From the Blogosphere

The Character of Cloud Computing

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 04:00:00 EST

Here's an important reminder for cloud service providers: character counts. Ethics, Values, and Trust are table stakes – for anyone who wants to succeed in business long term – but especially for cloud service providers. As a cloud customer, I am not simply buying/renting your hardware and software. I am grafting my company onto yours. We are intermingling our corporate DNA. I am loading my databases on your disk drives. I am modifying my internal processes to map to your services.

Mobile Application Integration Platform

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 03:00:00 EST

An increasingly large amount of data is being consumed by mobile handheld computers and Smart phones. This data can come from a wide variety of sources and be in many different formats including GPS, LBS (location based services), SMS, voice, Email, Video, digital photos, barcode scanning, RFID, voice memos, documents and Bluetooth data connectivity to a large variety of data collection tools and equipment. The data can come from many different ERPs, database applications and SaaS (software as a service) offerings in a cloud computing environment.

SaaS & Business Intelligence at Dreamforce

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

I was lucky enough to be at Dreamforce 2009 last week and wanted to pen down a few thoughts while the event is still fresh in my mind. I don’t think there was any earth-shattering news there, and I got the feeling (both onsite and online) that a lot of people didn’t really grasp the value of Benioff’s announcement (or strategy) about “socializing” the platform with Chatter. I, for one, certainly couldn’t make sense of Colin Powell’s presence at one of the keynotes (not sure what he can possibly offer the world of SaaS but maybe I missed something). But overall it was an enlightening conference and here are some of my impressions (and they pertain mostly to the SaaS BI realm).

The Cloud & Your Monitoring Vendor

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 08:33:00 EST

If you’re shopping around for a company that monitors your website transactions, servers or networks, there are many points of comparison that would be worth your time covering in a request for proposal process. But here are some major points that are worthwhile asking a potential vendor: - How quickly and efficiently can you update your [...]

SQL Server 2008 R2 Nov CTP Installs Easily on Windows 7

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

I had problems installing on Windows XP SP3 but it was very easy on Windows 7 Ultimate Evaluation copy (build 7100). If you have Visual Studio 2008 you may need to apply SP1 before you complete installation on Windows 7. I installed a named instance Hodentek\KUMORI (ver 10.50.1352) which is a minor upgrade to SQL Server 2008 RTM. If you want to work with a database in the cloud (SQL Azure) you need SQL Server 2008 R2 Nov-CTP.

Cloud Computing Service: Amazon EC2 vs Google GAE

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST

Though different cloud service providers are following different strategies, these are the two uniquely different approaches. Others either are similar to one of these or fall somewhere in between. I have excluded SaaS from this discussion - you can see the comparison between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS on this post on Cloud Strategy.

Cloud Computing in the Land of the Rising Sun

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

I just got back from a week in Toyko. My trip was actually quite the experience, the first time I've gotten the chance to visit Japan. I was there in part to attend CloudCamp Tokyo as well as an action packed week of meetings. Other then 7 days of sushi, which got old pretty fast, I had an amazing time.

ILM Was Cloud Computing Buzzword de Jour A Few Years Ago

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

Disclaimer, warning, be advised, heads up, disclosure, this post is partially for fun so take it that way. Remember ILM, that is, Information Lifecycle Management among other meanings. It was a popular buzzword de jour a few years ago similar to how cloud is being tossed around lately, or in the recent past, virtualization, clusters, grids and SOA among others. One of the challenges with ILM besides its overuse and thus confusion was what it meant, after all was or is it a product, process, paradigm or something else?

Go East for Cloud Computing Expansion

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:15:00 EST

In the story, I also noticed that Amazon also put out a new software development kit for .NET and support for private content in Amazon CloudFront – the company’s content delivery service. This is the kind of support that enables, say, a website that sells digital products, to restrict downloadable merchandise to paying customers. I like to hear about the development of support services that make companies feel more secure about doing business on the cloud. We have enough examples of security breaches, outages and other cloud snags that make consumers and businesses jittery. And, of course, I think supplemental services for website owners, such as website transaction monitoring and incidence notifications, go a long way to increasing a sense of security.

