There have been multiple white papers and articles written by analysts - Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise?  The question is asked so many times now - Is Cloud Computing ready for the enterprise?  So, I have to ask - Is the enterprise ready for Cloud Computing?

I’ll start this discourse with a few PC and sincere comments (the two are not mutually exclusive unless one is running for political office).

First, I love Corporate CIOs and IT managers (not in a romantic way, of course, but with great admiration).

Second, they have the most difficult jobs in the corporate universe.  They are the brains and the central nervous systems of large enterprises.  They are also the most taken for granted of all executives.  They represent cost centers who get no credit for their corporations’ profits, while keeping the corporation alive.  If they achieve 99.99% availability of their services, an iota of kudos is given for that 99.99%, but a mountain of wrath is doled out for the other 0.01%.

Finally, I spent 27 of my 37 year career in information technology as an enterprise IT manager and Fortune 500 CIO.  You guys and gals are my comrades.

So, why do I feel the need to put my comrades on a pedestal?  Well, it started with some comments I made at a Wall Street conference and variations of it that I made to members of the technical press and analyst community.  I used the following analogy.

If you woke up in the morning and read in the Wall Street Journal that an eCommerce company like Overstock.com had stopped using the USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. to deliver their goods and, instead, leased airport hubs all over the world, bought a fleet of jets and bought thousands of trucks and started delivering the stuff themselves, you’d think they were out of their minds.  So, why is is not equally insane for financial services companies, health care institutions, manufacturing companies, bio-tech companies, pharmaceutical giants, etc. to be spending a billion dollars or much  more each year on information technology infrastructure?

Well, that analogy has prompted several to accuse me of thinking that corporations are insane and corporate IT managers and CIOs are stupid.  I assure you that it not the case.

Then what do I do?  I really put my foot in my mouth.  I title this treatise “Are Enterprises Ready for Cloud Computing?”, as if to arrogantly proclaim that we are ready but enterprises are not.

But there is expiation for that as well (and I am not running for office, so this is a thought embellishment rather than flip flop).

Intellectually, of course you are ready.  Of course you have the experience and skill to adopt Cloud Computing.  And most of you have the resources.  Most significantly, you have always risen to the occasion when disruptive technologies have been thrust upon you.

But, practically speaking, whether you, I or anyone thinks that the future holds a world where all enterprises will get computing on demand and only pay for what they consume, we know that this will not happen over night.  I do see a world, though, in six or seven years, where this will be very much the norm and corporations owning datacenters will be the exception to the rule.

So, here’s where the Darwinian Theory of the Corporate Datacenter comes to play.

I have said many times that Cloud Computing is the most disruptive technology that has come along in a very long time.  Respected technology analysts say it will be bigger than e-Business and it’s potentially a quarter of a trillion dollar market (that’s almost enough to fund a fraction of a war!).  So, people ask me - Do you think Cloud Computing is a revolution or an evolution?

My answer is a resounding “Both”.

I believe that all evolutionary change starts with revolutionary change.  In Darwin’s Origin of the Species evolutionary changes start with a mutation.  Those mutations are the revolutions that result in evolution.  In most cases the mutation comes about as a mechanism to heighten the chance of survival - you know, to make the species more fit.  Subsequent to those revolutions, the evolutionary process gradually occurs as the most fit survive and the mutation becomes the norm - the standard.

Cloud computing is the mutation - the revolution.  Enterprise IT and Corporate CIOs/IT Managers will jump on the opportunity to evolve as they always have when revolutionary technology mutations have occurred.

So, here’s an example of a scenario of how the evolution will happen.

During the next couple of years two things will occur.

First, enterprises know that the hardest things to plan for with regard to capacity, performance, etc., are on line applications offered on the web.  They really have no control over who may log on, how many may log on, when they may log on, what they may do once they log on, etc.  So, the natural evolutionary step to mitigate this is to run those applications on massively scalable infrastructure that scales up and down dynamically as needed, using resources on demand, always there when needed and only paying for what is consumed.  These infrastructures are what we are now calling Clouds.

