cloud computing
There are 347 entries for the tag cloud computing
#infosec #adcfw #cloud Alternate title: How to take out an entire PaaS cloud with one vulnerability Apache Killer. Post of Doom. What do these two vulnerabilities have in common? Right, they’re platform-based vulnerabilities. Meaning they are vulnerabilities peculiar to the web or application server platform upon which applications are deployed. Mitigations for such vulnerabilities generally point to changes in configuration of the platform – limit post size, header value sizes, turn off some value in the associated configuration. But they also have something else in common – risk. And not just risk...
It’s about operational efficiency and consistency, emulated in the cloud by an API to create the appearance of a converged platform In most cases, the use of the term “consolidation” implies the aggregation (and subsequently elimination) of like devices. Application delivery consolidation, for example, is used to describe a process of scaling up infrastructure that often occurs during upgrade cycles. Many little boxes are exchanged for a few larger ones as a means to simplify the architecture and reduce the overall costs (hard and soft) associated with delivering applications. Consolidation. But cloud has opened (or should...
#fasterapp #ccevent While web applications aren’t sensitive to jitter, business processes are. One of the benefits of web applications is that they are generally transported via TCP, which is a connection-oriented protocol designed to assure delivery. TCP has a variety of native mechanisms through which delivery issues can be addressed – from window sizes to selective acks to idle time specification to ramp up parameters. All these technical knobs and buttons serve as a way for operators and administrators to tweak the protocol, often at run time, to ensure the exchange of requests and responses upon...
In a service-focused, platform-based infrastructure offering, the form factor is irrelevant. One of the most difficult aspects of cloud, virtualization, and the rise of platform-oriented data centers is the separation of services from their implementation. This is SOA applied to infrastructure, and it is for some reason a foreign concept to most operational IT folks – with the sometimes exception of developers. But sometimes even developers are challenged by the notion, especially when it begins to include network hardware. ARE YOU SERIOUSLY? The headline read: WAN Optimization Hardware versus WAN Optimization Services. I read...
There’s a significant difference between a platform and a product, especially when it comes to architecting a dynamic data center In the course of nearly a thousand blogs it’s quite likely you’ve seen BIG-IP referenced as a platform, and almost never as a product. There’s a reason for that, and it’s one that is increasingly becoming important as organizations begin to look at some major transformations to their data center architecture. It’s not that BIG-IP isn’t a product. Ultimately, of course, it is in the traditional sense of the word. But it’s also a...
Arises the fourth data center architecture tier – application delivery. The battle of efficiency versus economy continues in the division of the cloud market between public and private environments. Public cloud proponents argue, correctly, that private cloud simply does not offer the same economy of scale as that of public cloud. But that only matters if economy of scale is more important than the efficiency gains realized through any kind of cloud computing implementation. Cloud for most organizations has been recognized as transformational not necessarily in where the data center lives, but rather...
Hint: The answer lies in being aware of the entire application context and a little pre-planning Thanks to the maturity of load balancing services and technology, dynamically scaling applications in pre-cloud and cloud computing environments is a fairly simple task. But doing it right – in a way that maintains performance while maximizing resources and minimizing costs well, that is not so trivial a task unless you have the right tools. SCALABILITY RECAP Before we can explain how to do it right, we have to dig into the basics of how scalability (and...
Cloud needs to become a platform, and that means its comprising infrastructure must also embrace the platform paradigm. There’s been a spate of articles, blogs, and mentions of OpenFlow in the past few months. IBM was the latest entry into the OpenFlow game, releasing an enabling RackSwitch G8264, an update of a 64-port, 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch IBM put out a year ago. Interest in the specification appears to be growing and not just because it’s got the prefix-du-jour as part of its name, implying everything to everyone – free, extensible, interoperable, etc… While all those modifiers are...
Let’s ignore the business for a moment. Why should IT be excited about IT as a Service? The focus of IT as a Service (ITaaS) is generally on the value it would provide with respect to self-service provisioning for both business and IT customers alike. But let’s ignore the business for a moment, shall we? Let’s get downright selfish and consider what benefits there are to IT in implementing IT as a Service. The big exciting thing about IT as a Service for IT folks is how it enables less-disruptive change. Less-disruptive means less work, less...
Examining architectures on which hybrid clouds are based… IT professionals, in general, appear to consider themselves well along the path toward IT as a Service with a significant plurality of them engaged in implementing many of the building blocks necessary to support the effort. IaaS, PaaS, and hybrid cloud computing models are essential for IT to realize an environment in which (manageable) IT as a Service can become reality. That IT professionals –65% of them to be exact – note their organization is in-progress or already completed with a hybrid cloud implementation is telling, as it indicates a...
Examining architectures on which hybrid clouds are based… IT professionals, in general, appear to consider themselves well along the path toward IT as a Service with a significant plurality of them engaged in implementing many of the building blocks necessary to support the effort. IaaS, PaaS, and hybrid cloud computing models are essential for IT to realize an environment in which (manageable) IT as a Service can become reality. That IT professionals –65% of them to be exact – note their organization is in-progress or already completed with a hybrid cloud implementation is telling, as...
Application delivery infrastructure can be a valuable partner in architecting solutions …. AJAX and JSON have changed the way in which we architect applications, especially with respect to their ascendancy to rule the realm of integration, i.e. the API. Policies are generally focused on the URI, which has effectively become the exposed interface to any given application function. It’s REST-ful, it’s service-oriented, and it works well. Because we’ve taken to leveraging the URI as a basic building block, as the entry-point into an application, it affords the opportunity to optimize architectures and make more efficient the...
When abstraction becomes a distraction, cloud computing becomes a realm of architectural limbo… Cloud. It sounds so grand in NIST’s description; full of promises with respect to the ability to provision and manage resources without having to muck around in the trenches. Compute! Network! Storage! Cheap, efficiently provisioned resources in minutes, not months! The siren call of cloud continues to lure many a curious folk, only to trap it in what is rapidly becoming architectural limbo. Differing slightly from the original meaning, in colloquial speech, "limbo" is any status where a person...
The secret to live migration isn’t just a fat, fast pipe – it’s a dynamic infrastructure Very early on in the cloud computing hype cycle we posited about different use cases for the “cloud”. One that remains intriguing and increasingly possible thanks to a better understanding of the challenges associated with the process is cloud bursting. The first time I wrote about cloud bursting and detailed the high-level process the inevitable question that remained was, “Well, sure, but how did the application get into the cloud in the first place?” Back then there was no...
#devops #cloud If your goal is IT as a Service, then at some point you have to actually service-enable the policies that govern IT infrastructure.
My eldest shared the story of “The Turk” recently and it was a fine example of how appearances can be deceiving – and of the power of abstraction. If you aren’t familiar with the story, let me briefly share before we dive in to how this relates to infrastructure and, specifically, IT as a Service.
The Turk, the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century.
The...
People vote their resentment, not their appreciation. The average man does not vote for anything, but against something. --William Bennet Munro I was thinking Monday morning about doing some development of features I wanted to add to the web application Don and I use to manage our gaming groups. Thinking about that got me thinking about how Facebook implements the “auto-search and link” feature for tagging in its interface. I wondered, briefly, whether anyone but a developer could really appreciate the intricacies of what’s going on under the covers to make that work. There’s a number of functions...
#v11 A robust and diverse set of management tools enabling a variety of infrastructure integration options is essential to architecting a dynamic data center In the continuing quest for a more dynamic data center, infrastructure integration must necessarily take center stage. While virtualization has enabled fluidity of server infrastructure, it has not done so for the network and may never be wholly suitable for the task for a variety of reasons. But the agility resulting from virtualization, the ability to manage resources on-demand, must be incorporated into the network infrastructure in order to scale...
Ever hear the saying, “Closing the barn door after the horse has already left?” It’s not a good thing, and Dome9 aims to make sure you close the (cloud) barn door before the horse bolts – not after. An interesting* side-effect of deploying applications in public cloud computing environments is the fact that access to management functions is often accessible, necessarily, to any one. We rely instead on credentials and API keys to prevent unauthorized access and, given that we really can’t do much more than that based on the external constraints placed upon us...
Examining responsibility for auto-scalability in cloud computing environments. [ If you’re coming in late, you may want to also read previous entries on the network, application, and management framework ] Today, the argument regarding responsibility for auto-scaling in cloud computing as well as highly virtualized environments remains mostly constrained to e-mail conversations and gatherings at espresso machines. It’s an argument that needs more industry and “technology consumer” awareness, because it’s ultimately one of the underpinnings of a dynamic data center architecture; it’s the piece of the puzzle that makes or breaks one of...
#v11 Logging, necessary for a variety of reasons in the data center, can consume resources and introduce undesirable latency. Avoiding that latency improves application performance and in some cases, the quality of logs. Logging. It’s mandatory and, in some industries, critical. Logs are used not only for auditing and tracking but for debugging, for data mining and analysis, and in some tiers of the architecture, replication and synchronization of data. Logs are a critical component across the data center, of that there is no doubt. That’s why it’s particularly frustrating to know that the...
Examining responsibility for auto-scalability in cloud computing environments.
[ If you’re coming in late, you may want to also read previous entries on the network and the application ]
Today, the argument regarding responsibility for auto-scaling in cloud computing as well as highly virtualized environments remains mostly constrained to e-mail conversations and gatherings at espresso machines. It’s an argument that needs more industry and “technology consumer” awareness, because it’s ultimately one of the underpinnings of a dynamic data center architecture; it’s the piece of the puzzle that makes or breaks one of the highest value propositions of cloud computing...
Examining responsibility for auto-scalability in cloud computing environments.
[ If you’re coming in late, you may want to also read the previous entry on application-driven scalability ]
Today, the argument regarding responsibility for auto-scaling in cloud computing as well as highly virtualized environments remains mostly constrained to e-mail conversations and gatherings at espresso machines. It’s an argument that needs more industry and “technology consumer” awareness, because it’s ultimately one of the underpinnings of a dynamic data center architecture; it’s the piece of the puzzle that makes or breaks one of the highest value propositions of cloud computing and virtualization:...
Examining responsibility for auto-scalability in cloud computing environments.
Today, the argument regarding responsibility for auto-scaling in cloud computing as well as highly virtualized environments remains mostly constrained to e-mail conversations and gatherings at espresso machines. It’s an argument that needs more industry and “technology consumer” awareness, because it’s ultimately one of the underpinnings of a dynamic data center architecture; it’s the piece of the puzzle that makes or breaks one of the highest value propositions of cloud computing and virtualization: scalability.
