Business Tech

Cloud computing providers have a difficult marketing challenge, in my opinion. Think about it--no matter what service model or deployment model a provider is delivering, they must differentiate their service while meeting the "commodity" needs of as many customers as possible. It would seem these businesses are stuck between providing least common denominator service capabilities and being accused of intentional customer lock-in.

(Credit: Jake Shepherd/Flickr)

From a customer perspective, it is equally challenging when one is "looking for servers and storage" and must choose between a bunch of services that essentially run Linux or Windows and store your files. How does one choose? How do the cloud providers set themselves apart in the customers' eyes?

Unfortunately, I've been inundated of late by an increasing number of cloud service announcements that lack any sense of differentiation. Hosting providers are announcing "on-demand server capacity billed on a pay-as-you-go basis." Platform vendors are simply announcing what language they support, and how much they charge for services. Software-as-a-Service vendors have the easiest job to differentiate service, as they can do so based on functionality alone if they wish, but even there some vendors struggle to differentiate themselves by anything other than the fact they run as a cloud service.

This has to change. Forrester's James Staten is telling us that clients are getting "cloud weary." I believe a lot of this has to do with the ridiculousness of "cloudwashing" that we've seen for some products and services, and the relative monotony of pitches for things are arguably cloud services, especially in the IaaS space.

Below is a list of five key categories of competitive differentiation for cloud computing. It is not a complete list, nor do I think all vendors would look at this question in the same way. However, if you are looking to acquire cloud services, these are the elements I think you start with as you evaluate any service, be it SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS. If you are selling these services, consider this an outline for your next requirements document.

1. Ease of operations. Yeah, I could have kept things simple and just said "ease of use," but "use" in the cloud computing service sense is much more than how humans interact with the system. For instance, how does a company with hundreds of applications in the cloud strewn across a dozen or more vendors monitor and manage those applications to manageable service levels?

   And yes, phenomenal user interfaces will set some providers apart from others, but it will be the "behind the scenes" interfaces--such as APIs, publish and subscribe event streams, transparency and auditability systems, etc.--that will make the most significant differences between providers.

   Will many of the aspects of "ease of operations" be standardized? Sure. The Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) is an example of an attempt to deal with a large part of this challenge. However, differentiation will still be possible through extensions, quality of features and--yes--some custom interfaces.

2. Configurability. One of the things about today's best-known cloud computing environments is that they are essentially infrastructure and software architecture frameworks that dictate a lot about the application architectures that can be built on them. For example, the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows each server to be on one widely shared network. No separation of management traffic from DMZ traffic here (at least not explicitly from the point of view of the OS).

   No, application architects are instead forced to consider how they would build and operate their application in the infrastructure architecture given them. Good books have been written with this in mind, but ultimately the complexity of the problems we wish to solve with information technology will dictate the amount of configurability we require from our infrastructure systems--even if they are delivered as a service by a third party.

   The low-hanging fruit here for IaaS vendors are things like network architectures, data storage options, server options and so on. Also useful here are services that enhance the infrastructure, like security systems, message queueing, and storage tiering.

3. Performance. One public relations contact I got recently was quite interesting. A hosting company sent me an email indicating that they have an increasing number of customers coming to them from AWS, and finding that their applications actually perform better in the former than the latter. I haven't confirmed the truth of that claim, but it is an interesting claim nonetheless.

   Processing speed, memory speed, storage access, read and write speeds, latency, bandwidth--these are all things that are tunable by the cloud provider, either through technology acquisition, or through superior engineering and operations expertise. And, as with servers and storage, the fastest speeds per dollar spent will generally win.

   I would not be surprised if we saw a cloud performance war, similar to the RDBMS benchmark wars, especially in the IaaS category (though it would make sense in the PaaS and SaaS categories as well).

4. Reliability and security. I debated combining these two elements, as they represent different aspects of the same concept. However, that core concept--risk mitigation--is at the heart of so much of the decision over whether public cloud services are better than private data centers, that I think they will often be viewed through the same lens.

   Companies will need time to demonstrate differentiation in both of these categories, but features can be introduced today to increase the transparency of both operations and security in any provider. Redundant distributed data stores, "early warning" DDoS detection events, auditability APIs; these are all features that would "open the kimono" in a controlled fashion and increase customer's ability to trust that their provider has made the protection and availability of their data and functionality a core competency.

5. Customer service. After I wrote my closing post for the "big rethink" series, Kevin Magee, COO of ZeroTouch IT, wrote a post in which he noted several additional predictions for the effect of cloud computing on IT. Most notably, he pointed out that cloud will change "[h]ow Vendor Relationship Management will become a key discipline in IT organizations." Amen, brother, and I completely agree.

