Chris Boos on Automation

Coming to PULSE 2010 almost felt like coming to a friend I had not seen for a long time. The setup is very similar to last year´s with some little improvements. Obviously the conference committee was actually reading many of the suggestions given. For example the temperature in the conference center is no longer below freezing… Well PULSE started off as usual with Al Zoller coming on stage and getting all of us on track. “All of us” means more than 5.500 IT professionals who have come to Las Vegas despite tight budgets and economic crises. Al Zoller announced that this year IT service management at Tivoli is all about integration. After the idea of breaking down silos of competence integration – between the remaining silos (?) and especially between all the tools and processes we find in IT service management today is a great idea and actually long overdue. The scenarios and examples presented in Al Zoller´s and other first day keynotes are still very much in the shadow of economic downturn. Even though every manager is emphasizing that we are in a recovery phase their choice of case studies in the keynotes either shows that they are still skeptical (like most top managers) about the sustainability of the recovery or that in 2009 Tivoli did only do successful projects in more or less crises resistant sectors like energy, government or PPP. Since I do not believe the latter (Tivoli is just too big for that) I would say Tivoli top management is on the same page as many other executives, who make a great public appearance telling everyone that the crises is over but do not quite believe so internally – at least not yet. Following Al Zoller´s keynote address we had the chance to look at an example of integrated service management or rather an example of the applied theory of smarter planets. The demo was about Las Vegas and the Venetian as a smarter city or building respectively. The demo was quite staged and the Tivoli executives on stage had to struggle with their acting skills. Personally I do not believe in the usefulness of the kinds of dashboards shown in the presentations, but it seems this is what customers are looking for at the moment, so IBM was right on spot showing what could be done and how these dashboards interacted with all the data sources and process management systems. Speaking of data sources, I think if we are really going into the direction of a smarter planet and the internet of things, the term information overload will gather new meaning over the next couple of years.

The guest keynote given by former vice president Al Gore was the best guest keynote at any PULSE so far. I had heard that Al Zoller was criticized harshly for inviting Al Gore as an environmentalist, because IBM has such a strong customer base in the energy and traditional industry sector. Well guys, get real – oil will only be there for about 50 years (if that long) and Exxon et al are also looking into other concepts. Personally I would prefer if everyone was doing research about nuclear fusion as the energy source of the future, but taking nature as an example is maybe too far out for parts of the environmental movement. Al Gore was absolutely authentic, convincing and just fun. And he got everybody to think about their behavior, especially giving a speech on energy efficiency in a city like Las Vegas. As Al Gore said, the next generation will ask us either the question “How did you do it” or “Didn´t you see it coming”. So congratulations for Al Zoller for taking the initial heat when inviting Al Gore. More than 5.500 attendees at the opening session of PULSE 2010 were enthusiastic about the speakers and the integration message of IBM as well as the sustainability message of Mr. Gore on behalf of mankind.

Looking at PULSE I have seen many more client presentations and case studies than last year. And – coming back to a point I made before – these presentations are mainly not about state funded endeavors, but about companies dealing with the economic down turn successfully in one way or the other. Tivoli has also introduced the opportunity to meet reference customers in one-on-one talks and start an exchange on their experience with Tivoli products, which I think is a great idea – especially after seeing the customer panel discussion as part of the second day´s general session and the positive audience feedback to the panel. Even though the CIOs of several major international companies were not really sharing any news when talking about their efforts to deal with integration issues and reengineering their IT business alignment, getting these guys up on the main stage to openly declare that IBM was helping them to achieve their goals made everybody else walk out with a secure feeling. Not just great marketing, but obviously also a job well done on the part of the IBM Tivoli engineers, project teams and account managers.

