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virtualization
There are 124 entries for the tag virtualization
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In the networking side of the world, vendors often seek to differentiate their solutions not just based on features and functionality, but on form-factor, as well. Using a descriptor to impart an understanding of the deployment form-factor of a particular solution has always been quite common: appliance, hardware, platform, etc… Sometimes these terms come from analysts, other times they come from vendors themselves. Regardless of where they originate, they quickly propagate and unfortunately often do so without the benefit of a clear definition. A reader recently asked a question that reminded me that we’ve done just that...
posted @ Thursday, March 11, 2010 3:31 AM |
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The advent of virtualization brought about awareness of the need to decouple applications from IP addresses. The same holds true on the client side – perhaps even more so than in the data center. I could quote The Prisoner, but that would be so cliché, wouldn’t it? Instead, let me ask a question: just which IP address am I? Am I the one associated with the gateway that proxies for my mobile phone web access? Or am I the one that’s currently assigned to my laptop – the one that will change tomorrow because today I am...
posted @ Thursday, March 04, 2010 3:54 AM |
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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...
posted @ Monday, March 01, 2010 3:53 AM |
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What is needed to customize the cloud is a pair of data center ruby slippers called Infrastructure 2.0. Frank Gens of IDC discussed the “New IDC IT Cloud Services Survey: Top Benefits and Challenges” in his blog and what is not surprising is that security continues to top the challenges associated with cloud services. What may be surprising to some is the increasing focus on customization. It shouldn’t be. As customers continue to push at the boundaries of the cloud computing model they will inevitably find it unable to meet some need they have, such as customization....
posted @ Friday, February 26, 2010 3:31 AM |
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Managing a virtual machine is not the same thing as managing the stuff inside it. I’ve been noticing a disturbing, though not unexpected, trend in the world of virtualization and cloud computing around management of infrastructure, particularly around virtual network appliances (VNAs). Specifically this trend is claiming the ability to manage virtualized infrastructure. You’d think I’d be happy about that. I probably would - if the solutions were actually capable of managing the infrastructure. Digging into these management solutions shows that for the most part the definition of the term “manage”...
posted @ Wednesday, February 24, 2010 3:56 AM |
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Surprised? I was, but I shouldn’t have been. While working on other topics I ran across an interesting slide in a presentation given by Microsoft at TechEd Europe 2009 on virtualization and Exchange. Specifically the presenter called out the average 12% overhead incurred from the hypervisor on systems in internal testing. Intuitively it seems obvious that a hypervisor will incur overhead; it is, after all, an application that is executing and thus requires CPU, I/O, and RAM to perform its tasks. That led to me to wonder if there was more data on the overhead from other...
posted @ Thursday, February 18, 2010 3:47 AM |
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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...
posted @ Monday, February 15, 2010 4:06 AM |
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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...
posted @ Thursday, February 11, 2010 3:30 AM |
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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...
posted @ Wednesday, February 10, 2010 4:35 AM |
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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...
posted @ Monday, February 08, 2010 4:35 AM |
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We worry about VM sprawl but what about device sprawl? Management of a multitude of network-deployed solutions can be as operationally inefficient as managing hundreds of virtual machines, and far more detrimental to the health and performance of your applications. Turning them all into virtual network appliances that might need scaling themselves? That’s even badder. But all you hardware fanbois best not smirk too much because the proliferation of hardware network devices is only slightly less badder than the potential problems arising from virtual network appliance sprawl. WAIT, WHY IS DEVICE SPRAWL BAD AGAIN?...
posted @ Friday, February 05, 2010 4:02 AM |
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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...
posted @ Thursday, February 04, 2010 4:43 AM |
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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...
posted @ Tuesday, February 02, 2010 3:36 AM |
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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...
posted @ Monday, February 01, 2010 3:52 AM |
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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...
posted @ Tuesday, January 26, 2010 4:02 AM |
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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 ...
posted @ Tuesday, January 19, 2010 3:08 AM |
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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,...
posted @ Monday, January 18, 2010 3:35 AM |
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Infrastructure 2.0 enabled application delivery platforms have more than a few things in common with the Transformers. Like Autobots, there’s more to it than meets the eye. If you’re familiar with the mythology of the Transformers – and perhaps even if you aren’t – you know that they key attribute of Transformers is their ability to take on “alternate modes” such as cars, trucks, and winged vehicles simply by scanning the object and then adapting their own form to match. One of the key premises of Infrastructure 2.0 is also the ability of network and...
posted @ Tuesday, January 12, 2010 3:02 AM |
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If you’re just trading “specialized” hardware for “dedicated” hardware you’re losing more than you’re gaining. Apparently I have not gotten the memo detailing why specialized hardware is a Very Bad Thing(TM) . I’ve looked for it, I really have, but I cannot find it anywhere. What I did find was any number of random press releases announcing how “virtual version X” of some network or application infrastructure solution was now virtualized and hey, you don’t specialized hardware to run it. These random press releases neglect, I might add, to mention that there's very little difference between the requirement...
posted @ Monday, January 11, 2010 3:21 AM |
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The wrong load balancing algorithm can be detrimental to the performance and scalability of your web applications. When you’re mixing and matching virtual or physical servers you need to take care with how you configure your Load balancer – and that includes cloud-based load balancing services. Load balancers do not at this time, unsurprisingly, magically choose the right algorithm for distributing requests for a given environment. One of the nice things about a load balancing solution that comes replete with application-specific templates is that all the work required to determine the optimal configuration for the load balancer and...
posted @ Tuesday, January 05, 2010 3:50 AM |
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load balancing intermediaries have long used the terms “virtual server” and “virtual IP address”. With the widespread adoption of virtualization these terms have become even more confusing to the uninitiated. Here’s how load balancing and application delivery use the terminology.
I often find it easiest to explain the difference between a “virtual server” and a “virtual IP address (VIP)” by walking through the flow of traffic as it is received from the client.