Forget Defining Cloud Computing

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:45:00 EST

Defining cloud computing has proven to be nearly impossible. Ask ten different people and you'll get ten different answers. Countless discussion groups, blogs, articles, etc. have attempted to give their own take on cloud computing, and all to no avail. The industry just can't agree on a common definition. With that in mind, perhaps it's time to move past trying to define the cloud and look into the common characteristics of such solutions. Many of us have heard or read about some of these cloud characteristics, so I thought I would offer up my top five cloud computing solution characteristics here.

Cloud Gets Heavy with Monitoring Services

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST

I’ve been a proponent of cloud-based monitoring of networks, sites, servers, applications and transactions, etc., for a long time. I’m such a nut about it because I know what a revolutionary convenience it is for companies to not have to devote all kinds of resources, time and money to making sure their web businesses are running smoothly. And I know, personally, having come from the old-fashioned environment where you ran monitoring software on internal servers, and you couldn’t do anything remotely, what that was like. The time, the money, the energy used up!

Search Across Your S3 Buckets with CloudBerry Explorer PRO

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

In CloudBerry Lab we are always thinking how to bring more value to our users. Since we use Amazon S3 heavily ourselves it is easy sometimes to identify things that will make CloudBerry Explorer a better tool and the ability to Search for a specific data is one of them.

Using Token Translation and SAML to Link Domains Together

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:30:00 EST

Token translation using SAML is now quite an established way to allow applications in one security domain to communicate with applications in another security domain, on behalf of a user whole identity does not have to also flow with the data. For more

To Take Advantage of Cloud Computing You Must Unlearn, Luke

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:15:00 EST

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 or server should utilize more than X% of its resources at any time, is no longer acceptable as it wastes resources which in turn eats away at the bottom line.

ENISA Cloud Computing Risk Assessment

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:15:00 EST

The ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency) today released the Cloud Computing Risk Assessment document. The document does well by including a focus on SMEs (Small and Medium sized Enterprises) because, as the report says, "Given the reduced cost and flexibility it brings, a migration to cloud computing is compelling for many SMEs".

Cloud Computing Risk Assessment Report

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:30:00 EST

I've been traveling so there is a bit of a back log of news. In case you missed this, The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), working for the EU Institutions and Member States has released a Cloud Computing Risk Assessment report. ENISA is the EU’s response to Information security issues of the European Union. As such, it is the 'pacemaker' for Information Security in Europe. ENISA supported by a group of subject matter expert comprising representatives from Industries, Academia and Governmental Organizations, has conducted, in the context of the Emerging and Future Risk Framework project, an risks assessment on cloud computing business model and technologies. The result is an in-depth and independent analysis that outlines some of the information security benefits and key security risks of cloud computing. The report provide also a set of practical recommendations.

Scaling Security in the Cloud: Just Hit the Reset Button

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:15:00 EST

Today Security administrators deal with 10’s, 100’s, even 1000’s of servers but what happens when potentially tens of thousands of VM’s get spun up and they are not the same as they were an hour ago. Security assessments like Tripwire, while work, inject load and what if those servers are only up for 30 minutes? How can you be sure what was up and offering content was secure? One idea he offered was to have servers only live for 30 minutes then drop it and replace. If someone did compromise the unit, they’d only have a few moments to do anything and then it’s wiped. You can keep the logs but just replace the instance. Or, use an Open Source equivalent every other time you load, so crooks can’t get a good feel for baseline system.

Introducing SherpaTools for Google Apps

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

As Cloud Sherpas continues to help businesses and organizations adopt Google Apps, we have found that many customers, regardless of location or industry, request a common set of additional management controls and end user features for their Google Apps environment. Until now, the response to most of these inquiries was that organizations had to develop custom applications that work with Google APIs to achieve their goals.

A Walk in the Cloud with PowerVPS and Equinix

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:15:00 EST

Thursday, I was fortunate enough to get to walk around Equinix’s DC-4 datacenter in Ashburn, VA. In this 100,000 sq ft data center, there are carrier, equipment, and software agnostic, providing clients with energy, space, and cooling – allowing choice of carrier, equipment, and software. Their huge facility (just one of 5 at the site – totally over 450,000 sq ft) allows you to link up with your telecom of choice. Equinix’s facilities are impressive, from biometric hand scans, motion detecting cameras, and locks on cabinets, they are engineered to (physically) keep the right people in and the wrong people out. Equinix keeps the servers in cages allowing for your cage to be separated from all others with handprint entry only. Due to the fact that so many firms are collocated in this facility (300+), Equinix is serious about their security.

