Chris Boos on Automation

When discussion comes to clouds, there are some arguments, that are often repeated by skeptics: data privacy and security but also the availability of data.

These points are aiming the spine of IT, touching the most valuable IT-assets, data. From private photo collections to enterprise data warehouses, loosing data is usually worst that could happen and is often not an option. This is true, independent which computing paradigm you follow: if you keep your hardware under your table, in the closet, in a (On-Premise)-Data Center or if you store it in the clouds, that means in data centers of the computing-service provider of your choice somewhere in the world.

And this is the point: Why is it, that with any new technological invention these discussions are brought up? I remember these 25 years ago, when RAID-systems came up, starting to conquer the later on so called SLED (Single Large Expensive Disks). Rember that Fujitsu Super Eagle, 19″, 8 Units, 150 pounds and 600MB Storage? How is it possible to securely store a single file by splitting it up and store it on 5 disperate, cheap SCSI-Disks? And years later, you might say, skeptics where right – I save raids dying for some reasons and we had to restore data from logically corrupted tape backup – **it happens.

Human Nature?

I guess it is human nature to bring up these arguments. Security and steadiness are human needs that follow directly after basic needs like food, shelter or clothing.  Because I understand that this is an important issue, I’m willing to have a candid discussion on this topic.

Living in Germany I’m not only looking human needs, but also have to keep Law and order in mind. Laws that influence not only public life, but we also have certain laws aiming at handling, storing, processing of data, trying to protect any indivual person from harm by loss or misuse of their personal data and also putting regulations on any institution that handles any kind of person-related data. Other countries have similar laws or regulations, eg. HIPAA in the healthcare sector.

Holiday Photographs

I assume, that anybody in the past, storing his/her personal holiday photographs, didn’t waste a thought nor a dime on keeping redundant copies. Possibly the most important images of the first day in school were duplicated. Nobody asked about redundancy or data security. Ok. Privacy was not the issue, keeping them in the locked drawer. But when it comes to personal photo cloud-storage, eg. Smugmug, based on Amazon S3, people start asking questions. My personal opinion is, that Smugmug’s business model is based on the fact that you pay money for a secure and reliable data storage (“All that was left after a twister struck my house are my holiday photographs” <LINK>), so the will take every measure, that this won’t happen.

Talking about Risks

If I still feel uncomfortable with the situation, it’s up to me to develop my private data protection strategy and keep files stored on my local harddrive. So I still can use the cool, new community and sharing features and still have a local copy of my photographs. Same point applies for enterprise computing. Just bigger databases and more users. Repeat after me: Security is just a matter of personal needs and money.

I don’t want to start a case in favor or against Cloud Computing like others, but instead I suggest to openly discuss risks and their management <See Bernard Golden>. But this discussion is not related or limited to cloud computing. Any data processing or management, regardless if paper/pencil based, server-based or cloud-based imposes risks that have to be assessed and hopefully mitigated or maybe not, so you have to bear or share them.

So What?

The cloud-vendors have to face the enterprise grade security discussion and need to offer concepts and architectures that provide the personally or even statutory relvant level of security. Maybe in the past the they didn’t do enought to help cloud computing to come out of beta state and enter the enterprises. In the mean time we should be looking for new ideas like RAIC described be Storage Architect Chris M. Evans <HERE> and Enterprise Architect Mark Masterson <HERE>.

I’m sure there are more people and companies working on concepts and products addressing these issues, so let’s find solutions and look forward to new opportunities, rather than only whining about dangers and risks. Trying to keep the status quo also bears risks. Especially in these times.

Roland

Once in a while – unfortunately not as often as I like – I find the time to go back to Konstanz where I grew up. The home of the family is always a cozy place, but Konstanz with the Lake Constance is very special. It actually looks like the bay area – just at the southern border of Germany – and has the feeling of peace in nature, city and the people living there. I do not want to give you a history lesson, so I just leave it at saying that a walk through the forest above the lakeshore is made to clear your mind and focus your thoughts. And the lake itself is always inviting for a sailing trip or swim in the summer. Warm evenings down by the lakeside invite other thoughts – I also will not go into.

Just because some of you are too much in the city… Autumn in the forest is one of the most stunning experiences ever– and it is available at absolutely no charge and every year. The colors and the light are just amazing. Well and then going through the soft underbrush with an agile and willing horse. There is not much to beat that!

I finally find the time to write to you on the integration of automated IT operating into today´s working environment. One should think that automation means that just some other tool will be installed into the void of the IT service management jungle and maybe some administrators use this tool and become a lot better and a lot faster. Actually that is exactly what I am NOT talking about. If you are interested in my opinion on the “Automation Market” you will read an article here soon. So what I am talking about is more of an auto pilot – a machine that actually looks at problems and chooses to take action.

The question I am always beeing asked is ‘does this integrate with an established working environment and established processes e.g. ITIL?’ Yes it does. Indeed it needs established processes to function properly. An automation engine like ours (ff0000;">aAE) basically replaces the initial contact to IT experts.

