Windows Azure Appliance – Understanding the Impact

July 20th, 2010 | No Comments |  Share  | Windows Azure Appliance – Understanding the Impact

Last week, Microsoft announced the Windows Azure Appliance in an effort to bring its well-received Public Cloud Strategy within the confines of the DMZ. So why is this a big deal ? The Azure appliance is probably the industry’s first private “Platform as a Service” from a major platform vendor. This has the potential to disrupt the cloud computing landscape and this note explore the implications of the Azure appliance.

Who are likely to be the biggest use this appliance ?

Large Enterprises
Companies that are adept running their datacenters and looking to dip their toes in cloud computing will find this notion of a private Azure cloud appliance very appealing. In addition to modernizing their application stack to make it more “Service Oriented” and Cloud friendly, the get most of the advantages that Azure provides them without worrying about privacy and compliance. One thing they will miss out on is the dynamic elasticity that they would have got from the public Azure cloud.

Service Providers
This is an area which will likely see explosive growth and mass adoption. I predict providers rolling out purpose built clouds catering to industries, regions etc. At this time, many business details like cost, licensing terms, country availability, SLAs etc are not clear and are likely in the process of being defined.  Service providers can and probably will roll out custom clouds which cater to specific industry needs like HIPPA/PCI compliance. There is a strong chance that we might soon see clouds for Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail Payments, etc.

Government Agencies
Apps.gov is a good example that many Federal, local and State agencies have already started consolidating their data centers and application procurement for common functions. For the last couple of years the Federal Government has been in the forefront of defining Cloud Computing requirements albeit on the Infrastructure as a Service side. The Azure appliance will be interesting to the government for several reasons including data security , privacy and compliance reasons.

Why the Azure appliance wont be ubiquitous in the near future:

1. Dependency on new  purpose built hardware: Although we don’t know what the appliance would cost, requiring customers to buy hardware along with the appliance instead of just making it run on existing hardware will make it a much harder decision. The promise of the cloud was to move away from having to buy significant hardware and invest in managing them in house. The appliance does just that unless things evolve over time.
2. Scale: The bar for using the appliance is hundreds/thousands of servers. While this might make sense for a handful of large enterprises or ISVs, it is a significant barrier for most businesses.  This leads me to believe that the appliance will be more popular with the service providers first who can build “clusters” of special purpose clouds aimed at specific verticals.
3. Operations: Running an appliance that has 1000+ servers is not for the faint of heart. You need to have sophisticated processes ,tools ,skills available to pull it off. Add the complexity of the new world of private clouds, it will take wuite a ramp up before organizations can be mature enough to roll out enterprise wide private cloud offerings that take into account automatic provisioning, metering, chargebacks, dynamic scaling etc.

While it is still early days, I predict that the appliance will continue to lower the barrier to adoption and push the “fence sitters” to try the public Azure on their non-critical assets to get acquainted with the cloud model. Another trend we can expect to see gaining ground is that of “hybrid clouds” or “sometimes cloud”  where businesses can use the cloud to process excess capacity needs or use cloud to augment existing capabilities.

One thing is clear with the Azure appliance announcement – Microsoft is no longer afraid to cannibalize Windows Server licenses and perhaps is seeing the potential to winning over converts to its cloud. Though Amazon has a head start, the cloud computing game is just getting started and Microsoft is a market definer in many categories including the one we are discussing here – Private PaaS Clouds.

Cumulux receives the Microsoft 2010 Global Cloud Partner of the Year award

July 19th, 2010 | No Comments |  Share  | Cumulux receives the Microsoft 2010 Global Cloud Partner of the Year award

Cumulux receiving the 2010 Global Cloud ISV Partner of the Year award at the Worldwide Partner Conference from Microsoft.

Cumulux is the Microsoft 2010 Global Cloud Partner of the Year

July 8th, 2010 | No Comments |  Share  | Cumulux is the Microsoft 2010 Global Cloud Partner of the Year

Microsoft Global Cloud ISV Partner of the Year

Cumulux has been named as the “2010 Global ISV Cloud Partner of the Year” by Microsoft as a recognition to its position as a leader in the emerging Microsoft cloud ecosystem.
Learn more …

The winners for this year’s awards were chosen from a pool of almost 3,000 entrants worldwide and will be honored in the upcoming Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington DC from Jul 11th -15th.

From our Press Release
—————————————————————

“Cumulux has been critical to the Windows Azure cloud ecosystem as an early adopter, evangelist, and catalyst for the past year and a half,” said Walid Abu-Hadba, corporate vice president, Developer and Platform Evangelism Group, Microsoft Corp. “Microsoft is proud to award Cumulux with the Global ISV, Cloud Partner of the Year award for their innovative ISV Cloud solutions that drive adoption of cloud technologies to enterprise accounts, ISVs, and start-up businesses. Cumulux sets itself apart through the top-notch quality of their products as well as through their role as early adopters and evangelists of Microsoft cloud technologies.”

