/were-mostly-all-cloud-services-brokers-now/ and http://smart421.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/cloud-brokerage-and-dynamic-it-workload-migration/). I’m going to write two blogs about the topic. The first will be a background on my views and interpretations around cloud service brokers. In the second post, I will break down some of Robin’s points and explain why I agree or disagree.

Essentially, a cloud broker offers consumers three key things that a single cloud provider does not (these are from the NIST definition of a Cloud Service Broker):

Intermediation
Aggregation
Arbitrage (run-time, deployment-time, plan-time)

My interpretation of these is as follows. We’ll use Amazon Web Services as the example IaaS cloud provider and GreenPages as the example of the cloud broker:

Intermediation. As a cloud broker, GreenPages, sits between you, the consumer, and AWS. GreenPages and other CSBs do this so they can add value to the core AWS offering. Why? Billing and chargeback is a great example. A bill from AWS includes line item charges for EC2, S3, and whichever other services you used during the past month – so you would be able to see that EC2 charges for January were $12,502.90 in total. GreenPages takes this bill and processes it so that you would be able to get more granular information about your spend in January. We would be able to show you:

Spend per application
Spend per environment (development, test, production)
Spend per tier (web, application, database)
Spend per resource (CPU, memory, storage, managed services)
Compare January 2014 to December, or even January 2013
Estimate the spend for February 2014

So, going directly to AWS, you’d be able to answer a question like, “how much did I spend in total for compute in January?”

And, going through GreenPages as a cloud broker, you’d be able to answer a question like, “how much did the development environment for Application X cost in January, and how does that compare with the spend in December?”

I think you’d agree that it is easier to wrap governance around the spend information from a cloud service broker rather than directly from AWS. This is just one of the advantages of using a CSB in front of a cloud provider – even if you’re like many customers out there and choose to use only one provider.

Aggregation. As a CSB, GreenPages aggregates the offerings from many providers and provides a simple interface to provision resources to any of them. Whether you choose AWS, Terremark, Savvis, or even your internal vSphere environment, you’d use the same procedure to provision resources. On the provider side, CSBs also aggregate demand from consumers and are able to negotiate rates. Why is this important? A CSB can add value in three ways here:

1) By allowing you to compare the offerings of different providers – in terms of pricing, SLA guarantees, service credits, supported configurations, etc.

2) By placing a consistent approval framework in front of requests to any provider.

3) By using aggregated demand to negotiate special pricing and terms with providers – terms that may not be available to an individual consumer of cloud services

The approval framework is of course optional – if you wish, you could choose to allow any user to provision infrastructure to any provider. Either way, a CSB can establish a request management framework in front of “the cloud” and can, in turn, provide things like an audit trail of requests and approvals. Perhaps you want to raise an ITIL-style change whenever a cloud request is fulfilled? A CSB can integrate with existing systems like Remedy or ServiceNow for that.

Arbitrage. Robin Meehan has a follow-on post that alludes to cloud arbitrage and workload migration. Cloud arbitrage is somewhat science fiction at this time, but let’s look forward to the not-too-distant future.

First, what is arbitrage and cloud arbitrage? NIST says it is an environment where the flexibility to CSB has the flexibility to choose, on the customer’s behalf, where to best run the customer’s workload. In theory, the CSB would always be on the lookout for a beneficial arrangement, automatically migrate the workload, and likely capture the financial benefit of doing so. This is a little bit like currency arbitrage, where a financial institution is looking for discrepancies in the market for various currencies, and makes various transactions to come up with a beneficial situation. If you’ve ever seen the late-night infomercials for forex.com, don’t believe the easy money hype. You need vast sums of money and perfect market information (e.g., you’re pretty much a bank) to play in that game.

So, cloud arbitrage and “just plain currency arbitrage” are really only similar when it comes to identifying a good idea. This is where we break it down cloud arbitrage into three areas:

Run-time arbitrage
Deployment-time arbitrage
Plan-time arbitrage

In my next post, I will break down cloud arbitrage as well as go over some specific points Robin makes in his posts and offer my opinions on them.

To learn more about transforming your IT Department to a broker of IT services download this ebook

Cloud computing, Featured, ITaaS, Public Cloud, SDDC

The Big Shift: From Cloud Skeptics & Magic Pills to ITaaS Nirvana

febrero 27, 2014 Journey to the Cloud

By Ron Dupler, CEO GreenPages Technology Solutions

Over the last 4-6 quarters, we have seen a significant market evolution, with our customers and the overall market moving from theorizing about cloud computing to defining strategies and plans to reap the benefits of cloud computing solutions and implement hybrid cloud models. In a short period of time we’ve seen IT thought leaders move from debating the reality and importance of cloud computing, to trying to understand how to most effectively grasp the benefits of cloud computing to improve organizational efficiency, velocity, and line of business empowerment. Today, we see the leading edge of the market aggressively rationalizing their application architectures and driving to hybrid cloud computing models.

Internally, we call this phenomenon The Big Shift. Let’s discuss what we know about The Big Shift. First for all of the cloud skeptics reading this, it is an undeniable fact that corporate application workloads are moving from customer owned architectures to public cloud computing platforms. RW Baird released an interesting report in Q’4 of 2013 that included the following observations:

Corporate workloads are moving to the public cloud.
Much of the IT industry has been asleep at the wheel as Big Shift momentum has accelerated due to the fact that public cloud spending still represents a small portion of overall IT spend.
Traditional IT spending is growing in the low single digits. 2-3% per year is a good approximation.
Cloud spending is growing at 40% plus per year.
What we call The Big Shift is accelerating and is going to have a tremendous impact on the traditional IT industry in the coming years. For every $1.00 increase in public cloud spending, there is a corresponding $3.00-$4.00 decrease in customer-owned IT spend.

