Tag Archives: AWS

Jun 12 2012
News

Public vs private clouds: A matter of technology, politics, or culture

Is “hybrid cloud” or “private cloud” simply ways of saying that a company isn’t ready to fully embrace the “real” cloud? Cloudscaling co-founder Randy Bias arguesthat cloud computing requires a fundamentally different approach to sourcing and managing infrastructure, a point echoed by Amazon, which questions the very possibility of private cloud computing. There are surely different ways to embrace the cloud, some more advanced than others.

But the real question is whether an organization is culturally ready to embrace the cloud. If so, the necessary infrastructure follows and, importantly, it’s not necessarily always going to look like Amazon. As Mark Thiele writes:

For a legacy IT organization to adopt cloud solutions without significant organizational realignment and improved business participation, the benefits would largely be wasted. It’s akin to thinking you can put a modern 500-horse power engine in a 1970’s economy car and get all the same performance and protection characteristics you would enjoy in a 2012 model year luxury sedan.

In fact, the introduction of cloud without organizational improvements would likely increase enterprise risk and potentially cost. The real opportunity of a cloud operating model comes from the alignment of technical solutions, people, and process.

In other words, cloud isn’t something for IT to hatch in seclusion from the business side of the enterprise. Cloud is, in an ideal world, truly a function of what the business needs.

We’re starting to see this play out in the rise of DevOps, but ultimately the integration of the enterprise across functions will go even deeper. Cloud computing should demolish the walls IT has put up to protect its turf (and sanity). IT will need to work hand-in-hand with the business to build out the right cloud tools for a particular job, whether public, private, or a hybrid of the two.

Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services (AWS), dismisses the notion of private clouds altogether:

If you look deep into what [private cloud vendors] are offering, you will see that it’s basically an internal data center that is virtualized and has some management tools. Organizations that have private cloud systems will have missed out on all the advantages and benefits of going into the cloud.

But this is easily said by the vendor best-positioned to capitalize on public cloud computing. Amazon doesn’t need to worry about a potpourri of hardware and software choices, built up over years. Bias argues that this is one of the great strengths of AWS and, indeed, of all big web companies like Google and Facebook that have been able to build their clouds from the ground up.

Within the average enterprise, however, years or decades of legacy hardware and software choices must be balanced against the new imperative of the cloud. And so they consider the cloud for resource bursting or carve out a private cloud for new applications. Will they run as efficiently as Amazon? Almost certainly not. But that’s not really the goal, is it?

IT can play an essential role in helping the business to rationalize its existing assets and complement them with cloud resources. I suspect one area that can help bridge the gap between IT and the business is better tools to express what is happening in cloud systems, and what this means for the business.

At Nodeable, we’re trying to build monitoring tools that go beyond mere reporting of what’s happening to express why things are happening, and how these cloud systems impact the business. One of the key reasons for our Twitter-like interface is that we want the system to be approachable to non-technical users. Because, frankly, cloud systems shouldn’t be isolated to IT folks.

The cloud has the potential to democratize IT, and bring the business into the IT conversation. Part of this cultural shift can be complemented by the right tools, tools that don’t drown users in arcane minutiae but instead present insights into how things are working, and why. This is the recipe for cloud success, and it’s something we as an industry are just now starting to figure out.

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May 11 2012
Amazon, Cloud, Monitoring

The cloud shifts the CIO’s role to “Chief Data Officer”

The longer I’m in tech, the more inclined I am to accept the truth of William Gibson’s quote: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”  I saw this firsthand with a wealthy friend, who could afford to “see the future” by buying essentially unlimited broadband, powerful servers/computers, and more, and figuring out what the world would look like when average consumers could afford the same.

Sometimes, however, cost isn’t the gatekeeper to the future, but a willingness to risk is.  Such is the case with the cloud.

Google CIO Ben Fried thinks we’re nearing the tipping point for cloud computing, when CIOs determine that cloud computing’s cost and simplicity advantages outweigh other concerns like a lack of customizability, and jump in with both feet.  Sure, enterprises are already using cloud services: 86 percent according to Cloudability data; 81 percent by KPMG’s survey count; and 48 percent for SMBs, according to a recent survey.  But few big enterprises are using the cloud to handle the majority of their workloads.

In the future, according to Fried’s thinking, that will change.

Amazon is destined to displace big iron vendors like IBM and HP as the cloud becomes the preferred destination for enterprise computing, including mission critical workloads.  Just as Linux used to be relegated to the fringe of computing but came to dominate the heart of the data center so, too, will the cloud wreak havoc on the traditional data center business.

By taking technology out of the IT equation, Fried argues that cloud computing changes the way businesses structure themselves and do business, and may even force them to change the business they’re in altogether.  In many ways, cloud computing lets enterprises focus on the data that results from IT, rather than the IT itself.  This is a huge shift.

