Abicloud and Nimbus

Past couple of weeks I had been looking at few of the open source cloud computing environments, primarily Infrastructure as a service offerings. I’ve already mentioned about Eucalyptus in an earlier post, this time I’m going to mention two other offerings in this space – abiquo Abicloud and Nimbus. Though I don’t have the ‘bandwidth’ to evaluate each and give a feature comparison etc, here are few aspects of these environments that I found interesting.

Abicloud

Infrastructure software, for creating and managing cloud infrastructure, where you can create and manage ‘virtual datacenters’, a heterogeneous environment that facilitate private-public clouds to be managed from a single point. Typical cloud infrastructure features such as dynamic provisioning, de-provisioning, scaling etc are promised(I’m yet to try it, my Fedora 9 is giving me a tough time setting up VirtualBox, a pre-requisite for abiCloud). The virtual datacenter concept is what I liked here, a good way to organize and manage your enterprise I.T infrastructure

Nimbus

An aggregation of tools facilitating Infrastructure as a service. Claims they are primarily looking at building clouds/grids for scientific research, but since science and enterprise go hand in hand, I think we can use them too. I’m yet to have a closer look at this, as like any other ‘scientific’ software, looks not very ‘user friendly’ for us who spent too much time in business computing environments, have a look if any of you are interested in getting things done the hard way, but the right way.

Eucalyptus

Those who are looking for establishing a hybrid cloud environment(a combination of public and private ‘clouds’) must look at the latest developments happening with Eucalyptus, the open cloud platform. Apart from the elastic computing capabilities, it now has an interface to Amazon EC2 as well(I understand that the latest one is also compatible with S3), making it possible for customers to leverage both internal and external cloud capabilities. I always feel this is an important aspect of on-demand computing environments so that users can get the best services, irrespective of whether the resources are internal or external.

Though I’ve not experimented with it yet(shall do that next week on), this open source environment from what I gather is evolving in the right direction, to become a standards based, hybrid, services based cloud platform and more importantly it’s an open platform, means if you are worried about getting ‘locked-in’, it will be to yourself, a safer bet after all. Documentation on Eucalyptus here for those who are interested.

Why is IT all still Cloudy?

Those who say ‘cloud computing’ is yet another buzzword for whatever was existing earlier – Utility, Grid, SOA, <<x>>aaS and even the internet, I would say are both right and wrong. Right because it is all of the above. Wrong because the skepticism on adopting, attempting to improve something just because it exists (in pieces) already doesn’t help. Technology gets better when we find synergy between existing solutions. Cloud computing, even after being on top of the I.T hype cycles for couple of years, still not emerged as an underlying principle of enterprise architecture and I wonder why.

One of the key reasons I think is about the ambiguity on the internal versus external debate. For some, its still about resource virtualization or about using external data centers for hosting their systems, with the additional feature of ‘pay-as-you-go’. For others, anything that’s ‘internety’ is already cloud, so why waste any more time on something that’s already there.

On top of it, some of the recent analyst reports doubting whether adopting cloud environments will really benefit enterprises, as well as some attempts to define boundary/standards for the paradigm also sent out wrong messages about cloud computing. Also many (especially virtualization product vendors) projected it as a resource optimization mechanism, and not as a front-line business enabler.

Important enterprise concerns about security, ownership, regulations that protects their assets, interoperability standards are not addressed adequately as well. Also some of the key service delivery issues such as supports, network requirements and other governance aspects are not being well addressed. In my opinion(and I mentioned it here on multiple occasions), the fundamental problem here is people don’t look at the cloud of the larger spectrum of Information System services that can be provisioned on-demand by connecting a network of internal and external resources.

Cloud and virtualization

In his Cloud Interoperability Magazine blog post title “Cloud Computing Surpasses Virtualization in Popularity”, Reuven Cohen writes

"I was recently looking at Google's trends & insights tool and noticed something very interesting has happened over the last month or so. For the first time the term "cloud computing" has surpassed "virtualization" in terms of search popularity. What is all the more interesting is it took cloud computing a little over a year and half compared to nearly 5 years for virtualization to see the same level of search volumes. Astounding growth to say the least.


I think this is no surprise. Virtualization addresses only one part of cloud computing paradigm IMO – how to realize it technically. A cloud is much more than that, covering the larger spectrum of I.T services and not just the infrastructure. As I wrote here earlier, cloud computing is multi-dimensional and should cover the presently fragmented

1. Cloud of infrastructure services(IaaS, PaaS)
2. Cloud of internal enterprise shared services (the ‘internal cloud’)
3. Cloud of externally provisioned software services (SaaS)

We need Cloud - of services; not of server racks

In this Forbes article, Andy Greenberg quotes McKinsey analyst William Forrest, stating that cloud computing in its present form could turn out costlier for (large) enterprise users. Now my question is what is the ‘present form’ of cloud computing? If your answer is a ‘completely externally hosted I.T infrastructure, provisioned on-demand, charged on a pay-as-you-use basis’, I agree, the benefits are not much beyond SMEs, risk is high as well. But if it’s about ‘Provisioning and consuming I.T capabilities as shared, distributed, on-demand services spread across a cloud of computing infrastructure that include external and internal environments’, I would say the result will be very positive.

