Janakiram MSV » Cloud Computing

Do We Need ODBC for the Cloud?

Jani — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 06:44:30 +0000

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)

While majority of the participants of the poll felt that Amazon S3 API can be considered as the standard, James Urquhart from Cisco feels that it is too early to call anything a standard as of now. I completely agree with his viewpoint. Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage are still evolving and we will see many more capabilities in the future. With Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure offering CDN as a service, it will quickly become a logical extension for the Cloud Storage API. Developers will just need to add a few flags to push the objects onto the CDN.

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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Is Private Cloud the Future of IT?

Jani — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:30:10 +0000

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

Elasticity
Pay-By-Use
Self Service
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?

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Cloud Computing – What’s in it for you?

Jani — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:09:35 +0000

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.

Key Tenets of Cloud
Pay-By-Use – By leveraging Cloud Computing, customers will only pay for the resources that they use. There is no upfront commitment in the form of capital expenditure.
Elasticity – Cloud Computing enables applications to scale up or scale down on demand. This dynamic capability is referred as Elasticity.
Self-Service – Most of the Cloud Computing offerings have self-service portals and dashboards. Provisioning and configuring the Cloud services is easy and doesn’t require complex technical skill set.
Programmability – Cloud Computing empowers the developers by offering programmable infrastructure. Most of the Cloud Computing environments have an API or scripting interface to programmatically manage the service offering.

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.

Cloud Implementation
Public Cloud – Public Cloud is implemented by vendors who invested in powerful datacenters. Public Cloud is shared by multiple customers where each customer pays for the resources that he consumed.
Private Cloud – When the Cloud Computing environment runs within an organization behind the firewall it is called as a Private Cloud. Private Cloud offers all the abilities of the Cloud but only within the organizational boundaries.

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.

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VMforce – What’s in it for us?

Jani — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:12:44 +0000

Yesterday, SalesForce.com and VMware jointly announced a new PaaS offering called VMforce. This is a huge announcement that has a very strong impact on the Cloud ecosystem. Let’s see what it means to us.

The enterprise application development platform is dominated by two obvious platforms – .NET and Java. I qualified my statement with the ‘enterprise’ keyword because other platforms like LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Python are great for consumer web apps and they are not the first choice for building the Line of Business (LoB) applications. So, when the enterprise wants to seriously look at the Cloud, they want a platform exposing either .NET or Java as a service. The application platform on the Cloud is technically called as the Platform as a Service (PaaS). Till date, PaaS is typically associated with Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform, Google App Engine and Force.com. Windows Azure is the preferred platform for all the .NET developers. In the last one year, Microsoft’s continuous investments in Azure made it comprehensive and mature for the businesses to go live on the Cloud. Java developers had to settle for the limited capabilities offered by Google App Engine. Right from the day of announcement of Java runtime on App Engine, Google did very little to entice the Java community. Moving an enterprise Java app to GAE is not really straight forward. GAE doesn’t support all the capabilities of Java EE. Even for the web applications, there are quite a few constraints that force the developers to re-factor the application to run on GAE. Moving an app back and forth from the local datacenter and GAE is not easy. So, there has been no comparable PaaS offering to Azure for Java developers. In one of my articles, I covered how Sun lost the opportunity of delivering the Java PaaS to the community. This gap is now being filled by VMforce. They want to make VMforce the defacto Cloud platform for Java developers. VMforce for Java developers would be what Azure is for .NET developers.