The question appears to be a simple one: what component is responsible not only for recognizing the need...
When you get down to the architectures involving cloud – whether on or off-premise or hybrid – it’s really all about integrating infrastructure. It remains to be seen if network and operations are better off never using the word “integration” given the nearly violent negative reasons one sees in the development and architecture sides of IT to the word. Integration, even after the introduction of SOA and the nearly messianic view of the role of the enterprise service bus (ESB) in saving us from the horrors of traditional enterprise application integration (EAI), remains problematic for IT. Standards weren’t,...
Cloud-based services for all things digital will either drive – or die by – bandwidth
Consumers, by definition, consume. In the realm of the Internet, they consume far more than they produce. Or so it’s been in the past. Broadband connectivity across all providers have long offered asymmetric network feeds because it mirrored reality: an HTTP request is significantly smaller than its corresponding response, and in general web-based activity is heavily biased toward fat download and thin upload speeds. The term “broadband” is really a misnomer, as it focuses only on the download speed and ignores the very narrowband of...
That’s Cloud “Network of Women” and it’s a new opportunity to collaborate on cloud and emerging technologies Many, many years Fritz Nelson (then Vice President, Group Publisher for the Network Computing Enterprise Architecture) answered a question during an interview on the intersection of women and technology – particularly the lack of the former in the latter – essentially saying it was incumbent upon those women who were active and had a voice to use it in ways that encouraged other women to join, participate, and take up the reins of leadership when possible within the world of technology. ...
#infosec #infra2 If you take one thing away from the ability to programmatically control infrastructure components take this: it’s imperative to maintaining a positive security posture You’ve heard it before, I’m sure. The biggest threat to organizational security is your own employees. Most of the time we associate that with end-users who may with purposeful intent to do harm carry corporate information offsite but just as frequently we cite employees who intended no harm – they simply wanted to work from home and then Murphy’s Law took over, resulting in the inadvertent loss of that sensitive...
VM interoperability promotes inter-environment portability about as well as a wig would fool anyone into believing these two girls are identical twins. That level of interoperability is like beauty – it’s only skin deep. Image by Darren Kelly via Flickr. Connect with Lori: Connect with F5: ...
The quest for truly stateful failover continues… Lightning was the latest cause of an outage at Amazon, this time in its European zones. Lightning, like tornadoes, volcanoes, and hurricanes are often categorized as “Acts of God” and therefore beyond the sphere of control of, well, anyone other than God. Outages or damages caused by such are rarely reimbursable and it’s very hard to blame an organization for not having a “plan” to react to the loss of both primary and secondary power supplies due to intense lightning strikes. The odds of a lightning strike are pretty high in the...
The University of Washington adds a cloud computing certificate program to its curriculum It’s not unusual to find cloud computing in a college environment. My oldest son was writing papers on cloud computing years ago in college, before “cloud” was a marketing term thrown about by any and everyone pushing solutions and products hosted on the Internet. But what isn’t often seen is a focus on cloud computing on its own; as its own “area of study” within the larger context of computer science. That could be because when you get down to it, cloud...
Making the case for a stateless infrastructure model. cloud computing appears to have hit a plateau with respect to infrastructure services. We simply aren’t seeing even a slow and steady offering by providers of the infrastructure services needed to deploy mature enterprise-class applications. An easy answer as to why this is the case can be found in the fact that many infrastructure services while themselves commoditized are not standardized. That is, while the services are common to just about every data center infrastructure the configuration, policies and APIs are not. But this is somewhat analogous to applications,...
When there’s a problem with a virtual network appliance installed in “the cloud”, who do you call first? An interesting thing happened on the way to troubleshoot a problem with a cloud-deployed application – no one wanted to take up the mantle of front line support. With all the moving parts involved, it’s easy to see why. The problem could be with any number of layers in the deployment: operating system, web server, hypervisor or the nebulous “cloud” itself. With no way to know where it is – the cloud has limited visibility, after all – where do...
#v11 #iApp #devops Bring dev and ops closer together to enable IT as a Service and repeatable, consistent application deployments. The overriding theme of BIG-IP v11 is its focus on applications. From security to availability to management to resiliency, this release is focused on applications. Its revolutionary approach to application services offer immediate and future operational benefits by taking another step toward a dynamic data center. iApp is a feature name for what are fundamentally programmable application templates. These templates make simple user interfaces for complex system configurations. The minimal UI requirements are defined from the...
#v11 #vcmp #scaleN #iApp It’s time to bring the benefits of server virtualization, rapid provisioning and efficient, flexible scalability models to the network. Many of you know I’m a developer by trade and gained my networking stripes after joining Network Computing Magazine around the turn of the century. I focused heavily on application-centric solutions (sometimes much to my chagrin; consider evaluating ERP solutions for a moment and I’m sure you’ll understand why) but I was also tasked with reviewing networking solutions. In particular, the realm of load balancing and application delivery fell squarely to me for...
We need to be careful that we do not repeat the era of “HTML programmers” with “cloud programmers”.
If you’re old enough you might remember a time when your dad or brother worked on the family car themselves. They changed the oil, bled the brakes, changed the fluids and even replaced head gaskets when necessary. They’d tear apart the engine if need be to repair it; no mechanic necessary. But cars have become highly dependent on technology and today it’s hard to find anyone who hasn’t been specifically trained that works on their own car. Sure, an oil change or...
#IPv6 Integration with partners, suppliers and cloud providers will make migration to IPv6 even more challenging than we might think… My father was in the construction business most of the time I was growing up. He used to joke with us when we were small that there was a single nail in every house that – if removed – would bring down the entire building. Now that’s not true in construction, of course, but when the analogy is applied to IPv6 it may be more true than we’d like to think, especially when that nail is named...
We need to start focusing on improving the application deployment processes that all too often are the bulk of time spent trying to get an application out the door. The application deployment process is broken. Oh, I know it looks like it’s actually improving, but it’s not. Virtualization came along and took the low hanging fruit off the application deployment tree and paid no never mind to those still waiting in the upper branches. While applications are easy to provision today thanks to the wonders of virtualization, the rest of the infrastructure still is...
It’s kind of like thinking globally but acting locally… While I rail against the use of the too vague and cringe-inducing descriptor “workload” with respect to scalability and cloud computing , it is perhaps at least bringing to the fore an important distinction that needs to be made: that of the impact of different compute resource utilization patterns on scalability. What categorizing workloads has done is to separate “types” of processing and resource needs: some applications require more I/O, some less. Others are CPU hogs while others chew up memory at an alarming rate....
The former is easy. The latter? Not so much. In the many, many – really, many – posts I’ve penned regarding cloud computing , and in particular the notion of Intercloud, I’ve struggled to come up with a way to simply articulate the problem inherent in current migratory and, for that matter, interoperability models. Recently I found the word I had long been groping for: architecture. Efforts from various working groups, standards bodies and even individual vendors still remain focused on an application; a packaged up application with a sprinkling of meta-data designed to make a...
The dynamic data center of the future, enabled by IT as a Service, is stateless. One of the core concepts associated with SOA – and one that failed to really take hold, unfortunately – was the ability to bind, i.e. invoke, a service at run-time. WSDL was designed to loosely couple services to clients, whether they were systems, applications or users, in a way that was dynamic. The information contained in the WSDL provided everything necessary to interface with a service on-demand without requiring hard-coded integration techniques used in the past. The theory was you’d find an appropriate...
Driving a car in a circle, even at high speed, may sound easy but it’s not a one-man job: it takes a team with visibility to avoid accidents and enable a successful race. Optimization and visibility, on the surface, don’t seem to have much in common. One is about making something more efficient – usually faster – and the other is about, well, being able to see something. It’s the difference between driving in a race and watching a race. But if you’ve ever looked into racing – high speed, dangerous racing like NASCAR ...
The choice of load balancing algorithms can directly impact – for good or ill – the performance, behavior and capacity of applications. Beware making incompatible choices in architecture and algorithms. One of the most persistent issues encountered when deploying applications in scalable architectures involves sessions and the need for persistence-based (a.k.a. sticky) load balancing services to maintain state for the duration of an end-user’s session. It is common enough that even the rudimentary load balancing services offered by cloud computing providers such as Amazon include the option to enable persistence-based load balancing. While...
Turns out that ‘unassailable’ economic argument for public cloud computing is very assailable The economic arguments are unassailable. Economies of scale make cloud computing more cost effective than running their own servers for all but the largest organisations. Cloud computing is also a perfect fit for the smart mobile devices that are eating into PC and laptop market. -- Tim Anderson, “Let the Cloud Developer Wars Begin” Ah, Tim. The arguments are not unassailable and, in fact, it appears you might be guilty of having tunnel vision – seeing only the list price and forgetting...
Mobile and tablet platforms are hyping HTML5, but many applications are bound to a traditional client-server model, making API performance a top concern for organizations. I recently received an e-mail from Strangeloop Networks with a subject of: “The quest for the holy grail of Web speed: 2-second page load times". Being focused on optimizing the user-interface, they appropriately quoted usability expert Jakob Nielsen, but also included some interesting statistics: 57% of site visitors will bounce after waiting 3 seconds or less for a page to load. Aberdeen Group surveyed...
Heterogeneous storage systems remain one of the more difficult data center components to virtualize. F5 ARX and ARX Cloud Extender continue to broaden support for more systems, making it easier to normalize data storage – even if the data and provider interfaces aren’t. This week Don joins us to share the latest news from the F5 Data Solutions Group. The advent of directory virtualization opened up the ability to intelligently tier storage without a lot of manual intervention. The use of the strategic point of control between consumers of file services and the providers...
Tablets, smart phones and emerging mobile devices with instant access to applications are impacting the way in which IT provides services and developers architect applications.
When pundits talk about the consumerization of IT they’re mostly referring to the ability of IT consumers, i.e. application developers and business stakeholders, to provision and manage, on demand, certain IT resources, most usually that of applications. There’s no doubt that the task of provisioning the hardware and software resources for an application is not only tedious but time-consuming and that it can easily – using virtualization and cloud computing technologies – be enabled...
#devops #infosec Shared resources do benefit organizations, there’s no arguing about that. But when resources forming the basis of identity are trusted and then inadvertently shared, you may find your (IP) identity misappropriated. In the past two years there have been interesting stories floating around about what happens when IP addresses are “shared” in public cloud computing environments. You’ve no doubt heard how someone spun up an instance and was immediately blacklisted by some other website because the last application assigned that IP address was naughty on the Internets. Organizations have struggled with such issues...
