dynamic infrastructure
There are 94 entries for the tag dynamic infrastructure
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#RSAC Attackers have outflanked your security infrastructure
Many are familiar with the name of the legendary Alexander the Great, if not the specific battles in which he fought. And even those familiar with his many victorious conquests are not so familiar with his contributions to his father’s battles in which he certainly honed the tactical and strategic expertise that led to his conquest of the “known” world.
In 339 BC, for example, then Macedonian King Phillip II – the father of Alexander the Great – became engaged in a battle...
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#RSAC Traditional strategy segregates delivery from security. Traditional strategy is doing it wrong…
Everyone, I’m sure, has had the experience of calling customer service. First you get the automated system, which often asks for your account number. You know, to direct you to the right place and “serve you better.” Everyone has also likely been exasperated when the first question asked by a customer service representative upon being connected to a real live person is … “May I have your account number, please?”
It’s frustrating and, for everyone involved, it’s...
Stateless infrastructure and highly dynamic networks may eliminate this issue. There is great awareness in both consumer and corporate culture with respect to data and second-hand markets. We know that data stored on devices of all shapes and sizes can be a potential source of sensitive information loss if not carefully eliminated before sale or disposal. But consider, too, the potential value of picking up a second-hand switch or router from e-Bay that has not been carefully wiped of all configuration data. ACLs, routing tables, VLANs, comments. These configuration details are often left on infrastructure even...
Why a full-proxy architecture is important to both infrastructure and data centers.
In the early days of load balancing and application delivery there was a lot of confusion about proxy-based architectures and in particular the definition of a full-proxy architecture. Understanding what a full-proxy is will be increasingly important as we continue to re-architect the data center to support a more mobile, virtualized infrastructure in the quest to realize IT as a Service.
THE FULL-PROXY PLATFORM
The reason there is a distinction made between “proxy” and “full-proxy” stems from the handling of connections as they flow through the device. All proxies...
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...
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...
#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...
#v11 ScaleN breaks out of the traditional infrastructure scalability mold We previously introduced ScaleN but we didn’t really dig into how it’s enabled, other than to mention it’s been made possible in part by leveraging F5’s vCMP (virtual Clustered Multi-Processing) technology, which puts the “virtual” in “virtual networking.” The basic premise of infrastructure scalability is that if the component providing the scalability fails, well, the service for which it provides HA fails. That’s not good. So it was that HA architectures employing a variety of models came about to ensure that such a scenario...
It’s how much load that really generates and how it scales to meet the challenge. There’s some amount of debate whether Facebook really crossed over the one trillion page view per month threshold. While one report says it did, another respected firm says it did not; that its monthly page views are a mere 467 billion per month. In the big scheme of things, the discrepancy is somewhat irrelevant, as neither show the true load on Facebook’s infrastructure – which is far more impressive a set of numbers than its externally measured “page view”...
Cookies as a service enabled via infrastructure services provide an opportunity to improve your operational posture. Fellow DevCentral blogger Robert Haynes posted a great look at a UK law regarding cookies. Back in May a new law went info effect regarding “how cookies and other “cookie-like” objects are stored on users’ devices.” If you haven’t heard about it, don’t panic – there’s a one-year grace period before enforcement begins and those £500 000 fines are being handed out. The clock is ticking, however. What do the new regulations say? Well essentially whereas cookies...
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...
#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...
#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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
IT as a Service requires commoditization. Commoditization implies standardization. The network needs standardization, and that’s only going to happen via a common API and semantic model. Randy Bias of Cloudscaling apparently set off a firestorm at Cloud Connect 2011, stating with typical Randy forthrightness: “API's don't matter.” It’s not something we haven’t heard before. In fact, it’s not something I haven’t said myself, in a way. Randy wasn’t really questioning the need for APIs, that’s a given. What he was getting at was to question the need for standardization of APIs. Within IT,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
A deeper dive on how to apply scalability best practices using infrastructure services. So it’s all well and good to say that you can apply scalability patterns to infrastructure and provide a high-level overview of the theory but it’s always much nicer to provide more detail so someone can actually execute on such a strategy. Thus, today we’re going to dig a bit deeper into applying a scalability pattern – horizontal partitioning, to be exact – to an application infrastructure as a means to scale out an application in a way that’s efficient and supports growth...