At the same time, the mission critical data and systems of records that are the enterprise life blood residing in their datacenters need to be isolated from these on line applicatons exposed to every internet user.  This will be accomplished through the use of secure virtual gateways in the Cloud, connecting, in a loosely coupled manner, rather than a fully integrated manner, to the enterprise datacenters, their databases and systems of record.

These gateways will take many forms.  They may be SOA gateways using XML and virtual XML firewalls, virtual messaging systems such as MQ, virtual EAI appliances or customized appliances encapsulating organizations’ proprietary techniques for reliably and securely communicating among systems (and anything new that comes along to supplement or replace these things).

Second, infrastructure/architecture agnostic Cloud platforms (what we at 3tera call Cloud Computing Without Compromise) will be installed in enterprise datacenters.  There will be two factors that will drive this.

(1) As more and more apps are offered on line, those same apps will often be used internally by the enterprise employees.  Why incur the cost of having separate experiences for employees and customers who are accessing the same information and functionality.  Also, when connecting the on line apps in the Cloud to the datacenter and SORs, having them on similar platforms will make it seamless and efficient.  ‘

(2) A Cloud infrastructure done right, behind the corporate firewall, enables the enterprise to run their datacenters as metered utilities.  It enables them to more efficiently use their hardware resources by provisioning what is needed for each application on demand and releasing those resources when no longer needed for other applications to use.  It enables them to more efficiently use intellectual capital by shifting IT administrators from managing machines to managing applications.  And, most importantly, it greatly decreases time to market because the lengthy provisioning, configuring, etc., of hardware and infrastructure resources is, pardon the pun, virtually eliminated.  So albeit humongously significant, forget all the talk about cost reduction and avoidance.  Cloud Computing in the enterprise has the potential to greatly increase revenue and beat the heck out of competitors implementing like products using traditional datacenter deployment methods.

OK - so what’s the next step in the evolution?

At the same time that enterprises are growing comfy with apps in Clouds and realizing the upside of dynamic provisioning and scaling, they will be developing new applications and replacing/changing existing ones.  They will start building the new apps in Clouds and as they change existing apps, will consider migrating them to the Cloud in the process.  This will afford them the advantages of much faster times to market, the ability to run applications on demand in multiple datacenters (globally if appropriate) creating their first truly complete disaster recovery abilities and concentrate on their core businesses which may be financial services, health care, manufacturing, etc., but certainly is not datacenter operations (they will leave that to the companies whose core business IS datacenter operations).

Now the final step (well, as my limited vision can see it - of course there will be much more beyond this):

Enterprises will find themselves with datacenters that only contain data.  Finally, a datacenter will be what its name implies.  All of their functionality - all the non-data tiers of their services, will be in Clouds connected to the datacenters’ data.  At that point, evolution will have to start behaving like the datacenter is an appendage.  Over time, the corporate data will move to the Cloud just as many smaller businesses without datacenters are using storage services in Clouds today.  The corporate datacenter will be a vestige, and eventually evolution will cause it to disappear.

Discussion of this step always raises questions of privacy and security.  I maintain that when corporate data is in the Cloud it will actually be more protected than it is in the enterprise datacenter.  But I’ll save that for a separate, devoted future posting.

In short, the corporate datacenter is not a stupid useless entity.  There have been no alternatives.  My hat is off to the brave men and women who devote their careers to thanklessly operating them.  They are profound necessities.  But neccesity truly is the mother of invention, and the corporate datacenter, with all of its overhead, has bred Cloud Computing.

So, as I started this with a PC comment, I feel like ending it with one.  As I composed this, I did realize that there are many people out there that discount Darwinian evolution in favor of Creationism.  I assure you that I have the utmost respect for all beliefs, no matter how different from my own.  And my references to evolution here, obviously have to do with the evolution of technology, not of the human race.  Furthermore, I am very happy to depict the corporate datacenter as the eventual dinosaur with a saddle on it’s back being ridden by a member of the Cloud Computing species.

We (other members of the 3tera team and I) had the pleasure of talking to John Foley this week. John is writing for InformationWeek and is focusing on Cloud Computing. This is a knowledgeable guy who has thoroughly researched the space.

During the chat, something very important dawned on me. This space is getting noisier and noisier – rightfully so – Cloud Computing is hotter than Hades and better than sliced bread! And we are making it even noisier with our semantics.