#vcmp It’s great to be fast and furious, but if your infrastructure handles like a boat you won’t be able to take advantage of its performance We recently joined the land of modernity when I had a wild urge to acquire a Wii. Any game system is pretty useless without games, so we got some of those too. One of them, of course, had to be Transfomers: The Game because, well, our three-year old thinks he is a Transformer and I was curious as to how well the game recreated the transformation process. ...
A recent power outage in the middle of the night reveals automation without context can be expensive for aquariums – and data centers. You may recall from several posts (Cloud Chemistry 101, The Zero-Product Property of IT and The Number of the Counting Shall be Three (Rules of Thumb for Application Availability) that one of my hobbies is “reefing.” No, it’s not that kind of reefer madness, it’s the other kind – the kind associated with aquariums and corals and all manner of strange looking ocean-living fish. I only recently re-engaged after years of avoiding the...
Though responsibility for taking precautions may be shared, the risk of an incident is always yours and yours alone, no matter who is driving the car. Cloud and security still take top billing in many discussions today, perhaps because of the nebulous nature of the topic. If we break down security concerns in a public cloud computing environment we can separate them into three distinct categories of risk – the infrastructure, the application, and the management framework. Regardless of the model – IaaS, PaaS, SaaS – these categories exist as discrete entities, the differences being only in...
The economy of scale realized in enterprise cloud computing deployments is as much (if not more) about process as it is products. HP Cloud Maps simplify the former by automating the latter. When the notion of “private” or “enterprise” cloud computing first appeared, it was dismissed as being a non-viable model due to the fact that the economy of scale necessary to realize the true benefits were simply not present in the data center. What was ignored in those arguments was that the economy of scale desired by enterprises large and small was not necessarily...
#vcmp #interop Whether it’s a need to support cloud computing or manage the myriad requirements from internal customers, the new network must go beyond multi-tenancy There has been a plethora of content lately discussing the need for virtual network appliances. It’s only natural, after all, that once we managed to work out all the quirks and flaws of server and storage virtualization that we’d move on to the next layer of the data center, the network. What’s being discovered as enterprises build out their own cloud computing or IT as a Service environments is that multi-tenancy...
An interesting look at how automation combined with cloud computing resource brokering could go very, very wrong Automation is not a new concept. People – regular old people – have been using it for years for tasks that require specific timing or reaction to other actions, like bidding on eBay or other auction-focused sites. The general concept is pretty simple as it’s just an event-driven system that automatically performs an action when the specified trigger occurs. Usually, at least when money is concerned, there’s an upper limit. The action can’t be completed if the resulting...
It’s not just cloud computing and virtualization that introduce volatility into the data center. The natural state of cloud computing is one of constant change. Applications and services and users interacting in ways that constantly change the landscape of the data center. But it isn’t just the volatility of cloud computing and virtualization that makes traditional data center architectures brittle and more apt to fail. It’s the constant barrage of users, devices, and locations against a static data center configuration that makes a traditional architecture fragile and inefficient. Pressures are mounting...
The recent Amazon EC2 outage has been awarded far more importance than is likely due when compared to its impact on the Internet*. * Based on data from ec2disabled and Netcraft. Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,cloud computing,EC2,Amazon,availability,reliabilty,1024 Words
While everyone was focused on cloud, JSON has slowly but surely been taking over the application development world
It looks like the debate between XML and JSON may be coming to a close with JSON poised to take the title of preferred format for web applications.
If you don’t consider these statistics to be impressive, consider that ProgrammableWeb indicated that its “own statistics on ProgrammableWeb show a significant increase in the number of JSON APIs over 2009/2010. During 2009 there were only 191 JSON APIs registered. So far in 2010 [August] there are already 223!”
Today there are 1262 JSON APIs registered,...
Active Endpoints introduces Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com and reminds us that commoditization most benefits providers, customization most benefits customers. In the context of cloud computing we often mention the driving force behind many of its financial benefits is commoditization. Commoditization drives standardization which reduces costs of the product itself as well as the management systems needed to interact with them. Commoditization drives the cost of manufacturing, of creating and/or providing a good or service down for the provider. It is usually the case, expected in fact, that those savings are passed on to the consumer in the...
Like beauty, sometimes it is all about the view from the eye of the beholder. Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,cloud computing,1024 Words
And it all begins with the business. Last week was one of those weeks where my to-do list was growing twice as fast as I was checking things off. And when that happens you know some things end up deprioritized and just don’t get the attention you know they deserve. Such was the case with a question from eBizQ regarding the relationship between strategy and technology: Does strategy always trump technology? As Joe Shepley wonders in this interesting post, Strategy Trumps Technology Every Time, could you...
If by “caffeine and sugar” you mean one way operations can optimize application and application delivery network performance. The benefits of a successfully executed centralized infrastructure management strategy are well-understood. We all know that being able to monitor and subsequently manage the various configurations, options and dependencies in a data center is critical to an agile operational posture capable of reacting and adjusting policies and processes on-demand. But as cloud computing and virtualization continue to emerge as the preferred architectures of choice, unified management has become problematic. As organizations deploy a mixture of virtual and...
Application performance is more and more about dependencies in the delivery chain, not the application itself.
When an article regarding cloud performance and an associated average $1M in loss as a result appeared it caused an uproar in the Twittersphere, at least amongst the Clouderati.There was much gnashing of teeth and pounding of fists that ultimately led to questioning the methodology and ultimately the veracity of the report.
If you were worried about the performance of cloud-based applications, here's fair warning: You'll probably be even more so when you consider findings from a recent survey conducted by Vanson Bourne...
What distinguishes these three models of cloud computing are the business and operational goals for which they were implemented and the benefits derived. A brief Twitter conversation recently asked the question how one would distinguish between the three emerging dominant cloud computing models: public, private and enterprise. Interestingly, if you were to take a "public cloud" implementation and transplant it into the enterprise, it is unlikely to deliver the value IT was expecting. Conversely, transplanting a private cloud implementation to a public provider would also similarly fail to achieve the desired goals. When you dig...
When your data center is constantly under pressure to address operational risks, try leveraging some ancient wisdom from King Leonidas and William Wallace
The Battle of Thermopylae is most often remembered for the valiant stand of the "300". In case you aren't familiar, three hundred Spartans (and a supporting cast of city-state nations) held off the much more impressively numbered armies of Prince Xerces for a total of seven days before being annihilated.
A Greek force of approximately 7,000 men marched north to block the pass in the summer of 480 BC. The Persian army, alleged by the ancient...
But rather it is the ability to compensate for it. Redundancy. It’s standard operating procedure for everyone who deals with technology – even consumers. Within IT we’re a bit more stringent about how much redundancy we build into the data center. Before commoditization and the advent of cheap computing (a.k.a. cloud computing ) we worried about redundant power supplies and network connections. We leveraged fail-over as a means to ensure that when the inevitable happened, a second, minty-fresh server/application/switch was ready to take over without dropping so much as a single packet on the data...
Aristotle’s famous four questions can be applied to infrastructure integration as a means to determine whether an API or SDK is the right tool for the job. While bouncing back and forth last week with Patrick Debois on the role of devops , vendors and infrastructure integration he left a comment on the blog post that started the discussion that included the following assertion: On a side note: vendors should treat their API's as first class citizens. Too often (and i personally feel iControl too) API's expose a thinking model based upon the...
Internal processes may be the best answer to mitigating risks associated with third-party virtual appliances The enterprise data center is, in most cases, what aquarists would call a “closed system.” This is to say that from a systems and application perspective, the enterprise has control over what goes in. The problem is, of course, those pesky parasites (viruses, trojans, worms) that find their way in. This is the result of allowing external data or systems to enter the data center without proper security measures. For web applications we talk about things like data scrubbing and web...
The “what” is a dynamic data center infrastructure. Cloud is “how” to get there. Admist the chatter and sound bites on Twitter coming from Cloud Connect this week are some interesting side conversations revolving around architecture and how cloud may or may not change the premises upon which those architectures are based. Architecture is, in the technology demesne, the “fundamental underlying design of computer hardware, software, or both.” A data center architecture is the design of a data center, the underlying fundamental way in which compute, network and storage resources are provisioned and ultimately delivered to support...
You’re still asking the wrong questions about cloud computing .
The city of Santa Clara is covered by a cloud this week, but not the kind of clouds most folks associate with California. CloudConnect 2011 is gearing up for a week of sessions and workshops, thought-provoking panels and general conversation on a topic that continues to be top of mind for everyone from press to analysts to IT professionals.
“Everyone” is going to be there. Well, everyone but me.
Now you might think that’s odd, that a co-chair of a track at a conference wouldn’t attend the show. My cohort...
A reference architecture is a solution with the “some assembly required” instructions missing.
As a developer and later an enterprise architect, I evaluated and leveraged untold number of “reference architectures.” Reference architectures, in and of themselves, are a valuable resource for organizations as they provide a foundational framework around which a concrete architecture can be derived and ultimately deployed.
As data center architecture becomes more complex, employing emerging technologies like cloud computing and virtualization, this process becomes fraught with difficulty. The sheer number of moving parts and building blocks upon which such a framework must be laid is...
We need to remember that operations isn’t just about deploying applications, it’s about deploying applications within a much larger, interdependent ecosystem.
One of the key focuses of devops – that hardy movement that seeks to bridge the gap between development and operations – is on deployment. Repeatable deployment of applications, in particular, as a means to reduce the time and effort that goes into the deployment of applications into a production environment.
But the focus is primarily on the automation of application deployment; on repeatable configuration of application infrastructure such that it reduces time, effort, and human error. Consider a...
A: They’re both more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. An almost irrefutable fact of application design today is the need for a database, or at a minimum a data store – i.e. a place to store the data generated and manipulated by the application. A second reality is that despite the existence of database access “standards”, no two database solutions support exactly the same syntax and protocols. Connectivity standards like JDBC and ODBC exist, yes, but like SQL they are variable, resulting in just slightly different enough implementations to effectively cause...
Recognizing the relationship between and subsequently addressing the three core operational risks in the data center will result in a stronger operational posture.
Risk is not a synonym for lack of security. Neither is managing risk a euphemism for information security. Risk – especially operational risk – compromises a lot more than just security.
In operational terms, the chance of loss is not just about data/information, but of availability. Of performance. Of customer perception. Of critical business functions. Of productivity. Operational risk is not just about security, it’s about the potential damage incurred by a loss of availability or performance...