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...
Authentication is not enough. Authorization is a must for all integrated services – whether infrastructure components, applications, or management frameworks. If you’ve gone through the process of allowing an application access to Twitter or Facebook then you’ve probably seen OAuth in action. Last week a mini-storm was a brewing over such implementations, primarily regarding the “overly-broad permission structure” implemented by Twitter. Currently Twitter application developers are given 2 choices when registering their apps – they can either request “read-only access” or “read & write” access. For Twitter “read & write”...
Deploying a virtual network appliance is the easy part, it’s the operational management that’s hard.
The buzz and excitement over VMware’s announcement of its new products at VMworld was high and for a brief moment there was a return to focusing on the network. You know, the large portion of the data center that provides connectivity and enables collaboration; the part that delivers applications to users (which really is the point of all architectures). Unfortunately the buzz reared up and overtook that focus with yet another round of double rainbow guy commentary regarding how cool and great it’s going to...
You really can’t have the one without the other. VMware enables the former, F5 provides the latter. The use of public cloud computing as a means to expand compute capacity on-demand, a la during a seasonal or unexpected spike in traffic, is often called cloud bursting and we’ve been talking about it (at least in the hypothetical sense) for some time now. When we first started talking about it the big question was, of course, but how do you get the application in the cloud in the first place? Everyone kind of glossed...
As the majority of an application’s presentation layer logic moves to the client it induces changes that impact the entire application delivery ecosystem
The increase in mobile clients, in demand for rich, interactive web applications, and the introduction of the API as one of the primary means by which information and content is shared across applications on the web is slowly but surely forcing a change back toward a traditional three-tiered architecture, if not in practice then in theory. This change will have a profound impact on the security, delivery, and scalability of the application but it also forces changes in...
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...
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...
… 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...
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. ...
Standardization at the application platform layer enables specialization of infrastructure resulting in greater economy of scale In all versions of Dungeons and Dragons there is a nifty arcane spell for wizards called “Mirror Image.” What this nifty spell does is duplicates an image of the wizard. This is useful because it’s really hard for all those nasty orcs, goblins, and bugbears to tell which image is the real one. Every image does exactly what the “real” wizard does. The wizard is not impacted by the dismissal of one of the images; neither are the other images impacted by...
No, scalability may not be rocket science but it is computer science and not nearly as easy as it might appear In what might be considered an ironic statement, scalability in cloud computing environments is as much about decreasing capacity as it is increasing capacity. I know, puts my knickers in a twist, too. The description of “scalability” associated with cloud computing in almost every definition that’s put forth1, however, clearly indicates the need for elastic scalability and it is that modifier that makes all the difference in the world. ...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
There’s compression, and then there’s compression. One of the most common means of improving application performance is to reduce the size of the data being exchanged as redress for inherent network protocol behavior that can cause excessive delays in delivery of application data. Compression is often enabled to achieve this goal, and because most data being delivered to applications is text-based (XML, HTML, JSON) this technique generally works quite well. Depending on the architecture of the application delivery network, however, there may be other “types” of compression that can be used in addition to the “compression” typically associated...
The benefits of automation and orchestration do not come solely from virtualization. Virtualization has benefits, there is no arguing that. But let’s not get carried away and attribute all the benefits associated with cloud computing and automation to one member of the “game changing” team: virtualization. I recently read one of the all-too-common end-of-year prediction blogs on virtualization and 2010 that managed to say with what I think was a straight face that virtualization of the network is what makes it “fluid”. From: 2010 Virtualization Predictions - The Year the Network Becomes Fluid and Virtual ...
