Billy on Open Source

IBM Cloud Fizzles

2009-06-30T13:51:00.003-04:00

Based on my positive review below of IBM's CloudBurst technology for building internal clouds, I tuned into the IBM webinar for the external cloud companion product with high hopes. I was hoping to hear about a consistent architecture across the two products that would allow an enterprise to federate workloads seamlessly between the internal and external cloud. Boy, was I disappointed.

It seems the IBM external cloud is nothing more than an IBM hosted capability for running virtual appliances of IBM Rational Software products. Among my many disappointments:

- no ability to run virtual appliances defined by me. They don't even publish a specification.

- no federation between internal and external. They are not even the same architecture because one runs Xen and the other runs VMware, and they do not provide a conversion utility.

- private beta (alpha maybe?) for invited customers only. Why make an announcement?

- no timetable for general availability of a product. Why make an announcement?

This announcement was a terrible showing by IBM to say the least. It is obvious to me that the CloudBurst appliance folks (call them “left hand”) and the Smart Business cloud folks (call them “right hand”) were two totally different teams. And the left hand had no idea what the right hand was doing. But each was intent not to be outdone by the other in announcing “something” with cloud in the title. And they were told to “cooperate” by some well meaning marketing and PR person from corporate. And this mess of a situation is the outcome. Good grief!

IBM CloudBurst Hits the Mark

2009-06-29T11:35:00.002-04:00

IBM rolled out a new infrastructure offering called CloudBurst last week. Aimed at development and test workloads, it is essentially a rack of x86 systems pre-integrated with VMware’s virtualization technology along with IBM software technology for provisioning, management, metering, and chargeback. I believe IBM, unlike Verizon, has hit the cloud computing mark with this new offering.

First, IBM is targeting the offering at a perfect application workload for cloud – development and test. The transient nature of development and test workloads means that an elastic computing infrastructure with built-in virtualization and chargeback will be attractive to IT staff currently struggling to be responsive to line of business application owners. The line of business application owners are holding the threat of Amazon EC2 over the head of the IT staff if they cannot get their act together with frictionless, elastic compute services for their applications. By responding with a development and test infrastructure that enables self-service, elasticity, and pay-as-you-go chargeback capability, the IT staff will take a step in the right direction to head off the Amazon threat. Moving these dev/test workloads to production with the same infrastructure will be a simple flick of the switch when the line of business owners who have become spoiled by CloudBurst for dev/test complain that the production infrastructure is not flexible, responsive, or cost competitive.

Second, IBM embraced virtualization to enable greater self-service, and elasticity. While they do not detail the use of VMware’s technology on their website (likely to preserve the ability to switch it out for KVM or Xen at some future date), IBM has clearly taken an architectural hint from Amazon by building virtualization into the CloudBurst platform. Virtualization allows the owners of the application to put the infrastructure to work quickly via virtual appliances, instead of slogging through the tedious process of configuring some standard template from IT (which is never right) to meet the needs of their application – paying for infrastructure charges while they fight through incompatibilities, dependency resolution, and policy exception bureaucracy. CloudBurst represents a key shift in the way IT will buy server hardware in the future. Instead of either a bare-metal unit or pre-loaded with a bloated general purpose OS (see the complaint about tedious configuration above), the systems will instead come pre-configured with virtualization and self-service deployment capability for the application owners - a cloud-computing infrastructure appliance if you will. Cisco has designs on the same type capability with their newly announced Unified Computing System.

Third, it appears that IBM is going to announce a companion service to the CloudBurst internal capability tomorrow. From the little information that is available today, I surmise that IBM is likely going to provide a capability through their Rational product to enable application owners to “federate” the deployment of their applications across local and remote CloudBurst infrastructure. With this federated capability across local (fixed capital behind the firewall) and remote sites (variable cost operating expense from infrastructure hosted by IBM), the IBM story on cloud will be nearly complete.

The only real negatives I saw in this announcement were that IBM did not include an option for an object storage array for storing and cataloging the virtual appliances, nor did they include any utilities for taking advantage of existing catalogs of virtual appliances from VMware and Amazon. While it probably hurt IBM’s teeth to include VMware in the offering, perhaps they could have gone just a bit further and included another EMC cloud technology for the object store. Atmos would be a perfect complement to this well considered IBM cloud offering. And including a simple utility for accessing/converting existing virtual appliances really would not be that difficult. Maybe we’ll see these shortcomings addressed in the next version. All negatives aside, I think IBM made a good first showing with CloudBurst.

Verizon Misses with Cloud Offering

2009-06-18T10:43:00.004-04:00

About two weeks back, I was excited to see a headline about Verizon partnering with Red Hat to offer their customers a “new” cloud computing offering. I was hopeful that the details would reveal a KVM hypervisor based elastic compute capability coupled with an OVF based specification for virtual appliances to run on the service. I was also hoping to discover some details on storage as a service, with all of the services accessible via a management capability exposed via RESTful APIs. Boy, was I disappointed. Turns out the new Verizon cloud offering is just the old Verizon hosting offering with a new name.

Why is it so difficult for all of these old school infrastructure providers to understand the new path being blazed by Amazon AWS? Why can't they offer even a reasonable facsimile of the capability provided by Amazon? Surely it is the threat of Amazon that is leading them to re-name the old hosting stuff as the new cloud stuff. Why not go all the way and actually offer something that is competitive? Here is a recipe for any that are interested:

First, provide a X86 hypervisor based, virtualized compute service that allows the customer to bring their applications with them as pre-packaged, pre-configured virtual machines (virtual appliances). Don't ask them to boot a “standard OS” and then spend hours, days, weeks, months configuring it to work for them (because what you specified as the “standard” is certainly not what they have tested with their applications, and the whole purpose of elasticity is defeated if you can't quickly put images to work on the network in response to application demand). Better yet, let them boot existing Amazon Machine Images and VMware virtual appliances. Providing this capability is not rocket science. It is just work.

Second, provide a simple storage service (see Amazon S3 for what it should do) for storing unstructured data as well as for storing their virtual appliances that boot on the virtualized, elastic compute service. If you don't want to take the time to develop your own, follow AT&T's lead and go buy the capability EMC offers as part of the Atmos product line. You don't even have to think, you just need to write a check and viola – an Amazon S3 type capability running on your network. What could be easier?

Third, provide a block storage capability for attaching to virtual appliance images that must store state, such as database images. Most of the hosting companies already provide this type of SAN offering, so this part should be a no-brainer. Just price it with a very fine grained, variable cost approach (think megabyte-days, not months).

Fourth, provide access to the infrastructure management services via simple, RESTful APIs. You don't have to go overboard with capability at first, just make certain the basics are available in a manner that allows the services to be run effectively over the Internet without any funky protocols that are specific to your network implementation.

Finally, go sign up partners like rPath and RightScale to offer the next level of manageability and support for the virtual machines that will run on the network. These are the final touches that indicate to your customers that you are serious about providing a terrific capability for the complete lifecycle of your cloud computing offering. Instead of asking them to be patient with you while you re-name your hosting offering as a cloud offering in the hopes that it will assuage their bitterness that Amazon-like capability is not available on your network.

Federation - The Enterprise Cloud Objective

2009-06-02T15:34:00.003-04:00

I know the title to this blog post sounds a bit like a Star Trek episode, but I believe I have an useful point to make with the term federation - even at the risk of sounding a bit corny. I have been watching with interest the lexicon of terms that are emerging to describe the architecture and value of cloud computing. VMware uses the terms Internal/External/Private to describe the distribution of application workloads across multiple networks in a coordinated fashion. Sun uses the terms Private/Public/Hybrid, respectively, to describe the same architecture (although they would argue for Sun branded components in lieu of Vmware/EMC branded components). I think both of these term sets as descriptors for a cloud architecture that distributes workloads across multiple networks are flawed and confusing. Rather than simply complaining, however, I am willing to offer a solution.

The term Federation describes the end state of an effective cloud architecture perfectly, and I think we should all begin using it when we attempt to sell our respective goods and services to enable the enterprise cloud. Whether part of a Internal/External/Federation combination or a Private/Public/Federation combination or Network1/Network2/Networkn/Federation, the common term accurately describes the end objective of cloud computing.

First, some attribution. This term was presented to me as a descriptor for cloud value during my work with the cloud infrastructure group at EMC (the folks that own the Atmos product line) over a year ago. It is now my turn to put some greater structure on this enviable original thought that belongs to EMC.

A good general definition for Federation (independent of an IT context) is a union of member entities that preserves the integrity of the policies of the individual members. Members get the benefits of the union while retaining control over their internal affairs.