Fig 1 - classic ITIL incident management

Let us look at the ITIL V2 and V3 incident management process for example. As you probably know (see figure 1) a normal ITIL incident management process is either initiated by an alarm from some monitoring system or by a user contacting the helpdesk. The helpdesk handles all the bureaucracy and then passes the incident on to the IT experts who will perform further analysis – if required collect additional data and perform additional analysis – and then either take immediate action to produce a solution or initiate a change process to take this action. As you can see in figure 2 in an automated incident management process the automation engine takes the place of these IT experts. This also includes the engine communicating with the helpdesk, performing additional analysis, requesting additional data, documenting its actions and so forth. When the automation engine cannot find a solution it will contact the IT experts and ask them to step in. Only this time the experts will get a well analyzed incident with most of the boring work and analysis already done and well documented so they can actually work on something new and interesting.

fig. 2 - ITIL incident management with automation

This is how we introduced this auto pilot into our own ITIL compliant IT service management unit. We promised the real technical experts that they would never be bored to death by everyday tasks and tedious busywork. Instead the engine puts only these problems on their desk where an expert as such is actually required and can use his or her talent instead of just keeping mindlessly occupied. If you want to read some more on the human element and concerns connected with the introduction of automation you might want to look at the article “Plays Well with Others” written by Ellen Fussell Policastro last August. In this Article automation is looked upon not in an IT sense but in an industrial sense. This environment deals with change more practically than just IT and therefore it is probably an early adopter for the automation change on its way now.

So you can see that in an environment with well defined processes it is very easy to place an automation engine or an IT operating auto pilot. In an organization that does not have IT operating processes in place yet, just finding the proper interfaces for the automation engine and redefining the roles of the IT experts is probably a piece of work for Sisyphus.

fig. 3 - ITIL integration of automation

Incident management is just one example of how an automation engine that actually acts like an auto pilot can be integrated to dramatically reduce cost in IT operation while simultaneously increasing quality and making the jobs of IT experts much more interesting. As can be seen from figure 3 the automation engine places itself between CMDB with enterprise monitoring system and the process layer actually involving IT experts. This is not only valid for the reactive ITIL processes like incident or problem management but also for proactive processes such as availability or capacity management where our autopilot engine will itself invoke work load automation tools in order to up- or downscale an IT environment according to predicted usage and demand.

This level of integration into established processes and behavioral patterns of technical advanced staff is very rare for a tool that radically changes the workload of IT operating teams, service managers. So this approach is one of the few roads available to actually move one step ahead in an environment that produces ever more complex IT applications, interdependencies between IT services and speed of change within the environment. Just think about the kind of pressure a fully cloud computing based banking data center would put on administrators…

They would have to cope with a dynamically changing environment, changing dependencies and rapidly changing communication matrixes. Automation could handle the ordinary tasks in such an environment without being pressurized by speed and changing preconditions and contact IT experts with exact and well documented information when an unknown issue occurs – relieving them of the pressure generated by the dynamic IT environment and making much more use of their actual expertise. If that is not what we want (I could not really see a reason) it is certainly what we need to keep up with a changing world without further demolishing the image of the IT-Crowd.

Friends,

if I caught your interest in the topic of automation and you would like to see what we have achieved so far, you can see me at this year´s PULSE in Las Vegas. I will give a presentation on “Automation — The Key Factor in Producing and Maintaining Integrated IT Services” there.

Here is a short Abstract of what I will cover in the session:

Automation in IT operations reduces effort while increasing service quality. Integrating IT and ITSM processes are the focus. Today we can implement shared IT services and on-demand IT resources such as Clouds. But how is this ever-growing complexity managed while making availability a commodity to business? As cost increases are not acceptable, automation is “the future.” In this session you will learn about the possibilities of automation and automatic IT operations. Best practices and knowledge of experienced system engineers are conserved and multiplied, thus reducing manual labor while simultaneously pushing expertise up the value chain.

I am looking forward to many interesting discussions and meetings. If you want to schedule a personal get-together, please feel free to contact me.

Chris

Richard Stallman has started a big philosophical discussion about cloud computing by giving an interview to the Guardian in September 2008. Many participants in the Web community have taken this interview as a starting point to declare clouds and cloud computing as the evil itself. Basically Richard says that clouds are not a good idea, because you lose control over who processes your data and where it is processed. Stallman declares this dangerous, because only few players will offer these services thus putting all of us subdued to the will of these few corporations. Well, this is certainly a legitimate view of the world. But is this not fear of being controlled or at least controllable by someone else (especially a corporation) standing in the way of obvious technological progress? As you may have read in my late article “Heads in the Clouds” the concept of cloud computing is a logical step in technical evolution – although (and this is where I come quite close to Richard) is badly being misused by marketing.

Personally I think we are in many parts of our life more dependent on few people and corporations making decisions than we think. If you do not believe that I suggest reading “State of Fear” by the late Michael Crichton – you will find how much we are influenced and controlled by governments, media and corporations in our beliefs that even I believe if giving up control was an issue, we lost it long ago.

