VMware is poised to establish itself as a premier tech powerhouse, the likes which haven’t been seen since the PC crashed the mainframe party.  This leads me to a question posed by a recent phone call earlier with a financial analyst: Will VMware become the next Microsoft or the next Netscape?

The following is inspired by our conversational answer to his question:

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When strategies are formed it quickly becomes obvious that cloud computing is more about balance than anything else.

At a time when you’d think cloud computing would be the primary “go to” strategy for managing scale and rapid growth multiple well-known and demanding organizations are building their own data centers instead.

With all the hype around cloud being faster, cheaper, and more efficient these folks must be crazy, right?

Not at all. In fact, these moves illustrate the growing friction between the economy of scale offered by cloud computing and the control and flexibility that is part and parcel of owning one’s own data center.

In April Twitter announced plans to build a data center of its own. On Wednesday it provided additional details on the Twitter Engineering blog.

“Later this year, Twitter is moving our technical operations infrastructure into a new, custom-built data center in the Salt Lake City area,” wrote Twitter’s Jean-Paul Cozzatti, who said having dedicated data centers will provide more capacity to accommodate growth of 300,000 new users per day. “Keeping pace with these users and their Twitter activity presents some unique and complex engineering challenges. Importantly, having our own data center will give us the flexibility to more quickly make adjustments as our infrastructure needs change.”

-- Data Center Knowledge, “Twitter Picks Utah for New Data Center”

Twitter isn’t the only Web 2.0 savvy organization moving to their own data center. Facebook earlier this year announced it, too, was also investing in building out its own data center.

BUT CLOUD AUTO-SCALES and STUFF!

It’s not all about scalability. I know that sounds nearly heretical, but it’s not. And it’s not a new mantra, either. Scalability is certainly a factor in why one would choose cloud computing over a localized deployment, but also important are control and flexibility. 

Another consideration is the ability to customize your data center infrastructure to provide more granular control of operations. “That control gives us a ton of flexibility, and we can build new things without having to wait for our partner,” said Heiliger [Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s VP of Technical Operations]

-- Data Center Knowledge, “Data Centers: For When The Cloud is Not Enough”

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times: control is a huge factor in the decision making process and something that isn’t effectively offered by today’s public cloud computing offerings. Remember the Information week analytics Cloud computing survey in 2009?

Even though security remains concern number one, control and configurability are on the top of the list, as well. The issue of control has almost always gone hand in hand with cloud adoption inhibitors, but it always takes a back seat to the more glamorous and scary “security” issue. These are not minor stumbling blocks in many cases, and the inability to rapidly adapt an infrastructure to meet growth and scale and make architectural changes, if necessary, are paramount to success. If cloud computing cannot provide the agility necessary to meet these challenges then it is logical to assume that organizations will either (a) stay in the local data center or (b) move to a local data center from the cloud when it becomes obvious the environment is inhibiting forward momentum.

Current adoption patterns indicate that this is not an anomaly, but will instead likely become the norm for organizations. Applications that are initially deployed “in the cloud” will, upon becoming a critical business application or growing beyond the meager means of control and flexibility offered by the cloud, will migrate to the data center, where control and agility are provided by the simple fact that the organization can change at will any piece of the infrastructure – from its physical implementation to its logical organization – at will. This is evident in the percentage of organizations using cloud for “dev and test” but not for production. Clearly the economy of scale and rapidity of deployment makes the cloud a perfect environment for development and testing but not necessarily production.

ECONOMY of SCALE MAY be INHIBITING SCALE

The irony is that the economy of scale offered by cloud may well be biting cloud in the proverbial derrière as it becomes the inhibitor to effective scale by limiting or making extremely difficult the architectural changes necessary for an application to scale in a cloud environment.

At some point scalability can become not about the application but about its infrastructure and the way in which that infrastructure interacts. It can become about the network and its components and how applications end up interacting with and through that infrastructure. In a cloud computing environment it is rarely the case that a customer can impact that infrastructure and, when it can, it is then limited by other factors such as underlying virtualization technology and the physical server infrastructure on which the application is ultimately deployed. If the answer to a scalability obstacle is more bandwidth and higher throughput, you can’t really add another NIC to a server in the cloud. That’s not your call. But it is if you’re in the data center, and it is virtualization – not cloud - that ultimately provides the agility to make such a change and rapidly propagate that change across the application deployment.

