Cloud Platform - Select it carefully!

As a strategic part of your move to the Cloud, your Platform decision will greatly impact how you can maximize  your return on investment. The platform is just not simply a layer of technology. To fulfill the definition of 'Platform', it must meet 3 essential criteria:

1. Create a Standard Interface for users to "Plug-In"
2. Hide the complexity underneath
3. Provide quantifiable & tangible benefits to the users

The Platform helps to achieve the goals of the various cloud components. In a cloud, there are many layers of the platform - the hardware, the hypervisor & the cloud resources management. Each layer provides certain level of abstraction, interfaces & connectors for the next layer and obviously tangible value!

Cloud systems depend on the abstraction away from the virtualized resources, but the physical hardware beneath these virtual resources is critical. The underlying physical servers & storage are the foundation of this behemoth infrastructure and their quality is of utmost concern. Great care should be taken while designing & selecting the physical layer that will be the backbone of your cloud.

This physical layer seamlessly interacts with the hypervisor that provides administrators the ability to partition the physical servers into various virtual servers and hides the complexity of the underlying operating system and its complexities. The hypervisor acts as an agent that just needs to know that it has to setup a cloud service. The source of this request, which cluster to choose, what is the role of the service and what the service will it accomplish is not known to the hypervisor. Different hypervisors offer different type of features & flexibility and there are 3 considerations to keep in mind when choosing your hypervisor:

1. Type of workload that will be run on the hypervisor
2. Compatibility with the Management Layer that you have 
3. Compatibility with other hypervisors in your environment

The cloud resources management layer sits above the hypervisor that abstracts the virtual servers & storage and provides them to the users as a Cloud Service option where users can select & configure the service that they want by adding the components to their shopping cart. A good cloud management technology should integrate both upwards to the Data Center Management environment and downwards to all the underlying resources including hypervisors and should simplify & automate the various components. Select this layer carefully.

Together, all the above 3 layers are the basic platform layers for your cloud. Choose them very carefully as this is going to be the foundation stone of your Cloud!

References to a paper from Bryan Che, Red Hat

Nuts & Bolts of the Cloud

As I wait for my son to wrap his Saturday morning MindVenture class, I decided to type this post on my Blackberry about what is behind the Cloud, its components, basically it's Nuts & Bolts!  I am surely going to have sore thumbs after finishing this article! :-)

So here you go..

At the very heart of a cloud service is a Central Database expressed in an acronym as CMDB. In that layer are stored Policies and the Definitive Media Library that govern how things should be configured & controls around the same. 

The next layer has the elaborative Data Model over which the Service Manager sits as a dictator governing the Workflow Manager, Platform Manager & the Resource Manager. It also controls the Infrastructure Resources like network, storage, servers, hardware, software and all the other bells & whistles. Around these Managers is the Provider API that hooks up all the relevant managers to the providers - Control Provider, Advice Provider & the Resource Providers. These Providers do the actual dirty work of provisioning, communicating, reporting and configuring the resources as per the user requirements.

Beyond the Provider API, there is usually a Cloud API that lets external customer systems talk (integrate) to the Cloud Solution and beyond that is the Cloud User Interface that the Cloud End Users, Cloud Administrators  use to control, monitor & deploy their Cloud Experience!

Each of the above component is a beast in its own way with complex technologies under it. Unless all of these components synch up together and work like a team, the Cloud Solution may just fall apart!

Also posted on BMC Communities

Game of Cricket & Cloud Computing

What? How is cloud computing related to the game of cricket? Impossible! - Nope - the word impossible breaks down to "I M Possible" so yes, Cricket & Cloud Computing go hand in hand just like Cricket and Sachin Tendulkar!

During the 2011 ICC World Cup Finals, July Systems helped millions of cricket-fans across the globe stay updated about the matches on their iPhones and Android phones. Even the heavy-weight media houses like ESPN International, SuperSport and others relied on July Systems to keep their mobile services highly available to sports fans across the globe. And guess what, they used Amazon Web Services Cloud based Mi platform to build, distribute, manage, monetize and measure rich mobile experiences - quickly and effectively.

For IPL 3 Cricket tournament last year, Bangalore based SportingMindz migrated their app - 22yardz, a cricket match analysis product, to the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform to provide analytical solutions and services to sports organizations.22yardz is a cricket match analysis software designed to analyze the different aspects in a live match scenario giving the detailed statistics along with the strategy of oppositions and player analysis in all departments of the match with seamless integration of videos.  The cloud model has helped SportinMindz address pain points such as performance, scalability and availability!

Netmagic Solution's Cloud Computing services enables India's leading sports broadcasting company ESPN-Star Cricket to seamlessly broadcast Cricket T20 World Cup live streaming on demand over the internet without any lag time! With the Cloud hosted solution, they achieved immediate implementation for their client, on-demand scalability, short term hosting for reduced infrastructure costs & economic efficiency!

As you must have guessed by now, Cloud Computing has not only benefited IT industries but now is spreading its reach to non-IT sectors very rapidly!

Also posted on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more