When a client queries for “www.yourcompany.com” they get an IP address, of course. In many cases if the site is served by a load balancer or...
posted @ Monday, December 28, 2009 6:00 AM |
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Here comes St. Beaker and Santa Cloud … Twas two weeks past deployment and all through the house Echoed taps on a keyboard and clicks from a mouse The apps were all running inside VMware In hopes compute resources soon would they share. The dashboard showed statuses green and not red our admins had thoughts of going home in their heads The director was ready to it a wrap and I began...
posted @ Wednesday, December 23, 2009 6:06 AM |
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Beware the danger of building out isolated network and application network infrastructures in the cloud lest we end up with silos from which it is difficult to escape. While writing a separate post on the business value of public versus private cloud computing investments I specifically called out the fact that infrastructure – virtual or physical – provisioned in a cloud environment is applicable only to that cloud environment; it really can’t be shared within the enterprise architecture or other public cloud computing environments, for that matter. That led to considering the impact...
posted @ Tuesday, December 08, 2009 3:31 AM |
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There are many good reasons to go down the virtual infrastructure road. The illusion that it’s cheaper than dedicated hardware solutions is not one of them.
I was reading an interesting predictive article on WAN optimization that contends that virtualized WAN optimization controllers (WOC) are, well, just better than sliced bread. One of the reasons why the author opined this way was presented as the great benefits of horizontal scalability (linear) in cloud computing environments.
Savings and scalability. This approach ensures that there is no need for dedicated hardware to support WAN optimization, saving on CAPEX and OPEX. Cost...
posted @ Tuesday, December 01, 2009 3:52 AM |
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Sometimes the best answer to a problem is to hit the reset button, but it should probably be the last answer, not the first. My cohort Pete Silva attended the 2009 Cloud Computing and Virtualization Conference & Expo and offered up a summary of one of the sessions he enjoyed (‘Cloud Security - It's Nothing New; It Changes Everything!’ (pdf)) in a recent post, “Virtualization is Real” One of the sessions I enjoyed was ‘Cloud Security - It's Nothing New; It Changes Everything!’ (pdf) from Glenn Brunette, a Distinguished Engineer and Chief...
posted @ Friday, November 20, 2009 4:15 AM |
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Cloud computing management functionality and standards are right now laser-focused on virtual machines, and most APIs include the ability to stop,start,launch,etc…at that level of the infrastructure. This is because the application is still insulated by its virtualized environment. The “depth” of management and standards efforts today stops at the hard shell of the virtualization layer and leaves the soft, chewy application center alone. This means nothing is really all that different for developers. But it could, and some might argue should, be different. The development of a web-application for a cloud computing environment today is really...
posted @ Monday, November 09, 2009 3:57 AM |
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With just a few clicks you, too, can create a cloud computing environment. But if you’re like a lot of organizations, you may not know what to do with it after that. The latest version of Ubuntu Server (9.10) includes the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), which is actually powered by Eucalyptus. The ability to deploy a “cloud” on any server running Ubuntu is really quite amazing, especially given the compatibility of Eucalyptus with Amazon and the plethora of application images available for nearly immediate deployment. It supports both a public and private option, and a hybrid model, and...
posted @ Tuesday, November 03, 2009 5:30 AM |
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Cloud computing is, at its core, about using resources in the most operational and financially efficient manner possible. It’s about spreading resources around and sharing them to achieve greater scalability with fewer investments in hardware and software. But what if you aren’t moving to cloud? Or virtualization? Or perhaps you are, but the benefits won’t be really seen until you actually get enough resources shared across your organization. Isn’t there any other way to better utilize the resources you have now to improve the bottom line? Yes, yes, there is. And the best part is that these methods...
posted @ Thursday, October 29, 2009 3:30 AM |
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Carrying over the provisioning and capacity planning techniques used in a traditional data center to cloud computing negates the full power of the Force cloud computing. One of the benefits of cloud computing is supposed to be efficiency, particularly in the utilization of compute resources. Over-provisioning of compute resources has long been one way in which IT combats the need for scalability and availability of applications but this often leaves a large percentage of compute resources unused. The utilization rule once employed as a means to ensure availability and performance of applications, i.e. no device...
posted @ Wednesday, October 28, 2009 3:32 AM |
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Paul Miller, who pens Cloud of Data, had an interesting perspective during a chat this week on what effect infrastructure upgrade cycles might have on cloud computing adoption. Paul postulated that as these servers fail and organizations have to make the decision to replace or not replace them that cloud computing becomes a more viable option. That seems a reasonable assumption, especially if the primary reason organizations are evaluating cloud computing is driven by a desire to reduce costs. But in a recent post Paul posits this might not be the case, citing a recent ongoing study from Avanade in...
posted @ Friday, October 23, 2009 5:39 AM |
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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. ...
posted @ Wednesday, October 14, 2009 4:20 AM |
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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...
posted @ Thursday, October 08, 2009 4:36 AM |
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The problem of AJAX, interstitial request patterns, and the effect on the performance and availability of your applications. There are several reasons why applications need to be scaled out but they all come down to essentially addressing the same core problem: resource consumption. In the case of networked applications this often means specifically TCP connection resources. Now most people don’t think of TCP connections as a resource, per se, but every web and application server has an upper limit to the number of TCP connections it can hold open at any given time. In some cases this...
posted @ Wednesday, October 07, 2009 3:53 AM |
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A question I often hear is “Why don’t you just move load balancing/application delivery into a virtual appliance model?” My answer is almost always “That’s the wrong question.” The question that should be asked is “What are the potential impacts to the infrastructure and application?” Because the whole point of deploying an application delivery solution – virtual appliance or hardware – is about improving some facet of the infrastructure in order to better deliver your applications. So in order to determine whether using a virtual appliance is a good idea or not you have to ask what the impacts might...
posted @ Tuesday, October 06, 2009 3:43 AM |
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Isolation of resources in “the cloud” is moving providers toward hosted data centers and away from shared resource computing. Do we need to go back to the future and re-examine mainframe computing as a better model for isolated applications capable of sharing resources? James Urquhart in “Enterprise cloud computing coming of age” gives a nice summary of several “private” cloud offerings; that is, isolated and dedicated resources contracted out to enterprises for a fee. James ends his somewhat prosaic discussion of these offerings with a note that this “evolution” is just the beginning of a long process. ...
