Retooling for the Cloud

To truly utilize the new paradigm of cloud computing’s scalable architecture, developers need to rethink their application design from the ground up.  To leverage the lower cost of on-demand scalability (ability to scale only when needed) of cloud IaaS, applications need to be designed to run on multiple systems and assume that there are multiple implementations of that function doing the same thing.  Requiring a single instance of a class or function be running at a time eliminates scalability and introduces a single point of failure.

Amazon Dropping Prices Again

Amazon is dropping prices again.  Is the cloud prepping for hockey stick growth?  Maybe we are already there?   Another fun year in cloud computing coming your way.

- Chris Claborne

Do Govt. Laws Present Undue Risk To Cloud Computing?

(updated 12/12)  There has been a bit of a buzz regarding access to citizen and company data by the U.S government and the associated risks of Cloud computing in that regard.  I’m talking about the recent searches of gMail and Facebook of WikiLeaks supporters.  Paul Carr’s Tech Crunch article  and  David Linthicum’s InfoWorld story refer to these events.  In addition, the New York Times ran a story on secret F.B.I. subpoenas. When you move your data to the cloud, you lose some control over government access to your data during what may (or may not) be a legal search.  I touched briefly on this last year (here), in my article on the Challenges and Risks to Cloud Computing.  For the purposes of this article, I’ll assume your data is still in the US, not a foreign country data center, which poses an entirely different set of risks.

At issue: an individual or business person’s ability to stop an illegal search of their data when law enforcement shows up at your data’s door (that “door” being the door to your cloud provider’s data center).  There is also worry that Fourth Amendment rights will be trampled on because application data has moved to the cloud.  Because your data now lives in a data center, presumably operated outside your company or home, you lose the ability to know when you are being searched, to stop warrantless searches, and to analyze the warrant and validate that the search is, in fact, legal.  Unless you (or preferably your lawyers) are at the data center during the search, you can’t ensure that it adheres to the boundaries set by the warrant to prevent fishing expeditions.  At the same time, you may lose control of privacy or company secrets as part of that search.  How do you protect your Fourth Amendment rights if you don’t even know you are being searched?  If your data is co-located with other individuals or businesses that are being searched, how are you protected from information leakage when they are searched?

Cloud Management Tools Bring Sanity to Cloud Operations

A cottage industry of Cloud management tools has emerged to solve many of the issues companies face as they move to the cloud, like multi-cloud deployments, costs, governance, and security (see my earlier post).   I had the chance to sit in on a live demo of enStratus last week to see how they attack the issues mentioned above.  The enStratus cloud management solution provides a suite of tools for managing a cloud infrastructure, gaining control of costs and providing governance without sacrificing the agility the cloud can provide.

Plan Before You Cloud

IT has a history of solving problems, but in the process, creating new problems that must be dealt with in the future.  For example, back in the early days, IT helped the business digitize everything but as they did that, they ran into scaling issues, and then had to invent a way to store and access all of that data.  Businesses are moving to the cloud to lower costs, improve agility, and scale to meet new demands of their customers. But without proper planning, the potential to create a lot of new cleanup projects still exist when moving to the cloud.

Election 2012, A Case Study For Cloud Computing

There’s a lot of media coverage on the use of cloud computing by this year’s election teams and as a GigaOM article points out:

No matter if you voted for Red or Blue, you have to be impressed by the quick scaling up of systems, including applications, processes, and data to support the massive needs of the campaign.  This included spinning up the instances, operating them during the spikes of use, and spinning them down when not needed.  This is a great case study for the power and value of cloud computing.

For me though, it’s not just the “quick scaling up” but the ability to obtain this amount of computing just when you need it and move your costs to zero when the the campaign is over at a very low cost.  Before cloud computing the expense of deploying an entire data center’s worth of computing to do this would have been prohibitive and if a campaign did have the money to spend, the capability couldn’t be built fast enough.

Another factor that acts as an accelerant to cloud computing in this case  is mobility.  Campaigns had access to developers from all over the world, and built applications that connected candidates, voters and campaign workers via any internet connected device.  

-- Chris Claborne

Higher Risk in Data Loss than Security in the Cloud

In this article in InfoWorld, Gartner makes an interesting point.   Data loss is a bigger risk than security in the cloud.   They almost seem to intimate that  businesses using the cloud assume that they don’t need to have a backup and recovery plan if things turn ugly.

 Moving to the cloud doesn’t mean you can quit thinking about business continuity.  Whatever the service, IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS, you still need to understand what the backup and recovery plan is and how the vendor ensures recovery and up to what point in time.

