Lean and the Art of Cloud Computing Management

Lean and the Art of

Cloud Computing Management

A guide to building Agile IT Supply Chains

by Gregor Petri

Smashwords Edition

Table of Contents

Table of Content

Introduction

The Cloud Academy

Cloud - more a marathon than a sprint

Section 2: Cloud computing-defined

Cloud computing: what is it?

Cloud computing: the benefits

Cloud computing: the risks

Cloud computing: the building blocks

Cloud computing: management aspects

Cloud computing: from definition to deployment

Cloud computing: A better way

Section 3: Cloud questions

Is hybrid the new black?

Will audits and certificates erase cloud security concerns?

Can public clouds be assured?

The day the cloud was out

The private cloud debate is building up steam, but is it worth having?

Who leads cloud computing developments?

Will the cloud end micro management?

Will the cloud drive consumerisation beyond devices?

Will the cloud kill outsourcing, the browser and the web?

Will today’s data centre follow yesterday’s mainframe?

What will be the cloud’s killer app?

Can you have cloud computing without vendor lock-in?

Market developments around lock-in

Is there a role for government in stimulating cloud computing?

Vivek Kundra’s decision framework for cloud migration

Some pragmatic cloud advice from down under

Section 4: A new role for it management?

The rumours of the it managers death were greatly exaggerated

Why cloud spells c.o.m.p.e.t.i.t.i.o.n. for the average it department

Why is it so complex to make it simple?

Reshaping it management- by cutting it into two halves?

Rogue it and stealth clouds

The IT-dustrial revolution

Managing an industrialised supply chain of services

Applying manufacturing best practices

How lean is your cloud?

A service portfolio approach

An IT supply chain model; once more, with feeling

Building your first virtual it factory

On the importance of planning

Are there any shortcuts or even a better way?

The need for a cloud abstraction model

It’s all about the fabric

Is your cloud strategy 3d-ready?

Eight simple rules for creating a cloud strategy

Appendix

The NIST definition

About the author

0: Introduction

In organisations everywhere, both business and IT are embarking on a cloud computing journey- but from very different starting points. While many IT departments look upon cloud computing as a way to make IT operations more efficient, business departments see it as an opportunity to directly source solutions 'as a service', often bypassing the IT department. This can’t go on. These two groups need to begin talking again; otherwise the scenario will be similar to ‘strangers passing in the night’. Even worse, it is ‘a train crash waiting to happen’.

This management guide aims to facilitate this discussion by providing a non- technical, structured introduction to cloud computing. It also highlights the profound change that needs to take place in the way large organisations manage their IT. Cloud computing has the potential to further transform IT into a utility: affordable, reliable, always on and ubiquitous. And as Nicolas Carr highlighted in his notorious 2003 Harvard Business Review article, utilities need to be managed differently.

The question is: will this new approach to the management of IT increase or decrease the strategic relevance of IT? That is not easy to answer at a time when some predict cloud computing to be an emerging bubble, while others see it as the beginning of the renaissance of IT.

To answer the question, we not only need to understand what cloud computing is and how it is developing, we also need to realise that the management of IT already began its transformative journey before cloud computing was introduced. Cloud computing is the next station on the route to making organisations more agile, responsive, efficient and thus successful.

Gregor Petri

Advisor Cloud Computing, CA Technologies

1.1: The Cloud Academy

About a year ago, we published the Cloud Academy primer Shedding Light on Cloud Computing. Since then, interest in cloud computing has blossomed and I have had the opportunity to present our Cloud Academy content at cloud computing events around the world.

This new book encapsulates the insights and knowledge gathered from conversations at these events. That includes the dialogue with cloud practitioners, vendors, customers and the considerable number of cloud computing gurus this industry,- despite its young age,- already seems to have.

In section 2, 'Cloud computing defined', we include an abbreviated and updated version of the Shedding Light on Cloud Computing primer. This provides a quick recap of the various types of cloud computing, the reasons why organisations would want to implement such a strategy, and the risks associated with cloud computing.