posted @ Monday, September 21, 2009 3:21 AM |
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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...
posted @ Friday, September 18, 2009 3:19 AM |
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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...
posted @ Friday, September 11, 2009 4:01 AM |
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Infrastructure 2.0 is not just about automation, but rather is about the orchestration of processes, which are actually two different things: the former is little more than advanced scripting, the latter requires participation and decision making on the part of the infrastructure involved. Automation is the process of codifying – usually through a scripting language but not always – a specific task. This task usually has one goal, though it may have several steps that have to be performed to accomplish it. An example would be “bring this server down for maintenance.” This may require quiescing connections...
posted @ Thursday, September 10, 2009 9:45 AM |
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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...
posted @ Wednesday, September 02, 2009 4:03 AM |
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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...
posted @ Monday, August 31, 2009 4:33 AM |
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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...
posted @ Monday, August 31, 2009 3:48 AM |
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Cloud changes how we deliver applications but we’re still delivering applications With all the hype around cloud it’s easy to get caught up in deployment models and architectures and how much money it is/is not going to save us and, of course, with the cool factor that always surrounds such innovation. But when we get our heads too far up in the clouds we forget what we’re really doing: delivering applications. Whether it’s thin-client, fat-client, browser-based, client/server, three-tier, n-tier, traditional, .NET, Java EE, or cloud we are still all focused on the same goal: deliver an application. ...
posted @ Thursday, August 27, 2009 3:57 AM |
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Cloud providers know the secret to a successful cloud computing implementation is integration between the infrastructure and virtualization Ever notice that cloud providers are v e r y reluctant to reveal on what foundation their cloud computing architectures are laid? Most providers don’t want to share their “secret sauce” because, well, then everyone else could get into the game as well. While it is certainly true that the infrastructure – and specifically the application delivery infrastructure – you choose to lay the foundation for a cloud computing architecture can affect your ability to succeed and innovate...
posted @ Tuesday, August 25, 2009 10:17 AM |
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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...
posted @ Monday, August 24, 2009 4:07 AM |
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Idle resources will always need to exist, especially in a cloud architecture With IT focused on efficiency – for reduction in operating expenses and in the interests of creating a greener computing center – there’s a danger that we’ll attempt to achieve 100% efficiency. You know, the data center in which no compute resources are wasted; all are applied toward performing some task – whether administrative, revenue generating, development cycles, or business-related – and no machine is allowed to sit around idle. Because, after all, idleness is the devil’s playground, isn’t it? But before...
posted @ Wednesday, August 19, 2009 3:17 AM |
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Amazon EC2 and S3 are no more or less safe than they were last week despite hype around PCI compliance admission The recent admission/announcement that “Amazon EC2 is not PCI compliant” (this is not exactly true, but we’ll get to that later) has set off a rush of blogs, articles, and tweets that say, in effect, EC2 is no longer “safe”. But a lack of compliance does not make Amazon any more less safe than achieving PCI compliance makes a site more safe. Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet, I submit as proof the...
posted @ Tuesday, August 18, 2009 3:29 AM |
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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...
posted @ Friday, August 14, 2009 3:17 AM |
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When you’re thinking about deploying an application it would be good to remember Yoda’s words regarding the Sith: Always two there are, a master and an apprentice. ALWAYS TWO THERE ARE Like Sith Lords, there should always be two instances of any given application available. Just in case. And that doesn’t mean two virtual servers – unless each one is on a different piece of hardware. If you want to ensure availability then you absolutely must not confine your application to one piece of hardware. ...
posted @ Monday, August 03, 2009 4:26 AM |
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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...
posted @ Friday, July 31, 2009 3:41 AM |
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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...
posted @ Wednesday, July 29, 2009 4:34 AM |
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Can the inherent abstraction of virtualization succeed where SOA did not? My first read through a post on the Cloud Front Office led me to scoff disdainfully at the re-emergence of a concept central to a successful SOA implementation: the service catalog. Oh, we called it "registry" and then "registry/repository (reg/rep)" and finally "governance" but the concept behind it was exactly the same. Take a gander at the description of a cloud service catalog apparently growing out of discussions that began at Structure 09: Last week I attended Structure 09, one of the...
posted @ Thursday, July 02, 2009 3:39 AM |
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I was chatting with my mother a couple weeks ago about cloud (she’s a used-to-be programmer turned project manager for a Fortune 500. Don’t look at me like that, I keep telling you it runs in the family) and one of the problems she lamented about was that folks don’t seem to understand how entrenched COBOL and the mainframe is in the organization. It’s so entrenched that given the choice between a client-server application and a COBOL application that did the same thing they chose the COBOL program because it was less expensive and they had the knowledge on staff...
posted @ Friday, June 26, 2009 2:50 AM |
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Whether you are aware of it or not, if you’re deploying applications in the cloud or building out your own “enterprise class” cloud, you’re going to be using load balancing. Horizontal scaling of applications is a fairly well understood process that involves (old skool) server virtualization of the network kind: making many servers (instances) look like one to the outside world. When you start adding instances to increase capacity for your application, load balancing necessarily gets involved as it’s the way in which horizontal scalability is implemented today. The fact that you may have already...
posted @ Thursday, June 25, 2009 3:14 AM |
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One of the tasks of an enterprise architect is to design a framework atop which developers can implement and deploy applications consistently and easily. The consistency is important for internal business continuity and reuse; common objects, operations, and processes can be reused across applications to make development and integration with other applications and systems easier. Architects also often decide where functionality resides and design the base application infrastructure framework. Application server, identity management, messaging, and integration are all often a part of such architecture designs. Rarely does the architect concern him/herself with the network infrastructure, as that is...