People do not define terms in this space consistently. I think it’s ironic that the semantics of Cloud Computing are, er, uh …, well, cloudy.

I’ll paraphrase:

IW – You talk about internal Clouds behind firewalls. How can a Cloud be private and internal?

3tera – We think of Cloud Computing in terms of how, not where?

IW – I disagree. Cloud Computing is running on IT infrastructure that you don’t own – someone else is the datacenter operator.

3tera – Maybe this is just semantics. We could call private Clouds “internal utilities” instead of private “Clouds”. If an enterprise were to run an app in an external Cloud and wants to connect that to their systems of record in their own datacenters, they might want to consider the same platform in their data centers.”

…. and so on.

After wrangling about that for several minutes, the subject changed. All we accomplished though was an addition to the confusion.

The epiphany for me during that conversation is that whatever I call Cloud Computing and whatever someone else calls Cloud Computing is kind of irrelevant. A couple of years from now, someone will obsolete the term Cloud Computing with something more trendy and we’ll debate what THAT is.

For me, the future holds computing services on demand – Information Technology as a Service – MASSIVELY scalable IT as a Service. ITaaS – the sound of that tickles my funny bone. ITaaS will use the Internet and, I think, intranets as well. End users will need no regard for the underlying technologies that support their services. They will only need to know that the services are available and perform at any scale on demand.

If someone installs a generator in their home instead of using the power utility, they get electricity on demand, the same as if they plug into a public utility.

I concede though, at face value, the economics of Cloud Computing seem to favor Clouds as external entities. After all, the hallmark of anything on demand is that you only pay for what you consume. External Clouds can accomplish this by making the same hardware available, at different times, to different users, thus, eliminating idle time and getting the most bang for the buck. But looking deeper, the economics favor internal, private Clouds as well. If a data center manager wants to be provisioned only for average usage rather than peak usage, he/she can do that if he/she is on a Cloud infrastructure that can grab resources from external Clouds only occasionally, when needed. If you add to that, with a Cloud done right, the data center manager manages applications rather than servers, decreasing administration costs; and, time to market is greatly reduced due to the lack of need for tedious provisioning, configuring, etc., the economics of the private Cloud become quite compelling.

To me, the bottom line is this. This is the 21^st century. It has been almost forty years since a man walked on the moon. For most of those forty years, almost all businesses have relied to some degree on Information Technology. It’s about time that IT is available on demand – really on demand – and everyone can have access to world class technology, only paying for what they consume.

So, call it Cloud, call it Utility, call it Platform as a Service, call it ITaas, call it whatever you want to call it. But please, don’t call me late to dinner … and, pretty please, don’t call me late to the on demand computing revolution!

Xseed’s recent announcement offering AppLogic in Japan means cloud computing is now truly global.

Willy Chiu, VP of High Performance Computing at IBM, wrote a cio.com article identifying five business trends propelling cloud computing. Among his observations is this gem “Cloud computing is tailor-made for bringing order out of chaos.” I couldn’t possibly have said it any better myself!

Alistair Croll recently posted an excellent writeup on Gigaom that attempts to segment our somewhat noisy market into 9 vendor sectors that IMHO many prospective users may find helpful in understanding vendor positioning. Alistair put 3tera’s AppLogic alone in his “cloud building” sector, but like most of Alistair’s work the whole piece is worth a read so I won’t repost it all here.

Sys-con ran a three page piece today with 20 experts trying to define cloud computing. The results run the gamut from the uselessly broad “internet centric software” to the only somewhat more pragmatic ”infrastructural paradigm shift that enables the ascension of SaaS” to the disbelieving “Clouds are the next hype-term for the next year or two.” So, why are folks having so much trouble defining cloud computing?

IMHO there are two reasons. First, cloud computing really is still being defined as those of us developing the technology work closely with early adopters putting the new technology to work. In other words, whatever cloud computing is today, it will evolve before it stabilizes. Don’t fret this as a bad thing, though, because it’s quite the opporiste. A little competition will benefit all as more vendors produce useful technology and elevate user expectations of cloud computing. Second, as most readers will already have noticed, a great deal of the noise in the space is being propagated by companies with no new technology; they simply want to share in the attention. While this creates noise, it’s actually normal in developing spaces. So, rather than provide yet another definition, let me provide a use case to show just how real and different cloud computing makes infrastructure.