Moving to the Cloud: The Road Ahead

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:04:00 EST

I hope it’s clear that today’s clouds are powerful resources that can be used to rapidly develop and deploy applications; they provide on-demand resources and true value. The challenges I outlined in configuration, storage, networking, and management really come into play when you try to integrate the power of the cloud with your existing infrastructure and processes. These challenges are centered on the fact that the cloud is separate from the data center – a problem that hits home when you want to utilize existing applications and rely on your existing services and infrastructure.

Real-World Cloud Computing Applications

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:30:00 EST

In this article, we will see some examples of real-world Cloud Computing applications: Coca-Cola Enterprises uses a Cloud-based system to streamline operations with merchandisers in the field; Nasdaq uses Amazon’s S3 Cloud Service to deliver historical stock and mutual fund information, rather than add the load to its own database and computing infrastructure; Animoto, a small start-up which decided to use Amazon's Cloud Services, was able to keep up with soaring demand for its service and scale up from 50 instances to 3,500 instances over a three day period.

The Next Frontier in the Cloud: Legacy Apps

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Although cloud computing momentum continues to build and scarcely a day goes by without a new cloud announcement or study, there’s been little real enterprise adoption and almost no meaningful case studies. In part, that’s because early cloud providers and vendors were focused on developers and technology start-ups when they designed their offerings, and larger, more established organizations were rarely on their radar screen. While start-ups can easily embrace new technologies and architectures, enterprises have far more constraints and have been largely limited to “tire kicking” the cloud with small applications that aren’t particularly meaningful for the business.

WaveMaker 6.0 SaaS-enables Web Apps in Minutes

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Until today, web developers creating SaaS apps have been faced with an ugly choice: use proprietary development platforms like Force.com or build an open solution from scratch. WaveMaker released the first open cloud development platform. WaveMaker 6.0 is a visual development platform that runs in a browser. WaveMaker makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to prototype, develop and customize great looking web applications.

Dreamforce - Lots of Chatter

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:54:00 EST

The first thing I have to say about Dreamforce is WHOA! 19,000 people registered this year, from 60 countries. So many were in attendance that they had to have an overflow room for about 3,000 to watch Marc Benioff's keynote from afar. Salesforce.com clearly wants to see everything in the cloud...their cloud. What's not to like? A multi-tennant, pay-as-you-go, elastic...

Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) for Service Providers

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

You might have already seen the announcement regarding the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE). We believe this is wonderful news for our customers and partners; and represents an unprecedented collaboration between three highly regarded leaders in the IT industry: Cisco, EMC with VMware. This coalition was created to increase customers’ business agility – specifically, through greater enterprise IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy and real estate costs through pervasive data center virtualization and a transition to private cloud infrastructures.

Amazon Adding Active Directory Support

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

I was surprised to find an Amazon Web Services booth at the Microsoft PDC yesterday. They had nothing specific to say regarding additional Windows support or capabilities - at least not officially. What I did get was a wink-wink, nudge, nudge when I commented on Azure's integration with Active Directory and other touchpoints. "This is coming soon," I was then told. Then they saw that I had a media badge and that ended the discussion... Looks like the enterprise is the battleground - which was only a matter of time. Following the great enterprise roadmap preview I saw last week at the RightScale user meeting in Santa Clara, this is quickly becoming a great market for business computing.

Our Experience with AWS

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:00:00 EST

We have been working with Amazon Web Services for the last couple of months for various things and thouhgt of sharing our key findings with you all. First of all, I would like to thank Amazon for providing such a great experience to us , a simple webservice call , an instance of a computer up and running. When we started our exploration, we got an account with Amazon and working with S3 for quite some time. It is an another service for storage and works well for its cause.

Eucalyptus: Clouding Privately

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:00:00 EST

In our constant pursuit of exploring new technologies, we stumbled upon the Eucalyptus and greatly contemplated on its installation. Being driven by our leaning towards cloud. Eucalyptus really clouded our minds and we decided, "no pain, no gain". And here we are having successfully installed Eucalyptus and here is how we did it. We have the Cloud Controller, the Cluster Controller and Node Controller all up and running. But the document is still a draft version.