There’s been increasing interest in Infrastructure 2.0 of late that’s encouraging to those of us who’ve been, well, pushing it uphill against the focus on cloud computing and virtualization for quite some time now. What’s been the most frustrating about bringing this concept to awareness has been that cloud computing is one of the most tangible examples of both what infrastructure 2.0 is and what it can do and virtualization is certainly one of the larger technological drivers of infrastructure 2.0 capable solutions today. So despite the frustration associated with cloud computing and virtualization stealing the stage,...
Vertical scalability used to require optimizations inside the application, at the code level. Cloud computing changes the nature of vertical scalability and, one hopes, will lead to a new model of scalability based on the capabilities of Infrastructure 2.0 and increasingly granular resource management capabilities. RightScale recently offered up its own analysis of Amazon Usage Estimates and while the details they provide on Amazon usage from their vantage point is very interesting I found one of their related observations even more fascinating: In earlier days the predominant method of scaling was by...
Amazon’s ELB is an exciting mix of well-executed infrastructure 2.0 and the proper application of SOA, but it takes a lot of work to make anything infrastructure look that easy. The notion of Elastic Load Balancing, as recently brought to public attention by Amazon’s offering of the capability, is nothing new. The basic concept is pure Infrastructure 2.0 and the functionality offered via the API has long been available on several application delivery controllers for many years. In fact, looking through the options for Amazon’s offering leaves me feeling a bit, oh, 1999. As if load balancing hasn’t...
One of the benefits of Infrastructure 2.0 is connectedness: the ability to collect and share pertinent data regarding the health and performance of applications and infrastructure services. Based on that data a dynamic infrastructure can adapt on-demand and make decisions that respect real capacity limits, not artificial ones. Randy Hayes writes “The CapCal Blog”, and describes CapCal as being about “measuring the performance and scalability of web apps using real, production level workloads.” In A Very Delicate Load Balancing Act he discusses the impact of load balancing configurations on the capacity and performance of applications. ...
The term “Infrastructure 2.0” seems to be as well understood as the term “cloud computing.” It means different things to different people, apparently, and depends heavily on the context and roles of those involved in the conversation. This shouldn’t be surprising; the term “Web 2.0” is also variable and often depends on the context of the conversation. The use of the versioning moniker is meant, in both cases however, to represent a fundamental shift in the way the technologies are leveraged by people. In the case of Web 2.0 it’s about the shift toward interactive, integrated web applications used to...
Operational efficiency in the cloud comes in part from automation and orchestration as well as from the outsourcing of management and maintenance of the hardware. While you can’t achieve the latter without cloud or hosting externally, you can realize a lot of the same efficiencies in a traditional architecture just by leveraging existing collaborative capabilities of infrastructure 2.0. Glenn Gruber of Software Industry Insights in “Who’ll Be the First to Offer Cash for Infrastructure” (which is a great read in general) says: And for those who are thinking about evaluating a private cloud...
Infrastructure 2.0 requires collaboration. Collaboration requires the ability to communicate. The ability to communicate requires integration. But how that integration will happen may shape the future of infrastructure and network architecture. There is a growing recognition of the basic problems associated with the rapid rate of change inherent in on-demand architectures (cloud) and the complexity that comes from virtualized data centers. Challenges such as IP address and application management, visibility, and last but not least, integration. Yes, that most dreaded of all technology concepts has finally come to the network. The...
There’s more than one way to address the rapid rate of change in infrastructure supporting a dynamic environment. We spend a lot of time talking about how software and systems and standards are the ultimate solution to addressing the rapid rate of change in the association between applications and IP addresses in a dynamic infrastructure. But sometimes you have look down the stack to find a simpler, more economical and honestly, elegant, answer to the challenge of managing the problem associated with virtualized and cloud computing architectures. We need to take another look at the link layer...
Sharing is core to a successful cloud implementation but not something every organization does well. How do you encourage business stakeholders to play well with others? In most definitions of “cloud computing” there lies a central, key component: shared resources. It is the sharing of resources, in fact, through which many of the benefits of reduced operating expenses are supposed to be achieved. It is the sharing of resources – or perceived inability to share resources – that confounds some folks when discussing private cloud, although there are several ways in which sharing of resources can...