In the case of a technology infrastructure federation (aka a cloud architecture), the primary benefit of the union is the lower cost and risk associated with a pool of technology assets which are available across a diversified set of independent networks. In other words, application workloads should be distributed to the network with the lowest risk adjusted cost of execution – i.e. based upon the risk policies of the enterprise. If the risk of running a mission critical, enterprise workload on Amazon's AWS network is deemed high (for whatever reason, real or perceived), that workload might stay on a proprietary network owned by the enterprise. Likewise, a low risk workload that is constantly being deferred due to capacity or complexity constraints on the enterprise network might in fact be run for the lowest cost at Amazon or a comparable provider. For a startup, the risk of depleting capital to purchase equipment may dictate that all workloads run on a third party network that offers a variable cost model for infrastructure (Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS).

Independent of the proprietary calculus for risk that must be undertaken by every enterprise relative to their unique situation, it should become clear to all that the distribution of application workloads across multiple networks based upon the cost/capability metrics of those networks will lower the risk adjusted cost of enterprise computing. The same diversification theories that apply to managing financial portfolio risk also apply to managing the distributed execution of application workloads. The historical challenge to this notion of application workload federation is the lack of an efficient market – the transaction cost associated with obtaining capacity for any given application on any given network were too high due to complexity and lack of standards for application packaging (de facto or otherwise). Now, with virtualization as the underpinning of the network market, virtual appliances as the packaging for workloads, high bandwidth network transit and webscale APIs for data placement/access, the time is coming for an efficient market where infrastructure capacity is available to applications across multiple networks. And Federation is the perfect word to describe a cloud architecture that lowers the risk adjusted cost of computing to the enterprise. Enterprise. Federation. Clouds. Star Trek.

Oracle Lowers Expectations

2009-05-15T10:21:00.005-04:00

I was floored when Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun after Sun's deal with IBM fell apart. I never saw Oracle buying Sun in a million years – too much reliance on hardware revenue. Then, Oracle announced this week that they intend to purchase Virtual Iron Software. It seems that Oracle is serious about lowering their influence in the software technology ecosystem. They are going after the lower layers of the infrastructure, and they are putting their money where their mouth is in order to put some real assets into the battle for the next generation, virtualized datacenter.

Sun provides some terrific infrastructure assets in the form of the Solaris operating system, the ZFS file system, the Java programming language, and several other lesser known projects that are nonetheless useful technology in assembling a world class datacenter infrastructure. I actually believe that Solaris is not so relevant as an operating system (too difficult to do the driver work for all the variations in X86 hardware) as it will be relevant as a collection of useful system software and engineering expertise for delivering innovation and support. If you have not seen Sun's investment in this area, do some research on the Image Packaging System. It is Sun's implementation of the rPath approach for tailoring the operating system to the needs of an application (JeOS) and providing robust lifecycle management – they even wrote it in python, not java, to make it easier to mimic rPath's features.

Virtualization is going to change the notion of the operating system, and Solaris will get torn apart into a series of useful components and support libraries that will be attached as JeOS to various applications that will run on a cloud of virtualized infrastructure (witness Amazon EC2). The lines between Linux, Solaris, and other open system components will blur. This outcome is a good one for Oracle because it is very disruptive to the existing providers of one size fits all, general purpose operating systems. Especially if Oracle follows through on their commitment to virtualization as evidenced by their acquisition of Virtual Iron.

Virtual Iron was an early entrant into the hypervisor space – behind VMware but ahead of XenSource. They never really got out of the gate from a marketing perspective, but they always had some useful technology for managing virtual infrastructure. If Oracle makes a strong commitment to Xen as well as the management interface for controlling virtual infrastructure, they could definitely emerge as the strong contender to take on VMware in this market. I do not believe Citrix has a strong commitment to the datacenter infrastructure market (they prefer the desktop with a strong Microsoft alliance), Red Hat is far behind in market adoption with their late commitment to KVM in lieu of Xen, and Microsoft has so much anxiety over Google that worrying about VMware is likely lower on the list of priorities.

The race to the bottom of the software stack just became more interesting yet again. With Oracle continuing to raise the bar with lower expectations, it will be fun to watch the feeding frenzy for the assets that will win the hearts and minds of those datacenter customers that are certain to embrace virtualization and cloud as the new architecture for scalable, elastic computing.

Cloud Application Management - Agile, Lean, Lightweight

2009-05-06T22:32:00.003-04:00

The acquisition of Hyperic by SpringSource got me thinking about the next generation of application delivery and management for cloud applications. At first, I was cynical about this combination – two small companies with common investors combining resources to soldier on in a tough capital environment. While this cynical thinking probably has a kernel of truth to it, the more I thought about the combination the more I thought that it makes sense beyond the balance sheet implications. Indeed, I believe the future of application delivery and management will combine agile development with lean resource allocation and lightweight management. This new approach to application delivery and management is one that complements the emerging cloud architecture for infrastructure.

Agile development, with its focus on rapid releases of new application functionality, requires a programming approach that is not overly burdened with the structure of J2EE and EJB. Spring, Rails, Grails, Groovy, Python all represent the new approach – placing a premium on quick delivery of new application functionality. Application functionality takes center stage, displacing the IT infrastructure dominance of the legacy application server oriented approach. Developers will use what works to deliver the application functionality instead of using what works for the IT organization's management framework. The new approach does have implications for scalability, but we will get to that issue in a moment.

Lean is one of the newer terms emerging to describe the future of application delivery. I first referenced lean as an IT concept by relating it to the lean approach for manufacturing operations in a blog post about a year ago. With lean application delivery, applications scale horizontally to consume the infrastructure resources that they require based upon the actual demand that they are experiencing. The corollary is that they also contract to release resources to other applications as demand subsides. This “lean” approach to resource allocation with dynamic scaling and de-scaling is what a cloud architecture is all about – elasticity. Rather than optimizing the code to “scale up” on an ever bigger host, the code remains un-optimized but simple – scaling out with cheap, variable cost compute cycles when the peaks in demand require more capacity. Giving back the capacity when the peaks subside.

With the lean approach for resource allocation, a lightweight management approach that measures only a few things replaces the old frameworks that attempt to measure and optimize every layer in an ever more complex infrastructure stack. If the service is under stress due to demand, add more instances until the stress level subsides. If the service is under extremely light load, eliminate resources until a more economical balance is struck between supply and demand. If an instance of a service disappears, start a new one. In most cases, you don't even bother figuring out what went wrong. It costs too much to know everything. This lightweight approach for management makes sense when you have architected your applications and data to be loosely coupled to the physical infrastructure. Managing application availability is dramatically simplified. Managing the physical hosts becomes a separate matter, unrelated to the applications, and is handled by the emerging datacenter OS as described by VMware or the cloud provider in the case of services like those provided by Amazon AWS.

Take a look at the rPath video on this topic. I think it reinforces the logic behind the SpringSource and Hyperic combination. It rings true regarding the new approach that will be taken for rapid application delivery and management in a cloud infrastructure environment. Applications and data will be loosely coupled to the underlying infrastructure, and agile development, lean resource allocation, and lightweight management will emerge as the preferred approach for application delivery and management.

McKinsey Recommends Virtualization as first step to Cloud

2009-04-20T16:49:00.003-04:00

In a study released last week, the storied consulting company, McKinsey & Company, suggested that moving datacenter applications wholesale to the cloud probably doesn't make sense – it's too expensive to re-configure and the cloud is no bargain if simply substituted for equipment procurement and maintenance costs. I think this conclusion is obvious. They go on to suggest that companies adopt virtualization technology in order to improve the utilization of datacenter servers from the current miserable average of ten percent (10%). I think this is obvious too. The leap that they hesitated to make explicitly, but which was called out tacitly in the slides, was that perhaps virtualization offers the first step to cloud computing, and a blend of internal plus external resources probably offers the best value to the enterprise. In other words cloud should not be viewed as an IT alternative, but instead it should be considered as an emerging IT architecture.

With virtualization as an underpinning, not only do enterprises get the benefit of increased asset utilization on their captive equipment, they also take the first step toward cloud by defining their applications independent from their physical infrastructure (virtual appliances for lack of a better term). The applications are then portable to cloud offerings such as Amazon's EC2, which is based on virtual infrastructure (the Xen hypervisor). In this scenario, cloud is not an alternative to IT. Instead, cloud is an architecture that should be embraced by IT to maximize financial and functional capability while simultaneously preserving corporate policies for managing information technology risk.

Virtualization as a step to cloud computing should also be viewed in the context of data, not simply application and server host resources. Not only do applications need compute capacity, they also need access to the data that defines the relationship of the application to the user. In addition to technology such as VMware and Citrix's Xen technology, enterprises also need to consider how they are going to abstract their data from the native protocols of their preferred storage and networking equipment.

For static data, I think this abstraction will take the form of storage and related services with RESTful interfaces that enable web-scale availability to the data objects instead of local network availability associated with file system interfaces like NFS. With RESTful interfaces, objects become abstracted from any particular network resource, making them available to the network where they are needed. Structured data (frequently updated information typically managed by a database server technology) is a bit trickier, and I believe solving the problem of web-scale availability of structured data will represent the “last mile” of cloud evolution. It will often be the case that the requirement for structured data sharing among applications will be the ultimate arbiter of whether an application moves to the cloud or remains on an internal network.