The Microsoft Partner Awards recognize Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered exceptional Microsoft-based solutions over the last year.

About Cumulux: Cumulux is a leading provider of cloud computing products and services to enterprises and major independent software vendors. Cumulux’ flagship product ManageAxis® enables monitoring, management and governance of cloud computing solutions.

Cloud Computing RFP Questions – SLA

June 30th, 2010 | No Comments |  Share  | Cloud Computing RFP Questions – SLA

We had broached this subject earlier by proposing a Top 10 list of questions to address in your Cloud Computing RFP. We are going to explore those aspects in greater detail in the coming days. We will start with a look at Service Level Agreements ( SLA) which is probably the most important of these factors.

As Cloud Computing goes main-stream, assessing the level of commitment from the Cloud vendor is a critical factor in the process of determining the overall fit of the solution. This post will explore the notion of Service Uptime and what it means.

Service Uptime Guarantees Service guarantees are typically the % of time the services will be available for normal commercial use. For example, Amazon provides a guarantee of 99.95% for its compute and storage services. What this means is that Amazon expects its services to be fully functional for more than 99.95% of the time. Windows Azure also offers a similar level of uptime guarantee.

Windows Azure – http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/sla/
Amazon – http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/

In its recent Cloud Computing RFQ, The General Services Administration of the Federal government demanded a 99.95 % SLA guarantee thus establishing a benchmark for this evolving industry. While many Cloud services are offering 99.5-99.9% uptime, many of these companies have experienced outages of greater than 2 – 3 hours (google enterprise email and SalesForce.com for example) during core working hours in the U.S.  While 99.95% sounds great, it equates to about 4.5 hours of scheduled downtime per year. Another dimension that the cloud vendors are a little ambiguous about is in the time window that is used to calculate the uptime. Usually it is calculated in a rolling 12 month window but the Federal Government in its RFP insisted that SLA uptimes be calculated on a monthly basis. In upcoming posts, we will look into other aspects like Quality of Service, Disaster Recovery, Geo Location of data and applications, Compensation terms etc which are the other critical pillars of SLAs related to Cloud Computing RFPs.

Cloud Computing Governance

June 10th, 2010 | No Comments | Tags: Cloud Scenarios, Governance  Share  | Cloud Computing Governance

Governance in the Cloud

Cloud Computing enables a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability for deploying and managing your applications on the cloud. With this flexibility comes a list of items that have to be managed more closely compared to traditional systems.  Availability, Security, privacy, location of cloud services and  compliance are just some of the aspects of the cloud that have to be monitored and managed closely.

Governance in the Cloud is about defining policies around managing the above factors and tracking/enforcing the policies at run time when the applications are running. Different cloud vendors have varying degrees of flexibility when it comes to giving their clients access to the underlying infrastructure. It becomes imperative for businesses to understand these capabilities and define policies that mirror the needs of the business.

Governance Policy Definitions
During the design and development stage, it is important to establish rules and policies around how the various services in the cloud are going to be monitored and managed. The Quality of Service ( QoS ) of the underlying Cloud infrastructure and the Service Level Agreement ( SLA) levels of both the platform as well as the application have to be monitored and tracked. Additionally, defining access policies to control the roles in the organization who have access to the cloud environment is a key component of defining establishing governance policies. For example, Governance policies should be defined for the following:

1. Role based access to establish control over who  has access to deploy and manage cloud assets
2. Metrics for monitoring the application’s performance and other business critical KPIs
3. Rules for defining critical levels of the metrics define above
4. Service Levels ( SLA ) of both the application as well as the underlying infrastructure
5. Quality of Service ( QoS ) Levels including throughput, latency, etc.

Governance Policy Enforcement
One of the main attractiveness of the cloud is the ability to reduce the “Time to Market” significantly. Cloud gives businesses the ability to roll out changes to applications almost instantaneously compared to tradition models. This capability comes with its own set of issues around versioning, upgrades and compatibilities of services. Well defined and enforced policies are a must to ensure robustness of the cloud based application. Policies can be enforced through the following

1. Change Management Reports to track and log the changes happening to the cloud assets
2. Alerts and Notifications to ensure that changes are captured and bubbled up to the decision makers in a timely fashion

Threshold based actions based on pre-defined rules. For example, automatically increasing the footprint ( read # of load balanced Cloud instances ) if the performance of the system is below certain threshold levels

