Charles Makes a Point (or Two)

It appears I'm not the only one who thinks all this talk of 'clouds' is just a lot of hot air. Recently, Amazon and the VCE team have been going back and forth over the use of the term 'private cloud', and I find the comments from both sides interesting.

You can read about Amazon's shot across the bow here:

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/175953,video-time-to-kill-the-private-cloud.aspx

And the VCE team's response here:

http://www.crn.com.au/News/213820,vce-execs-defend-private-cloud-at-emc-inform.aspx

To summarize things, Amazon says that the idea of 'private cloud' ignores critical concepts like pay as you go, capacity on demand, and the idea that cloud is all about saving costs (since you still have to lay out capital to own the hardware). Their CTO argues that cloud is not about technology, it is about th advantages it brings. He also says that private cloud is a lot of marketing fluff (my assessment of his quote). Meanwhile, the VCE crowd (if you don't know, VCE stands for VMware, Cisco, and EMC) is beating the drum of revolution, and positioning the 'public cloud' as a consumer tool. It is 'hallucinatory' (a pretty interesting choice of words, IMHO) to think that enterprises who have invested in infrastructure will just throw it all out and dump their applications onto Amazon's cloud offering. To me, the truth of the matter is they're both right.

As I've said before, I think the talk about cloud is just that -- talk. No one implements a cloud. Clouds don't have any structure, any solid foundation, and reliability -- they go where the wind blows them. The metaphor doesn't just limp, it's lame. This concept shouldn't be about specific technologies, to Amazon's point, but it does require some fundamental things to work right, like virtualization (in whatever form it might take). I find it interesting that the VCE crowd points to hardware/software installs to demonstrate that the private cloud does indeed exist. It points out that though their marketing engine is in full swing, they don't understand the fundamental value of the combined technologies. The proof of private cloud isn't in how many UCS servers are deployed or how many licenses of VMware exist, guys, it's how many customers you have who adopted the combined force of your technologies and completely virtualized everything, creating a 100% uptime, flexible, constantly flexing environment. Talk to us about THAT.

To defend the VCE guys, though, they are approaching this "revolution" (another way over-used term) in a sensible way; as is quoted in the article, this is about incremental change. You don't just hear about something like this and throw everything you've built away, turning over application reliability, uptime, and security to an Internet company that can't always keep their own store online. Not if you like keeping your job, anyway.

This is about making network, compute, and storage a utility. Make the technology simple and easy to scale so you can work on the applications and the business metrics. Stop having to worry about how to design a server or your network, or your storage for a new application and just provide it resource units. That's got nothing to do with a cloud, but it has everything to do with building out a great architecture, and until Amazon and the other players can prove they can, over the Internet, provide the same level of security, performance, reliability and uptime as gear in my datacenter, they don't win the battle.

I've been getting push back on the idea that cloud computing has challenges becoming reality.  A lot of people seem to think it's already accomplished.  Private clouds, Amazon, Google, backup in the cloud, it's all happening. 

A thing hit me the other day while I was talking with someone about why Google Apps isn't a bigger hit in the Enterprise space (another topic for another day).  It occurs to me that one of the major reasons we aren't seeing more adoption (in addition to my other theories) is that there aren't many players.  Why aren't there many players?  The same reason a lot of 'good ideas' don't see the light of day: people haven't figured out how to really make money at it yet.

If you want to build these highly robust, highly available, highly flexible infrastructures that people can count on to run parts of their revenue-generating infrastructure (which if you want Enterprise customers you need to have), you don't go down to Best Buy and by some 1TB hard drives and some white box PCs.  You buy Enterprise infrastructure components.  That's not cheap (have you seen VMware license costs?).  This isn't a charity endeavor.  It's got to be profitable. 

Sure, you could try the Google approach with how they've built out their commodity-based infrastructure, but how many people does it then take to manage it?  People are obviously more expensive than technology, and at the scales this is supposed to work at, you need the technology or you need the people.  Either way your profit margins are slim.

This might be the biggest barrier yet.  What do you think?