About four months ago one of our customers was having an issue; a small percentage of page requests were getting dropped. The application involved was a search engine, and ran on around 100 servers in production. The problem wasn’t severe, but was evident to customers. After investigating the issue on their own, they requested our assistance along with a couple other vendors. A two hour Webex trial and error session ensued, but the problem persisted. If you’ve ever had to hunt for intermitant errors then you know what we were going through. At this point, though, the story diverts from your typical experience. The customer application was running on AppLogic after all, so it was a packaged system, literally scalable and portable as a unit.

Rather than proceed with tests on the production system, the customer agreed to send us a copy of their application! Yes, that’s right, a complete copy of the search engine - ready to run in our labs. Just as easily as you exchange Word documents with coworkers, they sent us a complete 100 server application. We then made several copies, each of which ran on just a few servers, and started destructive testing. We failed servers, dropped connections, deleted volumes - anything we could think of to exacerbate the error and make it repeatable. A few hours later the problem was solved - a simple misconfiguration in a third party piece of software.

Had this application been running on standard infrastructure, no doubt this story would have had a completely different ending. In all likelihood the error would have persisted for days or even weeks, because the type of troubleshooting we did wouldn’t have been possible. Cloud computing provided this customer a new way to deal with errors in production resulting in a better user experience, reduced manpower, and of course lower cost. 

So yes, there is a very real difference provided by cloud computing technology and its impact will be felt across our industry. Just don’t expect anyone to agree on exactly what it is for a while.

Just found this one via slashdot. Enjoy!

Twenty Experts Define Cloud Computing (with source links)

http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/read/612375_p.htm

Poll: should we add our own?

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Update, 7:30pm: Bert adds his view on why we shouldn’t try to make our own definition

I’m packing my bags to return home, having spent the past week in Japan at a private show hosted by our new partners at NetOne Systems. Attendance was excellent and the event was very impressive, even having its own tradeshow floor featuring dozens of booths complete with fully operational demonstration equipment, including an IBM mainframe.  Our sessions for press interviews and customer demonstrations or AppLogic were packed to standing room only thanks to the excellent organization and customer relations of NetOne. Xseed, the first Japanese service provider to begin offering commercial AppLogic services, used the event as a venue for making their service announcement as well. If you read Japanese, you can see some of the press coverage on Atmarkit.

More than two years ago, when we first came out of stealth mode, some of our first inquiries came from Japan. Unfortunately, at that time we weren’t ready to service customers here. My visit with customers this week has shown that the Japanese market is ready to embrace cloud technology. They respond to the efficiency, the scalability and the energy savings. And today, in conjunction with NetOne, 3tera can provide the service needed. Cloud computing is on the horizon in the land of the rising sun.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions and generated a few blog posts since we announced Cloudware back in June along with our desire to start a standards effort. Many, like this post from James Urquhart, are from other vendors in the space concerned about whether this gives 3tera an edge. Others, like Rich Miller’s post, are just good technologists wondering aloud what we’re trying to accomplish and whether open source would be a better way to go. So here goes a post that’s sure to raise a few eyebrows.

Open source does NOT provide interoperability.

I know that’s not the popular wisdom, but IMHO it’s true. Consider for a moment that in the relatively new space of cloud computing there are already several services based on open source. Unfortunately, none of them interoperate. Why? There are two reasons I see. First, although there are open source systems for the base technology, they aren’t a complete solution. Each provider must complete the solution themselves. Second, and IMHO more important, providers are looking for competitive advantage. So, while open source may let them get to market early each provider is free to change the system, and many do.

Let’s consider a larger market for comparison. Linux is open source, yet there are countless variations. From debian to ubuntu, Suse to Fedora, Redhat to CentOS, and countless others. Variations between distributions are at the same time the power and problem of Linux. The ability to modify the system enables users and vendors are able to tailor it for their specific application. Linux can be stripped down to run in 16MB or can power the largest servers. I myself have used Linux numerous times as the basis for routers, switches and load balancers. It’s embedded in cell phones, cars, etc. Everyone of us depends upon Linux every day whether we know it or not. However, it’s precisely because anyone can modify Linux, that not all versions interoperate. Most of us can name software packages that only work with specific distributions.

