The Wisdom of Clouds- Page 13

Workload mobility and the next Internet upgrade

The concept of workload mobility came up again recently in a discussion about the network requirements required to achieve that vision. My colleague Doug Gourlay recently posted several observations of what exactly networking in the cloud represents--and doesn't represent. In that discussion, he makes the following observation about the role of bandwidth in moving compute workloads around the Internet:

It's not all big pipes. I know, I wish the world were all 10Gb Ethernet too. I also wish I had 100Gb here today so we didn't have to focus so much on elegant link-bundling technologies. (this is a major area of network improvement in general in my opinion by the way, and may be worth another blog post on how to improve these...) Video is neat - it drives 5-10Mb/s, 15Mb/s for a big Telepresence. But moving a virtual-machine from one place to another may move up to 40GB of data, or 320Gb (sic). This would mean that in the course of an hour each VM movement is equal to about six concurrent TelePresence sessions in network demand. Compound this with VM sprawl, Dynamic Resource Scheduling, and data center consolidation and yes, there will be a heck of a lot of data moving between servers, between data centers, and with cloud computing from enterprises to service providers.

More than bandwidth though, which we can make the case for, how will the data move? Does the Internet itself have enough bandwidth and traffic management to support this data movement? And how will the addressing statefully move from one autonomous system to another? How will the security policy bound to a particular object (re: VM) stay consistent and coherent as the VM moves across the network and from one network to another. This is the longer term problem much more so than just the bandwidth issue, and one that is not currently being served by the hype-machines.

His observation about the immense bandwidth required to meet an open cloud with free workload mobility is a very interesting one. The live motion you know today typically bypasses moving data by leveraging shared network storage which is attached to a given VM regardless of which host it lands on.

The future is a bit different, however.… Read more

Finding distinction in 'infrastructure as a service'

Randy Bias, chief technology officer of ServePath cloud offering GoGrid, penned a post recently that raises an interesting distinction within the once uniformly defined infrastructure-as-a-service space.

To briefly recap the cloud market for context, commercial cloud computing has traditionally been seen as consisting of three distinct offerings:

software as a service (SaaS): Complete application systems delivered over the Internet on some form of "on-demand" billing system. Examples include Salesforce.com, WebEx, and Workday. platform as a service (PaaS): Development platforms and middleware systems hosted by the vendor, allowing developers to simply code and deploy without directly interacting with underlying infrastructure. Examples include Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure, and Force.com. infrastructure as a service (IaaS): Raw infrastructure, such as servers and storage, is provided from the vendor premises directly as an on-demand service. Examples include Amazon Web Services, GoGrid, and Flexiscale.

What Randy is arguing, however, is that there is a clear distinction between the service ecosystem approach of Amazon Web Services (which he calls an infrastructure Web service) and a more utilitarian infrastructure-focused cloud service such as the ones many of the hosting companies-turned-cloud providers have produced, including GoGrid, Flexiscale, and Rackspace CloudServers. He calls those companies providers of "cloud centers."… Read more

Amazon releases Web-based EC2 console

Mike Culver, technology evangelist for Amazon Web Services, on Thursday announced the availability of a Web-based AWS management console.

This first release, focused on its Elastic Compute Cloud, provides a laundry list of supported functions, including:… Read more

The biggest cloud-computing issue of 2009 is trust

In cloud computing lately, trust seems to be on everyone's mind.

Alan Murphy of the Virtual Data Center blog points to the dynamic nature of the cloud as a reason why there will need to be more "trust" between customers and vendors:

So moving forward, as the security people tear apart the (in)security of cloud computing, the rest of the world will just need to take that leap of trust. A lowering of our standards for what we can control in the cloud's outsourced data model.

As an end user, it kills me, but I know I have to make those sacrifices, if I want to use those services. So I have to modify my level of trust, and apply new and stronger safeguards to the rest of my work flow processes (personal and professional) to make sure I'm able to recover if/when there is a massive breach that's beyond my control.

My recovery is something I can control, and I definitely trust myself.

Chris Hoff of the blog Rational Survivability responds by pointing out that if more trust means less security, we've got a problem:

In simply closing our eyes, holding our breath, and accepting that in the name of utility, agility, flexibility, and economy, we're ignoring many of the lessons we've learned over the years, we are repeating the same mistakes and magically expecting (that) they will yield a different outcome.

A few months ago, I sat through a very cool "unsession" at the Cloud Summit Executive in San Jose, Calif., in which the conversation ranged across an incredibly broad range of cloud-related subjects.… Read more

Ready to automate data center management?

I wrote not long ago about the various disciplines that data center operations teams will need to work through to address those cloud-computing values you often hear hyped by people like me.

