• vCloud Hybrid Service Dedicated Cloud: Provides physically isolated and reserved compute resources, as well as a private cloud instance. Sold on an annual term with pricing starting at $0.13/hour
• vCloud Hybrid Service Virtual Private Cloud: Multitenant compute resource model, but with dedicated allocations for customers. Sold on a monthly term with pricing starting at $0.045/hour

It would be very easy to get critical at this announcement, and gasp at the fact that a company that formerly hated on the public cloud is now turning around and offering a hybrid solution. But that attitude ignores the reality for VMware customers who are often conservative and have only just developed an appetite for taking tentative first steps into the public cloud.

For those customers – application portability, an architecture they’re familiar with and an invoice from a vendor they’re already deeply partnered with is important. That’s the bottom line and the reason that, despite what the purists will say, this initiative will gain some traction.

It’s no threat to the big cloud providers of course, but it does raise some questions for those companies who make their income by helping large organizations built private clouds – their world just got a little bit more complicated.

In terms of technology, vCloud Hybrid Service will offer a simplified approach to management, allowing VMware customers to use the same tools and processes they use today to manage both on-premise and off-premise environments.  They’ll do this via the free vCloud Connector plug-in. As an interesting aside, VMware selected cloud automation technologies from Puppet Labs for the orchestration part of the offering – not surprising when one considers that  the company recently announced that it was putting $30M into Puppet Labs.

VMware is holding out an olive branch to partners – vCloud Hybrid Service can be sold the same way as on-premise VMware licenses with a standard SKU, and partners can retain the billing relationship with customers.

Interesting times huh?

…providing virtual environments in the cloud. CloudShare’s self-service SaaS platform and suite of solutions enable business users to build, freeze and share complex computing environments

The company boasts of over 175,000 users worldwide and more than half of the Fortune 100 as customers. Anyway – today CloudShare is extending their platform to deliver upon the needs of development and testing groups. CloudShare Labs is a self-service solution that delivers cloud infrastructure but in a way that is optimized for the particular use case of the department needing it. Particular capabilities of the platform include:

• Simplified Bug Fixing: The solution enables the capture of a multi-VM disk and memory state, literally freezing a bug in its environment so it can be shared with developers and corrected without having to reproduce the bug in a different environment
• Environment Cloning and Template Libraries: The ability to clone a master environment eliminates mistakes caused by misconfiguration and enables collaboration among cross-functional and dispersed teams through a web browser, console or SSH session. Groups can also create and store libraries of templates for later reuse
• Integration: The new solution integrates with the leading application lifecycle management (ALM) and software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes and tools, such as Team Foundation Server and Jenkins
• Remote Access: CloudShare Labs extends an organization’s existing on-premise development and testing environment to the cloud. Using an organization’s virtual private network (VPN), teams can connect to CloudShare to burst for more resources or collaborate with anyone, anywhere in the world.

It’s actually a compelling argument – individual development team are using so many specific functional tools that the idea of creating a one-size-fits-all development recipe that will cover all the different needs of a development organization is untenable. Rather what is needed is the ability to create libraries of stack templates, and to clone these environments as and when required. The environment cloning and template library aspects of CloudShare Labs make sense. The ability to “freeze” an environment mid-error and in doing so to more readily track and fix bugs is also a logical and compelling proposition.

The CloudShare approach is an interesting one and will suit large enterprises with a wide and diverse spread of development approaches and methodologies – it will be interesting to see the uptake that the product gains in the marketplace.

It’s worth reading the post but for those without the time, here’s the synopsis:

CycleComputing were contacted by Opscode to scale-test chef. One of CycleComputing’s science clients was running a massive scale run against a cancer problem – something to do with simulating the effects of different compounds on a protein associated with cancer. The run was estimated to take 341700 hours. CycleComputing built a utility supercomputer with some 10600 cloud instances, each of which were an individual multi-core machine – apparently this is the largest cloud HPC environment ever built. If it had been built physically it would have required 12000sq feet of data center space and cost $44M. Instead, over a two hour build time, and a nine hour run time, the total cost of the job run was $4362. 39 compute years, spun up in only a couple of hours, and completely run in half a day. Compelling story huh?

