A couple of weeks back, at the IBF Panel discussion on PaaS, we were discussing the opportunity for a Private PaaS. While a Private Cloud is typically associated with IaaS, I started to ponder on the value of a Private PaaS offering.

Microsoft’s announcement of Windows Azure Appliance at WPC underscores the significance of the Private PaaS. This appliance will remove the overhead of maintaining and running an environment to host applications. VMware is aggressively positioning it’s Spring framework on both Private and Public PaaS offerings. AppScale, the open source implementation of Google App Engine on EC2 and other standard VMs has a huge potential to become a Private PaaS. IBM WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance is another implementation of the Private PaaS. These appliances come with complete self-service capabilities and reduce the provisioning of development, test and production environments from days to few hours.

Let’s take a look at the scenarios and potential customers for the Private PaaS –

• Service Providers / Managed Data Centers – These are the next generation ISPs and companies who are into managed data center operations. By deploying PaaS in a box, they can focus on delivering the service to its customers vs. managing it. The multi-tenant capability which is core to the PaaS appliance will provide an isolated snapshot of the environment to the PaaS consumers.

• System Integrators – Large System Integrators who offer turnkey IT solutions can now offer PaaS to their strategic customers. This will enable SIs to deliver an end to end solution to the customers. System Integrators can now offer SLAs which are covered by the PaaS appliance providers. Customers will see value in this deal because the SI will own the entire lifecycle of the solution. This will also address the data security and compliance issues by keeping the sensitive data within the political boundaries of the country. I personally see this as a huge opportunity for the System Integrators in India.

• Large Enterprises – Large automotive, manufacturing and finance companies with presence all over the globe will be able to benefit from these PaaS appliances. By deploying a few in strategic locations, they will be able to reduce the maintenance cost of running Line of Business applications.

• Government – One of the niche customers of the PaaS appliance would be Government. By deploying state level appliances, the government will be able to create a secure Government Private Cloud. Since this runs within the premises of the government data centers, compliance and regulatory issues will not be a concern. Government can confidently store the data and run applications running a set of appliances deployed across the country.

This is an interesting space to watch. Do you see the potential for Private PaaS?

[This article was originally published in the Cloud Computing Journal]

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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It is a good sign that Google has decided to expose their Storage API based on Amazon S3 API. Eucalyptus Walrus Storage API is completely compatible with S3.

There has been a discussion on standardizing the API for the Cloud Storage. What fueled this discussion further is a poll that ReadWriteWeb.com ran on their site.

Poll from readwriteweb.com (as on 7/15)

Let’s get back to the original discussion on Cloud Storage API standards.
If we look back in history, the industry faced exactly the same challenge in the late 80s when the RDBMS market started to explode. Businesses didn’t want to suffer from lock-in and developers wanted flexibility at the API level. During the transition from monolithic to Client / Server, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) became the de-facto standard. Every DB vendor shipped their own libraries that adhered to the ODBC standard and developers could switch the libraries at runtime to talk to multiple databases. The front-end applications were completely insulated from the back-end.

For Cloud, we fortunately have the standards as the Lowest Common Denominator. What is common across all the APIs is that they are based on HTTP, REST, XML and SOAP. That makes it easy for abstractions to surface. What we need now is a Cloud version of ODBC. Let me take the risk of calling this as Open Cloud Storage Connectivity API. I am visualizing an architecture that looks something like this:

Open Cloud Storage Connectivity

This is based on the factory method pattern which is used by many enterprise architects. With this, a change in the configuration file will load the appropriate library for the target Storage service. This will be transparent to the Cloud Storage Consumer.

I already see this coming! Take a look at jClouds and Apache libcloud . The future of Cloud Storage is bright and exciting! What do you feel about the standardization of the Cloud Storage API?

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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Cloud Computing can be realized through multiple implementation models. One of the implementations that is gaining a lot of interest is the Private Cloud.  This article attempts to look at the key attributes of an ideal Private Cloud and takes a futuristic view of the Private Cloud in an enterprise from the IaaS perspective.

Private or Public, every Cloud implementation has to respect four key tenets. They are

1. Elasticity
2. Pay-By-Use
3. Self Service
4. Programmability

Elasticity gives the illusion of infinity. Consumers of the Cloud will be able to scale up, scale out or scale down based on the demand for resources. Since this happens on the fly, applications can instantly scale to meet the demand.