Some of the session presentations were of a little less quality than the ones I had seen in previous years. Maybe that is because everybody was very busy fighting IT budget cuts and the economic crises itself, but the content of most presentations was as good as I have gotten used to over the last three years. The only thing I am a little disappointed about so far is the track on Cloud Computing. This track is still very much about why clouds make sense and other theories that have long since been proven by reality. But some of the customer presentations (e.g. CSC or ITricity) had really good cloud examples. Maybe IBM feels that they still have to pick up the cloud skeptics by introducing them from the beginning, but I think the PULSE attendees are more cloud worthy than that. I have had no time to take a look at the new track on medium sized business, because the first two days are so packed with must see presentations that I simply could not spare the hour. But I am sure I will get around to the topic tonight.

The second day´s keynotes were dominated by Harriet Person – or as I said Ms. Security. Her presentation on regarding the integration of security into embracing change as an opportunity rather than being paranoid about all the things that could happen was authentic, fun and well received by the audience. The presentation also made the best points so far on the integration topic and its actual business effects (apart from all the effects of technical integration that I will not mention here, because those should have been addressed a while back). I already mentioned the customer panel which was a great idea of the conference designers. Some of the other talks in the 2nd day´s general sessions were a little dull to me.

I must give a little note on the usage of social media at this year´s IBM PULSE. Twitter screens all over the place, blogger meetings and lots of coverage on all kinds of channels have made it clear that IBM is serious about the social media community. Not integrating twitter into the main sessions however also shows that there is still skepticism about the uncontrollability or the enormous demands of interaction required by social media. I am sure the very positive coverage PULSE has gotten so far on twitter and blogs will give Tivoli´s senior management a hint as to the topic of being skeptics.

Yesterday night I attended the 2nd CloudStorm in London <LINK> togther with more than 100 other people interested in Cloud Computing solutions.
The organizers (namely Arvid Fossen from A-Server) have choosen a fantastic location at Allen & Overys offices in the 10th floor, which offered a great view over London, as you can see from the images. The venue was very decent and everything was perfectly arranged.

After a great keynote from Joe Baguley (@JoeBaguley) of Quest Software, serveral 5 to 6 minute talks presented Cloud Computing solutions and described some interesting real world customer scenarios. Following the talks there was a 40 minutes panels, where the audience posed a number of questions to the speaker: Most interest appeared to be the topic of security and how organisations and SME’s could benefit from Cloud offerings. There were a number of questions proving that Cloud Computing is a hot topic and people are starting to discuss benefits and tradeoff with their customers.

Following the panel there was a intesive networking party, including great finger foods and drinks, which offered a perfect framing for interesting discussions between the audience and the speakers, which countinued until around 22:00.

Overall it was great event, and we will continue to attend and contribute to the Cloudstorm events series. Find mor information at the Cloudstorm Homepage www.cloudstorm.org. There you soon will find all the slides from the event.

[View with PicLens]

Is it just me? Or do you also hear clouds everywhere you go but still you do not really know what to do with them. So even though I try to focus on the technical aspects of operating a dynamic environment  – which basically means putting an autopilot into the driver´s seat, since neither me nor you can “administrate a moving target” – I feel that the topic of cloud computing needs some real business focus. With everybody getting involved on the technical side and all the lawyers talking about all kinds of legal issues and risks a question I hear over and over again is “when can I use the cloud?”.

Well, here´s the good news: you can use “the cloud” (no such thing by the way) today. You just have to be satisfied with a limited business angle so far.

While the concept of cloud computing looks to change the way we buy, operate and use IT, many players present their services as an early part of the cloud movement. There are infrastructure services (no I am not going to mention the same names over again) or standards for outsourcing peak infrastructure needs as included e.g. in vSphere. You can also see a lot of the “Software as a Service’ guys positioning themselves to offer “cloud services”. Well to my judgement a lot of that is about marketing (SaaS works without clouds just as well (just as badly) as other IT does), but service providers like SaaS-providers are the first wave of businesses to benefit from the cloud idea because it is easy for them to embrace it.

Still, if you are involved in building, planning, operating or controlling a normal business in an IT sense, you probably want to know “When is the right time to go to the cloud?”, ”How can I start?” and “What professional services are out there?”. Well, you can attend many good events created by individual companies to promote their ideas (IBM Pulse, EMC World, …). You can join the evolutionary discussion on clouds at a CloudCamp and in a LinkedIn group. You can even go into the design of a completely open sourced concept and framework for cloud building and join Thomas Uhl and LiSoG in their efforts. Or you could join one of the fathers of cloud discussions – John WIllis in his efforts to get the world to focus on cloud computing. All these actions will definitely get you involved into the process of getting cloud computing into the real world.