It isn’t always about costs. Well, okay, it is about cost but in IT it’s about cost as it relates to performance, or flexibility, or other operational functionality required to successfully meet data center and business goals. When spending less on infrastructure results in higher operational costs, the organization really hasn’t saved money at all. Savvy CIO and CTOs understand that it’s not a battle, but a balancing act. It’s not about achieving the highest economy of scale, but the best economy of scale given the specific operational and business needs.

Devops needs to be able to SELECT COMPUTE_RESOURCES from CLOUD where LOCATION in (APPLICATION SPECIFIC RESTRICTIONS)

The awareness of the importance of context in application delivery and especially in the “new network” is increasing, and that’s a good thing. It’s a necessary evolution in networking as both users and applications become increasingly mobile. But what might not be evident is the need for more awareness of context during the provisioning, i.e. deployment, process.

A desire to shift the burden of management of infrastructure does not mean a desire for ignorance of that infrastructure, nor does it imply acquiescence to a complete lack of control. But today that’s partially what one can expect from cloud computing . While the fear of applications being deployed on “any old piece of hardware anywhere in the known universe” is not entirely a reality, the possibility of having no control over where an application instance might be launched – and thus where corporate data might reside - is one that may prevent some industries and individual organizations from choosing to leverage public cloud computing.

This is another one of those “risks” that tips the scales of risk versus benefit to the “too risky” side primarily because there are legal implications to doing so that make organizations nervous.

The legal ramifications of deploying applications – and their data – in random geographic locations around the world differ based on what entity has jurisdiction over the application owner. Or does it? That’s one of the questions that remains to be answered to the satisfaction of many and which, in many cases, has led to a decision to stay away from cloud computing.

According to the DPA, clouds located outside the European Union are per se unlawful, even if the EU Commission has issued an adequacy decision in favor of the foreign country in question (for example, Switzerland, Canada or Argentina).

-- German DPA Issues Legal Opinion on Cloud Computing

Back in January, Paul Miller published a piece on jurisdiction and cloud computing, exploring some of the similar legal juggernauts that exist with cloud computing:

  While cloud advocates tend to present 'the cloud' as global, seamless and ubiquitous, the true picture is richer and complicated by laws and notions of territoriality developed long before the birth of today's global network. What issues are raised by today's legislative realities, and what are cloud providers — and their customers — doing in order to adapt?

To date there are two primary uses for GeoLocation technology. The first is focused on performance, and uses the client location as the basis for determining which data center location is closest and thus, presumably, will provide the best performance. This is most often used as the basis for content delivery networks like Akamai and Amazon’s CloudFront. The second is to control access to applications or data based on the location from which a request comes. This is used, for example, to comply with U.S. export laws by preventing access to applications containing certain types of cryptography from being delivered to those specifically prohibited by law from obtaining such software.

There are additional uses, of course, but these are the primary ones today. A third use should be for purposes of constraining application provisioning based on specified parameters.

While James Urquhart touches on location as part of the criteria for automated acquisition of cloud computing services what isn’t delved into is the enforcement of location-based restrictions during provisioning. The question is presented more as “do you support deployment in X location” rather than “can you restrict deployment to X location”. It is the latter piece of this equation that needs further exploration and experimentation specifically in the realm of devops and automated provisioning because it is this part of the deployment equation that will cause some industries to eschew the use of cloud computing.

Location should be incorporated into every aspect of the provisioning and deployment process. Not only should a piece of hardware – server or network infrastructure – be capable of describing itself in terms of resource capabilities (CPU, RAM, bandwidth) it should also be able to provide its physical location. Provisioning services should further be capable of not only including location restrictions as part of the policies governing the automated provisioning of applications, but enforcing them as well.

Current standards efforts today such as the OCCI specification (intended as a means to query cloud computing implementations and its components for information) do not make easily available the ability to query a resource for location at run-time. It does, however, allow the ability to select all resources residing in a specific location – assuming you know what that location is, which nearly ends up in a circular reference loop. The whole problem revolves around the fact that standards and specifications and APIs have been developed with the belief that location wasn’t important – you shouldn’t have to know – without enough consideration for regulatory compliance and the problems of mixing data, laws, and location. It would be very useful, given the state of cloud computing and its “Wizard of Cloud” attitude toward infrastructure transparency, to provide location as an attribute of every resource – dynamically - and further offer the means by which location can easily be one of the constraints.