Pay-By-Use turns the CAPEX to OPEX. Instead of investing in a server farm upfront, the cost can be distributed based on the usage of resources. This is a significant benefit offered by the Cloud.

Self Service drives the adoption of Cloud by reducing the middle men. Since there is no human intervention required to perform standard operations, consumers will be in control of their infrastructure and needs.

Programmability enables the integration of Cloud with existing business logic and organizational workflow. This makes the Cloud truly democratic by opening up APIs that can be consumed in multiple ways.

These tenets of the Private Cloud offer quite a few benefits to the IT departments. Let’s see how these align with the typical operations that the IT department performs.

• Seasonal / On-demand need for servers – This sounds very familiar to IT Managers. How many times did you walk out of a leadership meeting where you were asked to quickly setup an intranet site to support the new management initiative? Sometimes this becomes a non-negotiable ask from the management and there is no scope to explain what it takes to setup a new server. You cannot afford to wait till the vendor delivers a new server and to setup the right software stack on it. It is a long cycle before you provision your server for the consumption of internal employees and groups. There is yet another classic scenario that IT managers will relate to. During certain seasonal events like performance review and internal evaluation, you have to reallocate resources to meet the demand. Provisioning and de-provisioning these servers is expensive, laborious and time consuming. This is where the Elasticity attribute of the Cloud will help you. You can have a set of templates of virtual server images that can be quickly provisioned. These templates will have the baseline software preinstalled in them. So the turnaround time is very less.  For seasonal demands, just increase the number of virtual servers powering the internal application and you have instant scalability. Once you have passed the peak season, scale down by resetting your virtual server count.
• Metering and Billing for resource consumption -  Servers and datacenters are expensive resources. It costs money for the organization to setup and maintain them. It is important to prioritize the resource usage to get better RoI from the datacenter. The organization might want to provide more resources to a department that is delivering a mission critical project. To discourage the misuse of the resources, organizations can enable a charge back model for the infrastructure usage. That way, they can monitor, track and optimize the usage of the resources. The report that gets generated at the end of the fiscal year will provide an interesting insight into the Total Cost of Ownership of your datacenter. The Pay-By-Use attribute of Private Cloud brings you these capabilities.
• Bring IT close to the employees – While most of the IT departments have a portal to request new servers and the provisioning, there is a lot of manual processes involved in completing these tasks. With a Private Cloud, authorized employees and  managers will feel empowered because they are in control of their infrastructure requirements. Most of the manual process will be eliminated by scripting and automating the provisioning of virtual servers. With appropriate workflow and approvals in place, the Self Service attribute enables the organization to realize the promise of the dynamic datacenter.
• Respect the organization policies and workflow  – Every organization has well defined set of policies for procurement and provisioning of resources. When IT turns into a commodity, it should integrate with existing workflows. With the promise of dynamic datacenter, you want to automate the whole cycle of provisioning new resources. This involves programming the Private Cloud and treat it like any other business logic. For example, when an employee requests for a new server, his manager will approve it and send it for approval to the IT manager. After all the approvals are given, the system should automatically provision the server and send a mail to all the stakeholders. Similarly, the IT manager might want to generate reports that help him understand the usage of the resources by cost center and a further breakup of no. of virtual servers deployed per cost center. The Programmability of the Private Cloud will enable all these scenarios.

Now that we have seen what to expect from a Private Cloud, I want to walk you through a fictitious scenario that depicts the benefits.

ABC Consulting Services is a software consulting company that is into the business of system integration and custom software development. There are about 1500 employees across various departments that include HR, Finance, Sales and Marketing, Development, Operations and IT.  Every time the sales team gets a new order for delivering a custom software solution, a new team is established to get started on the development project. After compiling the requirements for the new development and testing environment, the Project Head sends a request to the IT Manager to provision the required infrastructure. After a few rounds of negotiation, the development team and IT agree on the requirements and the timeline for provisioning it. The timeline might be anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months. IT department works in the background to reassign unused resources and ordering new servers to complete the setup. While IT was busy with this, there are a couple of more projects and soon they realized that they are spreading too thin in the process of meeting the demand from the internal project teams. Meanwhile, the management has formed a taskforce to evaluate the TCO of current IT environment. The taskforce is asked to propose new ways to increase the efficiency of the datacenter.