The company that I founded, rPath, has been talking about the virtualization path to cloud computing for the past three years. Cloud is an architecture for more flexible consumption of computing resources – independent of whether they are captive equipment or offered by a service provider for a variable consumption charge. About nine months ago, rPath published the Cloud Computing Adoption Model that defined this approach in detail with a corresponding webinar to offer color commentary. In the late fall of last year, rPath published a humorous video cartoon that likewise offered some color on this approach to cloud computing. With McKinsey chiming in with a similar message, albeit incomplete, I am hopeful that the market is maturing to the point where cloud becomes more than a controversial sound-byte for replacing the IT function and instead evolves into an architecture that provides everyone more value from IT.

Outsourcing gives way to Now-sourcing via Cloud Technology

2009-04-13T19:18:00.003-04:00

The theory behind the value of outsourcing, aside from labor arbitrage, was that the outsourcer could deliver IT resources to the business units in a more cost effective manner than the internal IT staff due to a more highly optimized resource management system. The big problem with outsourcing, however, was the enormous hurdle the IT organization faced in transitioning to the “optimized” management approach of the outsourcer. In many cases this expensive hurdle had to be crossed twice – once when the applications were “outsourced” and then again when the applications were subsequently “in-sourced” after the outsourcer failed to live up to service level expectations set during the sales pitch. Fortunately, the new architecture of cloud computing enables outsourcing to be replaced with “now sourcing” by eliminating the barriers to application delivery on third party networks.

The key to “now sourcing” is the ability to de-couple applications and data from the underlying system definitions of the internal network while simultaneously adopting a management approach that is lightweight and fault tolerant. Historically, applications were expensive to “outsource” because they were tightly coupled to the underlying systems and data of the internal network. The management systems also pre-supposed deep access to the lowest level of system structure on the network in order to hasten recovery from system faults. The internal IT staff had “preferences” for hardware, operating systems, application servers, storage arrays, etc., as did the outsourcer. And they were inevitably miles apart in both the brands and structure not to mention differences in versions, release levels, and the management system itself. Even with protocols that should be a “standard,” each implementation still had peculiarities based upon vendor and release level. NFS is a great example. Sun's implementation of NFS on Solaris was different than NetApp's implementation on their filers, leading to expensive testing and porting cycles in order to attain the benefits of “outsourcing.”

I believe a by-product of the “cloud” craze will be new technology, protocols, and standards that are designed from the beginning to enable applications to run across multiple networks with a much simpler management approach. A great example is server virtualization coupled with application delivery standards like OVF. With X86 as a de facto machine standard and virtualization as implemented by hypervisor technology like Xen and VMware, applications can be “now sourced” to providers like Amazon and RackSpace with very little cost associated with the “migration.”

Some will argue that we are simply trading one protocol trap for another. For example, Amazon does not implement Xen with OVF in mind as an application delivery standard. Similarly, VMware has special kernel requirements for the virtual machines defined within OVF in order to validate your support agreement. Amazon's S3 cloud storage protocol is different than a similar REST protocol associated with EMC's new Atmos cloud storage platform. And the list of “exceptions” goes on and on.

Even in the face of these obvious market splinters, I still believe we are heading to a better place. I am optimistic because all of these protocols and emerging standards are sufficiently abstracted from the hardware that translations can be done on the fly – as with translations between Amazon's S3 and EMC's Atmos. Or the penalty of non-conformance is so trivial it can be ignored – as with VMware's kernel support requirements which do not impact actual run-time performance.

The other requirement for “now sourcing” that I mentioned above was a fault tolerant, lightweight approach to application management. The system administrators need to be able to deliver and manage the applications without getting into the low level guts of the systems themselves. As with any “new” approach that requires even the slightest amount of “change” or re-factoring, this requirement to re-think the packaging and management of the applications will initially be an excuse for the IT staff to “do nothing.” In the face of so many competing priorities, even subtle application packaging and management changes become the last item on the ever lengthening IT “to do” list – even when the longer term savings are significant. But, since “now sourcing” is clearly more palatable to IT than “outsourcing” (and more effective too), perhaps there is some hope that these new cloud architectures will find a home inside the IT department sooner rather than later.

Maintenance Woes Handicap Microsoft's Azure

2009-03-30T16:42:00.002-04:00

Last week, Microsoft product manager Steve Martin indicated in his blog that Azure would be a Microsoft-only service – hosted only by Microsoft in Microsoft data-centers. It seems that maintenance challenges, or the ability to “innovate freely,” are limiting the availability of Azure to a pure service play. To be fair, Microsoft has indicated that key technology developed to support Azure will find its way into Microsoft Windows server products, which, of course, can be purchased and deployed by anyone. But I have serious doubts about Microsoft as a service provider because I do not think they have the operational mentality to succeed on the margins that are available to service providers – they are not cheap and efficient like Amazon. Microsoft is already demonstrating that the ties to their past technology architecture are already handicapping the potential success of their future cloud endeavors.

Anyone that pays attention to my musings in this blog knows that I am a huge fan of Amazon's web services – particularly the elastic compute cloud (EC2). And I believe Amazon is going to be very successful in this space because they have led the way with an architecture that effectively de-couples the definition of the application from the definition of the compute resources. Plus, they have an operational mentality – they are cheap and efficient. Aside from Amazon, I believe the really big winners are going to be the technology companies that enable existing service providers to respond to Amazon with a technology model that loosely couples applications to the infrastructure - eliminating the complex maintenance challenges that have historically precluded elasticity and enabling seamless application delivery across public and private clouds. Here are some of the potential players and my handicap for their success.

VMware – I believe virtualization technology is going to play a critical role in cloud due to its ability to de-couple the applications from the host computers – enabling elegant maintenance and true elasticity. VMware is certainly the leader in this space, and there is little doubt that they have relevant technology. The key question is going to be their willingness to respond to the “cheapness” and “openness” requirement of the service providers. VMware has historically sold technology to enterprises in a typical perpetual software licensing model. Cloud will require much more sharing of risk/reward in the sales model and a willingness to be flexible in the technology requirements to co-innovate with the service providers and ecosystem partners. VMware is not known for its partnering mentality.

Citrix – Xen is currently the incumbent technology for virtualization at Amazon, and Citrix is clearly aligned with Xen due to their $500M purchase of XenSource. However, cloud to date seems to be all about Linux and related open source infrastructure due to the flexibility of the licensing model, and Citrix has historically been very tightly aligned to Microsoft and its associated technology and licensing model. I think it is an open question whether Citrix is willing to embrace a radically different business model to monetize Xen as part of a service provider cloud ecosystem.

Cisco – the announcement earlier this month about the Cisco unified computing system is all about a new brand of infrastructure that is unencumbered by the legacy approach which tightly couples applications to the compute host resources. I believe Cisco “gets it” much more so than the current mega-vendors HP and IBM – each of which is going to be hampered with the legacy approaches for application delivery and management. But, as is always the case with new ventures like Ciscos unified computing system, the sky is always bluest when there is nothing yet to lose. We'll see if they can actually execute in the market with a new model.

Microsoft – While Microsoft certainly has many strengths, I do not think any of them lend themselves particularly well to cloud success. Of all vendors, they have the most to lose, and the least to gain, with this new approach. Their sales and distribution model discourages elasticity, they are way behind the leaders in the market for virtualization technology, and they do not have a mindset to be operationally efficient as a service provider. I believe their biggest opportunity in cloud is to provide a new desktop approach that seamlessly integrates all of the services a user would expect to be effective and productive in a networked world. If Apple doesn't continue to run away with that opportunity, maybe Microsoft will make some hay in this space.

Google – I have criticized Google again and again for their AppEngine model that essentially requires application providers to recode their applications to fit Google's infrastructure. I actually do not think Google wants to be a big cloud player for “infrastructure” services in the manner that Amazon is currently defining the market. Instead I think Google is going to be a next generation application platform provider more in the mold of Apple with its consumer products, but geared more to the needs of the business user. As a giant SaaS platform for applications like email, office productivity, VOIP, calendaring, geographical services, etc., I think Google has a great play with their current approach. Just don't expect them to compete with Amazon in the infrastructure space.

Salesforce.com – I think Salesforce.com is completely out in left field for everything other than applications that need to reside close to their CRM application. I personally feel that Marc should just go ahead and take on SAP and Oracle in the business applications space and forget about trying to morph their highly proprietary application platform into a general purpose application delivery platform. They have a terrific sales team, a terrific customer base, and the competing applications from Oracle, SAP, and others are just awful in terms of the grief customers endure to maintain and support them.

EMC – Some folks may be a bit puzzled by the inclusion of EMC in this list of potential cloud players, but remember that EMC owns nearly 90% of VMware which means that cloud is definitely top of mind at EMC. And they actually have been thinking about the data problem associated with cloud. Namely, how do I ensure my data is available to my applications when they become portable across multiple compute service providers? Their Atmos product is effectively Amazon S3 in a box with some interesting features around policy management and data federation. As an equity play, EMC may be a cheap way to own VMW, and they might make some hay themselves if they execute in the cloud market ahead of the other storage providers.

