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.

You may now kiss the field cricket

Another eventful week has gone past, the most important event for me during the week was that I voted - after being persuaded by the election commission, government, matinee idols(and dolls), cricketers, family and friends though none of them were sure why they wanted me to do so. Next big thing is that I’m now convinced we are inching towards becoming a ‘developed’ country. Not because we managed to develop so many big banks here (vote banks I mean), but because we now own a spy satellite and spy planes as well. You might ask how spying enhances prosperity, I say that’s because you don’t know the history of spying ,all those who currently enjoy the ‘developed’ status got one thing in common – they all had/have a very sophisticated spy network. Now with these high-tech spy doodads, we not only can spot the terrorists but even zoom to such minuscule details as the color and brand of the inner garments worn by the bollywo terrorists, according to experts.

Last week also had many other events that made us proud as a nation, apart from IPL . For me the proudest moment of the week as an Indian tech-worker(these days every professional is labeled with a ‘worker’ suffix in my part of the world, even the oldest) is that an Indian has been appointed as America’s Chief Technology Officer, once again its becoming obvious that hiring Indians can get you do things cheaper better. Moreover, governments are thinking in corporate lines, which is good. I’m waiting for their next corpo style move – mergers and acquisitions.

The week also had the most memorable day in an year for us environmentally concerned people(ECPs)- Earth day. Now if you are not an ECP, to give you an idea on how important the day is for us - it’s as ‘unforgettable’ a day as your spouse’s birthday for you. We celebrated Earth day on the 22nd by pledging to do more green marathons with more sponsors. Every year I adopt few new green initiatives on Earth day, and this year there are two resolutions that I pledge to do 1) From now on I’ll stop watching bollywood movies and music in an effort to curb global warming 2) I'll eat as much non-vegetarian stuff as possible, so that I don't contribute to cutting of plants, instead I'll help reducing the cattle population that eats up anything green that comes their way.

The week also saw many landmark court verdicts that have the potential to change the face of our violently conservative country. One is that kissing is not an offense, as long as you are married - to each other of course. It is also now official that officials who solemnize parenatally disapproved weddings will not inform the parents through a ‘notice of intended marriage’. Looks like cupid is the dog whose day has come.

Next on the key research finding of the week – a truly ground breaking one, especially for anyone who is running animal farms, families, relationships or all of the above. Biologists at UC Riverside have done an intense study on ‘field crickets’(and not on the vice versa as it would have been in India) and found for the first time that “Females commonly prefer males that provide greater material benefits, and even penalizes males that provide lower-quality benefits”. Now some of you might ask whats 'news' in this; remember, we are talking here about field crickets. Those of you who are adult field cricket males better read the said research report, might help you understand the field better before you venture out next time.

Before I go the latest recession related news here.

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)

If the choice is between hot chilli and election speech...

Those of you who are in the business of column writing will agree with me on one thing, becoming an established, well read commentator is not all that easy, especially when you are not backed by a strong media conglomerate or a powerful campaigning machinery like that of IPL (P could be Political or Premier, depending on where your loyalties lie this week). However, I would like to continue with my column here for one simple reason that I feel good when some things get out of my mind even if it means speaking in the woods. So here is a birds eye(and brain) view of the key events that happened in my part of the world last week.

Now that IPL is out of the country, the law enforcement agencies can peacefully fight with terrorists, naxalites and likeminded people to help us live and vote peacefully. Talking about elections, amid threats from various social and anti-social elements, we managed to complete our first phase of polling somewhat peacefully which is the greatest upside event of the week IMO. I think the week will have a place in history because this is the first time we see a nation adopting ‘shoe throwing’ as a peaceful method of protesting against their oppressors. I see a parallel here between the civil disobedience method Gandhiji adopted against the British and I wonder whether this is what some people call as the ‘Third independence movement’ in India.

Another news item that caught international acclaim was that an Indian woman has eaten the hottest chilli in the world. Now those of you who eat from the ‘Andhra Style’ restaurants in my part of the world might ask whats so great in that. Well, the uniqueness in this case is that she also ‘smeared seeds of 25 chillies in her eyes in one minute’. Now that I bet is something you and I wont prefer to do, even if we can eat vegetable kholapuri three times a day. I don’t have any report on her condition after this, but whatever it is, we are proving again and again that nobody can beat us when it comes to gulping the wackiest substances in the world, be it chillies, bombs, bollywood-dialogs or election-time promises.

Now those are on the positive side, on the negative side, inflation dipped to the lowest level in three decades . I’m no ‘economic person’ like many of my peers in office and on the street to tell what does it mean to the common woman and her man, all I know is that it’s time for those in the Reserve Bank to start talking about some cuts that they will be doing to the ‘basis points’, which ultimately will result in banks forcing us to take more loans so that the economy grows and you and I will end up being life-time debtors (which we are already anyway).