But your involvement into any of these much needed and very interesting activities will not really answer your questions as stated above because all these activities are very much focused on either a single approach, a very wide range or an evolutionary discussion. This is why A. Fossen from A-Server has come up with the idea of “a CloudStorm”.

CloudStorm 2010 is a series of events in Europe and the US where you do not only hear from one provider or vendor, but from many and where the focus is very much on today and interaction between the vendors rather than convincing you to follow one vendor into deep dependency (avoiding dependencies is exactly what  cloud computing is all about in the end). So if you want to get a good overview, see many examples of cloud usage that is taking place today and get into a discussion with vendors or have them run against each other (you will find out there is more cooperation than competition, clouds could actually become the first real driver for business eco systems) you should attend one or more CloudStorms. When Arvid presented the idea of a CloudStorm to us, we chose to get involved into the whole series because I strongly believe that using cloud computing is not a question of the future, it is just a question of where to begin – and this is exactly where CloudStorm is headed.

So join us all in the next event in London on Feb. 22nd . Free for attendees and just before the DataCenter Expo (so you may already be there anyway). That is, if you are not at IBM PULSE 2010 at the time (which I will be). If you cannot attend, the next event in London will be on March 15th connected to Cloud Computing Congress. After that, we are especially happy to meet you in Germany on May, 4th. So you see, there is not really an excuse not to get involved and take home lots of information where you can start to actually use cloud computing and in what legal and technical context you can use it for your business.

Become part of the CloudStorm, register today at www.cloudstorm.org.

As you may have noticed – by me being silent = not part of my personality – the organization of the Frankfurt CloudCamp is putting all of us to the test. But today I have some great news for you.

We have published a first glimpse at the agenda of CloudCampFRA. I can honestly say that I am much looking forward to a fabulous event. Thanks to our sponsors we are able to organize a unique event in the successful history of creative CloudCamp unconferences and this is attracting great speakers.

You will be enticed into cloud philosophy presented by Simon Wardly (a great show is guaranteed) in the keynote. Visionaries like Tim Cole will give you security insights for the cloud and market makers like Cedric Hüsler will speak about business oriented cloud development.

With CloudCamp Frankfurt focusing on the business possible in clouds today, we have put together an agenda structured in four tracks:

1. Security and legal issues in the cloud
2. Business with the cloud
3. Developing for the cloud
4. Building and maintaining cloud infrastructures

No – there is no track for putting down yet another 25 descriptions of what a cloud is and why one needs one´s own definition….

I am also happy to announce (before this is even out on the official CloudCamp site) that we were able to increase the number of seats available at CloudCamp Frankfurt, so more of you can register and join in on interesting discussions, networking and game changing eco system building for the cloud environment of your choice. Thanks again to a great crew of corporate and media sponsors.

Look out for more news on CloudCamp Frankfurt at t3n and O´Reilly or follow @CloudCampFRA or our modern PR partner @psmw.

See you at CloudCamp Frankfurt

   Chris

PS: If for some highly improbable reason you do not have time to join us on the evening of Monday 28^th September in the Museum of the Moving Images in Frankfurt you have another chance to join a CloudCamp on the 20^th October in Munich

As Organizers of Cloudcamp Frankfurt, we are proud to present the new event homepage for Cloudcamp Frankfurt: At

www.cloudcamp-frankfurt.de

you’ll find latest information about this upcoming, unique event. Beside the agenda, news and photos the site integrates all our media channels and will also show the press coverage. Following the event, we will have the slides and Audio and/or Video recordings of the talks, so please stay tuned.

Remember: Cloudcamp Frankfurt will be the place, where business meets Cloudcomputing, so be sure to register.

See you there.