In that post, I noted that many organizations had gained an understanding of how server virtualization could be used to abstract software concepts, thus managing them distinctly from the underlying hardware. I also noted, however, that few organizations had made the decision to systematically automate that management.

Channel-V tonight pointed me to an interview by Virtualization Review's Keith Ward of Bogomil Balkansky, VMware's senior director of product marketing. In the interview, Balkansky discusses the upcoming VDC-OS product release, and what it means to the next generation of data centers. He starts with a very familiar theme:

"Henry Ford introduced automation to the manufacturing world," Balkansky says.

"We're transitioning from swinging hammers to pushing buttons," he continues. "The focus becomes on what needs to happen, not spending the majority of your time executing it and making it happen. Ford introduced speed and efficiency and predictability in the (manufacturing) process." Those same elements will characterize VDC-OS, he says.

Balkansky goes on to point out that the very core of the system administrator role will change as a result, an argument that I've been making for some time. Rather than focusing on reactive, tactical operations, the system administrator of the future will "specify the service levels the application requires: availability, security, scalability."… Read more

Cloud server of tomorrow will look little like full-feature server of today

If you have an interest in the architectures that may very well come to dominate the world's most sophisticated data centers, you should take some time to check out an article in EETimes, entitled "Server makers get Goooogled."

The article, by Rick Merrit, describes new technologies being introduced by Rackable and other companies that are strongly influenced by Google's custom server designs over the last several years.

We're talking cool stuff here. As the article notes:… Read more

Is the cloud computing maturity model unnecessary or simply misunderstood?

In a recent post titled "Cloud maturity models don't make sense," Roger Smith of InformationWeek's Analytics Weblog takes umbrage to my recent "A maturity model for cloud computing" post. In Roger's post, he quotes my model and the "cloud adoption model" of Jake Sorofman, and then goes on to use a post by Ron Schmelzer--in which Ron debunks an earlier SOA maturity model--to express a strong objection to any cloud maturity model.

Just for review, here is the graphic from my post:

Another way to look at the model is this: is it possible to have an open cloud market not formed from competing compute utilities, themselves profiting from the efficiencies of automating the management of abstract components in an optimized--or consolidated--physical infrastructure?

Unfortunately, I think Roger completely misunderstood the tenor and theme of the post. This core argument from his post I think best illustrates the problem:… Read more

The great paradigm shift of cloud computing is not self-service...

There has been significant discussion over the short life of the term "cloud computing" about how little it differs from concepts like managed hosting and ASPs. And there is some truth to these observations; if you really look closely, what are the key differences between EC2 and a more traditional managed hosting provider? Some would say multi-tenancy, self-service and pay-per-use (including billing and elastic capacity). With specific regard to EC2, I would tend to agree.

(I would also hasten to point out that Amazon provides some very PaaS-like services in conjunction with EC2, such as Simple Queuing Service (SQS) and SimpleDB.)

However, if this is the great "paradigm shift" of cloud computing, as offered by smart people like Krishnan Subramanian of CloudAve, then let me offer that these basic extensions to existing hosting models will be peanuts next to a shift that will create one of the most significant market opportunities since the explosive growth of the Internet itself. I'm not dealing in hyperbole here; I honestly believe that there is a clear evolutionary step to the cloud occurring well after stand-alone self-service clouds are mainstream (which they arguably are today) that will inspire massive innovation.

That game changing technology disruption will be the federation of disparate clouds, and the distribution of software, data and billing across commercial and private cloud boundaries. In other words, the introduction of secure, reliable workload mobility in an extension of the Internet itself--an "Intercloud", so to speak.… Read more

Was InfoWorld's CTO of the Year award a year late?

Congratulations to Werner Vogels, the now legendary CTO of Amazon and one of the principle drivers of the Amazon Web Services vision. InfoWorld announced Sunday that Werner earned its CTO of the Year award. The accolades are rolling in from all over, but I think all agree that this was a well-deserved recognition for Werner and his team. In fact, Werner's recognition of the team effort that led to this award just makes him that much more of a class act.

What leaves me shaking my head, however, is that it took this long to see the incredible feat that Amazon pulled off, and the leadership that pushed a retail goods company to see compute capacity as a logical extension of their business.… Read more

VMWare VI4 renamed to vSphere

For those interested in where VMWare's Virtual Infrastructure is heading, there was interesting news out of a Minneapolis VMWare User Group (VMUG) meeting yesterday: apparently VMWare is making it official that VI4 is now vSphere.

From Jason Boche's blog:

Today at the Minneapolis VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting, VMware employees disclosed to a group of 150+ attendees the new name for the next generation of Virtual Infrastructure many have been referring to as VI4 or VI.next. The new name is VMware vSphere. I value and respect the various relationships I have with VMware and thus before posting … Read more