The PaaS Gold Rush

May 21st, 2010 | 1 Comment |  Share  | The PaaS Gold Rush

There seems to be a sudden rush to the PaaS goldmine with the recent announcements from Salesforce.com and Google to support the Spring based OpenPaaS offering from VMWare. To understand the massive implications of this , we need to peel back the layers to explore the landscape of cloud computing.
Infrastructure as a Service ( IaaS ) is getting commoditized. 4-5 years is a long time in Cloud Computing and thats how long IaaS has been around for. IaaS is essentially renting out Virtual Machines to businesses to run their applications on. The various vendors have tried to play it up by offering different flavors of it but at the end of the day , it is fast becoming as much a commodity as hardware has become. The promise of IaaS was that you can take an existing application ( on-premise) and run it as-is on the cloud without changing it much. While this might not be totally true, it worked to a large degree in many cases but the Total Cost of Ownership was not dramatically lower as promised. It starting becoming evident that unless applications are re-factored to take advantage of cloud computing, its elasticity and scale. This is where PaaS comes in….

The next frontier in Cloud Computing is clearly Platform as a Service ( PaaS ) which enables businesses to deploy “applications” on the cloud rather than move “servers” to the cloud. PaaS platforms should have the basic plumbing pieces necessary for application like persistence, workflow, identity, storage , authorization etc. Cloud Vendors like Salesforce, Amazon , Google etc are smart enough to figure out that PaaS is where the long tail of Cloud adoption is going to come from – so they are rushing to offer PaaS but there is one problem. Platforms are hard.Not every company can build platforms that are complete, compelling and sustain it version over version. Only a handful of companies truly understand how to do it and have done it for a considerable amount of time – Microsoft, IBM and to some extent Oracle ( with their BEA acquisition ) are the big ones.

But this is the cloud- the rules have to be different right ? Well, not completely. Traditional platforms are hard – Platforms on the cloud might be harder. So it is in this context , VMWare’s recent announcements of partnerships with Salesforce.com and Google are very interesting and might change the game. Until now, the biggest concern companies had with PaaS was lock in. If you wrote on Force.com or on Python to Google App Engine or to a lesser degree to the Windows Azure platform with .NET, you are stuck with that PaaS provider. There was little portability across cloud platforms.

So what did Google App Engine and VMWare announce at Google IO ?
VMWare acquired a set of Java development tools a little while ago called SpringSource which helped developers build enterprise Java applications. What VMWare announced with Salesforce.com and Google recently is that once you have a cloud application written in Java using the Spring framework, it will seamlessly run on the Google PaaS platform as well as in the Salesforce vmForce PaaS platform. so in essence, write once , run anywhere in the cloud. Wait, if you have VMWare’s vShephere internal clouds, it will even run on premise ! No lock in and full portability. Sounds great in theory but how many businesses are developing using Spring as their preferred development platform ? I would be shocked if it is even close to 5% of all Java shops. the promise of portability has never worked and I doubt if the cloud is going to be any different but it is a great marketing story !

This is just the beginning- I am positive that other Java frameworks for the cloud will emerge soon ( Are Oracle and IBM listening ? ). Microsoft on the other hand doesnt have to worry about these things. They have only only one platform to worry about -> .NET and can focus their energies on evolving the PaaS platforms rather than the development tooling and expand the lead on the PaaS market.

One thing is clear – PaaS  is the next frontier in Cloud Computing. The PaaS gold rush is truly on   –     Who will build the next Levis Strauss in this gold rush?

-Paddy

Azure Cloud Computing Webinars

April 27th, 2010 | 1 Comment |  Share  | Azure Cloud Computing Webinars

Interested in learning about the Cloud and trying it out for free? Join Cumulux for an hour in the Cloud with Windows Azure to learn more about the Cloud and launch your own application into the Cloud, for free ! http://www.cumulux.com/azurewebinars/

Cloud Computing and Web Properties

April 27th, 2010 | No Comments | Tags: Cloud Applications, Cloud Computing, Microsoft Azure  Share  | Cloud Computing and Web Properties

Web properties jumped the cloud bandwagon early and seem to be the ones that are riding  it the most. What makes the cloud an interesting paradigm for them? This article explores the main reasons why it makes so much sense for scalable web properties ( which includes web applications as well as web sites ) to adopt cloud computing.

Cyclical businesses

An online shopping site knows the travails of the tide and its turn. On Christmas Eve, such a website could receive two million hits. And before they can relax, New Year brings another three million. And then there is a pause when visitor count comes down to a trickle. But can that business dismantle its three-hundred-server infrastructure by the second week of January? Or is there Valentine’s Day to watch out for? Does that mean you have to spend on the hardware and twiddle thumbs between peak traffic periods?
For starters, it takes a non trivial time to get infrastructure ready for deployment by leasing the servers. And, you pay for this on a monthly basis. March through October is this business’ lean time. That means wages for full-time employees looking after the hardware & an IT team that develops and maintains applications. Cloud computing can provide elegant solutions.