Having available some standardized method of retrieving the physical location of a device or system would allow the provisioning systems to restrict its pool of available resources based on a match between any existing location restrictions required by the customer and the location of available resources. The reason for making location an attribute of every “kind” of resource is that restrictions on application or data location may extend to data traversal paths. Some industries have very specific requirements regarding not only the storage of data and access by applications, but over the transmission of data, as well. These types of requirements may include the location of network devices which have access to, for processing purposes, that data. What seems to many of us to be trivial becomes highly important to courts and lawyers and thus it behooves network devices and components to also be able to provide location from which eventually automated application-specific routing tables could be derived, thus protecting the interests of organizations highly sensitive to location at all times of its data.

This also implies, of course, that the infrastructure itself is capable of enforcing such policies, which means it must be location-aware and able to collaborate with the infrastructure ecosystem to ensure not just at-rest location complies with application restrictions but traversal-location as well, if applicable. That’s going to require a new kind of network, one based on Infrastructure 2.0 principles of collaboration, connectivity, integration and intelligence.

The inclusion of physical location as part of the attributes of a component, made available to automated provisioning and orchestration systems, could enable these types of policies to be constructed and enforced. It may be that a new attribute descriptor is necessary, something that better describes the intent of the meta-data, such as restriction. A broad restriction descriptor could, in addition to location, contain other desired provisioning-based attributes such as minimum RAM and CPU, network speed, or even – given the rising concerns regarding the depletion of IPv4 addresses – the core network protocol supported, i.e. IPv6, IPv4, or “any”.

If not OCCI, then some other standard – de facto or agreed upon – needs to exist because one thing is certain: something needs to make that information available and some other thing needs to be able to enforce those policies. And that governance over deployment location must occur during the provisioning process, before an application is inadvertently deployed in a location not suited to the organization or application.

I’ll be speaking on a panel at Cisco Live on July 1.  I’m looking forward to talking about the new demands on network infrastructure, and whether or not the enterprise is ready for seamless cloud.  Frankly, so much of the discussion about cloud is for SMEs (or regarding apps) and so little is about the readiness of cloud for the enterprise that it is refreshing for Cisco Live to embrace this topic.

Even the mention of “private cloud” gets negative reactions from some of the clouderati.   I heard: “No such thing” yesterday on a cloud pundit call.  Yet at the end of the day enterprises will be assessing when, where and what can be delivered from any cloud versus a private cloud and the answers will have a significant impact on the evolution of cloud computing.

While I think Amazon and Google have done well delivering undifferentiated services via subsidized business models, it is fair to ask when and how can enterprises take to the clouds.  IMHO it’s when the network is ready.

You can view the session abstract here: Seamless Enterprise Extension to Cloud (SEEC) - Ready for Primetime?

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The Dictator is Ruling the House of Information Technology with an Iron Fist

The ENIAC mainframe was introduced in 1946. As the first electronic computer it was a huge leap forward in how humans got work done. At the time of its invention the ENIAC was the best way to crunch numbers in the world, yet only a very small and very exclusive group of people had access to it. This is truly the era of the “haves” and “have nots” as far as Information Technology is concerned. Through the subsequent 50 years we’ve gone through phases of making IT available to a wider audience. In the 70s most large companies and universities had a mainframe or access to one. However, as a percentage of the business population this was still a pretty exclusive group, who mostly had limited access to a shared resource. In the 80’s we began the era of distributed computing. Now pretty much any company or individual with a little cash could have full time access to some level of compute capability, from desktop PCs to mainframes, minis and towers.  At this point while technology access is fairly widespread, barrier to entry is still pretty high. The average cost of a desktop was $2,500 and software and support could add another $1000. The average mom and pop shop or home computer user couldn’t afford that kind of spend on something that would be used for writing letters or doing the occasional spreadsheet. 

Fast forward from the 80’s to the year 2000 and the Dictator is Now Allowing Peaceable Assembly

By 2000 the relative cost of a PC had dropped to under $1000 as compared to the late 80’s prices vs. income and inflation. As you might have guessed, this dramatically broadened the accessibility of computing. There is also the little thing called the internet that came to life between the 80s and 2000. The internet lowered the barrier to entry by making information and applications available to anyone who could get on the internet and had a computer or could rent time at an access point terminal. This combination of yearly decreases in the cost of PCs and wide access to the internet continues to this day, making it a little bit easier for the average Sue/Joe to take advantage of the benefits of readily available IT tools.