In section 3, we discuss a number of more philosophical questions around this phenomenon that is reshaping today’s IT: How big is the cloud? Can cloud computing be assured and secured?; Does it mean the end of the data centre as we know it?

Finally, in section 4, we take a look at how cloud computing is creating both an opportunity and a necessity for IT management to transform itself from being a guardian of the IT factory to an orchestrator of a supply chain of internal and external services.

Some of the content in this book was originally published via the Cloud Academy blog, the cloud storm chaser blog, ITSMportal.com and in several printed publications. I hope you will find it a useful guide for your journey to the cloud.

1.2: Cloud - more a marathon than a sprint

Cloud computing is not an invention. The components that make up or enable the cloud are not new. We have had fairly broad networks for 10 years, have used virtualisation for 20 years and were sharing computing capacity (time sharing) even before I embarked on my working career.

Cloud computing is much more a practical innovation. Practical innovations combine existing technology into a compelling new product. The best example of a practical innovation is probably the Apple® iPod that combined existing and readily available technology like a portable hard disk, a compact headset and MP3 compression in a new type of Walkman. It represents an innovation that has profoundly changed the music industry. Cloud computing has the potential to change the IT industry in a similar fundamental fashion. The thing with practical innovations is that it is not about having the best idea; it is not even about having the idea first. It is all about planning and flawless execution. In other words, despite the hype and the peer pressure, 'ready-fire-aim' is not an encouraging strategy for cloud computing. This is why we decided to launch The Cloud Academy and subsequently publish this book with knowledge and insights from the Academy.

The Cloud Academy’s goal is to give IT and business technology (BT) professionals an opportunity to exchange ideas, discuss experiences and brainstorm about execution strategies for their complex environments. The content aims to be vendor and technology agnostic and covers all the different incarnations of cloud computing, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). The Academy is not a course where a teacher explains how cloud computing should be executed. The goal is to increase knowledge and insight, so participants can set a strategy for their use of cloud computing. This book, together with the brief primer Shedding Light on Cloud Computing were both created in that spirit The Academy sessions began in Europe in many countries in co-operation with, or via contributions from, recognised cloud players, such as Cisco, NetApp, Amazon Web Services and Cap Gemini.

The sessions are now also scheduled elsewhere, including in North America. During these sessions, debates are sometimes quite heated, as chief security officers, VPs of operations and heads of development (not to mention representatives of business departments) sometimes have conflicting objectives. The best way to resolve this is to build a common understanding of each group’s challenges and opportunities so they can be addressed in a constructive fashion. If you would like to participate in the debate, please join The Cloud Academy group at LinkedIn ⁰⁰¹, or attend one of the Cloud Academy sessions.

Section 2: Cloud computing- defined

This section contains a shortened and fully updated version of the Shedding Light on Cloud Computing primer that the Cloud Academy made available in early 2010.

2.1: Cloud computing: what is it?

As cloud computing is such a broad topic it makes sense to look first at some definitions. The shortest one, the best computer is no computer, seems to encapsulate much of the frustration that users traditionally had with IT.

A more pragmatic definition is used by consulting firm Accenture: the dynamic provisioning of IT capabilities (hardware, software or services) from third parties over a network. Most definitions, like the one below from Wikipedia, assume that network to be the Internet (or at least some Internet technology).

Wikipedia: Cloud computing refers to the provision of computational resources on demand via a computer network. In the traditional model of computing, both data and software are fully contained on the user’s computer; in cloud computing, the user’s computer may contain almost no software or data (perhaps a minimal operating system and web browser only), serving as little more than a display terminal for processes occurring on a network of computers far away. A common shorthand for a provider’s cloud computing service (or even an aggregation of all existing cloud services) is 'The Cloud' ⁰⁰².