The hype machine is in full swing regarding cloud based computing, and I'm beginning to think that this juggernaut of marketing and confusion may be the biggest barrier of them all to wide-spread cloud adoption.

I said this a few posts ago, and I've had a lot of conversations about this with various people.  Cloud isn't new.  It's a repackaging of failed or quasi-failed ventures of the past.  Remember how SaaS was going to change the world and do away with the need for IT departments to manage all these complex applications and databases, and we were just going to be able to use a web browser to get at whatever application we needed to use?  I'm sure you're all beacons of productivity and your IT departments have shrunk to one person because of your heavy SaaS adoption, right?

If you'll recall, Web 2.0 (another of those meaningless marketing terms that never should have been printed) was going to change the world with its ability to ubiquitously provide seamless connectivity from any platform to any Web 2.0 'enabled' application (whatever that meant).  I bet you're all just connecting to all your apps from your cell phones and seamlessly using the same interface from desktop to laptop to phone to kiosk to <insert other technology I can't think of right now> and are just so stinking productive, right?

Remember a few years further back how Managed Services were going to bring all of our data centers into these massively efficient multi-tenant datacenters with millions of machines and petabytes of data storage in them, effectively returning all that datacenter space back to the business to put revenue generating bodies in and eliminate IT?  Yeah, never really happened.

The major barrier here for cloud computing is that it isn't new, and people are really starting to catch on to that fact.  Don't get me wrong, the adoption of virtualization technology is a paradigm shifting event for most datacenters.  I'm very pro-virtualization, and think that complete adoption of VMware should be every CIOs goal.  But trying to put a buzz on virtualization of 'private cloud' has gotten old very quickly, almost to the point of being meaningless.  You're not creating a cloud, you're creating a highly dynamic foundation of infrastructure.  Try building a house on a cloud foundation and see how far you get.  

I personally refuse to talk about VMware in the context of a cloud, as I think most people are sick and tired of hearing about it that way. 'Cloud' has become such an over-used term that it has effectively lost any meaning it may have once had.  Of course, I argue it never had any meaning, since anyone and everyone decided to put the term on every piece of technology being sold, regardless of whether it honestly had anything to do with compute workloads that could be automatically moved between data centers based on business criteria or not.  Suddenly, every USB drive has something to do with the cloud.  Every software vendor on the planet has a cloud offering (which just has to be run on a large farm of servers in your datacenter), and before long your cereal box is going to have some magical connection to 'the cloud'.  

At some point one of two things has to happen.  Either the phrase 'cloud computing' must take on meaning, and by meaning, I intend to say that everyone agrees to what it's definition is, or two, if you open  your mouth to talk about it, you're going to be told by your prospect or customer to shut it, because they're sick of being talked to about things that have no real product/solution behind them.  Remember, IT solutions should do one or more of three things: 1) reduce costs, 2) avoid costs, and 3) increase revenues.  If you can't start to show some real dollars and real components of the solution, why are people going to listen to the conversation.  Yes, the concept is cool, it is flashy, it plays well to analysts as 'visionary', but if it can't really be executed on, what's the point?

Video killed the radio star, and hype may kill cloud computing.  We'll see.

"That's not how we do things here......"

Institutionalized thinking is the idea that something can't be done because it has never been done inside of an organization.  In my years involved in selling, I've heard it called 'losing to the status quo'.  I really like that description, because I think it fits what happens whether you're selling a product as a vendor or a project internally to upper management.  You lose to the status quo because most people are highly averse to change.  In my experience, they are exceptionally averse to change that may cause them to get outside their professional comfort zone and push them into a place where they feel their job security (whatever that is) may be threatened.