Firstly I think we should get away with this ‘Amazon and Amazon only’ mindset when talking about cloud computing. Cloud is a ‘cloud of IT capabilities’ and not a ‘cloud of server racks’ IMO. Now these I.T capabilities could come from your internal shared services environments, it could come from the externally hosted high capacity systems or it could come from externally hosted shared business services. I think then only it forms a true ‘cloud’.

So even if you are a cautious enterprise user who would not want to completely trust an external vendor to take care of your information technology needs and still want to manage it all in a cost effective way, I say a hybrid cloud approach sure will help you. Firstly, by having internal, shared services, you have achieved a level of normalization and streamlining of your I.T environments (Let me not use SOA here). Secondly by using external environments for high intensity processing jobs (on which I’ve written on multiple occasions here), you get rid of a large cost factor. Thirdly, by consuming relevant external business services (Yes, from SaaS providers), you further reduce investment and maintenance requirements.

Now I’m no MBA to tell you what are your ‘ROI’ gains by having such an approach, all I can say is if you smartly plan, architect and re-arrange your I.T environments leveraging both internal and external computing capabilities, that becomes your cloud, which becomes your cost effective I.T that we always talk about.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce(Beta)

In one of my earlier posts, I’ve mentioned some of the purposes for which enterprises can use cloud environments, even in their current ‘immature’ form. The key I think is exploring how we can use them for information processing capabilities such as performance benchmarking, fault tolerance testing etc. I think the newly released Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Beta) is a platform that exactly serves this purpose. Though I’m no expert on Map-Reduce or functional programming for that matter, from what I understand, this is the best method for crunching large amount of data and extracting key information out of it(We all know what Google does with it; don’t we).

Another key enterprise use for this platform is for business intelligence systems, as rightly mentioned in the Amazon article. Also organizations that process large amount of data in batches need not wait for doing that now at end of day; they can now be done more real-time, during business hours itself. We need no MBA to know that the faster you can process information; the better your business gains will be. I think the potential is also immense for companies that do image processing etc. Agree, programmers will have to do some work to get things done rightly, still this is a good example for demonstrating how cloud based computing will work for the enterprise, even in its present form.

Building Enterprise Services Network

In a recent blog post titled “SOA without service-enabled applications?”, Joe McKendrick points to a big misconception in the I.T circles about achieving an enterprise-wide service oriented environment - that every providing system has to be ‘service enabled’ to achieve SOA. He is right, services that are built from the functions of the underlying applications need not be part of the applications themselves, in fact in many cases it should not be too, in my opinion.

Everybody (including those saying SOA is a dead cow; no more milk-able that is) accepts the importance of building a ‘business services network’ in enterprise I.T these days, and such a layer can be built as an isolated layer above the business applications, though I wouldn’t say we would need a ‘ commercial SOA stack’ to achieve the same. Taking this approach has many advantages, including composing coarse grained business services from multiple underlying system functions as well as achieving better loose coupling levels.

Another advantage that I see is that, as enterprise environments are consuming more and more externally hosted services(yes, I mean the SaaS, Cloud stuff), the business services layer will help provisioning these services to the enterprise consumers easily because all we have to do is to connect it through the business services layer. This kind of an approach I would say make one of the key enterprise I.T concerns today - how to replace internal systems with Cloud/SaaS services - addressed better as well because now there is a clear abstraction between the consuming systems and the providers, the consumers just have to point to the same end-point in the business services layer no matter whether that service is provided by an internal system or an external one.

Open source and utility computing

Though I’m not a big fan of having open source software in enterprise environments, I follow the movements because of my personal interests (ultimately we are all ‘freedom’ guys, aren’t we) in the area. I was wondering whats the future of open source computing, in the wake of the upcoming utility computing models. Especially because till now most of the open source success stories are in the personal/experimental/collaborative computing space, with that landscape changing, I wonder what will be the next generation of open source look like.

There sure are a lot of indicators currently itself how ‘openness’ will be in the future environments, in terms of need for interoperability standards, open APIs, open platforms to build custom applications on top (Google Maps) etc.

Tim O’Reilly has this great article on the future of open source movements in the wake of increased attention on cloud computing these days.

Domesticating Cloud for enterprise use

For the past couple of years, I’ve been pursuing trends in enterprise computing firstly because it’s my bread, butter and cheese(cheesy stuff..hmm..). Secondly because it’s a trait of primates of all types to follow things that excite them. Frank(synatra)ly speaking, that’s the reason why I started pursuing the cloud computing bandwagon, even before it wasn’t this cloudy and we were calling it utility computing, ASP, SaaS etc. Now that we are all blind men and women trying to understand this mammoth, I was wondering what could be the best fit jobs that we can assign to it so that we can be familiar with the beast, and once it become a more domesticated, predictable, mature and usable one we can confidently ride on it.

Here are few things I feel we(enterprise I.T) can do even today with existing clouds

1. As I mentioned in another post here, testing sure is an area that we can look into, since no production data goes in there.