posted @ Wednesday, June 17, 2009 4:07 AM |
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Two steps forward, three steps back Every time there is a major shift in technology thought about architecture the question of how it will and should impact infrastructure arises. When SOA was the “next great thing” there was a spate of announcements regarding how infrastructure would not only support it but integrate into its ecosystem. This time it’s virtualization, and its impact on infrastructure both from a support standpoint and usage is getting a lot of mindshare. In a recent announcement around virtual network infrastructure Om Malik of GigaOm has some interesting commentary: As...
posted @ Tuesday, June 16, 2009 3:27 AM |
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How to optimize compute resources in a heterogeneous environment using weight/ratio-based load balancing Unless you’re starting from scratch your data center is full of physical servers of various and sundry sizes, colors, shapes, and compute resources. And even if you’re starting from scratch and you have beautiful racks of everything the same, it’s not likely to stay that way if for no other reason than, well, hardware moves on at an astonishing rate these days. So you’ve almost certainly got (or will have) a physically heterogeneous environment in terms of hardware compute resources. When you’re scaling...
posted @ Monday, June 15, 2009 4:25 AM |
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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...
posted @ Tuesday, June 09, 2009 3:20 AM |
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Automating components is easy. It’s automating processes that’s hard. The premise that if you don’t have an infrastructure comprised solely of Infrastructure 2.0 components then you cannot realize an automated, on-demand data center is, in fact, wrong. While the capabilities of modern hardware that come with Infrastructure 2.0 such as a standards-based API able to be leveraged by automation systems certainly makes the task all the more simple, it is not the only way that components can be automated. In fact, “legacy” infrastructure has been automated for years using other mechanisms that can certainly be incorporated into the...
posted @ Monday, June 08, 2009 3:14 AM |
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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...
posted @ Thursday, May 14, 2009 3:27 AM |
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Risks with virtualization is same as it ever was but different Hoff makes a good point about cloud security last month in his “The Cloud is a Fickle Mistress: DDoS&M” which was, if I may quote, “it’s the oldies and goodies that will come back to haunt us.” In other words, it’s the well-known, well-understood protocol-based attacks of uncloud computing that will be problematic for cloud computing. Security in virtualized environments and “the cloud” is indeed the “same as it ever was.” And yet it’s different, too. COLLATERAL DAMAGE While it’s...
posted @ Tuesday, May 12, 2009 3:45 AM |
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Why architecture matters not only to security but to the future of cloud computing It seems the phrase “in the cloud”, sadly, has become a marketing-hyped euphemism for “the Internet.” I say sadly because the use of cloud to refer to every and any service delivered over the Internet dirties up the cloud. It obscures the intent of cloud computing and makes it difficult for technologists in the trenches to get a handle on how cloud – both external and internal – can provide benefits and solutions to problems they have right now. The very loose use of the...
posted @ Monday, May 11, 2009 3:38 AM |
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Everyone who is involved in networking, application networking, cloud computing, and virtualization knows about and is probably planning some kind of presence at Interop. It is “the” event for a variety of inter-related industries, all revolving around network-something. For six years I attended Interop, but as a member of the press. This time, I’m on the “other side” with a vendor, and the view is very different. At a minimum, there’s a lot more planning that goes into exhibiting at such an event. There’s booth layouts to review and decisions on what kind of information...
posted @ Friday, May 08, 2009 3:42 AM |
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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...
posted @ Thursday, May 07, 2009 3:11 AM |
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You can’t afford not to invest in technologies that leverage virtualization to improve data center efficiency There’s an old adage that says you have to spend money to make money. In the data center these days this is more true than ever. You have to invest in technology capable of making your data center more efficient in order to make (save) money. A recent Robert Half Technology survey of 1400 CIOs indicates that data center efficiency and virtualization are top priorities. *CIOs were asked, "Which areas, if any, will your IT department be investing...
posted @ Tuesday, April 28, 2009 3:00 AM |
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How to defeat the ancient Jedi mind trick known as HTTP Request Smuggling. HTTP Request Smuggling (HRS) is not a new technique; it's been around since 2005. It takes advantage of architectures where one or more intermediaries (proxies) are deployed between the client and the server. HRS is can be used to poison web-caches and bypass security solutions such as web application firewalls as well as for the delivery of malicious payloads such as worms, viruses, and those used to exploit known vulnerabilities in web and application servers. The good news is that to exploit HRS,...
posted @ Thursday, April 23, 2009 3:39 AM |
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Automation isn’t some special brand of soup and there’s no “automation nazi” who can deny access to its benefits. The recent McKinsey report on cloud computing has pundits everywhere choking on their donuts and scrambling to dispute the report’s findings, which essentially end up saying “cloud ain’t cheaper.” I’m not going to rehash the arguments. I’m not going to analyze the report. But I am going to dig into a few comments on the report by Thorsten at RightScale who started off by saying: “Its claim that cloud computing (in the...
posted @ Wednesday, April 22, 2009 3:18 AM |
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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...
posted @ Tuesday, April 21, 2009 2:58 AM |
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What is this application delivery thing that everyone keeps telling me I need? Isn’t that just the latest marketing term for load balancing? A recently released Forrester report concludes that “firms must develop and integrated strategy for application delivery.” We don’t disagree with that, or with the Gartner report claiming that “Load Balancing is Dead, Time to Focus on Application Delivery.” Application delivery is the next step in the logical evolutionary path from the tactical solution of load balancing to a comprehensive application infrastructure strategy. Forrester’s research indicates that despite the fact that application...
posted @ Monday, April 20, 2009 3:40 AM |
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Leveraging virtualization as a means to create a specialized architecture can realize significant gains in performance and IT efficiency With all the talk about “packaging up applications” in a virtual machine and shipping them off to the cloud, it almost sounds as if virtualization might lead us to a return to architecting monolithic applications. The idea of packaging up everything you need to run an application in a virtual container and relieving the worries about connectors and adapters and integration is certainly appealing. But let’s take a step back from the virtualization craze as it relates to...
posted @ Thursday, April 09, 2009 3:34 AM |
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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...
