One of the most interesting aspects of the weeks leading up to and including this year's VMWorld was the incredible innovation in cloud-computing service offerings for enterprises--especially in the category of infrastructure as a service. A variety of service providers are stepping up their cloud offerings, and giving unprecedented capabilities to their customer's system administrators.
In this category, enterprises are most concerned about security, control, service levels, and compliance; what I call the "trust" issues. Most of the new services attempt to address some or all of these issues head on. Given that this is the infancy of enterprise cloud computing, I think these services bode well for what is coming in the next year or two.
Here is a brief analysis of the offerings that recently caught my eye:
Amazon Web Services Virtual Private Cloud: There is no doubt that the smart people at Amazon continue to innovate at a breathtaking pace. The last three years have seen a whirlwind of new and upgraded services, ranging from storage and server capacity, to payment processing and content delivery.
Amazon's new Virtual Private Cloud offering is just another example of how they listen to their customers when they build solutions. Not so much unique and innovative, as a near perfect execution of a simple solution to a raft of thorny problems, Amazon's VPC service is essentially a powerful VPN gateway which allows Amazon services to be added to the customer's network.
Now, this doesn't directly address security, compliance, or service levels, but it gives enterprise customers a level of control over network configuration that was previously unavailable from Amazon, which in turn enables the customer greater latitude to address those issues.
Savvis "Project Spirit": Available in beta "by the end of this year," Savvis's Project Spirit adheres to a "Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC)" concept very similar to the Virtual Data Center vision espoused by Sun. In a video providing an overview of the service, Savvis indicates that Project Spirit provides three tiers of service, each with an increasing set of capabilities and improved quality of service (QoS).
The video demonstrates wizard-based provisioning and drag-and-drop resource topology design, both of which are similar to features from GoGrid and Sun, though perhaps a little more aligned with the latter than the former.
What I like about Project Spirit is its sense of configurability; something that I think has been missing from many IaaS offerings to date.
Terremark vCloud Express: Terremark is one of the first out of the gate with a basic "one server at a time" offering based on VMWare's vCloud Express infrastructure. Targeted at the same users who find Amazon's EC2 so easy to use, the service is meant as a simple, low-risk way for customers to acquire compute capacity.
In a video recorded at VMWorld, Simon West, Terremark's VP of marketing, demonstrates provisioning a server in the service. Like other services in its class, it focuses on allowing you to select a server image from a menu of possibilities, click a button, and boot the resulting server in a few minutes. Pricing starts at $.036/hr for a 1 "VPU," 0.5GB server, but as Chris Flex of Citrix Systems notes in a blog post, Terremark charges differently than Amazon, so the CPU cost does not necessarily reflect cheaper overall operation costs.
Terremark's new service complements its existing Enterprise Cloud service, which is targeted at larger, more sophisticated infrastructure needs.
OpSource Cloud: Hosting vendor, OpSource, is taking a more network-centric approach toward cloud definition, similar to the "subnets" that Amazon allows customers to create in its VPC offering. The OpSource cloud is in pre-beta now, with an October target for "public release." When the OpSource team demonstrated their user interface to me, they showed me a metaphor that begins with the definition of a "network," which is an isolated through custom routing capabilities at the OpSource data centers.
Each network comes with eight public IP addresses (more can be added), and you can add resources such as servers, storage, and firewalls as you see fit. You can also create as many networks as you'd like for each account.
Obviously, there are many more offerings like these in the market today. However, it is interesting to note that the common theme here seems to be security, either through "isolation" via networking, and/or through the availability of enterprise-class firewalls, load balancers, and the like. The expansion of virtual data center offerings is also interesting, as I think it shows the early growth of what will likely be the true enterprise cloud-computing space.
Access control and user account management was a little sketchy in most of the services I saw, although some showed real promise.
However, one has to wonder as application architectures adjust to cloud computing, how much longer they are going to be tightly coupled to data center architectures. At what point will it no longer be advantageous for application owners to define infrastructure in terms of servers, storage, and security devices?
That being said, the independence of distributed applications from underlying architecture is a long way off, even from the enterprise perspective. I expect that by this time next year, we will see a stable of very strong enterprise public cloud offerings, with support for various compliance standards, sophisticated networking, and cloud-centric security services and technologies.
This is just the beginning of a long evolution, folks.
Update: Updated link to Hoff's terminology map and related image to his latest version.
I was privileged to be a part of the Enterprise Cloud Summit that took place at the beginning of Interop in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. The program was excellent, with an all-star list of cloud experts and a surprisingly large number of attendees who were new to cloud computing and trying to get a sense of what it was all about.
What was different from prior cloud-related conferences, however, at least for me, were the types of questions this inquisitive audience was asking. Almost nobody asked around defining cloud computing, but many took advantage of the show to ask panelists and speakers to describe how they could put the cloud to use in their own businesses.
The cloud conversation is moving from "what is it?" to "how would I use it for my business or institution?"
(Credit:
Chris Hoff / Rational Survivability)
I find this very exciting--and, quite frankly, very refreshing. The amount of energy spent on presenting and defending terminology and taxonomy has become a huge time-sink for those trying to advance the cloud discussion. It's not that I mind walking people through the differences between cloud computing and virtualization, but I'd rather focus my efforts on business cases and customer success stories (or even failures).
It's not that the industry has arrived at a common cloud definition--though the NIST definition has some legs, and I'm a huge fan of Chris Hoff's terminology map (pictured here). Rather, the market seems to have come to the conclusion that cloud computing has a lot in common with obscenity--you may not be able to define it, but you'll know it when you see it.
Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of this shift is the fact that we should start seeing some real business cases, use cases, and best-practice discussions appear in the cloud-computing discussion.
Best Buy running on Google App Engine; stories about impressive gains by the venerable New York Times and Animoto when they used Amazon Web Services; and Eli Lilly's tale of redefining research projects: all these serve as examples of cloud's value in the right contexts. We know from these examples that "batch jobs" are great cloud fodder (such as grid computing and image processing), as are applications with unpredictable scale.
We need to see more such examples publicized, however. Where are the financials with their complex models and data mining? Biotech with its constant data processing demand? Manufacturing with its "just in time" supply chain management?
Perhaps the examples will continue to be more of the same, but that's OK to me. Then we know where cloud's strengths and weaknesses are, and we can move the conversation forward from there.
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:
(Credit: James Urquhart)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 moreOne of the really difficult aspects of cloud computing for most established IT organizations is the fact that the move to clouds, even private clouds, is not a simple, intuitive one. Replacing the bulk of both technology and process with a focus on capacity as a service--an automated, self-administered service--results in many organizations "experimenting" with the cloud, but few pushing any barriers. To make matters worse, we are in that wonderful "discovery" phase of a technology, where there are few if any guides to how to do it right, with minimal risk, and those that do exist are generally personal opinions, not "burned in" recipes for success.
This post does not pretend to be such a recipe. However, over the course of the last several months, culminating in some great conversations with some really smart people the last few weeks, I've come to realize that there is a basic maturity model for moving from data center consolidation architectures to true open market cloud architectures.
Remember maturity models? They've been around for some time, but a couple of years ago there was a small burst of creativity among system integrators and analysts alike, and maturity models were defined for a variety of IT subjects, ranging from business processes to technology architectures, such as SOA. The basic idea was to lay out some milestones, or even "gateways", to be achieved by IT as they worked towards achieving some idealized computing or process goal.
To that end, below is a simple five phase maturity model that I and others believe describes the stages of evolution for an enterprise data center trying to achieve cloud Nirvana:
... Read more
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