Leveraging Java EE and dynamic infrastructure to enable a shared resource, on-demand scalable infrastructure – without server virtualization Many pundits and experts allude to architectures that are cloud-like in their ability to provide on-demand scalability but do not – I repeat do not – rely on virtualization, i.e. virtual machines. But rarely – if ever – is this possibility described. So everyone says it can be done, but no one wants to tell you how. Maybe that’s because it appears, on the surface, to not be cloud. And perhaps there’s truth to that appearance. It is more...
F5 and VMware demonstrate live migration of a virtualized application across clouds without downtime or user disruption Cloud is reaching the peak of possibilities and that (often) means just more paper solutions. You know the ones; the ones that exist only on paper (or in blogs as the case may be). Those paper solutions need to exist because the ideas need to come first either out of necessity, i.e. to solve a specific problem, or out of a desire to find new ways to leverage emerging technology, like virtualization. But still, you’d like to see some of these...
How to leverage a “private virtual cloud” such as Amazon VPC with your own dynamic infrastructure A couple of blog posts on Amazon’s recent announcement of its VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) have made much of the fact that the resources available within Amazon’s cloud via VPC aren’t public. These same commentaries seem to believe that this makes the resources not very valuable. One author called it a “terrible” implementation because “users can’t expose clients to the internet and can’t assign them IP addresses.” I understand how some might reach that conclusion if they...
Secure, optimized tunnels to a remote site, e.g. the cloud. Haven’t we been here before? In the continuing discussion around Business Intelligence in the cloud comes a more better (yes I did, in fact, say that) discussion of the reasons why you’d want to put BI in the cloud and, appropriately, some of the challenges. As previously mentioned, BI data sets are, as a rule, huge. Big. Bigger than big. Ginormous, even. One of the considerations, then, if you’re going to leverage a cloud-based business intelligence offering – or any offering in which very, very large data sets/files...
The real power behind cloud is processes, and those don’t come out of a box VMworld, in case you’ve been out of touch, is approaching fairly quickly. As with any trade show/conference there’s likely to be a lot of announcements about this and that and oh, of course, that too. What is interesting about cloud computing and virtualization is that most of the really exciting announcements are not going to be about new products or new features. You heard me, they aren’t going to be about new products or features. The foundations for cloud...
You’re going to need a dynamic infrastructure lest you effectively negate the gains achieved by higher VM densities In the continuing saga of “do more with less” comes a new phrase that’s being tossed around: VM density. For example, VMware puts forth the notion that the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of virtualization technology must consider VM density, saying, “Density matters in a many-to-one relationship.” VMware illustrates this concept in the context of TCO, but in general an increasing number of solutions are beginning to tout not only the benefits of higher VM density, but of their solutions ability...
I was recording a podcast last week on the subject of cloud with an emphasis on security and of course we talked in general about cloud and definitions. During the discussion the subject of “private cloud” computing was raised and one of the participants asked a very good question: Some of the core benefits of cloud computing come from shared resources. In a private cloud, where does the sharing of resources come from? I had to stop and think about that one for a second, because it’s not something I’ve really thought about before. But it was...
Without processes the cloud is not a cloud So you’ve virtualized your application infrastructure using VMware or Microsoft or the “virtualization solution de jour.” You probably also virtualized the application access via an application delivery solution so you can provide scalability on-demand. You might have even virtualized your storage to make it more efficient. Basically, you’re all ready to go and operators are standing by … And therein lies the problem: operators are standing by. The on-demand piece of your little private cloud is almost entirely managed by human beings, which means...
The concept of a server needs to go the way of the dodo One of the reasons I enjoy Twitter is that quite frequently – if you’re following the right people – you’ll see a tweet that is absolutely profound despite its simplicity and the constraints placed upon the author. Recently we were having a mini-discussion on Twitter regarding the definition of availability that elicited just such a golden nugget from botchagalupe: “Apps designed for a cloud should remove the ‘server’ concept.” First, I really like the use of the article “a” in...
