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.

Questions to Ask Your Cloud Service Provider...

If you were to sign up for a Cloud Service, be it Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), what are the questions that you would ask? I have tried to list down most of the questions, however, feel free to be extra cautious and do due diligence before you sign the dotted line!

1. Where will my information be stored? Do I have any control or say in this matter? What are the Security laws in these locations?
2. Can I physically inspect your Cloud operations?
3. Can I get historical data on your Performance Indicators along with historical downtime records?
4. What are the Exit Charges or Penalties if I want to switch to another Cloud Service Provider? Will you delete all the data if I move? How do you prove that all data has been removed from your systems?
5. What are your Disaster Recovery Plans & Policies?
6. What are your Privacy Policies?
7. What types of logs will you provide? Can I get a sample log file? How long do you keep the logs?
8. What are your policies regarding my sensitive data during a legal investigation?
9. What are your up-time SLA's?
10. What types of encryption policies will be implemented?
11. How will my servers be provisioned / decommissioned? 

This does not purport to be a full list of questions but tries to cover the majority of questions that you need answers before you sign-up...

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

Amazon EC2 Outage - What just happened?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. However, it just went down for many customers in the East Coast and the cause - Network Error! There were some issues with the Backup jobs failing as well and thereby eliminating redundancy.

The popularity of Amazon’s cheap, easily scalable hosting is showing its downside right now, with a number of popular websites and services throwing up errors or being down completely. Foursquare, Quora, Reddit, Moby and Hootsuite are among those affected by technical troubles on Amazon’s servers. The company’s status dashboard currently shows problems with the company’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Relational Database Service operations, based in North Virginia, with connectivity issues confirmed.
Let's hope that this is just a short term issue and will be fixed immediately, else customers may lose their confidence on the EC2.

So if you are planning to jump onto the EC2 band-wagon or any other low cost Cloud Service, expect these kind of outages as we are dealing with machines and machines may go down! Even their SLA's specify 99.95% uptime, right?