Do you really need a firewall to secure web and application services? Some organizations would say no based on their experiences while others are sure to quail at the very thought of such an unnatural suggestion.
Firewalls are, in most organizations, the first line of defense for web and application services. This is true whether those services are offered to the public or only to off-site employees via secure remote access. The firewall is, and has been, the primary foundation around which most network security architectures are built.
We’ve spent years designing highly-available, redundant architectures that include the firewall....
The definition of “broken” in IT is a lot more variable than in the real world. Sometimes you should follow the strategy not taken.
Don and I maintain a number of servers on which we run various web sites for fun.
Early on we determined we really did need a firewall both because we wanted to better control our young children’s access to the Internet and to prevent unwanted visitors. We happened to have one land in our laps. For the past – well, many years now - it’s been running with nary a glitch to trip us up. In other...
Database as a service is part of an emerging model that should be evaluated as an architecture, not based on where it might be deployed These days everything is being delivered “as a Service”. Compute, storage, platforms, IT, databases. The concept, of course, is sound and it is generally speaking a good one. If you’re going to offer an environment in which applications can be deployed, you’d best offer the services appropriate to the deployment and delivery of that application. And that includes data services; some kind of database. ...
Public cloud computing is about capacity and scale on-demand, private cloud computing however, is not. Legos. Nearly every child has them, and nearly every parent knows that giving a child a Lego “set” is going to end the same way: the set will be put together according to instructions exactly once (usually by the parent) and then the blocks will be incorporated into the large collection of other Lego sets to become part of something completely different. This is a process we actually encourage as...
Cloud is about achieving a steady state where dynamism is the norm but actions and reactions are in perfect balance. It’s called “dynamic equilibrium” and you’ll need to pass Cloud Chemistry 101 to get there. When you were a kid you might have had a goldfish. It lived in a bowl of water and you fed it and if you were lucky it lived for quite a while. You certainly didn’t concern yourself with things like water quality (unless the water started turning green, of course) or pH or alkalinity or gas exchange rates. Circulation...
Cloning. Boomeranging. Trojan clouds. Start up CloudPassage takes aim at emerging attack surfaces but it’s still more about process than it is product.
Before we go one paragraph further let’s start out by setting something straight: this is not a “cloud is insecure” or “cloud security – oh noes!” post.
Cloud is involved, yes, but it’s not necessarily the source of the problem - that would be virtualization and processes (or a lack thereof). Emerging attack methods and botnet propagation techniques can just as easily be problematic for a virtualization-based private cloud as they are for public cloud. That’s because the...
Both are taken for granted but provide vital services without which you and your digital presence would be lost. In the case of DNS, that should be taken literally. Mom. She’s always there, isn’t she? She kissed away your bumps and bruises. You treated her like Google before you had access to the web and, like Google, she came through every time you needed to write a report on butterflies or beetles or the pyramids at Giza. You asked her questions, she always had an answer. You didn’t spend as much...
Like Subway, too often we fail to recognize that ingredients is only half a successful recipe. Process is the other half. The response from sufferer’s of Celiac Disease (and similar conditions) to Subway’s announcement it was trying out a new, gluten-free version of some of its sandwiches was heavily weighted toward excitement. One of the most frustrating effects of suffering from Celiac’s is, of course, a lack of fast and tasty options for mealtime. We simply can’t run out to Subway or any other traditional “fast food” restaurant for a bite because, well, most of...
Network and applications. Operations and developers. IT and the business. These relationships are technical, personal, and organizational and all require each other to flourish. If you ask someone to describe the kinds of animals that are in the ocean they probably think of odd invertebrates like jellyfish and octopuses and of course the colorful, strange looking fish. They might also mention the corals or in particular the coral reefs – those long stretches of undersea “gardens” in which an exotic array of animals (or are they plants?) make their homes....
Focusing on form factor over function is as shallow and misguided as focusing on beauty over brains.
The saying goes that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I suppose then that it only makes sense that if the only tool you have for dealing with the rapid dynamism of today’s architectural models is virtualization that everything looks like a virtual image. Virtualization is but one way of implementing a dynamic infrastructure capable of the rapid provisioning and configuration gyrations needed to address the fluidity of the “perimeter” of the network today.
Dynamic is not...
You can put into place technology to mitigate and defend against the effects, but you can’t stop the attack from happening
In the wake of attacks that disrupted service to many popular sites in December the question on many folks’ minds was: how do you prevent such an attack?
My answer to that question was – and continues to be – you can’t. You also can’t prevent an SQLi attack, or an XSS-based attack, or a DDoS directed at your DNS infrastructure. You cannot prevent an attack any more than you can prevent a burglar from targeting your house. You can make...
Sometimes it’s not about how many resources you have but how you use them The premise upon which scalability through cloud computing and highly virtualized architectures is built is the rapid provisioning of additional resources as a means to scale out to meet demand. That premise is a sound one and one that is a successful tactic in implementing a scalability strategy. But it’s not the only tactic that can be employed as a means to achieve scalability and it’s certainly not the most efficient means by which demand can be met. ...
The right infrastructure will eventually enable providers to suggest the right services for each customer based on real needs. When I was in high school I had a job at a fast food restaurant, as many teenagers often do. One of the first things I was taught was “suggestive selling”. That’s the annoying habit of asking every customer if they’d like an additional item with their meal. Like fries, or a hot apple pie. The reason behind the requirement that employees “suggest” additional items is that studies showed a significant number of customers...
Options begin to emerge to address a real management issue with virtualized workloads in public cloud computing .
Anyone familiar with enterprise-class infrastructure and servers knows that lights-out management is a must-have; not just in the event of a failure but also in the face of any event that compromises the ability of an admin or operator from accessing the machine. Lights-out management was early on a “nice to have” that evolved steadily into a “must have” feature not just for servers but for network and infrastructure devices, as well. This was particularly important as we saw the impact...
Convergence, consolidation, and common-sense. When WAN optimization was getting its legs under it as a niche in the broader networking industry it got a little boost from the fact that remote/branch office connectivity was the big focus of data centers and C-level execs in the enterprise. Latency and congested WAN links between corporate data centers and remote offices around the globe were the source of lost productivity. The obvious solution – get thee a fatter pipe – was at the time far too expensive a proposition and, in some cases, not a feasible option. We’d had...
Bridging the gap between data access and cloud storage to enable a critical storage strategy: tiering.
There’s a disconnect between the way in which we access files and the way in which cloud storage providers are offering us access to files stored “in the cloud”. We use well-established file system access methods – CIFS, SMB, NFS – while they provide access via web-based standards, a la HTTP, SOAP, etc…
That means it is difficult to actually leverage cloud storage services directly. There’s a gap between implementations that needs to be addressed if we’re going to leverage cloud storage in...
It’s time to stop talking about imaginary trolls under the cloud bridge and start talking about the real security challenges that exist in cloud computing . I’ve been watching with interest a Twitter stream of information coming out of the Gartner Data Center conference this week related to security. There have been many interesting tidbits that, as expected, are primarily focused on cloud computing and virtualization. That’s no surprise as both are top of mind for IT practitioners, C-level execs, and the market in general. Another unsurprise would...
The debate between private and public cloud is ridiculous and we shouldn’t even be having it in the first place. There’s a growing sector of the “cloud” market that is mobilizing to “discredit” private cloud. That ulterior motives exist behind this effort is certain (as followers of the movement would similarly claim regarding those who continue to support the private cloud) and these will certainly vary based on whom may be leading the charge at any given moment. Reality is, however, that enterprises are going to build “cloud-like” architectural models whether the movement...
It is the database tier and its unique characteristics that ultimate determine where an application will be deployed. cloud computing is mostly about “elasticity.” The extraction and contraction of resources based on demand. It is the contraction of resources which is oft times forgotten but without it, cloud computing and highly dynamic, virtualized infrastructures are little more than seamless capacity growth engines. For web and application architectural tiers, the contraction of resources is as much a requirement to realize the benefits of shared, dynamic capacity as the ability to rapidly expand. But in the database...
It’s about business continuity between the customer or user and your applications, and you only have control over half that equation. Back in the day (when they still let me write code) I was contracted to a global transportation firm where we had just completed the very first implementation of an Internet-enabled tracking system. We had five whole pilot customers and it was, to say the least, a somewhat fragile system. We were all just learning back then, after all, and if you think integration today is difficult and fraught with disaster, try...
Without the proper feedback an automated data center can experience vertigo, leaving end-users dizzy and frustrated.
As organizations continue to virtualize and automate the data center in their quest to liberate themselves and their users from the physical bonds that have kept them tied to the data center floor they are necessarily moving “up the stack” and running into a profoundly important question: how do I enable IT as a Service?
Virtualizing compute, network, and storage resources is just the first step. Once those are virtualized, they must be managed. Once they’re managed, the next layer of the stack needs...
Like candy bars, it’s just a lot less messier than the alternative. Caramel. Chocolate nougat. Coconut. No matter what liquid, flowing, tasty goodness is hidden inside a chocolate bar, without the chocolate shell to hold it we’d be in whole a lot of trouble because your mom would so be on you for that mess, let me tell you. Every food-stuff that is liquid or gooey or both is encased in some sort of shell; even the tasty Swiss cheese and prosciutto hidden inside chicken cordon bleu is wrapped...
There are many logical fallacies, some more recognizable than others. Today’s lesson is brought to you by the logical fallacy “equivocation” and the term “multi-tenant”. Definition: Equivocation is sliding between two or more different meanings of a single word or phrase that is important to the argument. LOGIC DICTATES YOU SHOULD BACK UP and TRY AGAIN Say “cloud” and ask for a definition today and you’ll still get about 1.2 different answers for every three people in the room. It’s just a rather nebulous technology that’s hard to nail down and because it’s...
Automation implies integration. Integration implies access. Access requires authentication and authorization. That’s where things start to get interesting…
Discussions typically associated with application integration – particularly when integrating applications that are deployed off-premise – are going to happen in the infrastructure realm. It’s just a matter of time. That’s because many of the same challenges the world of enterprise application integration (EAI) has already suffered through (and is still suffering, right now, please send them a sympathy card) will rear up and meet the world of enterprise infrastructure integration head on (we’ll send you a sympathy card, as well)
I’m...
