Archivo de la categoría: Cloud computing

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.

 

 

Cloud computing, cloud management, CMaaS, Featured

Modernizing IT by Killing the Transactional Treadmill

By Geoff Smith, Senior Manager, Managed Services, GreenPages-LogicsOne

Many IT departments today are unable to get off the transactional treadmill. You may have some serious talent in your IT department, but valuable, strategic IT assets are becoming bogged down with tactical actions. When this happens, IT cannot fulfill its true purpose: applying technology to enable business success. As an IT decision maker, you need to be providing IT with an effective, efficient, and modern way of addressing every day responsibilities so that internal focus can shift back to supporting crucial business objectives. I consistently see this issue when I’m out in the field speaking with customers. For this reason, I’m hosting a webinar on May 8th to go over some strategies your IT department can implement.

In this webinar you will learn ways to modernize IT operations and combine advanced management tools, mature operating procedures, and a skilled workforce to:

  • Build an Enterprise Command Center to effectively address and monitor the health and status of critical infrastructure systems
  • Leverage run books and Standard Operating Procedures to complete required actions and create consistency in approach
  • Establish a transparent co-sourced operational structure that promotes a culture of collaboration and joint responsibility for success
  • Create visibility and analytics that maximize availability and functionality of technology investments

If you’re interested in learning more, register here & bring your questions May 8th at 11 am EST.

 

 

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

Cloud Computing Entering Hypergrowth Phase

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?

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

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 AWS, Amazon Web Services, Cloud computing, Google, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Opinion

A Big, Perhaps Watershed Week of Cloud Annoucements

  • Google harmonized its cloud computing business to a single entity, with a pricing model intended to hold customers by enticing them to build ever cheaper and more complex software. 
  • Cisco announced it would spend $1 billion on a “cloud of clouds” project. 
  • Microsoft’s new CEO made his first big public appearance, offering Office for the Apple iPad, partly as a way to sell more of its cloud-based Office 365 product.
  • Amazon Web Services announced the general release of its cloud-based desktop computing business, as well as a deal with to offer cloud-based enterprise software tools to industries like healthcare and manufacturing.

For more detail and opinions read this, and listen to this.

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

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

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 42nd 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

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!’