AWS Workshop, Chennai

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:30:00 EST

With the onset of the Monsoons in Chennai there were Cloud of a different kind looming, and the Met Department was evangelizing them; there was also another Cloud Evangelist in Chennai, Jinesh Varia evangelizing Clouds of different kind, the Amazon Clouds.

Cloud Shows Promise During Navy Trident Warrior Exercise

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

During a recent interview, Robert Carey, Navy Chief Information Officer, also stated that cloud computing offered real value to the Navy. Citing that both the Navy Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) and Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES) programs will leverage cloud computing, he envisioned a future day when "Grey clouds" within a ship's hull would eventually transition to clouds within the battle group. The increased IT efficiency delivered through cloud computing would also enhance mission accomplishment by making more resources available for investment into naval mission platforms (ships and planes). Mr. Carey sees ready access to authoritative data from the cloud as an important enabler to a real-time/near real-time decision making process, saying that the cloud delivers the ability to have a ubiquitous computing environment and interoperability. After observing the experiment, SPAWAR representatives showed similar sentiments, saying that the Navy was actively considering the use of cloud computing technologies as part of its Naval Networks Enterprise-2016 strategy

Predicting the Great Cloud Shakeout – Don’t Become CloudKill

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:30:00 EST

Setting aside the shameless cloud-washing that’s going on from some vendors, there are a lot of cloud service providers (CSPs – providers of cloud) today. Many of those listed in Sys-Con’s Top 150 report are CSPs, while others are providing extensions, tools or services for clouds. Everybody’s a cloud provider these days – and as [...]

Azure Owns the Enterpri$e

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:20:00 EST

I had a “discussion” on twitter a few weeks ago where I predicted that Microsoft’s Windows Azure would be “the one to beat” in the enterprise. It’s nice that companies are using Amazon and other clouds, but for the 80-90% of Windows/.NET applications that run your typical enterprise, Azure will be king. I’m at the [...]

Introducing Windows Server AppFabric

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:02:00 EST

About one year ago I was fortunate to be working on the launch of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. With the start of our new fiscal year, I was asked to take over a team which was responsible for the technical marketing for our developer platform product management team. It’s been quite a [...]

Rapidly Develop, Test & Deploy Windows Azure Applications Using the GoGrid Cloud

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:54:00 EST

Just in time for the Microsoft PDC 2009, GoGrid is excited to showcase an integrated solution for Windows Azure™ developers, using the GoGrid Cloud for seamlessly building and deploying applications for Windows Azure. Our solution interoperates with the existing GoGrid infrastructure and includes preconfigured development environments which allows developers to build applications and publish [...]

Who Invented Virtualization?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:00:00 EST

I’m willing to make this little bet with you: Most people of a certain age are more than willing to bet folding green that IBM ‘invented’ virtualization. Gen-any-letters will bet VMware with confidence. You will win either way. Today’s burgeoning virtualization market is a different story. And in that story, VMware is the dad.

Working with Table Storage on the Windows Azure

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

If you've been working with Azure for a while then you've probably spent some time using the StorageClient sample that came with previous versions of the SDK. With the November 2009 release of the SDK (the one they'll be using at PDC 2009), they have wrapped that sample up into the SDK and refactored it to fit more in line with the conventions and quality standards of a Microsoft API. As a result, some of your code will break (but not much). Queue storage and Blob storage (discussed in upcoming posts) actually have more breaking changes than table storage.

Table storage, under the hood, is exposed as an ADO.NET Data Service (formerly Astoria). As a result, if you've used the System.Data.Services.Client library before, you've already got a leg up in interacting with Azure Storage.

