Chris Boos on Automation

Ok, I may not have been too enthusiastic in writing about our Pulse visit up until now, but as we just enjoyed a really great session about virtualized datacenters I thought this would be a good reason to start doing so. Ok, it’s quite a different kind of automation compared to what we deal with usually, but it was quite impressive to see a reporting service being installed “on demand” on a virtualization cluster during the demo part of the session by means of just a few clicks in Tivoli Provisioning Manager. Ok, so you may wonder what is so exciting about the automated installation of a virtual system? Well, aside from the fact that you felt that the speaker (Vanja Gorazi) was really deep into the technical stuff behind it, it was probably that the way this happened was simply done right. Instead of specifying you need an xOS with ySQL to support the zReporting system, you simply choose the type of service needed and do not need to worry about all packaging and stuff behind the scenes. Oh, and did I mention that automation didn’t stop with the installation but continued with automatic addition of required or removal of unused resources by means of a component named Intelligent Orchestrator? Of course, the rules engine behind it sounded quite basic, so I guess there may will be some more interesting perspectives around here… guess I’ll need some time to think about that when this is over…

Yesterday I had the chance to get a feeling for one of the hottest topics in IT infrastructure. A panel session at IBM PULSE 2008 was dedicated to the topic of Cloud Computing (even though IBM marketing people don´t seem to like the term and have come up with quite some innovative words – words no one uses, so let us stick with the cloud). The panel was buzzing with intelligence, unfortunately we as the audience could not really match up. So we listened to a pretty much directed discussion on how cloud computing would replace today´s approach to hardware and infrastructure in general. Well I do agree, no one needs dedicated servers when resources can be allocated dynamically and come preconfigured and interconnected. Kristin Hansen stripped the key features of a cloud down to simplicity (users do not care how their resources are set up, they just use them), mobility (obviously use is possible from anywhere and even a large computing cluster could be controlled from a phone like device) and elasticity (you only setup or pay what you really need). Sounds fine to everyone and Google and Amazon have definitely shown to the world that this concept works in a closed shop environment. According to Dave Lindquist IBM is working on a methodology and technology to make most applications “cloudable”. The most interesting remark I heard during the discussion was the “Cloud Computing is the combination of technology (virtualization and automation) and discipline (a stringent way of breaking down the offered services into small blocks in order to recombine them quickly and automatically upon the user´s request as well as defining standards or service catalogues to be offered)”. I guess the discipline part will put forth a great deal of discussions between process consultants and methodology consultants and in the end there will certainly be a couple of good ways to set things up. Just as certainly there will be the need to standardize these processes and methodologies in the end, so clouds are not proprietary but keep mobile even between cloud providers.

Naturally I am more interested in the technology part, that is needed behind cloud computing. Technology - in this case - not referring to the cloud management servers and agents themselves, but the technology surrounding them. The first technology that comes to mind is virtualization as without this core there will be no cloud, at least no cloud that can integrate legacy applications rather than working in a very tightly closed universe like Google does. There are quite some good approaches to virtualization – commercially as well as open source – and the approach taken should really depend on the needs of the applications to be run on a specific part of the cloud. It does probably make sense to even merge the available virtualization technologies within one cloud. It might make sense to use containers build into the operating system or complete hardware virtualization depending on the kind of application to be run and therefore a cloud manager will have to deal with all kinds of virtualization technology.

More on my focus is the service management side of cloud computing and I strongly believe that automated operating is a key component of a good cloud infrastructure. Definitely the cloud infrastructure and management components will take care auf automatic provisioning and resource management, but as soon as legacy applications – that do not really know that they are running on a beautifully scalable environment – are involved manual administration of these applications would mean chasing an ever changing rabbit across a chameleon planet – an image most amusing to bystanders but neither funny to administrators nor to the ones paying them. So in my opinion an automation engine could be fed IT model data and monitoring feeds directly from the cloud manager and could thus deal with the ever changing environment and keep the application automation rules up to date with the cloud components currently in use. This automation engine cannot use a drill down approach, because the infrastructure might not even support drill downs and can change ever so often. The automation engine assuring a good foundation for quality service a professional service management will have to use a more human “circle in” or divide and conquer approach.

Does this sound familiar? By the way, check out the articles on the “Blue Cloud”; technical pioneers at work (other bloggers also think about the blue cloud)…. Also interesting is the cooperation between Google and IBM on producing cloud standards

As we have learned in a previous post of my valued collegue Chris, automation is a very easy thing -

It is the execution of actions based on conditions.

From the technical standpoint this simple explanation sums it up. But for me, working on productmanagement and marketing issues, I can tell you, that there are loads of other aspects of our featured subject Automation.

Today it’s possible to automate almost everything, starting from doors to production plants and - to switch over to the IT world - from simple applications to system run books even whole datacenters. All in common is the goal to make life easier and to prevent the “user” from doing unnecessary, repeating tasks, like opening doors, pressing knobs, typing commands into a shell window or even executing restart scripts.

I’m sure the potentials of Automation becoming the “next big thing” seems to be huge. So is the number of vendors offering offering products. The wheels are turning and the M&A guys have already started earning money. HP bought Opsware in summer last year for $1.6 billion and BMC Software by that time acquired RealOps, the so called “Run Book Automation pioneer” for $52.5 million and in March this year BladeLogic for an impressing price of more than $800 million. The latest news is CA signing an OEM agreement with Opalis, which leaves plenty of room for rumors. Happy merging.

The answer to the question “why companies are spending these huge amounts of money for Automation technology?” gives Bob Beauchamp, president and CEO of BMC, who said

“Organizations around the world will spend more than $140 billion this year running data centers, Automation is the only way IT can bring this spending under control and still meet the requirements of their businesses.”

Just a last word to think about: How much are companies spending for all the other stuff outside of datacenters?

As we are not really consultants for modeling IT infrastructure, we are always looking for a good way to minimize our manual effort when installing our automation engine, I actually thought it should be easy to load the necessary M-A-R-S information out of any CMDB, but so far that has proven much more difficult than expected. Most CMDBs we have looked at, did either not supply the needed relationship and interdependency data or did not contain the static node information we need to bind rules. BUT yesterday we had a workshop at the IBM briefing center in Mainz to take a look at the IBM CCMDB. And tell you what: It looks like we found a CMDB that actually contains all the data we need to load the IT interdependency model. Even if some organizations keep attributes we need for rule binding in excel sheets or other strange data sources we can load them off the IBM CCMDB through its federation technology.

But that is not the whole story. We were quite exuberant about the depth of relationship and interdependencies stored in the CMDB, but it really got amazing when we saw in an actual environment, that most of the interdependencies were detected automatically. Someone at IBM actually did the work of modeling quite some ssh connections and scripts to pull this information out of netstat and other system calls. Well going though firewalls without losing the network angle seems to be a difficulty that means actual real time detection of different zones of trust is not really possible, but what we are getting out here is much better than anything we have seen before. It will save us about 80% time on implementing automation for highly complex applications. Also the time our customers need to maintain the model in place while they change their IT landscape is probably greatly reduced. We will look into creating a persistent interface to the IBM CCMDB and while we are at it to their event bus and execution facilities as well.

You know my comments on other CMDBs and our difficulties of reading anything more than SML out of them. Normally I am quite taken aback and don´t say much, but this time I am really happy.