You may have heard the term “full-proxy architecture” or “dual stacks” thrown around in the context of infrastructure; here’s why that distinction is important. When the terms “acceleration” and “optimization” in relation to application delivery are used it often evokes images of compression, caching, and similar technologies. Sometimes it even brings up a discussion on protocol optimization, which is really where things get interesting. You see, caching and compression techniques are mostly about the content – the data – being transferred. Whether it’s making it smaller (and thus faster) or delivering it from...
Need it you do, even if know it you do not. But you will…heh. You will.
With all the attention being paid these days to VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) and application virtualization and server virtualization and <insert type> virtualization it’s easy to forget about network-based application virtualization. But it’s the one virtualization technique you shouldn’t forget because it is a foundational technology upon which myriad other solutions will be enabled.
WHAT IS NETWORK-BASED APPLICATION VIRTUALIZATION?
This term may not be familiar to you but that’s because since its inception oh, more than a...
Control isn’t just about technology. Sometimes control of strategy is just as essential to ensuring success. The Grasshopper and the Ant: A Fable for Developers and IT(http://bit.ly/8XboZ7) by Jake Sorofman, Chief Marketing Officer, rPath, Inc. In a field one summer’s day, a grasshopper was hopping about with great joy, dancing between blades of grass and chirping with pride. He was excited about the potential of his new invention and yearned for someone to help him finish it. Along came an ant, busily constructing a home that would withstand the unpredictable...
Do we need Three Laws of Cloud? Not yet. Neither should we be overly concerned regarding reports of cloud leading to the elimination of IT. Every time a technological innovation has spurred automation – since the time of Henry Ford right up to a minute ago – someone has claimed that machines will displace human beings. But the rainbow and unicorn dream attributed to business stakeholders everywhere, i.e. the elimination of IT, is just that – a dream. It isn’t realistic and in fact it’s downright silly to think that systems that only a few years...
Rackspace steps up to the plate with a new hybrid architectural solution. Earlier this year we talked about the “other” hybrid architecture; the one that lives out there, in the cloud, but that combines two different deployment models: applications deployed on co-located servers that are imbued with elasticity by taking advantage of the same provider’s cloud computing offering. Throughout the year I’ve posited (nearly harped upon) the reality that because most organizations are not greenfields, hybrid architectures will be the norm. This is especially true with applications that have consistent...
If you’re replicating session state across application servers you probably need to rethink your strategy. There’s other options – more efficient options – than wasting RAM and, ultimately, money. Although the discussion of Oracle’s “cloud in a box” announcement at OpenWorld dominated much of the tweet-stream this week there were other discussions going on that proved to not only interesting but a good reminder of how cloud computing has brought to the fore the importance of architecture. Foremost in my mind was what started as a lamentation on the fact that Amazon EC2...
Infrastructure 2.0 ≠ cloud computing ≠ IT as a Service. There is a difference between Infrastructure 2.0 and cloud. There is also a difference between cloud and IT as a Service. But they do go together, like a parfait. And everybody likes a parfait… The introduction of the newest member of the cloud computing buzzword family is “IT as a Service.” It is understandably causing some confusion because, after all, isn’t that just another way to describe “private cloud”? No, actually it isn’t. There’s a lot more to it than that, and it’s very applicable...
The underlying premise of delivering information technology “as a service” is that the services exist to be delivered in the first place.
Oh, it’s on now. IT has been served with a declaration of intent and that is to eliminate IT and its associated bottlenecks that are apparently at the heart of a long application deployment lifecycle. Ignoring reality, the concept of IT as a Service in many ways is well-suited to solving both issues (real and perceived) on the business and the IT sides of the house. By making the acquisition and deployment of server...
It comes down to this: the on-demand provisioning and elastic scalability systems that make up “cloud” are addressing NP-Complete problems for which there is no known exact solutions.
At the heart of what cloud computing provides – in addition to compute-on-demand – is the concept of elastic scalability. It is through the ability to rapidly provision resources and applications that we can achieve elastic scalability and, one assumes, through that high availability of systems. Obviously, given my relationship to F5 I am strongly interested in availability. It is, after all, at the heart of what an application delivery...
That doesn’t mean it isn’t hard - it means it’s a different kind of hard. For many folks in IT it is likely you might find in their home a wall on which you can find hanging a diploma. It might be a BA, it might be a BS, and you might even find one (or two) “Master of Science” as well. Now interestingly enough, none of the diplomas indicate anything other than the level of education (Bachelor or Master) and the type (Arts or...
We need to stop thinking of cloud as an autonomous system and start treating it as part of a global application delivery architecture. When you decided you needed another garage to house that third car (the one your teenager is so proud of) you probably had a couple choices in architecture. You could build a detached garage that, while connected to your driveway, was not connected to any existing structures or you could ensure that the garage was in some way connected to either the house or the garage. In both cases the new garage is...
Correcting some misperceptions regarding ADCs, virtualization, and the use of Cisco as the definitive yardstick for measuring the ADC market A recent article penned by analyst Jim Metzler asks “Can application delivery controllers support virtualization?” A fair question, especially when one digs into the eventual migration and portability of virtual machines across disparate cloud computing deployments based on just such support. But the conclusion reached is misleading and does a disservice to the entire load balancing/application delivery controller industry. Caveat: Having been under fire from vendors and readers alike in the past...
An IDC survey highlights the reasons why private clouds will mature before public, leading to the eventual consistency of public and private cloud computing frameworks
Network Computing recently reported on a very interesting research survey from analyst firm IDC. This one was interesting because it delved into concerns regarding public cloud computing in a way that most research surveys haven’t done, including asking respondents to weight their concerns as it relates to application delivery from a public cloud computing environment. The results? Security, as always, tops the list. But close behind are application delivery related concerns such as availability...
Normalizing deployment environments from dev through production can eliminate issues earlier in the application lifecycle, speed time to market, and gives devops the means by which their emerging discipline can mature with less risk.
One of the big “trends” in cloud computing is to use a public cloud as an alternative environment for development and test. On the surface, this makes sense and is certainly a cost effective means of managing the highly variable environment that is development. But unless you can actually duplicate the production environment in a public cloud, the benefits might be offset by the...
Multi-tenancy encompasses the management of heterogeneous business, technical, delivery, and security models.
Last week, during what was certainly an invigorating if not agonizingly redundant debate regarding the value of public versus private cloud computing , it was suggested that perhaps if we’d just refer to “private cloud” computing as “single-tenant cloud” all would be well.
I could point out that we’ve been over this before, and that the value proposition of shared infrastructure internal to an “organization” is the sharing of resources across projects, departments, and lines of business all of which are endowed with their very own budgets. There...
What goes up, must come down. The question is how much it hurts (the user).
An oft ignored side of elasticity is scaling down. Everyone associates scaling out/up with elasticity of cloud computing but the other side of the coin is just as important, maybe more so. After all, what goes up must come down. The trick is to scale down gracefully, i.e. to do it in such a way as to prevent the disruption of service to existing users while simultaneously trying to scale back down after a spike in demand.
The ramifications of not scaling down are...
An impassioned plea from a devops blogger and a reality check from a large enterprise highlight a growing problem with devops evolutions – not enough dev with the ops.
John E. Vincent offered a lengthy blog on a subject near and dear to his heart recently: devops. His plea was not to be left behind as devops gains momentum and continues to barrel forward toward becoming a recognized IT discipline. The problem is that John, like many folks, works in an enterprise. An enterprise in which not only the existence of legacy and traditional solutions require a bit more...
Bottles, birds, and packets: how the message is exchanged is less important than what the message is as long as it gets there.
I heard it said the other day, regarding the OpenStack announcement, that “the world does not care about APIs.”
Unpossible! How could the world not care about APIs? After all, it is APIs that make the Web (2.0) go around. It is APIs that drive the automation of infrastructure from static toward dynamic. It is APIs that drive self-service and thin-provisioning of...
When strategies are formed it quickly becomes obvious that cloud computing is more about balance than anything else. At a time when you’d think cloud computing would be the primary “go to” strategy for managing scale and rapid growth multiple well-known and demanding organizations are building their own data centers instead. With all the hype around cloud being faster, cheaper, and more efficient these folks must be crazy, right? Not at all. In fact, these moves illustrate the growing friction between the economy of scale offered by cloud computing and the control and flexibility...
Web 2.0 and cloud computing have naturally pushed all things toward application-centric views, why not the VPN?
When SSL VPNs were first introduced they were a welcome alternative to the traditional IPSEC VPN because they reduced the complexity involved with providing robust, secure remote access to corporate resources for externally located employees.
Early on SSL VPNs were fairly simple – allowing access to just about everything on the corporate network to authenticated users. It soon became apparent this was not acceptable for several reasons, most prominently standing out the risk of infection by remote...
Those eight bits in the IP header aren’t doing much of anything these days, perhaps it’s time to put them to work Back in the early days of bandwidth management, when quality of service and prioritization of traffic were on everyone’s minds because we were stuck with low throughput connectivity, there was a brief discussion about the use of IP’s TOS (Type of Service) bits as a means to meet specific application performance needs. I say brief because, well, it never really got anywhere. See, even though the creators of the IP specification had looked into the...
Web applications that count on the advantage of not having a bloated desktop footprint need to keep one eye on the scale… A recent article on CloudAve that brought back the “browser versus native app” debate caught my eye last week. After reading it, the author is really focusing on that piece of the debate which dismisses SaaS and browser-based applications in general based on the disparity in functionality between them and their “bloated desktop” cousins. Why do I have to spend money on powerful devices when I can get an experience almost...
If you thought the integration and collaboration required new networking capabilities, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Anyone who has ever configured a network anything or worked with any of a number of cloud provider’s API to configure “auto-scaling” via a load balancing service recognizes that it isn’t simply point, click, and configure. Certain steps need to be configured in a certain order (based entirely on the solution and completely non-standardized across the industry) and it’s always a pain to handle errors and exceptions because if you want to “do over” you have to backtrack through the completed...
No, it’s not global server load balancing or GeoLocation. It’s something more… because knowing location is only half the battle and the other half requires the ability to make on-demand decisions based on context. In most cases today, global application delivery bases the decision on which location should service a given client based on the location of the user, availability of the application at each deployment location and, if the user is lucky, some form of performance-related service-level agreement. With the advent of concepts like cloud bursting and migratory applications that can be deployed at any number of...
One of the ways in which traditional architectures and deployment models is actually superior (yes, I said superior) to cloud computing is in provisioning. Before you label me a cloud heretic, let me explain. In traditional deployment models capacity is generally allocated based on anticipated peaks in demand. Because the time to acquire, deploy, and integrate hardware into the network and application infrastructure this process is planned for and well-understood, and the resources required are in place before they are needed. In cloud computing, the benefit is that the time required to acquire those resources is contracted to...