The rest of the A-list technology providers – HP, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun – either do not get cloud, are actively bashing it (witness Oracle), have no assets that are currently relevant, or are so far behind in investing that, short of a series of acquisitions, I believe they will remain effectively irrelevant. Of course there will be lots of lip service and cute marketing tricks such as IBM's recent open cloud manifesto, but until there is some substance, I stand by the above handicaps.

Killing the OS Octopus

2009-03-16T11:18:00.004-04:00

The inspiration for this blog post title comes from a Paul Maritz (CEO of VMware) quote, during his presentation to financial analysts last week. Paul used the phrase "severing the tentacles of complexity" multiple times when referring to the new level of business flexibility that is possible when applications are liberated from their physical host by encapsulating them inside of a virtual machine with “just enough operating system (or JeOS).” They can be provisioned much more quickly because there is no need to provision physical assets. They can be moved from datacenter to datacenter more quickly because there is no onerous installation and validation process required. Indeed, virtualization enables cloud computing because the applications are no longer defined by the physical computers upon which they run. But, until VMware truly embraces a JeOS approach with their operating system support matrix, they are simply recommending “isolating” the tentacles of complexity. And the result will be a perilous and expensive condition often referred to as VM sprawl.

So what is the difference between “isolating” the tentacles of complexity and “severing” them? Isolating the tentacles means shoving the previous definition of your application running on a physical server into a virtual machine box. When you put a virtual machine box around the octopus, it can no longer create mischief with other application octopi running on the same physical host. Its tentacles are “isolated,” and utilization on the physical host can be much higher. This approach is valuable, and it has catapulted VMware into the spotlight as one of the hottest technology companies on the planet.

However, the octopus is still alive and well inside the box, and system administrators must continue to feed that hungry animal in exactly the same way they did when it was living on a physical server host. The level of maintenance has not been reduced. The level of security vulnerability has not been reduced. Although isolated, it is still a resource hog because those crazy tentacles demand CPU, and memory, and disk to flail and flap as they do. This condition of ever expanding system administration grief associated with the frictionless deployment of virtualized applications whose tentacles of complexity have simply been isolated and not severed is known as VM sprawl. And it will be a nightmare of system administration expense for those that embrace it.

In order to avoid the nightmare of VM sprawl, the tentacles of the complexity octopus must actually be severed, not simply isolated. Application developers and system administrators alike must re-think the category of the operating system in the context of a virtualized datacenter. Since the operating system is no longer the conduit for managing the hardware, it should become a simple shared library for system services required by the application. Two great example of this approach are rPath and BEA's (now Oracle) liquid VM technology. With both of these platforms, the operating system is specified in a manner that explicitly supports the needs of the application – without any extra bloat associated with the typical general purpose OS approach. As a result, the OS in both of these cases is 10X or more smaller than the smallest installation option offered by a general purpose OS. In theory, this should lead to a 10X reduction in the scope and scale of administration activities. Severing the tentacles of complexity by re-thinking the OS eliminates the perils of VM sprawl.

But VMware does not currently support this approach. They only support the legacy vendors of general purpose OS technology. Sure, these new approaches have terrific performance and value, and VMware is happy to have them contribute to the value of their virtual appliance market, but their support statement pretty clearly favors “isolation” of complexity over true elimination of complexity. But the winds of change are steadily and surely blowing in favor of this new approach in the market. Red Hat, for example, just announced that they are going to market with a bare metal hypervisor that is directly competitive with the VMware approach in lieu of their historical product architecture - where virtualization was simply a feature of the general purpose operating system. And Paul Maritz was pretty clear in his presentation that “severing the tentacles of complexity” and a “just enough operating system” approach are important to VMware. Perhaps we are drifting toward the precipice of an all out war for the definition of the future datacenter operating system. I said it back in 2006, and I'll say it again today -- let's fry up that OS octopus polvo frito and serve it with some spicy mango chutney and cold beer.

Will Agile drive a Hybrid Cloud Approach?

2009-03-04T10:10:00.002-05:00

Some workloads are perfectly suited for cloud deployment. Generally, these are workloads with transient or fluctuating demand, relatively static data (lots of reads, few writes), and no regulated data compliance issues (i.e. patient healthcare records). Test fits this description perfectly – especially with the growing popularity of Agile methods. With its focus on rapid iteration and feedback to achieve faster innovation and lower costs, Agile demands a flexible and low cost approach for testing cycles. I have no doubt that developers will begin using variable-cost compute cycles from services like Amazon EC2 because of its flexibility and pay-for-what-you-use capability. But I am also willing to bet that testing with Amazon will put further pressure on the IT organization to respond with a similar, self-service IT capability. I think a hybrid-cloud architecture with complementary internal and external capability will emerge as a productive response to the demand for true end-to-end agility.

Some time ago, I authored a blog post titled “When Agile Becomes Fragile” that outlined the challenge of implementing Agile development methods while attempting to preserve the legacy IT approach. What good is rapid development when the process for promoting an application to production takes several months to absorb even a few weeks of new development? If developers take their Agile methods to the cloud for testing (which they will), it becomes a slippery slope that ultimately leads to using the cloud for production. Rather than the typical, dysfunctional IT response of “don't do that – it's against policy,” I think the IT organization should instead consider implementing production capacity that mimics and complements cloud capability such as that offered by Amazon.

Along with all of the cool technology that is emerging to support Agile methods, new technology and standards are also emerging to support the notion of a hybrid-cloud. The new Atmos storage technology from EMC and the OVF standard for virtualizing applications are two good examples of hybrid-cloud technology. Atmos gives you the ability to describe your data in a manner that automatically promotes/replicates it to the cloud if it has been approved for cloud storage/availability. Whether applications run on an external cloud or on your “internal cloud,” the supporting data will be available. Similarly, OVF has the potential to enable virtualized applications to run effectively externally on the cloud or internally – without significant manual (and error prone) intervention by system administrators (or those developers that play a sysadmin on a TV show). In both cases, the goal is to enable greater flexibility for applications to run both internally and on the cloud – depending on the profile of the application and the availability of resources.

Agile is yet another important technology change that is going to pressure IT to evolve, and rPath is sponsoring a webinar series that dives into this topic in some detail. Whether you are a developer, an architect, or a system administrator, these webinars should be interesting to you. For the IT staff, the series may offer a glimpse at an approach for IT evolution that is helpful. In the face of Agile and cloud pressure, the alternative to evolution – extinction – is much less appealing.

Red Hat Goes Streaking - Dumps Xen

2009-02-24T13:26:00.004-05:00

Yesterday Red Hat announced their revised virtualization strategy. Most interesting to me was Red Hat's declaration that the hypervisor should indeed lie "naked" on the metal. Red Hat also announced end-of-life for Xen support and some stuff regarding desktop virtualization and protocols that I don't pretend to understand. While it was expected that Red Hat would end-of-life support for Xen after their acquisition of the KVM technology from Qumranet, the fact that Red Hat went streaking into the market with a bare metal approach to the hypervisor was a pretty significant strategy reversal.

Until yesterday, Red Hat had always adopted the Microsoft line on the hypervisor - it is simply a feature of a general purpose operating system. Red Hat historically claimed that the hypervisor should not lie naked on the bare metal, but instead it should be wrapped up inside the general purpose OS - a little extra bloating that never hurt anybody. It looks like some combination of market forces - likely VMware financial success and Amazon's adoption of Xen for their Elastic Compute Cloud - have forced Red Hat to consider a new approach. Now Microsoft stands alone in their contention that a hypervisor is just a new general purpose OS feature, and the rest of the market can move on to the market share land grab for the large-scale Linux datacenters. It should be an interesting race, because all three players - Xen (Citrix), KVM (Red Hat), and VI (VMware) are all coming from different positions of strength - and weakness.

In almost every case I have observed, Xen is the incumbent virtualization technology among the Linux datacenter consumers that have virtualized any production workloads. However, not many have actually virtualized because the historical compelling case for virtualization - server consolidation - falls on deaf ears among the Linux crowd. With Linux, as opposed to Windows, it is possible to run multiple application workloads on a single server without significant instability. Server utilization can be quite high without virtualization - hence no requirement for Linux server consolidation. But, the new benefits of virtualization - flexibility, security, and elasticity - apply equally, if not especially, well to the Linux workloads. If application workloads are separated into unique, small footprint, virtual machines (virtual appliances, if you like) that run atop a bare naked hypervisor, then:

- flexibility is better because one application can be managed/administered without interfering with another workload running on the same host

- security is better because vulnerable services like DNS are isolated and easier to maintain/secure due to a smaller footprint

- elasticity is better because application workloads can be scaled quickly when demand increases and also retired quickly when demand recedes (cloud, anyone?)

