The rise of the ‘Open’ in Clouds

The future of Cloud Computing lies predominantly in solutions that are based on open, safe and flexible cloud architecture, free from any trappings of vendor lock-in. The acquisition of from Cloud.com and its CloudStack technology heralds a visionary leap towards a comprehensive ‘Enterprise ready’ flexible Cloud Builder software suite that is targeted for Cloud Providers who’d rather use commodity x86 compute gear and pair it up with storage, networking and hypervisors of their choice in order to create Enterprise Private, Hybrid and Service Provider Cloud solutions for their customers.

With this move, Citrix now boasts of a compelling cloud software story that has the potential to leverage economies of scale and flexibility of cloud computing, similar to those achieved by Amazon. Using its Cloud Infrastructure foundations in Xen and CloudStack’s nifty orchestration, the fortified Citrix portfolio can help cloud builders replicate Amazon’s cloud success story within the context of an enterprise. This is certainly different from traditional private cloud building approaches adopted by the on-premise hardware & software vendors that offer pre-configured packaged hardware-software ‘a-la-Lego’ bundles – for example, Vblock (Cisco, VMware, EMC), FlexPod (NetApp, Cisco, VMware), Matrix (HP) and CloudBurst (IBM).  Citrix also happens to partner with several of these vendors and more in the traditional cloud building arena as well.

If you look at Citrix and CloudStack approach from the point of view of IT organizations, you can almost hear them heaving a sigh of relief. More often than not, IT folks’ response to cloud adoption is saddled anywhere in between anxiety at the risk of becoming redundant with cloud automation to the other extreme where they have been struggling to integrate, harness and reign in cloud-based applications with the existing on-premise systems. Enterprise IT could use this maturity in cloud through solutions such as CloudStack to elevate their value proposition within the organization. How? Well, through better alignment with business goals by harnessing the power of internal clouds that can co-exist with existing systems and grow on-demand using commodity hardware.  Integration capabilities with the legacy and heterogeneous systems support is the key feature of this potent mix of Citrix and CloudStack technology that offers a much better way of dealing with enterprise IT than the traditional approaches which are locked-in with one vendor or the other.

Besides the hypervisor and hardware independence, CloudStack also provides ‘borderless scalability’ through its single command and control management console that can manage multiple availability zones that are geographically disjoint. CloudZones enable the federation of managed or hosted availability zones within a CloudStack deployment. Another feather is the Hybrid Cloud support through CloudBridge, which enables applications to interoperate with Amazon EC2, S3 APIs and OpenStack API.

Why did Citrix pick up Cloud.com? Well, besides being a feature rich cloud orchestration suite that is built from ground up and complements Citrix’s Cloud portfolio and goals, CloudStack has gained a lot of industry momentum with its cool partnerships and at least 50 large-scale production clouds in deployment that have been built on its open source cloud computing solution including Nokia Research Center, Tata Communications, GreenQloud, Logicworks, Korea’s KT ucloud, Japan’s leading enterprise cloud builder  IDCF (a subsidiary of Yahoo, Japan ). An interesting case study of Cloud.com adoption is Logicwork’s Infinicloud that offers fully managed cloud services including shared root access, application monitoring, server patching, managed security, managed templates and snapshots, intrusion detection (IDS), and database clustering. It also enables hybrid cloud solutions for PCI, HIPAA, and SAS-70 Type II Compliance, making Infinicloud one of the most advanced public cloud offerings in the market. Another case in point is Pathway, a provider of integrated Internet solutions to businesses and residential customers. Pathway uses CloudStack for its offering CloudPath – a highly reliable and secure location for its clients to house important data. The primary reason why Pathway chose the Cloud.com cloud platform was because it integrates seamlessly into Pathway’s existing infrastructure that includes Citrix Xen, VMware, Cisco, KVM, Dell multi core servers, Linux and Windows 2003/2008.

Citrix already had partnerships with NetApp, HP for traditional private cloud builder solutions and now through Cloud.com acquisition, it has grabbed eyeballs for the x86 based commodity cloud deployment requirements of Service Providers and Enterprises laden with legacy IT  that are bound by the integration requirement strings. Citrix is in a leading position to help its customers by enabling them to easily transform their data centres into cloud computing environments while leveraging their existing tools, infrastructure and architectures and tools. The systems integrators can use this approach for building, deploying, and managing multi-tier and multi-tenant cloud computing environments in an effort at easing the transition to the cloud. Besides hardware partnerships, CloudStack offers tight integration with cloud management partners like RightScale to help customers manage multi-cloud, hybrid platforms that span across private data center to the public cloud. To address one of enterprise’s biggest hurdles to cloud adoption, security, this solution provides requisite Identity and access management, security, compliance and regulatory needs of the enterprise customer through its partnership with Symplified. There is a burgeoning ecosystem around CloudStack with startups such as UberSmith providing billing and metering solutions that take into account CloudStack resources as well.