Devops needs to be able to SELECT COMPUTE_RESOURCES from CLOUD where LOCATION in (APPLICATION SPECIFIC RESTRICTIONS) The awareness of the importance of context in application delivery and especially in the “new network” is increasing, and that’s a good thing. It’s a necessary evolution in networking as both users and applications become increasingly mobile. But what might not be evident is the need for more awareness of context during the provisioning, i.e. deployment, process. A desire to shift the burden of management of infrastructure does not mean a desire for ignorance of that infrastructure, nor does...
It seems only fair that as the Internet caused the problem, it should solve it. One of the negatives of deploying an Internet-scale infrastructure and application is that until it’s put to the test, you can’t have 100 percent confidence that it will scale as expected. If you do, you probably shouldn’t. Applications and infrastructure that perform well – and correctly – at nominal scale may begin to act wonky as load increases. Dan Bartow , VP at SOASTA, says it is still often load balancing configuration errors that crop up during testing that impedes scalability...
Security risks are not always indicative of a lack of faith in the provider’s competency but about, well, risk. IDC recently conducted another cloud survey and [feign gasp of surprise here] security risks topped a healthy list of concerns that, according to the survey, outweighed cloud computing benefits. While growing numbers of businesses understand the advantages of embracing cloud computing, they are more concerned about the risks involved, as a survey released at a cloud conference in Silicon Valley shows. Respondents showed greater concern about the risks associated with cloud...
Like most architectural decisions the choice between hardware and virtual server are not mutually exclusive.
The argument goes a little something like this: The increases in raw compute power available in general purpose hardware eliminates the need for purpose-built hardware. After all, if general purpose hardware can sustain the same performance for SSL as purpose-built (specialized) hardware, why pay for the purpose-built hardware? Therefore, ergo, and thusly it doesn’t make sense to purchase a hardware solution when all you really need is the software, so you should just acquire and deploy a virtual network appliance.
The argument, which at...
It’s the all new revised fifth edition of the popular real-life fantasy game we call Datacenters and Dragons DM (Datacenter Manager): “Through the increasingly cloudy windows of the datacenter you see empty racks and abandoned servers where once there were rumored to be blinking lights and application consoles. Only a few brave and stalwart applications remain, somehow immune to the siren-like call of the Cloud Empire through the ancient and long forgotten secret rituals found only in the now-lost COBOL copybook. As you stand, awestruck at the destructive power of the Empire, a shadow falls...
Google’s latest offering is a hint of things to come and indicates a recognition of devops as a real discipline Interestingly enough devops is comprised of two disciplines: development and operations. The former traditionally solve problems and address challenges through development, through coding, through a programmatic solution. The latter, operations, is often more administrative focused and its solutions to the same issues and challenges will also be programmatic, just on a different level – that of scripting. There is no right or wrong answer to this one; in fact the concept of devops is about...
Like most architectural decisions the two goals do not require mutually exclusive decisions. The difference between fault isolation and fault tolerance is not necessarily intuitive. The differences, though subtle, are profound and have a substantial impact on data center architecture. Fault tolerance is an attribute of systems and architecture that allow it to continue performing its tasks in the event of a component failure. Fault tolerance of servers, for example, is achieved through the use of redundancy in power-supplies, in hard-drives, and in network cards. In an architecture, fault tolerance is also achieved through...
Minimizing the impact of code changes on multi-tenant applications requires a little devops “magic” and a broader architectural strategy
Ignoring the unavoidable “cloud outage” hysteria that accompanies any Web 2.0 application outage today, there’s been some very interesting analysis of how WordPress – and other multi-tenant Web 2.0 applications – can avoid a similar mistake. One such suggestion is the use of a “feathered release schedule”, which is really just a controlled roll-out of a new codebase as a means to minimize the impact of an error. We’d call this “fault isolation” in data center architecture 101. It turns out...
I’m sure you’ve noticed that there have been quite a few posts on the topic of automation, orchestration, and infrastructure 2.0. Aside from the fact that an integrated, collaborative infrastructure is necessary to achieve many of the operational efficiencies associated with cloud computing and highly virtualized data centers, it’s also a fascinating topic from the perspective of understanding how network and infrastructure providers are dealing with some of the same issues that enterprise software has long had to face while navigating the enterprise application integration (EAI) landscape. One of the ways in which vendors like...
If we look at cloud in terms of what it does offer instead of what it doesn’t, we may discover more useful architectures than were previously thought to exist.
I have a fairly large, extended family. While I was growing up we gathered at our grandparent’s home during the holidays for, of course, a meal. Grandma would put extra chairs around the table but because she had five children (and spouses) there really wasn’t any room for us grandchildren. So we got to sit … at the little kid’s table. Eventually we weren’t “little kids” any more and we all...
Scott Sanchez recently rebutted the argument that “Cloud Isn’t Secure Because It Is Multi-Tenant” by pointing out that “internal data centers are multi-tenant today, and you aren’t managing them as well as a public cloud is managed.” Despite the truth of that statement, his argument doesn’t take into consideration that multi-tenant cloud security isn’t just about the risks of the model, it’s about the neighbors. After all, there’s no such thing as a “renters association” that has the right to screen candidate tenants before they move in and start drinking beer on their shared, digital lawn in...
The right form-factor in the right location at the right-time will maximize the benefits associated with cloud computing and virtualization. Feng Shui, simply defined, is the art of knowing where to place things to maximize benefits. There are many styles of Feng Shui but the goal of all forms is to create the most beneficial environment in which one can live, work, play, etc… based on the individual’s goals. Historically, feng shui was widely used to orient buildings—often spiritually significant structures such as tombs, but also dwellings and other structures—in an...
We won’t have true cloud computing until we have a services-based infrastructure and standardization of cloud management frameworks. We may call it “cloud” today, but what we really have with the offerings today is “capacity on demand.” We don’t actually have all the pieces necessary to execute on the vision that is “cloud computing.” We’ve almost completed server standardization through virtualization but we haven’t really begun to standardize network and infrastructure services. And we’re certainly nowhere near ready to standardize on the cloud and application frameworks that will enable a seamless Intercloud. The term “utility”...
It’s an integration thing. One of the advantages of deploying an application delivery controller (ADC) instead of a regular old Load balancer is that it is programmable – or at least it is if it’s an F5 BIG-IP. That means you have some measure of control over application data as it’s being delivered to end-users and can manipulate that data in various ways depending on the context of the request and the response. While an ADC has insight into the end-user environment – from network connection type and conditions to platform and location –...
Hidden deep within an article on scalability was a fascinating insight. Once you read it, it makes sense, but because cloud computing forces our attention to the logical (compute resources) rather than the physical (hardware) it’s easy to overlook. “Cloud computing is actually making this problem a little bit worse,” states Leach [CTO of domain registrar Name.com], “because it is so easy just to throw hardware at the problem. But at the end of the day, you’ve still got to figure, ‘I shouldn’t have to have all this hardware when my site doesn’t...
IT organizations that fail to provide guidance for and governance over public cloud computing usage will be unhappy with the results… While it is highly unlikely that business users will “control their own destiny” by provisioning servers in cloud computing environments that doesn’t mean they won’t be involved. In fact it’s likely that IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud computing environments will be leveraged by business users to avoid the hassles they perceive (and oft times actually do) exist in their quest to deploy a given business application. It’s just that they won’t themselves be pushing the buttons. ...
Just when you thought the misconceptions regarding cloud computing couldn’t get any worse…they do. We have, in general, moved past the question “what is cloud” and onto “what do I need to do to move an application to the cloud?” But the question “what is cloud” appears not to have reached consensus and thus advice on how to move an application into the cloud might be based on an understanding of cloud that is less than (or not at all) accurate. The problem is exacerbated by the reality that there are several types or models...
Training your data center “muscle memory” will ensure that when the pressure is on your network will make all the right moves. If you’ve ever taken dancing lessons – or musical lessons – or tried to teach yourself to type you know that repetition is the key to success. Or as your mom would tell you, “practice makes perfect.” The reason repetition is a key factor in the success of endeavors that require specific movements in a precisely orchestrated fashion is that it builds what instructors call “muscle memory.” You’re actually teaching your muscles to...
Salesforce and Google have teamed up with VMware to promote cloud portability but like beauty that portability is only skin deep. VMware has been moving of late to form strategic partnerships that enable greater portability of applications across cloud computing providers. The latest is an announcement that Google and VMware have joined forces to allow Java application “portability” with Google’s App Engine. It is important to note that the portability resulting from this latest partnership and VMware’s previous strategic alliance formed with Salesforce.com will be the ability to deploy Java-based applications within Google and Force.com’s...
… where response time and speed are concerned, many businesses automatically assume Google.com- and Amazon.com-levels of performance from services such as Google App Engine and Amazon EC2, but this can be a mistake. -- ESJ, “Q&A: Managing Performance of Cloud-Based Applications and Services” A big mistake, indeed. While the underlying systems may be optimized and faster than fast, that doesn’t mean that applications won’t suffer poor performance. There are many other factors that determine how an application will perform, and most of them are variable. They can change from...
Three simple action items can help ensure your next infrastructure refresh cycle leaves your data center prepared and smelling minty fresh*. Most rational folks agree: public cloud computing will be an integral piece of data center application deployment strategy in the future, but it will not replace IT. Just as Web 2.0 did not make extinct the client-server model (which did not completely eradicate the mainframe model) neither will public cloud computing marginalize the corporate data center. But it will be a part of that data center; integrated and controlled and leveraged via the new...
It’s been described on Twitter as “reading like a Greek tragedy” but then again, Novell’s interpretive reading of one of Hoff’s cloud security posts was describe in similar terms, so at least I’m in good company. Novell deserves kudos for this humorous set of “interpretive” readings of a variety of cloud-focused blogs, including some of their own. Direct link below if you prefer. "Get Your SaaS Off My Cloud" by Lori MacVittie from Novell, Inc. on Vimeo. Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,Novell,cloud computing,humor,video
Almost every definition of cloud, amongst the myriad definitions that exist, include the notion of multi-tenancy, a.k.a. the ability to isolate customer-specific traffic, data, and configuration of resources using the same software and interfaces. In the case of SaaS (Software as a Service) multi-tenancy is almost always achieved via a database and configuration, with isolation provided at the application layer. This form of multi-tenancy is the easiest to implement and is a well-understood model of isolation. In the case of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) this level of isolation is primarily achieved through server virtualization and configuration, but...