Of course it’s easy to say that this sort of requirement is very much an outlier and that’s a valid argument. But it seems to me that as we move to a world where we’ll be facing far larger computational jobs on a ever more frequent basis, the opportunities for cloud to enable something that has never been possible, or at least viable, before is also increasing.

Cloud’s not for everything, and there’s any number of workloads that will remain for the foreseeable future where they are. But for the sort of workload that CycleComputing described above, cloud is truly invaluable.

Some key findings:

Cloud adoption is driven by multiple factors.

• 80% of business executives cite better value as the a key driver for choosing cloud applications
• CIOs report a wide range of reasons for adopting cloud applications, including compliance requirements (58%), better value (53%), and competitive advantage (51%)

Employees like using cloud applications.

• 79% of those surveyed say that experience with cloud applications is beneficial
• 95% of CIOs say that IT employees want to gain expertise with cloud applications
• 83% of CIOs say they have no problem finding technical help for cloud applications

Outdated on-premise software is common.

• 61% of survey respondents say that critical applications have not been updated recently
• 14% say that they have business-critical software that has not been updated in over four years
• 28% of CIOs who have requirements for that business-critical software say they lack confidence in being compliant

MyPOV

Fodder for the punditry – but results inline with expectations. Businesses are starting to see that cloud is about more than cost savings but drives real value on a number of fronts. I’d be interested to dig in to the “value” responses here and see how many were a factor of the agility that cloud brings an organization. One assumes that the competitive advantage responses had much to do with being able to move more quickly with cloud and with traditional IT approaches.

No surprises that employees like cloud apps – while it’s not as simple as saying cloud is user-friendly while on-premise is not, the fact is that cloud application are, generally more recently created than on-premise ones and hence borrow many of the design and usability cues developed on more consumer focused applications – the net result of this is an experience which is easier to use, more intuitive and provides a better overall experience than more legacy apps.

Also no surprise about the outdated on-premise software – as I’ve mentioned many times before, IT budgets don’t have the scope to invest in moving legacy workloads, and updating applications is fraught with difficulty – the best outcome for these sorts of workloads is enabling mobile access to them through some kind of API strategy – it’s generally not about the application itself, it’s about the data and there is little need to move or update the entire application, rather a “bolt on an API” methodology delivers what the organization actually needs.

Some interesting results that seem to indicate an increasing maturity from cloud users.

As promised, I am embarking on a loose series of blog posts that should help organizations plan their process for moving to the cloud. There are so many different things to think about, on so many different levels, that giving IT managers and business people a set of bullet-points and topic areas should help them in their process.

This week I wanted to look at some technical considerations that organizations need to think about when developing a plan for a move to the cloud. Let’s break down some of the different issues we might face.

Which Apps – How Do We Decide?

When faced by sometimes rabidly optimistic vendors that suggest putting everything into the cloud, right away, organizations are naturally a little confused when it comes to deciding what to move and how to develop an incremental migration strategy. In one of the CloudU reports I advised organization to make a stocktake of their applications and workloads and look to the following areas as good initial candidates for a move to the cloud:

• Workloads that have significant interaction with external applications or services
• Workloads and applications that are not a point of differentiation between the organization and its competitors

The move to the cloud is something that will occur incrementally over time – an organization should think of this move like peeling an onion – tackle the outside layers first (say e-commerce, email or customer facing parts of the business) and slowly work in to the core over time.

Security Considerations – How Do We Keep Ourselves Safe?

While it sounds glib to say it, security is all about both the vendor and the user doing the right things and being aware. The key piece of advice here is for organizations to take time and understand that it’s all about open dialog between the vendor and the customer, and both parties making sure they do the right things. Yes, a customer should do due diligence on a vendor to make sure they tick all the boxes (secure data centers, regulatory compliance, etc.) but customers also need to look to themselves for some things – the best, most secure data center in the world won’t keep you safe if a users keep passwords written on a PostIt notes on their laptops!

