Internal Cloud – Another SOA in the making?

In the CIO blog article titled Economic Recession: Good or Bad for Cloud Computing?, Bernard Golden points to a few important questions on how fruitful will be an exercise to build an internal(private) cloud. I think he has some good points here that anybody attempting to build such environments should consider before jumping into the conclusion that it will improve the efficiency of their enterprise I.T environments without having to compromise on security and ownership issues.

The most important pitfall he points out is that the exercise needs investment, to build a ‘cloud’ layer over the existing (mostly legacy) systems, nobody is going to invest in such a thing. The second point he is raising is that whether there are ‘unused equipments’ lying in your data centers that can be used for building the cloud? Most of the time the answer will be ‘NO’ in my opinion too, simply because application owners are always short of systems, unless of course they have plenty of ‘center of excellence’s within the company who most of the time are ‘center of expenses’.

Also, we have the ‘almost failed’ example of SOA that it’s not easy to shift the I.T structure that is built over the years by multiple teams with multiple needs and priorities into a new umbrella, no matter how much future benefits you can show there, nobody is going to invest there, though all of us like the word ‘innovation’ more than earlier these days. No matter what skills you have in your enterprise I.T, you simply cannot build something that matches the external cloud providers in terms of capabilities and robustness, so you might as well leverage them than competing.

Having supported these arguments, I must say that I’m no a naysayer for internal clouds; my take is that, you sure need it, but don’t attempt building each and every layer of cloud computing within physically. Leverage the existing capabilities of external clouds such as processing power, networks, fault tolerance, dynamic provisioning and even storage for not so critical data backups etc, and build/host your business systems and services over it and form some sort of virtual internal cloud. As a first step, start using existing external clouds for computing needs where you don’t have to worry too much about data security. (Some of my thoughts on this model here).

Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum

Today (Am I always late?) I came across the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum group, working towards addressing one of the (or 'the'?) most important challenges in this technology domain - Interoperability. I will have to dig deep into the resources they have to comment on anything further, but this sure is addressing something very critical for the success of the cloud paradigm, I'll keep an eye on this forum for sure.

First step of cloud adoption – don’t move there

From what I read or hear from people who are in this business of talking to CTOs, CIOs etc(which unfortunately I don’t get to do) I think one of the worry that people have about cloud computing is that they lose ownership of their data, applications etc. Then my question is why don’t they use them for things that don’t need storing their data in clouds? One such case is testing – especially things like performance, load testing of applications.

The other day I was talking to somebody who badly needed to do performance testing for a web application. He could easily hire servers from Amazon for couple of hours and do it and could go back to his customer with the confidence that the application is ready to go live. He runs a small company, and I’m sure if it was not for the cloud environments, there was no way he could do that. So rather than sitting and worrying about how/ why/when etc about ‘moving’ the I.T environment to clouds, start using them for non-production work is what I say.

Then once your enterprise I.T become familiar, comfortable etc start thinking about the move part.

Let's offer GaaS

I agree with analysts on this - high time Indian I.T sector look at the new computing models and make use of them to provide better, wider, more ‘value-added’ services to customers. But my question is have we realized it? Even if we have, what are we doing about it? If we look at the current trends, enterprise I.T is becoming more and more services based(ok, ‘oriented’ - to rhyme with the industry buzzwords). More than the products, it’s the services that are going to be important for the customers(When was it not? Till vendors hijacked enterprise I.T landscapes). That’s the good thing for us, we are already in the services industry and what we need to now look at is to improve our services with the changing information technology landscape.

One such area is offering I.T governance as a service (I don’t want to shorten it to GaaS though), by hosting and provisioning enterprise I.T monitoring and management environments as services along with well defined governance strategy and processes so that customers don’t have to invest in costly monitoring tools and employ costly consulting teams to come up with an IT governance strategy. Some of us may be doing such services already, but we need to have much better solutions evolved in this space, say for example monitoring environments that fetch only meta-data through deployed agents from business environments so that customers are less worried about business data being shared.

What's your take?

(Utility, Grid, Cloud, SaaS, SOA,…) Computing

Though I don’t work with most of these areas, the things mentioned in the title always puzzle me, mainly by producing such questions in my mind as - Are they all the same or are they different? How are they going to affect our (I.T’s I mean) future etc. Here is what I understood so far on each of these things and how they are related, please correct if I’m wrong(and you are right)

Grid computing – A technique in which multiple small computing environments are connected and exposed to outside as a single unit of big processing power, data storage etc.

Utility computing – I think this is more of a business term that refers to somebody offering computing abilities as an external service to those in need of it, where they don’t have to invest in buying own computers on their own. SaaS I would say is an offshoot of this

Cloud computing – Ah! Trouble! Let me escape by saying this – it’s a model where grid capabilities are used in the back-end to deliver computing services to customers?

SOA – I know to some extend what that is, so I would say it’s about the way the computing services are exposed by the environments that provide those as cloud/utility services, so that consumers can have a common mechanism to reach to the servicing systems.

Though there are too much noise in this space currently, I think it will all settle eventually and we will have well tuned computing-on-demand environments available to use. Now the million dollar question is ‘by when?’. Since we are in recession and cannot afford any million dollar stuff, I don’t have an answer.