i want cloud apps, not just cloud...
TRANSCRIPT
2012
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Application-Centric
Cloud Management
Cloud Computing Made Easy
®
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Copyright © 2012 Kaavo, All rights reserved. Page 2
Table of Contents
Virtualization Crumbles Infrastructure-Centric Management ..................................... 3
In Comes the Cloud – And More Challenges .................................................................. 4
You Need an Application-Centric Approach ................................................................... 6
IT Evolution - Phase I.............................................................................................................. 6
IT Evolution - Phase II ............................................................................................................ 6
IT Evolution - Phase III ........................................................................................................... 7
IT Evolution - Phase IV ........................................................................................................... 7
Market Validation and Key Features .................................................................................. 9
On-Demand Configuration ...................................................................................................... 9
Flexibility to Work with Any Application Deployment ........................................................ 10
Runtime “Autopilot” for Managing Service Levels .............................................................. 10
Use Multiple Clouds both Across and Within Deployments................................................. 11
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 12
Resources............................................................................................................................... 13
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Copyright © 2012 Kaavo, All rights reserved. Page 3
Virtualization Crumbles Infrastructure-Centric Management
In the past when servers were within enterprise boundaries, there were fewer
physical servers and it was easy to maintain a mapping of which applications
were running on what servers (static servers) as well as their
interdependencies. Management tools were written for this model, expecting
applications tied to servers and servers to IP addresses and IP addresses to
switches and routers, not to mention access all the way down to the CPU. This is
the very meaning of infrastructure-centric management, where the focus is on the
infrastructure underneath applications and services.
Now with virtualization, unless you are running the actual datacenter, an
application owner has no concept of physical servers with static IP addresses. As
a result of virtualization, there is no need to run multiple applications on the same
server to increase utilization since applications can run on dedicated, dynamically
allocated virtual servers. The old tightly-coupled model has very little space to
accommodate the dynamic nature of a virtual infrastructure.
In addition, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) movement brought about
composite applications whose piece parts did not need to live on the same server
anymore. In the virtualized world, distributed applications can truly be deployed
anywhere at any time. Leveraging the old infrastructure-centric management
tools to ensure the health and wealth of these applications that are decoupled
from infrastructure resources is time-consuming, costly and complex.
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Copyright © 2012 Kaavo, All rights reserved. Page 4
In Comes the Cloud – And More Challenges
Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-
demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing
resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that
can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or
service provider interaction.
This is the definition of cloud computing from the National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST). Yet, even though we have spent more than 5 years
defining what the term “cloud” is, people continue to have their own variations. In
addition, many organizations do not fully understand how this technological /
operational and business platform actually applies to the specific goals and
drivers of their business. A customer once recounted how he believed his
infrastructure was indeed a private cloud; as it turns out, they had a virtual server
farm which could not even be accessed through a self-service portal.
Cloud computing has several delivery models. They are:
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Delivers compute / storage / network services in a pay-as-you-go on-demand model from the network (internal or external).
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Delivers development environments in the same style, and the ability to host the completed application.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Delivers applications in the same style.
Business-Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS): Delivers business processes (such as payment services) in the same style.
These delivery models provide several benefits. The more prominent ones are as
follows:
Elasticity: On-demand IT resources when you need them.
Pay-Per-Use: Pay for only the IT resources used.
CAPEX OPEX: Move from fixed costs to variable expenses.
Automation: Procurement cycles for IT resources reduced to minutes.
Most cloud implementations leverage virtual infrastructure in a multi-tenant model
to maximize the on-boarding of subscribers. The use of infrastructure-centric
tools in this environment is further complicated, as you are now dealing with
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Copyright © 2012 Kaavo, All rights reserved. Page 5
distributed applications whose piece parts may not live on-premise but within
outsourced providers. Infrastructure-centric tools are still valuable for IaaS
providers to intricately manage their shared pool of resources. But, for the
application owner who is responsible for managing applications / workloads /
services and their service levels, these old tools simply do not work.