posted @ Wednesday, March 18, 2009 2:49 AM |
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Owning the stack is important to security, but it’s also integral to a lot of other application delivery functions. And in some cases, it’s downright necessary. Hoff rants with his usual finesse in a recent posting with which I could not agree more. Not only does he point out the wrongness of equating SaaS with “The Cloud”, but points out the importance of “owning the stack” to security. Those that have control/ownership over the entire stack naturally have the opportunity for much tighter control over the "security" of their offerings. Why? because they...
posted @ Wednesday, February 25, 2009 3:13 AM |
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Cloud computing and virtualization promises to revolutionize the architectural principles of the data center. Shared resources enable efficiency, but ultimately the dynamism required to achieve such gains in efficiency will cause chaos in a variety of other functions throughout IT. The CIO is in for a rocky road unless a broader set of IT management vendors pave the way for a smooth ride. The (In)accuracy of Forecasting in a Dynamic Environment Organizations rely on the ability to forecast project costs and anticipated ROI in order to prioritize and set budgets for coming years. Many IT project management...
posted @ Tuesday, February 24, 2009 3:36 AM |
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If you’re looking at standardization and interoperability efforts only as they relate to providers or end-users then you’re not thinking long term nor are you really considering the potential of cloud computing and virtualization to revolutionize data center architectures. In a nutshell, if you equate “cloud” with “providers like Amazon and Google” then you don’t really get the big picture. While the ultimate goal of cloud specifications and standards is to enable interoperability and ease of migration for the end-user, approaching the creation of such standards from the point of view of the end-user will result in a...
posted @ Monday, February 23, 2009 4:06 AM |
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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,...
posted @ Thursday, February 19, 2009 4:55 AM |
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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...
posted @ Wednesday, February 18, 2009 4:14 AM |
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The issue of application state and connection management is one often discussed in the context of cloud computing and virtualized architectures. That's because the stress placed on existing static infrastructure due to the potentially rapid rate of change associated with dynamic application provisioning is enormous and, as is often pointed out, existing "infrastructure 1.0" systems are generally incapable of reacting in a timely fashion to such changes occurring in real-time. The most basic of concerns continues to revolve around IP address management. This is a favorite topic of Greg Ness at Infrastructure 2.0 and has been subsequently addressed...
posted @ Tuesday, February 10, 2009 7:59 AM |
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Rich Miller, in response to some questions I maintain on meta-data ownership and interoperability with regards to the CCIF's efforts in defining a cloud interoperability specification, had some questions of his own: The part I'm itching to ask her about ... or start a more open conversation: the possibility of "a specification regarding application network delivery metadata" which, if properly (??) abstracted and generic, could "allow the meta-data policies to be transported and applied across different cloud implementations while preserving the specific details of implementation within the cloud computing infrastructure." Whoa!! Tall order, isn't it? ...
posted @ Monday, February 09, 2009 4:19 AM |
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The February issue of Dr. Dobb's has a lot of articles about cloud computing. That's not surprising, cloud computing is very much on the minds of many folks these days and it does affect developers as much as (if not more than) most IT folks. One developer had a very interesting perspective on the topic, and very clearly spells out what he does and does not want: I don't want to write HTTP and SOAP and REST and SimpleDB queries. I don't want to be squeezed into a browser and I most certainly...
posted @ Wednesday, February 04, 2009 6:23 AM |
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The webification of applications over the years has led to the belief that client-server as an architecture is dying. But very few beliefs about architecture have been further from the truth. The belief that client-server was dying - or at least falling out of favor - was primarily due to fact that early browser technology was used only as a presentation mechanism. The browser did not execute application logic, did not participate in application logic, and acted more or less like a television: smart enough to know how to display data but not smart enough to do anything...
posted @ Monday, February 02, 2009 4:38 AM |
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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...
posted @ Wednesday, January 28, 2009 7:19 AM |
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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...
posted @ Tuesday, January 27, 2009 4:24 AM |
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Open APIs are a matter of much discussion these days in the realm of cloud computing. Just take a peek at the discussion that occurred via Twitter during Cloud Connect. Many folks were not shy in putting forth the notion that cloud portability and interoperability can only be achieved through accepted "cloud" standards. Integration standards, for the cloud, if you will. The fear is that any emerging standards will focus only the portability of the application or virtual container environment. They are likely to ignore the fact that no application is an island, and that the application delivery...
posted @ Monday, January 26, 2009 3:40 AM |
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Much of the dialogue today surrounding cloud computing and virtualization is still taking the 50,000 foot view. It's all conceptual; it's all about business value, justification, interoperability, and use cases. These are all good conversations that need to happen in order for cloud computing and virtualization-based architectures to mature, but as is often the case that leaves the folks tasked with building something right now a bit on their own. So let's ignore the high-level view for just a bit and talk reality. Many folks are being tasked, now, with designing or even implementing some form of a cloud...
posted @ Friday, January 23, 2009 4:51 AM |
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Twitter is, once again, feeling growing pains. This time the microblogging darling of the social networking world is proactively addressing the problem - by further rate limiting its APIs. Alex Payne, API Lead for Twitter, explained on the Twitter Developers mailing list: “Starting later this week we’ll be limiting those on the whitelist to 20,000 requests per hour. Yes, you read that right: twenty THOUSAND requests per hour. According to our logs, this accounts for all but the very largest consumers of our API. This is essentially a ...
posted @ Thursday, January 22, 2009 6:14 AM |
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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,...
posted @ Tuesday, January 13, 2009 4:15 AM |
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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...
posted @ Monday, January 12, 2009 4:29 AM |
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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...
posted @ Tuesday, January 06, 2009 6:56 AM |
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VM sprawl is predicted to be one of the outcomes of early adoption and excitement over virtualization. Just as IT struggled to manage the explosion of PCs and servers across the enterprise, it is predicted that now it will need to find a way to manage the explosion of virtual machines as they pop up all over the enterprise with surprising alacrity. Part of the difficulty in managing new technology is the rogue deployment of X. Whether that's physical or virtual servers is irrelevant, the challenges associated with managing what are essentially unmanaged applications and servers deployed outside...