2. Outward facing shared I.T services – Say B2B connectivity environments etc. One reason they are anyway externally facing, and a cloud hosted system can act as the gateway, plus give you all the benefits of cloud.


3. High computing power required internal systems such as
   
   
   
   • Systems with occasional very high payload, such as reconciliation systems, payroll calculators etc can hire on-demand processing power of cloud rather than investing in ten servers for a ten minute job in ten months?
   
   
   • Desktop applications like word processors etc – Now here there could be issues of data confidentiality etc, but if being found secure enough, these mass consumed applications can be moved to cloud.
   
   
   • E-mail systems – we have some of the most successful e-mail systems in the world on cloud already, I think corporate e-mails can also move there, security sure is a concern, but e-mails are pretty much secure these days, aren’t they?


4. Data archival – Store all your 19th century operational data in cloud data stores.


5. Communication, collaboration apps - if e-mails can, then why not all your other white/black boarding etc moved there as well? Why not even your online meeting stuff?

I'm bored..what else?

Innovation & Indian software outsourcing industry

Is it a good thing when everyone else also agrees with you on something? I would say no, especially if everybody agrees, have a drink and depart. I think that’s what happens when comes to talking about the need of innovation in Indian I.T industry these days. Other than low cost services, what have we done in providing better software applications to customers? Agree there are areas where we excelled in the past few years like semi-conductors, hardware devices etc, but when comes to innovations in business software applications and enterprise systems, we are kind of comfortable being disciples and clap around than being gurus.

Good thing is people are realizing it, bad thing is many(including this blagger of course) don’t know how exactly to transform from being outsources to true innovators as these two are not butterfly life cycle stages - to change naturally from one to another. What required here I would say is to consider software engineering as an engineering domain and encourage people to ideate and construct solutions and products rather than moving only in the path of resourcing.

A key area to be addressed is collaboration. Most of the time engineers in Indian outsourcing firms work at multiple client locations, on multiple domains and technology areas and the parent companies fail to effectively tap into the acquired knowledge which can help them build and offer better solutions to the customers. Foster internal technical groups, knowledge repositories etc is one way to ensemble and enrich this scattered knowledge-base. However, if the middle-level leadership doesn’t have a charter in place to do all these, and are forced to focus only on resourcing, then the journey will not be smooth, no matter what the CxOs try and how much ever skilled the engineering workforce is.

I would say our outsourcing companies are in a much better position than even product vendors to understand the pulse of customers with the kind of reach they have not only into the customers I.T departments but also into other key business units as well. Especially with the kind of economic turmoil we are in currently, customers I’m sure are in need of better, cost effective and efficient solutions more than earlier. And with technologies such as the utility computing models, web2, advanced mobile technology etc, I think the opportunities are immense, to come up with innovative ideas and solution offerings - only if we have the right vision, leadership, plan and risk-taking, experimenting mindset. The raw material – brainware – is in no short supply I think.

Vice versa of Business-IT alignment

When people talk about the business-I.T alignment issue(Is there an issue here first of all?), I always notice most of the time they point out the need for I.T to ‘respond’ to business needs or rather I.T not being able to keep pace with business’ changing needs. Agree; if there is such a problem, we got to address that. But I was wondering what about aligning business to I.T? Isn’t that important too? Even after I.T becoming an integral part of business, not many have adopted I.T as a mainstream business ‘enabler’ (I’m no MBA, not sure what is the correct word here) I think.

For example, the web 2.0 stuff(I hate to address it that way though), SaaS & cloud computing etc are still finding it difficult to get business adoption. I think this is also an ‘alignment’ issue. Now the question is why? Is it because business is not knowing how to keep up with the rapid changes happening in I.T? Or is it because I.T is not able to show business ‘the money’ or rather not being able to educate business on these changes? Or these technologies are not mature enough for business to adopt them? Or is it all of the above and something else?

Cloud, virtualization and wine tasting

The other day a colleague asked me a question – “What is the difference between virtualization and cloud computing”. Though I almost started with ‘old wine...’, suddenly realized alcohol of any kind is prohibited in the office, changed it this way – “Virtualization is a about utilizing computing resources in the most optimized manner by employing techniques that can run multiple separate operating environments in the same hardware which helps in realizing cloud computing, a paradigm with a much larger scope of having computing functions provisioned from an externally hosted, on-demand environment that charges on a pay-as-you-go basis and helps business to leverage best of the breed software applications and tools at much lesser cost by not having to invest in purchasing, hosting and maintaining these software applications in-house” … and with that I fell flat. For those who wonder what the title means, that's a cheap technique bloggers employ to drive attention, nothing else.

Lotus Domino

No matter what the rest of the world think(or not think), I still consider Lotus Domino as the best documents and workflow based applications development platform, even after I haven't got a chance to work on it for 3 years now. Another thing I learned from working with domino is that no matter how much ever naysayers try, some good things always survive in this world.

Recently I happened to hear something that any programmer would love to hear from his customers – that a domino application we deployed for managing few of their HR workflows is running for more than 3 years without breaking down even once during production hours, that too even after the number of users doubled. The biggest incentive (non-monetary I mean) for doing something I think is when your customers talk passionately about what you did for them…

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.