Before I end this short column due to lack of availability of time, screen real-estate and content, here is the latest recession related catastrophe, and I don’t consider this funny, though whoever titled it that way might think so.

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.

Running for a cause

What do you think is the one single factor that decides the bigness of news items to choose for a weekly news analysis column? Is it the number of people affected by it? Is it the number of people involved in it? Is it the ‘weight’ of the people involved? Is it the economic repercussions that matters? Or is it all simply media conspiracy? Since I’m no journalist working in controlled environments under supervision of egoistic editors, it’s the absurdity that’s the deciding factor for me. So here is an analysis of few very important news items that I came across last week.

The biggest news for me last week was that on March 28th we proudly celebrated ‘Earth Hour’ by switching to candles for an hour – from kerosene lanterns. The move has become such a success I understand, that people in my part of the world are now asking when can we NOT observe Earth Hour. My only question here is why did they chose March 28th, notwithstanding the fact that we had April 1st falling on the same week, a more apt day for people - especially in rural India - to observe Earth Hour(s).

The biggest landmark we as a nation crossed last week was that we now have our own seven wonders to litter around. I wonder why wonders are always seven in number. Is there a global standard set for the number of wonders that you can have at a time - like the number of U.N security council members, the number of KKR captains etc. Or does it symbolize something; say the number of colors that men can recognize? Now you might say it could be symbolizing the seven days in a week, then my question will be why not 12 or 365 or even why not for the number of holes in a human head. Your week proposition hence is a weak one as well. Now the news report quoted above also says that actor Aishwarya Rai, Her F-I-L Mr Bachchan, her M-I-L Mrs.Bachchan, her S-I-L Ms.Nanda, her husband Mr.Abhishek, Mr.Amar Singh and Mr. Kamal Hassan attended the ceremony that announced the wonders. Again, seven of them! Now I wonder what that symbolizes, I mean other than the obvious ‘odd man out’ question. Anyway, we are becoming a wonderful nation, which is good.

Now those are on the ‘up’ side of news which makes us prouder than the week before, I must also mention few things on the down side as well, to complete the article in true journalistic spirit. Though we humiliate ourselves everyday with our religions, politics, casts, moral-policing etc, here is one where we really failed in front of the world – According to this report , “Chowmein beats Indian curry as Britain's favourite food”. We better do something about it I say, rather than just sitting and watching the Chinese conquering the world, after all we are the world’s largest democracy. Not that it matters when comes to culinary expertise, but we got to console ourselves with something when compared with our neighbour right?

Now to the weeks biggest recession related news – On how a French pole-vaulter is trying to attract sponsors as his present sponsor backed out due to the financial crisis. It seems sports enthusiasts are waiting for other sports personalities around the world to follow him. I think this could even open up a new era for sports sponsorships if the running sports person also holds her/his hat out and seek public contribution. I’m sure she/he can collect enough sponsorship money to fund their entire career that way. Also more people will get to sponsor their favourite sports persons and reap the benefit upfront as well, no matter whether she or he wins in the actual game.

Before I go, here are some etiquette tips - for men in business and businessmen who employ them.

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.

IPL Highlithighs

Any large landscape where everyone is part of some or other – religious/linguistic/original/gender-al/habitual/regional/occupational/ cultural – minority or majority is a mine of subjects for a news analyst; in terms of abundance as well as explosiveness, something can get her/him into losing a vital organ or two too, no matter how many pages of the constitution are set aside for guaranteeing freedom of speech and expression. So an analyst has to be very careful not to hurt any types of sentiments of any of the above mentioned swarms while at work. That’s why in this space I always act as Courage the cowardly dog and restrict myself to things that generally doesn’t emotionally itch any beefy mafia - that is, things such as recession, common men and women, dogs, cats, cockroaches, research findings, cricket and things like that.

Today, I was forced to write a non-weekender column on The change of IPL venue from India because of the sheer weight of the subject(as well as it’s sponsors') plus its socio-economic/political implications. Though I’m neither a cricket fan nor a an exhaust fan in any political restrooms, I decided to comment on the subject because we analysts(of any size and shape) think anything that is pomp, bollywoody etc is more important than your that mean grocery bill and jolty job. United we stand in supporting the IPL stakeholders decision to move it all - including it’s flesh and boolood cheer leading – elsewhere. I must remind you all naysayers that cricket is a colonial game after all, we believe in exploiting the raw materials available here, building products elsewhere and selling it back here and earning huge profits.

I as a person believing in Export Led Industrialization bet Indians abroad would be ready to pay ten times more than that of an average local(country) Indian for a cricket ticket and the countries anyway can be satisfied by showing them the ‘high-li-thighs’ through the omnipresent idiot box - in typical bollywood style. So my advice to all cricket fans is, don’t get disappointed, de-motivated, emotional, commotional or subside for any other types of motions that originates in your body, keep watching the match highlithighs, it’s the economy we are talking about you foo ladies and gentlemen!