Because of these new business benefits, Xen is beginning to take hold in the Linux datacenters. Citrix, however, has not historically been a strong brand among the Linux savvy crowd, so it is unclear if they have the stomach for pursuing a new market segment. VMware is the 800 pound gorilla in hypervisors generally, but they too have shown very little Linux savvy (their management console only runs on Windows) - probably because 90% of their revenues come from virtualizing Windows workloads. Then there is Red Hat, the 800 pound Linux gorilla who has been in denial about the importance of a bare metal approach for the hypervisor - until now.

Based on this set of circumstances, I would say that the virtualization opportunity for the Linux datacenter market is a wide open race. Now that Red Hat has decided to run the race naked, it should be more fun to watch.

Is the Cloud Game Already Over?

2009-01-25T20:43:00.004-05:00

This is the thought that crossed my mind a few weeks back as I pondered Amazon's beta release of the Amazon Web Services Console. The reason the game might be over is because Amazon is apparently so far ahead of the competition that they can now divert their engineering attention to the management console instead of core platform functionality. To me, this signals a competitive lead so vast that absent quick and significant re-direction of resources and potential strategic acquisitions of capability, Amazon's competitors are doomed in the cloud space.

I saw this dynamic once before during my time at Red Hat. Red Hat had such a lead in the market with almost total mind share for the platform (Red Hat Linux, now Red Hat Enterprise Linux), that the company could launch a strategic management technology, Red Hat Network, while others were grasping for relevance on the core platform. Note that in the case of Red Hat, no one else has come close to their lead in the Linux market space. And no one else has really gotten around to building out the management technology that was offered by Red Hat Network 8 years ago.

Consider these other challenges facing Amazon's competitors:

1. Lack of machine image definitions - Amazon published the AMI spec for EC2 about 2 years ago. To my knowledge, all of the competitors that use virtualization (Amazon uses Xen) are still requiring customers to boot a limited set of approved "templates" which must then be configured manually, and subsequently lose their state when retired.

2. Proprietary versus open - when you require the customer to program in a specific language environment that is somewhat unique to a particular "cloud" platform (ala Google with Python and Salesforce with Apex), you dramatically limit your market to virtual irrelevance out of the gate. Amazon doesn't care, so long as you can build to an X86 virtual machine.

3. Elastic billing model - until you have a platform for billing based upon the on-demand usage of resources, you don't have a cloud with the key value proposition of elasticity. You simply have hosting. To my knowledge, most competitors are still on a monthly payment requirement. Hourly is still a long way away for these folks.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I bet I am not. If I am right, the day will come in the not too distant future (after the equity markets recover) when Amazon spins out AWS as a tracking stock (similar to the EMC strategy with VMware) with a monster valuation (keeping this asset tied to an Amazon revenue multiple makes no sense), and the valuations on the technology assets that help others respond to Amazon go nutty (witness the XenSource valuation on the day VMware went public). I say "Go, Amazon, Go!"

Cloud in Plain English

2008-12-23T11:09:00.002-05:00

I must take my hat off to Jake Sorofman, who runs marketing for rPath. Jake has done an incredible job distilling a bunch of complex stuff into a consumable and entertaining video. Do yourself a favor, and check out his Cloud Computing in Plain English video. Al Gore never looked so good.

And Happy Holidays!

Is JeOS a Tonic for VM Sprawl?

2008-12-12T14:56:00.000-05:00

It seems that everyone is worried about VM sprawl these days. When system capacity is easy to consume because the application is prepackaged as a virtual machine (a virtual appliance in the case of an ISV), the virtual infrastructure capacity is quickly gobbled up by those that have been waiting for IT to get around to provisioning systems for them. No more friction due to virtualization means no more waiting and wanting. It also leads to VM sprawl. But why is VM sprawl bad?

VM sprawl is bad because the scale of the management problem used to be throttled by the capital spending associated with the size of the infrastructure. Now, the scale of the management problem is equal to the true demand for application capacity as represented by the number of application images, or virtual machines, that get deployed. This scale factor associated with application images throws the old yardstick of X system admins per Y server machines out the window. What are we going to do to lower the work profile associated with so many new systems that now need to be managed?

I think at least part of the tonic for VM sprawl is the new acronym coined by Srinivas Krishnamurthi of VMware – JeOS. JeOS stands for Just enough OS and it is pronounced “juice.” In my mind, this liquid pronunciation is appropos given my view of its potential potency as a tonic for VM sprawl. A huge part of the burden of system management is the patching and associated regression testing for maintaining the security and functionality of the general purpose OS. If you can shrink the size of the OS by 90% (which is where we have measured the typical size for most applications built with our rBuilder technology) by eliminating any elements not required by the application, you can eliminate about 90% of the patching burden. More importantly, you eliminate the bigger burden of regression and stability testing that is coupled to the patching process.

With a JeOS approach, the number of virtual machines can theoretically grow by 10X the legacy approach without any impact to the cost structure associated with patching and testing the OS changes. I suspect a 10X reduction represents a real win for most shops as the OS patching and testing associated with security and infrastructure performance is a very sizable portion of their management spending. So if you are feeling the pangs associated with VM sprawl, I strongly suggest a healthy slug of JeOS each morning and once again in the afternoon to clear your system of the painful bloating that is brought on by virtualizing the general purpose OS.

Will Managing VM Sprawl lead to Rogue Cloud Deployments?

2008-12-05T15:34:00.001-05:00

I just read an interesting article regarding the potential cost pitfalls associated with VM sprawl. Jett Thompson, an enterprise computing architect from Boeing, has developed a cost model regarding the benefits of virtualization and the related pitfalls of VM sprawl. It seems that virtualization is easy to justify, so long as you don't give the users everything that they want. Here is the money quote from the article:

However, all of those savings [from virtualization] can be eliminated if sprawl isn't controlled. With virtual servers easy to spin up, users may ask for large numbers of new virtual machines and it's up to IT to hold the line, Thompson says.

"If you don't have demand management and good governance in place you're actually going to cost your company money," he says. "Virtual server sprawl can wipe out any savings."

Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman also says virtual server sprawl can be tough to control and is harder to measure than physical server sprawl. "Fundamentally, we believe virtualization sprawl can be a much bigger problem than physical sprawl," Bittman said

I believe that the unintended consequences of "IT hold[ing] the line" will be rogue cloud deployments. Rogue cloud deployments describes the phenomenon of business unit developers taking matters into their own hands when IT "holds the line" on making computing resources available. Once the business units understand that resources can be made available on-demand, either internally or via services such as Amazon EC2, they are simply not going to take "no" for an answer. Deploying applications as virtual machines, or virtual appliances in the case of an ISV application, removes all of the friction from the deployment process. This same friction was formerly the tonic that IT sprinkled about in order to "hold the line" on availability (and the subsequent management costs) of computing resources. The instant gratification culture that we are cultivating with SaaS and cloud will not be held in check if IT "holds the line" by saying "no" to requests for capacity/capability.

I have a recommendation for Jett and the folks at Boeing and elsewhere who are fearing the unintended consequences of frictionless system capacity brought about by virtualization. Push the control point for deployment policy upstream via automated build, release, and management processes for applications released as virtual machines, manage the scale problem by going vertical with a JeOS architecture, and build a seamless bridge managed by IT to cloud offerings like Amazon EC2. Charge the users with the costs for deployment and management, but give them the technology to do it the right way. Check out our cloud computing adoption model and the webinar that accompanies it. Rogue cloud deployments can be avoided, even in the face of VM sprawl control measures, when you say "yes" to your users while holding them accountable for building manageable system images.

IT Management Goes Vertical

2008-12-01T17:17:00.001-05:00

About 6 months ago, I had the privilege of engaging with the CTO of a large Wall Street investment bank on the topic of virtual machine management. One of his staff who was also participating in the conversation informed me that they had done a broad survey of their management technology providers regarding a new approach for system management -- vertical instead of horizontal. He said they polled the vendors with the following question:

Q: When does the unit of management shift from the physical host (horizontal) to the virtual machine (vertical)?

A: About 3 - 5 years

He said that all of the vendors agreed that this shift was inevitable, and the time frame for it to be in full swing was "about 3 - 5 years." He said they followed on with a second question after they received the response above:

Q: When do you plan to begin providing us with technology to manage vertically via virtual machines instead of horizontally via the physical hosts?

A: We'll worry about that in 3 - 5 years.

Amazing. The problem with this response, aside from the obvious, is that "about 3 - 5 years" is quickly becoming here and now. The term "vm sprawl" is on the tip of every analyst tongue, and the IT blogosphere is beginning to buzz with the imperative for managing the deployment of applications as coordinated collections of virtual machines (or virtual appliances in the case of applications delivered by a third party provider).

Lori MacVittie from f5 DevCentral writes:

When applications are decoupled from the servers on which they are deployed and the network infrastructure that supports and delivers them, they cannot be effectively managed unless they are recognized as individual components themselves.