What’s the Problem with This Form of Government

Unfortunately while the pool of “haves” has increased dramatically every decade since the 50’s, there are still a large number of businesses and home users who are still “have nots” or at best “have a little”. There are myriad reasons for this continued disparity of ownership;

-          Not everyone has easy access to a broadband connection yet, especially in developing parts of the world. (Like a big portion of the undeveloped world called the US of A)

-          In major parts of the world there is no support for owning and using a computer. You couldn’t get the power or the broadband necessary to put it to use

-          The big kicker is SOFTWARE! The cost of software has either held steady or increased with inflation over the years, even as every other aspect of technology has decreased markedly.

Cost of Hardware Over Time*

The above graph is relative pricing for computers and peripherals. Generally speaking the price of a PC has dropped roughly 15% per year over the last 12 years.

Why is the cost of Software still so High and why is that a Continued Roadblock to Wider Adoption of Information Technology

Today we buy software and hardware based on a 100% or 24/7/365 use model. We continue paying for the Oracle license, or for Microsoft Word, regardless of our use characteristics. The average user of any one software package only spends a few minutes or certainly no more than a few hours a day. Paying for 24/7 vs. “paying as you need” means that in most cases we’re paying 5-10X what we really should be paying. How can a 50 person company that is running on a shoestring budget afford world class IT tools, if they have to pay for them even when they’re not being used? Imagine if your finance person could log in to Oracle for an hour a day and 8 hours on the last day of the month and only pay for their use? A perfect example of where this paradigm is beginning to change is in office productivity tools. As a small business or home user you can get access (unsupported) to office productivity tools that have most of the features that the comparable Microsoft products do. While the Google option isn’t perfect, it is certainly a giant leap in the right direction towards democratizing IT. Think about all those pirated copies of MS Office that get spread around. True, it’s a shame that they aren’t being paid for, but it’s probably also true that most of those copies would never have been purchased anyway. Things are pirated for a reason and in many cases it is because the buyer would never be able to justify ownership at full price.

  A Small Sampling of the Per License Cost of Some Common Software Packages Over Time

Information on software prices was retrieved from a number of different online sources, and then averaged.

Cloud has the Potential to Make the Land of Information Technology a True Democracy

The advent of cloud is no smaller an opportunity for global business and change than the introduction of the internet. We haven’t begun to understand what new businesses will be created and what business models will change as a result of the wide spread access to cloud based IT services.  However, this change won’t happen by accident. There are still many evil doers out there who are attempting to derail our train to democracy. 

I don’t want to play the name game, but I will say that many of the biggest IT vendors in the market are working very hard to make the cloud business as usual. They’re looking to maintain their margins and lock in their customers. This effort is completely contrary to many of the benefits that should be assumed as part of using  or implementing cloud services.

Be very wary of big IT vendors bearing gifts of “cloud” solutions, “best” hardware platforms, and long contracts.

By its very definition Cloud is a “pay as you need it” IT model. If you’re getting locked in to long contracts, and you’re still making hardware purchases, you’re heading down the wrong road.  Cloud has created a model that should remove the final barriers to a truly democratized IT model. A small business owner should be able to buy the service they need, in the quantity they need. They should also be able to buy a package of IT services that allows them to mimic much larger organizations.  The home user or the user in undeveloped countries should be able to access technologies and solutions through the phone, or similar handheld devices and they should only have to pay for what they use. Maybe an engineering student could really use a tool like Visio, but really only needs it for an hour a day during one semester. Instead of paying $500 for a copy that will rot on his/her computer, they can pay $10 a month for the access period that they need. This same opportunity is true for the world over. Anyone, with even the most basic of access can now work with and experience the benefits of information technology. This “equal access” to IT creates a democratic world, which allows each of us to succeed or fail on our own terms.

Why Democratic IT Equals Amazing Opportunity

Like the micro loan programs being employed in India brought opportunity to the unserved masses, cloud can bring tools and technology to a whole new set of customers who would otherwise have been denied. Cloud also has the potential to provide a much richer application landscape, giving businesses and home users capabilities that have historically only been available to large enterprises. Imagine what this new found access and capability se