   In a tongue-in-cheek post from early 2008, I noted that system administrators should "get good at waiting on hold for customer service representatives." In reality, there is truth to that, but the providers have a lot of room to craft that experience.

   One thing they can do is advance the technical leading edge in terms of customer self-service and operations transparency. (Hmm. Has anyone else noted how often 'transparancy' comes up in this discussion.) I noted some ideas about this in a previous post. Smart providers will find others.

Cloud computing is one of those truly disruptive market opportunities that makes or breaks companies. The winners will find ways to differntiate. Those that don't almost certainly can't win. So, please, no more press releases that fail to differentiate in any meaningful way.

AT&T has unveiled its latest cloud-based offering, which lets businesses grab more computing capacity when they need it.

The company announced on Monday its Synaptic Compute as a Service, designed to let IT staffers store and maintain internal applications and data via AT&T's cloud. Capacity and availability can be ramped up when needed, especially if a company's own data center resources become taxed, AT&T said.

The service is designed is to help businesses save money by not having to maintain full network capacity year-round if demand only shoots up during certain times of the year. AT&T said that businesses can seamlessly access the software and content they need, whether stored internally or out on AT&T's network cloud.

Synaptic Compute "provides a much-needed choice for IT executives who worry about over-building or under-investing in the capacity needed to handle their users' traffic demands," Roman Pacewicz, senior vice president of strategy and application services for AT&T Business Solutions, said in a statement.

AT&T plans to introduce the service before year's end. Initially, it will be available only in the U.S.

Though cloud computing has grown in popularity among enterprise customers, concerns exist about both security and reliability. AT&T said that it has built security on top of its cloud layer, so that it is fully integrated. The company also expressed confidence in its track record of reliability, both in its own data centers and in its hosting and network businesses.

Since last year, AT&T has focused more on the industry push toward cloud computing for its customers. In May, the company announced its first Synaptic Services feature--Synaptic Storage as a Service--which lets customers access data on AT&T's cloud as needed, paying only for the storage they use.

A recent survey suggests that CIOs are loosening the purse strings on IT spending. IT vendors may want to hold off their celebrations, though, because much of the spending appears to be headed for deflationary forces like cloud computing, virtualization, and their kissing cousin, open source.

An economic rebound never looked so dire.

That's unless you're an IT buyer, of course, suggests a new report from Goldman Sachs. In this week's report, titled "A Paradigm Shift for IT: The Cloud," Goldman Sachs said it expects that pent-up IT dollars will flow in the short term to building out next-generation data centers (e.g., cloud computing). But in the long term, less money is expected to find its way into fewer wallets:

After the initial build-out, Cloud Computing could drive some headwinds for the IT industry, as a result of two factors. First, we see virtualization as a deflationary technology. Second, we see IT spending consolidating in the hands of fewer buyers--the Cloud providers, hosting vendors, and large enterprises. These factors will likely dampen IT spending growth due to greater utilization and buyer pricing power.

Even short-term build-outs may prove disappointing, however, as Goldman Sachs expects large enterprises to grow existing virtualization and automation technology adoption in the rollout of private clouds, shifting slowly to an embrace of public clouds over time. The chart below gives some idea as to when cloud computing will hit its stride:

Who wins in this scenario?

According to the report, Red Hat stands to benefit from the cloud-computing craze. ("Red Hat is well positioned for the emerging Cloud Computing ecosystem, largely due to its open source background and current ubiquitous deployments in data centers, including enterprises, as well as in Cloud providers such as Amazon," the report states.)

But the real beneficiaries will be...the same old crew. "[K]ey suppliers for internal Clouds are likely to be those that have the most complete portfolio of hardware, software, and services," including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, EMC, and Oracle.

New boss...same as the old boss.

The other beneficiaries are the start-ups that provide critical components of cloud computing, with an emphasis on management tools. Here we may see open-source companies benefit, including Reductive Labs (Puppet project), Cloudera, and the two rising private cloud companies, VMOps and Eucalyptus, among others.

While open source doesn't factor heavily into this particular Goldman Sachs analysis, the firm has before called out open source's role in wringing more value out of fewer IT dollars. Open source is a primary driver of the global reset in IT spending expectations.

With less money flowing into the pockets of fewer vendors, we can expect to see both increased consolidation and fierce competition for the IT spending that remains. Those vendors that can help CIOs do more with less stand to benefit from this shift to low-cost, high-value computing.

And those that can't? Well, let's just say they may pine for the good old days of the global recession.

Microsoft released on Thursday a new position paper, "Privacy in the Cloud Computing Era: A Microsoft Perspective," that includes information about the remote storage and processing of personal information.