Traditional infrastructure and its associated management intrinsically ties applications to servers and servers to IP addresses and IP addresses to switches and routers. This is a tightly coupled model that leaves very little room to address the dynamic nature of a virtual infrastructure such as those most often seen in cloud computing models . . . .

That model is broken in a virtual, dynamic infrastructure because applications are no longer bound to servers or IP addresses. They can be anywhere at any time, and infrastructure and management systems that insist on binding the two together are simply going to impede progress and make managing that virtual infrastructure even more painful.

The impending challenge is that the horizontal approach will become prohibitively expensive when the number of instances to be managed "horizontally" increases by an order of magnitude due to the liquidity of system capacity provided by server virtualization. Because it is so "easy" to provision a VM, lots of them will be provisioned for lots of very valid reasons. Managing 100 hosts becomes managing 1000 virtual machines. When this happens to you, be prepared to go "vertical."

Going vertical means defining and managing the contents of the virtual machines based upon the needs of the application. When a "host" is defined as the minimal software that is required to support the system functions of the application within the VM, 90% of the operating system software falls away because it becomes irrelevant. This smaller, Just Enough OS (JeOS or "juice") approach which considers only the needs of the application is more scalable because 90% of the management burden disappears. If the number of VMs increases by an order of magnitude, at least the footprint has shrunk by a corresponding order of magnitude.

Going vertical also means extending the discipline of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) into the realm of the virtual machine. Since all of the system software that supports an application is now based upon the needs of the application rather than the needs of the infrastructure (which is, after all, the point of virtualization), it is now possible to put the entire software content of the VM under strong version and release management. This version management discipline, which is classically associated with ALM, enables change management on a much larger scale than the ad hoc approach of the legacy horizontal model.

Historically, the boundary between applications and IT operations was fuzzy because it was impossible to discern the portion of the operating system that was responsible for supporting the application from the portion that was responsible for supporting the infrastructure. They were intrinsically coupled due to the duality of the operating system role - hardware support and application support. With virtualization, the fuzziness becomes a bright, clear line. The hypervisor supports the allocation of hardware resources, and the host inside the VM supports the application.

With this new bright line separating application development from IT operations, all of the change management advantages associated with years of prior art in the ALM space become available as a scalable mechanism for managing production releases of the application as a set of VMs. The expensive testing burden for promoting an application from development to production is dramatically reduced when every software component of every VM falls under a unified change management system. The unintended consequences of change are largely eliminated because version management provides visibility and pinpoint accuracy regarding the deployment of changes across the universe of VMs - those in production as well as those in the library repository.

When coupled with JeOS, strong version management provides the scalability for IT management to go vertical. If you stay horizontal in the face of the impending VM tsunami, you might drown in the technical equivalent of the 1000 year flood.

The Virtual Machine Tsunami

2008-11-14T13:38:00.001-05:00

Over the past 2 weeks, I have had a number of very interesting conversations with partners, prospects, customers, and analysts that lead me to believe that a virtual machine tsunami is building which might soon swamp the legacy, horizontal system management approaches. Here is what I have heard:

Two separate prospects told me that they have quickly consumed every available bit of capacity on their VMware server farms. As soon as they add more capacity, it disappears under the weight of an ever pressing demand of new VMs. They are scrambling to figure out how they manage the pending VM sprawl. They are also scrambling to understand how they are going to lower their VMware bill via an Amazon EC2 capability for some portion of the runtime instances.

Two prominent analysts proclaimed to me that the percentage of new servers running a hypervisor as the primary boot option will quickly approach 90% by 2012. With all of these systems sporting a hypervisor as the onramp for applications built as virtual machines, the number of virtual machines is going to explode. The hypervisor takes the friction out of the deployment process, which in turn escalates the number of VMs to be managed.

Amazon EC2 demand continues to skyrocket. It seems that business units are quickly sidestepping those IT departments that have not yet found a way to say “yes” to requests for new capacity due to capital spending constraints and high friction processes for getting applications into production (i.e. the legacy approach of provisioning servers with a general purpose OS and then attempting to install/configure the app to work on the production implementation which is no doubt different than the development environment). I heard a rumor that a new datacenter in Oregon was underway to support this burgeoning EC2 demand. I also saw our most recent EC2 bill, and I nearly hit the roof. Turns out when you provide frictionless capacity via the hypervisor, virtual machine deployment, and variable cost payment, demand explodes. Trust me.

Bottom line, we are all facing an impending tsunami of VMs unleashed by an unprecedented liquidity in system capacity which is enabled by hypervisor based cloud computing. When the virtual machine becomes the unit of application management, extending the legacy, horizontal approaches for management built upon the concept of a physical host with a general purpose OS simply will not scale. The costs will skyrocket.

The new approach will have vertical management capability based upon the concept of an application as a coordinated set of version managed VMs. This approach is much more scalable for 2 reasons. First, the operating system required to support an application inside a VM is one-tenth the size of an operating system as a general purpose host atop a server. One tenth the footprint means one tenth the management burden – along with some related significant decrease in the system resources required to host the OS itself (memory, CPU, etc.). Second, strong version management across the combined elements of the application and the system software that supports it within the VM eliminates the unintended consequences associated with change. These unintended consequences yield massive expenses for testing and certification when new code is promoted from development to production across each horizontal layer (OS, middleware, application). Strong version management across these layers within an isolated VM eliminates these massive expenses.

The VM tsunami is coming. I'm just happy to have my trusty rPath surfboard tethered to my ankle. It's going to be the ride of a lifetime.

Can You See the Clouds from Windows?

2008-10-24T18:49:00.000-04:00

During the course of our webinar entitled "The Pragmatist's Guide to Cloud Computing: 5 Steps to Real ROI," several of the attendees submitted questions regarding the status of Windows as an environment for cloud applications. In a partial answer to the question, Jeff Barr, a speaker during the webinar and a member of the Amazon Web Services team, responded that a beta implementation of Windows for EC2 was now available. The problem with the notion of “Windows for EC2” is that it perpetuates the broken, legacy model of tying your application to the infrastructure upon which it runs.

In the legacy model, applications became artificially tied to the physical server upon which they ran, and server utilization was low because it is very difficult to run multiple applications on a single instance of a general purpose operating system. The reason it is difficult to run multiple applications on a single instance of a general purpose operating system is because each application has unique needs which conflict or compete with the unique needs of other applications. Virtualization technology, such as that provided by VMware or Citrix with XenServer, breaks the bond of the application to a physical server by placing a layer of software, called a hypervisor, on the physical hardware beneath the operating system instances that support each application. The applications are “isolated” from one another inside virtual machines, and this isolation eliminates the conflicts.

Amazon embraces this virtualization model by using Xen to enable their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. So what's the problem? If the OS instances are not tied to the physical servers any longer (indeed you do not even know which physical system is running your application on EC2, nor do you need to know), why am I raising a hullabaloo over a “broken model?” The reason this new model of Windows for EC2 is broken is because your application is now artificially coupled to EC2. When you begin with a Windows Amazon Machine Image (AMI), install your application on top, configure-test, configure-test, configure-test, configure-test, configure-test to get it right, and then save the tested configuration as a new AMI, the only place you can run this tested configuration of your application is on Amazon's EC2. If you want to run the application on another virtualized cloud, say maybe one provided by RackSpace, or Terremark, or GoGrid, or even your own internal virtualized cloud of systems, you have to install the application yet again, configure-test, configure-test, configure-test, configure-test, configure-test to get it right again, and then save the tested configuration on the other cloud service. Why don't we just stop the madness and admit that binding the OS to the physical infrastructure upon which it runs is a flawed approach when applications run as virtual machine images (or virtual appliances) atop a hypervisor or virtualized cloud of systems like EC2?

The reason that we are continuing the madness is because madness is all we have ever known. Everyone knows that you bind an operating system to a physical host. Operating systems are useless unless they bind to something, and until the emergence of the hypervisor as the layer that binds to the physical host, the only sensible approach for operating system distribution was to bind it to the physical host. When you buy hardware, you make it useful by installing an operating system as step one. But if the operating system that you install as step one in the new virtualized world is a hypervisor in lieu of a general purpose operating system, how do we get applications to be supported on this new type of host? Here's your answer -- what we previously knew as the general purpose operating system now needs to be transformed to just enough operating system (JeOS or “juice”) to support the application, and it should bind to the application NOT THE INFRASTRUCTURE.

