Archivo de la etiqueta: cloud

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

Have You Met My Friend, Cloud Sprawl?

mayo 15, 2014 John Dixon

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:

Orphaned VMs – a lot like traditional VM sprawl, resulting in increased spend that is completely avoidable
Proliferation of processes – increased overhead for IT operations to stay compliant with various regulations
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:

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.
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.

Featured, Microsoft, Miscellaneous IT

March Madness Final Four: NCAA Basketball & Microsoft Ending Extended Support

abril 4, 2014 Rob OShaughnessy

By Rob O’Shaughnessy, Software Licensing Specialist, Pre-Sales Technical Support

It’s the Final Four for the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, and if you’re like me and your bracket is busted the only thing to root for is a potential happy hour deal at your local watering hole. By midnight on Tuesday morning a victor will be crowed, and there will be fans celebrating their teams win on the court (and winning bets) and fans mourning their loss both on the court and perhaps in their wallet.

On April 8th the season will be over and a new beginning of sorts will occur as teams prepare for the loss of their star players to the draft and or graduation. Some of these players have been loyal to the school and had productive years as players and students. They’ve given it their best to succeed and they should be commended for their efforts, but, as reality sets in, one must understand that it’s time for them to go. Newer, fresher players will replace them because the talent will continue to get better. It’s just the nature of the beast…

Ironically we’re in the Final Four days until Microsoft stops supporting iconic products of Exchange and Office 2003, Windows 2003 Server and Window XP Professional. On April 8th Microsoft will graduate these products and focus their attention on their more current offerings. There are still a lot of customers running these products, and why not, they’ve worked great, but the reality is they are over 10 years old and in four days will no longer be supported. If you’re someone using these products and are looking to make an upgrade, what can you do?

Microsoft has offered, and continues to offer, its products to be purchased through its various license programs. Microsoft technology can still be purchased as a perpetual license and be hosted on premise. In addition, Microsoft also offers some of their products through Office 365, which is their cloud technology sold via a subscription model versus owning a perpetual license. With regards to on-prem/perpetual license vs. cloud/subscription: each customer will have their own preference to choose which licensing model makes sense, but I can tell you this, Microsoft’s investment is in the cloud and they are making Office 365 a very attractive option. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the numbers.

One of Microsoft’s more popular products is Office Professional Plus. To license Office Pro Plus with 3 years of Software Assurance (SA) in the Open Value program it would retail for $954 a device. After the 3 year SA period is up the renewal price for 3 more years of SA is $444 MSRP. Over a 6 year span the price to license a single desktop of Office Professional Plus is $1,398. By getting Software Assurance you’ll be receiving the latest editions that come out as well as Home Use Rights, which allows employees to purchase Office Professional Plus for personal use at a very cheap price.

Now the very same Office Professional Plus through Office 365 retails for $12 per User per Month, which is $144 a year. Over a 6 year period the price of Office Professional Plus through Office 365 would be $864, which is a $534 savings compared to purchasing through the aforementioned volume license option. Office Professional Plus through Office 365 is licensed per user and each user can run it on up to 5 business devices. So an employee can run a copy on their work computer, their Mac, home PC etc. Now, let’s say you don’t want Software Assurance and wanted to look at just the license cost of Office Professional Plus. Well, that would run you $508 per device. To compare, one could purchase Office 365 for 3 years for roughly the same amount, get the latest technology on 5 devices and true-up or true-down the user count depending on how many users need to run Office.

To take it a step further, Microsoft also offers different Office 365 bundles and one of their more popular bundles is the E3 Plan which includes Office Professional Plus, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online Plan-2. This is also licensed per user and runs for $20 per User per Month or $240 a year. When you look at the technology baked into that bundle it’s hard not to see the attractiveness. Plus, since you’re not loading the SW on your own infrastructure, money can be saved on hardware costs.

Lastly if you’re an SMB customer, Microsoft is running a promotion called the SMB Advantage where you can receive subsidy dollars on purchases of Office 365. From now until the end of May, Microsoft will cut a check for 15% on MSRP for Office 365 orders in April and 10% for orders is May. In addition, if the E3 or E4 Plan is purchased, Microsoft will kick in another 10%, so it would be 25% subsidy for April and a 20% for May. To put it in perspective a 100 user purchase of the E3 Plan in April would be a $6,000 subsidy check. This can be used for services, more software or even hardware. Please reach out to your GreenPages Account Executive for more details and to see if you’re eligible.

So as you can see, Microsoft is very cloud centric, and it’s not too late to upgrade that older technology via avenues in place to help you do that. Please reach out (you can fill out this form or send us an email at socialmedia@greenpages.com ) if you would like more details and to see if you’re eligible. GreenPages can also assist you with any migrations needs and questions you may have.

Come Monday night, when Jim Nance is handing over the NCAA trophy and “One Shining Moment” is playing in the background, rest assure that Microsoft won’t be picking up your call to assist with your XP and 2003 support issues. Those products are done, they’ve graduated, but there are some better ones out there…it’s time to move on. It’s just the nature of the beast.

Editor’s Note: Rob picked Syracuse to win the tournament (terrible pick). Luckily he knows a lot more about Microsoft licensing than he does about college hoops.

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

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