Context, it’s always about context (or the lack thereof) I received a call recently that most people have probably received: our banking institution just wanted to verify that yes, that was Don or I making purchases at midnight in Wisconsin and then later in Indiana and yet again that afternoon in Ohio. That’s a good thing, I’m sure, as they’re just trying to watch our back. But later in the day I tried to make a purchase and was, horror of horrors, denied. The bank, when called, seemed matter-of-fact about the situation. The security flag hadn’t been...
Availability means more than the dread “d” word The focus on making servers unhackable to prevent service disruption (that’s such a politic way of saying the dread “d” word – downtime) is admirable but exposes the tendency of technical folks to go down rat holes when discussing application delivery challenges and specifically the challenge of assuring availability of applications and services. What generally seems to happen when we start talking about availability in the cloud is that we go down the rat hole of talking specifically about the cloud and not applications deployed...
So once we have the intercloud, what are we going to do with it? Some debate is heating up, at least on Twitter, about a variety of cloud-related topics. As James Urquhart pointed out in his “Three debates that will benefit cloud computing” debate is good, because it fuels innovation and drives markets forward. One of the things that’s frustrating about new technology and concepts is that terminology often confuses the discussion. We periodically still see discussions – and debates – around the definition of cloud computing, after all, so that shouldn’t be surprising at all....
Can intercloud intelligence eliminate the impact of intercontinental latency? Ken has always posited that it would be not only kewl but highly efficient if your data center could “follow the sun.” We all know that application performance is affected – positively and negatively – by distance. So if you’re a global organization with one primary data center that means some folks are going to have to settle for poorer application performance. That pesky speed of light law absolutely must be obeyed, for now at least, and intercontinental traffic has high latency, period. So let’s introduce the...
You can’t differentiate until you do something different Gartner analyst and cloud pundit Lydia Leong reminds us that without differentiation, all clouds look pretty much the same. “These are traits that it doesn’t take a genius to think of. Most are known requirements established through a decade and a half of hosting industry experience. If you want to differentiate, you need to get beyond them.” [emphasis added] She lists traits common to most cloud providers: premium equipment, VMWare-based, private VLANs, private connectivity, and co-located dedicated gear but doesn’t really get into...
I’m heading out today for a little time off and so you’ll have to make due the rest of the week without any (new) words of wisdom from me. I know, try to pull yourself together. You’ll live, really, and I’ll be back Monday with something interesting, promise. While I’m out, you might consider checking out some of the blogs I follow myself on a regular basis. They’re always full of interesting tidbits and stories and wisdom on a variety of subjects, and if you don’t follow them yourself you might find something interesting in them. ...
Balancing Cost, Performance, and Capacity in the Cloud There is a huge difference between provisioning applications to support capacity and provisioning them to support performance requirements. That as capacity increases performance decreases is one of the truisms of scalability that is likely to be one of the first axioms of cloud computing that will bite us in the proverbial rear-end while simultaneously reaching for our wallets. Alistair Croll of BitCurrent has a couple of great charts that illustrate this point perfectly. He then goes on to discuss how that affects cloud computing in “The cloud’s...
When SOA was declared dead there was a spate of articles and blogs on why the architecture “died.” Most pundits came to the conclusion that like many innovations it wasn’t the technology to blame but rather people. Architects lacked the skills to properly leverage SOA; business stakeholders failed to look at SOA as a strategic architecture, choosing instead to use it as a tactical integration-solving solution; network and systems’ administrators did not understand the unique characteristics and issues a well-designed SOA raised within the network and on systems; and developers were loathe to “reuse” and “share” services despite alternate...
Attackers say, we can go where we want to; we can leave our code behind… There’s probably a raid going on right now in Naxxramas and the attackers are almost certainly doing the Safety Dance. They probably learned the Safety Dance the same way I learned about it; from someone well-versed in its intricate steps. See, if you don’t know the Safety Dance and you come up against Heigan the Unclean, well… he’s not called Heigan the Unclean for nothing. You will not survive. Not even if you happen to have a Holocaust Cloak at...