Virtualization enables the separation of the application from the infrastructure upon which it runs – making possible a level of business agility and dynamicism previously unthinkable. Imagine being able to run your applications on-demand in any data-center around the world that exposes the hypervisor (any hypervisor) as the runtime environment. Privacy laws prevent an application supporting medical records in Switzerland from running in an Amazon datacenter in Belgium? No problem, run the application in Switzerland. Need to run the same application in Belgium in support of a new service being offered there next month? No problem, run it on Amazon's infrastructure in Belgium. The application has to support the covert operations associated with homeland security and it cannot be accessed via any Internet connection? No problem, provide it as a virtual appliance for the NSA to run on their private network. Just signed a strategic deal with RackSpace that provides an extraordinary level of service that Amazon is not willing to embrace at this time? No problem, shut down the instances running on EC2 and spin them up at RackSpace. All of this dynamic capability is possible without the tedious cycle of configure-test -- if we will simply bind the operating system to the application in order to free it from the infrastructure and let it fly into the clouds.

So why doesn't Microsoft simply allow Windows to become an application support infrastructure, aka JeOS, instead of a general purpose operating system that is bound to the infrastructure? Because JeOS disrupts their licensing and distribution model. Turning a ship as big as the Microsoft Windows licensing vessel might require a figurative body of water bigger than the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans combined. But if they don't find a way to turn the ship, they may find that their intransigence becomes the catalyst for ever increasing deployments of Linux and related open source technology that is unfettered by the momentum of a mighty business model. Folks with valuable .Net application assets might begin to consider technology such as Novell's mono project as a bridge to span their applications into the clouds via Linux.

I can tell you that there are lots of folks asking lots of questions about how to enable Windows applications in the “cloud.” I do not believe the answer is “Windows for EC2” plus “Windows for GoGrid” plus “Windows for RackSpace” plus “Windows for [insert your data-center cloud name here].” If Microsoft does not find a way to turn the licensing ship and embrace JeOS, the market will eventually embrace alternatives that provide the business agility that virtualization and cloud computing promises.

Will the Credit Crunch Accelerate the Cloud Punch?

2008-10-14T09:14:00.001-04:00

It's no secret that the days of cheap capital might be over. While it is obvious that startups with lean capital structures are already embracing cloud offerings such as Amazon EC2 for computing and S3 for storage, it seems to me that this trend might accelerate further for both startups and even enterprise customers.

Cloud consumption in the startup segment is poised to accelerate as investors like Sequoia Capital warn their portfolio companies to “tighten up” in the face of this credit crunch. Even the well capitalized SaaS software providers might begin re-considering the “ridiculous” expense of building out their offerings based upon the classic salesforce.com model of large scale, proprietary datacenters with complex and expensive approaches to multi-tenancy. They might be better served by a KnowledgeTree model where on-demand application value is delivered via virtual appliances. In this model, the customer can deploy the software on existing gear (no dedicated server required) because the virtualization model makes for a seamless, easy path to value without setup hassles. Or they can receive the value of the application as a SaaS offering when KnowledgeTree spins up their instance of the technology on Amazon's elastic compute cloud. In both cases, the customer and KnowledgeTree both avoid the capital cost of acquiring dedicated gear to run the application.

Large enterprises as well will be re-considering large scale datacenter projects. When credit is tight, everyone from municipal governments to the best capitalized financial institutions must find ways to avoid outlays of precious capital ahead of the reality of customer collections. More and more of these customers will be sifting through their application portfolio in search of workloads that can be offloaded to the cloud in order to free up existing resources and avoid outlays for new capacity to support high priority projects. Just as the 9/11 meltdown was a catalyst for the adoption of Linux (I witnessed this phenomenon as the head of enterprise sales at Red Hat), a similar phenomenon might emerge for incremental adoption of cloud associated with the credit crunch of 2008. All new projects will be further scrutinized to determine “Is there a better way forward than the status quo?”

As enterprises of all sizes evaluate new approaches to minimize capital outlays while accelerating competitive advantage via new applications, rPath is offering a novel adoption model for cloud computing that might serve as a convenient bridge to close the credit crunch capital gap. For those that are interested in exploring this new model, pleas join us in a webinar along with the good folks at Forrester, Amazon, and Momentum SI on October 23rd. If necessity is the mother of invention, we might be poised for some truly terrific innovations in the cloud space . . . . and we will owe a debt of gratitude to the credit crunch for driving the new architecture forward.

Larry Rains on the Cloud Parade

2008-09-30T17:02:00.002-04:00

At Oracle world last week, Larry Ellison derided the current “cloud” craze, likening the technology industry's obsession with “fashion” to the women's apparel industry. In a sense, he is right. Everything is being labeled cloud these days. New datacenters from IBM – cloud. New browser from Google – cloud. New strategy from VMware – cloud. I myself commented to Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal that I too feel the cloud craze is a bit “nutty.” At the same time, I believe there is some real change underfoot in the industry, and I believe that Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is leading the way in capturing the imagination about what is possible with a new approach.

The reason EC2 has captured the imagination of so many people in the industry is because it offers the possibility of closing the painful gap that exists between application development and production operations. Promoting applications from development to production has typically been a contentious negotiation between the line of business application developers and the IT production operations management crew. It is a difficult process because the objectives of apps and ops run orthogonal to one another. Apps is about new features to quickly respond to market demand, and ops is about compliance, stringent change control, and standardization to assure stability.

With EC2, developers don't negotiate with operations at all. They simply package up the innovations they want inside a coordinated set of virtual machines (virtual appliances in the case of the ISV vernacular), and deploy, scale, and retire based upon the true workload demands of the market. No requisitions for hardware. No laborious setup of operating environments for new servers. No filling out waivers for using new software components that are not production approved yet. No replacement of components that fail the waiver process and re-coding when the production components don't work with the new application features. No re-testing. No re-coding. No internal chargebacks for servers that are not really being used because the demand for the application has waned. No painful system updates that break the application – even when the system function is irrelevant to the workload. No. No. No.

The on-demand, self-service datacenter architecture of Amazon's EC2 is going to put huge pressure on the operations organization to respond with an internal “cloud” architecture – or lose the business of the developers who would rather “go to the cloud” than negotiate with ops. Here at rPath, we believe that the ops folks are going to need to provide the apps folks with a release (rBuilder) and lifecycle management system (rPath Lifecycle Management Platform) that enables the self-service capability and rapid promotion of EC2 while preserving compliance with operating policies that assure stability and security. And, if an application really takes off, you don't have to build a new datacenter to respond to the demand. Just scale out the workload onto Amazon, or another provider with a similar cloud architecture. IT operations now has a way to say “yes we can” instead of “no you can't.” Getting to “yes” from your IT ops provider by closing the gap between apps and ops is what the excitement of cloud is all about.

The Ties that Bind

2008-09-28T14:21:00.000-04:00

Last week I attended the MIT Emerging Technology Conference in order to listen in on the panel on cloud computing. The panel included participants from salesforce.com, Google, Amazon, as well as Mendel Rosenblum, the founder of VMware and a professor at Stanford University. The broad sentiment among the group was that cloud computing is an extension of the trend where network ubiquity and performance enables a transition of IT capability from fixed costs with a slow rate of change to variable costs and a rate of change that reflects true demand. Software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service all qualify under this broad definition. Technology innovations such as rich browser interfaces, virtualization, and SOA are further hastening this trend.

Sitting at rPath, my favorite quote was one from Mendel Rosenblum regarding the changing role of the operating system in response to a question regarding the technological transformations that will follow these trends. Mendel's quote went something like this:

"An operating system is not very useful by itself. It needs to bind to something to provide value. Historically, you would bind the OS to hardware in order to expose the hardware to the applications. Now, with the widespread adoption of virtualization as the technology that binds to the hardware, the OS needs instead to bind to the application. Every time I say that you guys in the press claim I said the OS is going away. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that it is going to change."

And this is what we have been saying at rPath for the past 3 years. When you bind an OS to the hardware in the legacy approach, the tie that binds is the OS installer that detects and loads drivers along with the utilities that are useful in managing the hardware lifecycle. When you bind an OS to an application to create a virtual machine, the tie that binds is technology that detects the needs of the application and loads the right JeOS (Just enough OS) elements while also bringing utilities that are useful in managing the application lifecycle. These are two very different approaches to operating system technology, and Mendel rightly points out that the future OS (and the related business model around the OS) will be different.

The great news is that this difference will further the move toward a more flexible datacenter - ultimately enabling seamless movement of application workloads across datacenters ala cloud computing. Binding the OS to the application as part of the application release process means that applications can be delivered to the infrastructure as a pre-defined, pre-tuned, coordinated set of virtual machines. Anyone with any experience with virtual machines knows that it is much easier to deploy a virtual machine (or a virtual appliance in the case of an application vendor) than to provision a new server and configure the application atop a new host OS. Metadata standards like OVF coupled with packaging innovations from companies such as rPath will free applications from the infrastructure and allow them to run in the clouds.

Needless to say, I was grinning ear to ear when I heard Mendel's comments. I hope they get repeated again and again.