In cloud computing environments the clock literally starts ticking the moment an application instance is launched. How long should that take? The term “on-demand” implies right now. In the past, we used the term “real-time” even though what we really meant in most cases was “near time”, or “almost real-time”. The term “elastic” associated with scalability in cloud computing definitions implies on-demand. One would think, then, that this means that spinning up a new instance of an application with the intent to scale a cloud-deployed application to increase capacity would be a fairly quick-executing task. ...
Extending identity management into the cloud
The focus of several questions I was asked at Interop involved identity management and application access in a cloud computing environment. This makes sense; not all applications that will be deployed in a public cloud environment are going to be “customer” or “market” focused. Some will certainly be departmental or business unit applications designed to be used by employees and thus require a certain amount of access control and integration with existing identity management stores, like Active Directory.
Interestingly F5 isn’t the only one...
The Internets are full of bad advice. Some is harmless, but some is downright dangerous, especially when it isn’t bad advice per se but rather shall we say, incomplete. Suggesting that you should only provide personal information to sites that use HTTPS is an example of the latter kind, because it implies that as long as a web application is using SSL for transport layer (network) security then it is safe to give up your private, personal, information. Because miscreants would never set up a phishing site and enable SSL. Because SSL somehow magically strips out malicious SQL...
Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking dynamic infrastructure is all about scalability. If it were the case that a “dynamic infrastructure” was focused solely on issues of scalability then I’d have nothing left to write. That problem, the transparent, non-disruptive scaling of applications - in both directions – has already been solved. Modern load balancers handle such scenarios with alacrity. Luckily, it’s not the case that dynamic infrastructure is all about scalability. In fact, that’s simply one facet in a much larger data center diamond named context-awareness. “Fixed, flat, predictable, no-spike...
Or in modern technical terms, don’t throw the software out with the hardware Geva Perry recently questioned one of Gartner’s core predictions for 2010, namely that “By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets.” Geva asks a few (very pertinent) questions regarding this prediction that got me re-reading the prediction. Let’s all look at it one more time, shall we? By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees...
I recently expounded on my disappointment with cloud computing services that fail to recognize that server metrics are not necessarily enough to properly auto-scale applications in “I Find Your Lack of Win Disturbing”. One of the (very few) frustrating things about working for F5 is that we’re doing so much in so many different areas of application delivery that sometimes I’m not aware that we have a solution to something that’s a broader problem until I say “I wish …” (I guess in a way that’s kind of cool in and of itself, right?) Such is apparently...
If you don’t know how scaling services work in a cloud environment you may not like the results One of the benefits of cloud computing, and in particular IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is that the infrastructure is, well, a service. It’s abstracted, and that means you don’t need to know a lot about the nitty-gritty details of how it works. Right? Well, mostly right. While there’s no reason you should need to know how to specifically configure, say, an F5 BIG-IP load balancing solution when deploying an application with GoGrid, you probably should...
There’s a growing focus on PaaS (Platform as a Service), particularly as Microsoft has been rolling out Azure and VMware continues to push forward with its SpringSource acquisition. Amazon, though generally labeled as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is also a “player” with its SimpleDB and SQS (Simple Queue Service) and more recently, its SNS (Simple Notification Service). But there’s also Force.com, the SaaS (Software as a Service) giant Salesforce.com’s incarnation of a “platform” as well as Google’s App Engine. As is the case with “cloud” in general, the definition of PaaS is varied and depends entirely on to whom...
Everyone has likely seen the optical illusion of the vase in which, depending on your focus, you either see a vase or two faces. This particular optical illusion is probably the best allegorical image for IT and in particular cloud computing I can imagine. Depending on your focus within IT you’re either focused on – to borrow some terminology from SOA – design-time or run-time management of the virtualized systems and infrastructure that make up your data center. That focus determines what particular aspect of management you view as most critical, and unfortunately makes it...
There have been many significant events over the past decade, but looking back these are still having a significant impact on the industry. Next week is Interop. Again. This year it’s significant in that it’s my tenth anniversary attending Interop. It’s also the end of a decade’s worth of technological change in the application delivery industry, the repercussions and impact of which in some cases are just beginning to be felt. We called it load balancing back in the day, but it’s grown considerably since then and now encompasses a wide variety of application-focused concerns: security, optimization,...
…with clouds, the business user can become king. Creating a private cloud will take considerable IT skill, but once one is built, authorized business users will be able to tap that computing power without a lot of know-how. -- Why ‘Private Cloud’ Computing Is Real – And Worth Considering, April 2010, InformationWeek Really? I’ve worked in a lot of places, including enterprises. Maybe your enterprise is different, maybe your business users are savvier than ones with which I’ve worked, but I just don’t see this happening on a regular basis. Business...
It’s all fun and games until application performance can’t be measured. We talk a lot about measuring application performance and its importance to load balancing, scalability, meeting SLAs (service level agreements) and even to the implementation of more advanced concepts like cloud balancing and location-based global application delivery but we don’t often talk about how hard it is to actually get that performance data. Part of the reason it’s so difficult is that the performance metrics you want are ones that as accurately as possible represent end-user experience. You know, customers and visitors, the users of your...
Are you scaling applications or servers? Auto-scaling cloud brokerages appear to be popping up left and right. Following in the footsteps of folks like RightScale, these startups provide automated monitoring and scalability services for cloud computing customers. That’s all well and good because the flexibility and control over scalability in many cloud computing environments is, shall we say, somewhat lacking the mechanisms necessary to efficiently make use of the “elastic scalability” offered by cloud computing providers. The problem is (and you knew there was a problem, didn’t you?) that most of these companies are still scaling...
My mother’s latest project is projected to be over-budget. Thanks to a change in the way projects are allocated she now has X dollars instead of Y hours. Her project needed 50,000 “IT” hours (yes, she actually did the quote thing with her fingers when she said that), but now it can only have 45,000 “IT” hours because the “cost” (yes, she actually did the quote thing with her fingers when she said that, too, because enterprise dollars are more like Monopoly money than real money) of IT has increased by a few dollars per hour and she was...
How should auto-scaling work, and why doesn’t it? Although “rapid elasticity” is part of NIST’s definition of cloud computing, it may be interesting to note that many cloud computing environments don’t include this capability at all – or charge you extra for it. Many providers offer the means by which you can configure a load balancing service and manually add or remove instances, but there may not be a way to automate that process. If it’s manual, it’s certain “rapid” in the sense that’s it’s probably faster than you can do it (because you’d have to acquire hardware...
One of the side-effects of the rapid increases in compute power combined with an explosion of Internet users has been the need for organizations to grow their application infrastructures to support more and more load. That means higher capacity everything – from switches to routers to application delivery infrastructure to the applications themselves. Cloud computing has certainly stepped up to address this, providing the means by which organizations can efficiently and more cost-effectively increase capacity. Between cloud computing and increasing demands on applications there is a need for organizations to invest in the infrastructure necessary to build out a new...
The biggest disadvantage organizations have when embarking on a “we’re going cloud” initiative is that they’re already saddled with an existing infrastructure and legacy applications. That’s no surprise as it’s almost always true that longer-lived enterprises are bound to have some “legacy” applications and infrastructure sitting around that’s still running just fine (and is a source of pride for many administrators – it’s no small feat to still have a Novell file server running, after all). Applications themselves are almost certainly bound to rely on some of that “legacy” infrastructure and integration and let’s not even discuss the complex...
When you combine virtualization with auto-scaling without implementing proper controls you run the risk of scaling yourself silly or worse – broke.
You virtualized your applications. You set up an architecture that supports auto-scaling (on-demand) to free up your operators. All is going well, until the end of the month.
Applications are failing. Not just one, but all of them. After hours of digging into operational dashboards and logs and monitoring consoles you find the problem: one of the applications, which experiences extremely heavy processing demands at the end of the month, has scaled itself out too far and...
It is true right now that for the most part, virtualization changes deployment of applications but not their development. Thus far this remains true, primarily because those with an interest in organizations moving to public cloud computing have reason to make it “easy” and painless, which means no changes to applications. But eventually there will be changes that are required, if not from cloud providers then from the organization that pays the bills. One of the most often cited truism of development is actually more of a lament on the part of systems’ administrators. The basic...
When co-location meets cloud computing the result is control, consistency, agility, and operational cost savings. Generally speaking when the term “hybrid” as an adjective to describe a cloud computing model it’s referring to the combining of a local data center with a distinct set of off-premise cloud computing resources. But there’s another way to look at “hybrid” cloud computing models that is certainly as relevant and perhaps makes more sense for adoptees of cloud computing for whom there simply is not enough choice and control over infrastructure solutions today. Cloud computing providers have generally arisen from...
Oh, load balancers are networks and applications are development, and never the twain shall meet. We have a brittle system underpinning the data center: the network. It’s brittle, yes. But it works. Thanks to years of tweaking and tuning and troubleshooting, it works. We know where everything is, and how everything interacts, and it works. It works well, in fact, now that we’ve got it all figured out. Is it any surprise then that we might be resistant to change that might (probably will) upset that delicate balance? One of the most difficult challenges...
What makes a cloud a cloud? The ancient Greek philosopher Plato might tell you“cloudness”, but what exactly does that mean? Long before human scientists figured out that DNA was the basic building block of everything living, philosophers spent long eons being satisfied with Plato’s (and his equally famous student Aristotle’s) explanation that there is some inherent “ness” in everything that makes it what it is. One of Aristotle’s dialogues deals with the answers to questions like, “What makes a cat a cat? And why does a kitten never have a duck?” as he explains the concept. Retroactively...
If we do it right, cloud interoperability could be as easy as a URL rewrite – a la API refactoring. Not kidding. Question is, can we do it right? Watching the emergence of a new technology is both fascinating and frustrating. In the case of cloud computing it’s fascinating to see the “process” of standardization and positioning taking place but it’s frustrating to see the same hurdles whittling away at the potential for true interoperability because of the silos that continue to exist not only in the organization but amongst the broader industry that provides infrastructure and services...
What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. Some apps you just can’t reach … in the cloud. Доброе утро! What? You don’t speak Russian? Not even “baby” Russian? French? Spanish? Indonesian? Korean? Chinese? If you’ve traveled you’ve probably picked up a few words here and there but it’s unlikely you are, at this point, fluent in any of the world’s languages excepting English. Luckily most other people in the world speak English better than you speak their language so you should get along just fine. Unfortunately for...