So, one interesting question to consider is if all those embedded Linux systems exist, how do they interoperate. Obviously, my cell phone can connect to the tower and from there to the rest of the phone system. All my Linux based networking gear works together to create my LAN. The answer is this interaction  happens at a layer above Linux, a set of interfaces defined by standards. In fact, Linux itself couldn’t exist at all without the standards that define the hardware it runs on. The growth in Linux was possible because so much of the x86 hardware interfaces are standardized. From ISA to PCI-X busses, from SCSI to IDE to SATA drives, graphics, keyboards, serial interfaces and memory are all standardized.

For example, take a look at Ethernet. Virtually every Ethernet port built in the past 15+ years will still work in your network. How is that possible given the technological changes that have occurred over that time? IMHO it’s because there’s a very well defined standard. HTML is a standard as well. HTTP is a standard. TCP is a standard. IP is a standard. USB too. The plug for your phone and your electrical socket are all standardized. When’s the last time you had trouble with one of them?

3tera supports the open source market. We use it and contribute to it. However, we feel it’s critical for users to be able to depend upon the interoperability of cloud computing services and that the best way to accomplish this is through standards. It’s also important to note that this in no way eliminates the potential for open source. Quite the opposite. Vyatta, for example, offers open source software based on networking standards. Apache emboddies the HTML and HTTP standards. So I’m certain we’ll see open source efforts built around cloud computing standards as well.

3tera will proceed with the standards effort and has begun to solicit participation, albeit due to my limited time I’ve only hit 20 to 30 folks so far, and we’ve had some positive feedback as well. We’ll provide data and describe methods proven to provide portable applications (something by the way no one else has yet demonstrated). If others share their capabilities as we’re proposing to, the result will be better products and services for users and a bigger market for vendors.

After 2 years+ of showing people how to run Wordpress on a grid, we finally bit the bullet and moved our own blog on Wordpress. On a grid, of course.

As advertised, the process was smooth and easy — the Wordpress famous 5 minute install worked on the standard LAMP cluster infrastructure from AppLogic. Five minutes flat (here’s how).

The rest of the two late nights on the weekend were dedicated, of course, to style sheets, plugins and porting the contents over. Much to my amazement, the process was way easier than I expected.

• The stylesheets (aka themes) in Wordpress are simple to set up, yet powerful — probably the easiest to set up among all the web apps I have used. (Of course, the word easy is cautiously applied to anything that has to do with CSS, but that wasn’t Wordpress’s fault; and, big thanks to Firebug!).
• The plugin model in Wordpress is install-by-file-copy (remember the old DOS days?) while still activation is from the GUI — simply brilliant combination.
• Pouring in the contents — 114 posts dating back to December 2005 — took a bit of work; the easiest way I found was through simulating Wordpress import: simple XML, only a few fields were really necessary, the rest Wordpress seemed to fill in itself (e.g., I set only the post_date and Wordpress autofilled the post_date_gmt; the only surprise was the post_status — must be set explicitly to publish; in hindsight, this could have been fixed with a single checkbox from the manage posts panel). Part of the time was, of course, spent reading some of the old posts — equal bits nostalgic and refreshing.

Overall, quite enjoyable. After the 4-conferences week (aka, the cloud computing conference week plus LTPact) and a lot of talking, talking and talking, it was great to get something done with my own two hands (and two keyboards). There is something really rewarding, in the sense of instant gratification, in putting up web applications and tailoring them to work exactly as you want them (PHP, while not the best language ever, is nearly the perfect instant gratification language, no offense to Ruby).

As a result, now all public facing infrastructure of 3Tera runs on the grid, as does almost all of our internal infrastructure. A shout out to the good folks at SiteKreator for taking our web site all the way to here — we are still running some personal sites on it and I will most definitely set up the first web site of my next startup there again.

Now, I wish our blog would become as popular as to deserve some of the more advanced infrastructure we have for LAMP applications — self-scaling based on load and remote replication. We’ll get there. In the meantime, to those who need such infrastructure today, it is easily available.