VMware Strikes Back

2008-09-16T14:47:00.001-04:00

The tech industry has been all abuzz lately about the competitive hullabaloo surrounding the new hypervisor technologies that are emerging to take on VMware's dominant hypervisor product. Microsoft launched Hyper-V with a party last week to upstage VMware's VMworld event this week. Red Hat purchased Qumranet to solidify its control of the KVM hypervisor technology. Now, VMware is striking back at the legacy OS vendors by labeling their new product category the Virtual Datacenter Operating System – a direct attack on the entrenched category of the general purpose operating system. The cold war of spies and covert operations to grab mindshare while outwardly promoting a message of peaceful co-existence has officially escalated to a hot war for the future architecture of the datacenter.

I, for one, am happy to see this rise in hostilities because I believe it will carry the industry to a much better place – and customers will be the primary beneficiary of the new approach. In the legacy datacenter, a general purpose operating system attempts to serve both the hardware infrastructure with device drivers while also serving the applications with system services. This approach has the disadvantage of artificially coupling applications to physical servers. Any attempt to move the application to another physical server typically requires that the configuration and validation process begin anew because it is extremely unlikely that the new server is absolutely identical to the previous one. This lack of flexibility leads to extreme overspending on capital equipment because an application with a period of low demand cannot relinquish its hardware resources to an application experiencing high demand. The hardware resources become application specific, and each application owner must size hardware capacity to meet peak demand. Server utilization in the datacenter averages 15 – 20%, and the general purpose OS is the culprit.

VMware has now declared that they offer an alternative approach to the general purpose operating system. The technology is not new, but marketing it under the category of an operating system is a very different tactic in this war for the datacenter. The conflict is now overt instead of covert, and this change was inevitable as VMware attempts to expand its footprint beyond its bread and butter business of Windows server consolidation and test lab operations. The new objective is the elastic datacenter and ultimately cloud computing.

The datacenter becomes elastic when applications are released by developers as coordinated sets of virtual machines (or virtual appliances in the case of a vendor release), each with Just Enough Operating System (JeOS or “juice”) attached to provide the system services required by the application. These applications can expand or contract on-demand because there is no onerous configuration process to ready the general purpose OS for a specific application. Instead, the hypervisor accepts the virtual machine and allocates it resources as specified by the OVF meta-data that is included with the image. Applications are up and running in a matter of seconds, and the process is totally repeatable to assure stability, security, and compliance as workloads scale, de-scale, and re-scale to meet the ever changing demand profiles of the enterprise application portfolio. Infrastructure can become a variable cost via this architecture because the scaling cycle can include hardware resources provided by third parties via a hypervisor layer – aka cloud computing as popularized by Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) via the Xen hypervisor.

The reason I label this new competitive tact by VMware as “warfare” is because the concept of a hypervisor as the infrastructure management layer with JeOS as the system services layer for the applications delivered as virtual machines destroys the value of the general purpose OS. If a hypervisor provides access to the infrastructure via device drivers, and applications receive system services from JeOS, and the flexibility of the datacenter improves, and the management of applications is simplified, and I can embrace cloud computing for variable cost infrastructure, why would I ever again buy a general purpose operating system? I won't. And customers won't either.

Unleash the dogs of war. Let's get to it so that we can all live happily ever after on the other side of history.

Red Hat Escalates Hypervisor Wars

2008-09-04T12:50:00.000-04:00

Red Hat today announced the acquisition of Qumranet, the company behind the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) bare metal hypervisor. With this acquisition, Red Hat is escalating the already fierce battle that is raging for control of the software layer that is rapidly replacing the general purpose OS as the access layer for hardware infrastructure. Qumranet is a very savvy acquisition by Red Hat because it plays to their strength as the primary maintainer of low level Linux kernel technology. The Linux kernel is a mature, high performing provider of hardware driver capability, and there is no doubt in my mind that it can become a significant competitor in the bare metal hypervisor space.

Given all of the competitive noise surrounding hypervisors these days – the Microsoft Hyper-V launch is next week followed by VMworld the following week – the stakes in this game are enormous. It represents a fundamental shift in the architecture for both server applications as well as desktop applications. No more will the general purpose OS be the table stakes for releasing or “certifying” an application to run in the customer's environment. Instead, the hypervisor is going to be the target, and applications will arrive pre-configured and ready to run as virtual machines with Just Enough OS (JeOS or “juice”) attached to provide system services and a connection to the hypervisor. Indeed this new architecture is one of the driving forces behind the concept of cloud computing. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is enabled by the Xen hypervisor, and the new CEO of VMware, Paul Maritz, has sounded off time and again about the importance of a cloud computing architecture since taking the helm of VMware.

Red Hat's new, aggressive move in this space is good news for customers who will inevitably embrace this cloud approach for enabling the flexible, elastic datacenter. It means that there will be more competition for the hypervisor design win, which translates to better features, better performance, and lower cost. This type of bare-knuckle competition is what the software market is all about, and customers are the big winners in this fight.

Single Minute Exchange of Applications (SMEA) - The Cure for Server Hoarding

2008-08-17T21:44:00.001-04:00

I recently had an interesting conversation with an IT executive that has built a self-service datacenter capability based upon virtualization. He described for me a system whereby business units can request “virtual server hosts” with a pre-set system environment (i.e. Linux and Java), and within an hour or two they receive an email notification informing them of the availability of the “virtual machines.” The goal of this system, as it was explained to me, is to “cure server hoarding” by the business units.

The theory is that if the business units are confident that they can get new capacity “on-demand,” then they will not request more systems than they really need. And since they are billed based upon the actual amount of capacity deployed, they have incentive to “give back” any systems that are not necessary to meet production demands. I asked how it was working:

IT Exec – Great. We have over 1500 virtual machines actively deployed in production in support of business unit demand.

Billy – Wow! That's terrific. What do the statistics look like for server returns?

IT Exec – What do you mean?

Billy – I mean how many systems have the business units returned to the pool of available systems because their demand was transitory?

IT Exec – No one has ever given back a single machine ever. They have the economic incentive to do so, but so far not one machine has ever been given back to the pool.

And therein lies the problem. The reason no one gives systems back is because the setup costs associated with getting them productive are simply too high. Even in this case, when the setup of the operating environment is accomplished within an hour or two of the request, the process of “fiddling around with the system” to get the application installed, configured, and stable is so expensive that no one ever gives a productive system back when demand falls. This situation leads to tons of waste in the form of over deployed capital and over consumption of resources such as power. I am reminded of the early days of the lean production revolution in the world of manufacturing.

In the late eighties, Toyota was whipping Detroit's fanny because they had implemented a system that the folks in Detroit did not think was possible. The folks at Toyota got much higher utilization out of their capital investment with much lower levels of waste and work in process because they had implemented a system that assured the expensive production equipment was always engaged in producing parts and vehicles that closely reflected true demand. A big part of this system was a capability known as the Single Minute Exchange of Dies, or the SMED system, which was pioneered by Toyota and evangelized by the legendary manufacturing engineer, Shigeo Shingo.

With SMED, expensive body stamping machines (or any machine for that matter) are kept productively engaged building the exact parts that are required to meet true demand by reducing the setup time for a “changeover” to less than 10 minutes. This is accomplished primarily by precisely defining the interface between the machine and the stamping dies such that the dies can be prepared for production “off-line.” While a machine is productively engaged building Part A, the dies for Part B are setup for production in a manner that does not require interfacing with the production machine. When it is time for a changeover from Part A to Part B, the machine stops, the Part A dies are quickly released and pulled from the machine, and the Part B dies are quickly engaged using a highly standardized interface. No fiddling around to get it right. The machine starts up again in less than 10 minutes and down the line roll the perfect output for Part B.

Contrast this approach with the standard approach in Detroit in the late eighties. The economy of scale theory in Detroit was to set up the line for long runs of a single part type and build inventory because changing over the line was filled with setup costs. Fiddling around with the dies to get the parts to come off according to specification might take a day or even a week. So instead of building for true demand, Detroit over-deployed resources, both capital equipment and work in process, in an attempt to compensate for poor setup engineering. We all know how this story ends. The Toyota system is still the envy of the manufacturing world.

Now is the time for the technology world to take a lesson from Toyota. Virtualization will provide the standard interface for production, but it is almost worthless without “setup” technology that enables the applications to be defined independent from the production machine. The resources of the datacenter should reflect “true demand” for production output instead of idling away – suffering from a miserable case of server hoarding because setup is so expensive and error prone. The time has come for SMEA – Single Minute Exchange of Applications.

At rPath, we are working towards SMEA every day. We have high hopes that the complementary trends of virtualization and cloud computing will highlight the possibility for an entirely new, and more efficient, approach for consumption of server production capacity. An approach where applications are readied for production without consuming machine cycles “fiddling around” to get the application stable. An approach where expensive machines running application A are given back for production of application B when true demand indicates that B needs the resources instead of A. The Department of Energy and CERN are already on board with this approach, but it will be curious to observe who in the technology world emerges as “Toyota” and how long it takes the status quo of “Detroit” to wake up and smell the coffee. In the meantime, I think I will take to calling Erik Troan, our CTO and my co-founder at rPath, Shigeo Erik – the father of Single Minute Exchange of Applications.