The concept of cloud computing makes great sense. Technologically because it takes one of the biggest challenges (parallelization) out of the programmer´s hands and allows him/her to focus on innovation instead. In Business because it saves a great deal of money as you are no longer obliged  to have all the computing power in store you might need at some stage. I found a more detailed well written reply “Cloud Competition, Lock-In, and Why Richard Stallman is All Wrong” going into Richard´s argument in detail at the SmoothSpan Blog written by Bob Warfield you might enjoy. If you are interested in the evolutionary aspects of cloud computing the current state and its off spring was described by James Urquhart in the “Wisdom of the Clouds Blog” article on “The Two Faces of Cloud Computing” which neatly fits into my current view on clouds and the future technical development awaiting us as described by “Heads in the Clouds”.

I would recommend facing the topic of cloud computing with less fear and more enthusiasm because this may actually be a step towards better software and services while at the same time cutting cost and “being green”.

I wish you all a happy new year. This may sound hollow as the upcoming year is starting out with immeasurable uncertainties. A recession is unavoidable as the economic mechanisms are working their way through the different economic sectors and into everyday life. Given the origin of this recession – the financial industry with capital being one of three pillars of our economic system– even systematic change may be in store. The greatest problem is decisions being held back due to these uncertainties thereby creating an even greater economical impact. Thus what we definitely are feeling as a crisis is a powerful well of change. This well will flood through economy, society and of course technology. We will need strong decision makers and innovators – real entrepreneurs – to embrace change and make use of its power to tackle some of the grand challenges built up during the last 50 years.

For those of us promoting new technologies the willingness to embrace change is often the biggest obstacle in putting these new technologies to use. Think about the argument of how cloud computing cannot be a good thing because it changes the relationship between our data and our computations we are so much used to. Or think about bringing the concept of automatic system operation to the administrators who will no longer be just operators but turn into system experts. All these high tech concepts require a dramatically changed way of approaching everyday problems and those of us implementing these new technologies know that inventing the technology is less than 50% of the way. The biggest challenge is attracting enough interest in all players the new technology touches, in order to make them embrace the required change to effectively make use of the new technology. The current situation may prove to be one of the most potent accelerators for technological change possible. So to all of you – those who invent, implement, decide upon or just make use of new technologies – make wise, well thought of and brave decisions embracing change. You will be the ones who will contribute towards a speedy way out of the current uncertain situation.

After giving you so much leeway ( ) by posting a few personal stories from the past summer to past autumn we are all back to business and I want to share some of the reading and thinking that I have done during the quiet time between Christmas and New Year´s Eve in the articles coming up this week. I will start out with a little catching up on the “clouds are bad discussion” started by Richard Stallman with an interview given to the Guardian in September 2008. I do believe there was a good deal of stubbornness and corporate mistrust behind condemning the cloud concept as you will read. I will then continue with a post on integrating the concept of automation – rather than just tools – into IT operation processes and tool infrastructure. After you have read Roland´s post on “Automating What?” in November you may be interested in how the concept of automation is integrated into everyday IT service management and how our concept of e.g. an automated incident management is incorporated into a working IT environment. Following this post I will try to show a landscape of technology and tools and the way the ongoing development is focusing in on automation as a concept. This process was started when tools were used to ease the manual process of maintaining system functionality (e.g. system management tools) and continued by the automation tools that enable complex changes to be performed by entering a simple command (e.g. change automation or run book automation tools). The process is now at a point where actually decisions are taken by the automation software (e.g. what hardware is used to do what tasks by which is decided by workload automation tools) and will finally come to tools that make use of all the experience of system administrators in order to automatically decide how to keep systems alive. Thus automating incident- problem- capacity- and availability management. This kind of tool is what we have been using and developing for quite some time now ( see the aAE) and the post will show how this kind of tool integrates with the whole landscape of tasks and tools involved in IT service management.

It is unavoidable to grow older – fortunately. I just read “God´s Equation” – an excellent book about relativity also giving the historical perspective on the evolution of Einstein´s theory and the evolution of mathematical methods taking place at the same time. Therefore I am quite content with the dimension of time being out of our circle of influence. So it was my birthday and what a day it was. In the evening I was greeted by great friends with a salmon and champagne aperitif in my office and complemented out of the place virtually with the glass still in hand.

As a connoisseur of most fine restaurants in Frankfurt I was taken to a – to me previously unknown – secret place. Pizzaria Olbia – a take away restaurant with a few tables right inside the kitchen to stand at. I was very surprised about the environment, but obviously the principle of “form follows function” also applies to gastronomy. The Pizza – we were obviously in a hurry – was one of the best I have tasted so far and we will definitely be back at Olbia for more food.

To be content – as the Romans said –you need food and play. The food (bread=Panem) part we had just dealt with and then came the big surprise. My friends took me to Frankfurt´s elaborate Variety show at the Tigerpalast. There we were presented with acrobats, magicians, dancers and a whole lot of fine wine. A wonderful show and a great evening spent with amazing friends and family. From the Tigerpalast we obviously had to take off to my 2^nd living room – Jimmy´s Bar (just voted the top 5 bar in Germany) – and actually toast to my birthday with some more bubbles.

To the friends who organized and spend this evening and night with me – thank you so much, you made it a very special event.