VMforce PaaS Offering

But why did VMware join hands with SalesForce.com? VMware has a proven stack for the Cloud in the form of vSphere and vCloud. They never wanted to compete directly with the IaaS providers like AWS or GoGrid. Instead, VMware wants to capture the Private Cloud market by aggressively competing with Microsoft and others. On the other hand, SalesForce.com has been in Cloud services business for a while and has become synonymous with SaaS. They also started to expose the middle tier that powers their CRM through the force.com PaaS offering. SalesForce.com has the right level of infrastructure that is ready to scale. But just virtualization combined with the right infrastructure doesn’t offer an exciting platform for the developers. VMware made two strategic investments last year. They acquired a Java framework and tools company called SpringSource and a Message-Oriented-Middleware (MOM) company called RabbitMQ. This investment made VMware ready for a complete platform offering. Just like VMware brings an abstraction layer between the real hardware and the OS, SpringSource adds a layer between Java runtime and enterprise applications. Java developers targeting SpringSource can easily move apps across multiple environments. Message Queuing is very important for enterprise application scalability. The combo of SpringSource and RabbitMQ offer a powerful and scalable enterprise Java environment. Now, when we look at the equation, it becomes pretty interesting. VMware offering the SpringSource framework for the on-premise servers and the Private Cloud that can be further extended to the Public Cloud hosted on SalesForce.com. Add the LoB components, the multi-tenant capability, enterprise database and the UI widgets that are already a part of force.com, they have a pretty solid PaaS in the making.

Deployment Scenarios

Who should be worried about this announcement? It is Google! They have a serious contender in VMforce. As a developer, I prefer setting up SpringSource environment on my local machine and use Eclipse to seamlessly deploy across my local server, Private Cloud or on the VMforce Public Cloud. I need not heavily re-factor my applications for the Cloud anymore. Relying on a proven Java framework like Spring gives the developers the confidence to standardize their apps across multiple deployment environments. But, should Microsoft be worried about this announcement? Yes. But not as much as Google! Microsoft did the right thing by bringing .NET to the Cloud early and helping the developers make a smooth transition. For any Microsoft shop, the first choice is Azure and Microsoft will continue to lead in that space.

Do you think VMforce will deliver on its promise? Let me know your thoughts!

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Cloud App and the Unmanned Aircraft System

Jani — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:01:05 +0000

According to Wikipedia, an unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aerial vehicle is an aircraft that flies without human crew on board the aircraft. … a UAV is defined as a reusable, uncrewed vehicle capable of controlled , sustained, level flight and powered by a jet or reciprocating engine.

So, what is the difference between an application running in your datacenter and an application running on the Cloud? Well, it is as different as an aircraft flown by a pilot and an unmanned aircraft system. Interestingly, both the Cloud application and the UAS share the same attributes!

When you are running an enterprise application hosted at the datacenter in your backyard, you have a lot of liberty in controlling it. You can monitor it closely to track the performance and it is fairly easy to fix the bottlenecks. Same is the case with an aircraft flown by a professional pilot. He can determine the right altitude and the direction based on the wind speed and the weather conditions. The pilot will take every step to make sure that the flight is as safe as possible.

Unmanned Aircraft System

Running the same enterprise application on the Cloud is no different from flying an unmanned aircraft. You never know which server, datacenter or the continent that hosts your application. For the UAS, imagine the challenges involved in accurately gauging the external factors like the wind speed, direction and the altitude. The external factors that define the smooth operation of the Cloud application are traffic, resource usage and security. You got to tweak the application to meet these demands on the fly!

Whether it is the Cloud application or the unmanned aircraft system, they need a sophisticated control center for remote operations. Apart from the remote control center, the constant communication between the control center and the UAS is very critical.

UAS Control Center

Though it is obvious that most of the Cloud offerings expose ‘Compute’ and ‘Storage’ services, there is another crucial service which is the ‘Management’ service. This service connects your Cloud App with the control center at your end. By consuming this service, you will be able to tweak your application to meet the external conditions.

Key Services Exposed by Cloud

Amazon Web Services offer a mature API to take control of the infrastructure that runs your application. Microsoft Windows Azure Platform has a Service Management API that lets the developers programmatically control the Cloud application’s parameters.

I will be covering the Azure Service Management API in detail in the coming posts.

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Janakiram MSV » Cloud Computing

Do We Need ODBC for the Cloud?

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Is Private Cloud the Future of IT?

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Cloud Computing – What’s in it for you?

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VMforce – What’s in it for us?

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