Cloud Adoption Challenges
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Copyright © 2012 Kaavo, All rights reserved. Page 6
You Need an Application-Centric Approach
In the cloud computing world, the most important element of your business is still
the same: your customers. Your customers do not care about problems related to
the network, storage, or servers; they just want a certain level of service from the
application(s) they are using. For application owners to effectively manage
distributed cloud applications, we need to raise the management abstraction
level from the infrastructure-centric approach of the past to an application-centric
approach.
You need to have an application-centric approach for deploying, managing, and
monitoring applications. This includes the ability to provision optimal virtual
servers (CPU, memory), network (bandwidth), and storage resources on-
demand, and provide automation and ease of use for application owners to be
able to easily and securely run and maintain their cloud applications. An
application-centric approach can handle simple and complex service
deployments (whether they are PaaS, SaaS, or customer applications) with
order-of-execution configuration dependencies, where management takes the
form of an independent dynamic controller as opposed to a bloated static
container. This approach will be critical for the success of virtualization and cloud
computing. In short we need to start managing systems for specific applications
rather than managing servers and routers. An application-centric approach
makes the infrastructure work for you, not the other way around.
Let’s take a look at some historic context surrounding four phases of IT evolution,
so that we can get a further perspective of why an application-centric approach is
critical.
IT Evolution - Phase I
In the good old days, application owners bought dedicated hardware for running
their applications and they had the flexibility to install whatever patches, OS, etc.
they needed for their applications to work on the dedicated hardware. This was
an era of high flexibility and low hardware utilization.
IT Evolution - Phase II
CIOs and their bosses didn’t like this approach as utilization was low, questioning
why hardware was being wasted. As such, the directive from the top was to
consolidate the infrastructure. Once the infrastructure, especially the servers,
were consolidated application owners lost flexibility; anytime they had to make a
change to the underlying shared infrastructure they needed to check with multiple
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Copyright © 2012 Kaavo, All rights reserved. Page 7
groups within the enterprise to make sure they were not going to step on
someone’s toes. This was a time of higher server utilization but lower flexibility,
configuration management and time for running regression tests on multiple
applications (even if the change was required by a single application). Several IT
organizations are still stuck in this phase.
IT Evolution - Phase III
Then along came virtualization, which resolved the conflict between flexibility and
utilization by allowing each application owner to run or install their own OS and
patches on a virtual server which would use a slice of the physical infrastructure
resources. Hence each application owner was able to run their own application
on their dedicated virtual server and apply patches, changes etc. without
impacting the other applications running on different virtual servers within the
same physical box.
Although virtualization solved the problem of flexibility, it created a new
management nightmare because for every physical server we ended up having
multiple virtual servers. So from an application owner’s perspective it introduced
new complexity, as they needed to track all the virtual resources used by their
applications. This problem is significant for on-premise clouds or virtualized
environments; however when you add the scale of public clouds, especially
clouds in different locations, management becomes a nightmare from an
enterprise perspective. How can a large company with 100’s of application using
1000’s of servers manage this complexity?
IT Evolution - Phase IV
Taking an application-centric approach for managing virtual resources addresses
the complexity issue, as each application owner can manage the entire
infrastructure used by their application as a system. This approach also allows
each application owner to hold the IaaS provider accountable for the SLAs
attached to the provided infrastructure resources, which may impact the service
levels for their applications. So the complexity is managed by having distributed
management, as each application owner can manage their own virtual
resources. The IaaS provider could be an internal IT team responsible for
managing a private cloud and/or it could be one or more public cloud providers.
In IT all the work we do ultimately leads to delivering and managing business
applications. The business measures our success based not on the speed of our
routers and servers, but on whether we are delivering applications on time and
within the expected business service levels. Business users are judging IT from
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Copyright © 2012 Kaavo, All rights reserved. Page 8
an application perspective, and you will do yourselves a disservice by not taking
an application-centric approach for managing your applications as if they were
wholly-contained systems.