There are some other things we know about The Big Shift:

The Big Shift is disrupting old industry paradigms and governance models. We see market evidence of this in traditional IT industry powerhouses like HP and Dell struggling to adapt and reinvent themselves and to maintain relevance and dominance in the new ITaaS era. We even saw perennial powerhouse Cisco lower its 5 year growth forecast during last calendar Q’4 due to the forces at play in the market. In short, the Big Shift is driving disruption throughout the entire IT supply chain. Companies tied to the traditional, customer-owned IT world are finding themselves under financial pressures and are struggling to adapt. Born in the cloud companies like Amazon are seeing tremendous and accelerating growth as the market embraces ITaaS.

In corporate America, the Big Shift is causing inertia as corporate IT leaders and their staffs reassess their IT strategies and strive to determine how best to execute their IT initiatives in the context of the tremendous market change going on around them. We see many clients who understand the need to drive to an ITaaS model and embrace hybrid cloud architectures but do not know how best to attack that challenge and prepare to manage in a hybrid cloud world. This lack of clarity is causing delays in decision making and stalling important IT initiatives.

Let’s discuss cloud for a bit. Cloud computing is a big topic that elicits emotional reactions. Cloud-speak is pervasive in our industry. By this point, the vast majority of your IT partners and vendors are couching their solutions as cloud, or as-a-service, solutions. Some folks in the industry are bold enough to tell you that they have the magic cloud pill that will lead you to ITaaS nirvana. Due to this, many IT professionals that I speak with are sick of talking about cloud and shy away from the topic. My belief is that this avoidance is counterproductive and driven by cloud pervasiveness, lack of precision and clarity when discussing cloud, and the change pressure the cloud revolution is imposing on all professional technologists. The age old mandate to embrace change or die has never been more relevant. Therefore, we feel it is imperative to tackle the cloud discussion head on.

Download our free whitepaper “Cloud Management, Now“

Let me take a stab at clarifying the cloud discussion. Figure 1 below represents the Big Shift. As noted above, it is undeniable that workloads are shifting from private, customer owned IT architectures, to public, customer rented platforms, i.e. the public cloud. We see three vectors of change in the industry that are defining the cloud revolution.

The first vector is the modernization of legacy, customer-owned architectures. The dominant theme here over the past 5-7 years has been the virtualization of the compute layer. The dominant player during this wave of transformation has been VMware. The first wave of virtualization has slowed in the past 4-6 quarters as the compute virtualization market has matured and the vast majority of x86 workloads have been virtualized. There is a new second wave that is just forming and that will be every bit as powerful and important as the first wave. This wave is represented by new, advanced forms of virtualization and the continued abstraction of more complex components of traditional IT infrastructure: networking, storage, and ultimately entire datacenters as we move to a world of software defined datacenter (SDDC) in the coming years.

The second vector of change in the cloud era involves deploying automation, orchestration, and service catalogues to enable private cloud computing environments for internal users and lines of business. Private cloud environments are the industry and corporate IT’s reaction to the public cloud providers’ ability to provide faster, cheaper, better service levels to corporate end users and lines of business. In short, the private cloud change vector is driven by the fact that internal IT now has competition. Their end users and lines of business, development teams in particular, have new service level expectations based on their consumer experiences and their ability to get fast, cheap, commodity compute from the likes of Amazon. To compete, corporate IT staffs must enable self-service functionality for their lines of business and development teams by deploying advanced management tools that provide automation, orchestration, and service catalogue functionality.

The third vector of change in the cloud era involves tying the inevitable blend of private, customer-owned architectures together with the public cloud platforms in use today at most companies. The result is a true hybrid cloud architectural model that can be managed, preserving the still valid command and control mandates of traditional corporate IT, and balancing those mandates with the end user empowerment and velocity expected in today’s cloud world.

In the context of these three change vectors we see several approaches within our customer base. We see some customers taking a “boil the ocean” approach and striving to rationalize their entire application portfolios to determine best execution venues and define a path to a true hybrid cloud architecture. We see other customers taking a much more cautious approach and leveraging cloud-based point solutions like desktop and disaster recovery as-a-service to solve old business problems in new ways. Both approaches are valid and depend on uses cases, budgets, and philosophical approach (aggressive, leading-edge, versus conservative follow-the-market thinking).

GreenPages business strategy in the context of the ITaaS and cloud revolution is simple. We have built an organization that has the people, process, and technologies to provide expert strategic guidance and proven cloud-era solutions for our clients through a historical inflection point in the way that information technology is delivered to corporate end users and lines of business. Our cloud management as a service offering (CMaaS) provides a technology platform that helps customers integrate the disparate management tools deployed in their environments and federate alerts through an enterprise command center approach that gives a singular view into physical, virtual, and public cloud workloads. CMaaS also provides cloud service brokerage and governance capabilities allowing our customers to view price-performance analytics across private and public cloud environments, design service models and view the related bills of material, and view and consolidate billings across multiple public cloud providers. What are your thoughts on the Big Shift? How is your organization addressing the changes in the IT landscape?

ICLOUD PE

Archivo de la categoría: Cloud computing

Cloud Computing Entering Hypergrowth Phase

Amazon, Google: a Battle to Dominate the Cloud

The cloud news categorized.