There is a tendency to describe every device on a network as simply “the network” regardless of whether that device is dedicated to security, or application delivery (layer 4-7), or actual network (layer 2-3) functionality. It’s an artifact of aging data center architecture models that there exists an artificial line of demarcation between web and application servers and everything else. We used to depict “everything else” as a cloud, but with the emergence of The Cloud doing so simply complicates discussions even further because the “network” necessary to support a dynamic, on-demand operational model of computing like “cloud” is more...
There’s apparently been a bit of confusion over what, exactly, F5 thinks of cloud computing as an organization based on a recent blog post. I thought I’ve been fairly clear on where F5 stands in terms of cloud computing but I may be suffering what’s known as the “curse of knowledge”, which means I am so deeply entrenched in F5’s view of cloud that I forget that other people don’t have the luxury of that knowledge. So I’d like to take this opportunity to clear up any misconceptions that may be floating around and just set the record...
As a telecommuter – and one that lives in that technological mecca of the midwest, Green Bay – I don’t often get the chance to talk face to face with, well, anyone. Being conscripted into booth duty at Interop this week means I get to talk to people with real problems and with ones that can quickly bring anyone with their head in the clouds back down to earth. Imagine if you will an application. A real, honest to goodness client-server application. Not web-based, but client-server; like the kind we wrote in Delphi and Visual Basic back in...
The consensus seems to be, at least from the myriad surveys, studies, and research, that cloud as a model is the right answer, it’s just the location that’s problematic for most organizations. Organizations aren’t ignoring reality; they know there are real benefits associated with cloud computing. But they aren’t yet – and may never be – willing to give up control. And there are good reasons to maintain that control, from security to accountability to agility. But the “people” still want the benefits of cloud, so the question is: how do we put...
If they aren’t now then Infrastructure 2.0 may force them in that direction - and vice versa. My brother (yes, it does run in the family) has a degree in computer science which, by most definitions, makes him a developer. That’s the focus of most computer science focused degree programs, much to the chagrin of the myriad other IT-focused specialties like networking, security, and operations. Interestingly enough, he worked his way through college as a sysadmin and his first job out of college was as a sysadmin. And now he’s doing a little of...
Don’t confuse computing services with infrastructure services. We aren’t there yet. The subtext to the cloud computing discussion is subtle, as is the wont of subtext. But it is clear that underlying all the concerns about cloud computing is a common theme: control. Whether we’re talking about reliability or security, it should be obvious if you’re reading between and beneath the lines that the biggest stumbling block to massive cloud adoption is the issue of control. There is a very real difference between on-demand computing and on-demand infrastructure. What the cloud provides now, and is described...
OVF (Open Virtualization Format) apparently just isn’t getting enough mindshare out there in the discussions of cloud computing that focus on portability and interoperability. The goal of OVF is to provide a portable, interoperable non-vendor specific meta-data that describes an application, its virtual container, and the attributes necessary to deploy it in a new environment with minimal human intervention. This will, allegedly, allow it to move seamlessly from cloud to cloud, drifting ever-so-gently and making the entire process appear effortless. Given that lofty goal, it’s no surprise that Jon Oltsik, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, wonders...
Remember when…it was sprawl or nothing? Remember when…you had to choose between security and speed? Remember when…you had to choose between agility and performance? It’s time for a change; a change that brings freedom and choice to the data center and puts IT back in control of its own architectural destiny. Technorati Tags: F5,revolution,data center,choice,change,freedom,agility,infrastructure,infrastructure 2.0,dynamic infrastructure,web,internet,video,blog Related articles by Zemanta Unified Ontology of Cloud Computing (johnmwillis.com) ...