Application-Centric Deployment and Management
To quote Lori MacVittie, Senior Technical Marketing Manager for F5 Networks,
from her blog entry, “when applications are decoupled from the servers on
which they are deployed and the network infrastructure that supports and
delivers them, they cannot be effectively managed unless they are
recognized as individual components themselves.”
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Copyright © 2012 Kaavo, All rights reserved. Page 9
Market Validation and Key Features
In February 2011, Amazon announced their AWS CloudFormation service. It
gives developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a
collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an
orderly and predictable fashion. In essence, this service allows users to automate
the deployment of complex applications or workloads within the AWS stack.
CloudFormation allows users to capture all deployment-related information within
one template, called a stack.
At the Microsoft Management Summit 2011 in Las Vegas, NV, Microsoft
announced what was called “a new innovation” to be released in Virtual Machine
Manager 2012 which would enable service level management. The enabling
technology powering this is what Microsoft hailed as the “new concept” called a
“service template”. According to Microsoft, a service template captures all the
information that you need to deploy a service. In essence, Microsoft had
recognized that in the cloud you have to take a top-down application-centric
approach to effectively manage applications and workloads.
Over the last few years many industries have been moving towards service-
centric views. We are now finally catching on to the fact that it is not just enough
to place a unified dashboard on top of existing complex tools. As you look for
application-centric management solutions to optimally use the cloud and to
effectively manage application service levels, keep the following key capabilities
in mind.
On-Demand Configuration
Without cloud it used to take several days to procure infrastructure resources, so
it was acceptable to spend a couple of days configuring servers and installing
software to get the applications up and running. However, with the cloud we can
get infrastructure resources on-demand within minutes, so this is no longer
acceptable.
Look for the on-demand ability to run your applications or workloads in the cloud,
not just on-demand infrastructure. You need the ability to configure the
infrastructure (e.g. firewall rules, VPN, access, etc.) and install software
automatically within minutes to run your applications or workloads on-demand,
irrespective of the cloud provider(s) you choose. Look for solutions that do not
just look at servers, but also look at all the resources required to deploy, run, and
manage an application top-down from the application owner’s perspective. This
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Copyright © 2012 Kaavo, All rights reserved. Page 10
includes servers, storage, networks, middleware, application code, runtime
management tasks, service levels etc.
Flexibility to Work with Any Application Deployment
Let’s face it, even the simplest of applications are all configured specifically for
your own business and IT needs. SAP in one’s deployment model may be very
different than how it is deployed in your shop. But the knowledge to lay down
these applications, after gaining access to the servers / storage / network, is in
your heads. Your business will also dictate how to lay down an application
deployment.
Ensure that the application-centric management solution can capture these best-
practice steps so that anyone can follow the same methodology in a repeatable
fashion, especially as you take an application from development through testing
and into production.
Runtime “Autopilot” for Managing Service Levels
As computing needs are growing, management complexity is increasing and to
manage this complexity you need automation to manage application service
levels during run-time. Most of us fly on airplanes, and we don’t even think about
the fact that most of the time the airplane we are on is flying on autopilot. In fact,
on all large airplanes and longer routes, autopilot is required by the FAA to
manage complexity and to avoid incidents due to pilot fatigue. Autopilot takes
corrective actions in response to changing conditions (e.g. wind speed, wind
direction, etc.) to keep the airplane on course.
Compare this analogy to how we manage application service levels in IT; we
have a pager system to page someone at 3am to fix a production outage, so that
he/she can perform tasks such as restarting a process or booting a server. 80 to
90 percent of all production support activities are known events with known
responses. The primary reliance on a pager model is not scalable at the cloud
level. You need automation to manage service levels during runtime. Let’s think
about this: if we can trust autopilot capability every day with millions of human
lives to keep airplanes on course and take passengers safely to their
destinations, then there is no reason why we shouldn’t trust automation to fully
manage the deployment and run-time service levels of our business applications.