When you're working with table storage, there are a few things that you're going to need. Once you've got these, you're good to go:

References to System.Data.Services.Client and Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient (obviously you also need a reference to service runtime if you're hitting table storage from within the cloud itself... remember that you can hit table storage from the desktop too, e.g. from WPF applications).
Credentials. There have been some changes to the way storage client credentials work that are beyond the scope of this post, but you can still use the same accountname/account shared key pattern that you used in the past.
A DataServiceContext. You're going to need this to interact with the tables in table storage. As you'll see in the code below, the pattern is to create your own context that derives from the base and exposes your tables as IQueryables. If you've ever worked with ADO.NET Data Services or Entity Framework before, this pattern should also look familiar.
Entity objects. Every table that you have in table storage contains arbitrary columns. In other words, if you really wanted, you could have a different schema for every row in your table. However, to work with it using the Data Services client, each row needs to conform to a fixed schema - this fixed schema you'll represent with a regular C# class that contains the necessary partition key and row key properties. This class also needs a parameterless constructor (required by the data services client to reconstitute instances of that class from the HTTP results)
The cloud table client. This new class will let you create tables and test for the existence of tables. You do not need to use this class for querying table storage, it's more of an administrative class for dealing with table storage itself.

The first thing we're going to want to do is get the credentials. The new SDK allows us to dynamically determine if we're running in a fabric or running as a standalone app (which allows us to build apps that we can run on-premise OR in the cloud!). Here's some code I used to get the configuration settings for the account name and shared key:

string accountKey = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["AccountSharedKey"];
string tableBaseUri = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["TableStorageEndpoint"];
if (RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable)
{
accountName = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("AccountName");
accountKey = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("AccountSharedKey");
}

Once you've got the account key and the account name, you can get an instance of the storage credentials and table client classes:

StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey creds =
new StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey(accountName, accountKey);
CloudTableClient tableStorage = new CloudTableClient(tableBaseUri, creds);
CustomerContext ctx = new CustomerContext(tableBaseUri, creds);

Using the table storage class, we can create a new table (if it doesn't already exist):

if (tableStorage.CreateTableIfNotExist("Customers"))
{
CustomerRow cust = new CustomerRow("AccountsReceivable", "kevin");
cust.FirstName = "Kevin";
cust.LastName = "Hoffman";
ctx.AddObject("Customers", cust);
ctx.SaveChanges();
}

Here I'm also using my customer context class and my customer row class (will show those shortly) in order to put a new customer into table storage. Note my use of an application name for the partition key and the username for the row key. Entire chapters of books can (and will) be written on strategies and patterns for using partition and row keys.

Now let's say that we're inside an MVC 2 controller and we want to make the list of customers available to the view. If we're not doing a strongly typed view (which we should be doing unless we can't help it...) then we can use code that looks like this:

CustomerRow[] customers = ctx.Customers.ToArray();
ViewData["Customers"] = customers;

Now let's look at the CustomerContext class:

public class CustomerContext : TableServiceContext
{
    public CustomerContext(string uri, StorageCredentials creds) : base(uri, creds) { }
    public IQueryable<CustomerRow> Customers
    {
        get
        {
            return this.CreateQuery<CustomerRow>("Customers");
        }
    }
}

The CustomerRow class is just a POCO class that has a default constructor and a constructor that takes a partition key and a row key, and inherits from the TableServiceEntity class.

public class CustomerRow : TableServiceEntity
{
    private string firstName;
    private string lastName;
    private string userName;
    private string applicationName;

    public CustomerRow(string applicationName, string userName)
      : base(applicationName, userName)
    {
      ApplicationName = applicationName;
      UserName = userName;
    }

public CustomerRow() : base() { }

I snipped out the rest of the class for brevity - I'm assuming we've all seen stock property accessors before. At this point you should be ready to roll using table storage. There is also one other benefit they gave us in November 2009 CTP - you no longer need to pre-rig your database schema in your SQL 2008 database!! The new development storage simulator accurately simulates the dynamic schema nature of the actual table storage in the cloud. I can't begin to describe how many headaches this alleviates.

Enjoy table storage on the new Nov 2009 CTP and I'll be posting similar blog posts about the new Queue storage and Blob storage clients shortly!

Diffusing Technology into Generation Z

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:00:00 EST

Us “Baby Boomers” tend to believe we have accomplished a lot in the years ranging from our roots of hard rock, to the birth of basic internet technologies in the early 1970s. We started our generation with black and white television, experiencing everything from the assassination of President Kennedy to absorbing the wonders of man walking on the moon.

Government Cloud Computing Value Survey

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:15:00 EST

As part of a continuing Government Cloud computing education program, Dataline, LLC has released a Government Cloud Computing Value Survey. This online resource has been designed as an aid to help Federal agencies explore the value of cloud computing. Through a 15 minute interactive session.