This isn’t to suggest that enterprises will completely forget about servers and such, but it does mean that they’ll think about compute resources differently, and will almost certainly have to think of new ways to keep tabs on them.  Companies like Boundary and Nodeable were built in the cloud for cloud resources, and focus more on surfacing actionable insights than on giving administrators or developers the tools to “spelunk” for themselves, which is inefficient and largely unnecessary in a world of semi-structured data accessed through APIs.

All of which would be a really bad idea if the cloud were just a fad.  But it’s not.  It’s how IT gets done going forward.  And it means that the Chief Information Officer is going to need to recalibrate the way she thinks about “Information.”  Namely, more a matter of “data” and less a matter of “technology.”

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Mar 26 2012
Big Data, Cloud, Commentary

Why Walmart should mimic Amazon.com and ‘open source’ its supply chain

Amazon.com didn’t get into the business of selling cloud computing services to make money from excess capacity.  That’s a myth.  Even so, Amazon.com did get into the cloud computing business because it knew quite a bit about how to manage infrastructure at scale, and made a bold bet that it could become the center of cloud developers’ universe just as it was increasingly the center of the retail universe.

So why isn’t Walmart, master of a hyper-efficient supply chain, peddling access to its supply chain expertise?

Walmart still needs to come up with a credible answer to Amazon’s dominance online, but there’s a great deal of retail business that will persist offline in brick-and-mortar stores.  Even Amazon recognizes this, and has been experimenting with offline retail.

Walmart, for its part, has been scrambling to innovate online, and most recently has been talking up an open-source Big Data strategy.  This strategy involves open-sourcing tools that Walmart is building to move data from legacy tools into Hadoop clusters, and should be a boon to the countless others that will have similar data management needs.

It sounds like smart strategy, and it is.  But it doesn’t get to the heart of what Walmart could, and perhaps should, be doing.

Back to Amazon.  Amazon Web Services was never about selling Amazon.com’s excess capacity.  That’s a myth, and one that Amazon CTO Werner Vogels rejects:

The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity, actually within 2 months after launch AWS would have already burned through the excess Amazon.com capacity.  Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itself, with the expectation that it could even grow as big as the Amazon.com retail operation.

What isn’t mythical, however, is that Amazon understood web applications at scale, and knew how to build the necessary infrastructure to drive them.  As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explains, Amazon both had the knowledge and the need to create this infrastructure for its own use, and figured it could then turn this into a serious business:

Approximately nine years ago we were wasting a lot of time internally because, to do their jobs, our applications engineers had to have daily detailed conversations with our networking infrastructure engineers. Instead of having this fine-grained coordination about every detail, we wanted the data-center guys to give the apps guys a set of dependable tools, a reliable infrastructure that they could build products on top of.

The problem was obvious. We didn’t have that infrastructure. So we started building it for our own internal use. Then we realized, “Whoa, everybody who wants to build web-scale applications is going to need this.” We figured with a little bit of extra work we could make it available to everybody. We’re going to make it anyway—let’s sell it.

Now think about Walmart.  While Walmart’s tagline is (or was) “Everyday low prices,” with an emphasis on delivering reasonable quality for market-beating prices, the way Walmart achieves this is through its legendary supply chain.  No one beats Walmart in terms of managing the process of filling shelves.  As one commentator notes:

Basically Wal-Mart runs on an entirely different road than everyone else, a sort of information data superhighway. Wal-Mart knows literally everything that any retailer could ever want to know about one of its products.  It’s been said that if the US was ever in World War III, the first thing to be taken over by the government would be Wal-Mart’s supply chain. It has THAT kind of performance power.

So if the supply chain is so good, why doesn’t Walmart “open source” it?  Amazon recognized early that it could build a significant business by outsourcing its expertise in infrastructure.  Why can’t Walmart do the same with its supply chain?  And just as web application developers have crowded into the shadow of Amazon Web Services, I suspect we’d see an army of brick-and-mortar retailers of all sizes happy to tap into Walmart Supply Chain Services.

Ultimately, retailers aren’t in the business of supply chains any more than application developers are in the business of infrastructure.  Walmart should be thinking of how to leverage its supply chain expertise to become the center of an ecosystem, and not simply the center of its own P&L statement.

And while I’m dispensing all this free advice, I’ll just add: Nodeable would be happy to track and analyze all the systems that feed into the supply chain, giving users a single pane of glass to see what’s happening throughout the supply chain.  Because, hey!  We’re generous like that.  :-)

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Feb 14 2012
Amazon, Cloud

The futility of Telcos Taking on Amazon Web Services

Another day, another mistaken assumption that Amazon’s public cloud business is ripe for disruption.  This time it’s ZDNet’s David Berlind arguing that Telcos (no, really) are on the cusp of relegating AWS to the dustbin of cloud history.  Berlind gets several things right about the raw materials Telcos have that could be used to unseat Amazon.  But he conveniently overlooks the entire of history of computing to reach his conclusion that these raw materials matter.

I’m not a fatalist, believing that once a company claims a dominant position in a market it necessarily will own that position forever.  The world changes, and in the technology world by the time government antitrust forces get around to taking action against a Microsoft or Google, the market will have changed.  Microsoft won in operating systems but the world moved to the web.  Google is winning on the web in search but we’re increasingly moving toward a social web.  And something will eventually disrupt Facebook’s hold on social.