Let’s look at some of the issues at ABC Consulting Services -

• Long turnaround time for provisioning
• IT has dependency on external server vendors
• Project teams have dependency on IT
• Unpredictable work loads and demands for provisioning
• Lack of resource optimization
• Manual reassignment and reallocation of resources
• Lack of ability to track IT usage by project

How can a Private Cloud help ABC Consulting Services? Here is the after effect of adopting a Private Cloud -

The Project Head will logon to an internal portal to request the provisioning of the new environment. A mail goes to the IT Manager to review the request. The IT Manager will access the Server Utilization dashboard of the internal IT portal which shows him the typical patterns of utilization of the physical servers and the virtual servers in the datacenter. After a quick negotiation with the Project Head, the IT Manager will approve the modified request. A provisioning task gets assigned to an IT administrator who will logon to the Private Cloud Control Panel to choose the right set of Virtual Server images from the library of server images. He will then choose a script to create a virtual network of these servers. Once the script is complete, the IT Administrator gets an email that the provisioning is complete and ready to be tested. Once he is convinced, he will mark the task as completed and that results in the IT Manager and the Project Head receiving a notification that the environment is ready. Periodically, IT Manager will be able to generate reports that explain the utilization of the physical and virtual resources per department / project. He can then send a bill to individual Project Heads based on their consumption.

What issues did the Private Cloud solve?

• Reduced turnaround time for provisioning (from few weeks to few hours)
• Reduced dependencies on external vendors (due to better utilization of existing servers)
• Predictable workloads based on the patterns established over a period of time
• Highly optimized resources due to dynamic allocation of virtual servers
• Dynamic assignment and on-the-fly reallocation of resources
• Complete visibility into the usage of physical and virtual servers

I personally believe that the future of every IT department is a Private Cloud. Do you agree with my viewpoint?

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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The expectations around Cloud Computing are very high. It is one of the most discussed terminologies among CIOs, developers and IT managers. While there is certainly more hype around it than what it really is, Cloud Computing is definitely promising. Gartner calls the year 2010 as the year of Cloud Computing. No doubt! Cloud Computing will redefine the IT management and data center operations. This article attempts to look at the Cloud through the eyes of an Entrepreneur, developer, IT manager and the consumer.

Entrepreneur – The most important factor that any entrepreneur considers is the IT budget. The challenge is to optimize the budget between human resources and IT infrastructure. As a startup entrepreneur, you may have an innovative idea and one of the best business models. But determining the right no. of servers to go live is not an easy task. You face the risk of over investing or under investing in the infrastructure. This is where Cloud offers tremendous value. Cloud is elastic by nature. Technically, you can start with one server and potentially scale to hundreds of servers on demand. One of the key tenets of the Cloud is pay-by-use. Through this, businesses can move their infrastructure to the Cloud and only pay for what they use. Based on the business demand, they can decide to scale out by ‘hiring’ more servers on demand and scale down when done. This will turn the CAPEX on IT infrastructure into OPEX. Budding entrepreneurs can benefit from this ‘elastic’ nature of Cloud by paying for what they really use. So, if you are an entrepreneur, you should explore the pay-by-use model that some of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers like Amazon and GoGrid offer. The other important attribute of the Cloud is Self-Service. To manage the Cloud infrastructure, you need not hire full time IT administrators. Most of the Cloud services have easy to manage self-service portals. This is true for Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings like Microsoft Business Productivity Suite offering Cloud based messaging and collaboration services. Bottom line – Cloud will help entrepreneurs save the upfront cost of infrastructure.

Developers – Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering targets the developers. The most popular developer platforms are .NET and Java. In an ideal world, developers never worry about the provisioning and the infrastructure plumbing tasks. PaaS brings the Cloud close to developers by freeing them from worrying about the provisioning and the IT management chores. PaaS promises the best of the abilities to the developers which include Scalability, Reliability, Availability and Security. Through this developers will design, develop, build, debug and test their applications on inexpensive local machines that run the stack of their choice.  Once they are confident, they will move their code to run on the world’s best datacenters running some of the proven services. Microsoft Windows Azure platform and Google App Engine are the popular PaaS offerings. Both offer tools and SDK to enable developers to emulate the Cloud environment locally for development. By deploying onto Microsoft Windows Azure platform, developers run their applications on the same infrastructure that powers Bing, Windows Live and other web services from Microsoft.

