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.

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).

Business services – an essential cloud capability

People who talk about cloud computing often divide the environment as a three layered structure - an infrastructure layer, an operating platform layer and an application layer. But in my opinion, this is not the cloud layers I would subscribe to in future, I would say the most important of them is going to be a – a services layer, comprising business services that aggregates capabilities from all the three underlying layers. This is what should be utilized by enterprise users, to take full advantage of the platform. Services and even process automation systems should be part of clouds.

Now you might ask isn’t it a little too much to imaging that companies will leverage externally defined and hosted business processes? I say they should, as long as they are definable, configurable, automate-able, service aggregations to make full use of cloud environments. Now I’m no technology expert on cloud computing to advice on how it can be achieved etc, all I would say is this is how I envisage a true shared services model to work. I would also say that utilizing the same infrastructure, same applications and storage doesn’t mean the services should give exactly the same output to every customer as well, they should be agile too.

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?

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.

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.

(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.