So I don’t think Amazon’s dominant grip on cloud computing is forever.  But I also don’t think for a millisecond that Telcos will be the ones to unseat Amazon.

Berlind defends his argument by quoting analyst Ari Banerjee, noting that carriers

own the network, they own the subscribers, they are used to delivering five nines availability, they know how to provide turnkey applications and services to hot market segments like [small and midsize businesses] SMBs, and much like the way that Amazon got started in the business of IaaS-provision, they have data centers with extra capacity.

And yet they have done exactly nothing to diminish Amazon’s market power.  Nothing.

Perhaps because, as Cloudscaling CTO Randy Bias argues of enterprise clouds, their approaches are mired in the past.  Amazon is an entirely new way of thinking about IT which enterprises and the Telcos that have served them don’t seem to be able to grasp.  Yes, AWS succeeds because of its simplicity and because of its rapid feature improvements, but ultimately it’s winning because it’s not like the traditional model that Telcos have pushed.

The Telcos have been well-positioned, based on raw materials alone, to take on Apple, Google, and any number of successful companies.  But they haven’t.  They remain dumb pipes, despite buckets of money spent trying to become “un-dumb.”

Cloud isn’t simply hosted IT.  It’s a different way of thinking about IT.  Cloud changes the way we manage our systems, the way we buy/rent them, the way we secure them, and just about everything else.  Don’t look to Telcos to figure this out.  They have far too much invested in outdated ways of thinking about networks and IT.

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Feb 10 2012
5 Comments
Amazon, Cloud

Public cloud: it’s open source all over again

Public cloud adoption largely follows the same pattern as open source adoption, and is having to overcome the same myths that once inhibited widespread adoption of open source.  Security, control, and quality are the red herring arguments that traditional software vendors used to slow the spread of open source, and these same arguments are being resurrected to stem the flow of public cloud adoption.  But it won’t work, just as it failed to stop open source.  And as Red Hat has been cleaning up in the open source revenues sweepstakes, Amazon should win big as the public cloud continues to win converts.

By some estimates, Amazon’s share of the public cloud computing market (IaaS) is as high as 90 per cent.  This doesn’t make it invulnerable – Enstratus’ James Urquhart points to a variety of ways to unseat AWS – but it won’t be for the faint of heart, and current competitors seem mostly to be getting their messaging wrong.  Companies like Alcatel-Lucent try to categorize AWS as “coach class” while their clouds are “first class,”  but the masses seem very happy with a coach class experience in the cloud.  It’s cheap, reliable, and gets them where they want to go.

The next argument plays to the CIO’s biggest concern with the public cloud: security.  How can it possibly be safe to entrust mission-critical applications to the public cloud?  This was the same argument that kept Linux to edge-of-network sort of applications in its early days.  As the story went, Linux would never succeed in the data center.  Who could trust some community science project to mission-critical applications in the data center?

Well, today, who wouldn’t?

This is the same thing that is happening in the public cloud, and particularly with AWS, and it’s been growing on the sly for years, for reasons highlighted by R0ml Lefkowitz back at OSBC 2008 (warning: PDF).  The general adoption pattern goes like this: a developer needs to get work done, and going through traditional IT channels will either take too long or will get killed.  So she puts it up on AWS.  Perhaps she starts with dev and test instances, but soon her team becomes dependent on it and asks the question, “Why redeploy this somewhere else?  Why not just put it into production on AWS, since it works?”  And soon that enterprise is actively deploying to AWS because it’s cost effective, secure, and it works.

Yes, secure.  Amazon claims that AWS is significantly more secure than the average private data center, and there’s every reason to believe this claim.  As Jason Bloomberg argues, Amazon hires the best security people, uses the best hardware, and has experience dealing with constant security threats.  It’s not that there aren’t some private data centers that might be more secure than Amazon’s public cloud, but the odds are that they aren’t.

Once people discover this freedom of the public cloud, and its cost and security advantages, the way they manage their infrastructure also changes.  Right now, Netflix is on the bleeding edge of public cloud adoption, but its mantra of “disposable infrastructure” will soon find its way into the mainstream enterprise.  Why spend days or even hours performing root cause analysis on system failures when it takes mere seconds to spin up a new AMI to replace the failing node?

Old-school systems management, then, becomes largely irrelevant in the cloud, because it focuses too much attention on the past.  The cloud is all about watching current trends and anticipating problems, flexibly deploying configuration changes or whatever is needed to overcome problems.  This is what Nodeable and a new breed of cloud “management” tools do: focus on visibility into cloud infrastructure, rather than the tools to fix past problems.

For those of us who lived through the open source adoption curve, the public cloud adoption curve looks very familiar.  As with open source, it will change the way everyone develops, deploys, and manages software.  It may be that Amazon won’t retain its dominance forever, but its model of exceptional service at rock-bottom prices is going to be hard to beat.  Just like open source.

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