Compliance Considerations

Depending on the type of industry the organization is in, there are a number of different compliance requirements that may need to be met: the sort of acronyms that makes lay people’s eyes glaze over but which are of fundamental importance for the people who actually have to deal with them – PCI, HIPPA, GAAP, SOX, IFRS etc. The very fact that these acronyms sound like arcane mythology to everyone else is a fairly good indication that businesses need to make sure they appraise their own particular regulatory requirements and how that relates to the cloud vendor in question – cloud absolutely can be compliant with regulations, but users need to make sure that they’re ticking all the boxes that are particular to their own organization.

Performance – When Speed Matters

There’s no denying the physics of the speed of light – those bits coming down the pipe need to traverse great distances. While applications can be architected to make them as fast as possible, there are times that particular operating requirements might mean that cloud raises some performance issues. Organizations need to think about the fundamentals of their particular workloads – database transfer rates, high CPU or RAM requirements and high throughput data entry may all prove challenging for cloud applications. But then again they may not; as always it comes back to specific due diligence.

Migration Strategy

People often look at the move to the cloud as a before and after situation. That ignores the very real issues about cloud migration. Moving to the cloud is a process and like all processes there are peculiarities and issues that arise – things like the bandwidth and time impacts of moving bulk data from on-premise to the cloud. Even more importantly though, as with any change process within an organization, it is the human element that potentially introduces the most challenges – retraining staff, possibly the need to redeploy some staff and the move to generally a “new way of doing things” really impacts on the migration process. We cannot stress enough the need for early consultation with all the various stakeholders in the organization in order to smooth the migration process. A few hours spent explaining things at an early stage can pay huge dividends later on in the process.

Summary

Cloud brings real benefits to an organization – but with even the simplest organizational change there are impacts and a move to the cloud can raise some thorny issues. As with any chance management process however, forewarned is forearmed and that is why we strongly advise people to spend a lot of time thinking about the different impacts that cloud computing may introduce to their organization. By doing so, and by planning for those impacts, organizations can do their very best to ensure a smooth and successful migration process.

It seems to me that we’re slowly getting to a point where organizations are no longer doubting the suitability of the Cloud for them, but rather having to make some big decisions about which Cloud vendor to use.

One of the things we’ve talked about a lot over the time we’ve been running the CloudU series is how Cloud Computing tends to democratize technology, meaning that organizations can get a level of IT that they simply wouldn’t have been able to achieve previously.

There’s  flip side to this democratization however in that this high level of accessibility also means that it’s very easy for organizations to set themselves up as vendors – sometimes without the necessary level of professionalism that would be optimal.

More and more than organization are having to perform a thorough due diligence and really assess the quality of prospective vendors. In a previous CloudU report we wrote in depth about what organizations need to think about when planning a move to the Cloud. But recently over on BoxFreeIT, Loryan Smith raised the issue once again. In the piece Loryan rightly pointed out that;

anyone can run an email and file server from their garage and call it a cloud service. The problem is that Bob’s Garage Cloud Co. doesn’t have all the key technical and business components in place to provide organizations with a business-class service.

So here’s a very quick checklist of things that organizations should be aware of or think about when moving to the Cloud;

• Have a process for deciding which applications or workloads are candidates for Cloud
• Think about service requirements in terms of security, compliance and performance
• Consider issues around migrating existing workloads
• Think about the economic factors – what to do about existing sunk costs
• Accurately think about the potential demand curve to assess the economic impacts of a move to the Cloud
• Consider issues relating to vendor lock-in
• Make sure any prospective vendor is sufficiently flexible to meet your needs
• Think about the changing scope of needs within your IT department
• Consider the management challenges that the move might introduce – things like dealing with objections and employee retraining

While we believe that Cloud is the way of the future for IT, we are adamant that organizations need to think long and hard about what the move to the Cloud and how that move occurs – one valuable resource for discussing the challenges and opportunities is he CloudU LinkedIn group, we’d love to see you over there!

