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 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.
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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
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“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.

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.

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 Gain Visibility into business critical KPIs
 Scale, Audit and Comply apps on Azure
 Manage application lifecycle
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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 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

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.