One of the oft cited reasons in surveys that enterprises aren’t flocking to the cloud like lemmings off a cliff is “lack of control”. Problem is that articles and pundits quoting this reason never really define what that means. After all, cloud providers appear to be cognizant of the need for users (IT) to be able to define thresholds, reserve instances, deploy a variety of “infrastructure”, and manage their cloud deployment themselves. The lack of control, however, is at least partially about control over the infrastructure itself and, perhaps, complicated by the shallow definition of “infrastructure” by cloud...
During my reading of the Internet I happened across an ad on Network World that stopped me in my tracks. And not because it was one of those “pre-ads” that you can’t avoid, nor because it was cool or flashy or said something particularly witty. No, it stopped me in disbelief because it implied that someone else (a vendor) was in charge of your data center architecture; that you had nothing to do but sit back and wait for them to let you know when it – and you – were ready to take the next step. Look,...
The focus of cloud and virtualization discussions today revolve primarily around hypervisors, virtual machines, automation, network and application network infrastructure; on the dynamic infrastructure necessary to enable a truly dynamic data center. In all the hype we’ve lost sight of the impact these changes will have on other critical IT systems such as network systems management (NSM) and application performance management (APM). You know their names: IBM, CA, Compuware, BMC, HP. There are likely one or more of their systems monitoring and managing applications and systems in your data center right now. They provide alerts, notifications,...
When folks are asked to define the cloud they invariably, somewhere in the definition, bring up the point that “users shouldn’t care” about the actual implementation. When asked to diagram a cloud environment we end up with two clouds: one representing the “big cloud” and one inside the cloud, representing the infrastructure we aren’t supposed to care about, usually with some pretty graphics representing applications being delivered out of the cloud over the Internet. But yet some of us need to care what’s obscured; the folks tasked with building out a cloud environment need to know what’s...
We've been talking a lot about the benefits of Infrastructure 2.0, or Dynamic Infrastructure, a lot about why it's necessary, and what's required to make it all work. But we've never really laid out what it is, and that's beginning to lead to some misconceptions. As Daryl Plummer of Gartner pointed out recently, the definition of cloud computing is still, well, cloudy. Multiple experts can't agree on the definition, and the same is quickly becoming true of dynamic infrastructure. That's no surprise; we're at the beginning of what Gartner would call the hype cycle for both concepts, so...
For as many deployment models for packaged software as exist there are an equal or higher number of software licensing models. I used to think integration of software packages was the biggest challenge when evaluating them for Network Computing but the truth is that calculating the cost of licensing for that software was even more of a challenge. And realistic comparisons? Nearly impossible. The old models of software licensing are wholly incompatible with cloud computing and on-demand environments. Enterprise software is in a category unto itself when it comes to licensing. It isn't like drive-by...
One of the reasons behind some folks pushing for infrastructure as virtual appliances is the on-demand nature of a virtualized environment. When network and application delivery infrastructure hits capacity in terms of throughput - regardless of the layer of the application stack at which it happens - it's frustrating to think you might need to upgrade the hardware rather than just add more compute power via a virtual image. The truth is that this makes sense. The infrastructure supporting a virtualized environment should be elastic. It should be able to dynamically expand without requiring a new network architecture,...
It has been suggested more than once, by folks normally considered rational, that in a cloud computing implementation everything - and I mean everything - should be virtualized. Even the infrastructure. The hype surrounding virtualization has spread not just to applications and their virtual image deployment as a means to achieve dynamic horizontal scale but also to infrastructure, to routers and switches and security devices. Indeed, there are a good number of infrastructure vendors currently offering and others feverishly working on virtual appliance versions of hardware devices for deployment in cloud and virtual computing environments. Part...
dy·nam·ic (adj) Characterized by continuous change, activity, or progress flex·i·ble (adj) Responsive to change; adaptable. Able to bend without breaking Infrastructure 2.0 is, at its core, about not just the network but the entire infrastructure evolving to a new level of interconnectedness, one in which the underlying infrastructure devices become flexible and adaptable; capable of responding to the continuous change in the next generation data center without breaking. The demands placed upon infrastructure by virtualization, consolidation, and the cloud require that networks grow out of their static configuration models and adopt a more...