Privacy and security concerns continue to be a primary argument that cloud naysayers use against storing data and applications on the Internet. Big IT vendors and service providers like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard will sooner or later be forced to take the cloud seriously or risk missing out on the whole next wave of IT consumption. And their large enterprise customers will expect them to offer cloud services with the appropriate levels of privacy and security measures in line with their business needs.

The interesting thing about this paper is that Microsoft takes surprisingly minimal responsibility for the data it will manage:

With a nod toward the heterogeneous application development environments that exist in most enterprise IT departments, IBM on Wednesday launched a pair of services targeted at building cloud applications.

The first, the IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud, is a cloud service hosted in IBM's data centers that provides tools and interfaces designed to support developers using Java, .NET, and Open Source environments. This service provides computing and storage capacity, and support for WebSphere middleware, Rational Software Delivery Services, and its Information Management database. It also provides "pre-configured integrations" of some Rational services based on IBM's Jazz framework, its collaborative software platform.

There are no pre-configured integrations announced for third-party or open source tools or languages.

In addition to the Smart Business offering, IBM is adding private cloud-targeted tools and services to the IBM Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing offering. These tools and services target three key elements of the development and testing of cloud applications:

• Agile development services, aimed at enabling collaborative development and testing through a set of best practices.

• An integrated set of services for test management and planning and test lab management.

• Tools, such as IBM Rational Asset Manager, which are targeted at increasing the efficiency of distributed application development teams.

By combining the expertise gained by IBM's Global Services organizations and the Rational Lab Services team in building and delivering development and test tools and practices in IBM-based clouds, the company hopes to become a one-stop shop for companies looking for a solid return on investment from adopting the cloud model in development and test.

IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud can be accessed as a free beta, and the IBM Rational Software Delivery Services for private clouds are also available in beta through the companies sales force.

It's been said that information technology is a fashion industry--that we just keep following the latest hype and fads. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison last year referred to cloud computing this way.

Ellison loves this dig, and he uses it least once every technology generation. He's not alone. I, however, disagree with the entire curmudgeon corps' "It's just hype!" attitude.

While it's true that we in IT have our fashions, just like any field of human endeavor, we're generally pretty practical. It's hard to see either IT's executives or its technicians as highly subject to the whims of style or flights of fancy. The truth is closer to the notion that we're an evolving industry--one constantly struggling to find better ways.

It's not easy to grapple with the fantastic, relentless progress afforded by Moore's Law (on the supply side), nor the constant demand for more capacity, capability, and integration (on the demand side).

In a few short decades, IT has undergone a massive shift from an engineering-oriented support role to driving the beating heart of the global economy. IT is now central to large swaths of all human activity.

As new technologies and strategies come online--whether network computing, open source, agile development, service-oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, virtualization, or whatever--we seek to employ them to improve our outcomes.

There's always a bit of experimentation and a bit of hype involved in the early days. Indeed, without that willingness to "try it out" and a strong shot of enthusiasm on the side, we wouldn't be advancing as well as we are. That's not just hype you're hearing; it's also the will to progress. And for the most part, the recipe works.

Most of the major new approaches touted over the past few decades have become workaday parts of the IT landscape. Most apps, for example, are now "client-server" in design. Linux and other open-source engines run much of the Internet. SOA is how enterprise IT is designed.

The same Web services that Ellison derided years ago now underpin much of e-commerce, as well as high-interactivity Web 2.0 services such as Google Maps. And virtualization and orchestration--frequently discounted at the top of this decade--are now fundamentally changing how data centers are operated.

Indeed, when one of these previously experimental, previously hyped approaches recede from view, it's usually not because they've failed but because they've succeeded so well that we don't need to talk about them anymore. They've been burned into the way we do IT.

Each wave of technology builds on the last, incorporating its best parts, weeding out what didn't work, and often re-emphasizing themes that had appeared years before but weren't quite workable at that time--though often using different names. The utility computing, grid, and application service providers of years past, for example, have become the software as a service (SaaS, or more generally, ITaaS) and cloud computing of today.

So when something new comes your way--a new approach, a new strategy, a new way of looking at or doing IT--by all means, be skeptical. Try it out in careful, measured ways. But do try it out--and have enthusiasm for those new things. That's how we advance.

(Credit: IBM)

IBM on Wednesday announced a program designed to help educators and students pursue cloud-computing initiatives and better take advantage of collaboration technology in their studies.

The IBM Cloud Academy, announced at the Educause annual conference, includes a global roster of educational institutions as initial participants. Educause is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.