Citrix’s acquisition of Cloud.com’s CloudStack technology brings a breath of fresh air into the rapidly evolving world of cloud computing, bolstering cloud maturity and realism (sort of!).  Well, yet again, the ‘old order changeth’, yielding place to the new and ‘data centers’ fulfill themselves in many ways.

State of Cloud Computing in China

With over 384 million people on the internet, 900 million mobile phones and 94.3 % of Chinese internet users having broadband access, why is the adoption of Cloud Computing slower in China than the rest of the world? Key driving factors for cloud adoption in US and elsewhere such as efficient cost structure, flexibility and ease of use, access to technology and solutions which were earlier not affordable don’t seem to be driving demand for cloud in China as much.

Cloud make a lot of sense for start-ups and they have been chiefly instrumental in driving SaaS and IaaS adoption so far.  If you look at the US Venture Capital figures (2010) of $21.8 billion vs. that in China – ~$3billion, there is hardly that kind of start-up-led cloud adoption push in the context of China. Interestingly, small and medium businesses are the backbone of economy not only in China but in APAC.  Their primary interest in cloud is in its capability to handle unpredictable workloads and not justs costs or accessibility. Remember, cost structure of internet services is drastically different from that in the U.S. and other parts of the world. For example, cost of bandwidth is significantly higher but the market price for a virtual machine is lower than that in the US. There is cheap skilled manpower available and alternative avenues of  hardware access in the form of  rental/leasing facilities which can substitute for small scale IaaS-like requirements with similar pay as you go model and the rental company maintaining and upgrading the hardware.

In addition to the difference in start-up culture, Chinese data centers may not be going through similar transition after all, as their US counterparts are. There are many older legacy laden data centers in US that are due for technology and facility overhaul to beat the single digit utilization rates and higher power consumption and PUE metrics  that result in wasted capacity and higher overall operating costs. In the US context, such data centers benefit tremendously from the virtualization and cloud computing paradigms whereas the Chinese ones are relatively newer or probably fewer legacy data centers than in the west.  If you draw parallels from the High Performance Computing (HPC) world -  China has recently upped its ante with World’s #1 Tianhe and push towards being a global supercomputing power.  The total number of indigenous supercomputing systems in China  is higher than in any other country. This illustrates China’s broader strategy for developing its own supercomputing infrastructure through indigenous system expertise and capability without relying on imports poentially down to the CPU level. Godson (aka Loongson) is a MIPS-based processor family, developed by the Chinese government-backed Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) in the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  In 2007, a supercomputer with the name of KD-50-I was constructed, using 336 Godson-2F processors to deliver one teraflop of performance.

Similar to HPC domain, Cloud Computing in China too has the same indigenous streak.  Most of the foreign players are wary of Chinese government rules and regulations and so are the customers in China.  They are more comfortable using local service providers as opposed to external players – take the case of qq.com which hit Microsoft IIS and Apache market and gulped 12% of Webserver market share in 3 months!

After government regulations and the extra administrative overheads that it entails, it is the data security in clouds that Chinese organizations are wary of .  They appear to be paranoid regarding having their data out of China even more than the US cloud adopters!  An Accenture survey suggests that Chinese organizations are averse to entrusting foreign providers with their data. Less than half say they are willing, even if the provider keeps the data within China’s borders. The number falls to below 20 percent for foreign providers that do not have cloud data centers in China.

Absence of clarity on data privacy laws in China is another hurdle to cloud adoption. There is no doubt that cloud computing is viewed as a beneficial IT paradigm in general but the compelling reasons for mass adoption are still fuzzy when it comes to Chinese landscape.  If you look at virtualization adoption – one of the cornerstones of cloud computing  – China lags in virtualization adoption as well.  Once the Chinese broadband speeds get better and match up with the other developing countries and basic cloud computing concerns of Chinese organizations are addressed especially reliability of cloud services and the sensitivity of their data we may see a spurt in cloud adoption.  As a culture, Chinese organizations are reluctant to use foreign cloud providers or turn to start-up companies, so there may be local players (Kingdee, Baihui, Ufida) that pop-up higher in cloud arena in near future. Boundaries in clouds are fuzzy (literally and also in cloud computing) and requirements such as ‘non-floating’ data location, privacy could end up tethering data in clouds or creating continental/country-private clouds!