IT Manager – Cloud is available to organizations in one of the two forms – Private Cloud or Public Cloud. Private Cloud brings the benefit of Cloud Computing to the enterprise by running within the organizational boundaries. Public Cloud is managed and run by vendors who offer the services on subscription. IT Managers will typically start by setting up a Private Cloud that acts as a test bed. After the pilot, they deploy the Private Cloud that can be leveraged by multiple internal teams. Private Clouds will drastically reduce the time and the management overhead involved in provisioning the new servers. IT Managers can then optimize the administrator’s time effectively. The task of setting up new servers that may typically runs into few weeks to provision will be reduced to few hours on a Private Cloud. Individual teams will be empowered to configure and take control of their infrastructure needs. Private Cloud can be based on Microsoft Windows Hyper-V or VMware. Based on the compliance and the regulations, IT Manages can move data and heavy computing tasks to the Public Cloud.

Consumers – With ubiquitous access to Internet, most of the traditional tasks of knowledge workers and consumers are moving to the Cloud. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a form of a Cloud that the end-users will experience. With the traditional approach, consumers will have to buy the software and licenses that may result in huge capital expenditure. They end up paying for features and products that they may not use very often. When the same software is offered as a service on the Cloud, consumers will have the option for subscribing to features/products that they care about. This results in better Return on Investment (RoI). Salesforce.com has been in the CRM business since 2001. They were the first to offer traditional CRM on subscription. Recently it is Zoho and Google Docs that became popular as the consumer SaaS offerings. Going forward, most of the office suits and Line of Business (LoB) applications will be offered as SaaS. Microsoft’s Office 2010 has the free Office Web Applications. Other popular services from Microsoft like Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Live Meeting are offered on subscription along with other Microsoft services like Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).

In summary, there is something for everyone on the Cloud. IT Managers are aligned with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) while developers are aligned with the Platform as a Service (PaaS) and finally consumers will subscribe to the Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings.

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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As one of the stakeholders of the Cloud ecosystem, I persuade, motivate and encourage decision makers in my circle to take a serious look at the Cloud. I want to share my experiences of having these conversations with the audiences.

Off late, I came across a few IT Managers and technology decision makers whose thought process is clouded about Cloud Computing. Some of them are carried away by the hype (which most of the new technologies tend to create in their early days) that Cloud has been generating while others are absolutely cynical and believe that they are better off without the Cloud. There are three different personas that I frequently encounter. Let me elaborate more on these personas.

• Cloud Fan Boy – These are individuals (decision makers) who believe that Cloud Computing is the magic pill for most of the problems that they face in their IT departments. They want to move their Line of Business applications, ERPs, Business Workflows and everything else to the Cloud and take credit for being an early adopter. They jump to a conclusion that Cloud is the remedy very early in the discussion. They don’t mind deploying a Private Cloud to run a departmental application which could have been otherwise run on a cluster of just 2 servers. Though they don’t accept it, the reality is that they are confused about making the right choice of the implementation model based on the Private / Public Cloud and the choice of service delivery model based on IaaS/PaaS/SaaS. These fan boys need to understand that not every application is Cloud ready and there are scenarios where Cloud is not an option at all.

• Cloud Fence Sitter – This persona typically represents a matured CIO. They take a neutral view of the new technology and don’t easily buy into the hype. They know that it is the future but delay their decision to observe the trend before jumping onto the bandwagon. They need strong evidence before investing in the Cloud. They are confused about where to start the evaluation. It is easy to convince this persona to embrace the cloud through facts and figures and a solid proof-of-concept. A staggered approach of adopting the Cloud will work really well for them. By staggered I mean consuming the Cloud Storage services and then eventually moving non mission-critical applications. This will enable the fence sitters to confidently defend their decision.

• Cloud Skeptic – These individuals do not carry an optimistic view of Cloud. They believe that Cloud is old wine in new bottle. They glorify the outages of some of the vendors in the recent past. They highlight the security concerns and prefer not to use Cloud Services. They argue that Cloud is a marketing jargon for Grid and High-Performance Computing that has been around for decades. They tend to snub off PaaS as vendor lock-in and IaaS as an administrative overhead. They go any length arguing that Cloud is not ready for the prime time and there are many regulatory issues and policies that need to resolve before the adoption happens.

Cloud Personas and Their Concerns

There are a few common concerns that I noticed in all the three personas.

In the future posts, I will try and address each of the concerns.

Have you been a part of a similar conversation? If yes, please share your thoughts.

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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