Moving to the virtual layer (and taking advantage of the cloud)

With infrastructure services like Amazon EC2, Rackspace, and VMware making it easy to take advantage of the flexibility, portability, and reduced costs of cloud computing, it seems obvious to jump on the cloud bandwagon for new IT projects.

But, developers are generally left on their own to deal with the pain of deploying their apps to the cloud: configuring application servers, libraries, disk partitions, networking, clustering, service connections, and virtual private networks. After they get their app installed they also need to install management agents that run on top of the application layer.

Isaac Roth, co-founder and CEO

(Credit: webappVM)

If you really want to take advantage of the cloud and optimize return on investment, you'll want the on-boarding process to be easy and fast and you won't install that agent. Agent-based solutions are inherently inflexible. Deploying agent-based solutions in a cloud-based environment, which is, by definition, highly flexible, is often like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. In agent-based solutions, hard-coded agents are installed on every machine to monitor the application. If a change to the application configuration occurs--such as the IT department adds a node or upgrades a component--the agents must be updated as well.

Each agent and management server must be configured separately with management and monitoring solutions generally not portable. When every change to an environment requires installation of multiple agents on each server and configuration of multiple management servers, it becomes a tall order to move an application from a traditional infrastructure to the cloud, or from one cloud infrastructure to another: private to public, public to hybrid, or hybrid to private.

How do you get around this so you can actually capitalize on the benefits of cloud computing? Go virtual. Move application management, including easy on-boarding, from above the application stack into the underlying virtual layer, along with the rest of the cloud infrastructure.

I was recently briefed by webappVM CEO Isaac Roth on how the company is pioneering this new approach. He said the virtual path allows you to actually realize all of the flexibility, portability, and reduced costs that come with the promise of cloud computing.

Using agentless technology eliminates the complexity of deploying an application to the cloud and reduces total cost of ownership. And it works with both public and private clouds.

The application management functionality that was previously provided by agent-based solutions is now built into the virtual layer. There are no agents to deploy, upgrade, or maintain, and no management servers to configure and install. There are also no endless upgrades to the management environment each time the application changes. It requires no integration and does not need to be reconfigured when adding, scaling, or moving applications.

Maybe it's time to ditch that agent and go entirely virtual?

[williamlouth]

What is a "hard-coded" agent? You seem to be inventing new terms and concepts to build up a case for ....<br /><br />"If a change to the application configuration occurs--such as the IT department adds a node or upgrades a component--the agents must be updated as well."<br /><br />Absolute nonsense. Have you ever worked in a IT operations environment?

[williamlouth]

By the way I think you forget to mention "HARD CODED" "BLACK HOLED" VM.

[richard993]

There are advantages and disadvantages on both sides (agent based vs virtual). Virtual machine based cloud providers boast security and flexibility... but keep in mind that an agent can execute modules within a sandbox much like the java vm. So security is NOT an advantage of virtual over agents. Flexibility is falsely labelled as an advantage for virtual as well... but agent based clouds offer runtime engines which completely control and load balance applications as well as provide virtual interfaces to the hardware thus providing portability.<br />Virtual cloud providers claim that agent based clouds have deployment and maintenance overheads. But virtual providers require a virtualisation layer to be installed in the OS and services to be loaded as well... or some virtual providers require certified hardware to be used and require an entire OS to be installed to enable cloud virtualisation.<br />So the argument goes on and on... but a simple fact remains. There will always be larger overheads for virtualised clouds compared to agent based clouds... and in a data centre with 5000 servers, the10% overhead would cost the data centre millions of dollars in energy costs.

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