Cloud Computing Can Revitalize Your Career as Software Developer

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 02:45:00 EST

Everyone knows that the longevity and ultimate success of a platform lies in the developers willing to create on that platform. Creating a healthy developer ecosystem in which both the developer and the platform vendor can grow and prosper is very important. No one knows this better than Microsoft. It has long been their mantra that “developers, developers, developers” are the key to success. With most of the new large scale websites and platforms being launched on open source platforms and now the cloud, this is becoming even more important.

Moving to the Cloud: Managing Your Environment

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

This post is part of a series examining the issues involved when moving applications between internal data centers and public clouds.

One of the advantages of cloud computing is that someone else is managing the infrastructure – including the servers, network devices and storage systems, not to mention the data center power conditioning, cooling and fire suppression equipment. One of the costs of offloading this infrastructure is that the cloud becomes something different and separate from your data center. In most deployments today, the cloud is almost completely isolated from your data center, and this often requires changes in how you manage and interact with your applications.

So what does “management” mean in this context? I look at it in terms of provisioning resources and managing the infrastructure, operating systems and applications. Over the years a remarkable set of tools and processes has been developed to handle these tasks in the data center, and the challenge now is how you integrate all this investment with the new cloud deployments.

For provisioning, the cloud has a model similar to a data center virtualized environment, in that you can provision virtual resources from a pool of physical resources. However, the definition of these resources is dictated by the cloud provider, which means you have to adjust your processes to account for the capabilities and limitations imposed by the cloud, specifically CPU, memory and storage resources. To be successful in the cloud, you need to match the resources required for your application to the capabilities of the cloud (i.e., pick enough CPU/memory/etc. to meet your application’s requirements while balancing the costs of the cloud resources). If you already have a provisioning system, you need to expand and modify it to account for the cloud (e.g., add parameters to account for cloud capabilities, build connectors to the cloud API, tie into the cloud account mechanism, etc.). If you don’t have a system in place, you need to build a new process to access the cloud resources. The overriding issue for either approach is that there are no standards yet for cloud provisioning, so the work you do to tie into a cloud provider is not portable to another cloud. The promise of cloud products which offer multi-cloud capabilities is that they can connect you to different clouds using a common set of interfaces.

Managing your cloud infrastructure can be a lot of work. You need to integrate with an architecture defined by the cloud provider, using its specific primitives for working with cloud components. This requires tying into the cloud APIs for configuring IP addresses, subnets and firewalls, as well as data service functions for your storage. Because control of these functions is based on the cloud provider’s infrastructure and services, you also have to modify your internal processes and control systems to integrate with the cloud infrastructure management.

Even managing your operating systems as part of a cloud deployment presents challenges. Many cloud services provide “base servers” or templates that contain a simple distribution or OS, which are then used to build up your specific server/OS/application. This approach works well when the provider has the exact base server you want to start from, and you have a process in place to build from a running server. The challenge is that when you build up a server based on a gold image, it may: a) not match the base cloud OS version, b) be built from a non-running or base OS versus a fully-running OS (as required by most clouds), and c) use internal resources (boot servers, internal repositories, etc.) that are not available in the cloud. From a maintenance perspective, many organizations use central controls for updates (like WSUS for windows), and these services depend on access to data center networks and services. Since public clouds are running external to your data center, these services either won’t work, or need to be altered to run the hybrid environment.

Finally, the cloud creates additional complexity for managing applications. You almost always need to modify applications to accommodate cloud differences (virtual environment, networks and storage), which means that the applications in the cloud diverge from the “original” or base applications in your data center. You may also use third-party tools to help with integration into the cloud (such as VPN software, integration scripts, encryption software, etc.), which then need to be maintained. Each of these software elements has it its own lifecycle and update management, most of which apply to every image deployed into the cloud.

The management problems introduced by including the cloud in your infrastructure all have their source in the same issue – the cloud is something separate and different from your data center. This separation becomes clear when you consider the integration and management issues that span everything from provisioning to reengineering your applications to changes in lifecycle management. At CloudSwitch we’re streamlining and automating cloud management to eliminate most of these issues, and bridge the separation between the cloud and your data center.

Next: Key Considerations for Cloud Performance