The Cloud JL Cabrera LTEC 4550
Introduction What is the Cloud? Cloud Basics What can the cloud bring to business? Costs and Benefits Capacity and Agility Risks to evaluate prior to proceeding into the Cloud? Challenges Security and Accountability Location of Data Affects Privacy and Performance Availability and Reliability Data and Application Mobility Is the cloud the end of internal infrastructure? What s at Stake? Evaluate Take Action Conclusion
The Cloud 3 Introduction Should businesses be considering the cloud as a viable option for business? What are some of the concerns with cloud computing? Is cloud computing the end of internal infrastructure or is it the next step of infrastructure? We will discuss the primary basics of cloud elements, what enterprises gain from cloud computing and what does it mean to the infrastructure professional. What is Cloud Computing? Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT's existing capabilities. Cloud Basics. In cloud computing, vendors rent computer resources to enterprise customers. The organization gets on-demand increases in capacity without having to procure or setup the physical infrastructure. There is no doubt that interest in cloud computing is at an all-time high across organizations of all sizes. Small enterprises are equal to large enterprises in the proportion that are exploring cloud service options. Small enterprises are well suited to adopt cloud-based services. The cloud offers lower cost of entry because it eliminates up front infrastructure requirements. Reduced barriers to entry mean that the small enterprise can pilot a cloud-based service solution without the large up front capital expense and wait time. It can be done, and it can be done fast. While interest is high, it is still early days for the cloud. Most enterprises are in the early phase of considering Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). In the current cloud hype any vendor that has off-site
The Cloud 4 Infrastructure, Platform, or Software services is calling themselves a cloud provider. Iaas, SaaS, and PaaS are not clouds. They are services that may be enabled by a cloud. Cloud Services. These represent three general ways in which applications are provisioned with cloud resources: Applications in the Cloud The customer contracts the use of an application, which is hosted and provisioned from a compute cloud. Examples include Salesforce.com and Google Apps. With this type of service, the enterprise must ensure that the basic feature offerings are sufficient. Platform in the Cloud A cloud platform is a Web application development and run time environment that is externally hosted in a compute cloud. The customer accesses tools and resources for developing and then running an application with the need to build and maintain an infrastructure. Examples include Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine. Some of the limitations here are the languages available to developers. Infrastructure in the Cloud What this entails is the management of basic compute services like processing and storage as virtual entities. For example, a server is hosted by a third party, but this server is a virtual machine for which the processing, memory, and storage have been provisioned from the cloud. Examples include Amazon s Elastic Compute Cloud and Rackspace Cloud. Types of Clouds. Though a cloud is by definition an abstraction of capacity, who owns the underlying physical infrastructure defines whether a cloud is an external public cloud or an internal private cloud. A hybrid cloud is a third kind of cloud computing that uses both internal and external. Internal Cloud
The Cloud 5 Internally maintained Private cloud The business is the client. The service is maintained by internal IT department. Using standardized and commoditized hardware helps reduce the cost per unit of compute resources. External Cloud Externally maintained Public cloud The entire organization is the client. The service is maintained outside of but accessible from - the internal infrastructure. Cost savings come from consolidation and aggregation as well as the eliminated need to Hybrid Cloud acquire more hardware. Third party providers and internal IT work together. The organization can decide where to invest and where to outsource.
The Cloud 6 What can the cloud bring to business? Small businesses are often the pioneers of new disruptive technologies. Cloud computing is no different. Some of the reasons why small businesses are able to try emerging cloud services include: Significantly lower cost of entry Higher risk tolerance within the business Flexibility and agility of service Cost and Benefits. Small businesses have traditionally been first to take advantage of disruptive technologies that provide good enough service at significantly lower upfront cost that the traditionally dominant technologies. Cloud services offer this kind of opportunity. For those evaluating and deploying cloud services, the opportunity to save on infrastructure costs and to deploy applications rapidly were the two highest ranked issues in terms of positively influencing the decision to deploy. Lower upfront costs are attractive particularly if the small business simply cannot afford the cost of the dominant solution. With distributed processing, for example, small businesses could afford industry standard PCs and network servers but not mainframes. Good enough service means that for issues like resiliency, availability, and security, the solution is within the bounds of tolerable risk for the business. With cloud services, for example, a 99.9% uptime guarantee may not be adequate for an enterprise that requires five nines availability, but for smaller firms three nines may well be good enough and better than what the best effort of their own infrastructure could provide.
The Cloud 7 Capacity and Agility. The customer does not need to acquire hardware to boost resources, and consequently does not need to have expertise in the underlying hardware in order to use the services. The focus can be on enabling core business processes with applications while decreasing the unit costs of compute capacity. So, for example, a cloud-provisional retail Web site can scale to meet Christmas shopping demands. The retailer only pays for the additional capacity used during the rush period.
The Cloud 8 Risks businesses should evaluate prior to proceeding into the Cloud? From an infrastructure management point of view, the cloud is a form of utility infrastructure with the physical infrastructure owned by a third party. However, in a utility infrastructure, the goal is to reduce the costs per unit as well as manage the risk. Listed below will be four challenges for enterprises to consider. Dealing with these challenges will inevitably add to the cost per unit of capacity. Challenges: Security and Accountability Data is a critical resource for which the enterprise will take extraordinary measures to protect. In cloud computing, these crown jewels are now entrusted to a third party. In fact, the crown jewels may be entrusted with more than one third party. For example, a SaaS vendor may contract raw compute resources from a cloud provider. An enterprise could be using the SaaS provider s application for a critical business process and neither the enterprise nor the SaaS provider knows where the data really is and who might have access to it. Location of Data Affects Privacy and Performance Data stored in the cloud could conceivably be stored anywhere in the world. This includes places where laws around privacy and data security are different. Location of processing and data also has an impact on performance for a cloud-based application. Distance adds latency. Latency will not only have an impact between the user and the application but also between the parts of a multi-tiered application.