Not So Fast NoSQL Evangelists

I found the comments in this InfoWorld article about the capabilities of MySQL vs a noSQL DB interesting.

"A lot of people think they have a big data problem, and a lot of times they don't," said Daniel Austin, who is the chief architect for PayPal. "They have an urge to find a big data solution to a problem, because it looks good."

I still wonder if companies like PayPal and Twitter are too closely tied to MySQL to pan it or if you can tile and shard your way to high performance without going to NoSQL.

Platform as a Service and Force.com

I haven’t written much about "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) up to this point but given Salesforce.com’s growing presence the buzz generated from annual user love-in, Dreamforce, this is a good time to talk about PaaS and Salesforce.  According to this article, Gartner predicts that PaaS platforms will grow from $900 million in 2011 to $2.9 billion in 2016, representing a 26.6 percent rise each year.

Although SalesForce.com (SFDC) is best known for its customer relationship management solution delivered as a service via a cloud, force.com is SFDC’s “platform as a service” offering.  By giving their customers a foundational component for sales and also providing an environment that allows customers to add on the pieces that they need while leveraging a common user interface, authentication framework, it accelerates the potential ROI to customers (and revenue streams for SFDC).  This article will review  PaaS, touch on the advantages, and then talk a little more about why PaaS at SFDC is such a powerful combination.  

CloudPassage Cloud Security Product Review

Updated:I came across a white paper published by CloudPassage, most likely in the attempt to drive interest in their cloud security product.  It worked, since it resulted in my doing a little digging into their product.  They did bring up a security threat I hadn’t thought of and it was just enticing enough to get me to investigate their offering a little further.  Their paper was focused on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments like Amazon Web Services (AWS) (reviewed here), or Rackspace (reviewed here).  The CloudPassage paper focused on the security threats within the context of the products that they offer in order to mitigate these threats.

I will review some of the key points made by CloudPassage here, and then I’ll review their solution offering.   Hang on though -- this article assumes you understand cloud IaaS, and some general Linux and security topics.

VMware Offers Disaster Recovery To The Cloud

I sat in on a VMware call today where they reviewed the new features in VMware 5.1.  The one that caught my eye was the ability to use the Cloud as a disaster recovery point.  In my article “How to Get Started With Cloud Computing”, I mentioned that one way was to use the cloud was as an inexpensive backup data center for your private cloud.  VMware just made this easier for customers that upgrade or implement VMware 5.1.

Patch Management in the Cloud

I was on my way to a lunch appointment when I started thinking of the headache of managing patching in the cloud.  More importantly how would you ensure that your template server that is used to clone for new servers is current?  

To resolve this, I’d love to see a cloud provider offer the ability to patch the dark VM on disk and if you have a local cloud, say using vmWare, do the same thing to your VM on disk.  After all, there’s an exploit to go directly to a VM image, why not a program that will scan that disk image?

Quick Review and Comparison of Rackspace

Rackspace, a cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendor, has been ramping up their advertising and recently announced that they were giving away their cloud management software for free for use in private clouds.  Given all the activity and buzz in the media about Rackspace and OpenStack, I thought I’d give Rackspace a test run.  I used the same approach that I used in my Amazon AWS review and setup an application on their cloud for a semi real-world trial.  Given that I’ve used AWS, I’ll try to do some quick comparisons as well. 

Rackspace Releases OpenStack Private For Free

I recently wrote about HP’s use OpenStack as part of their newly announced cloud hosting environment and how it could help feed their consulting and cloud offering sales.   Rackspace, who have been using OpenStack for a while, may be trying to capitalize on the same approach as HP by releasing their build of OpenStack for free.  I continue to think that these moves will allow CIO’s who don’t want to be left out,  implement internal clouds using the same technology and leave open an easy migration path to the providers public cloud.  In addition to this, Rackspace reminds the market of their relevance in cloud computing.  

CFO’s see value in the cloud, Being Courted by Google

According to a Google’s BLOG, in a survey of 800 CFOs, 81% think (AKA a believe) that completely implementing cloud technology would improve employee productivity, and 71% say it would reduce the time required to bring new products and services to market.  The CFO on a company is normally a big part of the decision making process.  I point out “belief” because a lot of times decisions are made in part or whole on a person’s belief.  If the numbers in Google’s BLOG are true, it will continue to fill the sails of cloud computing growth in the years to come.  I can get pretty analytical, but in general, I align with with the conclusions for reduced time for new services and productivity.  Also notice, CFO’s are being courted by Google... and for good reason.