One part of the announcement got me confused however and that is when the press release differentiated FireHost as a provider of “secure cloud hosting services“ (emphasis mine). Frankly, I’m not sure what secure hosting, as opposed to the rest of the vendors, actually means.

I understand that FireHost specifically targets organizations with stringent data protection requirements – part of their offering includes real-time reporting of blocked hack event, web application protection and origin of attack mapping. But the way I see it all that stuff is tablestakes for any reputable Cloud vendor (and probably a bunch of irreputable cloud vendors as well). FireHost does say in its press release that it is PCI and HIPAA complaint – but then again so are many of its competitors.

Interestingly enough the messaging of the press release, and attendant quotes, calls out their contract-free approach towards hosting as the main differentiator. In the words of one of their customers;

As we’d expect, FireHost protects us from any and all instances of cybercrime, but we’re particularly happy with how its business model fits with our requirements. As a growing company, the absence of any contractual lock-in gives us complete control over our expenditure as well as the ability to grow or cut back our activity in busy or quieter times.

I think it’s a mistake for FireHost to call themselves the “secure cloud hosting provider” – it introduces doubt into the marketplace and, while FireHost aims that at their competitors, it does nothing for any of the vendors, FireHost included. Far better (in my view anyway) to focus on the fact that FireHost provides a great product, and without any contractual lock-in. That’s a valid point of difference and one which will appeal to customers, without negatively reflecting on competitors or the industry as a whole.

Either way – it’s awesome to see another vendor make the move to Europe – there’s some realities on the ground over there that mean having Cloud services provided in-region is a non-negotiable aspect of service provision. The more vendors there are in that market, the better for all of us.

• Sam Johnstone - resident “say it how it is” expert and well respected Cloud commentator
• Christian Reilly- former manager of global systems at Bechtel
• Adiran Cockroft - Cloud architect at Netflix
• John Taschek - VP Strategy from salesforce.com
• Yours truly

The roundtable was wide ranging but one part that really struck home for me was a point raised by Reilly around IT department budgets. Reilly reflected on something that really impacts on the economic decision making process around Cloud Computing.

Back in our Cloudonomics paper we referred to a Gartner report that estimated that 80% of IT expenditure went into simply “keeping he lights on”. The approach we took in the paper was one of questioning this 80% expenditure and showing how significant the savings that could be made by abstracting this spend away from the organization.

In our roundtable Reilly rightly pointed out that the remaining 20% of IT budget has to cover the totality of greenfield opportunities that an organization might have, this is a significant barrier as it greatly limits the number and scope of new projects that can be undertaken by an organization. If only a small proportion of this greenfields budget can be used for innovation, and the organization has a large number of legacy line-of business applications delivered on-premise – there is little desire to spend the already limited resource on extensive re-architecting operations.

It really is a significant Catch 22 situation – IT cannot free up sufficient dollars to move legacy applications to the Cloud. And because they therefore have to focus a significant proportion of their budget on “keeping he lights on”, the opportunities for investment in these activities are eroded.

That’s the reason that distinctly line-of-business applications like salesforce.com, and specific standalone use cases like development and testing have more readily been moved to the cloud. But I contend that until we free up more funds to divert to innovation spend – we’ll impede the progress of cloud adoption, but more importantly reduce organizations ability to compete and prosper.

As always, I’m keen to hear your thoughts, oh and we’d love you to join in some of our webinars or read the whitepapers – the CloudU homepage is here – and you can register to have updates sent to your inbox (in a non-spammy way of course!) there.

I’ve spent a bunch of time arguing with people about the economics of Cloud Computing. While I don’t deny that the per-unit price of computing will come down because of Cloud Computing, I believe that focusing on cost in isolation misses the whole point of the Cloud. My contention is that Cloud Computing, as the natural progression on from outsourcing, finally allows IT to completely focus on the strategic aspects of its job, forgetting the low level maintenance stuff and instead really looking to how it can add value to the business.