As a corollary to the above, think of yourself as an advertiser during Super Bowl. You flash your web site address watched by millions on TV, and are confident of a million hits over 48 hours, compared to the average daily of a few hundreds. You don’t want to invest capital on equipment to support folks visiting your site for those two days! Hop onto the cloud and hop off when you are done.

Smooth delivery of content

If what you offer on your site is rich content delivery,  that is another good reason to consider an offering from the cloud. Assume that traffic to your site is pretty high (again, thanks to the ad during Super Bowl) and streaming your content requires pretty good bandwidth: you certainly wouldn’t want your visitors waiting to be done, before they make way for others in queue. So, folks logging on from Beijing would be served up content from a location, in the cloud obviously, in Singapore while those logging in from Nairobi would get the same from a server in Johannesburg. This constitutes what is commonly called the Content Delivery Network. Both Microsoft Azure and Amazon have CDN offerings on their cloud platforms that are much more cost effective to their traditional counterparts from the likes of Akamai.

And, imagine what this could do to the costs of complying with your board’s disaster recovery plan? If you have mission-critical applications running, a distributed network helps you keep one end up even if another goes down. Earthquakes or Volcanic ash, God forbid, in one part of the world? Worry not – another part of the world lights up! And, at costs incomparable to those you would spend if you set up sites all on your own across the globe.

Cloud Computing and IT?

February 19th, 2010 | No Comments | Tags: Amazon EC2, Cloud Applications  Share  | Cloud Computing and IT?

During a recent technology conference, I found myself in the middle of a discussion about IT professionals and the impact of Cloud Computing. It was very interesting to see the divergent perspectives from the group that included Software Vendors, Professional Services Vendors and Enterprises. The question is should IT professionals start looking for some other jobs? Does Cloud mean the end of IT?

Absolutely not! And here is my explanation …

IT teams today perform several functions and here are a few:
Infrastructure Management – Acquisition, deployment and management of servers and other infrastructure
Application Life cycle Management – Capacity Planning, Physical Design, Application Deployment, Management and Monitoring
Business Continuity – Ensuring 24/7/365 operation and support of both custom and packaged software applications
Governance – Security, Policy creation, Policy management, Data Protection, Identity, Risk Management
Information Management – Application Integration, Reporting, Backup, Data Mining and Analysis

What are the challenge that Cloud Platforms like Windows Azure, Amazon EC2, Saleforce.com and Google AppEngine address? They address the aspect of Infrastructure Management – removing the need to acquire, provision and operationalize Servers. But that’s only a portion of the functions that IT performs.

Cloud Platforms like Windows Azure make developing and deploying Cloud applications very simple, but the Architects and Developers cannot address management and governance? When we review a typical application lifecycle, management, versioning and maintenance form the long tail.

With the proliferation of the Cloud paradigm, IT can now truly be Information Technology management versus Infrastructure Technology management. As more applications in the portfolio move to the Cloud, IT has to play a pivotal role in ensuring that Cloud is effectively leveraged and critical business needs like Business Intelligence/KPIs are addressed to maintain competitive advantage in this global marketplace.

Windows Azure taking shape – our perspective

February 5th, 2010 | No Comments |  Share  | Windows Azure taking shape – our perspective

Let me first start by saying, I am a true believer now …

We got involved with Microsoft’s Cloud strategy almost 18 months ago. We had just come off doing a couple cool applications on other cloud platforms, notably Salesforce.com. When we were invited to participate in the Azure Design Preview sessions, we went in with some excitement, but mostly uncertain of the path ahead. And after 18 months of working on this, when I look back at what got released and read what critics say, I must say that I am truly giddy with excitement. Visual Studio Magazine tried to get a pulse of the Azure world pre PDC and prompted me to think about our experience. With all the recent activity around Azure, I wanted to share my perspective on Azure

During PDC Microsoft showcased some customer wins (one of whom we have been working for some time now), but it didn’t seem to pack the punch I had expected. There were some big names like 3M, Domino’s that were being showcased. I was looking forward to the actual release with real billing, partnership announcements and customer wins. And of course, more cool technology pieces.

Over the past few months, we have seen quite a surge in activity around customer interest in Azure and real world wins like this one and others are definitely paving way for the early adopters to understand the business value. And certainly things like partnership announcements with Intuit and NSF are raising the bar and expectations for the platform higher. Not be outdone on the technology side, impressive features like PowerPivot, Azure Drive, Velocity and the recent announcement of RDP support and VM management have certainly strengthened Azure’s promise.

Over the next couple of months, we will be talking a lot about our customer wins as we wrap up the engagements and I expect some these engagements to get quite a bit of attention. We are extremely happy to be a part of this journey and Azure is going to have a big impact on Cloud Computing.