IBM will provide the cloud-based infrastructure for the program, with some basic collaboration tools available at the outset. IBM's LotusLive service provides the basis for the new offering. Participants will immediately be able to do some very basic tactical functions on the new system:

• Create working groups on areas of interest to the education industry
• "Jam" on new innovations for clouds in education-related areas with IBM developers
• Work jointly on technical projects across institutions
• Share research findings and exchange new research ideas

Shared research across universities and other higher-learning institutions remains a vital part of technological innovation, but many programs don't have formal tool sets in place. Cloud services are a logical place to run these types of programs, especially as international groups need immediate access to data from their partners.

Expanding its cloud-computing storage services to a higher level, Amazon.com unveiled a new option called Amazon RDS for companies that want to store information in a database on the other side of the Internet.

The suite of Amazon Web Services (AWS) already included a database option called SimpleDB, a basic database with its own interface standard for storing data and retrieving it. The Amazon Relational Database Service, in contrast, uses a more standard database interface, embodied in this case in an online implementation of the open-source MySQL software, the company said Monday.

"With Amazon RDS, you get full native access to a MySQL database," specifically, version 5.1 of the Sun Microsystems technology, the company said on its Amazon RDS site. "This means Amazon RDS works with your existing tools, applications, and drivers. You can port an existing database to Amazon RDS without changing a line of code--just point your tools or applications at your Amazon RDS DB instance, and you are ready to go."

Amazon raised minimized hassle and increased flexibility as reasons to use the service, which is currently in beta testing.

"Every hour that you don't spend fiddling with hardware, tracing cables, installing operating systems, or managing databases is an hour that you can spend on the unique and value-added aspects of your application," Jeff Barr, the company's Web services evangelist, said in a blog post. "I should point out that RDS enables a lot of really enticing development and test scenarios. You can set up a separate database instance for each developer on a project without making a big investment in hardware."

With its years-long effort, the Net retailer has built Amazon Web Services into a formidable presence in the information technology world. Competitors include Google App Engine, a computing foundation that can run Java or Python programs on Google's own BigTable database technology, and Microsoft's Azure, which is set to offer access to Windows servers in the cloud when it formally launches in November.

One potentially interesting rival is Oracle, already a giant in the database market and, if it can overcome European regulatory concerns, the future owner of MySQL assets. Because MySQL is open-source software, though, anyone may use and modify it, even without its copyright holders' permission.

The biggest competitor to this model is doing things the old way, with companies running their own computing infrastructure. Cloud computing poses security and trust issues for many companies considering whether to put their data and business applications on somebody else's computer systems. But researchers such as Gartner, an influential but not radical analyst firm, now recommend that companies look seriously at cloud computing.

Amazon is working on greater robustness for Amazon RDS. It offers automated backup, and it later plans to offer a "high-availability" option at no extra charge, with which customers can create a separate instance of a database in a different geographic region.

As with all services on AWS, Amazon RDS is priced on an as-used basis--with per-hour charges according to the server memory requirements of the database: 11 cents per hour for a small database of 1.7GB of RAM; 44 cents for large, or 7.5GB; 88 cents for extra-large, or 15GB; $1.55 for double extra-large, or 34GB; and $3.10 for quadruple extra-large, or 68GB. There also are charges for the size of data stored, the number of input-output requests, the amount of data written to the database, and the amount of data read from the database.

With all the hubbub about Snow Leopard and Windows 7, there's another operating system out there you may not have noticed that's getting a significant update: Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu backer Canonical plans to release its "Karmic Koala" version on Thursday, and both the desktop and server versions of the open-source operating system take significant steps toward cloud computing. The concept of moving work away from the computer in front of you and into the network does have some merit, but cloud computing is today's fashionable buzzword, and Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth is sensitive to its overuse.

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth speaking at the Intel Developer Forum

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

"What frustrates me is the term 'cloud' has come to mean anything with an Internet connection, including some stuff that really looks familiar like internal IT," said Shuttleworth in an interview. It's fair to say that in Ubuntu's case, though, it's not a stretch.

Built into the server version of Ubuntu 9.10 is Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, technology built atop the Eucalyptus software package. Amazon Web Services (AWS), a collection of computing infrastructure accessible over the Net on a pay-as-you-go basis, is among today's most significant cloud-computing efforts, and Eucalyptus implements many of its functions so companies can build their own "private clouds" using the same services.

And in the desktop version of Ubuntu, the cloud connection is a service called Ubuntu One, which lets Ubuntu users synchronize files stored on different machines and back them up on the central service. Storage space of 2GB is free, and 50GB costs $10 per month.

The Ubuntu software itself is free; Canonical sells Ubuntu support services.