This is a huge issue for all the vendors pushing the concept of 'cloud' based computing.  We have generations of systems administrators who have no concept, training, or in some cases, no desire to do true capacity engineering and management.  We have IT Managers, Directors, Vice Presidents, and CIOs who came up through the ranks not doing capacity engineering and management.  It will be difficult to get them to see why things should change.  This is a major barrier, because if you think about it, in a 'cloud' world, a large part of system administration is just that -- capacity engineering and management.  It's understanding the concepts of performance models, information management models, and data classification (among other things), and being able to creatively apply strategic planning skills to the proactive management of a highly dynamic and scalable infrastructure.  Compare that to what most system administrators do today, and what a large percentage of today's IT leadership grew up professionally doing.  To put it mildly, they are reactive; this isn't a slight on them whatsoever, it's the hand they've been dealt and most admins I know take great pride in their troubleshooting and problem resolution skills (I know I certainly did).  In today's world, these skills are critical, must be honed, and with the best people, they are perfected over years of practice.  They are very, very good fire fighters, who respond to the problem bubble moving through their infrastructure with great skill and alacrity.  That said, they are not proactive, and they are not strategic in their thinking.  With the 'cloud' we are asking organizations to adopt a strategic view of IT in a traditionally tactical space.  We are asking traditionally tactical thinkers to change their thinking models, to get outside their box.  We are asking them to change the institutionalized thinking that permeates the very pores of their organization, as it were.

Are businesses ready for this?  Yes and no.  I think there are a few companies out there who do truly embrace technical prowess and see ways to make efficient use of IT resources a cost saving advantage.  However, I believe that most organizations are unable or unwilling to tear down the straw man that is IT, the scapegoat of costs and wasted projects, and stop thinking of IT as 'a necessary evil'. 

For a private 'cloud' (errr, fully virtualized infrastructure) to be well orchestrated, many things must play out.  The CFO must be willing to stop thinking in terms of assigning 'project costs' to IT.  The lines of business must be willing to pay their share of resources consumed, and assign those costs to their operational expenses.  The CEO must be willing to give IT a full-share seat at the table as a willing participant in the business.  The end user community must be willing to stop assuming that because you can buy a PC for $300 at your local retail mega-chain that is blazing fast and plays the latest death and dismemberment franchise game, that those technologies and prices are appropriate or applicable in an Enterprise environment.  Users must be willing to discuss requirements, not technologies.  The CIO must be willing to be a part of the business.  Enough already with all the blather about 'IT alignment'.  Stop trying to align to the business and be part of it (yet another post for another day). Oh, and the technology better work.

I think the vendors have to do something here, too.  Get over ourselves.  Get past the hype machine and let's talk brass tacks to these CxOs we do business with.  Stop promising all the joys of motherhood and apple pie and tell these people they need to change.  Get over it and get on with it.  Stop telling them everyone else has to change but them.  Stop promising that technology will deliver them from the pain.  It won't!!!!  We need to provide for our customers, the most important part of our business lives, a path and guidance on how to get from where they are to where they can be, and help them do it in a way that's cost effective and as pain free as we can make it.  Help them work their way through this fog (think Stephen King's The Mist) we've created with the 'cloud' and tell them it's probably going to hurt.  In the short term it might cost some dollars.  In the short term it might cost them some of the people they think are their top performers.  Show them how in the long term, they will be more nimble as an organization and able to reduce time to market on their products, glean more information from their data, and retain their customers more effectively, thereby increasing profit per customer and decreasing customer acquisition costs.  Help them find new people who get it if their current ones resist the change.  And by show them, I don't mean some sort of high level slick 3D PowerPoint slide.  I mean get in the weeds with them.  Understand where they are and what they can salvage from the current role IT plays, and how to move on.  Show them specifics about the technology, how it has to work, and where it is today. 

Less vision, more execution.

You want my data to go where?  How?

I wrote last time about my concern with bandwidth costs as a barrier to adoption of this 'cloud' based computing concept so many vendors are pushing these days, where our data centers no longer have boundaries, and we can dynamically move workloads across the wire to data centers that have spare compute capacity available in them to deal with peak loads.  No longer will we design for peak inside the four walls of our datacenter, and therefore we can deploy far less hardware than the previous generations of datacenter designers, and we can become capacity managers, not system administrators.  To clarify the point, I'm not talking about what Amazon does with S3.  I'm not aware of them pitching (today) S3 as a dynamic workload depot capable of addressing spiking workload needs (I've heard some folks talk about EC2 this way, but I've never seen any Amazon marketing material pushing this idea).  They're a pool of resources available for use in a planned fashion.  You move some data, you move some apps, you run what you need to run, you pull it all off (or keep it there if you need use of it long term).  Takes some bandwidth to make the initial move, but after that, remoting into the environment works well.  The same is true of security. 