Options to put a stop to the latest mutation of the Pushdo trojan The Pushdo bot is a malevolent little beast that is nothing new to Infosec professionals. What might be new, however, is that it recently changed its code and now creates junk SSL connections. Lots of them. I mean you are likely seeing an unexpected increase in traffic by several million hits spread out across several hundred thousand IP addresses. No you didn't read that wrong that is millions of hits and hundreds of thousands of IP addresses. This...
In the short term, hybrid cloud is going to be the cloud computing model of choice. Amidst all the disconnect at CloudConnect regarding standards and where “cloud” is going was an undercurrent of adoption of what most have come to refer to as a “hybrid cloud computing” model. This model essentially “extends” the data center into “the cloud” and takes advantage of less expensive compute resources on-demand. What’s interesting is that the use of this cheaper compute is the granularity of on-demand. The time interval for which resources are utilized is measured more in project timelines than...
There are two kinds of privacy. Only one is the responsibility of vendors and providers to ensure. The rest is up to you.
Regulations like HIPAA and PCI-DSS are designed to guarantee that providers storing electronic personally identifiable information, or PII in the vernacular, is safeguarded against theft or accidental disclosure. They are not designed to provide consumers with any kind of “social gag” that might alert them they are offering up information or photographs the likes of which they may later regret sharing. While social networking sites like Facebook now provide “privacy” options that allow consumers to control who...
What does a 2-year old and cloud-based applications have in common? The Toddler has recently decided that he can navigate the stairs by himself. Insists on it, in fact. That’s a bit nerve-wracking, especially when he decides that 2:30am is a good time to get up, have a snack, and recreate a Transformers battle in the family room. It’s worse when you’re asleep and don’t know about it. Oh eventually you hear him and you get up and try to convince him it’s time for sleep (see? all the...
In this case “baby” is load balancing and the corner is cloud computing. SocialCloudNow recently wrote up a pretty darn accurate (which is hard to find these days) description of “cloud computing” by walking through the components required. The author did an excellent job – especially where he dove into the relationship between orchestration and cloud computing. Loved that a lot – most folks ignore that piece of cloud computing even though it’s very, very important. But I was a bit put off (okay, a lot put off) at one statement: ...
Because it’s Friday and sometimes you just have to get it out of your head.
Your app is slow, demand has grownthe hardware is not your ownyour heart sweats, your body shakesanother clone is all it takes
Compute is cheap, it can’t be beatthere was no doubt, you’d take the leap your budget’s tight, exec’s decreedanother cloud is all you need
Whoa, you like to think that you’re immune to the stuff, oh Yeahit’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough,you know you’re gonna have to face it, you’re addicted to cloud
there’s no 5 9s, but you don’t...
Or Why Carr’s Analogy is Wrong. Again. Nicolas Carr envisioned compute resources being delivered in a means similar to electricity. Though providers and consumers alike use the terminology to describe cloud computing billing and metering models, the reality is that we’ve just moved from a monthly server hosting model to a more granular hourly one, and the delivery model has not changed in any way as we’ve moved to this more “on-demand” model of IT resources. There’s very little difference between choosing amongst a list of virtual “servers” and a list of physical “servers” with...
“Security” concerns continue to top every cloud computing related survey. This could be because, well, CIOs and organizations in general are concerned about security. It could be because the broader question of control over the infrastructure – including security – is never proffered as a reason for reluctance to jump into the fray known as cloud computing. Forty-nine percent of survey respondents from enterprises and 51 percent from small and medium-size businesses cited security and privacy concerns as their top reason for not using cloud computing. – Survey: Security Concerns Hinder Cloud Computing Adoption, NetCentric...
The current threat level is … the same as it was yesterday, and the day before, and will be tomorrow. We’ve all been in the airport before and heard the announcement. “The current threat level is orange. Blah blah blah blah yada yada whatever.” At least that’s what I hear today because I’ve become immune to the fact that “orange” means there’s a threat. There’s always a threat, it seems, and the announcement simply conveys what appears to many of us to be the “status quo.” We have effectively been desensitized to a “higher” threat level as...
Microsoft Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for Systems Center (DIT-SC) is hopping forward, literally, into the network. With or without established standards, this dog is going to hunt. It takes time to develop standards, something we often overlook. When the foundational standards upon which the Internet were being developed there were (almost) no users, no broadband, and no real urgency to get something available. The adoption of disruptive, highly volatile technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing result in an environment in which today’s standards groups are not afforded the luxury of time. Organizations want, nay they need, standards...
Ultimately a highly-scalable, high-performance architecture will rely on choosing the right form factor in the right places at the right time.
Scale is not just about servers, and for corporate data centers and cloud computing providers looking to realize the benefits of rapid elasticity and on-demand provisioning scale simply must be one of the foundational premises upon which a dynamic data center is built. And that includes the infrastructure.
This isn’t the first time I’ve touched upon this subject, but it’s a concept that needs to be reiterated – especially with so many pundits and analysts looking for the...
There’s a reason for the angst elicited by inaccurate definitions of cloud computing and it may lead to rethinking a laissez-faire view of such definitions. Language impacts our perception and can dramatically change the way we understand – or don’t understand – ideas. Because one of the primary uses of language is to present arguments or assert propositions such as “We need to allocate X percent of our budget to a cloud computing initiative” it makes it important that everyone involved in the conversation agrees on basic meanings and definitions. This is one of the reasons I,...
More interesting, what if you had the means to actually try to meet them? On the surface, Infrastructure 2.0 seems to have very little value to the end-user. It is, after all, about collaboration at the infrastructure layer. It is under the covers, as it were, of the application blanket with which end-users actually interact. But it may end up that Infrastructure 2.0 will have a direct impact on the control the user has over the way in which applications are delivered. Which is to say they might one day have some. What this means is something...
Or more apropos, it’s in the complex and intimate relationship between applications and their infrastructure. What’s the difference between a highly virtualized corporate data center and a cloud computing environment? There are probably many, but the most important distinction – and the one that earns the latter a “cloud computing” tag – is certainly that the former lacks a comprehensive orchestration system and was likely not architected using a rapid, infrastructure inclusive, scalability strategy. Mitch Garnaat, “The Elastician”, recently managed to sum up what should be every modern data center’s motto in a...
Preparing for the upcoming Cloud Connect conference several speakers and presenters have put forth the proposal that no one should attempt to define cloud yet again. After all, if you’re attending the conference (and you are attending, of course, aren’t you?) then you certainly have a firm understanding of what cloud computing is and what it can do. But most end-users and business stakeholders won’t be attending and don’t have a firm understanding of cloud computing. Even the technology pundits to whom these constituents turn to learn about the technology often fail to really “get” cloud computing, as evinced...
If developers will not write “virtualization aware” applications, who will? The future of application development platforms may be at stake… Right now developers are packaging up applications in virtual machines and deploying them. That’s according to, well, every survey you find related to virtualization and cloud computing. Joe McKendrick, citing the latest Evans Data Cloud Development Survey, noted that “sixty-one percent of 400 developers in Evans Data Corp’s recent Cloud Development Survey report that at least some of their IT resources will move to the public cloud within the next year.” But even given the number...
Agreed that cloud vendors need to differentiate on services. Disagreed that cloud standards will not forward that cause and that virtualization platform makes a difference. The battle for virtualization platform dominance rages on, but it will not be virtualization that makes or breaks a cloud computing offering; it will be the diversity – or lack thereof - of the services it offers. We need to stop focusing on virtualization as the be-all and end-all of cloud computing and start bending our efforts toward what really matters: the ability of providers to efficiently offer a broad set of...
Scaling applications that include AJAX and non-AJAX components may require more than just tuning your web server A common problem after deploying a Web 2.0 AJAX-based application shows itself through poor performance or lower capacity on the server, often both. Web serving tuning is almost always the first step in improving performance and capacity, but the inherently competing behavior of AJAX-requests and “normal” HTTP requests quickly becomes problematic as well. Tune for the AJAX requests and performance of regular old HTTP requests suffers. Tune for regular old HTTP requests, and performance of AJAX-requests suffer. This is...
We seem on the verge of repeating the mistakes associated with failed SOA implementations: ignoring the larger issue of architecture. Everyone – from pundit to public – is asking the same question: “Where are the network virtual appliances?” But fewer people seem to be asking a question that needs to go hand-in-hand with that one: “Where are the architectural guidelines to support deployment of network virtual appliances?” SOA has been deemed by many to be a failure in part because it lacked true architectural guidance. Architects were simply unable – whether by lack of skills or training or...
Emerging architectures are conflating responsibilities up and down the application stack. Who is responsible for integration when services reside in the network? While preparing for an upcoming panel I’m moderating at Cloud Connect (in the “New Infrastructure” track), the panelists and I had a great discussion on the topics we wanted to discuss in the session. During that discussion it became increasingly clear that an interesting phenomenon has been occurring: the conflation of network and application responsibilities in the traditional “stack.” Much of this inversion is absolutely necessary for emerging models of networking and computing...
Which of course are like Ogres. They’re big, chaotic, and have lots of layers of virtualization. In discussions involving cloud it is often the case that someone will remind you that “virtualization” is not required to build a cloud. But that’s only partially true, as some layers of virtualization are, in fact, required to build out a cloud computing environment. It’s only “operating system” virtualization that is not required. Problem is unlike the term “cloud”, “virtualization” has come to be associated with a single, specific kind of virtualization; specifically, it’s almost exclusively used to refer...
I haven’t heard the term “graceful degradation” in a long time, but as we continue to push the limits of data centers and our budgets to provide capacity it’s a concept we need to revisit. You might have heard that Twitter was down (again) last week. What you might not have heard (or read) is some interesting crunchy bits about how Twitter attempts to maintain availability by degrading capabilities gracefully when services are over capacity. “Twitter Down, Overwhelmed by Whales” from Data Center Knowledge offered up the juicy details: ...
Nope. Wasn’t under the couch. In fact it turns out it wasn’t even missing, it’s just been overlooked and might already be in your data center. As more organizations continue to make virtualization a core part of their overall application deployment strategy they are finding challenges associated with managing and, apparently, optimizing their newly created heterogeneous infrastructure. Kevin Fogarty, in “10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2010”, writes of some of the challenges with virtualization to come in the next year. One of those challenges is, apparently, optimization of resources across physical and virtual assets, at least...