US Federal: State of Cloud adoption

Armed with $20 billion Federal spending budget, several of the Federal departments have identified their primary areas where they believe cloud adoption can help cut costs and avoid duplication and overlap within federal processes and programs. Looking at several agency systems that are migrating to the cloud, it is a cautious adoption with email, website hosting and content management as the lowest hanging fruits that most of the agencies are seeking cloudification for. This is a classic case of a large enterprise trying to adopt cloud and benefit from it as it re-orients itself to become more effective and tries to move along with legacy IT that keeps it tied down.  Those sections of Federal agencies that have lagged in ‘IT enabling’ their systems now stand a real good chance with cloud computing to becoming more effective and efficient in their processes through cloud adoption.

This step addresses in part some of the objectives to ‘achieving operational efficiency by applying light technology and shared solutions’ that is part I A) of  the 25 point implementation plan to reform Federal IT Management (Dec 2010).  The real de-duplication and removing of overlaps will come from overall federal strategy and implemenation of ‘shared services’.

Part II of this Federal cloud implementation plan emphasises on the role of effective program management for dealing with large scale IT projects in the Federal marketplace.  While more than half of the agencies have targeted email, Department of State was the only agency that has identified ‘Program Management’ as a key area for cloud adoption.  40% of Fed agencies have chosen to move their Website hosting and content management to cloud. 7 out of 25 agencies are looking at adopting Private Cloud, data center services, and cloud based hosts, storage as part of this initiative.  20% of the agencies are interested adopting cloud for collaboration and document management.

Some of the agencies are already piloting and/or using some of the cloud based solutions. It would be interesting to note how vendors such as Concur would potentially grab opportunities such as the ones showing up in Department of Defense  [DOD is moving its Trip cost estimator to cloud]. GSA has already seen the benefit in adopting cloud for its Power Management Services through MaaS360 offerings. GoToMeeting is another service that seems to be gaining traction in Federal space.

Other areas that are slated for cloud adoption by the Fed agencies include Capital Planning software, Website analytics, BPM, employment verification, survey services, grants and claims management. Several agencies show interest in using cloud for managing resources -  employees, data – reports, case, and IT resources such as storage.  Besides these, DOT and DOD are also looking at the most obvious choice for adopting cloud – moving their application test and development environments to cloud.

What would the Federal Cloud enabled enterprise look like say 18 months from now?  It would possibly be an amalgamation of different agencies in different stages of cloud adoption but would it be mostly SaaS and IaaS?  The crux of  cloud adoption in Federal space is to increase effectiveness, avoid duplication and overlaps.  That sure would require not only IaaS or a conglomeration of Fed clouds (private and public) but also an effective and implementable PaaS strategy and plan. Not many of the enterprises that are adopting cloud today have any cloud exit strategy or any plan B to move or migrate to a different cloud based solution.  Same is the case in Federal marketplace.  It is heartening to note that along with cloud adoption the Federal strategy also intends to reduce the barriers to entry for small innovative startup companies into the Federal marketplace.  That requires more groundwork and collaboration with angel network and efforts such as 1m/1m to help lay the specifics of choosing the right candidates and have clear vendor selection criteria for Federal cloud marketplace, in addition to having clearly defined SLAs and risk management initiatives by the Federal cloud adopters.

You can find a spreadsheet version of areas targeted by different Federal agencies here.  Illustrative case studies of how various federal agencies are deploying and harnessing cloud computing can be found in CIO Council’s ‘State of Public Sector Cloud Computing‘  report.

Change is inevitable; except from a (cloud) vending machine!

Robert C Gallager may not have imagined Amazons and Rackspaces as the server vending machines but his quote and pun on change aptly applies to the ‘pay pennies as you go model’ made famous by the new age vending machines – churning out compute and storage as a service.  Talking about change, Cloud Computing brings forth a plenty.  For an enterprise, big or small, change is about getting comfortable with new models – both technological and business.  Earlier, if a system software vendor talked about a solution that required an OS patch or a modified kernel – it was a taboo and a strict no-no in terms of enterprise openness to adoption.  Now I see companies like CloudLinux coming up with new lean and mean OS geared for hosting providers.  When I look into the solution, I wonder – has the cloud changed the erstwhile enterprise mindset in some way or is the ball now into the hosting providers data centers?  Those who were unwilling to increase OS management complexity and did not want any changes to existing or standard OS  or the OS provisioning and management software by solution vendors – how would they respond to something such as CloudLinux offering?  What happens to the earlier investment an enterprise may have made in say the Windows or common flavors of Linuxes in the short term and long term?  What is CloudLinux model for bringing a typical enterprise on their bandwagon through the hosting providers? Or are they only targeting the startups and may be enterprises with a clean IT slate?