Recent surveys from lots of different independent analyst companies have shown that organizations are seeing agility as one of the key drivers for the move to the Cloud. That kind of makes sense when you consider the somewhat mind-numbing statistic that fully 80% of money that IT departments spend is “dead money”, being spent on day-to-day operations that don’t actually contribute to business growth.

I sat down a few weeks ago with Christian Reilly, an IT architect with one of the world’s largest construction companies, to talk about his experience building a private cloud for his organization. The thrust of the discussion was around the debate of whether the Cloud should be “public” or “private” but it is also interesting for those who contend that Cloud is a massive opportunity for IT to focus on the important stuff.

Reilly admits that in an ideal world they might be further along some kind of continuum than they currently are, but he does so from a position of total faith and belief in the value that their Cloud foray has driven so far – focus, efficiency, agility, predictability and a bottom line of adding value to the organization.

It is true that his move is going to pose many challenges to IT staffers – people will need to retrain, some positions will cease to exist and the demands on IT staff will move from primarily technical to primarily business aligned. But all of these challenges are valuable – they’re all part of IT doing what it’s promised for so long, and the Cloud is enabling them all.

Oh and we’d love you to join in some of our webinars or read the whitepapers – the CloudU homepage is here – and you can register to have updates sent to your inbox (in a non-spammy way of course!) there as well.

I spent some time talking with Datapipe who were keen to articulate what they see as the hidden pain and expense of managing cloud deployments – in a move reminiscent of Enomaly and enStratus among others, Datapipe seeks to ease these pain points.

Datapipe Managed Cloud, is a mashup of regular managed services with bundled cloud offerings from AWS. It’s an interesting concept that plays well into the hands of those who promote the concept of hybrid clouds – giving organizations the ability to utilize dedicated infrastructure but to also to scale up onto public cloud (at least as long as they like the Amazon flavor of public cloud). However Datapipe is doing much more than simply automating and centralizing cloud deployment, they offer a high service offering that includes architecture and design, forklifting, ongoing monitoring and management, patching and OS maintenance, and change management.

With this move to a partnership with AWS, Datapipe now also includes a suite of Cloud Accelerators for enhanced cloud infrastructure design. The modules include:

• Customer Access Manager – A user management system that provides complete access management for all cloud computing resources. Group and role support (i.e., web team, DB teams) allow customers to delegate access to resources on an “as needed” basis.
• Email Relay – Supports bulk-email applications and provides email relay capability from Amazon Web Services. Email relays are globally load balanced and highly available.
• Global Load Balancer – Datapipe offers global load balancing for AWS solutions from its highly available load balancing service.
• Web Application Accelerator – Datapipe delivers web caching of dynamic content and distribution to content delivery networks (CDN) through an award-winning infrastructure stack.

Of course this offering will only make sense for organizations who ant to scale their infrastructure needs onto Amazon’s cloud, I quizzed Datapipe on a possible tie up that would bring cloud offerings from other players into the mix, specifically Rackspace and Azure. Datapipe have nothing to announce at this stage but the idea make total sense to them – watch this space for a broadening of the offering.

In the interests of its desire to simplify things for customers, Datapipe offers customers a simplified billing model for accessing AWS infrastructure and the Cloud Accelerators as part of an all-inclusive price model for managed services, servers and storage – they’re also pragmatic about the drivers for enterprise IT and are offering customers a base monthly charge hat gives them certainty over their costs – full utility pricing is available but many customers prefer the stability that a base charge brings. In another interesting twist, Datapipe offers customers choice over their SLA, including the ability to specify a 100% uptime SLA, Datapipe achieves this by utilizing multiple Amazon regions plus their own infrastructure.

Abstraction of IT isn’t just about infrastructure – there’s a whole level of management that, t least for some organizations, is best handled by a third party. For organizations with these drivers, the Datapipe offering makes sense.