posted @ Friday, December 19, 2008 7:10 AM |
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The INTERNET, December 18, 2008 - In what is certainly a blinding epiphany for some it was suddenly realized today that some applications are not well suited for deployment in a public cloud computing environment. With all the hype surrounding cloud computing these days it is easy to forget that there's more to enterprise applications than just some code and a database. It is a rare application that is an island in the data center, and the more integrated with other systems a given application is the less likely it is that the application will be well suited...
posted @ Thursday, December 18, 2008 4:14 AM |
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Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. I'm going to start this one by quoting Hoff who was quoting Andreas Antonopoulos of Nemertes Research Group who was paraphrasing a concept put forth by Doug Gourlay. From Rational Survivability "How about using netflow information to re-balance servers in a data center" Routing: Controlling the flow of network traffic to an optimal path between two nodes Virtual-Routing or Anti-Routing: VMotioning nodes (servers) to optimize the flow of traffic on the network. Using netflow information, identify those...
posted @ Wednesday, December 17, 2008 4:03 AM |
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Christofer Hoff, better known as @Beaker to the Twitterverse, put on his devil's advocacy hat (yes, it really is a good color for him) yesterday and questioned whether there was a need for hardware application delivery solutions in the cloud. He postulated via Twitter that application delivery functions would become part of the cloud fabric and thus whether they were implemented in hardware or software was largely irrelevant. Generally speaking we're in agreement on that one. But then he really used that devil's advocacy hat and suggested that the application delivery control layer might be virtualized and...
posted @ Tuesday, December 02, 2008 7:15 AM |
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Thanks to a tweet from @Archimedius, I found an insightful blog post from cloud computing provider startup Kaavo that essentially makes the case for a move to application-centric management rather than the traditional infrastructure-centric systems on which we've always relied. We need to have an application centric approach for deploying, managing, and monitoring applications. A software which can provisions optimal virtual servers, network, storage (storage, CPU, bandwidth, Memory, alt.) resources on-demand and provide automation and ease of use to application owners to easily and securely run and maintain their applications will be critical for the...
posted @ Monday, December 01, 2008 2:59 AM |
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Horizontal scalability achieved through the implementation of a load balancing solution is easy. It's vertical scalability that's always been and remains difficult to achieve, and it's even more important in a cloud computing or virtualized environment because now it can hurt you where it counts: the bottom line. Horizontal scalability is the ability of an application to be scaled up to meet demand through replication and the distribution of requests across a pool or farm of servers. It's the traditional load balanced model, and it's an integral component of cloud computing environments. Vertical scalability is the ability of...
posted @ Tuesday, November 25, 2008 3:29 AM |
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The diseconomy of scale so adversely affecting the IP address management space isn't limited to network infrastructure; it's crawling up the stack steadily and infecting all layers of the data center like some kind of unstoppable infrastructure management virus. That is why, even with the simple act of managing an enterprise network’s IP addresses, which is critical to the availability and proper functioning of the network, actually goes up as IP addresses are added. As TCP/IP continues to spread and take productivity to new heights, management costs are already escalating. -- Greg Ness, "What Are the Barriers to...
posted @ Monday, November 24, 2008 3:47 AM |
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Amidst the hype of cloud computing and virtualization have been the publication of several research notes regarding SOA. Adoption, they say, is slowing. Oh noes! Break out the generators, stock up on water and canned food! An article from JavaWorld quotes research firm Gartner as saying: The number of organizations planning to adopt SOA for the first time decreased to 25 percent; it had been 53 percent in last year's survey. Also, the number of organizations with no plans to adopt SOA doubled from 7 percent in 2007 to...
posted @ Friday, November 21, 2008 3:09 AM |
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Last month I happened across this amusing, and ironic, poem describing the dichotomy that exists in trying to define cloud computing. Go ahead and read it, I'll wait, it's worth the time. Seriously. I am not going to define cloud computing again. I've done that already and the point of this discussion is not what is cloud computing but rather how the cloud is beginning to separate into distinct models, each serving a different set of needs. The common theme between these models is "as a service". Some "thing" traditionally relegated to the local IT data center is...
posted @ Thursday, November 20, 2008 3:12 AM |
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The saying goes that to forget (or in some cases blatantly ignore) the mistakes of the past is to be doomed to repeat them. ODBC. BPEL. JDBC. All three are extensible standards in the software industry that cause no end of headaches and increased management overhead for folks attempting to deal with them. None of them are interoperable; you can't use the ODBC driver for Oracle to hook up to a SQL Server database, nor you can use the same BPEL produced by one BPM solution as within another. Because they're "extensible" and that extensibility leads,...
posted @ Monday, November 17, 2008 4:45 AM |
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It is often the case that application server clustering and load-balancing are mistakenly believed to be the same thing. They are not. While server clustering does provide rudimentary load-balancing functionality, it does a better job of providing basic fail-over and availability assurance than it does load-balancing. In fact, load balancing has effectively been overtaken by application delivery, which builds on load balancing but is much, much more than that today. Clustering essentially turns one instance of an application server into a controlling node, a proxy of sorts, through which requests are funneled and then distributed amongst several...
posted @ Tuesday, November 11, 2008 7:05 AM |
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Many people are concerned with virtualization security (already coined VirtSec), and they're applying that concern from the virtual images all the way down the stack, to the network infrastructure through which virtualized application traffic is delivered. The desire for network infrastructure to be itself virtualized is growing out of a perceived need to isolate application traffic at every point in the infrastructure. But the technology to isolate application traffic at layer 2 and 3 of the infrastructure already exists, and has been essentially virtualized for years.
