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

Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud - The New Game Changer

The new mantra to the world of Cloud Computing is the Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud. With both vertical & horizontal service solution offerings increasing day by day, the cloud adoption question changed from "if" to "when" and more frequently to "NOW!" With time comes maturity and so has the cloud industry matured - organizations are using a mix of Public, Private & the Hybrid cloud offerings. As organizations increasingly adopt cloud offerings for critical business operations from public and private providers, connecting them all back to the core of the business is becoming a challenge involving complicated integration, orchestration, work-flows and business rules management.

Public Cloud refers to a Cloud offering on the Public Network - Amazon EC2, Private Cloud is an internal Cloud offering within an Enterprise and Hybrid Cloud is a mix of Public & Private Clouds. The new game-changer is the Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud that refers to multiple clouds integrating with the core as well as other clouds! Each of the cloud offering has to connect back to the business and also integrate with the other clouds in the enterprise. Yes, it can get really complicated.

This shift from "cloud" to "clouds" provides new opportunities for Service Providers, but it also brings new challenges to the Enterprise, beyond just integration-security, data integrity and reliability, and business rules management for business processes that depend on enterprise IT assets composed of one or more services.

Smart organizations need to have a comprehensive vision & an execution plan to integrate on-premise systems & the Hybrid Cloud services with the external cloud offerings without which integrations could become a nightmare! With more & more business functions getting on the cloud solutions independently outside the purview of IT Governance & Control, the end to end business processes are getting cluttered with multiple cloud players & service providers. This is resulting in Enterprise chaos and that's where Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud walks in.

To tackle this, organizations are turning to Cloud Service Brokerages that help to aggregate and orchestrate cloud services, manage the relationships and interdependencies required, leaving the back-end complexity transparent to the Organization. Gartner described just such an example in Case Study: Mohawk Fine Papers Uses a CSB to Ease Adoption of Cloud Computing, released in July 2011. Mohawk chose to work with Liaison, an aggregator and orchestrator of cloud services that was able to manage the relationships and interdependencies required, leaving the back-end complexity transparent to Mohawk. Liaison provides Mohawk with on-premises integration, supply chain integration for its 300 customers and 100 suppliers and other external e-commerce partners and with intermediation of all its third-party cloud services providers. While Liaison focused on the technical implementation of doing that, Mohawk focused on successfully incorporating the external service into its various applications and processes to meet new business requirements.

So friends, Cloud Service Brokerage is the new entrepreneurial opportunity in the Cloud World that is giving a new meaning to the Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud!

References to Case Study on Gartner.com and Thor Olavsrud's article on CIO.com

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

Implementing Identity Management in the Cloud

Effective Identity Management needs a very high level of commitment from the corporates and needs dedicated resources to get this accomplished. Typically, Identity Management in the Cloud requires the following to be in place:

• Establishing a Credentials database
• Managing Use Access Rights
• Enforcing the Security Policy
• Developing the capability to create & modify user accounts
• Setting up monitoring of resource accesses
• Setting up a process for removing access rights
• Provide training on the processes

The Open Group and WWW Consortium (W3C) are working towards a global standard for Identity Management System that would be interoperable, provide for privacy, implement accountability and be portable. Identity Management is also being addressed by the XML based eXtensible Name Service (XNS) open protocol for universal addressing and provides a permanent identification address for a container of an individual's personal data & contact information. XNS also provides means to verify whether an individual's contact information is valid and a platform for negotiating the  information exchange. 

Benefits of Identity Management in a Public vs Private Cloud

Public Cloud ·         Implementation best practices (example: provisioning/business use cases, etc.) gained over other customers can be reused in a cost effective manner during similar deployments for a new deployment ·         Security and SLA are at higher risks due to public exposure and a complex shared environment (network complexity) ·         ROI - cost effective in the short term

Private Cloud ·         Implementation expertise (example: development/technical) gained within the enterprise reduces further integration (wider and broader) costs & time ·         Shared Services architecture can be easily reused across the enterprise to easily drive other business requirements ·         Compliance and regulation requirements may be easily monitored/enforced within the company ·         ROI - cost effective over the long term

The ultimate solution is Autonomic Security. This is a self managing computing model in which systems reconfigure themselves in response to changing conditions and are self healing - something similar to the likes of Terminator or i-Robot...! It's still somewhere in the future but mind it, people have already started thinking about it and are working on many prototypes that will change the Cloud Identity Management!

References: Oracle.com, Cloud Security - Ronald L Krutz & Russell Dean Vines
Also posted on BMC Communities

Key Metrics for your Cloud

Both Cloud Consumers and Cloud Service Providers are looking to reduce costs, optimize the services and further their business goals. In order to achieve these, they need to focus on several key metrics:

Time to Market (Cloud Providers): Time is crucial in the highly competitive Cloud Service Provider industry. The time to market is a make / break factor in any cloud deal. The turnaround time for IT resources to be provisioned enables new services and products to be deployed faster than traditional IT and this is a critical success metric for any cloud service provider. Time & Effort required for provisioning a cloud service / resources is of utmost importance to an organization and is also a concern for cloud service providers.Reducing the time & effort to provision a service results in reducing the burden on IT staff thereby resulting in a reduced cost of the Service.

Utilization of Physical Resources: In traditional data centers, a lot of physical resources are under utilized. Cloud based data centers make use of automated workload management & virtualization techniques that help organizations get better ROI on their investments. From a Service Provider perspective, this helps them to maximize and optimize the usage of their resources.

Retirement of the Cloud Services: Proper service management enables organizations and service providers to have an end date to the services to help them manage, plan and budget the resources. In traditional IT data centers, people tend to "forget" services if they don't use it for a while.

SLA Management: This is the basis of tiered support of services in the Cloud. Service Level Agreements allow the services to be deployed by classifying them for uptime & failover parameters.High priority services obviously cost more to support and will be expensive. If your users expect lower service levels - eg. DEV / QA environments, go for lower SLA levels to reduce cost.

Admin - Server Ratio: A key metric for both the cloud consumers and service providers is the Admin to Server ratio. This demonstrates the optimization capabilities of the provider and the lower it is, the more cost benefits the customer can expect. Automation tools, workflows and workload management helps to reduce this ratio.

Predicting Service Costs: A key metric to look for is whether you can predict & trend your service costs. This can help organizations to predict demand, plan capacity and manage costs.

Apart from the above, there are many other factors & metrics that you can look out for based on your organization needs.

Also posted on BMC Communities.