Securing an environment of that nature where there is not a great deal of dynamic data mobility in and out of the shared infrastructure is a very important task, but not one that is any more difficult than securing any other outsourced data center.  I don't see security of these 'public clouds' the same way, and here's why.

Security is about control.  It is about limiting risk and exposure to unseen, unfriendly forces that seek to do some form of harm to your information, whether that is steal it, modify it, sell it, whatever.  In virtually every discussion I've had and everything I've read, the ubiquity of the Internet is one of the keystones to making this 'private cloud/public cloud' dynamic resource allocation trick work.  If your first choice provider doesn't have enough capacity available for you, move to your second choice, third, etc., until you find one (or a combination of several perhaps) that has the capacity you need.  If you only had one provider, and you had a great SLA with them to guarantee you a fixed amount of compute, storage, and network resource regardless of what else is going on in their environment, then securing this becomes relatively simple, much like securing a transport into a co-location facility is today (of course, you still have the bandwidth conundrum, but enough about that).  But that isn't the pitch.  The pitch is the 'cloud'  will allow for ubiquitous connectivity to any available 'public cloud' provider, and the Internet is the key to connecting to these providers (by the way when you read this, you must say 'the cloud' like the little martian toys in Disney Pixar's Toy Story say 'the claw', with great reverence and expectation that it will save you from all your datacenter woes).

I don't know about any of you, but when I think about data transport across the Internet, the very last thing I think is 'secure'.  Yes, there are things like SFTP and VPN tunnels, but neither of those scream 'ubiquity of network connection and transport'.  They instead scream 'something to tear up and tear down'.  Of course, you can't SFTP your data across the Internet for purposes of bringing up a virtual machine or series of machines.  How many VPN tunnels do you want to have constantly available for the purposes of transferring workloads around?  It's doable, but not necessarily very easy.  We can encrypt the data, and there are certainly things RSA has been talking about that would make this easier for us to do, but again this must be easy and not cost an arm and a leg to implement if it is going to be an attainable architecture to the mid-market, the place I argue needs this theory to become reality more than any other.

I actually like the idea of encryption done at a virtual host level, so that regardless of what transport mechanism is used and where it goes, the data is unreadable to anyone that might intercept it.  The problem becomes one of key management, as is always the case when talking about data encryption on a large scale.  There is a certain amount of overhead associated with this as well.  We're putting in these multi-core überfast CPUs to run our apps, not deal with encrypting/decrypting the data.  I agree with that, but with vSphere, we're talking about CPU and RAM levels per guest that are crazy, and will only continue to climb.  I don't think we're going to starve for cycles even in fully virtualized environments to encrypt at the rate the CPU space is going.  The other interesting possibility here is something like PowerPath.  I haven't seen if PowerPath/VE will support the encryption capabilities that standard PowerPath is capable of providing, but I've got to think it will at some point (perhaps it does today, I haven't been able to double check this).  Encryption appliances could make a strong push here, but I think that introduces another set of complexity and management challenges. 

Once again the problem is a lot of sizzle without a lot of steak.  We need someone in the vendor world to take the lead here, proclaim that yes, there is an issue that needs resolving, and provide us a way of doing that.  I know they've thought about it, there are way too many smart people inside of Cisco, EMC, VMware, HP, Microsoft, etc., to not have at least some thoughts.  I just don't see them being pitched.  I see way too much of the vapor and not enough substance.  This is something I will be exploring further with a number of folks as I get opportunity, and will share with you what I find as I can.

In my next post, I'm going to endeavor to address the largest issue which will encumber 'cloud' based computing, which is institutionalized thinking.

Thanks for reading.