As you may have read on the blog of Mark Masterson , we are one of the primary sponsors of CloudCamp Frankfurt. This CloudCamp will take place at the Museum of the Moving Images in Frankfurt am Main, Germany on September 28th (Monday) evening. Of course you can register at www.cloudcamp.com/frankfurt but much more important you can send me your ideas for lightning talks and panel discussions to my contact address.

Museum of the Moving Images Frankfurt

I think many CloudCamps have dealt with many good concepts on solving the technical challenges put forward by a parallel on demand computing environment. We want to address these issues in a track called “cloud programming” in the un-conference of Frankfurt´s CloudCamp. But we also want to put a stronger emphasis on commercial issues and what is actually possible today in a commercial environment.

So if you have anything interesting to contribute (not to sell) to the conference or if you are willing to share insights you have gathered at your own company or with clients, we are very happy to register your ideas and consider them for a talk, panel or even a track moderation.

I am looking forward to many interesting comments and e-mails.

Cloud Computing was a big topic at this year´s EMC World in Orlando. I think it is a given that virtualization is a pre requirement for any kind of Cloud concept that can be implemented today and thus EMC is playing a vital role in the Cloud space with VMware. Following the “keynote” on Cloud Computing and virtualization on Tuesday showed quite well what EMC expects. First of all I want to mention, that I thought it a pretty neat idea to turn a keynote into a panel discussion, because that demonstrates the impact Cloud Computing has on IT – it touches every part of IT and thus every part of a major vendor like EMC gets involved.

EMC World - Cloud Keynote Discussion

The discussion clearly showed that EMC is thinking of what can be done with the Cloud today rather than proposing the overall concept and waiting for it to be technically possible. For EMC Clouds have to tackle the space of legacy applications rather than requiring the users to rewrite all their software. In my opinion this is the absolutely logical step and therefore I liked the content showing how different concepts at EMC support making today´s applications “Cloud ready”. The biggest step into this direction is VMware´s latest release of vSphere that enables outtasking of compute resources on demand while turning the hardware available internally into a resource pool that can be allocated flexibly and automatically. This is supported by resource and system management software as well as storage. It is all done by adding management capacities and predefined behavior to the virtualization capabilities already available and by bringing other components closer to the virtual world by adding direct control over hardware though interfaces to the management program driving and allocating the virtual resources. This concept creates a resource pool out of all involved components (storage, network, compute) that can be allocated dynamically. The feature that tops up the concept is the ability to externalize such services if peak loads require additional resources.

By simulating the environments we are using today and bringing this simulation into such an dynamic space a pre Cloud becomes reality very quickly. This is what can realistically be done today and this is what makes Cloud concepts available to legacy application, short term project requirements as well as test and integration environments.

For my taste the fact that the Cloud concept would require the reprogramming of all software was a little overdone. Yes, I too believe that there is no way dynamic parallelization of computation cannot be reached unless you write programs for such a kind of super dynamic scheduler (like Google does).But this is where computing is headed in the long run. To try and reimplement everything on the spot is absolutely unrealistic and therefore the concepts of bringing at least some of the benefits of Cloud concepts to today´s applications and architects is great. But to say that reimplementation can be avoided in a very long term perspective is just incorrect. I think we should have learned something from the immense cost generated by maintaining the big monolithic legacy apps we do rely on today (If you want something, you make something new because changing the old think to look new will create more cost through maintenance in the long run).

Last but not least the EMC team emphasized many times, that the VMware approach created much less dependencies for customers than giving their applications into the proprietary domains of Google App Engine (where your program only runs with the Google API) or Amazon EC2 (where the virtual machine itself is hard to retrieve once deployed). This is a valid point. And despite the hype created around Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine this addresses the fear of many business users. On the other hand one should state too that EMC as well is building features into their “Cloud OS” that make a customer “want” to use EMC hardware and other EMC preferred services. All in all EMC is doing a good job of opening up the specs and standards for these kind of dependencies enabling other providers to step into the world of VMware and be just as well integrated.