Most industry analysts have their own definitions, but the most widely used or even ‘official’ definition of cloud computing is the definition provided by the North American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Following an extensive industry review, this definition was submitted in January 2011 as NIST Special Publication 800-145 (Draft) ⁰⁰³.

In short, this definition says:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (for example, networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics (on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measured service); three service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS); and four deployment models (private cloud, community cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud).

The visual presentation of the NIST definition (opposite) gives a nice graphical overview of the components of this definition (source: Australian government cloud computing strategic government paper). In the remainder of this chapter we will discuss the above in more depth. Before doing so, however, let’s remind ourselves of how today’s organisations typically run IT.

In traditional IT environments, stability is the name of the game. Applications,- regardless of whether they are built in house or bought as standard packages, run on permanently available, stable in-house infrastructure. Even if the infrastructure and/or management of these applications have been outsourced, the outsourced processes and infrastructure will be dedicated to the customer and boast similar levels of stability. Applications can of course be moved across the infrastructure; but to do so a ‘change request’ is needed, which has to be approved in advance by a change committee. In a pre-cloud environment, they almost certainly are not assigned dynamically to the server that happens to have the most capacity available.

Such stability does not necessarily make this type of environment easy to manage. The inherent complexity of a modern IT environment requires advanced processes, procedures and tools. Often the organisation will have turned to best practice frameworks such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) to help govern, manage and secure these large and complex environments.

1. Cloud computing service models

When discussing cloud computing, the IT industry has broadly divided the way cloud computing can be used in three scenarios.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

With IaaS, organisations - typically their IT departments - source infrastructure capacity (servers, storage or other) over the web, as a service. For instance, this may be to cater for unexpectedly large customer demand, internal requests for a temporary test server, or an extra SharePoint server for a departmental intranet. In most organisations, the end users will not be aware that their IT department is using such infrastructure cloud services.

Using virtualisation as an enabler, the requested infrastructure can be derived from a private cloud (a pool of infrastructure exclusive to the organisation, either located in-house or at a service provider), or it can be sourced from an external public cloud infrastructure provider. By sharing the infrastructure, at different moments in time and among multiple users or customers, IaaS allows for increased utilisation, reduced capacity requirements, lower cost and lower energy consumption, and also greater scalability and flexibility.

Deployment is also much faster than having new hardware ordered, supplied and installed in the data centre. Due to its dynamics, the allocation and de-allocation of capacity is optimised when fully automated. Often this is done by means of simple scripts, but larger organisations are rapidly turning to more advanced data centre automation solutions.

Some of the more familiar providers offering IaaS are Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark, GoGrid and Layered Tech.

Platform as a service (PaaS)

PaaS is a software development and execution environment that allows developers to develop applications and offer these as a service to their customers or users. Besides offering an efficient, high-level development environment, PaaS also significantly reduces the time required for deployment (moving the developed application into production), as the PaaS provider also hosts the created services, typically in return for a fee based on actual usage or users.

While internal IT departments may use PaaS for building custom applications, it is often also used by independent software developers to create specialised applications and make them available in the cloud more quickly. Easily combining and integrating these standard offerings with customer-specific developments is one of the promises of PaaS. One of the most familiar PaaS examples is probably Japanese Post, which developed an application that allowed millions of customers to check the whereabouts of their postal packages every morning.

Some of the more familiar names in PaaS are Force.com by salesforce.com, Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure.

With vendors like Microsoft offering both PaaS and IaaS from the same platform (for example Microsoft Windows Azure), the distinction between PaaS and IaaS is blurring. With IaaS users typically bring and install their own software and are responsible for running and tuning it on the provided infrastructure. With PaaS, users provide the application by defining it on the spot in the PaaS development environment or by loading existing (typically Java) application code. However, unlike with IaaS, the PaaS provider is responsible for running it at the agreed performance levels. The PaaS user does not have to worry about adding CPUs or memory, the PaaS provider takes care of that.

Software as a service (SaaS)

With SaaS, organisations do not buy software for installation on their own computers. Instead, they simply use their browser to access