The sudden desire for everything in the infrastructure to be virtualized completely is borne...
posted @ Friday, November 07, 2008 6:33 AM |
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The VirtualDC has asked the same question that's been roaming about in every technophile's head since the beginning of the cloud computing craze: what defines a cloud? We've chatted internally about this very question, which led to Alan's questions in a recent blog post. Lori and others have suggested that the cloud comes down to how a service is delivered rather than what is delivered, and I’m fine with that as a long term definition or categorization. I don’t think it’s narrow enough, though, to answer the question “Is Gmail a cloud service?” because...
posted @ Wednesday, November 05, 2008 6:53 AM |
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How the cloud acts and is used is more important than where it physically resides Cloud computing and SOA suffer from the same lack of prescriptive architectures. They are defined by how they act rather than what they are, or from what they are composed. They are, in a way, existential technology that cannot be confined to a simple architectural diagram but require instead a set of properties or ways of acting in order to be recognized. To over simplify and paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre's concepts of existentialism, we define ourselves (mankind) through our actions. To apply this to...
posted @ Monday, November 03, 2008 3:29 AM |
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Greg Ness calls it "connectivity intelligence" but it seems that we're really talking about is the ability of network infrastructure to both be agile itself and enable IT agility at the same time. Brittle, inflexible infrastructures - whether they are implemented in hardware or software or both - are not agile enough to deal with an evolving, dynamic application architecture. Greg says in a previous post The static infrastructure was not architected to keep up with these new levels of change and complexity without a new layer...
posted @ Wednesday, October 29, 2008 4:08 AM |
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Paul Maritz' keynote at VMWorld this year featured a demonstration of cloud computing using B-Hive, F5 Global Traffic Manager (GTM), and BlueLock. If you missed it, here's your chance to kick back and explore how these technologies fit together to provide a dynamic, virtualized environment. Related Links ...
posted @ Friday, October 17, 2008 4:14 AM |
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Not every infrastructure vendor needs new capabilities to support cloud computing and infrastructure 2.0. Greg Ness of Infoblox has an excellent article on "The Next Tech Boom: Infrastructure 2.0" that is showing up everywhere. That's because it raises some interesting questions and points out some real problems that will be need to be addressed as we move further into cloud computing and virtualized environments. What is really interesting, however, is the fact that some infrastructure vendors are already there and have been for quite some time. One thing Greg mentions that's not quite accurate (at least...
posted @ Friday, October 17, 2008 3:58 AM |
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There are a lot of SOA governance solutions out there that fall into two distinct categories of purpose: one is to catalog services and associated security policies and the other is to provide run-time management for services, including enforcement of security and performance-focused policies. Vendors providing a full "SOA Stack" of functionality across the service lifecycle (design, development, testing, production) often integrate their disparate product sets for a more automated (and thus manageable) SOA infrastructure. But very few integrate those same products and functionality with the underlying network and application delivery infrastructure required to provide high-availability and scalability...
posted @ Wednesday, October 15, 2008 5:37 AM |
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Everybody is jumping on the data center consolidation bandwagon again. It never really went away, it just took a leisurely Sunday drive through the countryside for a few years before turning back up on the streets of busy data centers everywhere.
RELATED LINKS
This time, it's virtualization that's driving consolidation, and this time it appears that the movement may actually have a better chance at...
posted @ Monday, October 13, 2008 4:16 AM |
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At Interop this week, security experts have begun sounding the drum regarding the security risks of virtualization and reminding us that virtual server sprawl magnifies that risk because, well, there are more virtual servers to manage at risk.
Virtual sprawl isn't defined by numbers; it's defined as the proliferation of virtual machines without adequate IT control, [David] Lynch said.
That's good, because the numbers as often cited just don't add up. A NetworkWorld article in December 2007 cited two different sets of numbers from Forrester Research on the implementation of virtualization in surveyed organizations.
First we are told that:...
posted @ Wednesday, October 01, 2008 3:43 AM |
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If you're excited about the automation capabilities of cloud computing and virtualization, you are going to love this solution. In a virtualized environment where applications can ostensibly be popping up all over, and applications are no longer tied to specific servers, there is a need to automatically manage these application instances in a high-availability (load balanced) environment. What you need is the ability to automagically add and remove application instances from the application delivery controller (load balancer) so you don't have to worry about tying those applications down, which could reduce the benefits typically associated with virtualization. If...
posted @ Tuesday, September 30, 2008 4:49 AM |
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Desktop virtualization. Virtual desktops. Application streaming. Whatever you want to call it makes no nevermind to me because the problem driving the entire concept is gone. Eradicated. Made irrelevant by the cloud. Made irrelevant by cloudware, SaaS (Software as a Service), and the ubiquitous browser. I cannot count the number of times I've heard complaints about some form of desktop virtualization/application streaming in the past. It's slow. The server died in the middle of my exam. It's slow. There are no more licenses left. It's slow today (why do you add "today", it's slow every day!). Sensing a...
posted @ Wednesday, September 24, 2008 5:01 AM |
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If your entire data center infrastructure is on one virtualized PC, you're doing it wrong. Where's F5 The comparison between the power of a modern PC and a 1960's mainframe is often made in conjunction with a smug "look how far we've come" look. ...
posted @ Thursday, September 18, 2008 7:26 AM |
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No matter where you deploy it, it's still your application Related Reading Everyone's talking about cloud computing and cloudware (applications in the cloud) services and pointing to the hiccups of several major cloud providers already this year. Reliability, availability, and security are still major concerns, and yet some reports indicate these three "itys" aren't impeding adoption of cloud computing models at all. ...
posted @ Wednesday, September 17, 2008 3:20 AM |
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We're virtually there! Figuratively speaking, of course. VMWorld kicks off Monday night, and F5 is just putting the finishing touches on everything we've got to bring along to the show (yes, that means trinkets, too). What the heck are we doing at a virtualization show? Pshaw. We've been in the business of network and server virtualization for ... well, forever. Hey, 12 years is forever in this industry, isn't it? We'll be doing a cool demo with BIG-IP GTM in the B-Hive demo, where we'll demonstrate global load sharing between virtual data centers, and Trace|3...
