Chris Boos on Automation

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.

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

There has been so much talk about cloud computing that at least my head is spinning in the clouds right now. The great idea of the “Do What I Mean Program” (to me the original idea of a cloud) is the logical next step from the “Do What I Mean Network” (Tim Berners-Lee´s original idea of the web). Unfortunately too many buzz word hunters have jumped onto the term too quickly, therefore this topic feels a little more like the emulsion resulting from !$%&/ hitting the fan than anything else. Still the idea is worthwhile, and this is why I have decided to put some time in structuring the cloudy talk out there.

In the long version of this article article you will read about the actual cloud – a distributed computation power that solves computer science problems and enables “us” programmers to focus on the actual value added we expect from our software. You will also read about the common cloud – the marketing talk out in many computer papers and on so many consultancy slides. I will try to show some examples of actual cloud implementation of both “kinds of clouds” and I will take you to the problem with the cloud approach – the problem being that only software either written explicitly for a cloud or really well modeled can actually make use of a cloud.
So, if this is your cup of tea, keep on reading and enjoy. Then again, if you want to read about how this great new technology will change your life and how IT drives business and such – do me a favor and consult either your local astrologist or read whatever IT tabloid you are addicted to and fancy.

Read the complete article here…