The Cloud 9 Availability and Reliability Any infrastructure supporting critical enterprise applications needs to be predictable, reliable, and highly available. Failures and outages are inevitable with any technology. For some enterprises, best effort is not good enough for critical applications. Service level agreements (SLAs) need to spell out how availability will be ensured as well as liability for unplanned outages. Data and Application Mobility In an ideal world, the cloud would be platform-agnostic and applications could move easily from one provider s cloud to that of another. Each cloud has its own limitation and differentiations. For example, Google App engine is limited to python programming language. Web services development for Amazon Cloud is Linux/Apache/MySQL/pHp-based.
The Cloud 10 Is the cloud the end of internal infrastructure? Does cloud computing mean the end of internal IT infrastructure professional? The answer is no, but cloud computing will significantly disrupt internal roles and processes. Failure to take ownership of cloud services will lead to increasing irrelevance for managers of traditional infrastructure silos. The cloud calls into question the cost and very existence of infrastructure. It s not about competing technology or platform but competing value proposition. The prevailing sense is that when comes to deploying internal infrastructure, the cloud is fast and cheap versus slow and expensive. What s at stake? There is a future for internal infrastructure even as external clouds mature and become hosts for key applications and processes. Infrastructure management and infrastructure roles will need to adapt to everything as a service to survive. Infrastructure professionals ignore the cloud and the organization may be tempted to bypass IT and go straight to attractive cloud service offerings. You will become irrelevant. Evaluate. Businesses are experiencing an increase in the volume of enterprise data between 40% and 60% per year. This increase in data storage needs routinely leads to additional storage capacity purchases. Enterprises look to alternatives like cloud storage to reduce storage costs, often ignoring the time required for uploading and downloading data, and not testing crucial steps like full server restores. Cloud storage can drastically reduce costs for companies with high traffic websites delivering large media files, and increase disaster recovery capabilities as an off-site backup replication solution. Maximize your cloud storage adoption success by using it in the way most appropriate for your business, not in the way cloud storage vendors believe you should. Every cloud storage
The Cloud 11 service has a use case that it is most appropriately suited for; you will save time by focusing your efforts on evaluating vendors that suit your business needs. Save money by avoiding capital expenditures on new storage capacity, and staying away from cloud storage vendors that nickel and dime you in every way possible. Invoices that are hard to read will instigate questions from the business about what you are paying for and why. Don t migrate just because you can: Evaluate cloud storage as an alternative to purchasing new backup/archiving capacity, deploying additional in-house servers, and improving the cost of your existing Web delivery solution. Do not deploy cloud storage just because adoption is increasing. Adopters have found value in cloud storage, but they aren t using it simply because it s available. Cloud storage solves needs like: o A lack of in-house growth capacity o Capital expenditure avoidance o Off-site disaster recovery capabilities o A need for greater flexibility. Organizations using cloud storage find it to be reliable and, overall, are satisfied with the security provided. Moving to the cloud is extremely time consuming organizations with anything less than a 10Mbps upload speed will likely find the time required too lengthy. Find a cloud storage provider that will let you ship them a hard drive or tape as a seed. Using cloud storage, for any purpose, can lead to reduced costs. However, cloud storage has to be managed just like on-site
The Cloud 12 storage migrating to cloud storage does not preclude the organization from enforcing existing storage, backup, and archiving policies. Investigate ways to decrease the amount of time needed to migrate to the cloud, like asynchronous WAN optimization solutions, shipping a hard drive to seed your cloud storage, and deduplication. Businesses using PaaS and processing IaaS should evaluate cloud storage for additional primary storage and backup. These organizations have already found the benefits of the cloud and it s time to extend those. Take Action. Take ownership of the cloud in a broader infrastructure-as-a-service strategy. Listed are some actions needed to be successful: Measure and articulate the total cost comparisons between internal infrastructure and cloud services. Lead in the creation of the internal IaaS to lay the foundations of a hybridized internal/external cloud future. Manage the impact on infrastructure roles including changing skills requirements, recruitment, and eliminating redundant roles.
The Cloud 13 Conclusion. I think the cloud has purpose and brings costs benefits to the enterprise. I also believe that the infrastructure professional has a place in managing the cloud. However, I don t believe in the idea that the cloud is the answer to all issues and everything should be migrated to the cloud ASAP. There should be a strategy and plan in place for each project and application. Each enterprise should be evaluated for the pros and cons to migrating to the cloud based on their own business needs. I think the cloud is here to stay and can be utilized by large and small organizations bring different benefits to each.
The Cloud 14 Resources: Knorr, Eric Gurman, Galen (n.d.) What cloud computing really means InfoWorld Retrieved from: http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/what-cloud-computing-really-means-031 Tadjer, Rivka (November 18,2010) What Is Cloud Computing? PCMag Retrieved from: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372163,00.asp Sarrel, Matthew (February 1, 2009) The Darker Side of Cloud Computing PCMag Retrieved from: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2330904,00.asp Wainewright, Phil (July 19, 2011) Three little clouds and the big bad world ZDNet Retrieved from: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/saas/three-little-clouds-and-the-big-badworld/1351?tag=search-results-rivers;item12