Amanda Blevins

This past year, I’ve run across several misconceptions that hinder a company’s adoption of cloud. This affects their ability to impact the market in their industry. My blog has been the platform for sharing these barriers with the world. The latest blockage has been around third platform applications or Cloud Native Applications.

For the record, I believe Cloud Native Applications are absolutely the future. Enterprises do need to develop their latest solutions as a CNA. They will be left behind and unable to compete if they do not. If any company provides their solutions as a SaaS not only to their customer base, but also to others in the same industry as a platform for purchase, they will be well positioned to take the lead. However, this applies to one, two, or possibly three applications at most today. What happens to the other hundreds or thousands of platform two or legacy applications left behind?

These applications can still take advantage of many principles of cloud. They can leverage virtualization at all layers, not just for compute. They can run in multiple locations around due to hybrid cloud. Cloud management and monitoring will still apply because of the world that these applications now exist in. Older management and monitoring tools can no longer understand the abstraction the software-defined data center and hybrid cloud introduce. Legacy applications can be packaged and deployed in an automated fashion via the cloud management platform. Platform two applications can also be first class citizens in the hybrid cloud.

While developing cloud native applications and operationalizing the infrastructure team to support this brave new world is a huge task, building a hybrid cloud for the rest is slightly less daunting. The older applications do not need to change operating systems, development platforms, etc. to run in the cloud. The same virtualization technology that allows them to co-exist on physical servers is the foundation of cloud. The software-defined data center is the next step in this evolution. Virtualizing compute, network, and storage lowers the operational touches exponentially when deploying a new system. Enterprises that were previously uncomfortable with virtualization due to the black box nature of the network, can freely run their application on virtual machines with network and security virtualization protecting their applications with full transparency. Also, the security of a system is automated and instantiated when the application is deployed based on pre-determined profiles. Whether this application is running on-premise or in a public cloud, the same rules apply. This results in the same security throughout the hybrid cloud.

The solutions are out there to accomplish this. This isn’t a futures discussion. Adopting this style of operations is still no easy feat. When it comes to the trifecta of people, process, and technology, the first two continue to be the most challenging. However, if they are not equally considered and executed upon, any type of cloud project or IT transformation will not be successful. The incomprehensible dependency map of applications that exists today would only become more complicated by a partially implemented cloud solution. Cloud Native Applications are important for the future, but so are the other thousand running today

Usually the title of this blog is referred to as the path to cloud. Based on recent conversations, cloud is already leveraged in most organizations. Thus, we are in the cloud, not moving to it. But what is the best way to weave these pockets of cloud together? I hear questions around the nature of Platform as a Service or public cloud versus private cloud versus hybrid cloud. Sometimes discussions reflect on how to reign in rouge public cloud use or how to provide seamless access to multiple Software as a Service offerings. The success of those efforts is the end state. They should not be goals for the beginning of the journey.

As a former athlete and forever competitor, my experience in developing any skill is to begin with the basics. All training is focused on ensuring form is correct before leveraging complex movements or thoughts. This is one hundred percent true of cloud as well. The purpose of enterprise cloud is for IT to become a service broker, or IT as a Service. To achieve this, we need to automate everything IT has been trying to do for the last 30 years.

These are my guidelines for a successful path of cloud:

1. Solidify virtualization

If your organization is not comfortable with virtualization, this will be a large barrier to cloud. Ensure the standard architecture for virtualization can support all workloads in performance and capacity. Implement reference architectures across main data centers and remote sites. Reduce the variables of physical hardware, software versions, patch levels, and virtual machine templates to a handful of approved types. Remove the process of negotiating for resources with application owners and developers. Leverage templates only.

2. Implement cloud management and monitoring

Once virtualization is standardized across the enterprise, performance and capacity management is key to ensure internal and external customer satisfaction. Older monitoring tools were not built for cloud agility and hypervisor capabilities. Capacity management is also different for virtualized environments as the various workloads and peaks running on the same hardware is difficult to account for in manual methods.

This step does not mean all previous tools are discarded. Instead, the ones providing unique data should be retained and rolled into the main analysis engine. But, where features overlap, it is an opportunity to prune down the number of solutions in the environment to a manageable number. This will also lower CapEx and OpEx costs for IT by not maintaining support on redundant software.

3. Implement configuration management

The solution required for this is not unique to cloud environments. The important requirements are that all hypervisors and operating systems are supported. The configuration management system should tie into cloud management and monitoring for a complete root cause picture when diving into issues.

4. Implement log aggregation and analysis

This toolset is also not unique to cloud environments but should support all standardized infrastructure and applications. Integration with the management and monitoring tool is ideal for root cause analysis. Understanding system and application logs is the only way to know the underpinnings of any environment.

5. Implement cost analysis

The main purpose of cost analysis is not to “Chargeback” to the business units for their overall environment consumption. Chargeback is a great feature, but more importantly IT must understand its spending. Also, IT must strive to become an innovation center instead of the cost center that exists today. Recognizing the least expensive location for workloads and reinforcing workload sizing is critical to success in later stages of cloud.

Once these five steps are complete, or at least well underway, then it is time to automate. Cloud is automating the request and delivery of a service. If an empty Operating System is deployed, this is Infrastructure as a Service. If it is a development platform, a web server, a database server, etc, then it is Platform as a Service. If the service is to a ready to use application, this is Software as a Service.

The reason I am providing these definitions is I have found, to my surprise, that they differ among the industry. The delineation of these terms is not to require folks to adhere to them, but to instead show the complexity of each. Each service builds on the former mentioned in the paragraph above. Thus, when I am asked where to start with automation, I always suggest Infrastructure as a Service because this is the simplest to provide. Simple is not to be confused with easy. When integrating requests with approvals, ticketing systems, IP management systems, networks, security, global DNS, operating systems, backups, monitoring, change management databases, and other tools, automation is a big step. Do not let this list of integrations deter you. It is the end state. The beginning is self-service access to basic virtual machines.

Keep in mind that the rewards of cloud are vast. The new measurement for an IT organization is not percent virtualized or time for deployment of a template. It is not cost per GB of storage or amount of network ports used in a data center. Innovation percentage versus “keeping the lights on” is the new measurement. The early adopter organizations are reaching 50% to 75% on the innovation side of the equation. This is only accomplished through the path of cloud.