In the long run I am sure standards for Cloud machine images, templates and Cloud programming interfaces will evolve. I think this will be an evolutionary process rather than the job of a standardization committee, because the Cloud idea spreads so quickly and many many different concepts are being tried out every day. Survival of the fittest is not the worst thing to happen here.

As one should save the best for last I can say now that EMC management and engineers obviously understand the need for more effective automation technologies. The discussion returned to the point that such very dynamic infrastructures and environments simply can no longer be managed manually and that the current toolsets available in system and resource management will have to take major steps towards actually automating the maintenance process fully. So in the eyes of EMC and VMWare management and engineering the operational auto pilot discussed in this blog many times and actually implemented in the aAE (arago Automation Engine) is not just a good way for cost cutting or freeing up resources for innovation and change, but becomes an absolute necessity in a dynamic environment where the speed of change is too high to be reflected in human experience. Thus I conclude that the idea of preserving these experiences within an automation engine as described before is the best way to protect investment into these experiences.

You will definitely find more information on Chuck´s Blog and for a more day to day recap you can look at Len´s Blog

I am sitting in the blogger´s lounge at EMCWorld 2009 – a really cool idea from ZDNet. After half a day of the conference I must say I am really impressed. In his keynote Joe Tucci (CEO EMC) talked about the challenges presented by the current economic downturn and EMC´s reaction to them. Technologically they concentrate on the areas of:

1. 000080;">Storage
   storage virtualization and the trend towards SSD
2. 000080;">information management
   where they are moving from a content management platform or system towards an information management framework with multiple repositories
3. 000080;">security
   though virtualization and HA solutions on the one side and a group of solutions around identity management and security on the other side
4. 000080;">clouds
   strategy for bringing the dynamic and flexible aspects of a cloud infrastructure to legacy applications while keeping security, reliability and control at the level they are today and promoting automation as a key point in making dynamic infrastructures possible on a large scale

Paul Maritz (CEO vmware) elaborated on the latter point by giving an actual demonstration of vSphere – vmware´s brand new “cloud operating system”. Even thou I think the term cloud OS is used a little prematurely, the concepts of delivering a dynamic management solution with the virtualization solution is obviously well designed and a great next step. This “cloud OS” will automatically manage resources from a service perspective – including automated provisioning and SLA tracking. This resource management does not only include computing power as before, but now also extends towards storage (dynamically moving storage, WOW) as well as automated HA, user based environment templates and the possibility to externalize resources on demand. To me this approach and the actual availability of the solution shows how a technology driven company can harvest the fruits of a clean and diligent design process even in turbulent times while at the same time making a big contribution to its customers cost reduction scenarios. 

Joe Tucci also made a very strong commitment towards EMC remaining a technology company and their strategy within the economic downturn. To him this means

• getting closer to the customers,
• securing talent,
•  no cuts in R&D budgets,
• increase in cash reserves,
• opportunistic  M & A as was as
• strategic investment.

To me this sounds like a viable strategy of a well positioned company.
Client virtualization and automated operating were put out as the next “hot things” they will be dealing with.

And I can tell you that I found some people to talk to about operating auto pilots and automation beyond dynamic provisioning really quickly. I will be going to an engineering round table this afternoon and I will surely keep you posted.

EMC World 2009

Last week we had an interesting lunch break with an eloquent cloud. We used this environment and especially the good atmosphere to discuss the current situation of cloud computing from a business angle. There is no recording of the actual discussion, but I have translated the slides I used as a guideline and want to share them with you.

The conclusion was very clear: Clouds have a fabulous business case, but internal restrictions (psychologically, regulatory and in company procedures) currently restrict using Cloud computing.

It was also very clear that these restrictions are likely to disintegrate over time.

At this year´s JAVA development conference (JAX 09) I had the honor and pleasure of giving the keynote presentation for the track on IT in the financial industry. As this touches many of the concepts we deal with in this blog, I want to share this presentation with you and maybe have a good discussion about:

1. Why clouds are cool, but average administrators hate them.
2. Why SOA can be a heaven or hell.
3. Why no one should think that writing code is a creative process.

Enjoy the presentation.

  Chris