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Copyright © 2012 Kaavo, All rights reserved. Page 11
Use Multiple Clouds both Across and Within Deployments
Many cloud providers are releasing similar services with varying pricing models
and service levels, not to mention industry-specific compliance attributes. As you
become advanced in leveraging the cloud, you may want to leverage multiple
cloud providers not just across different application deployments but within a
single application deployment. This will allow you to leverage the economies of
scale that cloud can provide, while optimizing your deployments for high
availability.
Application-Centric Cloud Management Simplifies and Automates Cloud Use
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Copyright © 2012 Kaavo, All rights reserved. Page 12
Conclusion The dynamic nature of infrastructure resources (virtual servers, virtual storage,
virtual networks, etc.) is testing the limits of current tools and processes.
Examining the evolution of IT cements this fact:
Phase I – “Cowboy Days”: Each application owner had their own dedicated infrastructure / hardware. Flexibility High, Utilization of Resources Low.
Phase II – Consolidation: Applications running on shared infrastructure. Utilization High, Flexibility Low.
Phase III – Virtualization: Use of virtualization within datacenters and use if public and private clouds. Utilization High, Flexibility High, Complexity High.
Phase IV – Application-Centric Management: Use of application-centric management for managing distributed virtual resources. Utilization High, Flexibility High, Complexity Low.
Many vendors across industries are now building cloud offerings from the
bottom-up, by implementing solutions for launching and monitoring servers,
storage, and networks. In the end, the goal is to deploy and manage applications
and workloads securely in the cloud, and manage their service levels. A top-
down application-centric approach is paramount, as it brings focus back to the
application and customers.
If lowering costs and complexity, improving time-to-market, and raising service
quality are all important application management goals when using the cloud,
contact Kaavo today and learn how you can get started with Application-Centric
Cloud Management.
Tel: 1.203.998.0450, Extension 21
www.kaavo.com
Sign up for a 30-Day Trial
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Copyright © 2012 Kaavo, All rights reserved. Page 13
Resources
Resources for additional reading or reference:
Biswas, Joydeep, “Enable application-centric cloud management,” developerWorks, IBM, October 13, 2010,
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-
kaavoimod/index.html?ca=drs-
MacVittie, Lori, “Managing Virtual Infrastructure Requires an Application Centric Approach,” Two Different Socks, December 1, 2008,
http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2008/12/
01/managing-virtual-infrastructure-requires-an-application-
centric-approach.aspx
Mazhar, Jamal and Somashekar, Sam, Various Blog Entries, Kaavo,
http://www.kaavo.com/blog
Ness, Gregory, “The Next Tech Boom: Infrastructure 2.0,” Seeking Alpha,
October 13, 2008, http://seekingalpha.com/article/99652-the-
next-tech-boom-infrastructure-2-0
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
Copyright © 2012 Kaavo, All rights reserved. Page 14
About The Author
Sam Somashekar, Vice President of Marketing and Business
Development
Sam Somashekar is responsible for leading all marketing and
business development initiatives at Kaavo. These include driving
strategic partnerships, product marketing, product management,
thought leadership and industry presence.
Mr. Somashekar has over 18 years of experience demonstrating success in
enterprise product management and development, market research and strategy,
marketing and business development. Prior to Kaavo, he held various senior
management roles at public and private companies, including Senior Director of
Product Management at CA Technologies (a leading IT management software
and solutions company). He has proven success in establishing, developing, and
inspiring high-performance teams, providing product vision and delivering the
best value to customers. At CA, Mr. Somashekar’s responsibilities included
creating and managing global product strategy for key industry areas such as
cloud computing, data center automation, service automation, and green IT.
Throughout his career Mr. Somashekar has provided leadership and vision to
increase both top line and bottom line growth, maximizing profitability while
addressing challenging and realistic problems.
Mr. Somashekar holds a BA in Computer Science from New York University and
is Pragmatic Marketing Certified. He is on the board of AFCOM’s Data Center
Institute (DCI), and has authored several articles and whitepapers on the subject
of enterprise IT management. Mr. Somashekar has also been quoted in articles
appearing in leading industry publications such as InfoWorld and Computerworld
and has been a regular speaker at industry events.
Share this eBook!
www.kaavo.com