posted @ Wednesday, September 10, 2008 4:18 AM |
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For those of you unfamiliar with the idiom, it should be taken to mean "benefiting one at the expense of another." In this case, Paul is the end-user and Peter is the server administrator. Or better yet, Paul is the browser and Peter is the server. All web browsers, including IE (Internet Explorer), impose a per-server connection limit was imposed to reduce overload on servers. This was introduced back when the web was exploding and browsers opened up connections willy-nilly and made server operators cry. Often. The limitation imposed by IE (two connections per host) was harsher...
posted @ Friday, September 05, 2008 4:19 AM |
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Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Social Computing, Forrester Research, tweeted recently on the subject of Chrome, Google's new open source browser. Jeremiah postulates: Chrome is a nod to the future, the address bar is really a search bar. URLs will be an anachronism. That's an interesting prediction, predicated on the ability of a browser translate search terms into destinations on the Internet. Farfetched? Not at all. After all, there already exists a layer of obfuscation between a URL and an Internet destination; one that translates host names into IP addresses,...
posted @ Thursday, September 04, 2008 4:52 AM |
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Green IT is a fairly well hyped topic at the moment. While the term may be seen as hype, there are tangible benefits to employing green tactics within IT. Even research firm Gartner sees it as one of the hyped technologies organizations can use now to see real benefits. Jackie Fenn, vice-president and Gartner Fellow on green IT via The Standard Another set of technologies that's benefit to companies now is green IT, which is valuable in more ways than one, Fenn said. "The happy...
posted @ Friday, August 15, 2008 5:32 AM |
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No, that's not a typo. That's the reality of virtualization terminology today: a single term means multiple technology implementations. Server virtualization is used to describe at least two (and probably more) types of virtualization. 1. Server virtualization a la load balancing and application delivery 2. Server virtualization a la VMWare and Microsoft Server virtualization as implemented by load balancers/application delivery controllers is a M:1 virtualization scheme. An application delivery controller like BIG-IP can make many servers look like one server, a virtual server. This type of server virtualization is used...
posted @ Thursday, August 07, 2008 4:14 AM |
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Cloud computing promises customers the ability to deliver scalable applications on-demand without the overhead of a massive data center. The visibility - and flexibility as well as control - you have into and over the cloud computing environment depends on whether the provider you select offers an opaque or a transparent cloud computing environment.
OPAQUE CLOUD COMPUTING MODEL
In an opaque cloud computing model all details are hidden from the organization. The hardware and software infrastructure details are not necessarily known or controlled by the organization but are completely managed by the cloud computing provider. This allows for a completely...
posted @ Monday, August 04, 2008 5:04 AM |
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Forrester Research recently conducted a survey on virtualization, citing server consolidation as one of the primary drivers behind the 73% of enterprises already or planning on implementing virtualization technology. But virtualization, particularly operating system virtualization, assumes you have additional cycles on servers to spare. In some cases, that's just not true. Your application servers are working as hard as they can to serve up your applications and virtualizing them isn't going to change that fact. But application acceleration technologies can change that, and offer you the chance to consolidate servers. I know that sounds crazy. How can...
posted @ Thursday, July 31, 2008 5:49 AM |
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Alistair Croll has a great post on GIGAOM discussing how networking vendors will need to change in order to support a cloud computing infrastructure. He outlines two options for networking vendors that will keep them relevant in a cloud computing environment. In option number one he postulates that virtual appliances are the way to go, that the "pendulum swings back to software". Option number two revolves around sales strategy, and he suggests that networking vendors will need to sell to the providers of the cloud. That makes sense to me. If you want to be a...
posted @ Wednesday, July 30, 2008 5:11 AM |
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There is a lot of hype around all types of virtualization today, with one of the primary drivers often cited being a reduction in management costs. I was pondering whether or not that hype was true, given the amount of work that goes into setting up not only the virtual image, but the infrastructure necessary to properly deliver the images and the applications they contain. We've been using imaging technology for a long time, especially in lab and testing environments. It made sense then because a lot of work goes into setting up a server and...
posted @ Monday, July 21, 2008 4:33 AM |
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Anyone who's listened to Bob Rivers' Twisted The Twelve Pains of Christmas can probably relate to the angry husband screaming, "When one light goes out they all go out!" because, yeah, we've all been there. Imagine now, if you will, a data center. A data center filled with servers humming along, each running three or four applications in virtual machines a la VMWare. Imagine now - it shouldn't be hard at all - that one of those servers suddenly just stops working. Let's say the drive crashes. After the blue smoke dissipates and the screams of...
posted @ Tuesday, May 13, 2008 6:07 AM |
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File virtualization and storage are gaining a lot of mindshare lately, probably because the longer a business runs the more data they have to store. And with compliance regulations, sometimes that means not only more data to store (like all your e-mail) but storing it for a very long time. And then there's building out large farms of servers to support high volume sites. File virtualization makes a lot of sense when you're trying to manage large numbers of servers, especially if they're essentially clones. And let's not ignore the other kinds of...
posted @ Thursday, May 08, 2008 12:15 PM |
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a.k.a The morning Lori was wrong I got an e-mail newsletter yesterday with a link to BEA's Virtualization TCO calculator. As my team is engaged in a lively debate regarding virtualization and its alleged benefits (you can tell which side of the fence I'm on at the moment) I visited the calculator to see what it would say. Then I sent the following results to the team, a smug smile on my face because the virtualized OS environment turned out to be more expensive than the non-virtualized environment. TCO Summary Non-Virtualized Virtualized OS...
posted @ Wednesday, May 07, 2008 7:29 AM |
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According to a recent CIO article and survey data, the top challenge to virtualization success today is balancing server workloads and maintaining application service levels. That makes sense; if you're going to create 3 or 4 or 99 virtual servers you need to be sure that the workload isn't going to suck dry the resources available on any particular machine. And, too, you'll probably need some solution to load balance those applications across virtual instances.
That part, at least, seems easy: get thee a load balancer, pronto. Turns out that the concern regarding balancing server workloads is more complex than most likely realize. A load balancer will,...
posted @ Tuesday, May 06, 2008 6:38 AM |
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